DISCLAIMER: ALL CHARACTERS HEREIN ARE OVER THE AGE OF 18. I do not condone any abuse of any kind IRL, and everything herein is just fantasy. Do not attempt to re-enact anything you read here.
The rain had started that day he'd met Charlotte, and hadn't stopped since. Despite her warning, he had had little choice but to start exploring the house out of sheer boredom. There were only so many endless hours you could spend on imageboards, chatrooms and forums talking about pornography. He had thought about describing the girl he had just met to a few of his online friends, but it seemed... crass. She was strange, sure, but nice. She was likely to be the only person near his age for miles around. He didn't want to do anything to mess that up.
The house was a lot older than it had seemed. It didn't take long to map out all the rooms, but each one was so full of old items. Some walls stretched between rooms and suddenly stopped. Others had doors hidden in alcoves which led to rooms you didn't expect. He even found one room totally hidden in between two others, a tiny little cupboard you wouldn't have seen if you hadn't been looking for it.
There was one room that really creeped him out. It was packed full of old furniture, and it was all covered in white sheets. He'd seen one too many horror movies with rooms like that. Even so, he'd taken a look under a few sheets. Even if this furniture all came from this house, it didn't match. Some of it was far older. It must have been accumulated over many generations of people living here.
How many families had lived here over the years? There was enough furniture in that room to fully furnish the whole estate twice. The barren state of the other rooms made sense now. All the furnishings were in here.
Some old paintings proved interesting for a while. He googled the names of people under the more extravagant portraits. Land owners, a few local politicians, even an early film star.
Next he decided to figure out what all the switches in the house did. Most were lights, a few though were more interesting. There was an electronic dumbwaiter which led to the cellar from the kitchen, and up to the second floor. There was a switch in the basement which dimmed every light in the house at once. A few did nothing at all, as far as he could tell.
That kept him occupied for as long as it took to download some 'viewing material', which he proceeded to go up to his room and peruse for a while.
The next day, as the rain showed no sign of abating, he decided to put a tag on every switch, and then figure out what every key was for. The drawer in the kitchen had easily fifty keys, and that air of mystery from the forest was back as he looked through them.
Some were easy to match up. The modern locks took modern keys, older ones the more arched and rifled ones, and the oldest ones used the kind of keys you only really saw in point and click adventure games these days.
Forty-nine keys, forty-nine doors or cupboards. It had taken a while but he dumped the keys back into the drawer, complete with their tags. Forty-nine... and yet one key was left.
Big, black, cast iron. The end was a thick heart-shape, and the head quite ornate and fancy. But where did it go?
He'd already found every door in the house. He'd even found one for a padlock leading to the cellar from outside. Where did this go?
He gave the house another once over, but no luck. he even checked all the sheeted furniture for a hidden chest. Whatever this key led to, perhaps it had been taken by a previous family, and the key forgotten.
Eventually, he sat against the wall in his bedroom, phone in hand, and decided to listen to the rain as he browsed some Discord servers. Behind him the rain was lashing against the windows, and the dark day grew darker.
A flash of light, followed by thunder, tore him away from the rather engaging content he had found -- full bodied redheads, coincidentally.
For a split second, in the light, at the bottom of the wall in front of him he'd seen something... odd. Turning the light on on his phone, he scanned the wall in the dim light, until another flash -- and there it was.
A keyhole.
---
It wasn't actually a keyhole. Or it was. Rather, the keyhole was behind the wallpaper. So easily overlooked, if it hadn't been for the contrast of the light, he would never have spotted it. Indeed, he might have lived here for years and never noticed it.
