Escape the Night

Love & Loss

Lilly's P.O.V

"Guys," Nate called us all over to the table. "Let's see what we need to do now."

Lia took the book out of Liza's hands and spun on her heel, angrily stomping over to the table, slowly followed by Alex, then Scott and Kristen. By the time I got over, they'd already put them in number order.

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Alex:

So, I notice all these books have three obvious things in common: a number, which we assume must be pointing towards the order; the symbol, which was probably just to show which books we needed; and a sort of arrow.

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"I suppose we've gotta use these arrows somehow," Alex suggested, his forehead scrunched concentration. I didn't think of that at all!

"Oh, wait!" Nate suddenly piped up, scurrying across to the window, carefully picking up the gramophone that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. I certainly didn't recognise it. "Look--this side has six dials, what if we have to put these in the same direction as the books tell us?"

"Oh my gosh, yesss," Kristen agreed. "Wow, that's such a good idea!" I raised my eyebrow at her sudden niceness towards the enemy. Nate only flashed a smiled in her direction as acknowledgement before testing his theory. he left the first dial up, the next pointing to the right, then the left, down, down and finally right again. I held my breath. Everyone fell silent, awaiting something--anything--with a sense of anticipation. Minutes passed. The soft ticking of the clock throbbed through my mind. My heartbeat rung in my ears. I glanced around at the group: nine worried faces with eyes darting around at the room crowded around the table leaning in.

Suddenly a loud ding! sounded, causing my to jump out of my skin. I snapped my head round to look behind me, expecting to see a ghost or shimmering withered human-like creature but nothing. Another ding! rang out, and this time Scott began laughing.

"It's just the clock!" he said, grinning. I looked over at it. 11 p.m. I grinned back. Fuck that clock.

*****

Adi's P.O.V

After we'd all calmed down, David suggested Nate's theory was incorrect. As much as it pained me I had to agree with him. We'd waited for ages and nothing had happened. If we were right, something should've happened already. Having said that, I would've bet anything that he was right. It makes sense really: find odd note with six symbols, leads to six books with arrow-like decorations, sinister gramophone suddenly appears out of thin air with six dials, I mentally listed, thinking back to each of the items. There must be another clue, right? It's not like this spirit would give us insufficient data--that's not fair, and so far when we got stuck, it gave us notes to help.

No, there must be something. I fished out the papyrus paper from my pocket. The symbols, all identical drawn in dark blue, green, black, pink, brown, and red. I looked back up at the books and something clicked: six colours of ink, six colours of fuzzy, faded covers.

I reached forward, rearranging the books in order of colour this time.

"What are you doing?" Nate enquired, curious.

"Try this," I replied holding the books upright for him to see the arrows. He did as I said, turning the dials to point down, up, right, left, right and down. There was a crisp click! as the opposite side of the box popped open.

"How did you guess that?" David asked.

"The note from earlier shows the order of colours," I shrugged, triumphantly. It felt like a fuck you  to David, and his whole group.