[https://i.imgur.com/Ee1hTdd.png]

[https://i.imgur.com/xqhZW3Q.jpg]

If Tarquin had known that when he woke up in the summerhouse it would be suspended at an approximate altitude of a million feet, he never would've slept in it. But his wife had moaned at him for snoring and it had been a hot spring night, so he'd grabbed a sleeping bag and plopped it over sawdust in the shed he privately thought of as his life's work.

Sure, Tarquin had got it from IKEA, but he liked to think he'd put his own special touch on the thing by draping the walls with all manner of cards: christmas cards, birthday cards, the get well cards from when he'd fought cancer a couple years back, etc. Three of the four corners were piled high with children's toys, teenage projects, and his son's woodworking abominations. Every square inch in the summerhouse was an invitation to remember a life spent with family. Tarquin's shrine to Tarquin.

Right now, it didn't feel much like a summerhouse. A bitter wind whipped through the cracks, and Tarquin’s breath turned to vapour as he exhaled. He wrapped the sleeping bag tighter around himself – it was the sole, thin barrier between his skin and the biting air. He'd slept in his boxers. It was becoming difficult not to think about how the floor was the sole, thin barrier between him and the sky. The summerhouse was shuddering, but

First things first. He'd rung his mum's hospice – time was running out for her and they needed to schedule a visit before – well. Before she recovered. Inside the warm depths of the sleeping bag, Tarquin gripped the phone tight.

The hospice hadn't answered. Instead, this Italian woman had picked up and said something odd. Probably a problem with the line. He held up the phone to try again, the freezing air sliced at his bare arm, and then he noticed a number on his hand. It hadn't been there earlier.

The number was glowing, and it was going up. Three unknowns, then: the location of his summerhouse, the Italian woman, and now the appearance of a number. That woman – what had she said about a count? He dialed his mum.

"Mum?" he whispered. He wouldn't let himself hope.

It was the woman who spoke. Maybe it was the temperature of the room, but her voice seemed to creep over the line like frost over grass.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

She said, "You're number two of nine, Tarquin. When the count on your hand hits ten thousand–"

"I heard you the first time, didn't I?" Tarquin said. "Listen, I'm happy to give you anything you want, whether it's money... or more money, but I need to get through to my mother, she's very–"

"–If you want to live, be interesting."

Click. The exact same words, in the exact same order. There was no easy way out, then. He tried to get through to his wife, then his sister, then his niece, then his son, then his daughter-in-law... but got sick of hearing the recording around the time he got to his grandkids.

Plan A, bartering for his freedom, had failed. Which left him Plan B, escape. The kidnappers seemed to have bolted the door to his summerhouse shut, and while he couldn't be sure that it led anywhere, it did seem to line up with the marble tower. He got out of the sleeping bag, shaking like an olympic hula hooper. Careful steps brought him to a pile of wood carvings at the far end of the shed, which began to sag as he walked away from the tower. The floor creaked. On the way, he swiped a pair of muddy gardening gloves and trousers that he found strewn among various novelty editions of Monopoly, but he didn’t have the courage to put them on with the shed slowly angling downward.

Quickly, but not too quickly, he set about chucking the wood carvings back at the door in order to offset the imbalance of weight . They were heavy, and his back wasn't what it used to be, but the cold stopped him sweating and kept him moving. Then he pulled out what he was looking for: a fire ax. It was just like Tarquin to leave the solution to a fire underneath a fire hazard. He had to hurry now, because he could barely make an OK sign with his fingers, even with the gloves on. A sure sign of frostbite.

The door split handily after a few blows of the ax and revealed a slabbed marble hallway that was lit by oil lanterns. He stepped inside and breathed out, his stomach glad to feel like he wasn't about plummet, then pressed his gloves on a lantern to warm them. On went the trousers. For as long as he could bear it, he waited at a bend in the hallway, ax raised high above his head in case one of his kidnappers came to check on him.

Yeah, he dropped the ax and nearly decapitated himself. It clattered to the floor, and when no guards came running, he pressed on around the bend and down a set of slabbed stairs. The architecture was smooth and formless in a way that didn't draw attention to itself, and it reminded Tarquin of a blank canvas. His daughter-in-law would have suggested putting a carpet down, or something. As it was, he kept nearly slipping over, and he didn't like the way his ingrown toenails clinked against the stone.

At the end of the stairs, he came to a chamber where there stood an ostrich the size of an elephant. It was sleeping in front of – blocking off, to be precise – a wide tunnel that led further down the tower. Tarquin crept out and nearly bumped into a woman who had just walked down a similar set of stairs.

Everything about her was short – she came up to his chest, but she also had a buzz cut and a sleeveless t-shirt.

She took one look at the ostrich and pointed to a third stairway.

"Coffee?" she whispered, beaming.