Chapter 35 Nina

Chapter 35

?Nina

The second room comes into view as Nina rounds the vestibule corner and when it does, she stops dead in her tracks, what she sees chilling her to the bone.

The room is large and white with a raised platform at its center. On that platform a six-foot-long glass box is laid out. A coffin.

Burial of the Dead.

She was right: the rooms will map the parts of her father and mother's favorite poem.

Why he did this, why anyone would do this she does not know, unless her father is still trying to tell her something. Though the thought of that seems to slip from her now that she attempts to grasp on to it, because why would he choose to tell her anything in this way? He was not like this, he was a good man, wasn't he?

Before her, in the center of the room, lies the immaculate glass coffin, its proportions slightly exaggerated. It's slightly wider and longer, its depth deeper, than the standard pine, mahogany, and oak coffins she was so recently shown back in England after her father's death.

Unlike any actual coffin she has seen this one is beautiful, incredibly beautiful, a sculpture almost; beautiful and terrifying.

It glints in the room's soft lighting, refracting twinkling beams across the ceiling as she approaches it.

There is something inside it.

At the head of it is a plate, and on the plate an apple, a slice of bread, and a hunk of hard cheese. Food. Beside it deep in the glass coffin sits a chilled metal tumbler of milk, beads of condensation clinging to its sides.

Nina looks around the space, one wall of the room a mirror; beyond it she is certain there will be more cameras. Or—she thinks with a shudder—actual people, because someone prepared this food. Someone is actually here watching this happen, right now, and not helping her.

Her stomach growls loudly but she ignores it and walks over to the mirrored wall, her own wild features reflecting back to her. When she reaches it she places both hands against its cool glass and tries to peer in, but of course the two-way glass does not permit that and all she sees are her own eyelashes and breath fogging the glass.

She pulls back. "I know you're in there. You made the food," she tells her reflection. "I don't know how you knew my father but he wouldn't have wanted this, I know that much. If he told you to do this then you have to tell me because I don't believe he was like this, that he would do this to me. Did he do it to other people? Did he?"

Nina looks at the silent glass, a wellspring of sadness bubbling up inside her. He is gone and she is here and perhaps this is what he wanted; perhaps she never meant anything to him?

Silent tears spill down her face. She watches them but no one speaks, no answers come. She sucks up the emotion and clears her throat.

"Okay, you want me to experience these rooms, okay. And what then? What if I get through every one of them? What then? You just let me go? Why should I carry on? Tell me that."

Nina jumps as Bathsheba's voice interjects loudly behind her.

"Please collect your rations from the plinth. You have sixty seconds."

Nina turns to the plinth, the coffin, and the food within. The food is right there, and unless someone comes in to take it away it will still be there after sixty seconds.

"Or what?" Nina retorts. "What, you come and get it? Good, I want to see your face. I want to see who you are."

Nina stops abruptly, a thought occurring with crystal clarity for the first time, an idea of who could be doing this to her. The inscribed book upstairs, the rooms themed after sections of that poem, the fact her father never married again or even considered meeting another woman, and this house out here.

Nina looks back at the glass, a cold terrifying calm settling into her.

"Mum?" she says to the glass. The glass remains silent.

Bathsheba speaks again behind her: "Thirty seconds remaining."

Nina turns to see that the glass coffin is now beginning to sink down into the plinth, the food with it.

Without a second thought she runs to it, leaping up onto the platform and jumping down into the retracting coffin. She quickly grabs as much of the food as she can and turns to jump out but to her absolute horror she can no longer reach up to the top lip of the coffin, it has sunk too low; she is trapped. She drops the food and tries to jump for the lip of the coffin above her but cannot reach. The coffin stops moving. She tries to wedge herself against the walls and shimmy up but the glass is too slippery against her wet clothes.

"Four minutes until game commencement. Please consume the rations provided," Bathsheba echoes above her.

—

After Nina has railed at the coffin walls, yelled and flailed in protest, after her energy finally flags, she sits down exhausted on the coffin floor and begins to eat her food.

—

When the four minutes are up Bathsheba speaks again. "Please lie flat and prepare for the game commencement."

Nina swallows the chunk of cheese in her mouth hard and downs the last of her milk as she looks up at the coffin sides above her. She has no intention of lying down.

But as she watches, high above her a glass lid slowly begins to emerge from the lip of the platform and seal the coffin. Nina leaps to her feet ready for whatever might suddenly happen, visions of the coffin filling overtaking her thoughts.

But that does not happen. Instead the coffin floor begins to rise to meet the lid as it fully seals above her.

Through the sealed glass she hears a muffled Bathsheba: "Please lie flat and prepare for the game commencement."

The coffin ceiling is fast approaching. Nina is forced to kneel, then sit and quickly swivel down to lie flat, narrowly avoiding making contact with the thick glass above her.

Now lying flat in the coffin, Nina sees that she has risen back up onto the platform. A screen is visible on the floor to her side.

Welcome, Nina, to The Burial of the Dead.

Your task is simple: lower your heartrate to 70 beats per minute, or lower, for more than 10 seconds.

Nina blinks at the screen and rereads the task.

They can't be serious. This is easy, surely. She knows from her last health checkup that she has a resting heartbeat of sixty-two beats per minute. Seventy bpm would be a breeze. The situation is stressful, obviously, but she feels pretty calm.

Suddenly a pulsing number fills the screen and Nina's eyes flare. Her heart rate is 105 bpm. The shock of seeing it immediately sends it up further, to 109. Nina lets out a long, slow exhale, the glass above her fogging. It occurs to her that she is locked in a sealed glass box and her oxygen will eventually run out. The screen pulses up to 111 bpm.

Nina tries to forget what she has just realized. She lets her eyes blink shut and tries to loosen her muscles and sink into the coffin floor. She lies in the silent box and breathes.

After ten breaths she looks back at the screen. Seventy-one bpm. A warm smile blossoms across her face. She is doing it, she can do it, and with that realization the number drops again to sixty-nine.

Beneath it a countdown suddenly begins: 10, 9, 8, 7—

Nina feels a tickling sensation down by her ankles and lifts her head incrementally to look. Sand is pouring into the glass coffin at various points: by her ankles, thighs, and elbows, and behind her head.

When she looks back at the screen the countdown has disappeared, her pulse now at eighty-two bpm.

Nina grimaces hard. She will have to ignore the sand, the limited oxygen supply, the enclosed space, and the fact that she will soon be buried alive if she cannot calm the fuck down. All she has to do is calm the fuck down.

Nina tries the breathing again but it only gets her so far, hovering around seventy-four bpm. That's not good enough. She needs to calm mentally as well as physically.

The sand now hugging to the underside of her limbs and body is warm. She wonders if it came from outside, if it's from the beach, so close and yet so incredibly far from here.

She thinks of her feet sinking into that soft fine sand, the feel of it between her toes, the warm seep of sun on her skin. Through the coffin glass she sees her pulse drop to seventy-one. This is the answer.

She pushes away thoughts of the rising sand and fogging glass above her face and closes her eyes. The only way to win this is to forget she's even playing.

She imagines herself back there on the beach, her feet in the sand, the warm sun on her limbs, and a light sea breeze cooling her face. And suddenly she isn't on Gorda anymore, she's somewhere else in her mind—she is in Devon, England.

She's on the wide-open expanse of a quiet beach on the Devonshire coast. She's maybe eleven or twelve, she's sitting on the wet sand of the waterline in her bathing suit, a book in her hands as she reads and the waves crash over her feet, popping and hissing all the way to her thighs.

She looks up from the book back to the beach behind her. Under a beach umbrella two people sit. A man and a woman. The man is reading a large newspaper, the woman attempting a crossword, glasses on, pen in mouth. Her father and Maeve. A rare beach trip in her youth. She forgot they did this; she has forgotten this day.

He looks up then, her father looks up at her from his deck chair, from the past, and he smiles at her. He is a good man. She knows it in her heart, she knows it like she knows herself.

Nina's eyes jolt open as a loud bleeping sound abruptly snaps her back to reality. Time is up. Panic overtakes her as she becomes aware that the sand now covers her face and mouth, only her nose remaining free. And then even that is covered. Nina holds her breath. She tries to lift her face but the weight of the sand and the continuing flow of it makes it impossible. The panic crescendos inside her as the bleeping continues. She manages to stay calm long enough to free a hand and wriggle it through the weight of sand up to the coffin lid above. But to her horror she finds that there is no air left; the glass box is now entirely filled. The bleeping continues muffled now as she tries to remain calm, as she tries to think, but the truth is there is no way out. The warm sand embraces her and a strange instinct overcomes her, one she could never have anticipated. She lets herself drift back to that beach in Devon, the warmth of the full coffin becoming once more the warmth of the sun, and just like that, with a sudden shudder, the coffin floor shifts and the sand pours out through newly opened holes, cool air pouring in.

Nina gasps in a chest-aching breath, her eyes bursting open. She turns her head to take in the bleeping screen beside her. It's frozen on a heart rate of sixty-eight beats per minute, the time counter beneath it reading zero.

A surge of triumph forces its way through Nina unbidden as she coughs and splutters sand from her mouth and nose. She's done it. The sand continues to pour out from beneath her but she has done it.

The screen resets.

Congratulations, Nina!

You have completed The Burial of the Dead. Please proceed to the vestibule.

Above her the glass coffin lid begins to slide back and Nina rises from its confines gratefully. Up on the platform she stretches her cramped muscles, puts her head in her hands, and gives herself a moment to recalibrate.

She thinks, once more, of the beach in Devon. A memory buried so deep in her she cannot recall ever having stumbled on it before.

Her father was a good man, she knows that. And her mother is not alive. He would have found her, been with her if she had been. He missed her and they had been in love.

And for the first time it occurs to Nina that all of this, from the letter, from the very beginning, might have been a trick. That her father did not have a house in the Caribbean, that James does not work for a solicitor's firm, that there is no probate and the forms and documents she had been shown were just props. That the knickknacks upstairs, the few personal objects she found of her father's, were props stolen to get her down here. Props to make her play a game she would not otherwise have started. A game that has nothing to do with her or her family and everything to do with the fact that now she has no one back at home to miss her.

"Please proceed to the vestibule door," Bathsheba intones.

Nina looks at the new open doorway and the corridor beyond. At least now she has an idea of what might actually be going on here, she figures. And they're wrong, of course, because Joe knows she's here, and Oksana.

And perhaps Oksana is a lost cause, but Joe will come, Joe will come soon, if he isn't already here.