Book Eight, Chapter 15: The Brain Teaser

It was funny in the end how tricky a storyline could be when there was no one trying to kill us. Nearly half of our tropes relied on us getting targeted or attacked or maimed or killed, but the danger of this storyline was simply getting trapped in a house forever.

That was it: leave before morning or you lose.

Such a simple idea, and yet it left us without a whole lot of tools to work with. There was no fight, there wasn’t a lot of plot; it was almost funny how strongly we relied on distinct antagonistic forces to oppose.

And now it was time for them to hear my plan. But because of those tropes that we did have active, it was better if it came from Camden, because with the boost from his Blood, Sweat, and Chalk trope, his Savvy was actually higher than mine. He had gotten shot and, while Bobby had patched him up, he still got the buff.

Not to mention, he had a trope that buffed plans that could be visually demonstrated for the audience.

Still, I was sure I could give him a jump start.

So, as I stood before them all, I said, “Did you notice that when we were running through the house, all separated because of that giant moose, or whatever it was, the rooms got bigger and bigger as we got further apart from each other?”

The others nodded.

“It seems to me that even though this house thinks it’s part of some forest out there in the Carousel Cedar Barrens, it is comprised completely of the material that’s actually in this house. That’s its weakness. That is its limit. Maybe our architect friend here can figure out a plan for that, since it’s his work the house has been copying this whole time.”

Camden picked up on what I was saying right away. He looked around the room and saw piles of boxes with books inside, items that had not been sold at the auction. He grabbed the boxes and moved them over to where we were speaking and started unpacking the books onto the floor, creating a tiny hallway with rooms and spaces for doors that mimicked the ones we were trapped in.

“Right, so if we imagine that the house has to recycle the boards it uses to create all these rooms and hallways, then it would look something like this.”

His Fall Like Dominoes trope really was a simple way to add zest to a plan. Surely the audience could follow along with his demonstration. If anything, his demonstration was overkill, but I would take that buff regardless.

“The house has hundreds of these boards. I should know; I counted every one of them. They were so large that it didn’t take that many of them to create these high-ceilinged rooms. It doesn’t seem to be morphing them, just fitting them together differently than they were originally. If my understanding of the underlying magic is correct, it’s simply trying to keep us here. It’s not being clever or malicious, it’s herding us like a sheepdog.”

“Good metaphor,” I said, “it thinks it’s part of the forest, and we’re rogue ghosts trying to escape.”

“Exactly,” Camden said. “The idea would be we could force it to use all of its resources, thereby possibly opening an exit for one or more of us. If we can get one of us to an exterior window or to the doors, we might be able to break through and get out.”

This house wasn’t the Backrooms from internet lore, and it wasn’t even the full forest that it had been built from. It had a finite amount of wood to build the maze we were trapped in. The story didn’t have obvious or on-the-nose themes; to me, it looked like a simple logic puzzle. With Nicole’s Pen Is Mightier trope, we could keep it simple and just outsmart the trap we were in.

We had other strategies that we didn’t employ because of the specifics of our dilemma. Molly had been prepping her Secret Savant trope to masterfully hack the security system to get the police here, but we wouldn’t be able to find the system with all the wood panels.

Dina had a similar trope to get the police here by committing a public crime, but of course, there was no public. It was a long shot, but it could have paid off. We were thinking a noise disturbance would do the trick. We could get the cops called on us. That plan was still in our back pocket.

Now we were doing something more on the fly, more suited to our circumstances.

“But only some of us would get out,” Bobby said. “Whoever just happened to find a door.”

“Come on now,” I said. “Whoever gets out will do whatever it takes to help the rest.”

Everyone nodded, but we all knew it wasn’t true. If anyone got out, we would all be fine when the story ended, but our characters wouldn’t benefit from that.

“I can get a wrecking ball here in an hour if I get out,” Molly said. “I know a guy on a demolition crew who would do anything for a seventh date with me.”

I stared at her for a moment, nodding my head, and said, “Yeah, whatever it takes.”

“But with those boards up, how are we supposed to know we’re near a door or window?” Nicole asked.

Fortunately, one of the first clues we ever got gave away that answer.

“Marks on the floor,” I said. “Someone had scratched these weird arrows and numbers onto the stone floor in the foyer area. I didn’t know why they had done it or why it was there. I’m betting it was one of the victims of the house. They were trying to mark on the floor where they had been because the rooms kept shifting. There’s one near the front door. I don’t remember what it said.”

“It said W-43,” Camden said, showing off his Photographic Memory trope. “I remember it. The scratches are a little faded, so you can only see them if you look at them from an angle. Maybe shine your light on them.”

“All right, Camden, show us our strategy,” I said.

He looked down at the little hallway made of books that he had created and thought for a moment, and that’s all it took. He was ready. With his buffed Savvy and natural intelligence, I was confident he could come up with something.

“So, the house can tell what you’re looking at, and it doesn’t move while you’re looking, right?” he said. “So, in order to strain its resources, we have to continue looking at the things it’s created. That should slow it down.”

He then grabbed his flashlight and put it in the little hallway he had made out of the books. “So, every person will become part of a chain,” he said. “A line-of-sight chain, so to speak. You watch the person in front of you go to the next junction, and you shine your light in their direction. Then they do the same for the person in front of them.” He grabbed my flashlight and put it at the end of the hallway, and then he took more books and created a room, and we each put our flashlights down, representing ourselves.

“That way, it can’t just keep getting rid of the rooms behind us to create rooms ahead of us,” I said.

“It shouldn’t be able to force us back together if we do that,” he said.

“We can always pick the furthest path,” Nicole said. “It keeps having to spend what little resources it has, and eventually the person at the front of the line has more room to roam.”

“Exactly,” Camden said. “Assuming the house’s rules are consistent, it will run out of wood to keep sending us in circles.”

For this scene, our ghost pals remained as nothing but little faded silhouettes, abstractly represented in the grain of the wood around us, but they seemed impressed with our plan, from what I could tell.

“And if we lose,” Dina said, “at least we’ll have given it a run for its money.”

There was a beat of silence as we all contemplated what we were about to do. We were on the top floor of the house, which, in the original plans, was much more open with fewer walls, but it was so crowded with hallways and rooms now that I couldn’t even tell where we were.

“Let’s move,” I said. “We need to find a set of stairs first.”

That shouldn’t have been too hard; there were stairs all over the place. We had largely avoided them because we didn’t want to get separated, but now that we had a plan, they were exactly what we needed.

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Camden took the lead, then Nicole, followed by Molly, Bobby, then me, and finally Dina.

The goal was to just keep eyes on the person in front of you. It was a pretty simple strategy.

We ended up covering a lot of ground and binding a lot of the rooms and hallways so that they couldn’t move on us. We got so far apart that we ended up having to use our radios again.

We wandered around for about an hour, but I could tell the house was straining, trying to send us in circles, yet failing because we were so persistent. We hit dead ends more than twice; we simply changed the direction of the line and let Dina find a path.

It was Camden who eventually found the stairs, and Nicole was the one who reported it.

“We have a way down,” she said.

“Stairs down to the first floor or straight on through to the basement?” I asked.

“As long as they go down, I’m getting off at the first floor,” she said. “That’s the secret to my success. I’m not afraid to do the demolition myself.”

I found that funny. Nicole’s Secret to My Success trope was like a character motivation version of Convenient Backstory. Instead of giving her bonuses based on things that she had experienced or skills that she had developed, it could change her entire character arc, all with a nice line. But she had used it and Convenient Back Story at once just to make herself better at tearing down a wall. Camden, of course, helped; they had joined up together.

And, of course, it turned out that those stairs did lead directly down to the basement, skipping the first floor. But as Nicole said, she and Camden started prying through the wall of the stairwell until they found themselves pressing through onto the ground level.

“It’s a tight squeeze,” Nicole said, “and a bit of a drop, but I’m on the ground floor. The kitchen, I think.”

We moved forward one at a time, always keeping the person in front of us in our line of sight just as we planned, and eventually it was my turn to squeeze through the hole they had made in the stairwell.

“So, if this is a dollhouse,” Molly said over the radio, “I wonder where the kid is that’s supposed to play with us.”

I was Off-Screen, so I burst out laughing.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dina called out on her walkie-talkie.

“Somebody said it was a magic dollhouse,” Molly said.

“No, we didn’t,” Nicole said. “Haven’t you been talking to your grandmother’s spirit? Didn’t she tell you? It’s a barrier between worlds.”

There was a pause.

“Is that what she was saying? She wasn’t making a lot of sense,” Molly said. “She didn’t have her teeth in. That itself opens a whole can of worms about the afterlife.”

Laughter echoed through our flashlight conga line.

“Do not use the radio for anything but important conversation,” I said.

Of course, Molly had been doing something important. She had a Comedian Stooge trope that could debuff an enemy that she humorously misunderstood, though the truth was, I couldn’t tell if the house was an enemy or if it could be debuffed. But I was glad to see her try.

“I see one of the markings on the ground floor,” Camden said eventually. His voice was breaking up slightly on the radio. Our line-of-sight strategy had done more than help us keep the house pinned down while we explored it; it also prevented the radios from malfunctioning. Maybe it was because there was always a player in earshot of anything being said, even if not everyone was.

“If I recall correctly,” Camden continued, “this one must be ten feet from the front door, but there’s no way to get through. I’m at a dead end.”

“Can you not just go through the wall?” I asked.

Nicole piped up. “Riley, this stuff is solid. All pillars and crossbars. We don’t have enough room to squeeze boards out.”

We continued forward one at a time to regroup wherever Camden and the others were.

“It’s like hell for people that cheat at Jenga,” Molly said once she saw the wall they were describing.