Chapter Text
A rolling expanse of grassy, sun-bleached hills, in which Emily could scarcely tell one landmark from the next, seemed to be on repeat outside the bus window. Emily frowned and let her gaze fall from the landscape to the bus windowsill immediately next to her, snorting in disgust as she sighted a mashed wad of chewed gum in a spot she hadn’t thought to look at before. She relocated herself an additional two inches away from the wall of the bus and took the opportunity to stretch where she sat, uncurling her spine and flattening her shoulder blades against the rigid seatback. She exhaled through her nose and closed her eyes, taking a brief respite amidst the tedium. The monotonous hum of a diesel motor was the only noise that could be successfully heard within the sparsely populated bus cabin, until…
“Oh wow, this really is the sticks.”
Emily opened her eyes. Jessica, currently leaning from the aisle seat much too far into Emily’s personal space, peered out the window with something of a smug glimmer in her eye.
Emily responded with the first phrase on her mind, “I still can’t believe I let you talk me into taking the bus.”
Jessica withdrew from Emily’s air with a grin on her face, “Oh come on, Em. What were we going to do, fly there?”
“You’re right…” Emily sighed, raising a hand to her forehead to sweep away a stray piece of hair. “I should really be asking ‘why are we going to a town without an airport?’”
Jess shook her head, causing her blonde ponytail to swing around the side of her face momentarily. “Remember what we agreed this trip was about? Trusting eachother? Leaving the past behind? You should trust me on this. We are going to have fun. This place is supposed to be like a hidden gem.”
Emily frowned. Her eyes widened as Jess reached over her lap and took her hand in hers. The scars on Jessica’s face seemed to stand out for a second.
“Listen Em, after what happened last year…” Her gaze fell. “I just feel like… we can’t keep fighting, you know?”
Emily bit her lip.
“I sound ridiculous, I know… but after what we survived… I almost feel like… We need to live our lives, like, to honor the others.”
Emily rolled her eyes, and then kept her gaze deliberately focused on the window. She snorted, “I’m not ‘honoring’ Mike, or Matt… Both of those losers made it perfectly clear what their priorities were.”
She returned her gaze to Jessica’s face. Jess looked pensive, possibly somewhat saddened, but nodded and released Emily’s hand.
“I get it, Em, I do. I guess I’m just saying that I thought this trip could be a fresh start, you know?”
Emily frowned, but nodded.
Jess’ eyes flitted back to the window. “No joke, though, this really is nowhere… How much longer do we have?”
Without waiting for the cutting response Emily had ready on the tip of her tongue, Jessica pulled out her smartphone and tapped the screen. A quick look at the time display told Emily they had just entered hour three of the estimated four-hour bus ride.
Emily groaned, “If I felt like I could sleep on this thing, I would say wake me when we get to civilization…” She turned back to the window. “Preferably ‘civilization’ with room service.”
Nearly as soon as she had spoken those words, she and Jess were thrown forward in their seats as the bus came to a screeching halt. Emily grasped at the seat in front of her and righted herself to look out the window. However, despite craning her neck and nearly touching her forehead to the fingerprinted glass, she was unable to see the reason the bus had stopped.
Emily pulled away from the window to exchange confused looks with Jessica. Jess gave a brief head shake, communicating to Emily that she didn’t know what was going on, either.
Emily rose from her seat, “Excuse me? Driver?”
The words died in Emily’s throat as she spotted the bus driver, whom she had remembered for their orange-red hair dye job, sprawled across the floor next to the driver’s chair. Standing over the driver’s unconscious body was a tall, thin person clad in a faded leather jacket with large lapels and a full face mask with tubes running from the nose and mouth area. At Emily’s exclamation, they turned to face her. They stared at her for a second before reaching in and drawing a metal cylinder from inside their jacket, which they tossed once in the air and caught in a gloved hand.
“J-Jess…” Emily started.
Before she could get out any more, the figure took a step back, and in one fluid movement, chucked the cylinder at the aisle in front of them. It rolled up to a point a few feet in front of them and stopped. Emily only heard startled gasps and the beginnings of screams from behind them before a loud BANG and a flash of bright light enveloped her senses.
The next thing she saw was Jess falling out of her seat—slumping onto the floor, unconscious, as a thick cloud of smoke billowed up and wove through the seats around them. Reflexively, Emily backed into the window and it occurred to her to hold her breath just as the smoke reached her face.
She scanned the bus quickly, hoping to get an update on their mystery assailant’s position and caught the masked person staring directly at her from a spot near the bus’ entry stairs. That was seconds before the smoke became so thick around her she couldn’t see more than a couple rows away.
Ignoring the burning sensation in her lungs, Emily crouched and made for where Jess had fallen before the smoke became too thick to see through. She batted away the smoke with one hand and patted at the floor with the other until her fingertips reached something soft and warm. Through what sounded like a wall of water around her, Emily heard the distinct sound of footsteps approaching. She redoubled her efforts to clear away the smoke over Jessica, but just as she was able to finally see the cuff of her jeans pant leg, the stale air that had been trying to escape her lungs came pouring out and she was forced to inhale on the next beat.
The smoke and the footsteps closed in on her as she collapsed onto what had to have been Jessica’s warm body. The footsteps grew louder in her right ear and stopped as what little she could still see of the world before her faded away.
___
An obnoxious light pouring into Emily’s face was the first element that greeted her when she regained consciousness. The second was the sight of a dirty, faded wood floor in her face when she opened her eyes and realized she was lying on her side in what was, aside from the light in her face, a very dark room.
She shifted and accidentally inhaled a puff of dust which rose up from the floor, causing her to cough and splutter and pull her body out of its sedentary state all at once as she curled in to put a hand to her mouth.
Besides the smell of dust and wood polish, the only other notable sensations were those of the pins and needles in her left arm, which had been previously pinned underneath her body.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” came a cheerful voice from the darkness.
Emily shot to her feet and spun around to see the vague outline of a person standing just out of the skylight beam. Though she could discern no details other than that it was a relatively tall, probably human figure, Emily thought she saw its head tilt to the side.
“Is your head okay?” the figure said, or at least the voice seemed to be coming from them. “They kinda threw you when they brought you in here.”
Emily squinted at the humanoid outline. Her head was pounding, but she decided she wasn’t going to lead by mentioning that particular vulnerability.
“W-Who are you?” she demanded. “Step into the light.”
The figure froze, and for a second, Emily thought she might have made a mistake in thinking she was addressing a person. That was, until the figure righted what appeared to be its head and took a couple of steps forward.
Emily swallowed, fear freezing the blood in her veins. She could just make out a roundish face with dark, wavy, shoulder-length hair and… glasses.
It couldn’t be.
It felt mildly like the room was spinning as Emily’s rational mind struggled against the pounding headache and surging fear that was leading a parade of terrified, illogical thoughts through her head.
“Hannah?” she braved in spite of herself.
The girl said nothing, and Emily couldn’t see enough of her face to determine her exact expression. Emily took a couple of steps back, all the while staving off the suffocating feeling of panic rising in her chest.
She held her hands up, “H-Han? If that’s you… I swear it was just a prank.”
She took a final step back and braced herself as the figure took another couple of steps forward. Even if it wasn’t Hannah, she still had no idea where she was, who this person was, or what was going on. The lack of information was not something she was used to, and especially after the events of the prior year, it only added to her feeling of apprehension.
The girl stepped a little farther into the light, face wrinkled in what thankfully appeared to be a state of confusion, not anger. As the light from above bathed the girl’s features, filling in details where there had been gaps before, Emily let slip a small sigh of relief as she realized this was not Hannah Washington.
“Who’s Hannah?” The girl asked with a casual tone that suggested to Emily she might have thought she was making small talk.
Instead of answering, Emily fired back, “Who are you? What am I doing here?”
The girl visibly brightened, “I’m Sarah.” She paused for a second to think, before she answered the second inquiry with, “and… I don’t know. They just put me in here and then they threw you in the door. But I’m glad to have someone with me, even if you were asleep for a long time.”
Emily took a moment to absorb this, and to study ‘Sarah’ further. The girl didn’t look like the mastermind of a kidnapping. She was maybe sixteen or seventeen, with a fashion sense that was rather infantile, comprised of pieces that Emily thought would have been snubbed at the thrift store even when thrift-store-chic was in fashion.
“What’s your name?” Sarah inquired brightly. “You look like you’re about my age, maybe a little older...”
“It’s Emily,” Emily borderline-snapped, causing Sarah to jump slightly.
Even if Emily had startled her, she seemed to recover quickly, “That’s a nice name. I had a friend named Emily in elementary school.”
Emily was quick to cut her off, “Look, I don’t want to sit around and talk, all right? I want to know what I’m doing here and how to get the hell out of this place.”
Sarah frowned, then nodded. She looked thoughtful as she spoke, “Well, the woman on the tape said we have to work together to get out of here.”
Emily stared.
“What tape?”
---
Dust swirled up into Jessica’s face as she rocked onto her side. She flattened a hand against the dirty floor that was in her face, and with some difficulty, managed to get her feet underneath her.
“E-Emily?” she called out weakly. “Em, are you there?”
She stood up, shakily and surveyed what little she could see of her surroundings. A couple of boarded-up windows in the far wall let in what little light there was, and Jessica could just make out the faint outlines of some dusty, antique furniture.
“Hello?” She called out. When there was no response, she made her voice a little louder. “Is anyone-“
Jess’ cry of surprise was muffled as a hand clamped over her mouth. A very strong arm wrapped around her torso and pinned her arms to her side. Her back collided with what she could only guess was her abductor’s body behind her and she subsequently began to panic, screaming into the hand that covered her mouth and thrashing in the grip that held her.
“Shut up,” a low, growly voice barked in her ear. “We don’t know if they’re monitoring us.”
Jess slowed her movements, and noticed that the person loosened their grip slightly. Her chest heaved in quivering motions and fear-driven tears welled up in her eyes. Mentally, she rolled through her options for escape, until the solitary word bite crawled into her consciousness. She opened her mouth as much as she was able, preparing to dig in to the fingers pressing her lips if they did not let go.
“I’m going to release you now,” said the voice, “but you have to be quiet.”
Jess nodded vigorously, and at once her captor released their hold. She stumbled forward a few steps before colliding with what felt like the edge of a sofa.
“Please don’t hurt me, please don’t hurt me!” she cried out, troubling images of possible fates for her coursing through her mind.
These actions returned a hoarse utterance from the dark, “What did I just fucking tell you?”
Jess paused, trembling. There was an aggravated sigh and then footsteps behind her.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the voice said. “But we don’t know if the noise will bring whoever did this back here. Unless you’re prepared to fight off we-don’t-know-what, you’ll want to keep quiet.”
Though, truth be told, Jess didn’t totally trust the stranger’s assertion, the words imbibed her with just enough courage to turn around and look at them. When she turned, she was met with the sight of a tall, world-worn woman with some the fiercest eyes she had ever seen. The woman’s gaze alone, which seemed a permanent, intense scowl was enough to prompt her to take a step back and brace herself against the furniture she had almost stumbled into. It didn’t help much that this gaze was largely the product of a set of brown eyes that seemed to almost glow a sickly yellow in the ray of light that landed on them.
“Please don’t… Please don’t…” was all Jess could manage to say.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the woman repeated in an impatient whisper. “I’ve been in this room longer than you, and I have training that enables me to know how to survive situations like this, so you should really think about trusting me, and keeping your voice down.”
“I don’t even know who you are,” Jess uttered desperately.
The woman’s eyes flashed for a second and she shifted where she stood. She drew her shoulders back and answered Jess while looking down the bridge of her nose.
“My name is Lilly,” she whispered. She paused, and narrowed her eyes at Jess, as if deciding how much more she wanted to tell her. “I’ve received training through the United States Air Force and since then I’ve lived through a shit-storm of things that have tested my ability to survive. That’s why I’m telling you now that you will need to listen to me if you want to stand a chance of getting out of here.”
Jess brought a trembling hand up to the pullstring on her hood and idly wrapped it around her finger as she surveyed ‘Lilly.’ She could not discern whether or not Lilly was telling the truth –after all, it wasn’t like she was trained to pick out U.S. Air Force personnel- so she spit out the only thing that came to mind.
“I’ll do w-whatever you say. Just get me out of here.”
Lilly nodded, “It would be helpful to know your name.”
Jessica thought for a second, “It’s…” She thought about lying, and the names ‘Beth,’ ‘Hannah,’ ‘Ashley’ and ‘Emily’ rolled through her mind as possible alternatives to give her before Lilly took a step forward and she blurted out the truth on a frightened impulse. “Jessica… It’s Jessica.”
“Jessica,” Lilly echoed cooly, “Now that you’re awake, there’s something you need to listen to.”
---
Emily stared in disbelief at the ancient metal boombox sitting atop a large doily on an old end table. The piece of 1980’s technology was faintly illuminated by the light pouring in around the door nearby.
As soon as Sarah had pointed out that section of the room, Emily had been more interested in the door near it and had spent a good ten minutes doing everything she could think of to get it open, to no avail. Finally, she relented to listening to Sarah, who continued to mention something about a tape and a woman’s voice and now Emily stood, staring at the music player which looked like a person with its tape deck mouth hanging open, mockingly, as it waited for the tape she had in her hand.
“Where did you find this, again?”
“It was on the floor with me when I woke up,” Sarah explained. “Go ahead, play it.”
Reluctantly, Emily slid the tape into the appropriate slot and closed the tape deck. Sarah, apparently growing anxious, reached around her shoulder and pressed the play button in her stead.
There was some crackling and white noise and then the speakers on the boombox blared to life with a rather monotone woman’s voice.
“Congratulations. You two have been selected to participate in a set of challenges which will test your intellect, resourcefulness, and ability to work together as a team.”
The voice was clinical, sterile. Emily took an instant dislike to it.
“The room you are in currently is host to a challenge that will test your capacity for teamwork. Complete the challenge and you will have earned your freedom from this place. The punishment for not completing the challenge will be that you will simply perish in this room. As there is no food delivery and no lavatory facilities, it is estimated that you have three to four days to complete the challenge. However, it is recommended that you complete it much sooner than the allotted three days in order to avoid… unpleasant circumstances.”
“What the fuck?” Emily whispered.
“Keep listening,” Sarah urged from her right.
“All the clues you will need to complete the challenge can be found in this room. You will need to work together to complete the challenge. These are your instructions.”
With that, the tape dissolved into static.
“You’re not serious?” Emily blurted out in protest, speaking to no one in particular.
“You will need to work together to complete the challenge. These are your instructions.”
Jess let her mouth hang open slightly as the cryptic recording concluded.
“That’s the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard…” She turned to Lilly. “That’s not… It’s not real, is it?”
“It seems to be,” Lilly answered, gesturing towards the only door Jess could see. “This door is reinforced. If you look through the cracks you can see the locking mechanism running all the way through it. It can’t be broken down, nor can we apparently tamper with the locking mechanism.”
Jessica swallowed. “So where do we begin?”
Lilly’s eyes narrowed, “Well, clue number one is pretty obvious, I think.”
Jess thought about nodding, but instead remained still. Lilly’s fierce gaze seemed to double in intensity, as if she were silently prompting Jess to complete her thought, and her exasperation became evident when Jess did not.
“Look at the door,” Lilly ordered in a low monotone.
Jess nodded and moved to inspect the door. She noticed as she stood in front of it that it, first of all, it was made of wood and it was slightly larger than the average house door. Where there should have been a doorknob there was instead a large metal plate with three small, rectangular slots in it. She crept closer, crouching to look through the gap around the door, and confirmed for herself what Lilly had said about the locking mechanism running all the way through the door.
Lilly’s voice pierced the silence, prompting Jess to back away from the door abruptly.
“Three keys.”
“What?”
Lilly moved so she was standing next to her and pointed to the metal plate with the slots in it. “See the slots in the door? Those slots have to fit keys of some kind. Those keys must be hidden in this room. If we can find the keys…”
“We can get out of here?” Jess breathed, startling herself as she finished Lilly’s sentence.
Lilly nodded, “Start searching.”
---
“So, what are we going to do?” Sarah asked, tentatively, hovering close to Emily.
Emily turned abruptly and stuck her index finger in Sarah’s face, “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to beat these challenges, get out of here, find the person that did this to us, and put my Christian Louboutin seven inches up their ass.”
Sarah looked vaguely concerned, but nodded, “That sounds… painful.”
“Damn straight,” Emily hissed. “Now, let me think... All we have to do is find something that sticks out, right? Something that shouldn’t be here…”
“Well… I don’t know what you’re looking for, but I think I found something earlier.”
Emily sighed, “What was that?”
Sarah gestured to the far corner of the room, where a dusty bookshelf was positioned at a diagonal. “The books in the shelf… They’re all blank.”
Emily fixed Sarah with a stare, “What?”
Sarah shrugged, “You were out for a long time. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, then, so I tried to read…” She furrowed her brow. “But all the pages were blank… except…”
“Except?” Emily prompted hesitantly.
Sarah moved over to the shelf and pulled a thin, blue book from one of the lower shelves. “Except this one.” She stepped back into the center, under the light, and held the book out for Emily to see. “It’s just a children’s book. I read it twice. It’s kinda boring.”
Emily bypassed Sarah and made for the bookshelf, where she tore out book after book and flipped through the pages, desperately searching for anything that would debunk Sarah’s discomforting observation. A note of distress welled up within her as she found nothing but blank page after page.
“See?” Sarah’s voice came drifting over to her. “It’s just like I told you. This is the only one with anything in it.”
Emily looked over her shoulder to where Sarah held the book proudly out in front of her. Slowly, Emily rose to her feet and moved closer to inspect it. On the cover was a relatively cartoonish drawing of some type of glowing figure rising up out of a river. A man with a thick beard knelt on the riverbank nearby.
Sarah followed Emily’s eyes to the cover. “It’s the story of a woodcutter who loses his axe into a river… then a water sprite offers to bring it back for him. First, the sprite brings back two axes that aren’t his… a silver one and a gold one… and the woodcutter could take them and be rich, but instead he tells the truth and asks for his old axe, and the sprite gives him all three as a reward for his honesty.”
Emily screwed up her face, “What the hell’s a ‘water sprite?’” she asked, injecting an uneasy laugh into the last word.
Sarah only frowned.
“Okay well, if that’s the only thing in the bookshelf, then… maybe it’s a clue?” Emily stood up. “The tape said there’d be clues in this room. Did you find anything else?”
Sarah shook her head, “No, not really…”
“Okay, that’s fine…” Emily muttered, eyes scanning what she could see of the rest of the room. “There’s gotta be some significance to that book. Is there anything else in it? Numbers? Something written in it?”
Sarah pursed her lips and flipped through the book, “Um… There’s just the publisher in the front… The author and the illustrator… and someone circled some of the page numbers.”
“Which page numbers?” Emily demanded.
Sarah flipped back through the book, “Two, five, and eleven… Those are prime numbers, right?”
Emily rolled her eyes, “Okay, so that can’t be a coincidence. Those numbers must have something to do with this room.”
Sarah nodded, a thoughtful expression on her face.
Emily rubbed her temples, “Ugh. We need more clues. What does it say about the publisher?”
Sarah held the book closer to her face and tilted it to inspect the inner cover, “It says… AS Publishing House. That doesn’t mean anything, does it?”
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
Silence engulfed the room save for Sarah flipping back and forth through the pages of the book. Emily paced the perimeter of the room in the darkness, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the section where there was lower light.
“You said that book was about axes and shit? Maybe there’s one in here we can use to bust the door down.”
Sarah didn’t lift her face from the book, “Um, I don’t think so. There’s nowhere to hide something like that in here.”
Emily paused by a table of antique junk that included an old brass gramophone horn and turned towards Sarah.
“You know, you’re awfully fucking calm for someone who’s been trapped.”
That got Sarah to look up, but her perplexed expression only further frustrated Emily.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s one thing to be like rational and cool… but the way you’re acting, I wouldn’t be surprised if you put us in here.”
Sarah closed the book slowly, “Wait… Do you think I kidnapped us?”
Emily put her hands on her hips, “That’s cute.” She scowled as Sarah stared. “If you didn’t have anything to do with this, how the fuck are you so calm? Like nothing’s happening?”
Sarah’s response was disconcerting, but not nearly as frustrating as before. Her posture curled inward slightly, and she hugged the book to her chest, idly drumming her fingers on the cover. Her voice came out very small, and her tone was enough to make Emily regret her words.
“I was trying to be brave.”
Sarah’s fingers stilled, followed by her entire person, and Emily watched from the shadows as the light overhead illuminated her struggle to fight back what was obviously fear.
Sarah continued, “I know this is scary, but… I can’t be afraid. I… I had this friend, and she knew how to do things, and she wasn’t scared of anything. She and my dad protected me.”
Emily stayed still and listened with pursed lips, absorbing Sarah’s words.
“I want to be like her,” Sarah whispered, clutching the book tighter to herself. “I know she would be brave, and try to solve the problem, and my dad would too, even if they were scared.” She raised her head and turned to face Emily with a renewed confidence flowing through her voice, “I want to be brave.”
Emily rolled her lip under her front teeth, standing still as she surveyed Sarah once again.
“Plus, I thought with you here, it wouldn’t be so bad. At least I’m not alone.”
Emily couldn’t gather words together at that moment, so she simply nodded and resumed her search. She could tell from the rustling of pages behind her that Sarah returned to the book.
---
“God, it’s so dark in here…” Jessica groaned, patting the shelf that sat just above her eye-height to find it empty on the right side. Dust puffed out into the air above her as it was displaced by her hands, and drifted down to land in her bangs. She raised a hand and swept said bangs out of her face. “Have you found anything?” She called behind her. Lilly didn’t answer, and Jess nervously began to fill the ensuing silence while continuing to search the shelf above. “You think the keys will be in a container or something? Like, I’m thinking it won’t be as easy as…”
She stopped as her hands seized on a cold, smooth object. She felt around what she suspected was the middle of it, and determined that it was heavy and most likely made of glass. She cupped her hands around its circumference and gently scooted it towards the edge so she could get a better look at it. As the top appeared over the edge of the shelf, she judged it to be one of those glass containers her mom sometimes stored flour in in their pantry at home.
“Hey, maybe this is something?” she called to Lilly, not even sure the woman was listening anymore.
She clutched the base of the jar and lifted it off the shelf. She brought it down and cradled it in her arms for half a second before recoiling in horror.
In the recessed darkness of the shelf, she had failed to realize that there were small holes punctured in the plastic top of the container and that the insides up to the neck of the container were choked with spiderwebs. She let out a short scream as her eyes scanned across a handful of large, very-much-alive brown spiders staring at her from various places around the jar. She released her grip on the container in the next subsequent movement. She watched in what felt like slow motion as the jar of spiders hurtled towards the wood floor, imagining it inevitably bursting, shattering, and the arachnids scattering across the room. Before this could happen, however, a pair of hands shot into her view and seized around the jar, stopping it before it could reach the floor.
Jessica’s gaze trailed from the hands up a length of leather sleeve to Lilly’s determined face.
“Be careful,” she hissed, fixing Jessica with a look.
Jessica waved her palms at Lilly. “Sorry…” she spat in a defensive tone.
Lilly took a step back and righted herself, bringing the jar of spiders up to what was chest-height for both of them.
“You almost destroyed it, and it could be a clue.”
Jess made a face and folded her arms as Lilly turned away and began to inspect the jar of spiders. Jess watched as Lilly held the jar close to her face, turning it over and over.
“So, can I ask you a question?” Jess said, raising her voice just enough to get Lilly to stop inspecting the spiders and look at her. She didn’t wait for permission from Lilly to ask the question. “You said you had been through all kinds of shit that taught you how to survive. What do you mean?”
Lilly’s eyes flashed for a second, and Jess had to dig her heels into the floor and mentally remind herself to stay still as Lilly eyed her with an obvious disdain, jaw visibly clenching.
However, when she did speak, Lilly’s tone was surprisingly patient, “Where I come from, people like you and I are rare. Most of them have died off. I knew enough before I was captured to figure out that this is not that kind of place.” She looked around, pointedly gesturing with her upper body, “In some ways, it seems worse.”
Jessica nodded.
“My turn,” Lilly said, surprising Jessica. Lilly’s eyes narrowed, “Where did you get those scars?”
Jess’ eyes widened and an unpleasant sickly feeling welled up in her chest as she flashed back to Mike’s horrified expression as she was lifted up off the ground by something she couldn’t’ see. That was the last thing she could clearly remember from that night.
Abruptly, Lilly’s voice broke into her thoughts, “It’s fine.”
The image of Mike faded away and was replaced by Lilly again. She was eyeing Jess with a type of expression Jess hadn’t seen on her before, and couldn’t quite find the right word to describe.
“I’m going to guess it was traumatic,” Lilly pronounced in a tone that sounded, to Jess, inappropriately disinterested. “Whatever it was…”
“It’s… I just..”
“It’s fine,” Lilly repeated. “The instructions were clear. I don’t have any choice but to work with you, and you don’t have any choice but to trust me.” She tapped the side of the spider jar with her index finger. “It’s understandable to want more information, but we’ve got more important things to worry about.”
With that, she approached Jess with the jar and held it out for her to see. She turned it just slightly, causing the spiders to twitch and scamper a bit, and gestured towards the very bottom of the jar.
“Look,” Lilly whispered.
In the very bottom of the jar, embedded among the spiderwebs, was a rectangular chunk of what appeared to be brass with some grooves cut in the side of it.
“That’s gotta be it, “ Lilly said softly.
“Is it?”
“It has to be one of the three. Look at the size and shape.”
Jess turned from studying the chunk of metal and eyed the door panel over her shoulder. Sure enough, the item would have fit nicely in one of the slots on the door.
Jess started to get excited, “It’s a key? We found a key?”
“Keep your voice down,” Lilly whispered, “It’s only one of three that have to be in this room, but, if we can get it out here and test it, then we’ll know for sure.”
Jess nodded, “How do we get it out of there?”
Suddenly, Jess didn’t like how Lilly was looking at her.
---
The door taunted Emily.
With nothing more to go on, Emily had taken to examining the door for further clues as to how to get it open. She could feel from pushing on it that it was heavily reinforced, and could even see a series of bars running through the gap around it. However, the most annoyingly obvious and yet mystifying clue of all was the giant hole full of gears where there should have been a doorknob.
Emily sighed and turned back to survey the room. She couldn’t immediately see anything that stuck out to her as a clue, so she’d been thinking that maybe there was a tool in the room they were supposed to use to tamper with the gears, but neither she, nor Sarah, had been able to find anything like that.
Speaking of Sarah, the other girl was off in the far corner of the room, still combing over the children’s book for Emily didn’t know what reason. Since Emily’s earlier outburst, Sarah had been reluctant to make eye contact with her, and had taken to responding to her in seemingly as few syllables as possible. She didn’t seem to be angry with her, per se, but her disposition was much different from when Emily had initially encountered her. There was no more smiling, no more of the same friendly chatter, just Sarah off on her own, doing things that Emily only kept track of at first for being wary, and had since been monitoring because she felt… guilty somehow?
Sarah sat in a wicker armchair next to the table full of junk and appeared to be studying one of the illustrations in the book.
“Sorry,” Emily blurted out.
Sarah raised her head, looking at Emily as though she wasn’t sure she had spoken.
“For what?” Sarah asked, seeming genuinely perplexed.
“For being a jerk a while back?” Emily sighed, feeling a twang of regret at both the actions she was referencing as well as having blurted out the apology. Nevertheless, she continued, “It wasn’t fair, and so far, you’ve found the only clue that might get us out of this shithole, so... sorry.”
Sarah smiled. It wasn’t a friendly, beaming smile like before, but it was a smile, at least. “That’s okay. People get mad sometimes when they’re scared.” She closed the book and stood up, “But I’m glad you apologized.”
“Yeah, well…” Emily began, and then stopped herself.
Sarah moved so she was standing directly in front of Emily and stared at her for a few seconds. About when Emily was going to ask ‘What?’ Sarah extended a hand.
“Friends?”
Emily stared at Sarah, noticing that the hopeful smile had returned.
“Something like that…” she roughly grabbed and pumped Sarah’s hand, a grin on her face. “Now, let’s try to get out of here, huh?”
Sarah nodded.
“Did you find anything else in that book?”
Sarah’s brow briefly furrowed with concern, “Not really.” She smoothed a hand across the cover, “I was thinking about the axes.”
“Yeah?”
“They’re kind of a big deal in the story… maybe they have something to do with the puzzle?”
“They’re just supposed to reinforce some fucking moral about not being greedy,” Emily sighed. “But like, if you cut wood for a living and you were offered that much silver or gold… I mean, wouldn’t you take it? Especially in those days, and then you’d never have to cut wood again…”
“I think it’s a pretty good moral,” said Sarah. “But I get what you’re talking about.”
“Which one did the ‘water sprite’ offer first? Silver or gold?”
“Silver,” Sarah replied, cracking the book again. “The illustrator drew it as a shiny silver axe with all these blue jewels all over it.”
“See, I’d take that one. I wouldn’t even wait for the gold...” Emily drawled.
Then, something in the corner of the room caught her eye.
“I’d tell the truth, I think,” Sarah mused casually. “But I wonder what my dad or Clementine would do?”
Emily moved away from Sarah, eyes locked on a silver gleam in the corner of the room, on top of the junk table.
“I think my dad would be honest? Though, he might take the silver or the gold axe if he was worried about taking care of me…”
“He a saint or something?” Emily murmured, half-listening, as she approached the junk table. A small, sterling silver box with a blue jewel mounted right above the locking mechanism glittered at her.
“No? Hmm… I don’t know what Clementine would do…”
Emily stood in front of the junk table and studied the small silver box she had found. It looked to be a small jewelry box. Emily reached out and tried the lid. It didn’t open.
“It’s locked,” she murmured. “Sarah, come look at this.”
Sarah visibly shook away her train of thought and came to stand next to Emily.
“It’s pretty,” she said. “But it doesn’t open, I’ve tried it.”
“Can you help me look for a key or something? I think it’s important.”
“Okay, sure.”
As Sarah moved away to start her search, Emily started by overturning nearly everything on the junk table, and made a noise of guttural dismay when she didn’t find anything this way. She moved to the wicker chair nearby and started patting around the arms and lifting up the seat cushion.
“Fuck! Where is it?”
She put a knee in the cushioned seat of the chair and craned her neck over the back to look behind it. She could hear Sarah’s footsteps getting closer to her, which was mildly frustrating because she reasoned they could have covered more area by splitting forces, rather than congregating in one section of the room. She peered into the darkness behind the chair, and heard Sarah’s footsteps come very close to her and then stop at a distance that had to be no more than a foot away.
Before she could manage a toned-down version of what she thought to say to Sarah, the voice of the girl-in-question came drifting over to her.
“Emily, hold still.”
Emily froze for half a second, panic coursing through her system once again. Flashes of long, skinny appendages and ripped mouths with sharp teeth rolled through her mind.
“Why?” she uttered aggressively, at least partially ignoring Sarah’s request.
Rather than a verbal answer, she was greeted by a tug on her jacket and a loud ripping sound.
Panic pushed its way into her system again, but this time for an entirely different reason.
“My jacket!” she cried out, jumping off the chair backwards and turning on Sarah. “What did you do to my…”
She stalled out as her eyes settled on the blue jeweled item that Sarah held up in in her left hand. Sarah looked up from attempting to flick away a wad of what appeared to be packing tape from her other hand and smiled, briefly, at Emily.
“Look!” she said cheerfully, holding out what was very obviously a small silver key with a blue jewel on it. “This was taped to the back of your jacket.”
Emily reached up and snatched the key from Sarah’s hand. She turned it over several times in her hand, breath going shallow.
“It looks like it should go in that box over there,” Sarah cautiously added, as though she wasn’t quite sure Emily had caught on.
Emily looked up, “Why would that have been on my jacket?”
“I don’t know. It makes sense, though. The tape we played was next to my glasses on the floor.”
Emily stared, then nodded.
“Nice one, Sarah.”
----
Jess was struggling not to breathe. She was also kind of trying not to look at the spiders that scampered all over the jar Lilly continued to study. Jess wasn’t sure, but she might have opted to try and squish the spiders to get the key, as opposed to what they were doing now.
“Keep it still,” Lilly ordered, pointedly eyeing the metal hatbox Jessica held at arms-length. They had found the hatbox wedged under the couch that Jess had bumped into earlier and, after finding it empty, opted to make use of it for the purpose of transplanting the spiders.
The fine-toothed hair comb which Lilly currently turned between her fingers had been Jess’ main contribution to this plan. She had brought it with her on her trip with Emily and it had been left on her person after Emily had demanded to borrow it to comb a knot out of her hair. Lilly twirled it in one hand while cradling the jar of spiders in the crook of her other arm.
“When I say ‘now,’ open the lid,” Lilly instructed.
Jess grimaced, eyeing one of the spiders closer to the top.
“One, two, three….” Lilly’s eye’s flickered to Jess as if issuing a warning before she hissed, “Now!”
With a great deal of hesitation, Jess reached out and clasped the jar lid with a jittery hand. In a movement that ended up being more jerky than she intended it to be, she flipped the lid off the container and withdrew her hand.
Lilly briefly side-eyed her, but said nothing, and proceeded to dip the comb into the mouth of the jar. She scraped it around the edges, detaching the spiderwebs up top. One of the spiders backed up, and then reared up on its back legs and began batting at the tip of the comb. Lilly ignored the show of defiance, and continued to scrape downward in a spiral pattern until she eventually had a large, detached ball of web and spiders.
“Hold it out,” she whispered.
Jess craned her neck away and held the hatbox as far out as she could. Lilly eyed it dubiously for a half-second before, in one fluid motion, she tipped the jar over and used the teeth of the comb to drag the webbing and spiders out through the opening.
Jess made the mistake of looking down at the hatbox as the ball of web fell into it. One of the spiders got free and scampered to the edge of the metal container.
“One second,” Lilly uttered in a hushed tone, no doubt addressing Jess’ discomforted expression. She tucked the comb under her arm and reached into the now empty jar. She plucked the metal ‘key’ from where it had come to rest, and examined it for a half-second in one of the rays of light. In the next motion, she brought it up to her mouth and bit down on it. She held it between her teeth as she took up the comb again and gestured for Jessica to bring the hatbox closer.
Jess’ didn’t really register the actions Lilly took to get the spider-ball back in the jar, but when she looked up, the hatbox was empty.
Add ‘spider-wrangler’ to Lilly’s repertoire of skills.
Lilly snapped the lid back on and handed the comb back to Jessica before taking the metal rectangle out of her teeth.
“That’s that,” she murmured. “Let’s go ahead and test it.”
She set the jar back in the shelf and took the hatbox from a confused-and-mildly-irritated Jessica. Before Jess could say anything, she approached the door and slid the metal rectangle into the middle keyhole.
Jess heard something loud click followed by what she assumed was the sound of the metal poles sliding through the door. She heard the same sounds again when Lilly removed the card from the door and replaced it in a different spot.
“What are you doing?” Jess sighed.
Lilly didn’t turn around, “It appears that the locks all have the same pattern. I was going to see if we could use this key to unlock all three, but as soon as I removed it, the locking mechanism reengaged.”
“Shit,” Jess breathed, looking up at the ceiling.
Lilly paused to stare at her with a curious look before adding, “It’s not all bad. We have one out of three. It can’t be that hard to find the others, unless…”
Jess’ neck nearly snapped as her gaze returned to Lilly. She rested a hand just above her hip, “Unless?”
“Unless there are decoy keys in here, in which case we’ll need to try them all in the locks before we start celebrating.”
Jess stared.
“No… no… who would do that? Come on!”
“What kind of person would kidnap people and force them to complete puzzles to get out of a room?” Lilly barked. Jess noticed she had seemingly given up on the whole ‘be quiet’ thing. “Let’s just assume that’s part of the equation, and go from there.”