Colt and Lacey were just congratulating each other enthusiastically as they waited patiently for whoever was going to turn the lights back on. They had no doubt that someone would get to it eventually and no fear of the dark. They were a little too caught in the dreams of the future to worry about a little darkness.
“Our first room is going to be the dungeon crawler one, right?” Colt was gushing as Lacey clung to his large frame, bouncing on the balls of her feet with unrestrained excitement that she rarely allowed herself to feel.
“Seven Deadly Sins!” Lacey poked her finger into Colt’s face. “You promised!”
“Okay, okay,” he laughed, his tone teasing. “We’ll do the cabin in the woods.”
“Blasphemy!” she growled back at him good-naturedly. The cabin in the woods theme was so cliché, even Colt wouldn’t do it first.
“Just to get our feet wet,” he played with her, but she laughed.
“Seven Deadly Sins and then the Stairway to Heaven,” she kept a grip on his shirt even as she stepped out of his hug.
“You’ll have them branding us the religious nuts,” he argued in the same way he always did about the themes than ran rampant in her head.
“We can only have three rooms to start with,” Lacey nodded as her head went off to contemplate what they’d already over-planned. “It’s all the budget will afford.”
“I’d do a hundred rooms if we could,” Colt sighed out, resting his heavy arm on Lacey’s shoulder even as she let her feet flatten on the floor for the first time since the music stopped.
“Three,” she insisted. She was the frugal one, the one who reined in his enthusiasm and imagination.
“To start,” he insisted right back in the way they always did. Lacey didn’t know why she hadn’t let go of him, just like she didn’t know why she was starting to feel uneasy.
“Lace…” came Colt’s voice and Lacey realized that she wasn’t the only one feeling it. She didn’t let go of his shirt. He reached up for her hand and they held onto each other, also just as they always did when things were tight. Like they had the night after her dad had kicked her out, clinging to each other in the dark as they’d sneaked into her old house for something she’d forgotten.
“Is there a problem, guys?” Lacey called out into the darkness, tightening her hand on Colt’s. “We don’t have a breakage debate, do we?”
“Maybe they’re going over the tapes?” she could feel Colt shrug. Of course, her imagination was sliding into the paranoia of every horror movie about escape or murder rooms that she’d dragged Colt to see. Sure, the invitation had looked authentic, but wouldn’t it? Colt was probably expecting someone to come out and apologize for technical difficulties at any moment, but Lacey was getting the feeling that there wasn’t anyone out there.
“Can’t we do this in the light, folks?” Lacey called out again, her voice not as sure as her last demand. “This is getting a little creepy.”
Their eyes were adjusting to the darkness. The problem with that was that it didn’t look like the murder house study escape room they’d just finished and that didn’t make sense. They hadn’t moved. Lacey hadn’t felt like they’d been moved on some platform or something. Could they do that? If so, Lacey wanted to do that in their rooms.
“Uh, Lacey,” Colt broke the silence with words, probably as much to reassure himself that Lacey was still there as to say anything important.
“I’m here,” Lacey answered, squeezing his hand.
“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” he stated, trying for levity.
Lacey sighed. “I didn’t feel anything move, did you?”
“Maybe they moved the room away?” Colt suggested, though that was pretty extreme. Then again, it was a sizable prize.
“Could it be a bonus level?” she asked.
“Maybe,” he answered, and Lacey grabbed at the notion like it could save them from her imagination.
Something began to glow and, with their eyes already attuned to the darkness, the dim glow was enough to illuminate a larger area that was NOT the room they’d just left. It was like some guy was raising the lights in the middle of a stage, only the illumination was so slow that they hadn’t noticed the start of it, even in the pitch black. If her eyes were to be believed, they were in a cave and that was enough to make her heartrate kick up and sound like a snare drum in the silence. Lacey reassured herself that if she couldn’t hear Colt’s heart, he couldn’t hear hers. They stood there like a couple of girls in a horror flick, clutching hands and parts of each other’s shirts.
The glow in the center of the “cave” was like someone had underlit a four-foot-high pedestal with a tablet on it. The tablet portion was facing away from them, the light blue glow lighting up some primitive cave walls. Without conversation, Lacey led the shuffle toward the pedestal, their sneakers sliding loudly on the grit beneath their feet. The floor was smooth, but almost dusty with grit. The sound of her feet was swallowed by the scuffle of Colt’s right behind her. He dragged his feet, something he’d taught himself in a household of brothers and sisters who had liked to torment the youngest. He’d taken to shuffling across carpet to build up static electricity so that when they touched him, they were shocked. He had that kind of introverted intelligence that had drawn her to him as a freshman at a new school in a new town.
It was so much easier to think of normal stuff than the cave around them. Lacey was an only child, and a boisterous foil to Colt’s quietness, but in his household, Lacey was his shield against the chaos. She was so engaging with his family that he could sit back and watch. She was often distracting anyone who wanted to pull him in. Just as his house had been her entertainment, her house had been his solitude. They would lounge around in the silence reading books or playing video games. Lacey was really hoping that tablet was glowing with a bonus room kind of video game.
Her parents were never home, workaholics who insisted that she should be grateful for the food on the table and clothes in her closet whenever she’d asked for their time or attention. After the divorce, Lacey’s dad’s workaholic tendencies took over completely in this new town and new start, which was code for a whole new group of younger women that her mom hadn’t poisoned against him. He didn’t even come home at night. That had been okay because that way he didn’t notice how often Colt stayed a little too late. So, as Lacey and Colt walked toward this pedestal, his bulk was the silence behind her, and she was his willing shield.
“It’s a game console, I think,” Colt explained as he was looking over Lacey’s shoulder. That was really easy considering that her pathetic five foot two barely reached his collarbone. Being so easy to overlook, Lacey tended to overcompensate with over-boisterousness, not that she was showing that now.
“Room’s about thirty feet in diameter,” Colt fell into his role on the team, and Lacey tried to do hers, not that there was much to count except 1 spooky pedestal in the middle of 1 empty cave. The pedestal was rimmed with what looked like a rune cipher, only they looked incredibly like runes. Lacey, having found something to obsess on, took a closer look. She and Colt had very detailed plans for a Druid Circle escape room, so she’d studied some runes. She ran her finger along the rim and shaft of the pedestal. They were carved into the rough stone.
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“Celtic runes,” she whispered, kneeling at the base and scanning the underneath of the pedestal. “Full set of 24 Elder Futhark runes repeated 4 times around the pedestal lip and another 7 times along the base. There are some other runes along here, but I don’t recognize them.”
“The game console is in Celtic runes too,” Colt reached a hand out to the screen that seemed built into the pedestal. They might have let go of each other, but they stayed within easy-grasping distance as they assessed their surroundings.
“Maybe it’s an advertising teaser for a new video game version of escape rooms?” Colt suggested and Lacey rolled her eyes.
“And maybe my dad set the whole thing up to repay me for all the pain and trauma he caused us in my youth,” Lacey scoffed, to which Colt frowned. He might have still been hopeful, but Lacey was the pragmatic one and didn’t delude herself. The rock was too solid, the pedestal looking like it had grown up out of the smooth ground.
“Alien interference is more likely than that,” Colt blew out a breath and tried to see if there was room to pry the little tablet off of the pedestal. There had been dozens of times in high school when her boisterousness resulted in a bloodied nose for him. He wasn’t the biggest guy out there, but he stood between her and them every time. Of course, she didn’t hide. She kicked shins in little sneak attacks that were often more effective than Colt’s gentle giant act.
“Inguz,” Lacey said, pointing to the single rune in the middle of the screen. “If that’s a Celtic rune like the ones on the pedestal, then it’s Inguz. It can stand for Home or Goals or Growth depending on the placement in a rune reading.”
“Like a home screen?” Colt asked, and he was back to hopeful.
“I don’t think the Celts would have used it that way since they didn’t have electronics that I know of,” Lacey answered a little glibly.
Colt’s lip quirked a bit at that. “If aliens could have built the pyramids, then maybe Celts had technology.”
Lacey just shook her head at him, but it wasn’t as hard to deal with the situation when she could think of it like a bonus level. She blew out a breath through pursed lips. She let myself ignore the real feel of the stone floor, the weight of solid rock above them, and the fact that she’d pinched herself already to see if she was dreaming.
“The runes around the base are all the basic runes with some bind runes in there too. Inguz,” Lacey searched her memory. “It’s represented by a seed. I remember because I was going to carve the rune into the center of a walnut shell.”
“I still think that clue is too hard for normal folk,” Colt touched the rune on the screen and a list of four new runes popped up.
“Probably,” Lacey admitted reluctantly, scanning the list of runes. “But I was willing to rate the room at extreme difficulty.”
Colt shrugged at her as she scanned the runes for something she could make sense of. The title of the page was a simple X. If it hadn’t been for the runes around the pedestal, she might have mistaken the runes for regular symbols. Below the X, which would stand for Gebo or the Gift, were a list of Uruz (looking like an outhouse with a slanting roof), Kennaz (a greater than sign), Ansuz (like half a rudimentary pine tree), and Nauthiz (a simple t shape with the crossbeam crooked), each with the rune Perthro (like a crooked table on its side) for chance next to it. Degaz (a sideways hourglass) blinked slowly at the bottom of the page.
“These could mean close to anything,” Lacey complained, her fingers fluttering over the letters indecisively.
“Take your best guess,” Colt shrugged, only ever practical when Lacey got flustered. “Start with the one that’s repeated.”
“I don’t know, maybe game or chance,” Lacey sputtered out. “In my notes, it had a picture of a dice cup next to it, but all this stuff was used for divination more than communication. People have their own interpretations of them.”
“Here goes nothing,” he shrugged and tapped the chance rune next to the top rune.
Lacey flinched, but nothing really changed much. The chance rune was replaced by another symbol that Lacey had never seen before. Colt went ahead and pressed it on each one of the four listed runes and got a different result each time, none of which Lacey knew. When he’d touched all the chance runes, the sideways hourglass at the bottom of the page blinked slowly. Colt touched it too, but that made the page change so that it looked like what could be another sideways hourglass only this time, it had legs or flagpoles depending on how you looked at it. The rune was in the center of the screen with four filled in circles at the cardinal points of a compass around it.
The light got a little brighter in the cave, so Lacey looked up and nearly jumped high enough to perch on Colt’s shoulders. They were suddenly surrounded by blue-outlined images of glowing things. There were four in total. Colt did his gentle giant tree impression while Lacey squeezed herself between him and the pedestal, but the monsters didn’t move. When she looked closer, she could make out that they were just projections. The one behind Colt was shorter than Lacey, green-skinned, had sharp-looking teeth, long limbs and wore a loincloth. The other three flickering projections consisted of a sickly worm, a beetle of some type, and what looked like it might be a bat with overly large feet.
Colt hit the rune in the center of the screen and Lacey jumped as a voice came from what could only be a speaker nearby, not that she could see it.
“What?” Lacey called out, but nothing happened so Colt hit the rune again to try to repeat it.
It said something different this time in some guttural language that they again couldn’t understand. Four more tries and they realized that it was maybe changing languages each time. Colt kept touching the rune until it finally spat out something that sounded close to what they could understand.
“Choose race,” it said, and Lacey stood there with her mouth hanging open.
“Whose race?” Colt asked out loud, not expecting an answer. “My race? Her race?”
“A foot race?” Lacey suggested, trying to find humor in it even as Colt glared in a way she knew he didn’t mean.
“Language detected,” the voice said. “Do you wish to set this as the default language?”
“Yes?” Colt answered quickly, giving Lacey a shrug that she returned.
“Language filters saved,” the voice said, and it seemed to have a slightly Irish or Scottish lilt to it.
“Great!” Colt told it. “Now can you explain what we’re doing here?”
It didn’t say anything in response, so Colt hit the rune on the tablet again.
“Choose race,” it repeated.
Colt and Lacey looked at each other in that way that only people who have lived together for years can do. They had a conversation about how idiotic the voice was and what they were going to do about it. All of which ended in a double shrug.
“If it’s our race, I don’t want to be a worm,” Lacey pointed at the monster behind Colt who frowned and nodded. During their silent discourse, she’d noticed that the circles coincided with the positions of the monsters around them, so she was figuring that the circles were the buttons to choose from. “I wonder what we changed on the previous page,”
“It’s not like there’s a back button,” Colt waved his hand over the screen in frustration. “At least with the goblin-looking one we’ll be able to talk.”
“What if we don’t choose at all?” she posited, trying not to think of what she’d look like as a female version of what could only be a goblin.
“Choose race,” the voice intoned, saying something for the first time without Colt having to hit the button.
“It’s listening,” Lacey whispered to Colt.
“I know,” Colt whispered back.
“What now?” she hissed.
“Choose race,” the voice whispered between them, causing them to jump apart like a pair of kids caught doing something naughty.
“Of what!?” Lacey demanded of the disembodied voice that was not nearly as helpful as it should have been.
That, it didn’t answer.
Lacey would have stood there at the stalemate for a good long while. She had the stubborn streak. Colt took the choice out of her hands and chose the goblin. Lacey jumped to intercept, but secretly, she was glad he’d made the decision she couldn’t have made. She didn’t want to be an ugly old goblin.
The worm, beetle, and bat projections disappeared as the goblin became less transparent in a slightly alarming way. Neither Lacey nor Colt had thought that it would be the race of something they might have to face in person until the goblin was almost fully formed. They only had a moment to regret their decision.
As Lacey’s eyes widened in dismay, the goblin became more detailed and realistic, down to a line of drool that slowly dribbled out of the thing’s mouth to plop disgustingly on the dusty stone floor. Lacey was caught staring into its beady little red eyes, but thankfully Colt was more pragmatic as he darted his gaze around the room for anything to use as a weapon or defense against those long, pointed teeth; teeth that filled a mouth that broke into a disconcerting smile as it cocked its head to the side eerily.
“I don’t think this is a bonus level,” Colt broke the silence.
Lacey’s only reply was a very loud gulp and a heartbeat she was sure was loud enough to fill the cave.
“Greetings masters,” the goblin said around a tongue that shouldn’t have been able to form the words.