Chapter 42 Nina

Chapter 42

?Nina

After a few minutes Nina stands, but she is still dizzy, her eyes still itching, her throat still burning. She has no idea how long antidotes take to work or if it even has worked. Or perhaps certain damage has already been done. She has no way of knowing. All she knows is that she needs to keep moving. She needs to get to a hospital. She needs help. And she knows the only way out is through.

On the screen above her a new message has appeared.

Congratulations, Nina!

You have completed The Waste Land. Proceed to the next room to begin the Four Quartets.

Nina cannot pull her blurry eyes from the screen, fear trickling through every vein of her body.

She had thought it was nearly over. She'd expected as many rooms as there are parts to the poem. But she has completed those parts and there is still more.

There can't be many more rooms down here, she tells herself, there simply can't unless the building goes farther down again.

The next room or the one after must be it. She'll be finished soon; it will be over soon.

She stretches her arms over her head and cricks her neck. Her body aches and throbs in so many ways, she can't focus on one particular sensation over another. The dizziness comes in waves that threaten to engulf her then subside. It will all be over soon, she tells herself, it has to be.

—

Nina watches as the door to the room opens, the vestibule beyond coming into view, curving around a corner, lit in that familiar pinkish tone.

She takes a burning breath and heads out.

As she turns the corner her blood runs cold: a white flight of stairs leads down.

The house does go on, how far she does not know. But there is a limit to the physics of any house, she tells herself, and reality is not elastic. Nina has been down here awhile now, though, and she doesn't quite believe the truth of that thought anymore.

She takes the stairs down. They lead directly into another room, the stairwell door sealing behind her.

—

This room is the largest yet. Nina takes it in, eyes stinging. Its massive floor is covered entirely with a thick layer of gray ash.

The door out of this room is different from all the others: it's a real door, a wooden one.

Half delirious, Nina wonders if it leads straight back outside. If beyond it lie the gardens and the beach and the sky. But of course she must be far underground now; there is no way that door leads out to the grass of the lawns. And yet she can't help thinking that a wooden door might signal an end to all this.

In some part of her exhausted mind, she wonders if she chose the correct syringe, if she should still feel this bad. But she pushes the thought away.

Nina steps forward onto the ash but quickly pulls her bare foot back to the safety of the doorway. The ash is hot. Really hot.

Nina sees the screen across the room fill with text. If she wants to find out how the hell to get out of here, she has to get to that screen. She takes a breath, braces herself, and runs as fast as she can across the hot ash.

She skids to a halt on the raised area beneath the screen. She's safe here. She shifts her weight quickly from one scalded foot to the other to ease the discomfort of the brief run.

Nina could have predicted the name of this room before she even looked up at the screen—and when she does, she sees she was right.

Welcome, Nina, to Burnt Norton.

The key to the door is all that's left here—if you dance you can persevere.

"Find a key in here?" Nina exclaims, looking at the vast ash-filled room. "You have got to be fucking kidding me!"

She takes in the sheer square footage of the room, every bit of it covered in thickly packed ash except the raised area where she stands and the entrance and exit doorways. It will take her hours to search through all the dust—which wouldn't be a problem if the floor weren't burning hot. She has barely been able to stand on the floor for more than a few seconds.

The screen beside her updates, a temperature reading appearing where the text was. The floor is currently forty-five degrees Celsius.

As she watches, the screen clicks up to forty-six degrees. It's going to get hotter. It will just keep getting hotter and her prospects of getting out of here will fall exactly in line with that.

She needs to get in that ash now.

Another wave of dizziness floods her senses. Nina forces herself to focus, to remember the poem, the room's namesake. There will be a clue in all this, she's sure.

The poem is about the past and the future; about time. About the present and seizing it. Well, that sentiment is certainly relevant now.

She recalls that Eliot wrote the poem after visiting a manor house called Burnt Norton. It isn't actually about a burnt house, though the room clearly uses that symbolism. And in a way it's beyond apt, because God knows Nina wishes this whole house would burn to the ground or slip into the sea as James suggested the day she arrived.

James has not popped into her head for a while and as he does, she knows with certainty that he is a part of all this, to what degree unclear. But Nina knows he was aware that something wasn't right here when he left her that first day. She pushes the thought away. There is no time.

She needs to work out the room's riddle.

Nina racks her brains for lines from the poem and something pops out of the ether, a line instantly recalled, one of its most famous: there the dance is, at the still point of the turning world.

She looks out into the center of the room: the still point of the turning world.

She will have to go out there, right into the middle. And she will have to stay there awhile and dig in that hot ash.

The temperature readout beside her clicks up to forty-seven degrees Celsius. And without a second thought Nina runs straight into the middle of the room, dives down onto all fours, and begins searching in the burning ash for a key. Intense dizziness floods every part of her as she tries to push away the pain and find the one object that will save her.