Escape Room Read online

  Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

  Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

  Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

  Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

  How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

  Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

  To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

  Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

  Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

  And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

  To seek a shelter in some happier star?

  Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

  The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

  The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

  The face of the provost turned severe, and she looked down at Chance when she spoke. Up close, Chance could see she wore a heavy sheen of makeup.

  “Mr. Matthews, this is a science and technology showcase. The best minds came here to compete, to test themselves, to demonstrate mechanical and technical genius. Although your little poem may rhyme, it is quite out of place here. In fact, I think it’s a bit of a “fuck you” to your more serious-minded classmates — oh, yes, I caught your pantomime earlier.”

  Chance felt blood rush to his face. And as bad as this dressing down was, he knew the one coming from his father would be far worse. He could practically taste his father’s disappointment behind him.

  “Wise up, Mr. Matthews,” the provost continued. “Poetry, no matter how … creative, is not exactly a recipe for a successful future.”

  “It’s from Edgar Allan Poe,” Chance protested. “It’s a commentary on how science has removed the old, poetic ideas of the way the world worked. The harsh rules of science have sucked dry the art of the poet. He’s warning us that artists are losing their power.”

  For a moment, the Provost merely grinned, her perfect white teeth glistening. Chance suddenly felt like he was being…examined.

  “A piece of advice,” she said, “from someone who encounters thousands of students every year, from someone who knows how to identify successful people: Forget the silly limericks and find something in the sciences that interests you. And then maybe you’ll make something of yourself.”

  With that, she turned on her three-inch heels and sauntered back toward the stage. Chance watched her go, frozen in place. It took him a full minute to gather the courage to turn to face his father.

  “Dad, I can explain—” He cut himself off. His father was gone. Somehow, that made it even worse.

  “That was rough,” Oliver said. “I mean, the poem isn’t that bad.”

  “It’s about the conflict between science and art,” Chance said. “The tension between new technologies of the industrial age and the art of the romantic era. It’s a warning about blind progress.”

  “This is a science fair, dumbass,” Oliver chided. “Not exactly the right place to insult the sciences. I don’t know, Chance. Sometimes I wonder if you’re from another planet or something. Your brain is just wired differently.”

  Chance had heard this before. His brain was wired differently. It didn’t always turn out well for him.

  “I guess I’m walking home,” he said.

  With a deep sigh, Chance turned back to his own table. There, propped up against his poster board, was a single gold envelope.

  He glanced about the gym, scanning for anyone who might’ve dropped it there by accident. But when he picked up the envelope, he saw that it had his name neatly written across the front.

  “What’s that?” Oliver asked. “The prize for last place?”

  “I don’t know. It was just laying here.”

  Chance opened the flap of the envelope and removed a single sheet of gold paper. Bold lettering stretched across the top.

  CAN YOU ESCAPE?

  Chance read the rest aloud.

  You are hereby invited to a special opportunity to challenge the Escape Room. Please join us on Saturday, April 25 at 314 East Newgate Way, Baltimore, Maryland. This invitation is absolutely non-transferable.

  Chance flipped the sheet over. The back was blank. “That’s it, that’s all it says.”

  Oliver said, “Sounds like a free coupon to one of those escape rooms. You know, those places where they lock you in a room and you have to solve puzzles to try to escape within 60 minutes.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of them. I’ve never been.”

  “It must be some kind of random door prize,” Oliver said.

  “Not random. It’s got my name on it.”

  “You gonna go?”

  Chance shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably not.”

  He shoved the invitation and the envelope into his pants pocket, turned back to his display and started breaking it down. By the time he walked outside, and started the trek home, it had started to rain.

  Can you escape?

  Using the poster board as a makeshift umbrella, Chance headed into the downpour.

  TWO

  When Chance finally got home, tired and hungry and wet, his father was not there. Chance pulled on dry clothes and puttered around the empty house, flipped through Netflix without finding anything interesting, absently scrolled through his Instagram feed. He made himself some pasta and ate standing up in the kitchen.

  It was well after Chance had gone to bed when he heard his father walk through the front door. And he was gone again by the time Chance woke up the next morning. It was a Sunday, but Clay Matthews was known to work at the shop even when it was supposed to be closed. Chance resisted the urge to go down to the shop. If his father needed space, it was best to give it to him.

  His father’s room was sparsely furnished. A bed without a headboard. A small bedside table. A four-drawer dresser, topped with a pile of unopened envelopes. The walls were bare.

  He sat on the bed and pulled open the small drawer in the bedside table. He removed the small square picture frame and held it with both hands.

  The years had tinged the image with a faint sepia tone. His mother was standing in the shed, surrounded by four heavily-painted canvases mounted on wooden easels. Colored papers and paints and brushes covered a small work table, slightly out of focus in the background of the photograph. The paintings were brightly-colored in thick, wavy brushstrokes. Her body faced one of the canvases, a palette in one hand and a brush in the other. Her head was turned to the camera, as if surprised by the presence of the photographer. Her smile glowed, and a halo of light from some unknown source illuminated her face. Her auburn-blonde hair was pulled back in an unkempt ponytail. She looked like an angel. Chance stared at the Polaroid for a long time.

  A sudden longing surged through him. He felt a distance between him and his mother, a sensation that he wanted to reach out for her, to be held by her. She was just out of reach, hovering like an apparition just behind the tips of his fingers.

  And yet, there was also an indissoluble bond between them. He barely remembered her. He couldn’t remember what her laugh sounded like, or the smell of her hair. But she was undeniably a part of him. Chance couldn’t quite explain it, but looking at the photograph now, he knew there was something that bonded them together. It felt almost spiritual. If Chance believed in such things.

  She left the day after the picture had been taken.

  Chance slide open the square frame and pulled the original photograph free. He took one last long look and then slid it into his jeans pocket. It was his now.

  It wasn’t until after the sun went down that his father trudged through the front door.

  Chance was waiting for him.

  “Dad, I want to explain.”

  His father looked tired. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his shoulders hung limply at his sides. He could barely meet Chance’s gaze. “There’s not much to talk about, Chance,” he said. “Yesterday, you embarrassed yourself and you embarrassed me.”

  “Dad, it was just a meaningless science fair. Y
ou said it yourself. I’m just a junior. It won’t even matter —”

  “No!” his dad said sharply. “Nothing is meaningless. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. It’s a pattern now. I had really hoped — prayed even — that I was wrong. But the stunt you pulled yesterday was the final straw. I know what has to be done now.”

  Chance didn’t know quite how to respond. Pattern? What was his father talking about? “Dad, I just —”

  His father stilled him with earnest eyes. “When you were 12, you spent the entire summer in your room, in bed. I should’ve known then.”

  Chance remembered that summer. It had been horrible. His body just felt like it had shut down. Even walking around the block was a struggle. The turmoil inside his head was even disconcerting. His brain was sluggish. He struggled to form coherent thoughts. The few friends he had drifted away.

  It was late that summer that he found a well-thumbed book of poetry in the garage. He didn’t know how it got there; it certainly wasn’t his father. Chance had never seen him read so much as a newspaper.

  It was a slim volume, containing a dozen poems by William Blake. Chance had never heard of him, but something compelled him to open to the first poem. It was “The Tyger.”

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye,

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  In what distant deeps or skies.

  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

  On what wings dare he aspire?

  What the hand, dare seize the fire?

  It was a simple poem, spare in words and form, and yet to Chance it felt like magic. The words transfixed him. They pulsed with rhythm and mesmerizing imagery. For the first time, Chance found meaning in stanzas. Who created the great “tyger,” so strikingly beautiful and yet so utterly terrifying? What did its creator see in the great beast? It was a poem of good and evil, of god and nature, of beauty and horror.

  That single poem transformed Chance. He spent the rest of the summer in a flurry of activity. He wrote dozens of original poems, hundreds of pages that he painstakingly scribbled into a journal in his back yard. Chance spent every free moment with a pencil and paper. He was happy when he was writing, and sullen when he was forced to do anything else.

  He never showed anyone what he was writing. So to most of his schoolmates, he was a loner.

  “And last year, you had that episode with the assistant principal,” his father said.

  It had been nothing, really. Chance was running late between classes; his locker was not in the most convenient location. Ms. Abernathy clucked at him as he hurried along the school hallway. “No running,” she scolded. “And you’re late.”

  Something inside him snapped. He could almost feel a lever switch tracks in his brain. He could scarcely believe his own words when they came spilling out. “Well, pick one, Abernathy. If don’t run, I’ll be late. Which offense is worse in your ridiculously slow-witted head?”

  The outburst had resulted in two weeks of detention for Chance and a string of meetings with teachers and the school counselor for his dad. Clay Matthews was not much of a talker, and he did not share with Chance what they talked about in all those meetings.

  “You need to watch your mouth,” his father had told him. Chance apologized to the assistant principal and tried hard to put the episode behind him. It even inspired a novella that Chance wrote during detention, about a young boy who learned magic and could render anyone speechless with just a touch of his finger.

  “Then there was the thing with the soccer team. Remember when you—”

  “Okay, Dad, you’ve made your point.”

  Clay Matthews exhaled slowly. “I shouldn’t be surprised by yesterday, but I guess I just wanted to be wrong about you. But the time has come to face it head on.”

  Chance braced himself. His father’s go-to punishment was restriction, which he never seemed to realize didn’t bother Chance at all. Just more time to return to his words and his stories.

  “Your mood swings, your defiance of authority, the times when you do nothing but lock yourself in your room and write. There’s something wrong, Chance. Inside you.”

  This was not the first time he’d heard that he was somehow broken. There was a doctor show on Hulu where the main character was bipolar. His dad watched it all the time. The doctor alternated between periods of depression and manic episodes where he worked double shifts and then went right into all-night poker binges in the back room of a local liquor store. That’s what his father thought of him.

  “You need help,” his father said quietly. “Help that I can’t give you. It just means you need a little help to stay evened out.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Chance heard his voice getting loud. “I don’t need drugs. I don’t need anything to fix me.”

  “Nobody said you need to be fixed.”

  Chance blurted, “I wish Mom were here.”

  He saw as his words hit his father like a right cross. His father winced, and his lips curled back into his mouth. Chance immediately wanted to take the words back into his mouth.

  “Dad, I—”

  “Chance, there’s something I need to tell you about your mother. Something I’ve never told you.”

  Chance perked up at this. His father almost never spoke of Chance’s mother.

  “Your mother was bipolar.”

  For a moment, Chance simply stared at his father, and tried to ignore the flutter in his stomach.

  Bipolar?

  “It came on shortly after you were born. She changed somehow. Doctors thought it was postpartum depression, but it started to get worse. She didn’t want to hold you and wouldn’t get out of bed for days. I did what I could for her. Cooked, cleaned, became a single parent. Her doctor prescribed medication, but she wouldn’t take the pills. She said they just made her feel dead. That was the word she used, dead. The only time she resembled the vibrant, beautiful woman I fell in love with was while she was painting. So I turned the back shed into a studio for her. For a time, she was happy there, surrounded by her paints and her canvasses. But even that passed. Things got worse.

  “She started fighting with me, physically. She argued with strangers on the street. Muttered to herself, started seeing things that weren’t there. I suspected that she had started to drink. So I took her back to the doctors, specialists. They diagnosed her with something called residual schizophrenia.”

  Chance placed a hand on the kitchen counter to steady himself. He barely knew his mother, but in his mind, she was the young and beautiful woman in the Polaroid in his father’s bedside table, vibrant and full of life. And creative. Chance knew about his mother’s paintings, because his dad had never cleaned out the shed. It was still filled with canvases splashed with bright colors and bold shapes. He loved looking at them, wondering about where his mother was now, what she was doing.

  “I lost your mother shortly after that,” his dad said. “She started putting all the blame on me. And then, I came home from work one day and she was just gone. No note, no explanation, nothing. We searched and searched. Her sister got involved, the police were called in. But she was gone.”

  Suddenly, Chance was having trouble breathing. He opened his mouth to gulp air.

  “You think I’m going to turn out like Mom,” he said quietly.

  His father didn’t answer right away. Chance could see that he was fighting a truth he didn’t want to admit. Finally, he said, “The signs are all there, Chance. The mood swings, the defiance. The disconnect from reality. The creativity.”

  “So now creativity is a bad thing?”

  “Not bad,” his father said quietly. “But maybe, I don’t know, signs of a troubled mind.”

  A troubled mind.

  “You want me to get help, counseling. Get medicated.”

  “Yes,” Clay Matthews said firmly. “I’m going to make an appointment for you to see a psychiatri
st next week. The earliest I can get.”

  His father had never been a man who exhibited physical affection. Chance could see his discomfort now, knowing that he should reach out to embrace his son, but holding back. Instead of a touch, his father rapped his knuckles on the table. “We’re going to get you better,” he said. “I promise.”

  Chance retreated wordlessly to his room.

  It wasn’t as though Chance didn’t recognize his behavioral problems. Sometimes, he just got so frustrated. Like shaking a can of Dr. Pepper — eventually it was going to explode. It wasn’t something he felt comfortable talking with his father about. If it wasn’t sports, his father wasn’t much interested. Sometimes, Chance would stay up to watch mixed martial arts with his dad, but winced at the violence, even looked away if one fighter mounted another, and started to rain down blows. No, he would not find common ground with his father through sports. In fact, the half-hearted attempts just made Chance feel further away.

  He picked up a mechanical pencil and his journal and crawled into bed.

  What the hand, dare seize the fire?

  THREE

  It was an unexpected place for an escape room.

  Seagirt Marine Terminal was a sprawling 284-acre industrial complex on the north shore of the Patapsco River in East Baltimore. Just a few miles from the wood-paneled restaurants and science museums of the popular Inner Harbor area, Seagirt was the city’s gritty underbelly.

  With four dual-hoist cranes, 12 rubber-tired gantry cranes and eight deep-water berths, the terminal was one of the busiest ports on the East Coast. The loading yard was filled with hundreds of shipping containers, stacked three high. From a distance, they looked like multicolored Lego bricks. A row of squat, hangar-like buildings ringed the yard. East Newgate Lane, the only artery through the terminal, ran north to south.

  “Here?”

  The Uber driver pulled up to a low building, painted hospital-green, and stopped. There was no sign on the building’s façade, nor on any of the adjacent structures. There were no other cars here; it felt deserted. Abandoned.