Frozen

Because of the trauma that we’d faced in the first room, I was apprehensive about the second. The room that was next on our clockwise route involved passing through Dylan’s corridor, and walking to the very end of the two-way crossroads that split at its end. We veered right, and right again, through hallways which were all as ornate as the last, though empty of the previous tables and ornaments. These two corridors only possessed two things of real interest to me – a crimson carpet which ran constantly down the centre of the floor, and the paintings.

I knew that old houses were renowned for the beautiful, ancient artwork that they proudly upheld, but the number in the abbey was more than seemingly conceivable.

Every few feet hung a painting. First a landscape, of the rocky hills and snow-topped mountains of another country, perhaps Scotland; then a portrait of a stern-looking man in his forties, in imperial dress; then a cordial party scene, depicting three small children playing ring-a-ring-a-roses, each of their mothers sitting modestly for afternoon tea and constantly watching them, from the background. And it went on. A thousand lives littered the walls. It made me uneasy.

At last we came to the dead end of the second corridor. We’d passed two other rooms, one on each side, but the final door was on the right. This one was less secretive than the one to the mirror room; though plain and unassuming, it didn’t hide itself in a corner. It simply was.

Dylan and I had talked little during the short time it had taken us to walk to where we now stood; he’d been utterly engrossed by the paintings, and I hadn’t had the heart to tear him away from treasures that had been hidden with him for so long, but of which he’d never been allowed to see. I wondered that if he hadn’t been frozen in just that single room, if he would have coped better. Would the history in this place have set his mind at ease? Thirty years was a long, long time though…yet it already felt like I’d been trapped in here for days.

We came to the door and I turned to Dylan to ask if he was ready, if he was OK – everything we’d seen was already confusing enough without this new, undoubtedly unfolding mystery…

He’d already opened the door and gone inside. I followed nervously, and on a second’s thought span to walk backwards through the doorway. It was odd, I knew, but I wanted to watch the door.

As I’d thought, the moment I stepped over the threshold, it shut by itself, as if an invisible person or a gust of wind had closed it. There was no such thing as invisibility as far as I knew, and a quick inspection of the unfamiliar walls around me satisfied me against the possibility of a draft. Troubled, and somewhat spooked, I surveyed our second room.

It was smaller than the first, though I guessed that the darkness and mirrors had made it seem bigger than it really was. The room was much simpler than its predecessor too; it consisted of wooden walls and a wooden floor, of course (the entire abbey was fundamentally wood), an enormous red-and-gold carpet covering almost the whole floor space. The ceiling watched it with a matching pattern of thousands and thousands of small flowers woven into each other, almost like a mosaic. It was stunning.

There was no furniture in the room, but oddly it didn’t seem bare. It just looked vacated, waiting, as if someone could move in at any moment. That aura was added to by the large windows, placed one at each of the walls either side of me, but not in front or behind. They looked out onto the clearing outside, the mere width of the glass making the slopes longer, the grasses broader. For all I knew, it was a mirage. And if it was, Kayne was right; it was exactly what I wanted to see. Familiarity. Memory. Escape.

It taunted me.

The other things of importance were two other doors, both on the far wall in front of me, at the north side – I could tell because I could see the sun in between its peak and the horizon, on my left. There was one door beside either corner, identical to the one we’d just come through.

I looked to Dylan and he wordlessly began moving backwards, towards our entrance, whilst I hurried across the space to the left-side door. I heard his sigh of unsurprised defeat before I reached my goal, and afterwards, his light, jogging footsteps to the third possible point of escape.

There was something oddly formidable about the inconspicuous door, with its plain doorknob and faded panes. I tried to turn its hand, but it didn’t move an inch, like it was jammed instead of locked, where the doorknob still could’ve twisted. I even pushed against the panes, using all of my muscle strength. It was a futile attempt.

Teeth gritted, yet knowing that Kayne would’ve been a fool to make it as easy as I’d hoped, I wandered over to Dylan.

“No luck.” He said, grimacing before I’d gotten to him. So we were stuck in a room with three doors, all locked. What other way could we escape? Why could’ve Kayne have left an easier challenge? Even if it was so easy that it wasn’t a challenge at all? Surely a man of insanity had flaws in his mind…

Grimly, Dylan and I tried to force open the windows, peeled back the huge carpet for any sign of a trapdoor, and even ran out hands along the halls. Somehow, I wasn’t surprised to discover that hidden rooms opened by loose panel switches weren’t Kayne’s style.

We met in the centre of the room with unhappy expressions. What now? Before I could utter my confusion aloud, the silence in the room was subtly disturbed. It would’ve been near-impossible to hear in a normal environment – the buzz of daily life nowadays was so full of voices and electricity – but the only sound in this place was mine and Dylan’s breathing.

A tiny sound of rustling paper drifted to my ears, and its difference to the stillness made me look around myself excitedly for the disturbance. Everything was so…fixed here. Any change had to mean something new, and a lead to the way out.

Only a rebellious ray of sunlight lancing through one of the huge windows revealed it to me. Its pale gold, misting with dust motes, caught a sliver of bright white in its light – a small, paper message spiralling downwards from the near-empty ceiling above, where I hadn’t thought to look. Was there a trapdoor hidden behind the modest chandelier instead? It seemed ridiculous to think of a chandelier as modest, but compared to the treasures I’d seen in the abbey, it was miniscule, its clear glass and vacated, metal candleholders rendered uninteresting.

I watched the swirling descent of the message, and it fell in gentle spirals into my up stretched hand. For a moment, I simply dwelled in the beauty of such a thing. Then I noticed Dylan’s eyes trying to x-ray through the paper, and brought the message into our views.

I am three, it wrote.
One escapes to brotherhood.
Two escapes to emptiness.
Three delivers to nowhere, but accepts everywhere.
Simplicity is but a view of logic.
Logic is but a view of simplicity.

OK, I thought to myself, semi-confidently, this is something I can work with. Maybe now doing all those logic puzzles in Year Eight will pay off now.

I read though the poem carefully once more. It was obvious to me that it was about the doors. I am three… I turned behind to look at our entrance to the room. One. Back on the north wall, the door I’d failed to open. Two. My gaze flickered to the right end of the same wall, to the exit that Dylan had also been unable to use. Three. Unfortunately, that was the only obvious part of the message.

The hard, italic script revealed nothing much more to me. My mind whirred through possible meanings, synonyms of the words racing through, like it was my own, personal thesaurus. Related subjects blurred witlessly together, like a child’s game…

Send. Deliver. Message.
Escape. Exit. Freedom. Fire.
Accept. Greet. Welcome.
Simplicity. Easiness. Logic, logic, logic…

It made my brain hurt.

“I’m not good with logic,” Dylan admitted frankly, interrupting my train of thought.

I glanced to my right to see his expression, and it was so serious, so disappointed, that I had to stifle a laugh.

“It’s OK,” I replied, smiling, not because of his weakness but at the sheer goodness of his nature, “I might be able to figure it out; I loved this kind of thing as a kid.”

“Being trapped?” he asked bemusedly. Stress had clearly warped the common sense of his brain.

“No, logic puzzles.”

Obviously trying to conceal his embarrassment, Dylan stalked off to what I now thought of as ‘my’ door, shouting back over his shoulder on the way.

“I’ll check if you tried hard enough!” he taunted, and I pursed my lips. After a moment’s thought, I copied him, and ran over to ‘his’ door, on the other side.

“Yeah, I bet I didn’t have enough muscle to twist the doorknob.” I replied sarcastically, and I heard his light-hearted laugh bounce around the empty room in answer.

I faced the third door, identical to the second. In the natural motion, I reached for the doorknob, and almost fell forwards in surprise. It had opened! But my shock was then increased when, as I tumbled into the doorway, a force similar to the ‘time bubble’ of earlier, but much smaller, forced me backwards a few steps, the door slamming in my face! One quick motion told me that it wasn’t likely to open again.

“Hey, Dylan! It-“

I span to my left triumphantly, but not for long. Dylan had disappeared. Laughing to myself quietly, I twisted on the spot, expecting him to jump out from somewhere behind me.

He didn’t.

I was just starting to get worried when I heard a yelp and a hurry of running footsteps. I jumped violently at the silence’s disturbance and turned in midair, shocked, to see Dylan falling out of the first door on the other side of the room. Simultaneously, that same door slammed defiantly shut, and Dylan very promptly landed on the floor, on his face.

I burst out laughing at the ludicrousness of it all, but with a half-hearted wink in my direction, he stood, brushed himself off, then opened and sprinted back through the door!

What was he doing?!

I waited impatiently in the subsequent silence, which was longer than the first, staring at the door through which he had vanished. Soon enough I had to break it, the quiet, smothering intensity of the room, and shouted into the soundless space,

“Dylan! Where are you?”

A few moments more of nothing coalesced around me, and then a small part of my mind, instinct or notion, made me turn to my door once again. With the distinct impression that I needed to be extremely cautious, I began to walk slowly across the room. Any second, he would fall out it. Any second, he would run through…

I reached out, twisted and pushed, and opened onto a darkness that was somehow dazzling. As if it were a bright, bright light that I could hardly bear to look at. I didn’t step inside the doorway, not an inch, but I looked through it from every angle I could, until I was pretty sure that that was all it contained: just darkness. Surely it was just another room? A coat-closet, maybe? I definitely didn’t trust myself to know how a house like this would be laid out, and with Kayne’ mind behind it all…

After the events of the mirror room, I’d had a feeling that in here in the abbey, anything was possible. That feeling was growing stronger all the time.

“Dylan?” I questioned the inky darkness. I received no reply. What did he think I was going to do, wait for half an hour and plait my hair? Unless he was in trouble. Did he need my help? Was he hurt?

“Dylan!” I took a step forwards, the darkness almost touching my face. Was he in there somewhere? Just when I had determined that the only thing I could do was go in and find out for myself, I heard a distant call of my name.

“Adena?”

“Dylan?” I cried into the doorway. As it turned out, I apparently didn’t require an answer. At least, not a vocal one, because the next second, the boy himself suddenly appeared, running in mid-stride through the doorway and I became an unimportant, inanimate object in his path.

Too soon to evade, we fell to the floor, entangled, and the impact jarred sharply up my back. To both avoid awkwardness and to vent out my frustration at him, I then roughly shoved Dylan off my legs, and demanded,

“Why do you have to keep running all the time?! Did you not think that I might be standing in the doorway, looking for you?”

He apologised in a small voice. I sighed, and smiled.

“Explanations?” I asked spontaneously, in a much calmer tone. I nodded towards the door to explain what I meant. What had been beyond the threshold of that doorway? With his cheeks slightly flushed – from the running, I presumed – he rose to his feet and offered me a hand up, which I accepted. His skin was warm.

“It’s one of those things you just have to see for yourself,” Dylan replied, grinning wryly.

I raised my eyebrows at him questioningly.

“Trust me.”

As it happened, I’d never been very fond of surprises. I didn’t like walking blind, whether it was moving around the house in the dark, or playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. I wasn’t scared of it. I just hated not being able to see.

So at Dylan’s insisting, all my instincts were screaming at me to say no. But he was fine, so there couldn’t be any danger…

It was only the dark.

With a half-curious, half-desperate glance at my bystander, I faced the doorway, and determined not to hesitate, plunged through it in three, quick steps.

The darkness immediately closed around me, the light of the room behind that would’ve had Dylan’s silhouette splashed across it, absent. My eyes reeled wildly, searching for any light, any glimmer of it. I paused for a few seconds, calming myself, seeing if this was something my eyes just had to get used to, so I could see again. It didn’t happen.

I couldn’t even see my hands in front of my face. When I moved them in wide circles around me, spinning on the spot and to one side, I felt nothing. Soon I felt so disorientated that I had to stop, and then I wondered if my other senses might be of use to me instead. I took a steady breath in through my nose, and received a rewarding aroma in return. I quickly deduced that though it was strange, it was familiar, slightly musty like an old storage room. No clues there.

As a last stab in the dark, I strained my ears in attempt to decipher even a small sound from the choking emptiness around me. I did gradually pick up something, though faint, distant. It was unmistakeably human. It was horrible, and a sliver of ice trickled down my back as my ears and brain broke it down into sense. Odd outbursts, like a small animal in pain and nearly unable to scream, penetrated a cascade of whistling breath. It was a sound of barely contained, crazed fear.

I strained with my every sense to try and find the source, holding onto to the single thing that seemed to be detached from the dark. Was there someone here in the darkness with me, or was another poor soul trapped in the abbey too? I tried to open my blinded eyes wider against the black, reached around myself with hands rendered useless by lack of sight, my chest moving quickly with my breathing.

It was with the desperate, bizarre wonderment that maybe taste could even help me here, as my mind went to my lips, that I realised that they were trembling. Then it all made sense.

That noise, that horrific, fearful sound, it was coming from me.



Everything rushed out of me then, and my terrified scream pierced the black. I felt strangely detached from my body, my limbs moving without me realising I’d thought them to move. I was running, sprinting, hysterical, and I couldn’t see. I needed to see.

For a moment, I thought I heard a voice that was not my own, a stranger’s cry, but then all thought was knocked clean out of me. With a flash of white-gold light that seared my eyes painfully, I fell in a stumbling, desperate run, back into the room. Before I registered it, I was on the floor, the material of old carpet tickling my face. Dry sobs and that horrible, animal keening sound fell from my lips, and my eyes were scrunched up tight against the burning vision outside my eyelids.

I breathed in gasps, feeling my body shaking with each one. Not even the knowledge that I was safely back inside this slightly familiar room comforted me; the darkness, the memory of it, was real enough to keep me caged in fear.

I felt warm hands on my shoulders, and instantly sensed my body reacting, calming. My gasps became fewer, my shaking lessened. My breathing began to even out, with simple, human contact.

“Adena,” Dylan’s voice whispered from somewhere near me, “What happened? What did you see?”

My reply didn’t need any deliberation.

“Nothing.” The half-choked word had an undertone that clearly spoke of its hidden meaning.

Dylan’s confused silence settled around me. His hands squeezed my shoulders, soundlessly urging me to explain. I curled out of my stiff, foetal-like position and moved gradually to sit up. I wiped dried tears from my cheeks and met his gaze with eyes that I knew must’ve been torn with fear.

“I couldn’t see anything. That’s why I was so scared.”

He appeared to consider this briefly, and then a quiver of emotion shot across his features.

“You’re scared of the dark?”

Anger blossomed in my chest and set in my jaw. He hadn’t had the past that I’d had. He might have been trapped, hidden from the world for thirty, timeless years, but at least he’d been safe from the outside world. He hadn’t spent months wondering if a wounded man would limp up the drive, shouting his name. He hadn’t lost a parent and spent the past four years wondering a thousand possibilities for his father’s abandonment, or whether he was even still alive…

Still feeling strangely unaware of my body, I used pushing hands against the floor to power myself roughly onto my feet. Sadness and frustration wrestled like fire and water in my veins. Water doused fire, but only if there was enough of it. And it was so that my long-controlled anger – the short temper that had been born of a hundred children’s thoughtless questions and comments, thousands of news stories that had only given me nightmares and not real news, not the news that I’d needed – slipped out of my control for a handful of hasty seconds.

Almost immediately after I’d raged to my feet, my peripheral vision caught an object in front of the doorway that I’d fallen through. Another three steps told me all I needed to know, and gave birth to many more questions. I soon held a small book in my hands, with a dark green, leather cover. In my anger I didn’t think of it as that, and only as a tool.

“Adena, did I say something wrong?”

I couldn’t meet Dylan’s eyes, and my emotions overflowed my mind like a flooding reservoir bursting through its barriers.

“Yes, you did, Dylan.” I snapped back irrationally, having no idea of what I was saying or doing, only knowing my feelings and not seeing the hurt on his face, “You just don’t understand!” With that and a half-scream, half-shout of desperation, my right arm leant back and shot forwards, powering the book through the air and towards the left-side window.

“Just let me out!” I shrieked at nothing in particular, but to the same effect because I knew that Kayne was listening. It didn’t occur to me that he might have found my little emotional outburst amusing.

Then I came back to my senses, running both hands through my hair, pushing it back from my forehead in a weary, wretched motion. A peculiar silence hung in the air – wasn’t there supposed to have been some kind of sound to fill it?

Startled, realisation hit me and I turned to the window. It was unblemished. High on emotion and adrenaline, I ran over to it, to find the glass clear and whole, with not a crack in sight. My eyes raked the floor below for a second possibility – had my throw fallen short? But the book was nowhere to be seen, and there simply wasn’t anywhere that it could be hidden.

A thin whistle of movement through the air reached my ears, and fortunately my reflexes worked faster than both my mind and Dylan’s at that point. My legs jerked and I fell to my knees with the warning shout,

“DUCK!”

My head snapped up from safety to watch a blur across the space where I had just been standing, and followed it across the room to rebound off the opposite wall. Again I ran over to the unexplained, unsurprised to find the same, green volume sitting on the carpet. What did it mean?

All of the earlier outburst forgotten, I moved quickly over to Dylan in the middle of the room, not taking in the concerned gleam in his eyes, laced with astonishment. I lifted up his hand so the message that he still held could be seen by both of us, and followed its lines with a finger as I spoke,

“One,” I read, casting my eyes to the entrance door, “sends to brotherhood,” I looked back to my door and then into my spectator’s eyes, “It sent you to the second door, its brother.”

Dawning knowledge shone in Dylan’s face. A piece of the puzzle clicked satisfyingly into place in my mind.

“Two,” I followed the words, gesturing to my door with my free hand, “Escapes to emptiness. That darkness was emptiness. When you turn the lights off in your room, it’s cast in too dim a light to see, but you still know where everything is. You can still see it in your mind. But that darkness…it was more, it was empty.”

I continued without looking to Dylan again. I knew he couldn’t understand, not yet at least. I owed him an explanation, but I wasn’t ready or free enough of answers to give it. And…

“Three delivers to nowhere, but accepts everywhere. I don’t know about the first part, but I think that the ‘accepts everywhere’ is that it takes in things from anywhere, apart from through itself. It took in the book somehow and spat it back out. I bet that if I jumped through one of the windows, it’d throw me back in here too.”

I was about to deliberate the final section and my unsolved few words. Dylan cut me short.

“I have an idea,” he said, and I faced him expectantly, “It’s quick and easy; it delivers to nowhere – it won’t let us in. When you were outside the room, wherever that door led you, I tried opening the third door again. It’s still locked.”

A sudden grin sprang to my lips.

“So it delivers to nowhere, because it won’t open? It won’t let us in?”

“Exactly.”

“But how does this tell us how to get out? It says where each of the doors go…” I glanced to the message’s last word, “…and it taunts us at the end with Kayne’s ‘superiority’, but which door is the way out?”

Dylan frowned, his brow wrinkling, green eyes sparkling as he thought. He began to read the poem again; whilst I let my thoughts run wild…

Three won’t let us out; we can’t get inside…
It’s either One or Two…
‘Escapes to emptiness’? Did I miss our escape because I was so scared there, in the dark?
Do we have to go inside? Will I have to be blind again?

A light tremor shuddered through me. I would do almost anything in order not to have to face that again. However, I knew that my fear of that emptiness was not as great as that of being trapped in here, for Kayne’s twisted idea of forever.

I heard Dylan mumbling under his breath and I moved over to stand beside him. The replying hope in his face was contagious.

“Any more ideas?” I smiled lightly, and the corners of his mouth twisted up a little in response.

“One.”

He ran a finger under the lines like I had, and recited, “One sends to brotherhood; Two escapes to emptiness. They deliver to each other. Kayne has power over the time in the abbey, but he can’t warp space as well. If that darkness was a sort of corridor, and when you’re alone and follow it, you would come back here. If both of us followed it instead, one from each door…”

“Wouldn’t we meet in the middle?” I interjected. There was something about his buoyant, sure tone that sparked a reflection in me, like the light of one of the candles in the mirror room being shot between a dozen mirrors, and amplified into brightness.

“The middle is the way out. We’re not trapped; he counted on us staying together. We run through the first two doors separately, and we meet on the outside.”

I was beginning to become familiar with how Dylan’s mind worked. Despite his earlier confession and his acute sensitivity, he had a logical, straightforward manner of thinking. I always thought way into things, so as a team, together we had all our bases covered.

“OK, let’s do it.” I said firmly. Before I change my mind.

Uncertainty crossed Dylan’s face and he opened his mouth to way something, but I cut in.

“I’m fine. Let’s go.”

He was clearly still having doubts – about my sanity probably - and who could blame him? I determinedly strode across the room to face my door, for what I hoped would be the last time. I turned my torso once there to see Dylan in front of the entrance door as I was. A sparkle of mirage-born sunlight shone in his eyes, so brightly that I could see it over the space between us.

“One,” he called, and for a moment I wondered if he was stating the name of his door. I caught up soon enough though, feeling that it was oddly fitting that I alone would say the next number.

“Two,” My voice was steady. I rolled my weight back onto one foot and took in a deep breath.

“Three!” Our shouts mingled, and a shocking sense of déjà struck me. We had said this together only a short time ago, going into the mirror room. I propelled myself forwards, spending several paces in darkness before I forgot the light that I’d been so thankful for, after the first time through the door. Then it really occurred to me that I was hurtling through empty darkness, and for no conceivable reason I decided to close my eyes against it. Perhaps it made sense if I thought of it as if I couldn’t see, then at least it could be by my choice alone.

I tried to focus my fear into my legs, to run faster, in longer strides. Desperation set in to my body like it had before, but I didn’t allow myself to gasp pathetically this time. My heart hammered in my chest disjointedly, like some kind of rabid drummer. Surely only a few seconds more…every corridor had an end.

How much meaning did movement have in this nothingness? When I thought that what must have been over a minute had finally passed, I began to panic. Was this longer than before? Had Dylan been wrong? Was this not the escape at all? Were we just pawns on Kayne’s chessboard, running through a darkness that would never end?

No! I would not be trapped here. What would my father have said if he knew that I was giving up?

It was just the motivation that I needed. My father’s face glowed on the canvas of my closed eyelids, not fearful and horrified, or cold and spotted with blood like the last time I’d seen him, in the mirror. Instead, it was how I really remembered him, in the memories I cherished. His curling dark hair framed his kind, soft-featured face, which smiled our smile, and his brown eyes shone with the love and memory of years of fatherhood.

My arms pumped at my sides and I flew through the dark. Dad wouldn’t want me to give up…I’ll keep going for him…

As it turned out, I had been wrong to doubt Dylan. This place, so dark, so foreboding, was only the way out. Only a corridor. The only thing missing had been the glowing, neon-green exit sign.

That bright, white-gold flash of light burned through my closed eyelids once more, and the brief shock of it slowed my pace, enabled me to open my eyes again. I gradually came to a stop, collapsing onto the floor.

Carpet. Crimson carpet. I was back outside the room. We’d done it!

The other half of the ‘we’ was only a few paces behind me, and he crouched down to my level, breathing heavily. I looked up triumphantly at Dylan, and was somewhat startled to find something other than triumph answering me back.

“You need to look at this.”

His voice was disjointed with the exertion, the words slurring slightly. Nevertheless, feeling physically and emotionally drained, I looked to what he was holding in his hand.

It was the green book.

Frowning, I met his level gaze once more. It told me one thing, and one thing only.

“This is going to be another one of those things you just have to see for yourself, isn’t it?” I asked dejectedly.

Dylan’s eyes so obviously proclaimed his feelings that he didn’t even need to nod in agreement.

Another step into the dark then…