by A. L. Knorr
We stood outside the fire-gym, just the four of us. I fixed the blindfold around my head and felt Guzelköy’s hand loop under my elbow. The door squeaked as he opened it and led me inside. He guided me across the neoprene floor and directed me to the left of center.
He stopped me and guided one of my hands up to feel an edge of wood. “You’re standing in front of an open door. Step inside, walk forward three paces. When I close the door behind you, you may take your blindfold off. Wait thirty seconds before you light any fire.”
I nodded, hearing Davazlar relay similar instructions to my competitor off to my right. Guzelköy released my elbow, and I shuffled forward, finding the door’s sill with the toe of my shoe. Stepping over it, I walked forward and felt a whoosh of air as the door closed.
The sound of a ticking clock came to my ears.
I pulled the blindfold off, not that it made much difference in the pitch darkness. Putting my hands out in front of me, I felt only empty air. I took another step forward. My shoe scuffed on what sounded like a wooden surface with nothing below it, a floor over a layer of air. Something brushed against my hip. I brought my hand down and brushed my knuckle against something hard and cold. Grasping it, I felt a round railing, like a ballet barre. I followed that until my hand knocked against a vertical post. Running my fingers up this post I stumbled onto an object; a smooth glass surface with a rounded belly with narrow pipe-like top. The glass gave a soft clink and shifted under my fingers, so it was moveable.
Thirty seconds had surely passed but I waited a little longer just in case before snapping my fingers to light a flame to see by.
The darkness retreated. What I had touched was a kerosene lamp, right in front of my face and fastened to the wall.
Lifting the glass top off, I held my flame to the wick. It flickered to life. As I put the top back on, a whooshing sound accompanied the lighting of a dozen other lamps throughout the box. They lit one by one rather than all at once, illuminating more and more of the room.
I was in a replica of an old-fashioned clock tower. The sound of a ticking clock made sense but it should have been a lot louder considering I was within a few feet of a complicated tangle of gears and cogs.
It had two stories. The bottom floor was connected to the top by a narrow vertical ladder leading up through a small square hole. Four massive clock faces, in reverse because I was inside the tower, surrounded me, one face in each wall, now backlit by a blue-white light. Each face had matching elegant roman numerals, and was ten or twelve feet across. None of the clocks read the same time. As I stood there gawping at the details of my surroundings, the minute hand of the one to my immediate right moved with a click. The other minute hands stayed put.
So, bring all the clock faces to match the one clock that was working? It was a good bet, but I wanted to explore further for more details before taking any action.
In the center of the first floor sat the complicated mechanism. Cogs, gears, chains, pulleys, and a zillion nuts and bolts all came together to make a tinny and quiet ticking noise. Cables ran from the mechanisms to another set of gears and cogs overhead. Through the hole leading to the second floor I could make out the shining curved surface of a bell.
Passing the mechanism to look behind the ladder, I found a little bedroom. A small single cot made up with an army-issue woolen blanket sat beside a collection of furniture. Beside the bed, a crate sitting on its side held a neatly stacked collection of books and vinyl records. On top of the crate sat an antique gramophone with a bright green bell. On the other side of the bed was a sideboard with a set of cupboards and drawers. I tried them and found them locked.
I left the clock-minder’s bed to do a full circuit of the bottom floor and found a fire hose behind a locked glass door as well as a wooden panel on one wall, near the floor. The panel didn’t budge. Near one of the frozen clock faces, on a thick vertical beam supporting the second level, was a keypad. The keys were distinguished by colors and skimming my fingers over them confirmed that I could depress them. I left them for now and completed my circuit.
Climbing the ladder, I poked my head through the hole to confirm the presence of a large black-lacquered bell with a matching hammer, poised to strike at the top of the hour. Climbing the rest of the way up, I found the platform was connected to a wooden beam about six inches wide. Wide enough to walk along. The beam ran the perimeter of the room, though not equidistantly from the walls. It ran close enough to one clock to reach the minute hand, but too far from the other clock faces to reach without help.
I crawled over the metal railing encircling the bell and inched my way along the beam, arms out for balance. When I reached the clock face whose minute hand I could touch, my eye was drawn to a square patch of color painted on the reverse of the minute arm. It was bright pink and within the pink square was painted a black number one.
I eyeballed the minute hand and reached out, slowly to keep my balance, and applied some pressure. The minute hand did not budge one way or the other. Running my eye down the minute hand to the central point of the clock face, I discovered why. A clamp had been bolted to the arms to keep them from turning. The only way to get the clamp off was to either melt away the bolt and nut or find a wrench of the appropriate size. Either way, I couldn’t reach the bolt from the beam, but I might be able to reach it if I stood on the railing of the walkway that ran around the perimeter of the room, a structure that was lower than the beam I was standing on.
I made my way down to the first floor and lifted myself up to stand on the railing of the walkway, tricky, since it was tubular. Stretching up, I could just reach the bolt and found it fastened much too tightly for even fire-mage fingers to turn. I hopped down to continue the search.
Passing a clock face on my way to inspect the bedroom area more closely, I paused to see if it too had a bolt preventing its movement. It didn’t have a bolt, but it did have what looked like a marble jammed into the space between the base of the minute hand and the hour hand. It also had a colored square and a number painted on the back. This one was white with the number zero, or it might be the letter ‘O’.
I returned to the bedroom and began to snoop through the books and records, flipping through pages and peeking into the cardboard record cases. Painted on the fabric back of an old copy of The Time Machine by HG Wells was an orange square with the number seven. Paging through the contents didn’t reveal any secret notes or hidden pockets.
I went through the vinyl records, checking the pockets for clues and skimming the titles. There was I’ll Never Smile Again by Tommy Dorsey, Chattanooga Choo Choo by Glenn Miller, Rag Mop by The Ames Brothers. I paused when I found one that stood out, The Longest Time by Billy Joel. Not only did it have “time” in the title, it belonged to an era newer than the rest, which were all from the forties and fifties.
I dropped the record out of its case and into my hands. Placing it on the gramophone, I moved the needle to the starting position. Nothing happened, there was no power. I sat back on my haunches with a frown, blowing a strand of hair out of my eyes. There was no obvious way to turn the thing on.
Then I noticed something strange beneath the plate. Small scoop-shaped indents, all with the same concave curve, like little spoons, running around the base of the gramophone’s plate. They triggered a memory.
We had a wood stove in our basement back home in Saltford, and while it was great to have wood-fired heat during the cold, damp Atlantic winters, we found that the side of the room with the stove would bake, while the heat wouldn’t make the journey around the corner into the rec-room, leaving it too chilly to enjoy. Also, the air near the ceiling would make our foreheads gleam with sweat, while our feet would still be cold. My dad intended to have a ceiling fan installed but it fell down the priority list until finally, in aggravation, my mom had ordered a heat-powered fan to circulate the air in the basement. This turn-table had similar scoops to the ones that ran that fan, only these were smaller and there were more of them.
Pushing hea
t into the end of my finger, I held it near the turn-table’s edge and smiled when it slowly began to turn. Lowering the needle onto the record with my other hand, the doo-wop sound of Billy Joel’s hit crackled from the bell in a too-slow, drunken drone.
As I pushed more heat out through my finger, the song sped up. I increased the heat until Billy Joel sounded more like himself. The tune made me smile as I looked around the room, watching for something to be triggered by the music. When a bang went off behind me, I gave a startled scream and then laughed when I realized the sideboard’s drawer had popped open.
When I moved away from the gramophone, Billy Joel’s singing began to deepen and slur. I pulled the drawer open to find not a wrench, but a crank handle. Even better.
I skipped over to the clock face and crawled up on the banister. Slipping the socket over the bolt, I fired up the power in my right arm and applied pressure to the handle. The bolt came loose. Spinning the handle around and around with a finger, the crank and the nut fell away and into my other hand. The metal clamp slipped off and fell to the floor before I could catch it. The ticking sound increased in volume as the minute hand moved with a click.
Craning my neck to check the time on the only clock face that had been functioning when I first arrived, it read nineteen minutes to twelve. The hour hand of this clock was stuck at six, so I had to make several revolutions of the minute hand to get the hour hand past eleven. Bringing the minute hand up to match the other clock, I jumped off the banister.
Two clocks aligned. Two to go.
I returned to the bedroom to hunt for more clues, inspecting every record and book. There were no more titles alluding to time, neither songs nor stories, and no more items with colored and numbered squares. I stripped the bed and looked under the mattress, inspected the sideboard and crate-table and the little wooden chair sitting in the corner, but found nothing more of interest.
My stomach knotted up as the sound of the clocks began to wear on me, a constant reminder that Kristoff was in the other escape room hunting for clues, just like me.
Returning to the second level, I discovered that I could reach the chains that dangled near the bell. Pulling on them revealed a pulley linked to a track that ran out over the nest of gears. Even so, no clear task emerged.
I needed to figure out what the painted squares and numbers were all about. They had to be connected to the keypad of colored buttons, but those buttons had no numbers on them. So I was looking for something which would give me numbers, or a sequence of colors. Maybe I had to punch the corresponding colored keys in the order each color was given. The highest number I’d found was seven. If there were seven digits in total then I could assume I had four more squares to find.
I’d found two of the colored squares on clock faces, so I descended the ladder and went to a clock face I hadn’t inspected well enough yet. Sure enough, on the back of the hour hand was a blue square with the number two. My pulse quickened as I went to the other clock face, scouring it for a colored patch. But there was nothing.
As I stepped back and bit my lip, scanning the room, a glint inside the fire-hose box caught my eye. I knelt in front of the glass for a closer look. The yellow hose had been wound around a familiar metal shape: a pitch spindle. I tugged on the glass door, but it was locked.
Impatient, I decided that it was time to move things along and put my hand against the glass panel. I turned it into goo and watched as it rolled down toward the floor, hissing as it went. Then I reached in and lifted the fire hose. The whole thing came away. It wasn’t attached to anything, it was just a prop, but as the last of the hose emerged there was a sliding sound, then a click. The pitch spindle slid forward and began to glow.
I put my hand on it. It ratcheted itself up into the two-hundreds, then the five-hundreds, then past the thousand-degree Fahrenheit mark. It finally settled and stopped changing at 577.7 Celsius, and 1072 Fahrenheit.
I grinned and let out a little whoop. This was my code, it matched the numbers I’d found. There couldn’t be any more colored squares to find because the temperature only had four digits.
I crossed to the keypad, flipped up the cover and punched in the sequence of colors. One, zero, seven, two. Pink, white, orange, blue.
There was a metallic popping sound that made me jump as the end of a floorboard flipped up and bounced in the air. Heart thumping, I went over to look in. Lying beneath the floor board was a long-handled, elegant-looking hammer. It had a small brass head and an arched handle as long as an umbrella. Brows pinched, I reached in and picked it up. As I inspected the end, I realized it was exceptionally narrow for a hammer. Just the size of a marble, in fact.
Carrying it over to the clock face with the marble jammed between its two hands, I crawled up onto the banister and balanced myself. Shifting the grip to hold it toward the end, I stretched out and gave the marble a tap. It popped out, flew over the mechanism, bounced off the wooden floor and rolled into the seam between the wall and floor.
Dropping the hammer, I spun the minute hand around and around until this clock face matched the other two: eight minutes to twelve. With a mechanical click, it began to keep time. The ticking was quite loud now.
I hopped down, eyeballing the final stopped clock. Going to stand beneath it, I craned my neck to look between the two hands to try to see what was keeping it from moving.
There was nothing visible blocking the clock’s movements, in fact as I was watching it, the minute hand tried to click forward but succeeded only in vibrating in place.
Running my gaze out to the end of the minute hand, I spotted a wire that stretched to the ceiling. The other end of the wire was too buried in shadow for me to see what it was attached to.
This clock face was too far from the banister for me to reach. But, if I could ride the chains along the track, I might be able to get close enough for a better look.
Climbing up the ladder again, I crawled over the banister and hung on with one hand while I stretched out for the hanging chains. Wrapping my fingers around the cold metal, I gave a tug. It held fast to the track fixed to the ceiling. Gingerly, I transferred my weight to the chains, wrapping my legs around and hooking a toe into a link. The moment my weight had transferred, the pulley squeaked and the chains moved along the track. Very slowly.
Inching my way up to the top of the chains, I reached overhead and hooked a couple of fingers on a rafter to push myself a long. The track was not well-oiled, so progress was slow and noisy, but when I hit the end of the track, I was close enough to see that the wire was wrapped over a rafter and twisted back on itself.
Eyeballing the wire, which wasn’t very thick, I drew back on that internal elastic, snapped my fingers and sent a bullet sized fireball flying. With a crackle, it struck the wire. Sparks flew but extinguished before they struck the floor. I repeated snapping until a section of the wire began to glow, then I aimed a bigger fireball at the minute hand.
With a snap and a hiss, the wire broke. The minute hand bounced and vibrated. A few seconds later it gave a tick to show me it had been freed.
Using slow-burn in my shoulders and back to combat the fatigue growing in my body as I hung there, I craned my neck to see the time. I only had to move the minute hand three quarters of a rotation to bring it in sync with the others.
Sliding down the chain to where I could swing, I used my weight to pendulum close enough to the minute hand to reach it with an outstretched foot, giving it a downward shove. The hand spun and stopped at the quarter to noon mark—thirteen minutes short.
Sweat beading on my brow, I shifted on the chains and began to swing again. This time I gave the minute hand a kick to send it up to the eight minutes to twelve mark. It now only five minutes behind the other clocks, but now I was out of range. My legs simply weren’t long enough.
I blew a raspberry, thinking of Kristoff’s long limbs, and eyed the rafters. Some were I-beams while others were basic two-by-eights. An I-beam passed overhead, running parallel to the track.
Using slow-burn to shimmy up the chains, I stretched out and hooked my fingers around the narrow flange of the I-beam. There was only five centimeters of metal to grab, but fire oozed into my knuckles and locked them in place as I swung the other hand up to hook the other side.
Releasing my legs from around the chains, I lifted my knees a little and shuffled along the beam, hand over hand. My knuckles locked and unlocked systematically, bringing me close enough to the minute hand to reach it.
Leaving one hand locked on the flange, I reached out and grabbed the minute hand. Hoping for some sign that I’d reached the end of the game, I nudged the minute hand into sync with the other clock faces, then dropped to the floor.
Other than the ticking sound increasing in volume, nothing happened. Frowning, I double checked that all the clocks were in sync. They were, and I counted myself lucky that there was no second hand that needed fiddling with.
I stood there chewing my lip and looking around the small room for more clues. The time was now three minutes to twelve. I’d used the keypad, the fire-hose panel, rifled through all the furniture, and used the gramophone. What else was there? Looking up, I scanned the rafters and balcony, chains and track. My eye fell on the bell as the minute hands clicked over to two minutes to twelve.
Taking the ladder back up, I inspected the inside and found nothing amiss. I ran my fingers over the hammer and up the arm to the inside hinge, discovering a small metal disk wedged there. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it.
The minute hands clicked forward, one minute to noon.
Every clock tower in the world marked the top of the hour. I assumed this escape room clock would be no different, but what would happen if the hammer couldn’t move?
Running my fingers over it, the little metal disc felt like a penny. My mind raced as the seconds seemed to grow loud, counting down the time to high noon. The penny had to go and there was no time left to do anything other than melt it away. The bell was cast iron, with a melting point only a few hundred degrees higher than copper.
