Hundreds of them. Padlocks, skeleton locks, combination locks, rusted iron deadbolts, tiny brass suitcase locks, a clock-face lock with no hands. They covered the surface from floor to ceiling, each one fastened to a ring bolted into the dark oak.
By the time I was fifteen, I had stopped believing in Uncle Shom’s stories. That was my first mistake.
He stood slowly, his knees cracking like dry twigs. He held a single key in his palm. It was black iron, warm to the touch, and shaped like a question mark.
Now, this is Part 3. I arrived on a Tuesday in October. The leaves were the color of bruised plums. Uncle Shom didn’t greet me at the door. Instead, I found him in the parlor, sitting before a wall I had never noticed before. It wasn't a wall of plaster or wood. It was a wall of locks. uncle shom part3
“That’s the secret, nephew,” he said. “You don’t.”
“The first two were lessons,” he said. “This one is a choice.”
He smiled for the first time in ten years. Hundreds of them
His house sat at the end of a gravel road that no one bothered to pave, a crooked Victorian with a porch that sagged like an old mule. Everyone in town knew Uncle Shom as the man who fixed clocks and never smiled. But I knew him as the man who, twice before, had shown me things that couldn’t be explained.
I looked at the silver lock. Then at the wall of hundreds of others, each one humming faintly, like a held breath.
He pointed to a lock near the center of the wall. It was small, silver, no bigger than a thumbnail. It didn’t belong among the others. By the time I was fifteen, I had
By an unreliable nephew
“You didn’t tell me you had a third thing.”
Part 1 was the jar of fireflies that never died. (He shook it on Christmas Eve, and they spelled a name I’d never heard: Liora. )