It's a crummy way to spend a Friday but you haven't had a boyfriend in a year, not that Kyle had been much of a boyfriend. You and he had gone to the gay pride parade together, held hands when going out on a date at The Mack -the local gay bar- and enjoyed each other's company, but he never would return your affection in public. He was still a high school senior, despite being old enough to make legal decisions about who he slept with, but still balked at even the smallest public displays of affection.
You, on the other hand, just wanted someone to hold your hand when on a walk around Vista Park Lake.
The inside of McKinnison mansion is dusty and you sneeze a couple times before remembering to slip on your breathing mask. All of the old furnishings are still in here. You take out your digital camera and start taking reference photos for your job.
By the time you sit down to take a break and eat the sandwich you brought with you for lunch, you've made your way to the finished attic.
As you sit on an old chest and munch corned beef on rye, your eye catches sight of something odd.
The light coming in the small, round window behind you falls just right at your feet. One of the attic's floor boards looks loose. Curious, you bend down and nudge it with your fingers. It swivels to one side easily. There, beneath the opening, is a small, recessed area in which sits a single, old-fashioned bronze key.
You raise an eyebrow curiously and retrieve it.
It definitely looks like some of the keys they'd given you for the house but it doesn't appear to match any of them. A new key? Did someone miss something?
Scratched into the side are the words "lower basement".
You look around the attic and then to the drop-stairs leading down to the third floor. No one told you about a "lower basement".
Finishing off the sandwich, you take your new key and head downstairs.
Camera still in hand, you search the house until you find the stairs that lead to the basement. You checked it out, briefly, earlier but didn't see anything special. You return, now, with the key in hand.
The light is bad down here so you flip on your belt light.
They key and the mystery it promises must be preying on your mind because the next time you check your watch, an hour has passed. While the basement runs under the whole house and is huge, you found no other locks that the key would fit.
The old furnishings down here, covered with tarps and blankets, make the place look like it's haunted by sheet-ghosts. You smile at the image and then catch sight of something.
Amongst the detritus and debris of the old, insane man's life, a door frame leans against the wall by the furnace. It's not attached to anything; it's just free-standing. It looks like it might even have been originally an exterior door that got removed and stored down here when the house was last rennovated. You get up and cross to it, putting the bronze key in the lock.
It turns.
Mystery solved! You chuckle to yourself; the key is just a key to an old lock in an old, discarded door. Why it was hidden in the attic, you have no idea; it's obviously just a piece of junk...
The door clicks outwards just a bit and light shines out from between its edge and the frame.
You jump back, blinking.
A breeze wafts through the crack in the door and you fancy you hear birds singing.
You step forward and look around the side. There's a good two feet clearance behind it between the bottom of the door frame and the wall. It's unattached and there doesn't appear to be any electrical rigging around the inside of the frame that could produce the light or air.
Curious, you put your hand on the knob and pull.
A gust of wind blows the door open and the crashing sound of distant waves against a cliff fills your ears. You stumble away from the aperture and stare at a strange vista. There, just feet beyond the door, is the outside world ... but not your world. On the other side is anything but the suburbs.
You see tall grasses waving as they roll over the landscape towards the top of a cliff looking out on a vast ocean or sea. To the left is a deep, evergreen forest with tall spruce and trees the size of redwoods. A red bird of some kind flits past the doorway for a moment, as if the aperture was the most normal thing in the world.
You can do little but gape.