Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Vallis Reach ·
Why They Leave the Keys In
At the Reach a key left in its lock is found turned the other way by morning, and the sheet counts it locked.
- status: folklore
You are new on the Reach, so this comes to you now and not later, the way it has come to every pair of hands posted on this water since the sheets began. At the Thin Hour nothing at the Reach is locked your own way. Not the wardens' cabins, not the tool hut, not the net store, not the reach keeper's own door. You leave the key in the lock, brass out to the street, and you go inside and bank the fire and sleep like a man whose door is seen to by the shift.
Come the morning rounds, the key has been turned the other way. The night sheet keeps a column for it — LOCKED, OTHER WAY — and the warden on the rounds initials it the same as any lock on the books, and that door counts locked, safe as a counted door. Nobody on this Reach has ever argued the count, and here is the reason the count holds like a tide table: a door locked your own way at the Thin Hour is found open at the rounds, and the key is gone off the ring, and the loss is written up lawful and the ledger carries it. A key left in its lock is never taken. It turns. Once, one full throw, from the street side, and stops. The Reach has lost no key that was left, not in the memory of the sheds, and the memory of the sheds goes back past the naming of the water.
The glass of the lock fogs from the street side on cold nights, and inside the fog the turning goes, once and no more, and no hand stays in the glass afterwards. The custom is not to watch. Men have tried leaving a key half-turned, to see which way it means to go; the half-turn is found squared up to a full one by morning, and that is the whole of the watching the Reach advises. A key that counts as locked asks no watching, and the sheets come out the same whether a man stands all night at the glass or sleeps, and the Reach learned long since which of the two the wage is for.
The custom is older than the Board's name on the shed doors. The old men tell it that the Reach took the practice up the year the city's counting went strange — the second of November, gone a third past three — when the books of every office on the water would not sit square and neither would the locks. The Reach made its peace with its books first of anybody, and it made the peace by the key. Leave the key in and the books stay square: that is the bargain as it was struck, and the sheets have held their side of it every winter since, cold nights especially, when the fog sits on the street side of every lock at once and the turning is quiet and equal, lock by lock down the whole reach, like a verse going along a row of children. There is no use asking what the bargain bought or what it costs, because the Reach answers that in its own arithmetic: one key turned counts one door shut, and the column never comes up short.
It is Sid Anstey keeps this telling going now, bridge end of the water, thirty winters on the night sheet, and Ray Cobbett carries it to every new pair of hands that comes up the towpath, and they give it out the way you have had it tonight: leave the key in, brass out, count on the other way. And they hand you the ask that comes with the custom, the one the new men take a season to stop turning over in their heads, the same as old Anstey turns the bridge lamp low at the third hour, the same as Cobbett squares his column and signs: the key is turned from the street and counted on our sheet — so which side of the door is the inside, and whose column does a turned key fall under when the Thin Hour comes down?