The Second Key by Suman Das
In November 2008, the river began to lower its voice.
Mornings along the embankment came without fog that year. The water pulled back from the stones, exposing a rim of dark algae and the pale shapes of old bottles lodged between roots. The air smelled of iron and wet leaves. Trams rattled across the bridge at fixed intervals, their sound flattening as it reached the river and dissolving into something duller.
Elias walked the same stretch every morning before work. He had done so since the factory reduced his hours and then restored them again, a gesture meant to look like stability. He wore the same coat, thin at the elbows, and kept his hands in the pockets even when the temperature rose enough to make his palms sweat.
The river had been there longer than the factory. It would outlast it.
On the third morning after the fog disappeared, he noticed the door.
It stood just beyond the public path, half hidden by a stand of plane trees. At first he mistook it for a utility panel or a maintenance shed left unlocked. The wood was dark and swollen from damp. The paint had peeled in long strips, revealing earlier coats beneath—green under brown, blue under green. There was no frame, no wall. It rose directly from the soil, its base sunk into mud and leaves.
Elias slowed. A cyclist passed behind him, tires hissing, bell ringing once in irritation. He stepped closer.
The door had a handle, brass dulled to the color of old coins. Below it, a keyhole. No sign. No lock.
He looked around. The river slid by without sound. The trees stood bare, their branches thin as wire against the sky. No one else seemed to notice the door.
He reached out, then stopped. His hand hovered a few centimeters from the handle. The metal looked cold.
At work, he tried to recall whether the door had been there the day before. He could not be sure. The factory floor hummed. Machines stamped and pressed and cut. The smell of oil coated everything, even the break room coffee.
His supervisor, Marta, came by near midday. She was younger than him by a decade and older in the way she stood. Her hair was pulled back tightly, her eyes always on something just past the person she was speaking to.
“You’re drifting,” she said, not unkindly.
“I’m here,” Elias said.
She nodded, as if confirming a fact already known. “Take your break on time today.”
He did. Outside, the air had warmed. The river caught the light in thin shards.
The door was still there.
This time he circled it. The back was the same as the front: paint, handle, keyhole. No hinges visible. No gap beneath it.
He touched the handle. It was cold. He did not turn it.
That night, he dreamed of corridors.
They were narrow and unlit, the walls pressing inward. Doors lined both sides, all identical. He tried one after another. None opened. Somewhere ahead, water dripped with mechanical regularity.
When he woke, his mouth tasted of metal.
On the fourth morning, someone was sitting beside the door.
She was small, wrapped in a gray scarf that covered her hair and most of her face. Her hands were bare despite the cold, fingers red and chapped. She sat on a folding stool, angled toward the river, as if waiting for something to arrive by water.
Elias slowed. She looked up.
“You see it too,” she said.
Her voice was flat, uninflected.
“Yes,” he said, though he wasn’t sure what he meant.
She nodded once. “Most people don’t.”
He stood at an uncertain distance. “What is it?”
She shrugged. “A door.”
He waited for more.
“It wasn’t here yesterday,” he said.
“It was,” she replied. “You just didn’t notice.”
Her eyes were dark and steady. There was no challenge in her gaze, only patience.
“Does it open?” he asked.
She looked at the handle. “Sometimes.”
“Have you tried?”
She smiled, briefly. It changed her face only slightly. “Everyone tries.”
He felt something tighten in his chest. “What happens?”
She adjusted the scarf around her neck. “Depends.”
On the path behind them, a man walked his dog. The animal strained toward the river, nose low, tail rigid. The man tugged the leash, muttering. Neither glanced at the door.
“What’s behind it?” Elias asked.
She stood, folding the stool with practiced efficiency. “You won’t like it if I tell you.”
He almost laughed. The sound caught in his throat and came out wrong.
“Why are you here?” he said.
She considered this. “I watch.”
“For what?”
“For who opens it.”
“And you?” he said. “Have you?”
Her hands stilled. The stool hung half-folded between them.
“Yes,” she said.
“And?”
She finished folding the stool and leaned it against the tree. “I came back.”
The next day, she was there again. And the next.
Her name was Anna. She said she used to live nearby, in an apartment above a bakery that closed after the owner died. She worked nights now, cleaning offices across the river. She did not say where she slept.
Elias told her about the factory. About the hours that expanded and contracted without warning. About his wife, Lena, who had left three years earlier, taking with her the sound of dishes clinking in the sink and the way the apartment smelled of soap and bread.
“She didn’t leave all at once,” he said one morning, watching the river pull at a branch caught near the bank. “She started by forgetting things.”
Anna listened without comment.
“The keys,” he said. “She forgot her keys more and more often. I started leaving the door unlocked.”
Anna looked at the door beside them.
“That’s how it goes,” she said.
One afternoon, as clouds gathered low over the city, Elias reached into his pocket and found a key he did not recognize.
It was old, its teeth worn smooth. The metal was warm, as if it had been held for a long time.
He stopped walking. The river was darker today, its surface bruised by wind.
Anna watched his hand.
“You found it,” she said.
“I don’t know where it came from.”
She nodded. “You never do.”
He closed his fingers around it. “Is this for—”
“Yes.”
He felt suddenly exposed, as if the trees had leaned closer.
“What happens if I use it?” he asked.
She did not answer at once. A tram crossed the bridge, its sound louder than usual.
“You go through,” she said finally. “You see what you need to see.”
“And then?”
“And then you decide.”
He laughed then, a short sound. “I’ve been deciding my whole life.”
She looked at him. “Have you?”
The rain began without warning, a fine, cold mist that soaked through his coat. The door darkened, the wood drinking in the water.
He did not go to work the next morning.
The factory called once. He let it ring.
The path was empty when he arrived. The river ran high again, its voice louder after the rain. The door stood unchanged.
Anna was not there.
He waited. An hour passed. The cold seeped into his bones.
Finally, he stepped forward.
The key slid into the lock without resistance. He turned it. There was a soft click, almost polite.
He pulled the handle.
The door opened inward, revealing a narrow room lit by a single bulb. The air inside was dry and warm, smelling faintly of dust and something sweet.
He hesitated, then stepped through.
The door closed behind him with a sound that echoed more than it should have.
The room was no larger than a storage closet. Against one wall stood a small table. On it lay a stack of envelopes, neatly arranged. Each bore a name in familiar handwriting.
His handwriting.
He picked up the top envelope. It was addressed to Lena.
His fingers shook as he opened it.
Inside was a letter, dated four years earlier. He recognized the words even before he read them. He had written it on a night when the apartment felt too quiet, when Lena had been asleep in the other room, her breathing uneven.
I don’t know how to tell you this, it began.
He dropped the letter.
Another envelope lay beneath it, addressed to Marta. Another to his brother, whom he had not seen in a decade. Another to a man whose name he did not recognize.
He opened one at random.
I should have said something sooner.
The letters were apologies. Confessions. Admissions of fear and failure. Each addressed to someone he had kept at a distance, each written and never sent.
His chest tightened. The air felt thinner.
On the far wall hung a mirror.
He approached it slowly.
The man reflected there was older than he felt. His hair had thinned. Lines etched his face deeply around the mouth.
Behind him, in the mirror’s depth, he saw movement.
A woman stood just inside the doorway.
Lena.
She looked as she had on the day she left, coat buttoned wrong, hair unbrushed. Her eyes were tired.
“You didn’t answer,” she said.
He turned. The room was empty.
When he faced the mirror again, she was closer.
“I knocked,” she said. “I waited.”
“I didn’t hear you,” he said.
She smiled without warmth. “You never did.”
He reached out. His hand met glass.
“You left,” he said.
“I did,” she replied. “After you made it clear you were already gone.”
The words landed softly, without accusation.
He shook his head. “I stayed.”
“You stayed in the rooms you knew,” she said. “You locked the others.”
The mirror flickered. For a moment, the room behind him shifted.
He saw himself at the kitchen table, years younger, staring at a blank page. He saw Lena in the doorway, holding her keys, watching him.
He had not turned.
“Why now?” he asked.
She looked past him, toward the table. “Because you finally opened something.”
The bulb overhead buzzed.
He felt a sudden urge to leave, to pull the door open and step back into the cold, the river, the familiar path.
“I can’t fix it,” he said.
She nodded. “I know.”
“Then what is this for?”
She reached out. Her hand passed through the glass, hovering inches from his chest.
“So you stop pretending you didn’t choose,” she said.
The room darkened. The bulb flickered once, then steadied.
The mirror showed only his own face.
The letters lay untouched on the table.
The door stood open behind him.
He stepped back through.
The river’s sound rushed in, loud and insistent. The cold air bit his skin.
Anna stood beside the door.
“You stayed a while,” she said.
He nodded. He felt hollowed out, as if something had been removed with care.
“Did you see?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She did not ask what.
“What happens now?” he said.
She picked up her stool. “Now you decide what to do with what you saw.”
He looked at the door. “It’ll be here tomorrow?”
She paused. “Maybe.”
“And you?”
She met his gaze. “I won’t.”
He watched her walk away along the path, her steps light despite the cold.
The next morning, the river was high again. Fog had returned, thick and white, swallowing the opposite bank.
Elias walked the path.
The door was gone.
In its place, only mud and leaves, pressed flat as if by long use.
He stood there for a long time.
When he turned to leave, his hand brushed against something in his pocket.
The key.
He held it in his palm. The metal had cooled.
Across the river, a light flickered on in an office building, one floor above the waterline, then another.
Elias closed his hand around the key and listened to the river, wondering which doors still remembered his name.