Untoward

 There was no way she could fathom the lock, either to open or to secure the door. She had possession of a key, true, but the key looked gangly and gauche as far as keys were keys in earlier remembered days, at a time when there was no available electronic intervention to help with the physical acts of an exit or entrance from one place to another within a building or into or out of the building per se, as part of one’s initial rapprochement with the duties of the day.

The key itself had appendages that seemed easily bendable by even her slim fingers, and somehow it could only be used by the left hand whether she was left-handed or not. The lock itself was an open heart-shape, the wood around it so splintered she wondered if there was any point in using the key at all but instead merely forcing the lock out with her fingers of her right hand. She supposed there must be legal reasons why the latter course of action would be inadvisable. They would come down on her like a ton of bricks for breaking and entry which, these days, was a capital offence, more serious than helping the clearance of hospital logjams with perfect murders.

So, all in all, she had no option but to address the lock in a lateral way – and she placed the strange key she had been handed by others back into her handbag, while retrieving from it the all-purpose card such agents as herself had also been given, and she waved it in front of the flimsily distended lock with a confident flourish. She heard the tumblers satisfyingly fall one by one, one by one, and, delighted with her own guile, she turned the old-fashioned doorknob beside the now empty lock with some trepidation, but she must’ve used the wrong hand to turn the knob — with the most sinister of repercussions beyond even the simple collateral of terror. You can fill in the gap yourself.