A Catch

The chair should have been comfortable.

Everything pointed towards comfort. The material was fine. The texture good. The angle sculpted to the human form. And yet, and yet, somehow, it wasn't.

The back was... lumpy.

Bob adjusted the cushions. He shuffled around. He fought the good fight. He told himself he'd forget it in five minutes.

Five uncomfortable minutes later, it was all he could think about. And the only thing that kept him in the chair was a powerful, overwhelming impulse to laziness. It might have been a form of psychological torture. A single inescapable hard spot jammed continually into the lower back.

Bob managed five more minutes of utterly unpleasant and unrewarding relaxation.

It was the most difficult thing he'd ever done.

But that was it. That was the line. He'd had enough.

He jumped up, threw the cushion on the ground, and started patting down the chair-back. A tricky rascal. You couldn't tell anything just patting. The thing was nestled behind thick layers of cushioning.

Bob reached for his hunting knife.

It was the only way.

Bob plunged the knife into the chair and dragged it down in a long, diagonal slash. Mrs Armchair screamed. White stuffing poured out of the wound as Bob thrust his hand into the opening.

He ferreted about inside, manic in his search for the evil, little demon. He passed over metal springs and waded through cotton padding, until, yes, he had it! A little sharp thing. He jerked it out in triumph, "got you!" And just as he was about to throw it onto the ground and stamp on top of it—

He stopped short.

He was holding a small, metal key.

Bob turned to look at Mrs Armchair. She was in a wretched, pitiful state. She had been calling out to him all this time. She'd been trying to tell him. Warning him. And what had he done? What had he done to her?

Mrs Armchair died in Bob's arms.

That was the last time Bob tried to do something sensible. That was the last time Bob didn't listen to his heart when it pointed him at a well-upholstered recliner and begged him to sit.

Hard work be damned!

The key fit like a glove. The padlock clicked open and Bob was able to access the iron case behind it. Inside was a display panel. Six numbered dials—the first five, black font on white background, the last, white on black. Below the dials was an "enter" button and beside the "enter" a little glass window with the number five inside.

0 0 0 0 0 0 Enter [5]

You didn't need to be a genius to figure out the game. A good thing too because nobody had ever called Bob a genius (yet!).

What we have here is a six digit combination lock with five guesses. Somewhere, hidden in the room's contents, was the combination. Bob's task was to figure out the combination and unlock the door.

Now, who doesn't enjoy statistics?

Because there was one very obvious candidate: the shift numbers of the encrypted books.

Drawn out in graph form (the five shelves and four rows).

| | S1 | S2 | S3 | S4 | S5 | | ------ | --- | --- | --- | ----- | ---- | | R1 | 12 | x | 15 | 15,11 | x | | R2 | 2 | x | 5,8 | 9 | 14,4 | | R3 | 20 | 8,9 | x | x | 19 | | R4 | x | 1 | x | J | X |

Detective Brown puffed contentedly on his imaginary pipe.

See there was only one combination that added up to exactly six digits and Detective Brown didn't believe in coincidences.

The third row — 2 0 8 9 1 9.

That had to be the combination.

Bob just dared the system to give him an E grade this time. He had blazed through the puzzle. He had crushed it. He was a code-breaking machine. Detective Brown would be teaching the code-breaking course next year.

Bob slotted in the six numbers and slapped down enter.

Click!

The five rolled down to a four. And the door didn't burst open.

That was... unexpected.

Must be something wrong with the mechanism. Old machinery and all.

Bob tutted to himself. Even the omnipotent system was trapped beneath the degradation of bureaucracy. Someone somewhere had forgotten to order a new combination lock. If that wasn't a manifesto on the limitations of true power, Bob didn't know what was.

Bob double-checked the little digits, making sure to line them all up to a tee.

Perfect.

"Ok, here we go."

He pressed enter.

The four rolled down to a three. The door remained locked.

Bob was stunned, floored, absolutely stumped. He needed to sit down. He tripped over to the armchair and slumped back. Alas, his knife-work had seriously compromised Mrs Armchair's lumbar support.

Bob spent a couple minutes playing around with his little book of statistics. What if he multiplied these two numbers together, or summed the digits, what about division, division, yes, ah but the decimal places...

Bob put his head in his hands.

It couldn't be. He wouldn't believe it. It wasn't true.

Was there really no connection between the books and the combination?

The idea was simply frightening. What devilish cunning! To put the whole bookcase there, with its formulas, its mysterious jamphlet, its strange symmetries and then for it all to be completely irrelevant to the combination...

If there was a God, he must absolutely hate his creations.

Back to the drawing board.

There were six slots. So Bob was looking for something connected to the number six.

He gave a lazy glance around the room. Apples scattered on the floor, a crackling fire, books stacked up on the ground, the box of candles, the empty book frame, the tin of rainbow crayons.

Detective Brown smiled.

There had been six candles. Five in the box, plus one on the stand.

Bob pulled the candle box closer. The base was grooved into five channels and in each channel was printed a number: 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Bob examined the silver candlestick next and sure enough there was a stylised number 1 on the base. Presumably those numbers indicated the respective order and the combination digit was encoded somehow in the candle itself.

Detective Brown slapped himself on the head.

Why hadn't he seen it before?

The candles were all different lengths. And the pencil case just so happened to contain an inch-only ruler. Bob measured the shortest candle. It was exactly 2 inches. Not roughly. Exactly. The next was exactly 4 inches.

Bob was onto something. The combination was hidden in the candle heights. He just had to measure each candle to get the digit and input those digits in the given order.

And then came the catch. Because there is always a catch.

Bob had already burnt one and a half candles.

There was something very wrong with the difficulty settings of this tutorial. How on earth were you meant to figure out that you weren't supposed to burn the candle? The candle that was spontaneously illuminated when you entered the room and that provided the only light source in an otherwise pitch-black room.

Time to assess the damage.

Bob measured each of the candles in turn.

From shortest to tallest: 2, 4, 5, 6.3 (the partially burnt candle) and 7 inches.

Bob distinctly remembered picking the longest candle after the first one burnt out, together with the fact that none of the candles had been the same length. So he felt pretty confident assuming the second candle's original height had been 8 inches.

The difficulty was that first candle.

Bob had never directly compared it to the ones in the box.

Now he understood why the combination lock allowed five guesses. A thought quickly followed by the recollection that Bob had entered the same combination twice on the off-chance that the lock had failed to register the correct combination.

Odds he might end up regretting that later?

Very high.

Bob racked his brain, trying to remember just how tall that original candle had been.

It had been tallish. He thought. Maybe about as tall or even a little taller than the tallest candle in the box. That gave him four reasonable options: 7, 8, 9 or 10.

Wouldn't it have been grand to have four guesses about now?

Bob had three.

Bob made a little prayer and tried the first combination: 7 4 8 5 7 2.

Click.

The three tracked down to a two.

Bad news, Bob, bad news.

Two more guesses then his head was going on the chopping block.

Could the candles be a decoy? Was there something else, something cleaner? The books were out. The drawer was just assorted knick-knacks. There were nine crayons, five missing, four remaining.

All useless.

No, it had to be the candles.

Bob had the measure of the escape room by now. And the sheer pleasure of watching a participant bumbling around the room searching for the key as the crucial combination was burning away under their very nose... What system could resist that?

8, 9 or 10.

Bob chose 9.

Click!

The two rolled down to a one.

His last guess.

Was the darkness closing in on him? The room felt strangely dark. Strangely cold. Bob shivered and looked around at the little, stone-walled room. This here was a dungeon. A black, indifferent hole you throw someone in to die.

8 or 10. 10 or 8.

What should he do? What should he do?

Bob didn't like 10. You had to use the second digit and that seemed inelegant somehow.

Bob, are you really going to stake your life on that? On the elegance of a puzzle? On the aesthetics of this demented system?

Bob pressed enter.

Click!