What was happening? The candlestick was on the ground, the candle gasping for breath, as Bob stood there, his head pounding, struggling to understand, and then in a flash, he dove down, but he fumbled the stick, he was making things worse. The flame flickered, an eternal moment of darkness, and then came back to life. Bob was sitting on the floor, panting, as he protected the infant flame. But he didn’t have time to sit here, he couldn’t wait, he had to act.
The southern wall was lined with bookcases. They were all expensive-looking, leather hard-cover volumes, about the same size and make. The spines had no inscription, so the eye saw only a hodgepodge of different colored leather: reds, greens, whites, blues, even some purples and yellows; they were all jumbled together without apparent order.
Bob pulled a book down, laid it out on the lip of the shelf and opened it. The book was empty: blank page after blank page — funny that. Invisible ink? Had he just gotten unlucky? He tried another and another and another and... this one had text. He brought the candle closer as he made to read the words. Only they didn’t make any sense. The text looked like English, at least in so far as the Roman alphabet was used and the rough spacing and alignment seemed familiar. But all the words were meaningless, unpronounceable, like someone had taken English sentences and shuffled the letters around.
Bob groaned. There was some clue in there, no mistake. You didn’t set up a bookshelf full of coded books without having a definite purpose, that and a lot of free time. Tragically, Bob didn’t count code breaking among his varied and numerous talents. Worry was gnawing on the edges of his mind. He didn't get it. He couldn't see the way out. And he had so little time.
Fear had settled on his shoulder like some evil demon. And every step, it grew heavier and heavier, dragging him into the ground. His thoughts came all lumpy and disordered. He wasn't thinking straight. He wasn't thinking straight to the point that even he himself could tell that he was thinking straight. Maybe he hadn't been thinking straight this whole time. He might be about to make some kind of terrible mistake. Wait. Maybe he already had. Bob had started to sweat. He sweated as he shivered in the cold room. He kept telling himself to slow down, but his heart wouldn't stop shouting. He carefully replaced both books. Order might be important.
Bob came to another ninety-degree turn. He'd circuited the room. He was at the south-west corner. A few steps back, a turn northward, three more paces, and he would've returned to the central island with the table and chair. Crunch. His foot had landed on something hard but squashable. Bob screamed. Spiders, cockroaches, caterpillars, centipedes; a warm liquid spilled out of the carcass, Bob staggered back, waving the candle in front of him. A tangy, acidic smell filled the air. Wait a moment. Bob sighed and shook his head. He really wasn't thinking straight. That must have been one of the apples. Bob took a few moments to gather up all of the loose fruit he could find and lined them up on the side table.
Good job Bob, Good job, a few hiccups along the way, but mission complete. Sure, mission complete: he had no idea how to get out, had learned practically nothing and just bumbled around in the dark, dropping candles and stepping on produce. So much for steadying one's nerves with a little self-congratulation. Bob could be really unkind to Bob sometimes. What Bob really needed was a long sit and a little think. He looked longingly at the armchair, he couldn't imagine a greater temptation, there was such an inviting quality to its curved lines and soft outline. Bob positioned himself above the seat. Only a moment.
Stop Bob! You're not thinking straight. Yes I am. Bob I'm warning you. Shut up Bob. Bob... Yes? You'll doze off in thirty seconds and wake up in a dark room. Why you gotta spoil everything? Step away from the chair, Bob. Fine, you win. Bob snatched up a pencil and exercise book from the drawer and parked himself unhappily on the cold floor, mumbling to himself about nobody giving him a chance. The childish exchange helped calm Bob down a little and after thirty seconds, he had settled down enough to start on a rough drawing of the room.
The room was basically square: four ninety-degree walls, each about ten paces across. To the north was the doorway, to the east the fireplace, to the south the bookcases and to the west… He hadn’t found anything to the west, only blank wall. That might be a sign he had missed something there. Bob marked all of this on his map.
In the center of the room, roughly equidistant from each wall was the table and chair. The chair faced east, namely at the fireplace, while the side-table stood to the chair’s right, so towards the bookcases. Was Bob forgetting anything? He decided to add a detailed description of the northern door, as well as a note on the empty and nonsensical books.
Bob surveyed his map. The conclusion was obvious. There was only one way out. The door. The door locked by a key. A key he needed to find. So start looking. Except, somehow, you know, Bob couldn't shake the feeling he was forgetting something, something important even, very important; Bob bit his lip. He always did this. Bob only forgot the most important, the most unforgettable things. It was like his mind was putting it aside to make sure he wouldn’t overlook it, but with the unfortunate consequence that he couldn’t find it when he looked for it.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
He glanced up at the candle. Fire helps a man think. Yes, yes, he murmured to himself, something to do with the candle. He’d set the candlestick on the side table as he worked on the map. He looked blankly at it. Only a few centimeters of wax left, he observed calmly, only a few centimeters… Good god!
Bob grabbed the next tallest candle from the box and leaned the wick into the flame. How many times was this going to happen to him? The wick caught. Bob sighed. He blew out the flickering stump and exchanged it for the newly lit candle. Time, yes, that’s what he was forgetting. He only had so much time and how was he spending it? Sitting cross legged on the floor, pleasantly drawing little maps.
How long did he have left? Five candles worth, but they all looked shorter than the first one. That had lasted maybe ten, fifteen minutes. So best case he had 45 minutes and worst case closer to 30. In that time, he needed to find the key to the padlock and then solve whatever waited in the case beneath. What was the chance that the key alone would be enough to open the door? Ha, if only he could be so lucky.
Bob nervously paced around the room. Why wasn’t he looking for the key? He needed to start looking. No, there wouldn’t be enough time. It was a trap. Focus, Bob, focus. I need more time. The candles won’t be enough. He turned suddenly towards the fireplace and then at the bookcases full of books. That was it. He needed to start a fire.
He took up the candlestick, stepped forward to the bookshelf, reached out to pull down a book and paused. No, Bob be smart about this. Do you think the books were placed here without purpose? There’s some secret to them. What if you burn the book that holds the clue to the escaping? You mustn’t burn them. You mustn’t. Traps within traps. Why was this place so uncooperative?
Burn them and you’ll have time to find the key, but you won’t be able to get past whatever lies behind the case. Tricky, tricky, Bob folded his arms, thinking. There was so little time. What about the side table? Yes, yes, that could work. Bob eyed the side table. The legs were thin, the drawer hollow, it would burn well enough, Bob wasn’t worried about that, but would it give him enough time? Maybe an extra twenty minutes. He could even use the exercise book pages for kindling.
Twenty minutes, minus however long it took him to strip apart the desk and start the fire. Bob looked longingly at the bookcases. Four hundred books. That would take hours to burn through. But he mustn’t. He knew he mustn’t. And then there was the frame itself, nice, thick wood, the shelves too. Bob snapped his fingers. The shelves, yes.
He brought over a pencil and started to work clearing out the top shelf. On the cover page of each book, he wrote out, the bookcase number, the shelf number and the position within the shelf, going from east to west and top to bottom. Bob didn’t know if the order mattered, but better safe than sorry.
Once he’d emptied the top shelf, he grabbed his knife and cut around the screws securing it to the frame; the shelf fell down onto the books below. Bob started chopping and smashing the shelf into smaller pieces and then stacking the pieces in the grate. He also picked up and reused the leftover wood he'd noticed earlier. The more the merrier. Finally, he tore out several pages from the exercise book, crumbled them up and scattered them under the logs.
The moment of truth. He carefully lit the corner of a crumbled sheet with the candle flame. Flames licked up the dry paper. Bob didn’t expect the wood to catch at once. No, he was eyeing a small chunk, at the bottom of the stack. There he rolled page after page, ensuring a continuous stream of fire, as he carefully blew fresh oxygen into the flames.
The wood blackened, cracked and then caught. Bob kept going, feeding the fire with paper and oxygen and readjusting the other planks so they would soak in the updraft. A few minutes later and he had a happy, crackling fire. He sat cross-legged, giving himself a moment to relax; he snuffed out the candle with thumb and forefinger. No reason to waste good wax. He was safe now. He had fourteen more shelves he could burn, and if it came to it, the frame itself. It was a weight off his mind, not to have his life depending on the whims of flickering, fragile drop of flame.
He'd done it. Intellectual giant over here. He'd bested the time trap. Bob Brown wasn't going down easy. The light from the fire was much brighter than the lone candle. He could see almost the whole room, excepting a few dark corners. Now he would rest, warm the cold out of his bones, maybe close his eyes, let the mud dry and crack. He was just making his way back to the armchair, which seemed almost to be calling out for him, when he caught sight of some dark lines on the ceiling. He frowned. Had they been there before?
He pushed over the armchair a little, climbed up on top and examined the markings. There was no mistaking the thing. It was a trapdoor. He pushed on the door. Nothing happened. He pushed harder. Still nothing happened. He noticed a little slot in the bottom corner, like an oddly shaped hole, roughly square but with uneven depths and slopes inside. A keyhole perhaps? But not for an ordinary key.
Bob tilted his head, trying to get a better look. From the shape of the hole, Bob guessed he’d need a kind of towered block with four quadrants. Hm… Now that he thought about it, that wood at the bottom of the grate had had rather a curious shape to it. He jumped down and hurried over to the fireside. Ah yes, fire; it wasn’t simply a matter of reaching a hand inside and feeling about. Where was a poker when you needed one? Not that it would have done him any good. Any wooden keys in that fire had long since lost their cryptographic properties.
He slumped down on the floor. An intellectual giant caught bang-snap in a trap. A trap, within a trap, within a trap. Now Bob, what do you think the chance is that that big, scary door is just a dummy and the only real escape was through that trapdoor whose key you just burned? I give it about fifty-fifty at this point. Seems fair.