It was highly unusual for a door to lock by its own accord without key or tampering. Lara was not a key-holder for any door bar the main entrance, nor had her mother ever been. Alec slept better knowing that his home’s security was in his safe hands alone. The doors throughout the house’s ground floor had keys, yes, but they were never locked. To the best of Alec’s knowledge, he had stored whatever keys he had in the top drawer of his desk. There was every chance that the one he now needed counted amongst them. Dinner could still be on the menu.

Alec slid open the drawer and went about rummaging through its various effects. There were envelopes tidied into its corner, a silver letter opener, diaries, and a miscellany of paper. He turned its contents over and over, frustrated by the sudden truancy of order in his life, but the keys were not there.

It was his housekeeper’s responsibility to lock the outside door. The key to the inner one always resided in its keyhole. Now, to further his mystification, Alec found that also to be missing. He tested its handle – locked. It would seem his movements were confined to the study, though no longer by choice.

Alec resettled into his chair. The fire needed stoking. But instead of taking due action he simply stared into its flames, too disturbed by the evening’s odd turn to notice the needs of another.

Could Lara be responsible? She was the only other with access to his home. No, she was dependable, as her sick mother had been. Neither of them had ever flouted his daily rituals or acted out so strangely as to go about his home, locking doors and stashing away their keys. There had to be a reasonable explanation. It would come to him. Alec just had to think awhile. The firelight had retreated from his chair. But there was peace in the crackling of its wood, and an understanding that all would be fine once he and Lara had spoken.

Then, Alec heard it – a sound he knew so well and yet one entirely unexpected in that moment. The grind of the shutters. They were lifting. Every single panel that guarded the study’s windows was furling upwards, leaving only the curtains between Alec and the night, where he knew the creeper had stood since the day he was born.

His fingers scratched into the chair’s leather as he stared at the curtains, fearing them to fall from their hooks at any second. He listened to the shutters’ slow, metallic roll. And then there was silence. Alec imagined that face described to him by all those now deceased. Did it loom inches from the pane, yearning to be seen?