I Dare You To Read This Book.

Playing The Game Of Seven Doors: Part 4

The weekend was a mess of anxiety and apprehension. I called Elia once on Saturday and on Sunday to check in on her and make sure she was okay; by the time I got her on the phone Sunday afternoon, she sounded pissed. "Look, it's sweet that you're all worried, but everyone's been calling me all day, all weekend. I'm fucking fine. I'll see you tomorrow." She hung up abruptly.

Jay was off hiking with her parents all day. I got a few of the others on the phone, but there were no solid theories on what we might have stumbled into. Elia wasn't talking much, and apparently was over all the phone calls she was getting. It was 1996, so there wasn't much information on the internet, or even much of an internet at all; still, I got a call at 6pm Sunday night from Shina, who hadn't been at the sleepover on Friday but had been since filled in on what happened.

"You got a sec?" she said when I took the phone from my mom.

"Yeah, we just finished eating. What's up?"

"Okay, so I've been keeping track of all the symbols that we've seen on the door. This afternoon I slipped into a chatroom on AOL called Esoterica. Usually it's just a lot of Wiccan fluff and throw back new age stuff from the 70's, but sometimes a few hard core occultists float through and spew nonsense for a while before being booted by a mod. I decided to scan in photos of that big symbol that Lauranne first saw in the middle of the door, and the other symbols that Elia remembered, and post them all to the room, just to see if anyone recognized anything or knew what it might be." I heard the shuffling of papers on the other end of the line. "Most of the conjecture didn't seem to go anywhere, but one guy, uh...user EnochLives77, he said some stuff that kind of made sense."

"EnochLives77?"

"Yeah." Shina sounded embarrassed. "This chat room was pretty intense. Like, people believing that they're vampires and stuff. That was definitely not the weirdest username I saw."

I sighed. "Okay, well what did Mister 77 have to say?"

"He said he recognized one of the symbols at the top of the door, the one that looked like spokes on a wheel; he said it was an old Sumerian sign called 'dingir' (she pronounced it like "danger" but with two i's) and that it meant, like...god, or deity. He said that if archeologists usually find it on plaques or carvings or whatever, and it comes before someone's name, then that means that person is some sort of deity or higher being."

"Sumerian?"

"Uh, like...the oldest civilization. Remember in History class, we did that whole...Mesopotamia thing, and we read Gilgamesh for two weeks?" Shina paused, adding, "Jay almost failed our final because she kept slipping her headphones in during the class readings? It was when she finally got Frogstomp, and she could barely function unless she listened to it at least twice a day."

"Oh, yeah. Jesus." I glanced over my shoulder to check and make sure my mom was still in the living room, and slipped into the hallway, dragging the phone chord with me. "How would anyone in a chat room know that?"

"Apparently they geek out hard over this stuff."

"Okay, so one of the marks on the door means...deity. Special super powered person. Did they say anything else?"

"Well, once we got on the Sumerian track, he mentioned that another symbol right below it could be one called..." More shuffling of papers in the background, and then Shina's voice butchering the pronunciation "...usbalkit. He said that some people are still arguing about the meaning of some of these words. This one sometimes means 'rebel' or 'revolt,' but it can also mean to like...turn something upside down, or reverse it. He said he wasn't sure, but that the second meaning would make more sense in this case."