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All bedrooms appear the same in the darkness. With the lamp turned off and the wooden blinds closed against the starry night sky, Uncle’s sumptuous bedroom was a blank canvas upon which could be imposed the image of any bedroom he ever occupied. Sometimes he awoke in the night with a pounding heart, convinced he was still confined in his old dormitory, and could not dispel the irrational conviction until he swung his arthritic knees into the cold beyond the blankets and turned on the lamp. Those dreams returned more often now that he was alone.
Other nights, he dreamt that his wife still slept beside him, warming the blankets to his left, and then he would awaken with only the puffy comforter and the winter night’s desolate loneliness. More often now it was his bladder that prompted him to depart the cocoon of his trapped body heat and shuffle in his slippers across the hardwood floor to the cold bathroom tiles.
After such an excursion on a moonless night the bedroom appeared especially featureless, his night vision spoiled by the bathroom’s electric light fixture, and Uncle was obliged to fumble for his bed. Upon reaching it, he kicked off his slippers, being careful to leave them in their accustomed positions, drew the curtain closed, and lay down upon the mattress with his hands folded over his rounded stomach.
His watch’s hands had long since ceased to glow, so he did not know what time it was, nor how much time passed since nature called, but it felt like forty minutes. Frustrated, he turned over on his side, fluffed his pillow, and fought the compulsion to begin his day at that inhuman morning hour. He recalled the declined invitation still on his refrigerator and wondered if that explained his restlessness.
“Can’t sleep?” a snide voice asked him from within his bedcurtains.
Uncle instinctively yanked the blankets to his neck, though what blankets would do to protect him from an intruder he did not know. He listened in the darkness for some sign of the trespasser and discerned the faintest rustling of the blankets, then of the bedcurtains. Faint huffs and puffs drifted on the chilly air, the blinds clacked, and brilliant moonlight flooded into the room as through a prison’s bars.
Though Uncle looked towards the window, he could see no sign of the intruder, and had not it been a moonless night when he went to bed? Yet the moon appeared as full and brilliant as he’d ever seen.
The bedcurtains rustled again, and a miniature figure climbed upon the edge of the bed, backlit by the moon. If this was a hallucination or dream, it was a realistic one, for the figure’s slight weight indented the blankets convincingly. His height was two handspans, not including his pointy hat, and his teardrop face was boyish, save for a tightness around the onyx eyes. Aside from the hat, his clothes were ordinary: a charcoal suit tailored perfectly to his diminutive frame, a wool overcoat with a glittering pin like a key on the lapel, and a knit scarf.
“Yes, I’m real,” the figure asserted, as Uncle regarded him with some consternation. “My name is Haer, I’m a witch and a key maker. Can we please skip the obligatory poking, prodding, and logical exertions?”
Uncle relaxed his grip on his blanket-based shield and sat up against the headboard’s carved relief. “I’m more concerned with your intrusion.”
Haer shrugged. “Then I apologize for intruding. Now, follow me.” He hopped down from the bed, though it was a fall of over twice his height, and stepped up to the wall opposite the window, where he produced a wand and tapped it against the sapele trim. A portal opened, shaped like the clean arch of a comic book mousehole, but Uncle could see nothing through it. Haer gestured. “Hurry up: we only have ‘til dawn.”
“To do what?” Uncle asked. “And I won’t fit through there.”
“Sure you will: just trust me.” Haer swept his hand towards the portal. “Don’t you want to know?”
Haer was right: Uncle wanted to know, though he did not know what Haer meant. Embarrassed though he was of his pajamas, he belted his robe from the bedside hook over them in haste’s name and stepped towards Haer. The portal expanded with each step, or perhaps he shrank, so that when he’d crossed the room in his slippers he passed easily through the darkness. He experienced a moment of disorientation, and then…
…Uncle stood upon a carpeted staircase, leaning upon the banister and witnessing a domestic scene. Snow blew from a gloomy sky outside a picture window. The presents upon the table, the balloons strewn about, and the streamers festooning the ceiling made apparent the celebration at hand. Haer stood beside him and did not flinch, as Uncle did, when a slightly plump, matronly woman in a flowery dress brushed through them without the slightest acknowledgment of their presence.
The woman – Mrs. Feyberry, Uncle’s nephew’s former wife – joined the festivities in the living room, where a girl of eight or nine was opening her birthday presents. Mrs. Feyberry kissed her daughter’s curls before settling into a folding chair. Uncle glanced at Haer for some indication of why they were here or the knowledge to which the witch referred, but the tiny key maker appeared content to observe the party. His nephew, predictably, was less present than Uncle.
A throng of people filled the living room and spilled into the kitchen; Uncle was obliged to ascend two stairs and crane his neck so that he could see his grand-niece, Chrysanthemum Feyberry. He watched one present after another enthusiastically unwrapped and presented to those assembled, who ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ on cue. This continued until Chrys came to a final stack of presents separated from the rest, which Uncle recognized. Gifts always seemed the least he could give, though he was adept at it.
She read the name scribbled on the to-and-from card and looked around the surrounding crowd. None of the faces immediately confronting her answered, so she dismounted her chair, climbed atop it, and stood on tiptoe to search. Her gaze passed over Uncle and Haer, though Uncle waved to her before he remembered that he could not be perceived. When her search was finished, Chrys’s face fell, and she dropped back into her chair. Though she opened the remaining presents and exclaimed over the contents, she looked to her mother when she was finished, and Mrs. Feyberry murmured a platitude that helped not at all. Presents were not a replacement for presence.
“What is this?” Uncle asked Haer. “You implied an urgency, and now we linger, invisible, at an illusion of my grand-niece’s birthday party?”
Haer shrugged and tapped his key-shaped lapel pin as he reclined against a baluster the way another might lean against a Grecian pillar. “This is yours, not mine. I just…open the door.”
“The door to what?” Uncle frowned, but his attention was diverted by the arrival of the birthday cake featuring ten candles. Uncle frowned further, distracted from the singing and wishing by the number of candles. “Are you trying to convince me this is the future?”
“Like I said: this is yours, not mine. All I did was open the door.” Haer pulled out a pocket watch and tapped the face before glancing out the picture window, where the snow was coming down even thicker than when they arrived. “Time’s almost up. It’s nearly dawn.”
All signs Uncle could discern indicated it was evening, not morning, but Haer seemed certain. He realized the living room was beginning to fade with the retreat of what light had been filtering through the gloomy sky outside the picture window. Another moment of disorientation caught him by surprise, and then he was back in his own bedroom. He lay upon his back in the bed with the little witch sitting cross-legged on the pillows beside him – his wife’s pillows, which he still kept fluffed and clean, though she never lived in this house.
“Did it work?” Haer asked.
“Did what work?” Uncle propped himself back up against the headboard. “I suppose you’re going to tell me this was real, and not a strange dream?”
Haer put a hand to his breast. “I never presume to tell someone else what’s real.” He paused. “So, did it work?”
“Did what work?” Uncle repeated.
“The key. Do you know?” Haer said it like it should have been obvious and then glanced over his shoulder at the window with a certain trepidation. When Uncle sighed, he nodded. “Good. I think it worked.” He climbed to his feet. “Well, dawn is nigh, so I must be off.” Without awaiting a reply, the key maker leapt down from the bed. The next place Uncle saw him was the windowsill, where he paused with one hand in the pocket of his overcoat and looked back towards Uncle. He looked terribly serious, but only for a moment before he winked. “Don’t be late,” he said. “Don’t miss the keystone.” Then he was gone as the first rays of dawn touched the glass.
Uncle lay abed whilst the sun rose before he joined it with a groan and a crackling of joints. The sunlight did not long endure; a snowstorm brewed, and by the time he made breakfast for himself the sky was slate grey. Passing by the refrigerator, his glance lingered upon the invitation affixed there with a magnet. He had told them he wasn’t coming – they surely only sent him the invitations as a courtesy, anyway – and the weather was maladapted to travel. Still, it remained on the fridge.
Despite the ominous weather, Uncle bundled up and took his morning walk, stomping down the fallen snow and letting fresh flakes accumulate on his hood. When he returned home, his cheeks were ruddy, but the miasma of the night’s events presisted. Although, he could not blame Haer’s visit alone for his listlessness, apathy, and disengagement with the world; those were his companions since his wife, his center, died. He kindled a fire in the hearth and settled down with a book and a cup of tea.
The grandfather clock chiming noon awoke him from an inadvertent nap as words echoed in his mind. “Don’t be late,” he heard Haer repeat. Grumbling, Uncle picked his book up from the floor and set it on the side table. He lingered, and then flung up his hands. “Fine!”
Snow fell thickly, and the roads were barely passable, even when Uncle reached the highway. He drove slowly, squinting and leaning forward, though part of him wanted to rush. “Don’t be late.” At least there was little traffic, for everyone rational remained at home.
Five minutes before three, Uncle pulled onto the street and found a place to park along the curb a block from the house. He might be old, but he could still walk, thank you. Clamping his hat to his head, he traipsed through the snow to the house, where he lingered on the stoop agonizing for almost five minutes before he knocked.
A ten-year-old girl answered the door with an artificial smile on her face. Chrys looked up the woolen overcoat to the newsboy hat, and her mouth opened into an entirely genuine grin. “Uncle?! I thought you weren’t coming!”
Uncle shuffled his feet and sought to maintain a stern expression. “Yes, well, plans change,” he muttered, just before Chrys leapt onto him in a fierce embrace and his wrinkled grimace gave way to a grin that matched her own. “Will you let me inside, or shall we spend the whole party standing on your mother’s doorstep?”
Chrys released Uncle, but no sooner was the embrace ended than his keystone seized his hand and led him into her party.
Thank you for reading Lloyd Earickson’s short story, The Arch, the Centering, and the Keystone, an IGC Publishing original story. If you enjoyed the story, please consider leaving a comment or review in the discussion below the story. Be sure to follow IGCPublishing.com for updates, more information, and other freely available stories.
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