“Yes!” The lock popped open, and Lacey pumped her fist.

“It opened? From a nine scratched onto the underside of the couch? Seriously?” her partner groused, but she knew he was into it. She just gave a grin and waggled her eyebrows as they entered what they hoped was the last room. “This is whack!”

She checked her watch and then scanned the room. Colt was right. This was truly a whacked escape room. The walls felt solid as if they’d used sheetrock and everything instead of the cheap movable plywood partitions. Lacey was going to make her rooms like this. Even the furniture was heavy, like it was real stuff. Lacey was ready to hit the garage sales for their stuff and she was going to make it so solid, even the diehard fans couldn’t thrash it. The rooms until now had challenged even her and Colt and they were ranked nationally as a team. All they had to do was complete one last room in fourteen minutes and they’d have the capital to start their own business. Lacey’s palms itched with nerves as she pressed her short nails into her palms to calm herself down. The prize money for first completion of the nationally televised escape room was insane, but they were ready for it.

Lacey’s eyes slid over the grandfather clock face that was stuck at 12:46 am and glided down the pendulum to the roman numerals stamped along the shaft and the sun emblem on the pendulum bob. Colt headed for the rolltop desk and started sliding open drawers. Step one was to inventory the room. She was scanning for number of books on the shelves, the balls of yarn pilled in the basket near the fireplace, and number of bricks on the fireplace surround and skirt. Anything could be a number for the locks.

“Two locked drawers,” he listed it off. “One letter and one numeric combo lock.” This is what her partner was good at. Colt logged the locks and Lacey looked for the keys to them. “Hidden safe access under the desk but that one has a key lock.”

The bookcase held hundreds of books, all with titles that matched the old mansion’s murder house theme. “What color are the locks on the desk?” she asked, knowing that he would already be scanning everything on the desk.

“Red and gold,” Colt rattled off. “The safe key should be silver though. Five numbers on the gold lock. Datebook is blank, with a single page torn out, but I used the date for the lock, and it was no good.”

“Decoy, but keep it in mind if we find another combo lock. Try four, six, five, nine, four on the numeric lock,” she told him excitedly.

“Why?” he asked, but he was sliding the number in even as he asked.

“The gold books in the bookcase,” Lacey answered automatically, already noting the number of each of the other colored books. “There are four on the top shelf, six on the second.” There were also four pens, three tacks, and at least ten paperclips on the desk, but Colt would already have tried those numbers.

“It’s open,” Colt shook his head. “There’s just a single word on a piece of paper. It just says ‘Look.’”

“How many letters on the other one?” she asked, skimming the titles on the red books on each shelf. It had to be an anagram as the letters didn’t spell anything. If one lock was from the bookshelves, the other likely would be too. Creators liked that kind of symmetry.

“Seven” he answered her. “So ‘Look’ can’t be the answer to that one.”

“Try mockery?” Lacey told him, joking. It couldn’t hurt their reputation to do a bit of mugging for the camera. It would be free publicity when the show aired, which wouldn’t be until someone solved the room, which was today. They’d be calling their new company Mockery Escapes.

“No dice,” he answered after a rattle of a still-locked combo. “There’s another lock on the raven’s cage. Looks like it needs a key, Lacey.”

“Yeah, probably, but it’s just a time drain,” she growled out. “Look. Look. Look. Look at what?” Lacey scanned the room again. She gently knocked over the armchairs that were facing the fireplace, snatching up the rug. Nothing under the rug, but the rug had fourteen coils of roses along its border. The fireplace wasn’t lit. It was gas and could be lit with a key, but that key wasn’t under the rug nor was it taped to the underside of the chairs or the desk where Colt had been. “See if that grandfather clock opens up,” she looked up into the fireplace and rattled the flue, then ran her hands over all of the stones. There was a music box on the mantle of a little bear holding a cross-stitched pillow with 43 stitches on it. Again, there was no key. That was four keys and a word to find in what was now closer to twelve minutes. Lacey could taste the prize money.

“Another key lock on the grandfather clock door,” Colt reported, tilting the very realistic and ancient-looking clock to the side to run his hands underneath it. “No door on the back of the clock, but there’s a sun emblem carved near the bottom with a blurred-out manufacturer’s name.”

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“I scanned the bookcase and counted the books but see if any of those knickknacks move or rattle while I check the mantle,” she pointed, and Colt nodded. He could move quickly when he wanted to.

“The books move,” Colt pulled each one out as quickly as not causing damage could do. When the room went public, they’d fix that because people destroyed books in these rooms. Normally the books would have been mocked up or glued down to make cleanup faster. It was a nice touch for the cameras.

“It’s just a time drain,” Lacey insisted until there was a click, and the fireplace roared to life. “I stand corrected. Pull them all.” The gas key for the fireplace had been a decoy? Lacey was back to being impressed. The statue on the mantle rattled as she shook it, so she stuck her fingers up inside of it. She’d have broken it, but there was a time penalty for breaking things. Another careful shake and the music box key dropped out. She quickly turned it in the bear’s back to listen to the tune. “Put lullaby in the letter lock.”

Colt rushed back to the drawer and tried it to a satisfying click that Lacey lived for. “Another piece of paper that says ‘Up.’”

Like every escape room she’d ever done, Lacey felt utterly stupid as she finally focused on the clues and looked up to the ceiling. There was the main puzzle, and she’d lost four whole minutes figuring out that she needed to look up to find it. She would kick herself for it later. Now she had a cipher.

It was a pretty advanced cipher wheel that turned on massive cranks around the central light fixture with its 5 lights. They quickly moved the 6 potted plants off of what was not just a decorative plant stand. The small step stool, once unburdened, then had to hold Colt’s bulky form because Lacey was too short even on the top rung to reach the ceiling. It meant that Colt had to work the mechanism but that suited them fine as Lacey rattled off numbers for him to line up on the dials.

It was easy going from there though. By decoding the roman numerals with the time from the grandfather clock, a key for the raven’s cage dropped out on a string that had to be cut by a pair of scissors that were beneath an embroidery ring that said Home Sweet Home and was propped on a small, basket that had a false bottom that had been locked. By using the ceiling cipher wheel and entering the number of rug rings and the date on the newspaper at the bottom of the raven’s cage, they got another key to the safe beneath the desk. Inside the safe, they found the key to wind the grandfather clock, but no key to the clock itself.

“We have two minutes, Lacey,” Colt fidgeted, and she bit her lip.

“What did I miss?” she scanned the room again, feeling the tick of the clock press against the back of her mind. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. And each tick was bringing her closer to losing the prize of their own escape room business. It was maddening.

“The fire,” Colt pointed, and Lacey looked. The soot of the fire had blackened all but a single word against the back of the firebox. “To Kill a Tomcat?”

“It was a book!” she shouted, nearly moaning at the fact that while she remembered the book and the fact that it had been on the bottom shelf, that didn’t help as much as it could have. Colt had moved all the rest of the books which were then neatly stacked in the mess that he’d made while finding the fireplace lighting mechanism. Messes were expected in the escape rooms, but they’d been careful to not even over-ruffle a single page of those books. Colt was always gentle for all his bulk.

They scrambled to the books and carefully scanned the covers and spines.

“What color was it?” Colt demanded.

“I think it was black with maybe red shiny lettering,” she answered, remembering it only because the lettering had been flickering like fire. She’d thought it was a cool effect.

“Got it,” Colt held the book up and Lacey grabbed it fast enough to hear the very slight rattle. With a held breath, they opened it together to find the key.

The key fit the grandfather clock, and Lacey opened it up with hands that wanted to shake, but didn’t dare. Not daring to waste the time to check their time, she quickly used the winding key to wind the grandfather clock as Colt set the pendulum in motion. Then they stood watching it with bated breath as the hands of the grandfather clock began to move far too slowly.

“Maybe it has to chime?” she shrugged, feeling yet another opportunity slip through her fingers.

Colt moved the minute hand up to twelve and the grandfather clock began to ring with the same Brahms lullaby that had echoed from the other side of the room as the music box came to life again. Lacey’s heart leapt as she now had the time to look at her watch. They’d done it. They’d done it in time. For a few pregnant seconds, they stood there waiting for something to happen as the grandfather clock gave a final bong.

“Did we do it?” Colt whispered as if he was afraid to jinx it.

Trumpets blared. Confetti burst from the 17 “hidden” holes in the ceiling.

Lacey threw her arms around Colt and nearly squealed, “With a half a minute and some change to spare buddy!”

The music faded away to an odd silence just before the lights went out. Colt gripped Lacey in a bear hug that made her give an audible squeak, but he knew she wasn’t really hurt. They’d never been right for each other romantically, but Colt and Lacey had been friends since high school. And since high school, they’d been working on this dream. It had taken them ten years of working up to it, including nagging their parents for escape room tickets all the time. They’d worked fast food mostly lately, rooming together in a shitty apartment, and spent all their money on every escape room they could afford. Two years ago, when the reality TV craze had extended into escape room competitions, they’d been the underdog team that had broken records. This was the first competition that was going to be televised nationally. It had been invite-only. And it had a cash prize that…

The lights went out, but they weren’t worried yet. Colt was still whooping into her ear.