Imeline Vincent Finds a Key

I don’t entirely remember how old I was when Mother locked me away in the Dark Room. Twelve, perhaps? Well, the exact age doesn’t matter, I suppose, only that it was one of those in-between ages; between girlhood and womanhood, you could say. An age in which being locked away in a room without windows—the only way in which to see the outside world one so desperately wanted to be a part of—felt like a death sentence. 

         Perhaps it was in a way, a death sentence. Being locked away in the Dark Room could hardly be called a life. It was a flat, empty little place, with no decoration to boast of, and no hearth to light in the dead of winter. The first night—I remember it rained—I cried myself to sleep. I cried every night after that until I’d spent two weeks locked away, with my meals slipped under the door, and seeing only Winifred, the maid, when she came to clean my chamber pot every morning. Oh, I would beg and plead for her to help me—to somehow convince Mother to let me go, to set me free. But Winifred would only look down at me with her brown eyes that were much too wide for her face, pat my stringy red hair, and say in her thick, stodgy accent, “Madam says you’re to stay up here until you’ve learnt your lesson, Miss Imeline.”

         What lesson that was exactly, I didn’t know at the time, but I’d figure it out soon enough, and when I did, I’d be left with more questions than answers. 

         Leading into the second month of my captivity, I began marking the walls with tallies. One tally for one day past. I’d found a loose stone between mortar that had dried and crumbled ages ago, and after prying it free, had used it to scrape a single tally mark against the wall. The noise it made was horrible- that stone against stone noise like the opening of a tomb. Every day I’d make a tally, and every day I’d sit there in the Dark Room and ask myself what exactly it was that I’d done wrong that had resulted in Mother—a strict woman, yes, but not overly given to tyrannous acts of punishment—locking me up in the highest room of our already tall house without explanation. 

         Albeit, leading up to the act itself, she’d been behaving strangely. Father had left again on one of his many trips that seemed to take him to all corners of the world. I had cried. I remember that, because I had stained the lace collar of my new dress and Mother had yelled at me for it. Father, bending down on one knee, his traveler’s hat sitting slightly askew, took me by the shoulders and stared into my eyes. 

         “We all go on journeys, Imeline,” he’d said. “Some more than others, I suppose. And while I’m gone, you just might go on your own. All you need to do is find the right key.”

         That was the last I’d seen of him. Mother had never acted the same again. One night, after receiving a letter—the handwriting on which I had recognized to be that of Mr. Specks, Father’s business partner—Mother had ordered me upstairs, dragging me by the arm toward the Dark Room. 

         “You’ll be staying in here for a while, Imeline,” she said, in a voice that no longer sounded like Mother. 

         She’d tossed me in, as I cried and screamed, and pulled out the big, brass key ring she often wore around her waist. She’d said nothing else as she’d closed the door and locked it and that was the last I’d seen of her since. 

         So here I was, sitting on the small cot tucked into one corner of the Dark Room, counting the tallies. Forty-five. Forty-five days of sitting in the murky-greyness with only the watery light of tallow candles to play witness to my scrawny hands as they scraped the stone against stone. I had no way of telling the exact time, but Winifred had slipped the third meal of the day beneath the door several hours ago, and I was feeling rather tired, so it must be nearing nighttime. I wondered at the world outside the Dark Room. Had Mother eaten dinner, too? Was she sitting in the library as she often did, feet curled up before the fire? Had she forgotten about her daughter, sitting all alone in the dark and the cold, passing the time by dreaming up stories and scraping lines on the walls?

         It was my favorite pastime—daydreaming. It had been so even before Mother locked me away. And as I pulled the thin blanket up to my chin and blew out the candle on the floor beside my cot, I began to dream up a new one. 

         Closing my eyes and settling into the attenuated mattress, I pictured a big, empty field stretching as far as the eye could see. Grass the color of my Father’s favorite jadeite mug, swayed in a gentle breeze that smelled of sea salt and wild roses. I stood there in that field and escaped the Dark Room. Because that’s what stories are, in a way—little escapes. Journeys that take us away from everyday life. Adventures that remind us that we’re all called to something greater if only we look for it. 

         Eventually, I fell asleep just as my story brought me to the footsteps of a castle. I slept fitfully that night, dreaming of that castle, but it had turned dark in my nightmares, like the room Mother kept me in, and somewhere deep within its walls, a cruel queen kept Father prisoner. 

         I awoke the next morning, drenched in a cold sweat, as my food tray scraped against the floor stones. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I felt around for the small packet of matches Winifred had left for me and struck one of them against the wall. A single, weak flame flared and I brought it against the candle wick, coaxing it to life. The room was as it ever was, cot in this corner, chamber pot in the other. The food tray lay beside the door and I quickly went over to retrieve it in case Winifred were to come to clean the chamber pot and step into a bowl of porridge, ruining my only chance at breakfast. Not that I was all that hungry, mind you. I hadn’t been hungry much at all for the last forty-five days. 

         I lifted a spoonful of the lukewarm porridge to my mouth and walked back over to the cot. 

         Mhm, no, I thought to myself. Forty-six. Forty-six days locked in the Dark Room. 

         Setting the tray down beside the candlestick, I reached under my pillow for my tally stone when the door opened, and Winifred appeared in the blinding light beyond my prison. I blinked furiously. There was only so much candlelight in the Dark Room, and it was nothing compared to the real, true light that was now spilling in from the corridor outside. Saying nothing, the maid—stodgy in both tone of voice and build of body—tucked Mother’s brass key ring (for which it seemed she’d been made steward of) into her apron pocket and went about cleaning the chamber pot. It made a funny, pinging sound as she placed it back down in its respective corner, but I paid it no mind. 

         Only once Winifred was gone, did I fully reveal the tally stone I now held in my hand. I don’t think I was afraid, exactly. Of Winifred or Mother seeing my tallies. But they were mine, you see. They were what had been my constant companions for the last forty-five—sorry—forty-six days, and I wasn’t about to let anyone take them away from me. 

         Spinning the tally stone in my hand until it fit my fingers like a pencil, I turned to face the wall behind me and stopped still. 

         The tallies were gone. 

         All forty-five of them. My forehead creased and my palms ran slick with sweat as I stared at the empty stone wall before me. It was impossible, they couldn’t have just disappeared. Absentmindedly, I reached down for the candlestick and brought the flame up to the wall. Not a single tally remained. The wall was perfectly clear, not even a stray scratch to betray what I’d been doing for the last forty-five days. 

         I stared blankly, more confused than anything else. Had Winifred come in the night and scoured them away? No, I told myself. I would have woken up, and besides, wouldn’t she have cleaned my chamber pot as well, so she could’ve avoided doing so in the morning?

         My thoughts now suddenly turned to the chamber pot and that strange noise it had made earlier. Thinking it would be a more solvable mystery and therefore something that would help me process the missing tally marks more logically, I turned away from the empty wall and walked over to the chamber pot. The air around it smelled of lye and hot water, and though it came at the expense of being locked in the Dark Room for forty-five—I shook my head—forty-six days, I was grateful to Winifred for keeping it clean. 

         Holding out my watery light, I bent down to examine the ceramic pot and caught a glimmer of something gold inside. Hunching over it, I held the candle aloof and peered into the shallow urn. No, I saw to my surprise, not gold, but brass. Inside the chamber pot, lying against its base, was a brass key. Immediately, I recognized it from Mother’s brass ring. 

         Hoping that Winifred had done as best a job she could at cleaning, I reached my hand inside the chamber pot and brought out the key. In the weak glow of the candlelight it glistened with a tarnished sheen. The handle of the key curled to form an interlocking knot and the teeth had funny little spikes on them. I’d noticed this key before, on Mother’s ring. But when I’d asked her about it, she’d only told me that, “Little girls mustn’t pry into things that were none of their business.” Terrified of being sent to the Dark Room for my insolence, I’d quickly shut up, and had never mentioned the peculiar key again. 

         But now, here it was, fitting so perfectly in my hand that it seemed to be made for just me. Without thinking much about it, I rushed toward the door, inspecting the wood for a keyhole. But of course, there was none. Who had ever seen keyholes on the backs of doors before? Sighing rather miserably, I blew a swath of hair from my face and turned back, facing the great emptiness of the Dark Room. I held the key up to the candlelight, making out every scratch and mark on the cold metal. 

         Why on earth would Winifred have dropped this key? Of all the ones that might’ve proven more useful, why this one? Never in my life had I seen Mother use it. 

         With half a mind to throw the key against the wall, and half wanting to tuck it safely under my pillow beside the tally stone, I walked back over to my cot. 

         It was then that I noticed the keyhole. Just lying there, in the wall, in the exact place my first tally mark had been. It was an unassuming kind of thing—nothing ornate or detailed—and as I stepped closer to inspect it, I noticed that it was the perfect size to fit the key. I felt rather strange all of a sudden, standing there before my tally mark keyhole, with the mysterious key clutched in my hand. As if I had grown suddenly very small, and the world around me suddenly very large. The air in the Dark Room seemed to grow tremendously tight, like the walls themselves were closing in around me, pushing me closer and closer toward the tally mark keyhole.

         For a moment, I partially made up my mind to ignore it. To slip the key back into the chamber pot and not give it a second thought. But then I thought of all my daydreams, the ones that put me to sleep, and I thought of the words Father had spoken to me on the day he’d left.

         “We all go on journeys, Imeline…all you need to do is find the right key.”

         Abandoning any sense of fear or trepidation, I leapt onto the cot and fit the key into the keyhole, giving it a sharp twist. A first, nothing happened, and I began to chide myself. It was all probably some elaborate trick created by Mother to exacerbate my punishment. But then, ever so softly, a sort of gilded brilliance began to emit from the space behind the keyhole. Stepping off the cot, I placed the candlestick back on the floor, and watched as four razor thin cracks broke out around the keyhole. That familiar grating stone noise reverberated through the Dark Room as a doorway creaked open and in poured golden light. I blinked again at the sudden radiance, until my eyes grew accustomed to the sight that lay before me. 

         A field stretched out beyond the keyhole, swaying with grass the color of Father’s jadeite mug and the air smelled of sea salt and wild roses. I stared down at the key and then back up through the opening. 

         Footsteps pounded on the stairs outside the Dark Room and I could hear Mother’s voice calling for Winifred to “hurry up,” because there was “no time to lose.”

         My stomach began boiling and my arms danced with tingles. I kept my eyes fixed on the doorway and heard Mother fit a key to the Dark Room door. There was only one thing to be done now, wasn’t there? Taking a deep breath, I wrapped my hand around the key and leapt into the gold brilliance of my tally mark doorway, unsure of what waited for me on the other side.