Uncle Shom Part3 🆒 🔖

Now, this is Part 3. I arrived on a Tuesday in October. The leaves were the color of bruised plums. Uncle Shom didn’t greet me at the door. Instead, I found him in the parlor, sitting before a wall I had never noticed before. It wasn't a wall of plaster or wood. It was a wall of locks.

Uncle Shom pressed the black key into my palm. It was heavier than any metal should be.

“That’s the secret, nephew,” he said. “You don’t.”

I felt the air change. The house groaned. Somewhere above us, a clock began to tick backward. uncle shom part3

“You’re late,” he said without turning.

“Which one do I open?” I asked.

By an unreliable nephew

His house sat at the end of a gravel road that no one bothered to pave, a crooked Victorian with a porch that sagged like an old mule. Everyone in town knew Uncle Shom as the man who fixed clocks and never smiled. But I knew him as the man who, twice before, had shown me things that couldn’t be explained.

I looked at the silver lock. Then at the wall of hundreds of others, each one humming faintly, like a held breath.

Part 2 was the basement door that opened onto a staircase with thirteen steps—no matter how many times I counted. Now, this is Part 3

“Understand what?”

He smiled for the first time in ten years.

“The first two were lessons,” he said. “This one is a choice.” Uncle Shom didn’t greet me at the door

He stepped back. And the wall began to turn. End of Part 3.