The Keyhole

The closet in which Rupert was hiding for the past thirty minutes was unbearably small. Between crouching and kneeling on the hardwood floor, his arthritic legs were failing. Above him, shirt sleeves and jacket ends draped his shoulders with an air of condemnation, disembodied spirits posing with their captive. A beam of light streaming through the keyhole had settled on Rupert’s bald head.

A man and a woman quickly entered the room, and just as abruptly shut the door behind them. The sudden rush of air slightly rattled the closet door in front of Rupert's face. He looked through the little keyhole, his wrinkled eye bathed in a pale glow. He tried to quell his worried breath, which rose and sank in a shrill wheeze, while his eyelashes nervously fluttered, and a thin line of sweat trailed down his nose. The man in the room spoke coolly, knowingly, as though he could strike the woman without laying a finger on her. She was trying feebly to pacify him.

“Tell me a bedtime story, mother,” he said.

“If I had only known the trouble it would cause you, I wouldn't have mentioned it. But come to reason, please. He’s your father’s brother.”

“He is? Why didn’t anybody tell me?” he mocked.

The figures appeared and disappeared from the vista of the keyhole. They were slowly circling the room from opposite ends. When they were out of view, Rupert carefully adjusted his position. He could bend on one knee only for a short length of time before the pain became intolerable. He hoped they would leave soon. It was a bad idea, he thought. There were much better ways of obtaining information. When he looked again, he saw only the woman, framed in the keyhole’s little silhouette. Her son, whom she watched in terror, now paced along the unseen wall.

Neither one spoke. There was an interminable silence. The woman eyed her son carefully and nervously smoothed the folds of her dress. A lion tamer trapped in the beast’s cage might have shown as much restraint. Rupert now feared the possibility of a sudden, violent action. The woman will be torn abruptly from his view, he thought, killed or battered.

While still pacing, the man began to speak, but no longer in the voice of an offended child. He spoke rather with a feigned, calculating calm, as if he had summed up everything and was now pronouncing a verdict.  

“Tell me, mother, do you blush?”

“What?”  

“A whore in league with her lover, a husband’s mysterious death, a son deprived of his father. Enough reason to turn crimson?”

“What is this? What do you mean by all this?”

The man withheld his answer for a moment, as if by suspending it, he was making it monstrous. He then uttered in a menacing tone, “Murder. That’s what I mean. Foul murder.”

At this moment, Rupert banged the door with a hollow rap while switching knees. At once the hurried tap of footsteps was heard. His heart sank. The saliva in his mouth thinned, then dried almost instantly. When he peered again, timorously, through the keyhole, he saw only the man now, facing the closet door with a menacing leer.

“My, my, mother, I think there's a mouse in your closet.”