T-041 Skeleton Key

Threshold Institute · Case file T-041

Number

T-041 in the catalogue

Kind

Object

Class

Class I: harmless while it is left alone

Found

Year 39, month 5, day 22

Where found

The rift, in the lock of a door that stood alone in an open field, with no wall on either side of it

Status

Contained

Now

At the lab and in the rift

Part

Part III: Going through (the objects)

Containment procedures

The key is held on a hook in the containment chamber's anteroom, where every door is one the Institute's cutters can open again. It is used only by the leader of a run or the head of the response team, and before any use the user names, in the log, every door they have come through since they last stood in the anteroom. It is not to be used inside a cell block.

Description

A short iron key, plain, the kind that opens a cellar. It opens any lock once: a padlock, a cell door, a bank vault in testing, it turns and the lock gives. It will not turn in that lock again, and the lock does not work for anyone else afterwards.

The cost is behind the holder. When a door is opened with the key, a door the holder has already come through locks itself, at once and for good, and the key does not open it.

This is not the key that Anneli Sund's expedition went for. That key, which the deepest of her surveys was sent to bring home, was never recovered; it is held in no cell and has no number in this catalogue, and it lies, as far as anyone knows, where her team was lost, far deeper than any retrieval run goes (T-031). The two must not be confused in the files.

Discovery

The run went out on the strength of the hollow (T-031). Petr Lask's gear had been taken from the thing that wore it, and his last log said Sund's team was looking for a key. When the run saw a key in a lone door, Rehn believed for an hour that it was hers. He turned it. The door opened onto the same field. Behind them the gate of the Institute's own forward post, eight kilometres back, was later found locked, its bolts fused.

Addenda

Addendum T-041-A

Test log

Year 39, month 7, day 2. Technician Ruth Abel opens a cell door from the cell block corridor. Both of the corridor's doors lock behind her. The cutters take four hours to reach her. The cell was empty. Year 39, month 7, day 30: the key opens a padlock in the yard; the door locked behind the holder is the main gate of the observation wing, forty metres back, which he passed through that morning. The bolt has to be cut out of the frame. From then on the key is used only where the doors behind are known.

Addendum T-041-B

Note

In Rehn's hand, Year 39, month 7, day 3: "Hers opens something. This one shuts something. That is the difference, and I want it in the file." Erik Halden asked for this key during the widening (T-055). The file does not say whether it was given.

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In the file

• People: Tomas Rehn, Anneli Sund, Petr Lask, Erik Halden and Ruth Abel.
• Places: The Institute’s site, The containment chamber, The cells, The observation wing and The land beyond the rift.

In the game

The note you find in the game:

Year 39, month 5, day 22. Found beyond T-001 in the lock of a door that stood alone in an open field, with no wall on either side, by a run sent out because Petr Lask's last log, taken from the hollow, said Anneli Sund's team was looking for a key. Tomas Rehn believed for an hour that it was hers and turned it; the door opened onto the same field, and the gate of our own forward post eight kilometres back was later found locked behind them.

A small black iron key whose bit is never the same shape twice. Turned within 2 tiles of a sealed containment cell or a shut shutter, it opens it at once; a cell so opened raises no alarm, though what it holds still wakes. At each turning a door behind its bearer bolts itself, the doorway the bearer came in by, and stays locked for 2 minutes. It turns once in a site and not again until the next.

Held in a sealed cell, in a box with no lock. Status: contained.

Today it is found at the lab and in the rift.

It is an item you can carry: Skeleton Key.