Mike Shevdon - Sixty-One Nails

Every time he hit the knife it made a jarring note that accented the wrongness in the metal. It was like scraping fingers down a blackboard, but a hundred times worse. By the time he was ready to stop I had a thumping headache and Blackbird looked no happier.

Jeff and his daughter crowded back into the forge to view the results. Blackbird and I had no wish to get closer to the knife or the forge, so we stayed outside. The headache had intensified and I was seeing vague images, like brief mirages, in the periphery of my vision.

I felt Blackbird's hand on my arm. "Are you well?"

I nodded, sending needles of pain through my forehead making me grimace.

"It's done now. They've finished," she reassured me.

There was an animated discussion going on between Jeff and the old man. They were arguing technicalities and sparking off each other. The argument died as quickly as it started. They put the knife back into its box and brought it back to us.

"It's still whole," Ben told us, "though the metal has started to crack. If I had continued it would have broken again."

"So is that a yes or a no?" Blackbird asked him.

"I think the lass has the right of it: it was hammered cold. Remember though, simply dropping it onto a hard floor was enough to break it in the first place."

"That was a fault in the metal," Jeff interrupted.

"Regardless, if we cold-hammered the new knife then it would crack and break."

"Not if we had the right tools," Jeff interrupted again.

"Jeff, we've been over this. The anvil would need to be enormous and specifically made for the job and the hammer would have to be tuned to the metal. Even then…" His frustration at his son evaporated as he watched the expressions on our faces change. "What?" he said.

"This anvil? How enormous would it need to be?" Blackbird asked him.

"Big. Bigger than anything we've got."

"About this long, so high?" She hopped around, miming the distances, unable to spread her arms wide enough to encompass it.

He looked askance at her theatrics, but nodded.

"We saw it," I told him. "It's in London, hidden." I described the anvil sitting on the island amid the dark water of the underground river.

"It sounds right, but without a hammer that's tuned to it, it only solves half the problem."

There was a pause while we thought it through.

"You wouldn't want to separate the hammer from the anvil, would you?" Blackbird suggested.

"No," I agreed, "But you wouldn't leave it lying around either, not where someone could appropriate it for some other purpose. It might get lost."

"Or stolen," she added. "You'd lock it away."

"Somewhere close by," I agreed.

"Somewhere safe."

"But we can't open it. It's sealed, remember?"

"Would the two of you mind telling me what on earth you're talking about?" the old man interrupted.

We described the square iron door in the wall, neither of us mentioning the two visitors that had come to inspect it while we had been there.

"But it's locked and we don't know how to unlock it," I told him.

"And you reckon there's a hammer in this lock-box?"

"Where else would you put it? It has to be there."

He scratched at his unshaven chin. "You might be able to break into it, but it sounds like you'd need heavy cutting equipment. Any idea how thick the door is?"

We both shook our heads. "The door is flush to the wall and not easy to get at. It's set in the wall above head-height over a thin ledge where it would be almost impossible to set a ladder, let alone apply any leverage once you had climbed it."

It was his turn to shake his head. "Even if there is a hammer in there, it doesn't sound like you'll be able to get at it without unlocking it."

"There must be a key." Frustration rang in Blackbird's tone.

"Are you sure the key's not with the anvil?" Jeff suggested.

"No, there's nowhere to leave it where it would be safe. Besides, why leave the key with the safe? There'd be no point in locking it if the key is with it. Are you certain you don't have a key here, handed down through generations, a family heirloom perhaps?"

"We can look," Jeff volunteered.

We followed Jeff back into the kitchen and he started pulling out drawers looking for keys.

"Jeff, I'm trying to put lunch together. Do you mind?" Meg Highsmith protested as Jeff started turning drawers out onto the kitchen table.

"It's urgent," was all he said and continued pulling things out.

Ben went into the room with the dogs, amid much snuffling and a low growl from the big dog at us. Ben emerged with a wooden box filled with bits of rusty broken tools, orphaned cutlery and old keys. He spilled the lot out onto the table. Meg folded her arms and sighed as they began sorting through the oddments.

"If you tell me what you're looking for I might be able to help," she offered.

They carried on sorting, but explained the dilemma of the missing key. There was a growing pile of old keys in the centre of the table, but none looked likely.

"It has to be quite large," I told her, picking up an ornate brass key. "The keyhole is square and about a quarter of an inch on each side. The thing is, it didn't look as if the lock turned."

"No, it didn't did it?" agreed Blackbird. "How do you turn a square key in a square hole?"

"Maybe it's a round key that goes in a square hole?" remarked Jeff.

"Maybe, but then where do the 'key' bits go; the bits that trip the levers?"

James Highsmith had watched all this from the far end of the kitchen table, but now he stood up and started talking in low tones to his mother.

"I don't know, James. Ask them," she told him.

He turned to us, glancing at his father. "There's this PlayStation game…" he started.

"James, not now!" The disappointment in Jeff's voice at the change of subject to his son's passion was palpable.

"Jeff. Hear him out." Meg Highsmith stood behind her son. This was clearly a point of friction between the man and the teenager and it looked like Meg had had to stand between them more than once.

James hesitated, but at a nudge from his mother he started speaking again.

"In the game you collect an ornate dagger, early on in the game. I thought it must be a magic one; you know, effective against certain types of monster? But after a while, you stop using it because it's useless. It's much more effective to use the bigger weapons."

Jeff sighed, but subsided at a look from Meg.

"Then, when you get into the later levels there are people that try and buy it off you, or steal it, or trade it for something. It got so I kept it just because everyone wanted it. Anyway, you get to the big castle at the end and the drawbridge is up, the gates are locked, but you need to get inside to fight the big boss."

He paused, but found only blank faces. I don't think any of us had ever played on a PlayStation.

"The thing is, there's a little gate which you can get to by climbing around, but when you get there it's locked. The keyhole is a funny shape, like a thin diamond. The only way of opening the gate is to put the dagger into the keyhole. Then you're in."

"And?" said his father.

"I think what James is telling us is that while we are all looking for something shaped like a key, that may not be what we need," said Blackbird.

"You said the keyhole didn't turn," James pointed out. "Maybe it doesn't need to, if you have the proper-shaped thing to put into it?"

"So we're looking for something that could push into a square hole about so big." Blackbird held her thumb and forefinger apart to show them the size.

Everyone looked blank.

"That makes it worse," I said. "We were looking for a needle in a haystack. Now we don't even know if it's a needle." James looked crestfallen so I added, "But James may be right. A literal key may not be what we're searching for." That brought back a hesitant smile.