Nina tries to still the panic avalanching inside her, tries to still the fear that somehow, she has forgotten how to do this. She has forgotten how to read Morse code. Treading water as she breaks the surface, head bobbing closer and closer to the ceiling, she sounds out the letters. Forcing herself to think.
“L, P, H, E,” she splutters and just like that the letters seem to rearrange in her mind. HELP. There it is, jumbled but there.
Nina gasps a breath and plunges back under the surface, kicking down to the screen and typing the letters into the keyboard.
Read with your hands, using your head,
the rhythm of the water is what the thunder said.
HELP.
The screen seems to be frozen but her eyes dart to the timer with one and a half minutes still ticking down. It’s just taking too long. Her chest aches to push back to the surface but she holds fast and waits for the screen to change.
It finally shifts; the now familiar bright-green font appears, declaring:
Correct!
The timer tells her she has just under sixty seconds until the room is full, all air gone.
But that does not fully prepare her for what she experiences on reaching what she presumed would be the surface. Only half an inch of air remains at the top of the room between the water and the hard surface of the ceiling. She cannot bring her nose and mouth out of the water without adjusting to lie back prostrate floating in the water, gasping in breaths.
The world’s least relaxing flotation room, Nina muses, spluttering a gallows-humor laugh then promptly sobering as her nostrils fill with water. The room is not draining yet; its final bursts of water make the level continue to rise, the last remaining inch covering her mouth. She forces herself to remain calm.
She holds her breath beneath the surface, a hand braced to the ceiling, as the deafening sound of the drains opening beneath her roars, her chest desperate to heave in a breath. She cannot rise, because there is nowhere for her to go.
Then with a wave of profound relief she feels the water level pull away from under her, the hand braced above her on the ceiling suddenly free from water. She bobs up into the new gap and drags air into her lungs greedily as the water level rapidly lowers around her. She drops fast, a grateful buoy bobbing on the surface until her toes finally brush back onto the floor and she is able to stand again. Her limbs weak and trembling from the exertion of treading water for over half an hour.
A great sob issues from her and as the water drains from chest level, to waist level, to knee height, she appears to crumple down with it until, room drained, she lies with chest heaving, muscles quaking on the cool wet floor.
Nina isn’t sure how long she lies there, slipping in and out of sleep, unwilling, and possibly unable, to stop it washing over her exhausted body. She lets it until the shush of the hydraulic door opening breaks the silent spell the room has cast over her.
She heaves herself up quickly. Looking back, she sees that the door she entered from is still sealed; the noise instead came from a new door on the opposite wall. Another corridor stretches out beyond it, this one in an ambient pale-green tone. She looks to the screen above the tap as if it might suddenly decide to explain everything to her. But it does not. Instead it simply reads:
Congratulations, Nina!
You have completed Death by Water. Please proceed to the
vestibule.
As if reading her mind Bathsheba promptly reiterates the command, “Please proceed to the vestibule immediately.”
But Nina does not.
She stares at the words on the screen. Death by Water.
Nina knows the phrase well; it’s the name of one of the five parts of T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land.” And the clue included another part of that poem: What the Thunder Said.
She thinks of her father’s first-edition copy of The Waste Land upstairs on the library bookshelf, of its inscription inside. Now she isn’t quite so certain that the words etched into the title page by her long-dead mother were quite as innocent and hopeful as she had supposed. How she missed the significance of that book being upstairs, she does not know. After all, who in God’s name gives, or receives, a copy of The Waste Land as a lover’s token?
Nina knows the content of the poem, start to end, she’s even lectured on it recently, among other things. It is not a joyful poem, not a lover’s poem; it’s a poem about disillusionment, emptiness, and the garble of humanity.
It was up there as plain as day. Nina, for the first time in a long time, certainly since her father’s death, pronounces herself an idiot.
That book was a clue; the whole house above her was a clue. This is a massive escape room, and she is the sole player. And if she doesn’t sharpen up, she will lose the game.
If this room is called Death by Water and she’s heard What the Thunder Said already, then it’s no stretch for her to infer that there might be other rooms down here with similarly themed names. There might well be three more rooms, at least, for the three other parts of “The Waste Land.” She runs them through in her head: Death by Water, What the Thunder Said, then Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon. Clearly the rooms are not in the correct order down here, but taking the one she has just completed as first, this seems the likely order.
What the rooms are for, however—what any of this is for—she as yet has no idea. But her father must have built this place for a reason, and she has to believe it wasn’t to try to kill people. He wouldn’t do that.
