The house was a small cottage, Flinn’s first. He had only looked at the pictures in the online real estate viewer and knew the house was right for him. He had payed the measly 100k and had driven his black land rover to the house immediately. The Penske truck, per his frantic waving, pulled into the driveway behind Flinn’s own vehicle. He and the two men inside the truck began to unload, until everything that had been in the truck was in the house. He thanked the two men and they drove away, tipping their baseball hats as they went.
Flinn began to rearrange the furniture throughout the one-story building. It was not an arduous task, and that night he slept in his bedroom, which was fully organized and laid out perfectly. He awoke to the alarm he had set on his phone. Just what I need to start my day. Mozart’s 5th symphony, he thought. He jumped out of bed.
Flinn walked into the kitchen and grabbed a protein bar. He still had some unpacking to do. But first, he would take a look at the door. The door was the reason he had bought the house, though, in all fairness, there were other good reasons. But the door had sparked something in Flinn’s imagination, and he had known that the house had been made for him. It wasn’t exactly a door in the picture. More of an opening with a mysterious looking steel box. On further investigation and after having asked the owners, he had confirmed that it was real.
He locked the doors and closed all the windows, making sure that no one could get in without his noticing them. He would not be caught off guard. Flinn started in the bedroom. After pulling everything that even remotely resembled a lever (and breaking some things in the process), he determined that the door was not in his room, and moved on.
Hour after hour he spent, searching for the door. Opening windows, pressing screws, flipping every switch, all without avail. He could find nothing. Well after lunchtime he took a short break to eat another granola bar, then went right back to work. Whistling cheerfully, he pulled back curtains, tapped walls, and pulled every longer carpet string. It was tedious work, but he found nothing. There is no heroism in tedium, he realized, and sighed dejectedly.
At eleven o’clock, he gave up. He flopped in bed, disheartened, closed his eyes and laid in bed for hours before he went to sleep.
Flinn flipped open his laptop lid in a hurry. He had noticed something about the house, something which could give him a clue. The online real estate place might still have the house up, as the transaction had been done so quickly. He typed in his long password and waited impatiently for twenty seconds while the laptop turned all systems on. It was finally ready, and he double-clicked on the internet icon.
He clicked on the bookmark icon that would take him directly to the website. His heart thumped in his chest as the page loaded slowly. “Load!” he shouted at the screen.
The page loaded and the images quickly popped up in their places. His heart pounded even louder as he zoomed in on the picture of the opening. It took a little while to load, and when it did, he quickly took a screenshot in case the website was taken down. He examined it carefully, looking for the one distinguishing mark.
What he had noticed when he had looked around the house for the umpteenth time was that each room was painted in a different color, sometimes only a shade or two from the next room. If the picture had a little tiny sliver of the paint color, he would know what room to look in.
After fidgeting around with the zoom, he finally found the color of the wall: blue. There was only one room in the house painted with a blue that dark. It was the living room.
Flinn slammed the computer lid and sprinted out of his room. Once in the living room, he looked around for anything that could be the hiding place of a secret door, but saw none. Still, he knew it was the living room. There wasn’t much to it; just the fireplace, some pictures he had provided, a few light switches, and the bland carpet.
He flipped all the light switches, trying every combination that made its way into his head. After thirty minutes of trying, he reasoned that it could not be complicated, or the owners would have told him. He tried the light bulbs, twisting each one. He then tried simple combinations involving the light bulbs and the switches both, but nothing happened.
The fireplace was the only obvious appliance left in the room, besides the outlets, of which there were only two. He had already tried those. Seeing no other options, he examined the fireplace. He saw nothing he could do. Everything was completely normal, and there were no hidden nooks and crannies. It was just a solid extrusion, a block with a hearth.
Flinn noticed that it was getting colder. He was right by the fireplace, so he decided he would turn it on to see how well it worked. He took the gas key which the owners had given him and inserted it in the slot, twisting to start. He went to the kitchen to get a matchbox, and ran back into the living room to light the fire. He threw the match on the fireplace and watched it burst into flame. It was a lot warmer, so he moved closer to the fire, taking the key out of its place. As he did, he noticed something strange. There was a slot for a small key right on the little metal extrusion for the gas key.
Something clicked inside him and he bolted upright, shouting, “A keyhole! There’s a keyhole! I found it! I found it!”
After several minutes of frantic shouting, he realized that he didn’t actually know where the key was. It was not the housekey, which he had thought at first. It was something else, something more complex. He groaned as he realized that the object of his search had changed. He had potentially found the door, just not the key to get past the door. In this instance, he assumed he was just missing the key. Though he didn’t know it, he was correct.
The next few weeks Flinn spent looking in vain for the key. Months passed, in which he spent less and less time looking. Then years. He married a lovely woman, and soon after the honeymoon he renewed his search for the key, with the help of his wife. They still found nothing.
After his wife had two children, the War happened. He built a bomb shelter under the house and went off to fight. He fought in the next two wars, and then left the military. Four more wars happened, but he had had his fill of killing people who didn’t want to be killed while fighting a war he didn’t want to fight over a problem that didn’t exist.
When he was older than he had ever hoped to be, he bought himself a rocking chair to tell stories in. He told stories of hiking with his family, of the military and the battles he had won singlehandedly, of all sorts of adventures. And yet he never told of the key.
One day when Flinn was feeling very old and wise, he heard the doorbell ring. Standing outside was a handsome young man, waiting patiently. Flinn opened the door.
“Please, come in,” he said.
The young man smiled. “No, thank you. I only have one question.”
“Yes?”
“Have you found it yet?”
Flinn sighed and smiled a little. “I’ve lived in this house seventy years, and I still haven’t found it. Looked for a combined total of a year, probably. Why?”
“I’m afraid my parents didn’t want you finding it. In their will, they left me this.” He held up a small, thin stick of metal. “It doesn’t belong to me.”
Flinn took the object and held it with reverence. “Thank you.”
The young man bid him a good day, climbed into his car, and drove away.
Back in the living room, Flinn fiddled around with the key and the keyhole. It clicked after a few minutes and Flinn stood back. In an incredibly anticlimactic moment, the fireplace clicked forward a few inches. He stepped forward, opened it all the way, and removed a reinforced steel box. There was no lock, no key, no latch. Only a large button. He pressed it. The top flipped open and revealed the inside. He fell to his knees and gaped. Gaped at what was inside - nothing.
Inside was an absence of existence so complete, so abject that not even the vastness and emptiness of space compared. In the steel confines of the box, there was no space, no time, no anything. Life changed in an instant and the world, for all he could tell, froze. Nothing could have even half-prepared him for that lack of anything, the defiance of everything. And that was exactly what nothing did. It was not nothing as the absence of something he could touch, it was an absence of everything.
This will be my final story, the one I won’t try to explain.
He closed his eyes, reached forward, and touched it.
