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MATTHEW MCFARLAND-JOHN NEWMAN
MALCOLM SHEPPARD-AND CHUCK WENDIG
Ring of Keys
By Chuck Wendig
The house—really, just a cabin—sat on a ridge. The ridge overlooked a ravine,
and at the bottom of the ravine ran a muddy creek, a serpent of churning clay-
colored water that wound through the dark hills. Even now, in the morning, the
early sun was already hot, bleached, bleary. A pair of buzzards circled one another
overhead, black wings buoyed by exhalations of warm air.
A car approached. Sedan, silver, four-door. A rental. Plumes of dust rose behind
the tires as it wound through the crooked evergreen spears and outcroppings of
shadowed granite. It stopped at the cabin, tires popping on limestone gravel. The
sun moved to hide behind the only cloud in the sky.
“Doesn’t look like a big place,” Greg said, poking about. He clicked on a dusty
lamp next to a lumpy recliner. Fanned out a stack of hunting and racing magazines,
then sighed. “You can give us an appraisal pretty fast, then?”
Barbara, with her plain-jane ashen hair and face like bleached saddle leather,
clucked her tongue and wagged a pen. Her jaw worked hard at a stubborn piece of
spearmint gum; even after the two-hour drive up here, Greg could still smell the
stale mint.
“Can’t be too quick,” she said. “Tax purposes. Real estate purposes. All that.
Honestly, I’m surprised. I heard you wanted to sell this little gem, and I thought to
myself, well that is
just
a dang shame. Beautiful cabin, sittin’ pretty up above Buz-
zard Creek—”
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“About that,” Karen, Greg’s wife,
started. “It’s dry up here, bone dry, I’m
getting nosebleeds and I’m using a lot of
moisturizer, but that stream below us, it’s
like whitewater rapids down there. Why
is that?”
“Snowmelt,” Barbara said. “Heck,
there was snow on the ground just two
weeks ago. But late spring hits, and so
does the sun. Part of the dryness, though,
is all the
thin
air up here, and you want
to watch out for altitude sickness be-
cause—”
“Listen,” Greg interrupted. “You’re
the real estate lady, do
your real estate thing.
I want to sell this
place. I do not want to
keep it.”
“If you say so. I
just know that this
little gem
is a real
keeper, and obviously
your father loved it
very much; it feels
very cozy and warm
and just plain lived-in.” Barbara made a
frowny-sad-droopy face.
Greg’d had enough. “It looks lived-
in because it
was
lived-in. Dad died of
a heart attack in that chair
right there
,
that’s why there’s an empty soda can on
the table, that’s why there’s an empty
bag of fucking Funyuns laying on the
loor. So. Do you want to do business or
not? You drag us all the way up here, all
the way out to Assfuck Mountain to do
what? Moralize at me? Sell me a place
that’s already mine thanks to the will
they found under his goddamn mattress?
Or do you want to be quiet and do your
goddamn job?”
Karen, his rock, his steady, his an-
chor, put a calming hand on his shoulder.
The real estate lady looked stung,
like somebody’d just slapped the gum
out of her mouth. “You don’t have to
use such impolite language. We’re polite
people here.”
“Fuck you. Get the hell out of here.
I’ll ind somebody who wants to do the
job.”
"i just know
that this little
gem is a real
keeper,"
Moments later, a door slam. A car
engine. More gravel
underneath tires.
Greg slumped into the
recliner, springs squeal-
ing. He took a deep
breath. Gritted his
teeth.
“Rough day at the
ofice?” Karen said,
standing behind him.
She rubbed her thumbs
over his temples. It was a joke, that ques-
tion, something she asked him nearly
every day. Funny—or, at least, funny to
them—because he worked out of the
house, in their attic studio.
Greg laughed a little. It felt nice,
both the temple rub and the small smile
that played at the corners of his mouth.
“Mmm. Rough month. Rough year,
rough decade. Let’s recap, shall we? Dad
divorces Mom ten years ago. Mom dies
of pancreatic cancer. Dad buys a house,
this
house, this little bolthole cabin, and
moves away to the approximate epicen-
ter of nowhere. Oh, but before he moves,
he tells me what a worthless waste of
good semen I was, because he wanted a
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hard worker and instead got himself a
watercolor artist
. Then he disappears for
ten years. No phone calls. No letters.
Not even a postcard from ol’ Buzzard
Creek down yonder. Then,
then
, the old
man dies. Heart explodes, boom. He
leaves his fortune—which includes this
palatial estate and everything in it, all
the animal heads and racing magazines I
could ever want—to me. The worthless
waste of good semen.
So. We get on a red-
eye, and I can’t get any
sleep because some
two-year-old dickhead
does the Russian Kick
Dance on the back of
my seat for four hours.
Am I missing any-
thing?”
“One thing.”
“Oh yeah? What’s
that?”
“The real estate lady drove us here,
and now she’s gone. With the car.”
He chewed on the inside of his
cheek. “Well, shit.”
there. My stomach’s already rumbling.
You want to get out the notebook and
pen, and then we’ll start up the inven-
tory? Might as well kill time until the
real estate lady realizes she left us to die
on the top of this ridge. She’ll be back.”
sitting on the
lower shelf
were two pack-
ages wrapped in
butcher's paper
Greg popped the fridge, and a gamy
smell socked him in the face. He swal-
lowed a relex gag and
sucked in a lifesaving
breath. Flies appeared;
they orbited his head.
Didn’t take long to
identify the offenders.
Wasn’t the cranberry
juice or the shelf of
mostly-empty condi-
ment containers. No,
sitting on the lower
shelf were two packag-
es wrapped in butcher’s
paper: one labeled ELK, the other BEAR.
Brown blood soaked through. Trails of it
grew vicious red mold.
Closing the door with his foot, Greg
staggered backward just as Karen showed
up with the notebook from her purse.
“First two items on the inventory,” he
said, “two packages of spoiled meat. Maybe
we can sell them on eBay.”
“No food, then.”
“Not unless you know how to kill
botulism, no.”
“Onto the inventory?”
“Onto the inventory.”
No cell phone signal. Zero bars. And
Greg had decided months ago—as execu-
tor of the estate—to stop paying the
phone bill at the cabin because he didn’t
think he’d need it. So, sure enough, the
phone was dead. They were stuck.
“Do we have food or water?” Greg
asked.
“A bottle of Aquaina and two half-
eaten rolls of generic Mentos.”
“Meal it for a king, then. I’ll check
the fridge, see if there’s anything in
The bedroom. Where his father
had slept these past ten years. Bedposts
4
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