Persey retracted her previous assessment of Mr. Sheryl: although she’d nailed the professorial vibe, there was nothing comforting about his personality—he was as pompous as his wife was tense.
“Two minutes!” Sheryl squealed. “She hasn’t moved a single tile yet. We’ll never win that prize money now.”
As if you actually need it.
“It’s not about the prize, Sher…” her husband said, trying to placate her. Persey wondered if that ever worked.
“Don’t you ‘Sher’ me. I’m going to ask for our money back the second we get out of here. I don’t care if this is supposed to be the only unbeatable escape room in the world. We spent months on the waiting list for this spot and she’s been hogging all the challenges!”
Whose fault is that? It wasn’t so much that she was hogging the challenges as she was the only one who’d offered a solution to them. Or at least, offered the correct one. After the first two puzzles, the other three participants had informally abdicated leadership of the team to Persey, and it was pretty much understood that it was now her responsibility to solve this final puzzle.
The unbeatable one. According to the propaganda in the lobby, several people had made it to this final challenge of the Hidden Library before time ran out, but no one had managed to solve it and claim the thirty-thousand-dollar prize. This escape room had been installed all over the world, and yet in its four months of operation, not one single person had unscrambled this tangled mess of images on a touch screen embedded in a narrow, old-fashioned secretary desk in the corner of the faux library.
What makes you think that you can, huh? You can’t even pass algebra.
The voice in her head was right. This was her first ever escape room, and it was crazy to think that she could succeed when literally thousands of Escape-Capades aficionados from around the world had already failed. Sure, she’d learned a fair amount about how these things worked—the challenges that built one upon the next, the red herrings and misleading clues, the attempts by the room designers to create a claustrophobic atmosphere—but that was a far cry from actually participating in one of these games. And now here she was, on the brink of solving the impossible. Was she delusional to think she could win this?
Persey closed her eyes and took a deep breath. If she refused to be bullied into action by Sheryl, she needed to be equally as stubborn in resisting her overwhelming (ever-present) sense of self-doubt. Neither would help her, and giving in to either would probably result in a wrong move. She was so close.
According to the counter beside the scrambled image, she could move or rotate only eight tiles in her quest to re-create an image, which would have proved difficult (impossible) even if she had the original in front of her to compare it to. Which she didn’t. She had no idea what the muted browns and reds, diagonal lines and sharp edges, were supposed to represent, but the clues they’d picked up over the course of the last hour should have helped her figure it out by now:
1. The large mural painting of skeletons and peasants dancing in a circle behind which Persey had found a key to the rare bookcase.
2. The eighteenth-century rhyming dictionary on said bookcase in which the word “saucer” had directed them to the half-consumed cup of tea on the librarian’s desk.
3. The tea-leaf motif around the border of the librarian’s framed certificate of completion in a language course on Old English, but written backward in a florid scroll so it looked merely decorative when viewed head-on, but became readable while viewing it in a mirror.
4. The pin on the lapel of the librarian’s tweed coat, slung lazily across the arm of his desk chair, which depicted a medieval cathedral.
They had all led Persey and her co-participants to this secret screen, hidden away in the back of a research cubicle behind a stack of books about the Black Death in Europe. They had to unscramble the image in eight moves or less….
She had missed something. Some connection between the previous clues and the jumbled mess before her.
Danse macabre. A cathedral. Old English.
“Sixty seconds!” Sheryl cried.
And what did a teacup and saucer have to do with anything?
“We’re gonna have to agree to disagree here, Prof,” Pedicure said, still arguing the persimmon-versus-pomegranate point. “But, hey, maybe you can answer