The Key

The snow had been falling for three days before anyone noticed the dog was gone. Mara stood at the window of the station, breath fogging the glass, watching the white accumulate over the track marks she had not made. The depot lights flickered. Outside, the sled sat untethered to nothing.

She had arrived in the valley on the advice of a man she barely trusted, carrying instructions written in a hand that was not entirely human. The letters curled at the ends like sleeping animals. Go north until the compass stops agreeing with itself. She had gone north. The compass had, in time, stopped.

There was a key in her coat pocket. She could feel its weight when she breathed — not heavy, exactly, but present in the way that important things are present. She had never seen the lock it opened. She was not sure the lock existed in any place she could point to on a map.

Harlan came in from the cold stamping snow from his boots and pretending he had not been listening at the door. She turned from the window. He had that look — the one he wore when he already knew the answer to the question he was about to ask.

"The sled team's gone," he said.

"I know."

"All seven of them." He held up a number of fingers that was definitely not seven. She did not correct him. "You're not surprised."

"I've been surprised so many times this week that I think I've used up my supply."

He laughed at that — a short, reluctant sound, like something being dragged across gravel. He dropped into the chair nearest the stove and held his palms toward the heat. The fire made his shadow enormous on the far wall. She watched the shadow instead of him for a moment, the way it moved with a slight lag, like a translation that wasn't quite faithful to the original.

Later, when Harlan was asleep in his chair, she took the key from her pocket and looked at it in the light. It was old — older than the style of its making — and the bow was shaped like a running animal, though what kind of animal was unclear. The teeth were cut in a pattern that didn't repeat. She had spent hours looking for a pattern. There wasn't one, or there was one she couldn't see yet.

The fire had burned low. Through the window, the snow had stopped.

She put on her coat and went outside.

The night was extraordinarily still. The kind of still that made you aware of your own heartbeat. She walked to where the sled sat, its harnesses lying in the snow like shed skins. She walked past it. She walked until the station light was small behind her and the stars had shifted into configurations she didn't recognize, which was either navigation or a symptom of something worse.

At the edge of the tree line there was a door.

Not a building, not a frame — just a door, standing upright in the snow, its frame sunk a few inches into the ground as if it had been there long enough to settle. It was painted a dark color that was difficult to name in the dark. The keyhole was the right shape.

She stood there for a long time. The key was in her hand without her remembering taking it from her pocket.

You always had it, someone said, very close to her ear.

She turned. There was no one there. Only the snow, and the door, and somewhere behind her, a light that was slowly going out.

She put the key in the lock. She turned it. She opened the door.

Inside was everything that happened next.