An ordinary man stands in front of an ordinary house.
He is still in the autumn afternoon.
Except for a calloused thumb, which worries the shaft of a long brass key, in his long leathered palm.
As a child he’d stood here, with the rumors of this house flickering behind his eyes.
Haunted. Abandoned. The lair of cannibals.
And then he’d found the key, propelled by a dare, beneath the cannibal’s doormat.
On that night the porch-lights guttered as the lightning threatened, and he’d run home faster than the wind, which had brought the following the storm.
Twelve springs later, when childhood fears were put to bed by logic and bureaucracy had caged his questions, he’d used the key.
He was 22.
All these years later, as he watches the dusk gather itself in the right angles of the house, he can remember that moment as if it were seconds ago.
The heavy front door opened silently.
A waft of lemon verbena and time.
Mahogany floorboards the length of the hall, glowing with polish and…
Was it music from an old Victrola?
His weight on the lintel.
His first time in the house, his second step along what should have been an entry- hall, had landed on the rough stonework of a narrow lane, deep in the heart of a bleak, Russian farming town.
When his ravings had subsided he’d learned that he was six years older, with no personal effects, but for a long brass key.
Hospitals, begging, nights beneath hedgerows, trains and the cramped lower decks of ocean going vessels had brought him home eight years after the key had turned.
Fear and fatigue should have razed all interest in the house, should have buried every question.
And yet…
Each time, time after time, he has returned to the same spot, in which he now considers.
At times he is older by minutes and at others by years.
The number of his steps along the hallway varies, before he inevitably steps on the stone, or dirt or dead brown leaves of someplace else, sometimes near and sometimes half the world away.
And always is the loss of time and possessions, except the key.
As what had been his life fades with lost years, he has gathered a new one, filled with precautions, habits and measures. And at its’ heart is this house.
Always later than sooner, he returns to his heart.
So now he stands in the cobalt air, as the porch-lights come to life.
His mental fingers are moving memories, like abacus beads, and adding up pieces of time. In his heart and mind he wears the freshly washed age of twenty- seven years.
But the calendars tell him it is 1956 and that forty-four years have passed since his first glimpse of the hallway.
He is sixty-six years old by all measures but his own.
He is moving towards the porch.
He is wondering if his next steps inside the house will carry his years beyond the limits of his body.
What then?
He is smiling as he reaches for the door.
Yes, he sighs to himself, what then?
He steps across the threshold.
One, two, three, four…
And the door closes softly behind him.
