Traps within Traps

Everything went dark. A pitch, molten dark, like you were standing at the bottom of the ocean.

And then... pop!

A candle flickered into life. A white candle set in a silver candlestick.

"That is not suspicious at all."

Challenge Two (2/4): Escape!

Bob gulped.

He'd never really liked enclosed spaces. Dark, mysterious, enclosed spaces especially. He took one step forward. Nothing happened. He took another step forward. Nothing happened. He—

"AAWW! God dammit..."

Bob had smacked his foot against something hard. His knife clattered down, his stack of apples cascaded away, and the whole world trembled as the candle tottered on its stand. It teetered, then tipped, then...

The world stilled.

Bob had thought his heart was going to stop.

He inched carefully forward, then slammed his hand down on the side table (his enemy in the darkness), seized up the candlestick and gestured it wildly around.

"Oh my word."

Squatting beside the table was an oversized armchair.

Brown, faded leather, soft and plump, just the thing to slump into after a long day. A real chair. The genuine article. Bob didn't think he'd ever seen anything so beautiful.

His hand reached out unthinkingly and brushed along the armrest. His breath caught in his throat. His mouth started to water. He'd been trapped in the middle of nowhere for so long. Mud and rain, livestock and loincloths.

A chair is civilisation.

Bob had to sit down. The chair was calling to him. He was going to sit down. He was...

"No, Bob."

Bob controlled himself.

"Not yet, Bob. Soon. Soon."

System challenges were not to be underestimated. Bob took stock.

His mission was to escape the room. The portal behind him had disappeared. His only light source was a flickering candle flame. And in front of him stood a beautiful armchair and a backstabbing side table.

On the side table was a wooden box filled with five candles of varying heights. They looked half-used, judging from the lips of melted wax. Inside the side table's little drawer was:

First, a transparent pencil case. Contents: yellow pencils, rubber, ball point pen, little plastic ruler, super glue, sellotape, screwdriver and a pair of rounded scissors (lest somebody accidentally hurt themselves).

Next, a tin of rainbow crayons. Nine colours—white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet and black. But, as often happens, some twerp had nicked half of them. The first five crayons were missing.

Finally, a blank, exercise book. Squared paper with a page at the front for your name.

That exhausted Bob's immediate surroundings. And, most unfortunately, there had been no magical escape route hidden between the armchair pillows. Which meant he would have to venture out there.

Out into the darkness. Beyond his little puddle of yellow candlelight.

Was he afraid?

He'd seen worse. He'd faced worse. He was a survivor of the first challenge, slayer of the mighty boar, heaven-anointed "Mud Monster," so of course, he was afraid. He was very, very afraid.

Escape rooms don't usually have traps, do they?

Bob tiptoed off, hand groping around in front of him, candlestick thrust out. And he discovered—

A blank, stone wall.

Yes, Detective Bob Brown on the scene (thank heavens!).

Next came a big stone hearth with an iron grate.

Detective Brown knelt down and examined the grate with his imaginary magnifying glass. He found some white ash and a few misshapen pieces of partially burnt wood. And he deduced... fire.

A fire? In a fireplace? Who could have guessed?

Then came a more serious discovery: bookshelves.

Five shelves of leather-bound volumes all about the same size and make. No titles or labels, just a jumbled hodgepodge of different colours, red books and green books and yellow books and so on and so on.

Detective Brown selected a volume at random. It was... empty. He tried another and another and another. Before landing on one with text inside. The text was all gibberish. It used the Roman Alphabet all right and the rough spacing and alignment seemed familiar, but all the words were meaningless, unpronounceable mumbo jumbo (in the detective's professional opinion).

Qmot otmxxqzsq oazfmuze m tuppqz anvqof ar qjfdmadpuzmdk baiqd. Rad qjmybxq, ftq tqmxuzs mbbxqe ar ftq rudef otmxxqzsq, ituot omz tqmx mzk iagzp mzp zqgfdmxulq mzk baueaz.

Most unfortunately, Detective Brown had skipped the code-breaking lecture at Detective school. He had asked himself, most reasonably, why any serious criminal would bother leaving coded messages that could only help the authorities in their investigations. But then the system was no ordinary criminal.

And last of all, the most important discovery yet: the way out.

A big, heavy oak door, barred shut, with a chained padlock securing an iron case over the handle.

Detective Brown gave the chain a hopeful tug.

Frustratingly enough, the thing didn't just fall off. But a man didn't know until he tried.

That completed Bob's circuit of the room. And now he was headed back to base. He had done his duty. He had circumnavigated the globe. He had found all there was to find. He deserved a good rest and a long sit.

Mrs Armchair was waiting for him.

Crunch!

Bob screamed.

Spiders. Cockroaches. Caterpillars. Centipedes.

His foot had landed on something hard but squashable and a warm liquid was oozing out of the carcass. Bob staggered back, dropping the candlestick, as a tangy, acidic smell filled the air.

The flame flickered.

An eternal moment of darkness.

Bob was after it in a flash. He dove down. He grabbed the stick. He fumbled it. He was making things worse. The candle started to roll away. He snatched it up. The flame guttered back to life. Bob panted, gasping for air.

"Bloody, loose fruit!"

Bob had tripped over one of his apples.

He sat there, staring blankly into the candle flame, as he waited for his breathing to steady. Something about an open flame calmed a man's soul. Only a few centimetres of wax left, he calmly observed.

"Only a few centimetres of wax left!"

Bob jumped to his feet, grabbed the next tallest candle and leaned the wick into the flame. The wick caught. He was safe! Bob sighed out as he extinguished the dying candle.

And that was when he saw it. That was when it hit him at last.

The trap.

Because he only had six candles. Six measly pillars of wax. And every moment, his precious seconds were burning away, melting down and evaporating into a trail of indifferent smoke. And the instant that last candle burned out...

Darkness.

He would be trapped all alone in this room, in these stone walls, cold and voiceless, swallowed up by the impenetrable darkness, without hope, only waiting for death.

Time was running out.

Was it his imagination or did the walls seem to press against him? He felt dizzy. Somehow he couldn't catch his breath. He was hyperventilating. The darkness seemed to push against the feeble candle flame, eyeing Bob with a devouring hunger, a prowling, predatory gleam.

The books!

He would start a fire. Bob leapt into action. He rushed over and grabbed up a volume.

Stop!

Were the books really placed here without purpose? No more than fuel for the fire? No, that couldn't be. A clue. They must hold a clue. What if he burned the book that held the secret to escaping?

No, no, you mustn't burn the books. It was a trap.

A trap within a trap.

Bob breathed out. He needed to calm down. But he kept glancing at the candlestick, at the black smoke twirling up and away, burning down his life. He gazed longingly at the bookcases. There were hundreds of books. They would last hours and hours. But he mustn't. He knew he mustn't. And yet... And then there was the frame itself, nice, thick wood. And just look at those shelves.

Bob snapped his fingers. The shelves!

Bob tore through the top shelf. He dug out the screws with his knife. He hammered the boards into tiny splinters. He dumped everything into the grate and filled out the empty spaces with crumbled-up sheets from the exercise book.

The moment of truth.

Bob carefully leaned in the candle flame. The dry paper melted into fire. The wood blackened, cracked and then caught. Bob kept going, feeding the fire page after page, as he blew oxygen into the flames.

A few minutes later and he had a happy, crackling fire.

Bob 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 a flickering, fragile drop of fire.

He'd done it. Intellectual giant over here. He'd bested the time trap. Detective Brown at his finest.

The light from the fire was much brighter than the lone candle. He could see almost the whole room. Now he would rest, warm the cold out of his bones, maybe close his eyes, let the mud dry and crack.

The moment had finally come.

Mrs Armchair, embrace me!

Bob was just about to sink into the chair when he caught sight of some dark lines on the ceiling.

Bob frowned.

Had those been there before?

He pushed over the armchair a little, climbed up on top and examined the markings.

It was a trapdoor.

He pushed on the trapdoor. Nothing happened. He pushed harder. Nothing happened. He noticed a little slot in the bottom corner, like an oddly shaped hole. A keyhole... But for no ordinary key.

Bob tilted his head, trying to get a better look.

From the shape of the hole, he guessed he'd need a towered block with four quadrants.

"Oh no..."

Now that he thought about it, that partially burnt wood at the bottom of the grate had had a rather curious shape to it.

Bob jumped down and rushed over to the fireplace. The fire was crackling merrily—too merrily in Bob's opinion. Almost like it was making fun of him. Any wooden keys in there had long since lost their cryptographic properties.

Bob chuckled weakly to himself and slumped down on the floor.

An intellectual giant caught bang-snap in a trap. Detective Brown at his lowest.

A trap, within a trap, within a trap.

"Now Bob, what do you think are the chances that the big, scary oak door you found is just a dummy and the only real escape was through that trapdoor whose key you just burned? "

"Fifty-fifty? "