Sitting in the black velvet lining, as if it has been waiting here just for me, is an old bronze key.

Perhaps they are like reflections, these echoes in the house. Reflections of what once was there, the house constructed of one great mirror so seamlessly incorporated with reality that we do not even see the edges or the backing but only the perfect image of the world echoed back at us. If so, my encounter with the mirror, with seeing a me that was not-me, reveals itself as a recursive anomaly; if I was attempting to shine a mirror onto a mirror, then I was creating an infinity mirror, and here I am, mise en abyme, placing myself into an abyss of reflections. If such is the case, and the reality of this house is a mirror, then it would stand to reason that all mirrors in this place are suspect, are wormholes to infinity, and are therefore not to be trusted. I shall have to be careful not to look directly into them while I brush my teeth.

Or, perhaps, shining a mirror onto another mirror will finally reveal the secrets of the house, solving the mystery of our lives. Like a key in a lock.

That I now have possession of the key mitigates my dread not at all, for the weight of it lies heavy in my pocket, and I can feel it there, waiting to be reunited with the lock. Even though I have never seen this key before, it is only too clear where it leads. All other doors in this house are fitted to the skeleton key that opens them all, all except one. The one that, supposedly, has never been opened.

But if it has never been opened—if it has been locked since time immemorial—then how did my mother come to possess this key? And did she use it?

And why did she hide it?

Before leaving the basement and after pocketing the key, I make sure to close the door leading to the tunnel, hesitating there to feel the cold rank air pass over me and to peer down its length as far as I can see, which isn’t very far at all. Just far enough to make out the uneven ground patched with puddles and the roots that reach down through the earth like crooked tentacles from above.

It is almost two in the morning when I am finally back in bed. I leave the candle lit beside me and the mirror facedown, just in case.

My class the next morning proceeds in a groggy stupor. It is one of the introductory archaeology courses that does not involve fieldwork. You can tell, looking at the students, that they want to be out there doing things, digging in the earth like groundhogs, but instead they are trapped here in this little white box of a classroom, with me.

It is the kind of class where I set up the premise of finding a piece of clay pottery and ask them what sort of dating techniques they would use, and a student in the back replies, “I would start with buying her dinner.” It is the kind of class where I try again after the laughter has died down and am met only with dull silent stares, two dozen pairs of eyes gazing blankly at me like chips of glass, waiting for me to answer my own question. And I fight with myself because I want to teach them, I want them to offer their ideas and their excitement, but I am also afraid of them, afraid of their unreadable condemnatory stares and the thickness of their boredom, which pours into the air with a physical presence. They are strange beings, fortuitously wrought in human form by the whims of nature.