Chapter 27 Nina

Chapter 27

?Nina

As Nina enters the room, the lighting state changes to a pinkish hue.

She notes the small metal panel on the wall just inside the door that says Atrium as she passes it on her way to the pulsing green button.

Nina's academic mind slips easily around the word's etymology. If the house is a puzzle box, then every word is important.

Atrium from the Latin: first room of the house, from which other rooms lead off.

Nina stops in the middle of the room to take it in, the cavernous space, the smooth white walls now bathed in pinkish light. Entrance hall indeed.

It's funny, now that she is down here she has never been so certain that her father truly did build this house: the cleanliness of line, the simplicity, the functionality. But why would he build this, what was he doing down here?

She turns to the pulse of the green button. Perhaps that flickering pulsing light has all the answers, she thinks wryly, but there is only one way to find out.

She cannot see a camera in here but she knows there is one. The music in the house beyond stops abruptly as she steps up to the green button.

They want silence for this. This is the moment they've been waiting for. She does not know who they are yet, whether the Korean man is involved or not, or the woman who had been emailing Joe's company for months prior to her arrival, or even if Joe himself is somehow involved. And she is even less certain how much of this seemingly awful situation is down to her father, her brilliant, kind, loving, gentle father. Her father with the secret house. The secret house with the secret rooms upon rooms beneath it.

But help is on its way. Joe is on his way, and she would rather know than not know what all of this means. Because part of her still is certain her father was a good man, and that he wants her to see, to uncover something. That all of this will turn out to make sense, somehow, if she can just get to the bottom of it.

And with that thought Nina presses the green button. Far behind her back, the door into the atrium slides shut. She does not run to it; she was expecting as much. Instead Nina remains where she is and waits for the house to make its next move.

Noiselessly a door begins to open beside Nina. She flinches from the movement momentarily until her brain makes sense of what is happening. Beyond the opening door she catches a glimpse of a long thin hallway, the door at its end sealed.

"Attention," the voice of Bathsheba intones, causing Nina to jump at the sound. "Please make your way to the vestibule door."

Nina looks back at the new doorway and what she can only assume is the vestibule. She steps inside, the door closing behind her. She turns back to view the sealed door. There is no door panel on this side; she suspected as much. The rooms seem to be individually sealed, leading her on like a rat in a maze, cutting off enter and exit points and funneling her on. A door at the end of the corridor begins to open and with it comes the sound of flowing water. Nina follows the sound. On either side of the corridor, mirrored walls.

She is now officially playing whatever game this is.

She reaches the doorway and takes in the new room. It's brightly lit, brilliant white, and much smaller. Perhaps big enough only for a single bed and a chair, though the room has neither. A twinge of claustrophobia yawns inside Nina, though she has never had it until now.

The room doesn't feel crushingly small, and as she looks up she notes that the ceiling here is notably higher than in the previous rooms, perhaps reaching fifteen feet in height.

On the farthest wall there is a tap. It's flowing, its water pouring directly down onto a grate and disappearing from sight. Every few seconds the tap stops and restarts in automated pulses.

Above the tap, built into the wall, is a flatscreen panel. Words appear on the screen as she watches, but she is not close enough to make them out. She would need to go in, and she is fairly sure what will happen if she does.

But she has come this far for an explanation; surely she isn't going to chicken out now, she berates herself. And yet she has never been a huge risk taker. Perhaps it's better not to go in after all, to wait here in this vestibule for Joe to arrive with the police, with other people. Best to wait to be rescued. Then they can tear this place apart, search the rooms, find out who is behind this whole setup.

Yes. She steps back from the doorway. That's the sensible thing to do. As she pulls back, more words automatically appear on the screen across the room. Nina feels the pull of urgency, suddenly terrified that there might be someone else down here trying to contact her, someone else trapped.

The message behind the mirror upstairs warned her not to come down here—but what that meant really relied on who left the message.

Nina turns to look at the large mirror panels in the hallway.

"I'm not going any farther until someone tells me what's going on. If you want me to keep going, you'll have to explain what the hell this is," Nina tells her reflection.

She waits, then she waits some more, but no one answers.

Across the room she can see more writing appear. Perhaps they are trying to communicate with her that way.

She warily leans forward into the doorway and strains again to read the words on the screen, but she can't.

Then she gives up.

"Okay, I can wait. You know someone's coming. You know and I know. And this is only a game if I consent to play it, and I'm not consenting."

Nina walks back into the vestibule corridor and sits down on the floor, her back to the wall, and waits. She can wait as long as it takes for Joe to get here, and unless they do something she is not going any farther.

—

Over the next hour the temperature in the vestibule steadily creeps from an ambient twenty-one degrees Celsius to an intensely uncomfortable forty-one degrees Celsius. Nina sporadically removes layers of clothing until she wears only her shorts and a hastily put-on sports bra. The heat is becoming unbearable. She paces now, no longer able to comfortably sit on the hot floor, her sweat running in rivulets down her spine onto the ground, her movement providing the only flow of air available. And she is parched now, the rhythmic stop/start of the tap in the next room impossible to ignore.

She is being flushed through the system, Nina knows that, but it doesn't stop it happening. She needs water.

And just like that she enters the room.

The door closes behind her as she heads straight over to the flowing water and bends to slurp furiously at the cool intermittent bursts of it: bursts that Nina can't help but notice are irregular in their duration, though clearly preprogrammed to be so.

However, she does not have time to contemplate that fact further as her ears prick up to focus on Bathsheba's voice.

"Welcome, Nina. Proceed to the control panel to begin."

Nina pauses, rising from her thirsty gulps at the tap, cool water still dripping from her chin as Bathsheba slips once more into silence.

Her eyes travel to the screen. Text flutters onto it, scrolling as it appears.

The door is now firmly closed, the vestibule, atrium, and other floors of Anderssen's Opening long gone. She is in whatever this is now. She is in the heart of the game. And her opponent is showing her their next move.

She wanders to the control panel, wipes her mouth, and reads the text. A poem or a riddle, repeated and repeated and repeated as it scrolls. Nina blinks, a certain part of her coming alive. That Thursday-evening-with-her-father part of her, the vast swaths of useless knowledge she gathered and tended in order to keep up with his mind now uncurling inside her. She made it her lifework to live up to her father, to keep pace or at least not slow him down. If ever anyone was ready for this sort of thing, then it would be her, surely?

She blinks and rereads:

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.

Nina realizes with a flush of triumph that it is a section from the third stanza of "The Waste Land," but her thrill of recognition is short-lived as the sentiment of the final sentence hits her.

Fear death by water. The phrase overtakes everything in her mind. Nina's hand rises to her wet mouth as dread blossoms neatly inside her. She just drank the water. Potentially poisoned water?

She bends quickly to the flowing water and sniffs. Then she pulls back, frowns, and sniffs again. Her mind filing through her complete knowledge of poisons.

There is no scent of garlic: phosphorus. Heart failure, coma, low blood pressure, death.

No scent of sulfur: hydrogen sulfide. Delirium, convulsions, blindness, death.

No scent of ammonia: ammonia. Shortness of breath, coughing, blindness, degenerative organ failure, death.

No scent of almonds: cyanide. Headache, dizziness, shortness of breath, slowed heart rate, vomiting, death.

She can't smell any of them, but then would she bet her life on it?

And then of course there is the possibility of thallium or arsenic —both scentless.

Fear erupts inside her, the absolute certainty that she has ingested one of them solidifying in her mind.

Nina looks urgently back to the screen, desperate for an answer or, at the very least, more questions. She tries to recall if either poison has an antidote.

The screen now reads simply:

Death by water is: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

It requires an answer. An answer might supply her with a cure.

The answer is eight letters long. Her death by water is: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _.

Thallium fits. And hydrogen, but not hydrogen sulfide. Would hydrogen still count?

Shit. Nina blows out a hard breath, her hands shaking with the tension. Then a thought occurs.

"Bathsheba, how many guesses do I get?" she asks, her voice assertive with an underlying quiver.

"Checking system," Bathsheba answers efficiently. "Question one will allow for two incorrect answers. Your third answer will be final."

Three guesses. Nina quickly types in thallium —because if it is thallium, she only has a short amount of time left, and if it isn't then she has two more chances.

The room emits a bass-y failure tone, the lights lower in hue.

"Oh fuck. Fucking fuck," Nina erupts, turning to the console again. "Think, think," she orders herself. She cricks her neck and shakes out her hands with a light bounce on her feet.

There is a splash, splash noise from the floor as she moves. She looks down. The small room is filling with water. She steps back from the console, her eyes roving the room for an explanation—which she finds beneath the stop/start tap. The grate that was previously draining away the flowing water is now pumping water back into the room at a frankly alarming rate.

The room is designed to fill with water: death by water.

That is it, not poison. She hasn't been poisoned; the water is going to kill her in a very different way.

Instead of fear, joy bursts through Nina as she rapidly counts out the letters on her trembling fingers. Yes, that's it. That's the answer.

She wades back to the screen, water now at knee height and rising. She taps out her answer, her finger hovering momentarily over the submit button, before squeezing her eyes shut and tapping. On the screen her answer pulses.

Death by water is:

D

R

O

W

N

I

N

G

Correct!

The lights in the room return to normal but to Nina's horror the water does not stop. It continues to inch farther up her thighs with every second.

"Bathsheba, what the hell is going on. I got it right. I got the question right!"

Over the bubble and lap of incoming water Bathsheba's voice remains as always unnervingly calm. "You are correct. Question one complete. Two remaining questions."

"What the fuck!"

Silence from Bathsheba.

The screen instead flashes up with the next question.

This room is filling at 3 cubic units per minute. This started three minutes ago.

How long until the room is completely submerged?

A timer appears at the top of the screen expressing the three minutes already mentioned, seconds adding on as she watches.

"Maths, okay," Nina blurts suddenly, talking herself through it with a strange disassociated calmness, her hands trembling the whole time. "So, three threes are nine. We're nine cubic units in. The room's volume is—" She spins to estimate, then splutters out a "fuck" as she realizes she has absolutely no idea.

The water is now almost at her crotch. She takes a breath and forces herself to refocus.

Then the glimmer of an idea. Nina suddenly remembers a completely random and soul-crushingly embarrassing single-woman life hack that she found on YouTube her first week as a new homeowner back at Cambridge University. She had never lived alone before and had found the act of trying to get the house in order herself while working all the hours under the sun utterly soul destroying. There was never enough time, or the right tools, and the house still looked like an anonymous shell. So at 2 a.m. she'd watched a tutorial on hanging pictures without tools. She'd used a log from the wood burner stack as a hammer, some picture hooks, and her own arm span to measure distance.

Without a second thought Nina stands and sploshes her way to the nearest wall, water now at waist height, and presses her nose to the wall, one arm stretched out to touch the other wall. Then marking the spot where her other shoulder hits the wall, she measures one meter. She repeats the process across the first wall and can complete the action twice more, telling her that the wall is almost exactly three meters across.

She pulls away from this wall and repeats the action on the three: all three meters. She looks up: the ceiling in here is high for a basement. It looks about the same as her father's townhouse ceiling, perhaps four meters.

So three by three by four meters? Thirty-six cubic meters.

Nina quickly looks back to the screen. The timer is hitting four minutes, the water now at Nina's chest.

"Okay, okay," Nina mutters, trying to stay composed. "So, four minutes of flooding in the room at the rate Bathsheba suggested of three cubic units per minute means the room must now be twelve cubic units full. And if there can only be thirty-six cubic units in total in the room and those twelve units are already in it then I only have twenty-four cubic units left to go before I drown." She visibly shakes off the thought and refocuses.

"And if the room fills with three cubic units per minute, that's twenty-four divided by three. I have…eight minutes left," she concludes triumphantly. In front of her the timer counter clicks onward. "Shit, no, no, I have seven minutes now." With the water at her collarbone, lapping just beneath the screen, Nina waits until the timer hits five minutes exactly and then types her answer.

Correct!

The screen flashes up, the water inching up its own glowing edifice.

The screen will shortly be submerged, Nina realizes, and she will have to duck under to read it.

The water does not stop in spite of her second correct answer. And with that her tiptoes lose the floor beneath her as she begins to tread water.

"Come on, Bathsheba, next fucking question. Come on!"