A Tin of Keys (1 of 6)
The Grandfather Clock
I found the can—a slightly rusted Maxwell House tin—sitting atop a beam in the post-and-beam frame of the barn on the property I bought in 1998. It wasn’t all that interesting at first. Just an old coffee can with a handful of keys inside.
The barn held far more interesting things: a hand-hewn ox yoke worn smooth by use; a cracked wooden hay rake still holding its shape; a shingle froe and mallet for splitting cedar; a barrel of rust-fused square nails; a hand-forged sickle with a darkened handle; a doubletree once used to hitch a team; a dovetail box marked E.C. in faded ink; and four Wyman & Sons blueberry crates filled with sheets of hand-pounded lead.
There were other bits and bobs too numerous to mention, and hand tools whose use had long since been forgotten.
I lived in the Cape Cod–style house for two years before I finally sorted the barn: discarding what I didn’t want and organizing what I kept. I set the old horse-drawn cultivator on the lawn and turned it into a flower planter.
The house was built before 1819. That was the date etched into the horsehair plaster behind peeling wallpaper in one of the second-floor bedrooms. The downstairs had been built earlier, as was typical of Cape Cod homes. In those days, you didn’t finish the upstairs until you had enough children to fill the downstairs.
It was a turn-of-the-century home in a state of disrepair, but it had features worth keeping: well-maintained tin ceilings, wainscoting in the kitchen, and a fireplace with built-in natural vents.
I used to wonder about the hands that built it. Not just the ones that raised the frame or laid the hearthstone, but the ones that patched the roof with whatever they had, or hung blankets where a door ought to be. The house didn’t feel haunted, exactly—but it felt held. Lived in. The way a coat remembers your shape even after you’ve taken it off.
I nearly tossed the Maxwell House can on a dump run one afternoon. My daughter, six at the time—still reeling from the loss of her grandmother to cancer—rode with me and helped sort through some remnants.
“These feel warm,” she said. “What do these keys go to?”
“Hard telling,” I said. “They fit nothing on the property, so whatever they went to is long gone. No point keeping them.”
“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully. “But I still wonder what they went to.”
I nodded at her as I tossed out bits and pieces of things earlier generations had held on to—because they, or their parents, or their grandparents had lived through the Great Depression. That era left its fingerprints on three generations, embedding a quiet instinct to keep what might one day be useful, or meaningful, or simply not so easy to replace.
“Can I keep them?” she asked.
“Whatever for?” I asked.
“To play with them,” she said. “To imagine with them.”
“Fine,” I said. “But don’t leave them strewn all over the house.”
She knew what that meant. It was a reference to a set of four old hand irons—missing their handles, blackened from years of being heated on wood stoves. Women of earlier generations had used them to press clothing on chilly fall mornings, steam rising from damp blouses.
She had turned them into playthings once and left them in the backyard, where my brand-new riding lawnmower rediscovered them—resulting in a bent spindle on the mowing deck.
“I’ll take care of them,” she insisted.
“All right,” I said.
She didn’t, of course.
I found the keys dumped on the ground beneath the tire swing I’d hung from a Norway maple—the same tree that later broke my ribs when I fell from it while clearing a visual path for the DirecTV dish.
I wasn’t angry. She was a child. When she asked and I said yes, I already knew this moment would come. I was just relieved they were all in one place. I scooped them up, tucked them into my jacket pocket, and promptly forgot about them.
Winter came, and the jacket went into the back of the closet in favor of a parka. It wasn’t until the next spring that I found the keys again, while pruning the apple trees that separated the wild blueberry fields from the well-manicured rear lawn.
I was wearing gloves, carrying a set of hand pruners and a pole saw I’d taken from the barn. As I approached the trees, I heard a faint jingling from my jacket pocket.
“What the heck is that?” I muttered.
I pulled off a glove, reached into the pocket, and felt the shape of a key.
And everything went black.
When I awoke, the absence of a ticking clock startled me.
It was a strange sensation. I didn’t have a ticking clock—so why would the lack of its sound unsettle me?
I looked around the room and found myself in my house, except it wasn’t my house somehow. I was in my living room, lying on an antique couch that I didn’t own. The wallpaper had changed, and the fireplace was crackling. It had gone from day to night, and the smell of baked bread and something more overwhelmed me.
A woman I didn’t know poked her head in from the kitchen and said:
“Honestly, dear, are you just going to lie there all evening?”
“Huh?” I responded.
“Well, come on, wind it up and get in here. You’ve got a turkey to carve.”
I stepped into the kitchen, noticing the wainscoting had a fresh coat of varnish and the floor was no longer tiled—it was a fine hardwood. The kitchen end-heater (a miniature wood stove covered in white porcelain) was also ablaze, and the table, set for six, was occupied by four children between the ages of three and twelve, none of whom I recognized.
“You didn’t even wind it up!” the woman said, glancing at me. She set a china serving plate, filled with a modest cooked turkey at the apparent head end of the table.
“I need the restroom,” I said, heading to the bathroom.
“You’ve just had a rest, ya fool,” she said. “Now are you going to wind the clock or slice this bird first?”
She handed me a carving knife, and I realized, for the first time, that I was clutching a key in my right hand. I tucked the key in the pocket of my trousers—trousers of some style I had never seen before and did not own.
“One moment,” I said, disappearing into the sanctuary of the bathroom, which was no sanctuary at all.
The bathroom was still mine—or close enough to fool the eye at first glance—but everything had… shifted.
The sleek fiberglass tub-and-shower surround was gone. In its place stood a cast-iron clawfoot tub, its enamel chipped in a few spots, the feet shaped like lion’s paws and dulled with age. A porcelain soap dish was bolted to the wall above it, stained with the rusty memory of years past. There was no shower curtain rod, no wall-mounted fixtures, just a handheld spray nozzle attached to a pair of cross-handled taps—one marked “H,” the other “C,” in letters so old they looked hand-painted.
The modern vanity with its quartz top and under-mount sink had vanished. In its place stood a weathered washstand with a scalloped marble top, a basin sink perched on top like a bowl waiting to be filled. The mirror above it was beveled and foggy around the edges, set in a gilded wooden frame that didn’t quite hang level. A ceramic toothbrush cup rested beside a glass bottle with a cork stopper.
The toilet had been replaced with a high-backed gravity-fed water closet; the tank suspended high on the wall with a long chrome pull chain dangling from it. The bowl was rounded—heavy—with a porcelain glaze that felt older than the house itself. A faint, metallic clink echoed when the chain gently swayed.
The lighting had shifted too. The ceiling fixture was no longer LED-bright and flush-mounted. Instead, a glass globe pendant hung from a braided cord, casting a golden glow that trembled slightly, as though powered by an uncertain current.
And the air—somehow cooler, tinged with iron and lavender talc—held the faintest echo of someone else’s routine.
But the most shocking thing about the bathroom was the man staring back at me from the mirror.
It wasn’t me.
“What the—?”
I closed the water closet lid, sat down, and tried to breathe.
There was a knock at the door, accompanied by a small voice.
“Daddy, I gotta go pee-pee.”
A boy.
“One moment,” I said.
‘Hurry up, I gotta go.”
“Okay, just a second,” I said.
I stood and looked at the man in the mirror.
He was older than me. Maybe by ten years. He had gray eyes, which I found freakishly strange compared to my own hazel. His hair was shorter, neater, and beginning to thin at the crown. There was a scar on his chin I didn’t remember getting.
He looked calm.
I wasn’t.
“Daddy?” the boy called again.
I turned toward the door, then back to the mirror.
The man was still staring.
But this time, he smiled.
Not wide. Not warm. Just enough to let me know he knew something I didn’t.
I opened the door and was nearly bowled over by a six-year-old boy.
“Don’t forget to flush,” his mother called. “And wash.”
“You okay?” she asked me. “Your eyes look tired or something.”
“I don’t know why I’m here,” I said, inanely.
“Because I got you up off the couch, you old fool. You’re just not awake yet. You took the carving knife into the bathroom with you. I was afraid you were going to drop it on my little fun toy.”
She winked at me and I saw a little bit of a crimson rise in her cheeks.
I smiled back, though I didn’t know why, and then began carving the turkey.
I plucked out the wishbone and looked at it.
The children all shouted, “Me! Me!”
“It’s Anna’s turn,” mother said. “Now, you gotta put it on the mantle so it dries out a bit.”
The mother looked at me, expectantly.
I think I was saved by the fact that there was only one girl, about twelve in age.
I handed her the wishbone.
“Thank you, Papa,” she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek.
“You’re welcome, Anna.”
“You look different, Papa” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your eyes just look different.”
I didn’t say anything.
Now, my wife was a great cook. She made the most delicious Thanksgiving meals, and her homemade bread was to die for. But the flavors from that Thanksgiving meal were out of this world somehow. The cranberry sauce was—more cranberry somehow. The gravy was the best I’d ever had, probably because it didn’t come from a packet. And somehow the consistency of the mashed potatoes was just perfect, slightly lumpy still, just the way I liked it.
After dinner, where I met Anna, Henry, Elliott, and Chase (the one with the small bladder), I was back in the living room on the antique couch, with candles and oil lamps burning around me.
A very pretty and wonderful smelling lady I didn’t know was cuddled up to me, whispering things about the fun toy I possessed and making promises that, while intriguing, felt like a betrayal somehow—since I have my own wife who I love very much.
I have to admit that it was a little bit uncomfortable.
She sensed it too.
“You out of sorts?”
“I am feeling a little displaced, yes,” I said.
“Well, maybe you do need a good night’s sleep. I’m sure you’ll be up early and in the woods with your rifle.”
“Rifle?”
“Well, your dad’s rifle, really,” she said, grinning at me.
She tilted her head to point to the fireplace.
Above the fireplace, mounted between a pair of old iron hooks, was a rifle that didn’t belong.
It was a U.S. Springfield Trapdoor, chambered in .45-70. Long, heavy, single-shot. Military issue, by the look of it—late 19th century. The kind of rifle that once echoed through the Black Hills or over the ridges of San Juan.
The breech block was unmistakable—hinged like a jaw, ready to bite down on a fat brass cartridge. The stock had that straight military line, but the wood was darker now, oil-soaked and smoothed by time. The buttplate was solid steel, the kind that bruised if you held it wrong.
I knew that rifle.
But I shouldn’t have.
There was a serial number, now faint, rubbed down by a century of hands. And just ahead of the trigger guard, someone had carved initials—S.R.A.—shallow and crude, but unmistakably mine.
Except I’d never seen this rifle before.
Beside me, she was stoking the fire, humming low. The children were upstairs. The oil lamps flickered.
“You’ll want to take it out early,” she said, not looking at me. “You always do on the first snow.”
I reached for the rifle, and the cold steel felt like it had been waiting for me.
“There are better things to make love to than your father’s rifle,” she said, grabbing my biceps and pulling me to her.
It was a temptation, that’s for sure, but I needed to get away and breathe for a second.
I set the rifle back in its position.
She was too near to me. Too close. My hands wanted to do things.
So I stuffed them in my pockets for safekeeping.
She poked at the fireplace one last time and then placed the fire iron in its stand and closed the grate.
“Come on into bed when you’re ready,” she said.
My fingers touched the key in my pocket.
“Let me wind the clock,” I said.
She smiled coyly at me, making sure I noticed her undo a button on her blouse as she walked away.
I opened the silent grandfather clock, pulled the old key from my pocket, and cranked it.
Everything went black.
When my eyes opened, I was in my backyard, pruner and saw in my hands.
There was still work to be done on the apple trees.
But I could still smell turkey dinner.
And the key was gone.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.
Time travel by key! I will have to come back later for the next chapter.