Morning all, I spent the weekend transferring my little seedlings into the garden beds. With luck, there will be no more surprise frosts to take them out. As I don’t recall ever having a surprise frost in May her I think I am safe. Although it would certainly be a surprise. I feel good about the transfer though even though my muscles are sore. But sore or not, we have a morning writing prompt. So timers set and off we go.
Okay it took me a while to figure out where I was going with this. Now that I know I think I may take a few more minutes and add a bit to it. This could be fun. What a great way to kick off a Monday.
Monday, May 6th: This key looked different from the others.
This key looked different from the others. The others were clearly made at one of the kiosks at the grocery store. He had used them many times before. He maintained several properties for the Langstroth Corporation. Tenants were moving in and out all the time and keys often went missing. Plus new tenants liked to know that former tenants didn’t have keys. So each move necessitated a locksmith rekeying the lock. John then took the new key provided and made an emergency master key for the office on the off chance it was needed.
He then had to dispose of the old keys. ‘Although dispose is probably not the right term.’ John tended to put the keys no longer needed into a box and then when the box was too full he would melt them down and create small ingots of metal. He then sold the ingots to a friend of his for various metal working projects. He liked to think of it as his bit for recycling.
‘Box is full now,’ he thought. John set the side away for later. For now, there was this key. All of the others had the same look to them. This one was older. He could tell right away that it was iron and painted with some sort of anti-rust agent.
‘There is no way this came from the kiosk.’
He turned the key over in his hands. He knew his keys. He had rings for every building that was in his care. He had the spare ones for the apartments safely tucked away, but he also had the keys for the maintenance rooms and anything that might be needed to access storage spaces, sheds, attics, basements or any off limits to anyone else areas. Almost all of the buildings had new locks put on every door as the corporation acquired them, so even if they only had the key the lock came with, it wouldn’t look like this. Yet here the key was in his desk drawer.
There was no other key ring near it and he was positive that it didn’t belong on any of the other rings. ‘So what is it even doing here.’
His office door was only open when he was in the space. Otherwise the door was closed and locked. He didn’t want anyone making off with any keys or rifling through the personal details in the rental agreements. He had been in his office all morning and then at lunch left for an emergency across town. The key wasn’t there when he left and he knew he locked his office door. He left the key on his desk and checked his door. It showed no signs of tampering. No small scratches to let him know that it had been picked.
He turned and blinked in surprise as he saw the outline of a door on the back wall of his office. That door hadn’t been there before. The back wall of his office was cinderblock and had one door and two windows. Neither the door nor the windows were in that wall.
Now there was the outline of a door. It was dim, as though the door was pushing through from the other side. He could see the outline of a door knob but it didn’t protrude from the wall. It wa as though it was just drawn on the wall.
‘With the lock below it.’
John glanced to the key still sitting on his desk. Despite the cinderblock building having been built in the late 1990s and the key significantly older, John suspected the key would fit the lock. He felt a strange twisting in his gut as he backed away from the still forming door.
Ten til Midnight 