When you arrive at the bottom of the stairwell, you find yourself in a dank section of what appears to be the school basement. However, the basement area you’re in, under the library, appears to be walled off from the rest of the school. No exits show themselves except for the stairs which you just descended. The area is disheveled; a number of old-fashioned desks are stacked up in a corner, and several rusty old boilers line one wall. A couple circular thick wooden tables sit in the middle of the space with desk chairs strewn about them.
However, the part of the wall which you judge must have been walled off from the rest of the school’s basement seems to have been done with consummate skill. Usually repair work looks different, newer than the original, especially for such an old building as the library wing, but this wall looks like it could have been installed on day one, which is ludicrous of course.
Although the wet air tickles your nose, your sense of adventure is in full-swing, and so you cast about the area, looking for clues as to why this area has been hidden behind a secret door. Some clues immediately present themselves: Surrounding and adorning the two tables in the middle of the space are a number of crude glass bottles. They smell of alcohol, but the labels on the bottles completely mystify you. Rather than a decipherable script, they appear to be written in some kind of language that favors scratchy runic writing.
Now that you’re standing next to the table and chairs, you can’t help but notice that the legs on each have been sawed and snapped off. Already made for young people, they’ve now been rendered effective only for people in the realm of 4 feet high!
You scratch your smooth chin as you pace around the tables and try to wrap your head around this puzzle. While you do, out of the corner of your eye another something catches your attention: Set in the basement wall there is a small arched doorway, surrounded by a frame of large stones. The door itself is made out of thick pine and bound with heavy bars; also it’s thoroughly locked or barred in place. The whole thing was crafted with such skill that it’s barely noticeable, which explains why you had overlooked it entirely at first.
As you stand regarding this new marvel, you realize you’ve been hearing a distant noise, and as you tilt your head to hear it, you realize the noise you’re hearing is the school bell! Lunch is over, and you’ve got to get to class! Casting one more piercing look over the scene, you retrace your steps to the stairwell and back out into the school proper. However, for the rest of the day your attention is devoted solely to the bizarre fairytale basement scene.
The next time you have the chance, you return to the basement, only to find to your surprise and dismay that everything you... thought... you saw the other day had vanished. The bottles are gone, as well as the sawed-off student chairs and the two round tables. Even the doorway, the one you could barely find previously, appears to have disappeared as surely as if it were never there! What’s more, the area seems undisturbed, covered with years worth of dust.
Try as you might to solve it, you are never able to discover the origin or disappearance of the remarkable basement scene.
The End.
To read more, click here to go back to the beginning.
If you loved this to death, consider buying a copy of Armageddon: Pick Your Plot (paperback, Kindle) to see what other adventures Percy gets up to! 