The Silver Key

A Boston aesthete who spent his boyhood dream-traveling to genuinely other places finds, at fifty and thoroughly disillusioned with waking life, an ornate silver key his ancestors left behind in an old attic box. Driving out to his family's ruined homestead to test what it opens, he leaves behind only his car and the box it came in — and, by his closest friend's account, is very much still somewhere, just not anywhere reachable by road.