Chapter 24 Nina

Chapter 24

?Nina

Nina looks up at the air-conditioning ducts. If the doors are all locked, the only way out is up.

Or through the plate glass of the windows.

She looks back to the terrace doors, then seems to make up her mind, marching toward the firepit at the end of the living room. She grabs the heftiest of the andirons and runs full-tilt at the doors, swinging like a golfer.

The metal makes contact with the reinforced glass, letting out a loud, angry reverberation that resonates back through the andiron to Nina, forcing her to drop the quivering weapon. Tempered glass. She remembers from her father that the only way to break tempered glass is to hit it on its edges. She looks at where the glass disappears into the metal and seals of the door structure—she won't be able to reach the edges.

She looks up at the ducts again and wanders the length of the room, following their direction in and out of bedrooms until she feels certain the exit point is through the wall above the smallest guest room.

She climbs on top of the chest of drawers and stands up on it to inspect the grate. The screws have been sealed over with resin. She wouldn't be able to access the grate or duct system even if she wanted to.

Whoever is doing this thought of everything. Well, almost everything. They didn't bank on the Korean man leaving her messages.

Or maybe he's part of it?

To ask who the note leaver was would be to ask who the one locking her in here might be—and ultimately, what either had to do with her father.

She listens to the silence of the house. She is locked in—but to what end?

She scans the walls of the guest room for mirrors and quickly finds one seamlessly embedded in the wall. Now that she thinks about it, most rooms in the house have mirrored walls or mirrors of some sort.

There will be a camera behind each, she doesn't doubt it. The house is a kind of set, filming the inhabitants. She sits down on the chest of drawers and stares at the mirror opposite, her wet hair and slack expression catching her eye and forcing her to look at herself afresh. Why would someone want to watch her: a thirty-something, recently bereaved English professor with no family and no life?

Did her father film people in this house? Is that what this is? Was he a terrible, terrible person and this is how she's going to find out?

Nina slips herself down off the chest of drawers and walks over to the mirror, as if proximity to the lens through which this person might be watching might help her glean more.

The thing is, she thinks, my father is dead and whoever is doing this clearly isn't.

Her father built this house, she has no doubt about that. Its name and Bathsheba's name are proof enough that her father had a hand in whatever this is—but he is dead. He cannot be doing this to her directly. Someone else is, either at his direction or in order to show her firsthand what kind of man her father really was.

A fresh dread spreads through her, like ink in water. What kind of man was he, to have a locked house full of cameras?

She snaps out of her reverie and wanders back into the living room once more, taking in the scene with fresh eyes.

Her father named the house after an opening move. The room downstairs was the bait to action for her and however many other people. She swallows hard at the thought of other people trapped here, filmed—other women. Are there other women still here, down there?

She casts her eyes with dread across to the staircase. Downstairs the locked-door tone sounds again as if deliberately calling to her.

The answers will be just down the stairs, she knows that. Whether she wants them or not.

A secondary thought occurs to Nina, sending a bright jolt of hope shooting through her. She asked Joe to come, and though the terrace outside is empty she feels certain he will get here soon. She said enough in her message to cause concern, especially if Joe can't reach her and can't enter the property. He does not seem like the kind of man who would simply walk away and assume she is fine when everything points in the opposite direction.

He will make his way up here. He will find her. He will call someone and they will get her out.

The tone beeps again downstairs and she knows with certainty that they want her to go down there. That's how they want this to go. And every fiber of her body tells her not to. Better to wait here for Joe. Or James even?

She tries to recall the last message she left James, and whether it might cause him enough concern to make him fly out to Gorda to check on her over the weekend.

She realizes shamefully that she knows nothing about James really: does he have children, a wife, a husband, or a partner? She has no idea. But it seems unlikely he will charter a flight on the basis of a slightly concerning voicemail message. When he does realize that he can't get hold of her he might alert the island authorities to perhaps check on the house—but there is no guarantee that that will happen before Monday. As far as he is concerned, her calls are work calls, and work happens Monday through Friday. Monday will come, but not soon enough. A shadow thought passes over her: perhaps James is in some way responsible for this, if he is aware of what this house is, or has been.

But she pushes the thought away. Joe will come first.

And she will leave him a note.

She turns from the terrace doors and heads to the stationery drawer in the side console behind the sofa, rooting out a pen and paper and a small roll of Scotch tape. She quickly scrawls a message then heads back to the terrace doors to affix it to the glass, its letters facing out onto the terrace.

Nina stops suddenly in her tracks, a thought occurring that sends a shiver down her spine. Joe helped build this house too. What if he is in some way connected, if he knows what is down there?

She stops the thought. She forces herself to recall elements of their meeting earlier that day. Joe is not a bad person, she tells herself. And in spite of this the simultaneous thought surfaces, in Nina's mind, that she spent a lifetime with her father and thought the same of him. Yet here she is trapped in a house of his making.

She physically shakes off the thought and turns on her heels to head back across the room toward the staircase, then down into the basement.

Once she has left the room, the camera behind the living room mirror whirs, zooming in on the note left hanging on the glass, the sun backlighting the reversed words so that anyone looking can clearly read:

Joe, call the police! Not a joke.

Something weird is happening here.

The house is a trap. Be careful. Stuck inside.

I am going down to the basement now.

I think it's all to do with that.

Get help.

Nina

In the basement Nina stands outside the locked room that is no longer locked. She presses her palm to the door panel, which now glows green instead of blue. The door slides open with hydraulic smoothness to reveal an enormous empty white-walled room, reminiscent of an art gallery but completely devoid of art.

Nina's eye catches on movement on the far side of the cavernous space. A light slowly pulses: a circular green button, about chest height, in the wall. She stares at it mesmerized by the simplicity of it. If that is Anderssen's Opening, then it is a good one: a button that demands to be pushed.

But Nina does not push the button. She steps back from the room.

She thinks back to what she can remember from reading about the original chess match between Adolf Anderssen and Paul Morphy in 1858.

If she remembers correctly, Morphy didn't beat Anderssen in the first game, but he did win the subsequent matches.

Nina wonders what might happen if she does not enter the room, if she does not play on and make her move.

In chess you have 120 minutes from the start of play to complete your first forty moves—but it is unclear to Nina how many moves in either of them are at this stage.

She just knows that the big green button is a game changer.

Upstairs, either Joe is coming or he is not, but Nina knows that to find out more she must enter the room and play the game.

Suddenly music kicks in, loudly, Bathsheba pumping a familiar tune at volume into every room of the house. Nina looks up at the ceiling as the opening chords play out. It is a song that was performed by a string quartet at her father's memorial service, a fitting song, a song that matched his sense of humor and in a way Nina's too.

Nina's eyes rove the hallway for the nearest mirror. She finds it staring back at her from the end of the corridor.

After a moment's thought she raises her middle finger to the camera that she knows rests just behind the glass, and she mouths Fuck you as "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" blasts merrily through the empty rooms of the locked-down house.