Four Numbers

Trick and Stan burst into the final room, already taking in details. Like the rest of the Escape House, it was a scene of carefully ordered chaos. Posters and paintings hung from the walls, hand drawn graphs and sketches were pinned to cork boards and half the floorspace of the fifteen by twenty foot room was covered by tables, cabinets and book shelves. There was a tarp in one corner and a cardboard cutout of a buxom female archaeologist in the other.

"Almost to the end,” the cutout said in a distorted, tinny, prerecorded voice. The owners of the attraction hadn't put much money into delivering the story, nor was said narrative much more substantial than the cardboard she was made of. Yet the creators did hide some clues in her dialog, so both of them stopped to listen. “The sun and moon, the seven stars will bless you with the secrets of the forgotten spheres if you can find your way to them.”

Trick chuckled and started to rifle through cabinet drawers. “Not much to work with there.”

“Well they can’t just hand us all the answers in the last room,” Stan said. “Something in this place has to be a challenge.”

Trick paused his search long enough to glance at his watch and note that only twenty minutes had passed since they’d entered the Escape House. “Yeah, it hasn’t exactly been rocket science so far, has it?”

Stan grabbed the tarp in the corner and yanked it up with a sharp snap. “Well, they did say the place was closing in another week and it’s only been here a month and a half. It must not have been making money. Got a hatch with a combination lock in the floor here.”

“What colors?”

“This one uses numbers but the tarp was black.”

“Yeah, I saw the tarp, too, thanks.” Normally they wouldn’t bother with banter in the middle of running an escape room, they considered their two man runs serious business. However most of the Escape House puzzles were coded in bright, primary colors. It was hard not to feel like they were in Baby’s First Escape Room. Expanding the escape to the size of an eight room house hadn’t made things any harder, just forced them to move around more than normal. “So we need numbers. What we got is a cabinet with a sextant, an orrey and a bunch of star charts here. Bookcase full of horoscope books and calendars next to it, I get the feeling that ‘seven stars’ bit was important.”

“Sun, moon, seven stars,” Stan muttered. “Maybe one, one, seven? The combination is four digits so we need one more number.”

Trick finished scanning the book titles on the shelf. None of the names stood out and it didn’t look like any of them were marked in a way to draw attention to themselves. It was possible they were supposed to skim through all of them but he didn’t think it was likely. He’d come back to it if they couldn’t figure anything else out.

Stan rapped his knuckles on one of the cork boards. “Look at this. Is this supposed to be a sketch of the solar system?”

That was what it looked like, although it was missing a lot of details. Really it was just a set of ten concentric circles that took up most of a sheet of letter sized paper. Trick frowned. “I guess? Wouldn’t you usually put dots on the circles to represent the planets? And there’s nine rings for eight planets here.”

“Pluto is a planet.”

“Okay, go with that. What does that mean? Think the code is one, one, seven, nine?”

Stan went back to try it on the hatch while Trick kept looking over the notes pinned to the board. After a moment’s pause Stan said, “That’s not it. Maybe the sun, moon, stars comment is a red herring?”

“The first time the recording mentions a number is in the first room with a numerical combination lock and it’s not a clue?” Trick shook his head. “The puzzles in here haven’t been very hard and I don’t think they’d spike the difficulty with something that obtuse at the very end.”

“Okay, so maybe the number seven is the clue? Pair that with ten circles and you get seventy so maybe zero, zero, seven, zero?” There was a pause, then, “Nope.”

“Strange that they’d put Pluto in the drawing but not the moon when the recording mentioned the moon specifically.” Trick kept looking at the corkboards but most of it wasn’t useful. He saw drawings of interlocking hexagrams, a hexagram divided into six colored wedges of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple and a pair of black and white hexagrams next to each other. That was something they’d seen a lot of already. “Got more honeycombs here. Most of them have colors but there’s a few black and white and…”

Stan looked up as Trick’s voice trailed off. “What do you see?”

There was a sheet of hexgrid pinned to the board that, at first glance, appeared to be normal paper. It had the usual six colors in a hex each plus a black hex and gray hex. At first Trick had thought the gray hex represented the white one until he noticed a slight difference between one blank hex and all the other blank ones. As he pulled the sheet to look at it closer he realized the hexgrid was on some kind of transparent vinyl layered over a sheet of white paper. One of the clear hexes was filled with white.

He pulled it off the board and showed it to Stan. “Look at this.” He pointed to the white and black hexes on the left. “The sun and moon.”

Stan had leaned in for a closer look, his finger circling the gray and colored hexes on the right. “And seven stars?”

Trick gestured to the broad open stretch between the two groups of hexes. “Maybe it’s not one, one, seven. Maybe it’s two, seven?”

“We still need four numbers, Trick.”

He glanced at the ten concentric circles. “Times ten? Try twenty, seventy and see if that works.”

Numbers clicked, the handle rattled and the hatch failed to open. Stan hesitated, his hand still on the handle, and said, "Show me those hexes again.”

Trick held them up for his inspection. "What're you seeing?”

"The big space in the middle with the colored spots on the edges. It looks an awful lot like two, zero, zero, seven.”

“Worth a shot.”

Stan worked the numbers then grabbed the handle and yanked. The hatch swung up with startling abruptness, as if it had no weight and pivoted on well oiled hinges.

The whole room felt like it took a deep breath, the air suddenly flowing towards the hole under the hatch with a sharp whistling sound. Papers were ripped off the tables and corkboards. Wind whipped past Trick with the force of a running river. He was far enough from the hatch that he didn’t take the full brunt of it and was able to brace himself before he was pulled off his feet. Stan was not so lucky.

He scrambled frantically against the wind for a second then he slipped and was sucked down the hole before he had the time to scream. For a moment Trick didn’t really register what happened. Then he scrambled forward, struggling to keep his feet against the rushing air, trying to see what had happened to Stan.

Instead he caught a glimpse of strange, cloudy skies. Distant, misshapen creatures fluttered through the air on huge, black wings, distant cries like the whinnies of horses echoed in the distance. He couldn’t see Stan at all.

Without anyone there to keep it open the hatch got caught in the wind and slammed itself shut again. The whole process took three or four seconds. Trick was left standing in the middle of the room, dazed.

There was a scuffing noise, then the distorted woman’s voice announced, “The sun and moon are chosen. The stars remain.”