I’m a manager at an Escape Room and it finally happened: a group beat my new puzzle room.
Some background on this before I delve into the story might be needed. My occupational history, while varied, focused primarily on art endeavors and event planning. Probably the reason the struggling local Escape Room business favored my resume over other candidates. No, I won’t give you the name of the business, but rest assured that you’ve heard of it. Or will soon.
See, I got the job about 2 months ago after beating all three of their existing rooms in under 30 minutes a piece. Alone. For those uninitiated few, most Escape Rooms give you a one hour limit and provide you with hints throughout to keep your progress moving, and many invite groups as large as 10 to participate in the experience. Hey, being a trivia whiz actually paid off for once in my life, so sue me.
Along with my normal duties as manager, I was given the task of designing a fourth room for the company to try and boost sales, and I promised to give the owner the ultimate in room experiences.
I suppose I lived up to that promise if nothing else.
With the impending Halloween season in mind, I began to draw up plans for puzzles, riddles, set designs, and all the associated embellishments they would require, along with a new twist: the introduction of employee actors into the room as an integrated part of the group. These individuals could be incorporated in two ways, either as a “paying customer” or as an integral plot element to the room’s story, depending on the makeup of the actual paying group.
We cleared out the basement of the building for this new addition, and I drafted up plans for three distinct variations (to be reviewed and ultimately selected by the owner): The Haunted Tomb, Lair of the Nosferatu, and Dante’s Inferno. She decided to move forward with the Inferno theme, hoping the edgier nature would draw more people during the normally slow fall season. If you aren’t familiar, most escape rooms are quite family friendly (if boring for younger kids) and it was working against this model that we were hoping to draw a new crowd.
It worked.
After a month of off-hours renovations and new training programs implemented for the existing employees–as well as hiring 2 trained actors and a makeup artist–the new room was ready for business. Now, I’m generally not one to toot my own horn, but the design was slicker than the water off a duck’s ass: crimson columns, black furniture with all the necessary modifications for trapdoors and secret compartments, murals on the walls of a nightmarish landscape, even a completely redesigned torture rack that would be manned by on of our new actors. The room looked like it walked right out of Eli Roth’s wet dreams when we were done with it. The puzzles were nearly unbeatable, as well.
It opened at the beginning of August and was immediately booked up solid for the season, as far out as the middle of November. It was covered on the news. We invited all the biggest brains everyone knew to beat the room.
The best part: no one could. Inferno went 123-0, remarkably with no complaints about the difficulty. People saw it as a challenge. A true experience. The ambiance, the actors, the puzzles; everyone who stepped foot in that room raved about it even though it bested every single one.
Until today.
As of 1:37pm Eastern Standard Time on August 26th, 2019, Inferno was the undeniable champion of Escape Rooms. As of 1:38, the first group escaped.
It was an unassuming family of four who finally escaped: a father and mother in their mid-fifties, just past their prime enough to be sporting wrinkles but enough of a curiosity to be excited; an older son who had to be verging on 20, who carried with him an air of intellectual superiority reserved for a seasoned escape room pro; and a teenage daughter in the blackest hoodie I had ever seen, with the eyeliner and attitude to match. I paired them up with Rachel, our best actor, who I knew could really sell her role as a tortured denizen of Hell.
Rachel took her place in the torture rack before I admitted the group to the room. I watched the group’s progress on our monitors from the floor above, knowing that Rachel (once freed) would be providing most of the clues to the participants. Just enough to keep them going, but not enough to solve the major puzzles and riddles.
They were greeted with a dark room and Rachel’s mock screams of anguish. Unphased, the goth daughter managed to whip through the first 3 easy puzzles and get the key to free Rachel, who took up her accustomed place in the corner, rocking back and forth as if traumatized. Though the audio wasn’t great on our systems, I knew she would be muttering the answer to the next part under her breath. They were sitting at an below-average time of 22 minutes when the son managed to open the secret chamber at the back of the room. Even I was impressed.
Here is where things started to get odd: the monitors started cutting in and out, obscuring my view of the room for precious seconds at a time. Rachel was up and wandering around like she was lost, going off script for the first time since she was hired, to the best of my knowledge. Between flickers of static, I saw the parents putting their collective knowledge together to gain access to a scorched chest in the newly opened part of the room. Red light poured into the darkened room as its contents were revealed. Rachel’s face suddenly appeared directly in front of the main camera, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying; the audio must have gone on the fritz, as well. Her eyes had a strange glassy sheen to them.
The family rooted around in the chest and within another 2 minutes they had completed the next part of the challenge. That was when I heard it.
Thuds, like the footfalls of a giant creature. Coming from the basement, and almost loud enough to feel in the center of your chest, like the bass drum at the front row of a rock concert. It was…not normal. Not part of the experience.
The family, for their part, didn’t seem to notice. But Rachel, a veteran of this room, did. Her face was now filled with fear.
They were 35 minutes in and on the brink of beating Inferno. Not only were they close, but the time was almost unbelievable.
The entire building shuddered as the last lock was removed from the door. The lights in the room cut out completely. Here was the final test. Few had made it this far. One ultimate test to open the door to freedom: I called it The Sacrifice.
Now let me explain, as it will come up soon, I’m sure. In the very first cabinet is a bottle of pig’s blood (kept fresh by a local butcher shop). This is hinted at by a poem emblazoned on the exit door, and the handle of the door contains a moisture-sensitive compound that expands when a certain amount of liquid is introduced. This allows the internal mechanism of the handle to align and be turned. Quite ingenious, if I do say so myself.
The lights in the room flickered back on momentarily, and I gasped. The daughter had a pocket knife. In between fits of static I watched her slide it across her opened palm. She grasped the handle and turned it.
White light flooded the room and the cameras cleared at last. There was a huge dark shadow at the back of the room, looming like a thundercloud. The family, along with Rachel, ran out the door.
The time was 1:38pm. Inferno had been beaten in the strangest way I could have imagined.
I took the steps two at a time down to the staging area immediately outside the escape room to congratulate the family on their victory (and to check on the girl’s injured hand, of course!), only…there was no one. No family. No Rachel.
As of the writing of this, the police are still searching the building and reviewing the security footage from inside and outside Inferno.
But they are gone. They escaped. I just don’t know to where.
Part 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/cweex3/im_a_manager_at_an_escape_room_and_rachel_came/