Work Text:
The Car
Once they realized what was happening, they discovered that the car doors, of course, were locked. Michael's body went cold, hollowing out with the same awful sensation he'd felt after encountering that painting—that woman.
They were still playing the game. They hadn't escaped at all.
Karen's voice floated to him, muffled as if he remained trapped there, in the water, his limbs heavy with chains. He fought off the sensation with the same determination as before, straining against the viselike hold with one thought to guide him: his daughter needed him.
Just like that, his ears popped. Sound came rushing back. "There has to be a clue," Karen was saying. She nearly elbowed him in the head as she clambered into the back seat to search. Her palms swept across the upholstery and into the pockets and crevices. "Dad, c'mon. We're wasting time."
"Right. Um—" Michael kicked into motion. He studiously ignored the snide voice that insisted everything was futile as he ran his hand under the dash to feel for anything hidden. He had no idea what the tangle of plastic and wires normally felt like, but nothing stood out to his questing fingers.
Behind him, Karen released the fold down seat. She started pulling rags and other random crap from the trunk. "Is there anything on the note?"
"The note?"
"From the mechanic."
Hastily, Michael fished the paper out of his pocket. He unfolded it and flipped it over to study the blocky handwriting.
It was just
a valve,
easy fix.
No charge.
Enjoy our
little town.
Keys inside.
Word scrambles had never been his forte, but that was a lot of text for that sort of puzzle, wasn't it? It was a three digit padlock, so adding up the letters in each of the four sentences wouldn't work.
He looked for changes in case or odd wording that might hint at a cipher. Nothing. He twisted to pass it to Karen when something caught his eye. "Hold on." He turned back to the window. He plastered the paper to the window, smoothing the wrinkles with his fingertips and using the glass as a light box. A faint watermark revealed itself beneath the ink, hidden inside the paper itself. "Oh my god, you're right, there are numbers."
Karen immediately lunged over the passenger seat, reaching for the padlock. He read the numbers off for her, his breath held in his throat as she rotated the dials.
Click.
"It worked!" Karen grabbed the brass key triumphantly.
Michael slotted the antique key into the ignition and prayed for it to work. As the car rumbled to life, the rush of relief was sudden but brief. What now?
"What are we doing to do?" Karen said, echoing his thoughts aloud. She turned wide eyes at him as if he had an answer for her. If only.
"Well, we can't go back," he insisted. The urge to floor it and drive as fast and far away as possible overwhelmed him, but he forced himself to calm down. He fastened his seatbelt and gestured for Karen to do the same.
"What do you mean, we can't go back?" Her hands twisted in the strap. "We have to go back."
"Karen—"
"No, Dad! We never actually left! If our past selves are just starting, maybe we can stop them before they even go inside."
"How? We'd never catch up. We don't have a map, and I don't even remember half the turns the cab driver took to get us there. Do you?" He gripped the steering wheel like a lifeline, struggling with the knowledge that deep down, he knew she was right. They were going to have to go back inside the house to win the game.
Karen's seatbelt clicked into place and she set her hands on the dash as she thought through their options. "Okay, let's figure this out. Based on the clock, we have a little over an hour."
Michael glanced at the time and did the math, too. If the cab ride had been about ten minutes and they'd spent another five for the orientation, so yeah, a little over an hour was right. But what good was that? They clearly hadn't found the right master key. And if they tried to find Josie first, wouldn't they be risking running into whoever killed her?
Worse, if they got the key from her before she died, wouldn't they need to put it back inside her in order for their past selves to escape in the first place? The more he tried to follow the logic, the more it slipped away from him like something slick and scaly.
The time stuff was messing with his head. Focus, he told himself. Start at the beginning.
The corners of his mouth tugged down as he recalled bits and pieces of the story Josie told them in the parlor. "Karen, what do you remember from the intro? Strange things started happening in the township, but the source was in the house?"
"Doctors thought it was psychosis or something, but it was the inventor testing experiments."
"And the church!" Michael recalled, with a suddenness that stole his breath away. "The church thought it was black magic." Images from the projector flickered through his memory, all the more morbid now that he knew they weren't staged. He could hear the creak of the rope as the body—Ty's body—swung from the rafters.
Karen frowned. "Yeah, but it was the inventor's experiments, wasn't it?"
"Maybe. What if it was really all those things? The inventor was trying different methods to communicate with the dead, right? It'd make sense that he dabbled in some black magic, too." As he said it, Michael felt the phantom touch of ice cold water rising in the footwell and seeping into his shoes. His gorge rose with it and he flexed his fingers to firmly remind himself that his arms weren't bound and that the pressure across his chest was simply the seatbelt.
Again, Karen's voice pulled him back to the moment. "Dad, we need more information." She twisted in her seat to look at the diner. "Maybe we can borrow someone's phone."
"I don't think we should go backwards. If we were supposed to find something in there, the door would've been locked, wouldn't it? And the key was for the ignition. That probably means we're supposed to go somewhere. As screwy as it is, there are still rules to all of this."
Karen tapped her hand rapidly against the dash as an idea came to her. She pointed excitedly towards the road that had carried them through the small town's historic center. "What about a library?"
Relieved to have a destination that wasn't the house, Michael put the car into gear. "I think we passed one," he said, and took them back the way they'd come.
The Library
In a town this size, the library wasn't hard to find. Adjacent to a small park in the cozy downtown, it was a stately brick building that shared a wing with the local fire station. Karen was ready to leap from the car the minute Dad pulled up to the curb. She silently told herself to slow down and pay attention to the moment. Rushing might mean missing important things.
As they approached the front doors, she spotted a loose brick on the ground that by the scrapes on the concrete clearly often doubled as a stopper. She nudged it into place to keep the door from closing behind them. Maybe it wouldn't help, but she could tell it made Dad feel better, too.
Inside, the familiar hush soothed her nerves, a calming quiet instead of the eerie silence of the escape room house. The front desk sat empty, but that probably wasn't out of the ordinary for a place like this. At school, the librarian was always off doing stuff too.
They ventured past colorful main displays and assessed the stacks. Dad rested a hand lightly on her back, and a bit of tension eased out of her. As she turned to glance up at him, she caught him staring down towards the span of his fingers across the fabric of her t-shirt.
"Feels like it was only yesterday when your mom and I brought you home from the hospital." A faint smile turned the corners of his mouth. "You know, once upon a time, you were small enough to hold in one hand."
She shrugged, not knowing what to say to that. It felt like ages since they'd been anything resembling close.
"Now, college applications are lurking on the horizon, aren't they?"
If they ever made it out of here.
Dad cleared his throat, probably thinking the same thing. "What are we looking for?"
"Local history, probably? Maybe also anything on the occult?"
A loud bang echoed through the library and Dad instinctively pulled her close as they both jumped.
"Did you say a local history of the occult?" A woman in a patterned polyester blouse and lavender slacks rested her hands atop a heavy stack of books she'd just dropped on one of the long study tables. By the bifocals pushed up to perch in her graying hair, Karen guessed she was maybe only a little younger than her grandmother.
"Yeah, anything on strange sightings or black magic."
She seemed briefly exasperated before giving Karen a second look. "Oh, school project?"
"Um, yeah."
"We've got a few shelved over in that section"—she gestured to one of the stacks before resuming sorting the pile of books—"mostly for the ghost hunters that come in from all over the place. Our little town has quite a long history of strange goings on. You've heard about the woman in white, haven't you? You kids never get tired of scaring each other with tales of demons and seances at the old Sinclair house. Most folks aren't really interested in any of it outside of campfire stories, though, so good for you, dear. If you want to be thorough, the primary sources are locked in the downstairs archive."
Locked downstairs? Karen didn't really like the sound of that, but couldn't say she was surprised. Of course, the inventor wanted them to solve more puzzles. Her gaze slid to the shadowy steps descending beneath a small hand painted sign that read archives.
"Can you take us, please?"
The librarian smiled. "I'll do you one better. Since you have an adult with you, you can head down there and take all the time you need. Just be careful, a lot of those papers are really old." She produced a small ring of keys from her pocket and detached a perfectly normal looking door key from the cluster. She passed it over with a reminder to lock back up when finished. "If I'm not at the desk when you're done, just leave it under the keyboard or ring the bell if there's something you want to check out," she instructed, and went back to her work.
"I'd really feel better if you came with us," Dad said.
"I trust you, and I've got a lot to do. You understand."
Dad shot her a look, he'd tried. "Yeah, thank you. Just one question," he added. "It's been a long time since I was trading campfire stories. The woman in the white: she's the one who drowned?"
"Oh, I'm surprised you knew that! Most people younger than me only seem to hear the hanged version. I think since they fenced off most of the property, people remember the tree more than the old fishing pond. There are a few oral histories in the archives that go deeper into her story and its connection to the Sinclair house. You'll find those in the same cabinet"—her glasses slipped down her forehead as she glanced upward in thought—"third from the left just as you enter. Look for the drawer labeled 19th century spiritualism."
The Archives
Michael led the way down the stairs, taking the key from Karen just in case. His heart lodged in his throat as he unlocked the door, but opening it revealed nothing obviously sinister, just a crowded but tidy basement full of heavy wooden filing cabinets that looked like they'd been made in the 1930s. He hung back at the threshold while Karen made a beeline for the third cabinet.
As he looked for something to hold the door open, some unseen force shoved him inside. He stumbled and the door snapped shut. The lights in the room flickered and dimmed, threatening to plunge them into inky darkness. After a few thudding heartbeats the long fluorescent bulb hanging overhead brightened and held.
"For a second I thought that thing was coming," Karen said, visibly shaken.
"Locked," he confirmed, testing the handle. He ran his fingers over the smooth brass where a keyhole should be. He gave their surroundings a second look. There wasn't much beyond the cabinets and, in one corner, what looked to be an old standing lamp covered in heavy plastic. "I think we need a new key. Maybe for that other door." He nodded towards the dull red glow of an emergency exit sight at the far end of the narrow basement.
Karen followed his gaze and whispered a quiet "shit" beneath her breath.
"You can say that again," he muttered. "I'll go look for the key."
"No, Dad, we need info on the inventor first. If we don't figure out what happened, it doesn't matter if we can't open the door."
The artificial light gave her skin a sickly pallor, and Michael forced his mind away from the grim thoughts that tried to surface. He was forced to agree. With a nod, he joined her and skimmed the tags resting in the brass fixtures tacked to the drawer fronts. The spidery cursive was much easier for him to read, and he spotted the spiritualism drawer first.
Karen tugged on the handle. It didn't budge. "Shit!" She braced her foot against the cabinet to give it all she had.
She'd seemed so disengaged with anything but her phone as she got older, but today Michael could see she was still the same resilient soul that bounced right up again whenever she took a tumble and skinned a knee. Echoes of her mother shining through, he thought, as he gently nudged her aside.
"Here, let me try," he said, not wanting her to hurt herself. He grabbed the handle and gave it a hard tug. On the second try, it unstuck and they took turns grabbing handfuls to haul the contents free. They pulled dozens of files and folios out, each of them bearing a label written in the same delicate cursive, the blue ink fading into yellowing paper. Wordlessly, they divided the stack of materials in two and began combing through them.
Most of it was paperwork—ledgers and records of room rentals or furniture sales related to several notable spiritualists or their devotees. Other flyers or newspaper clippings were preserved in cheap plastic binder sleeves, some of them with accompanying notes by whomever had assembled the collection.
"Spiritualism gave many women an outlet to speak their mind," Michael read aloud. "Mediums holding seances could champion ideas of women's suffrage or the abolition of slavery while claiming these messages came from the spirit realm."
"So it was all fake?" Karen asked.
"I don't know, but it only takes one real medium, doesn't it?"
Precious minutes ticked by as they dug through more of the files. As Karen flipped through a trio of photo albums, she broke the silence. "Hey, Dad, why did you ask the lady about a woman in white?"
Michael paused halfway through riffling a stack of papers from a folder marked Dr. Wm Sinclair. "When we were separated," he began, struggling to find the words, "there was a painting on the wall of a tree on the edge of a pond. I don't know how to explain it, but it was… mesmerizing. I couldn't stop staring at it, and I—" His throat tightened and he reached up to pull away the chain. His fingers closed on nothing.
"Dad? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, honey. It was just so strange and so real at the time." He massaged his neck and braved a smile. "I was looking at that painting and then suddenly I was outside. Or maybe I was inside— inside the painting. It sounds crazy."
"Everything about today is crazy."
A startled laugh burst free from his lips. Wasn't that the truth. "One minute I was in the house and the next, I was knee deep in pond water. A woman in a white dress was there." The details now that he was recalling them seemed hazy, flitting away like wisps of fog. His brow furrowed. "I think she tried to drown me. But at the same time, something was pulling me back towards the house."
"A white dress," Karen whispered, turning the album around to show it to him. "Is this her?"
All the blood drained from his face. In a faded old photograph, standing at the edge of that small pond was the woman in white. Her dark hair was neatly pinned in an up-do, with a heavy plait on one side that rested alongside her neck. A ribbon choker made it appear like the echo of a noose. In her hands—
A flash of memory: the painting, transformed. Clad in the woman's dress, Karen's mother stood in the foreground. Her arms bound in chains, she cradled a glowing, blood red lantern. Her gaze was turned aside, as if she refused to look at him. She'd looked the same when news of his infidelity had come to light.
"Yeah, that's her," he managed to say, swallowing down the sting of bile. "What is she holding?"
"I think it's an old-timey planchette."
"A what?"
"Like the pointer piece of a ouija board," Karen explained. "It's the thing you touch that's supposed to connect to the spirits for the message." The heavy black paper of the album rasped like dry leaves as she flipped to another page of photos showing the woman in the middle of a seance. At the top, in small block letters, the name 'Ms. Charlotte Davenport' was written in white ink. One photo captured her with her fingers poised on the dinner-sized planchette. A pencil stood propped through it, the graphite scrawling a message onto a sheaf of paper. After a moment, Michael recognized the room as the same parlor they'd been served tea in.
"If she was the real deal, maybe she opened a door she shouldn't have," Michael suggested. "Or,"—he pointed to a newspaper clipping hanging out of Karen's stack—"met an untimely end."
Karen pulled the article free and skimmed it. "Miss Charlotte Davenport, the renowned medium, has gone missing along with her dear friend and assistant, Miss Josie Mills of St. Louis," she read aloud. She looked up at Michael. "Oh my god, do you think it's the same Josie?"
He shrugged. How could it be, but— "At this point, we can't rule anything out." He gave Karen's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "Okay, now what? Do we keep looking?"
"Do you remember when we first got to the house? Josie acted like she knew you. She was relieved to see you. If she's a restless spirit, maybe the woman from the painting is, too."
As Michael tried vainly to forget how it felt to plunge his fingers into Josie's still-warm abdomen, Karen dug through the stack of papers again, coming up with a hand-drawn map of the grounds. She smoothed out the thin paper and stabbed a finger at a crooked line that snaked through the property and fed into a fishing pond just behind the house. "I think we need to go here."
Every fiber of Michael's being told him no, he wasn't supposed to go back there. That something awful—more awful than a vengeful woman's spirit—awaited him.
Overriding all of that was the hope that Karen was right. That, and knowing he'd felt this way before, five years ago, when he'd stood in socked feet in the upstairs hallway with his shoes in his hands because he hadn't wanted to wake her mother. But his wife had already found out. She already knew who he'd been out late with. He'd just been too much of a coward to tell her all the things he'd kept buried.
He knew, deep down, that he could've fixed things with Karen's mom if he'd had the guts to try. Maybe he needed to stop running away from things, including whatever it was about that painting that he was refusing to see.
"Let's do it," he agreed, and looked to Karen before his gaze slid to the back of the room. "That door's going to need a key though, isn't it?"
She ran to test it to confirm. "There's a keypad like on a phone! Two is 'ABC' and three is 'DEF' so I think it has to do with these drawers," she said, pointing at the handwritten labels. "If you look closely, some of them have braille written on them, too."
Never more glad for his years as a scout playing in the woods with old walkie-talkies, Michael recognized it immediately. "It's morse code," he said, and taught her what letter each card hid.
The Conservatory
When the library's emergency exit opened into a dark concrete stairwell and they climbed a series of shallow steps lined with moss, Karen had let her hopes rise. But the game didn't let them back out into the street, or take them to the pond. It brought them right back into the house. They hadn't been in this room before—a space filled with long work tables and huge potted plants—but she could feel it the same way she had in the morgue drawer. Something malevolent was waiting for them.
Waiting for the right time to claim its prey.
"It's like a jungle in here. This must be a conservatory," Dad said, sounding a lot more calm than she felt. He scanned the long row of windows covered with old newspapers and stamped his foot against a scuffed wooden floor made up of raw slats that had never been smoothed down by anything but time. "Or some kind of carriage house turned gardening shack."
"There's a door," Karen said, catching sight of a hinge through broad leaves.
The plants grew more wild in that direction, and as they inched past a series of cactus leaves prickling with wicked looking spines, Dad's hip caught on a work table. Karen caught sight of the door and a shadowed figure on the other side. He stumbled, his hand hitting the pane of frosted glass, and a scream ricocheted in the hall on the other side.
Hastily, she clamped a hand over his mouth to keep him from responding. "Don't," she hissed quietly. She had no idea why, but just like in the diner bathroom, something primal told her that something very bad would happen if their past selves saw them now. Tyler hadn't been able to see them, but he was echo. She was positive that this was different. Terror knotted her insides as they waited frozen until her footsteps moved away. She was going towards where she'd heard Josie's voice.
"You're why I screamed after I went out the window," Karen breathed, unbelieving.
Dad ran his hands through his hair and clawed at his short beard, his facade of calm cracking. "How is this possible? If you remember that, it means we were already here. How many times have we done this?"
On the other side of the door, a loud banging and then voices—Dad, Andrew, and Melanie.
Dad's eyes widened to white, his hands shaking uncontrollably. "I remember now. There were footsteps in front of the painting. Muddy footsteps. I was there before, too." He wavered on his feet before scrambling to the corner and retching into an empty pot.
Karen didn't know what to do. She watched helplessly until he straightened, then went over to him to put her arms around him. She pressed her cheek between his shoulder blades, and his shallow, uneven breathing slowly returned to normal.
"I don't think it's some kind of inescapable loop," she said, her face muffled in his shirt as she tried to make herself feel better too. "Time isn't right in here. We're existing in the same space and everything is happening at once, like time is folded back on itself, or something." Maybe it would make sense to a scientist or something, but it didn't matter. The truth of it was they had two choices: give up or go on. "We'll go crazy if we try to make sense of it."
"You're right, kiddo," Dad said, twisting and pulling her into a tight hug.
Somewhere else in the house, a door slammed shut.
Another minute, and with one more squeeze, he let her go. He took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded towards the hallway. "It's open."
The Hallway
Dreading every step, Michael led the way to the painting. The muddy footprints he remembered weren't there—yet—but the strange hypnotic pull of the landscape hadn't changed. If anything, it was stronger.
Karen felt it too, he sensed, as his peripheral vision dimmed and the world seemed to collapse at the edges. He anticipated the strange pop in his ears and the sensation of his stomach dropping out like a rollercoaster as the floor beneath his feet turned into the cushion of lush grass. After it vanished, he turned to look for her, but she was gone. He was alone at the edge of the water again.
Not alone, he amended, as the dead woman emerged to embrace him and the gears began to turn. She looked him in the eye, not attempting to kiss him. You're different, the dead woman said to him, speaking into his mind like a memory, half-forgotten. You've left your yearning behind.
A heavy chain snaked around his leg. Another lashed itself around his chest. He wasn't fighting it so hard this time, he realized, this time she was pulling him into the icy water. It was almost up to his neck.
I'm sorry, Michael. It's not my choice who he feeds to us. Better you than your daughter, I trust.
The water inched up over his mouth and a spark lit at the mention of his daughter. Karen, he remembered. He needed to get back to her.
Michael thrashed against the chains and the sucking mud. He'd gotten free before, he could do it again.
Suddenly, a sound like shattering glass.
He blinked as he found himself collapsed on the floor of the hallway. Karen's hand pressed to his shoulder. Trying to speak, he found he couldn't. He couldn't breathe, either. Panic sent his heart racing as Karen pushed him onto his side and he spit up mouthfuls of water.
"What th—" he gasped, unable to finish the sentence. His limbs trembled, weakened as he pushed himself back to standing with her help. He looked down at himself, but this time his clothes remained clean and dry. Shards of glass glittered across the glossy hardwood at his feet. Karen had ripped the painting from the wall and thrown it to the ground.
"It was just another trap," she said. "We need to get out of here and go to the real pond."
Is any of this real? he wondered silently. "You think this place will let us?"
"I don't know, but I say we get the key now from Josie and we try."
If Michael hadn't wanted to face the painting again, he wanted to encounter Josie again even less. He gnawed at the inside of his cheek. He couldn't let himself fall into despair. He had to push forward for Karen. No matter how little hope he had, he had to keep it alive in her.
They breezed through the rooms again to find the closet. Slumped on the floor, surrounded by the stink of mothballs, Josie was still breathing like she had been the very first time they'd found her. This time around, he noticed the blood trickling down the nape of her neck. She must've taken a blow to the head. "You came back," she said with a wan smile. Her gaze unfocused and she frowned. "So did the inventor. He struck me."
"Josie, oh my god, I'm so glad you're alive." Karen clasped Josie's hands in hers, and gingerly lifted the front of her shirt. There was no wound. "Dad, she's okay."
With a sinking feeling, Michael noticed something else at her neck besides the dark trickle of blood. "She still has the key."
"My key?" Josie's hand drifted to her necklace. "You can borrow it if you need to, though he gave it to me as a cruelty."
As Karen reached for it, Michael hastily grabbed her wrist. "Wait! If we borrow it, who puts it back," he asked, terrified that he already knew the answer.
"Dad, it doesn't matter. We're thirty minutes in. You find me again five minutes from now. When Ty didn't see us, we were there forty minutes after him. He was already dead, but we started over so we're synced up with everyone again, which means Andrew is still alive. We can find a way to save him before whatever that thing is takes him."
"Save Andrew? Are you fucking kidding me? No, we stick to the plan. We get the key and find out what's in that water."
"You need to—" Josie coughed weakly. "You must rely on your wits and one another," she whispered, her eyes rolling back as she mumbled through the beginning of the same introductory script they'd sat through in the parlor.
Karen gently removed the key from Josie's necklace. "Josie, please, can you tell us how we get outside? We think we need to find Charlotte. We think she's in the water."
"Miss Charlotte, yes. The inventor invited us here, you know. It was wonderful at first, he paid us twenty dollars a day—plus room and board—to commune with the other side, but then everything changed. He summoned something terrible, you see, and together they began to experiment on her. When that did not break her spirit, he drowned my beloved Charlotte to chain her and the foul thing he had unleashed for all eternity." A tear slid down Josie's face. "She is the engine that powers his infernal machine. She is the key to everything."
"Which door do we take to get to her?"
"What?" Josie's head jerked to the side like a marionette.
"Which door do we need?"
"Your friend will know. He's died so many times, but he's always one of the most clever. This time, I think things will be different," she whispered, before her lashes fluttered and she drifted into unconsciousness.
Michael's fingers curled into a fist so tight his knuckles ached. "How are we supposed to fight whatever killed Andrew?"
"Dad, I don't know."
"What did it look like?"
"I don't know! It was pulling at him and he tried to hold on to the edge of the duct, but the metal cut him. I tried to grab his hand," she stammered, staring at the blood still flaking on her fingernails. "It was so slippery."
Leaving the closet this time, nothing was hunting them. They ended up on a landing with three other doors, all of them locked. Josie's key worked on each of them.
There was no obvious choice. Nothing hung on the paneled walls except a clock whose merciless second hand progressed with an ominous ticking. The only furniture was a sideboard positioned beneath a barred window. "What do you think?" he asked.
"None of them," Karen said. She took the key from him and crouched in front of the sideboard, running her fingers over the dark wood to find a keyhole hidden in the shadows.
"How did you—"
"Everytime I look at this, it gives me that same awful feeling as when we've almost crossed paths with ourselves. …and it's the right size. Don't you see, Dad? You pulled Andrew out, not a monster."
Recognizing that they didn't have enough time for him to question the how or when, Michael opened the cabinet and poked his head inside. Sure enough, the inside defied physics, revealing a T-section of metal ductwork that extended beyond what should've been just outside the second floor of the house.
"Did you hear that?" Karen's voice echoed inside the duct.
Just past the bend, Michael could see Andrew's shoe. In the other direction, a faint rattling announced the approach of a too-familiar horror. With no chance to explain, he grabbed Andrew's leg and pulled with all his might.
Despite Andrew's size, leverage was on Michael's side, and he hauled the man around the corner. Karen's screaming rang in his ears, hooking into his breastbone and fueling his adrenaline. His daughter was going to be okay. That one, and the one helping him drag Andrew out of the duct and onto the landing.
The sideboard snapped shut.
Karen tried to fling her arms around a stunned Andrew. He recoiled, shoving her off him and backing away. His gaze swung wildly between them like a pendulum.
"What the fuck is happening."
Michael's eyes darted to the clock. "We don't have a lot of time to explain, but the short version is: this house is really fucked up and something is wrong with the way time works in here. You started thirty-five minutes ago, when we did, but Karen and I have been playing for over an hour. Right now, in another room, she and I are being reunited, but we think you're dead."
"What do you mean you're— Are you talking about quantum superposition stuff?" Andrew asked.
"I don't know what that means," Karen said, before Michael could admit the same.
"There's a thing called the slit experiment—" Andrew waved a hand dismissively. "Nevermind, it doesn't matter. It's a quantum physics thing, and I don't really understand it either. Something about all of time happening at once."
"Shit, you're still bleeding," Michael said. He tore a strip off the bottom of his shirt and passed it to Andrew. "Here, wrap it with this."
"What now?" Andrew asked.
"Josie said you'd know how we could get to the fish pond."
Andrew looked to Karen. "The one in the painting in the weird hallway? Yeah, it's right out back. I saw it when I parked."
"But which door?" Michael asked.
"Are they all unlocked?"
Karen nodded. "We used the key on all of them, but we haven't opened any yet."
Back to being frustratingly unruffled, Andrew shrugged. "Three of us, three doors. Maybe we try opening them at the same time?"
The Pond
Andrew's door opened to a well-groomed gravel parking area. Karen squinted as they stepped into the outside, waiting for her eyes to adjust so she could get her bearings.
"My car!" Andrew said, reaching for them both. He took a step towards a fairly nondescript sedan. "I keep a spare key under the wheel well. We can leave."
"We tried that with our car," Dad started to explain.
"It was another puzzle," Karen said, willing Andrew to understand.
He looked her straight in the eye, and after a heartbeat, he nodded. He started towards the back of the small lot where the veritable wall of ivy thinned to reveal the aging slates of a wooden picket fence. "I was stretching my legs after the drive and found a little gate back here. The pond is right down the hill. What are we looking for?"
Passing through the gate and down a nearly invisible footpath, Karen did her best to catch him up. If he didn't believe her, he didn't say.
At the end of the path, it turned steep just before the ground leveled out. Karen stepped down and immediately lost her footing, the thick carpet of grass hiding how muddy it really was. As Andrew caught and steadied her, she saw that her dad had stopped a few feet back.
"Dad?" He didn't have the same blank expression as he had when he'd stopped in front of the painting, but the strange faraway look and the shallowness of his breath scared her. "Dad, are you okay?"
"Yeah, it's just—" Slowly, he wet his lips, then carefully picked his way down to them. "I've been here twice, sort of, and this time, I can feel it. Something is waiting in that water."
They stared in silence at the still, dark surface of the pond.
"I can go," Karen ventured. "I made the swim team last year. I can hold my breath for more than a minute."
"It can't be that deep, can it?" Andrew said. "Maybe five feet at the most?"
Dad bent down to pull off his shoes. "It's deeper than it looks, and it has to be me," he said, with eerie conviction. He stepped forward, feet sinking to the ankle in the dark mud, and waded into the water.
Karen found herself clinging to Andrew as they watched her dad disappear under the glassy water.
The Grave
Michael dove down, heading straight for where the massive gear had been. Like an echo in his skull, he could hear the mechanism cranking, trying to pull him towards it while another set of chains tried to pull him towards the house. His joints ached as his hands clawed at the slimy plantlife rotting at the bottom of the pond. The further he searched, the stronger the phantom strain of being torn apart set his nerves screaming.
But he found what he was looking for quickly, the thick links familiar as he curled them in his grip and pushed back up to the surface. The bundle was heavier than he expected, weighing down the strength of his kicks until he realized he wasn't going to make it. He was too deep. Too weak.
The sensation of fingers slid across his cheeks. A body pressed to his front. As the water swirled around them both, he could feel the flesh sloughing off them until only sharp bone scraped against his face. You came back for her, something whispered in his mind. Your daughter.
What do you mean? he thought back.
The dead rarely get a second chance to do anything other than die again and again, it told him, as he felt the mud envelop them. Oh, to be awake again, as you are. Even so briefly. Locked down here, I have no power but what he harvests from me.
Dimly, Michael felt the pain of something jabbing him in his hip. He felt for it, finding the shape of the key in his pocket. Locked. The chains were locked! With the last of his strength, he followed the links by touch until he found the bulk of a padlock and fitted the key inside.
The click of the lock releasing slammed through him. A shockwave pushed through the water like a bomb had gone off, foul gasses bubbling up from the muck around him. He could feel the dead woman's icy rage—Charlotte Davenport's rage—howling in his skull like a vicious winter storm.
Something clamped down on his arms and Michael lost what breath he had left as it tried to rip him apart.
Before it could, his head breached the surface of the water, and he found himself fighting Andrew and Karen, who were trying to get him to the shore.
"It's only three feet deep right here, man, we're almost out," Andrew said, repeating the depth as they guided him step-by-agonizing-step to solid ground and Michael could think straight again. "You were right. It was a lot deeper than it looked, and you were down there for a really long time. Are you okay?"
"Did it work?" Michael asked, when he could manage a full breath. He pressed a palm to his forehead, still feeling a little out of sync with himself. "I found her body. I unlocked the chains."
"I don't know," Karen said.
"Something feels different," Andrew remarked. "You ready to try getting out of here now? I've got some blankets in the trunk."
Karen looked to Michael for confirmation. He nodded, feeling more himself with each passing second. They made their way slowly back up the path. The gate they'd passed through hung off its hinges, vines threaded through as if it'd been in that state for years.
And the house—
Michael stared at its crumbling exterior. More than half of the windows were boarded up, the rest were dark mouths full of jagged, broken panes. He spotted a few colorful splashes of graffiti.
"I don't know what the fuck just happened, but thank god my car's still here," Andrew murmured, reaching under the rear tire to find his hideaway key. He popped the trunk and produced a pair of blankets, passing one to him and one to Karen.
"Hey!"
The shout startled all three of them, and they turned to find themselves staring at Melanie and Tyler. "This is the escape room place, isn't it?" Melanie said, not volunteering her name as she looked them over. "We're a little early, but it looks closed."
"It looks deserted," Tyler corrected. "What happened to you three?"
"We took a walk and my dad fell into the pond back there," Karen said, improvising.
Michael saw Andrew's eyes flash with recognition. "This is how it happened before, besides you guys," he said, turning to Michael. "I got here first, stretched my legs for a bit, and then they showed up. Tyler told me they parked on the other—"
"We parked on the other side of the house," Tyler said, gesturing back the way they'd come. "Were we supposed to park here?"
Melanie peered through one of the broken windows. "We tried the door, but no one answered. This can't be the right place."
"If you saw the ad in the paper, it must've been old, or fake," Andrew said. "It's definitely not safe to go inside."
Melanie looked bitterly disappointed. "I love these things, but they're always going under. Guess you got your wish to do anything else other than an escape room."
"I said I'd do one with you."
"Maybe try the minigolf," Karen suggested.
Tyler perked up at that. "We had a great time at the minigolf place with your brother's kids last year."
"Yeah, but like that's the kind of fun I want on my birthday." Melanie gave Tyler a pointed look as they moved to leave.
"You know, I think you two need to get on the same page and start listening to what the other is saying," Michael called after them. "It's the key to a lasting relationship."
"Okay, whoever you are, but I didn't ask for your advice," Melanie said, tossing off a dismissive wave as they disappeared around the corner.
Andrew unlocked his car. "I can't wait to get out of here, take a long, hot bath, and fire my therapist," he said, a full-body shiver rippling through his frame. "Whew. Give you a lift back to town?"
Opening the passenger side door, Karen gave the interior a thorough inspection before she slid inside. When Michael didn't follow, she called out a tremulous, "Dad?"
He heard her, but down, back at the pond, he swore he saw two women in white, standing side by side with their fingers entwined. Josie and Charlotte?
A breeze licked the back of Michael's neck and between blinks, the figures were gone.
"If you want, you can stay at my place tonight," Andrew offered, stepping in front of him. "To be honest, I don't want to be alone quite yet, and I can't imagine you two do, either."
Michael looked up, the last wisps of the haze that had been surrounding him snapping like a thread. "Thanks, that'd be great," he said, and felt truly awake for the first time in a long, long time.