A key ring holding five keys is the most promising thing in the world. Promise of discovery and promise of loss, but promise none the less.

Key one opens a door. A gigantic door painted with swimming, mesmerizing patterns made of the most vibrant colours. Shades that only you can see, transported from foreign worlds for your eyes only. This fantastic door is screaming for your attention. Patterns that you feel enslaved to, are pulsing, drawing you closer. You can feel the dangerous uncertainty of what’s behind, crawl up your arm as you put the key into the hole. Several different clicks and turns, you hear them like insects crawling inside the lock. This is the most important lock of the five, and the most heavily guarded, you can feel it. The rest should come easy now.

Inside the door is a room full of things. Inanimate and alive. Full of boxes and treasures, mirrors and lights. Monsters of all shapes and sizes, fantastic creatures from thousands of different worlds. Not one looks as though it shares lineage with another. One with dark feathers and bright, glowing eyes. Another with a serpent body and slick oil skin, leaving its mark soaking through everything it touches. One makes the rounds in a dark grey suit, he must be the biggest creature there. He holds a birdcage, inside is a fierce red bird with a beak vicious enough to make the scars that line it’s holder’s face. The monsters will crowd around you, move with you. An undulating mass of magnificent madness, with you at the center. At first you are afraid that their intentions are wicked, in fact they are. Don’t panic. You discover that you can control them, quite easily really, and they eventually disperse and return to their milling and shambling about. This gives you a window of opportunity. A grand window, huge, but the view is blocked, and so you climb through cautiously. You wander around the room, which you can’t even see the back wall of, but you know it must be at least a mile back to hold so many creatures. Even farther, for the dark creatures take up more space. There are so many things to see, to touch, but not nearly enough time to understand.

Key two opens a second door. This door is smaller and not as lurid as the first, but entirely more welcoming. A soft glow emits from the crack underneath. This second keyhole is small, tricky. You have to be sure when unlocking as you could easily drop the key, and if it slides even slightly, it will be lost under the very door you need it to open. So I repeat, you must be certain when you use this key that it will fit in the first time. And carefully you will turn the key, clockwise until your veins are  ceiling gazing and you can hear the bolt separating from the strike plate. When you push in, the door opens to a small room. Narrow, about five feet across, 10 feet back. But the ceilings are high, allowing you to breath.The room is empty but for the fireplace lit with eternal burning logs casting the warm glow. This is the room of sanguine, a place that will come in handy later, when the monsters decide to horde again. You recognize that the second key is important, and remember to keep your eyes on this door, making sure that you have a clear path to it at all times.

Key three opens a box. A secret, metal box, with lots of screws and bits and ends. An impressive padlock guards the front, but you access it handily. Inside the box are a million cards, all labeled with the monsters you see around, and some with monsters you don’t. You take one out and put it in the middle of a different row, as curiosity dictates you do. The monster belonging to the card, belonging to your will, moves to a different section of monsters in the room. You already put it together in your head, and you spend the next hour arranging and rearranging the cards. Doing your best to create order within the room. Grouping only the monsters with scales into one group, or the creatures of blue hues opposite the creatures in pink. You notice that certain combinations make changes to the room. Some groupings of monsters make the room brighter, some make it colder. You then realize that it would take forever to fully understand, and that trying to completely organize it is futile. You close the box ,knowing that you’ll come back again and again over the days trying to organize the monsters enough to see the back wall. You think about putting the box into the sanguine room, but decide against it when you notice how exhausted the card shuffling has made you. Days spent like that would drive you senseless and deranged.

Key four opens the only other door that you can see. The door is the entrance and exit to and from an indoor garden. There are as many different kinds of flowers in the garden as there are monsters outside, with empty soil beds waiting for more to be planted.There are no birds singing, it is silent, but friendly topiaries smile at you from above. You stop to smell a few of the flowers. Some have beautiful, sweet exotic smells, others have putrid, rotting scents. But every perfume has an overpowering scent of nostalgia, the sweet, and the putrid. The garden around you disappears to the feelings that are forming into pictures behind your eyelids. You lose yourself in the garden for a while, you don’t know exactly how long. You stand in the center absorbing it all in your head. With each new whiff of a scent, another image rolls together and displays itself before you. You stay until the nostalgia panging in your chest hurts too much, and the butterflies in your stomach make their way through the rest of your body. You can feel their wings tickling your throat. After you leave you can still smell the scent of flowers trailing from the cracks around the door, escaping. You wonder if you could ever remove and replant some of the sweeter flowers out in the main room, if it would have any effect on the monsters.

Key five remains a mystery to you. You spend considerable amounts of time hiding in the sanguine room, getting lost in the garden and playing around with those cards. Until your limbs become stiff from sitting, your head becomes light from the aromas, your hands become sore from papercuts, and your mind is fatigued. You have a feeling that the last key fits somewhere in the back wall, if you could only find it. In fact, you know it does. You also know that turning the key in it’s right spot will release a bolt that will somehow make sense of everything that goes on in this room. The monsters, the flowers, the quiet, the order. Until you find the back wall and you can turn the fifth key, this room can be a dangerous place when you spend too much time there. So you come and go with the promises of 5 keys on you at all times.