Stefan came back from the war with a thousand-yard stare and a girl who never moved, spoke or ate. He set up a room for her, with a moth-eaten cot and a guttering oil lamp that fitfully illuminated the enormous brass lock set into the center of her chest.

The keyhole was like a star, around which three concentric brass circles orbited, made up of endless rods, pins, tumblers and gears. The minute, frozen lines of gold-colored metal were so small that they looked like some kind of calligraphic script, and the craftsmanship of the lock was such that it didn’t protrude more than an inch out of her pale, waxy skin.

She lay silently, like an embalmed corpse, staring up at the rough wooden ceiling through closed eyelids. Her chest rose and fell fluidly and smoothly, so slow it was almost imperceptible, and I assumed she was comatose the first time I saw her. But after the hours I spent in the room with Stefan, watching the spasmodic light of the lamp play across her insubstantial skin, I began to notice a few breaks in her sleep. Sometimes her eyelids spasmed or her fingers fluttered, disturbing her stasis.

Stefan rarely left her side. He sat and stared at her for hours on end, his eyes glazed and waxy like her skin. Whenever one of her rare twitches came, he would twitch sympathetically, as if in pain. He started to miss meals, and his frame become cadaverous, skin under his eyes hanging down in black bags. He didn’t sleep much now.

I’m not sure how long he stayed like this. I didn’t see him that often, but whenever I came into his house for at least three months, he was in the same place – the gnarled wooden chair next to the cot, staring at her. The only change I saw was his ribs, protruding more and more from his chest every time I came in.

He took food from me, but I don’t think he wanted to feed himself anymore after a few months, so at that point I had to come more often – to keep him sane and fed. We talked about the weather, mostly. I got very good at making conversations about the weather last as long as possible. Neither of us had any desire to bring up the topic lying on the cot in the other room. We worked very hard to avoid it.

However, as far as we stayed from that conversation, it quickly became apparent that he was going to waste away, even with my help, if something wasn’t done about her. When we were in the dining room, it was always obvious that he was struggling to keep his eyes on me and away from the door behind which she lay. I had to do something about her, or he would die of starvation, grief, something.

I bought him a book on lock-picking shortly after. He smiled gratefully.

I came every day for the next few weeks. Stefan stayed at the dining room table and ate absent-mindedly while he worked through the book, checking and double-checking his techniques, warping screwdrivers and silverware into a set of professional-quality lockpicks, preparing his mind and body for the task to come. His fingers developed calluses and his cheeks developed twitches that were nothing like hers. He focused all of himself into his purpose until he was like one of lockpicks – inflexible, pointed, useful for only one thing.

He locked me in with him when he finally began the job. It seemed like the thing to do.

The first thing he did was open the small white suitcase he had brought in with him to make it easier to carry the lockpicks. He stared into it with absolute focus for a moment before reaching in and retrieving the largest lockpick.

The click that it made when it entered the keyhole reverberated around the dim room like a clock embryonically ticking into motion.

He worked the lockpick in the keyhole for maybe an hour. It felt longer. Beads of sweat formed on his collarbones and arms, but they never reached his hands. He stared at the lock with surgical intensity. I wasn’t even sure if he knew she was there anymore.

Finally, there was another click. The outermost of the three concentric rings of the lock chittered like a million brass insects and opened, gears disengaging, tumblers swinging tightly outwards, the whole intricate machine unraveling finely as if somebody had dropped a stitch in its brass yarn.

He didn’t stop working. The first lockpick came out, and I realized with a plummeting sensation that it was slick with rich, oily blood.

The second lockpick, smaller and finer than the first, went in next. Her spasms were a little more pronounced, a little more frequent now. The lock gave off tiny popping sounds as Stefan ventured deeper and deeper into its labyrinth. He clenched his teeth and worked the lockpick in deeper. I could see his jaw working every time he hit a snag.

The second ring clicked – louder than the first one, but without any real finality – and sprung open, like a dull gold scorpion in its death throes, clawing in protest, kicking its brass legs vehemently into the acrid air and then lying immediately still.

The second lockpick came out. The blood that dripped from its point and stained the beige suitcase was vivid and dark, and each droplet reflected Stefan’s glazed, dripping face.

Stefan took a deep breath and put the third lockpick in. By this point, he had gotten deep enough into the lock that he had to hold the pick almost completely vertical, and the ticks and pops of his progress echoed slightly, like they were at the other end of a long brass hallway. Her spasms and twitches became more frequent and more urgent, and a few times she almost seemed to be responding to pain – when Stefan moved a critical tumbler aside deep within the cavity of her chest, her fingers curled and uncurled and she took rasps in and out. I was worried. I didn’t know what would happen.

The last ring clicked, and the last seal of the lock spun and twirled with the same spider-like efficiency as the first two, a wave of gold-colored cogs and pins whirling and writhing out of her body and into the air, clawing pathetically at Stefan. Then the whole lock hissed pneumatically and the three sections slid out of her like the centers of a Russian doll.

Stefan’s last lockpick lay in the suitcase, coated in blood that was swirled and mottled with translucent rainbows of oil, and yet so red that it stung my eyes to look at it. He tentatively, haltingly, reached over to the lock and wrapped his fingers around the edge, and then lifted it out of her with a kind of reverence I have never seen him show anything since.

She gasped. Her eyes flickered open for a second. They were dark brown. A series of minute, mechanical twitches skittered down her body and she mouthed broken syllables of protest for a moment, and then she lay still again. She was not breathing.

I stared at her, wide-eyed. It took me a moment to realize that Stefan had not looked up for a second from the lock. He was staring at in wonder, a tiny smiling playing on his lips.