Page 27 of Only Fangs

“Yeah. Just…” I trail off. “Nothing.” I shake my head to chase the memory away. We need to remember our history, but at the same time it isn’t good to spend too much time thinking about what was. The past is a place full of the ghosts of people I used to know, long dead and turned to dust.

Brody rings the bell and a few moments later a large man appears in the entrance and invites us in. “Shall we?” Brody asks as he motions to the open door and allows me to be the first through it. He does have very good manners.

“So what are we doing here?” I ask, desperate to distract myself from my thoughts of 1906.

“It’s an escape room. Basically a big puzzle we have to try to solve.”

“And then what?”

“And then we get to leave.”

I spin round to look at him. “What do you mean ‘and then we get to leave’?”

“Well, we’re locked in the room until we solve the puzzle.” He’s so nonchalant it almost hurts.

“Are you actually insane?”

“It’s fun. I promise.”

“But what if we can’t solve the puzzle?”

“If we can’t figure it out within an hour then they just let us out.” He grins at me. “It isn’t like they lock us up forever.” He says it like the very idea is funny. He’s obviously never been to the dungeons of Hele House; the horror stories of what used to happen there are the stuff of vampire nightmares.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but a room full of 80s paraphernalia was not it. The walls are covered in posters of Madonna and Kate Bush and the ceiling has a hideous swirled Artex pattern to it. The TV is an enormous box that looks like it weighs as much as an elephant, even though the screen itself is tiny. There’s a three piece suite, all upholstered in the same floral pattern that almost hurts my eyes to look at. A vintage Rainbow Brite doll balances on a stack of Just Seventeen magazines.

On a table are two items: a cassette tape and a pencil. “What is this?” Brody asks, almost to himself as he stands and looks at them. He reaches out to pick up the cassette. “This just says Mix Tape on it.” He turns to look at me. “This is for music, right? Can we play it?”

“I haven’t seen a tape player.”

“Hmm.” He puts it down and continues to walk around aimlessly.

“You’re too young to remember these, aren’t you?” I ask softly. It feels utterly insane to be around someone who doesn’t understand the concept of the cassette. I remember how excited we were when we could carry a handful of tapes around instead of lugging a pile of records. Vinyl is heavy.

I pick up the pencil and the cassette. “You know the link between these two things?”

He shakes his head.

I place the pencil in one of the spools and turn it. “Sometimes the tape would get chewed up in the machine and we’d have to wind it back in. Or sometimes I’d use it to rewind the tape to save the batteries in my Walkman.”

For a moment confusion flashes across his features. but then his brain kicks into gear. “There could be a message on the tape.”

He’s right. There’s a four digit code: 3569. “But what’s it for?”

We begin to search the room, looking for anything you could put a code into. Eventually Brody strikes gold and finds a little metal box with a small padlock on it. The padlock unlocks with 3569 and inside is a whole collection of magnets, each one a single word.

There’s an ugly looking avocado fridge in the corner. “There’s questions on it,” Brody shouts and I go to join him. “These must be the answers.” He’s bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet as if he can’t contain his excitement. “This is so cool.”

I’m not quite convinced. The whole escape room thing feels more than a little pointless. But he’s obviously enjoying himself and so I decide to just go with it, to relax and allow myself to have fun, however trivial the activity itself is.

In the end it is fun. And we finally make it out of the room, giggling like school children. Brody picks me up and swings me round. “We did it.” He smiles and I can’t help but smile back.

Chapter 16

Brody

The Castle Brasserie is a restaurant in the old part of the city and apparently one of the most popular places in the area to take someone on a date.

“This place is weird,” Ari whispers in my ear as we walk past the huge windows to get to the door. Light spills onto the pavement, casting a warm glow onto the puddles by our feet. Inside I can see the rows of small tables, each one occupied by a couple, a single stuttering candle between them. “It’s full of people who don’t seem to like each other very much.”