Postby Jay Candice » Tue Jun 26, 2012 11:16 am
“It’s One-Way Cave,” Melody remarked. She was now dressed in jeans and a camouflage tee and very unbound. I’m embarrassed to say that I dozed off on watch duty, and if they hadn’t cut us some slack, we would probably bound and gagged right now. Stupid me.
I was dressed in a green hoodie and jeans, while Elise was dressed in a tank top and cargoes. They had left us new clothes while we were asleep, so we changed and left our clothes there. They also gave us some food and three backpacks, so that was nice of them. I wondered why they did it, seeing as they were aiming for us to fail. Whatever, it worked.
“The name sounds familiar,” I remarked. “Another necessary challenge?”
“Yup,” Melody confirmed. “Once we go through this, we can’t turn back.”
“Kind of why it’s called ‘One Way Cave’, right?” Elise said skeptically. “It’s not like we were turning back anyways.”
“Let’s just go,” I said. I grabbed the single torch that was on the front entrance and trudged on. We all now had hiking boots and socks, so the hard ground didn’t bother us. The ceiling was high, but dark, and everything had a damp feeling. I seriously expected to see the door close on us, but it never did. So much for being “One Way”.
We stepped over rocks and went down small inclinations. Sometimes the ceiling would get so low we needed to get down and dirty and crawl. Sometimes the ceiling was at least thirty feet high in huge rooms of pretty much nothing. I wondered if these were natural or they were man-made.
The orange light of my torch pointed out all obstacles, but I was still worried. What if a boulder dropped on my head? I heard that miners wear those hard hats to protect their heads from hitting stalactites and stuff like that. I didn’t really see how they could just hit their heads, but they wore them for a reason, so I wasn’t really in a position to doubt them.
I had never been a cave, so it was sort of cool. I figured I would be doing a lot of stuff I had never done on my trip to this island.
“Pretty dark,” Melody remarked.
“Obviously,” Elise agreed. “Wonder why nothing’s happened yet.”
“Please don’t say that,” I said. “You’re going to jinx it.”
“You believe that?” She said, her eyebrows raised.
“I like to cover my bases.”
She shrugged, “I guess that makes sense. But still, I never really believed that kind of stuff.”
“It doesn’t really matter,” I said. “But still, I think it’s nice to have stuff like that in our lives.”
“Maybe for you,” She shrugged again and we trudged on through the dark caverns. To be truthful, I was wondering too. It wasn’t like them to have intervals of this little bindings in a while.
Along the walls were what looked like cave paintings sometimes. Carvings, some of them looked prehistoric. I wondered if they were authentic. But other times spray painted graffiti showed, and a mural of bound slaves showed at one section. Another time there was an Egyptian-style painting showing a girl being tied up. A few Chinese-style paintings depicted a man over a bound girl in a Kimono. I wondered how long they spent decorating the cave. I also wondered how mad they would be if I ripped them down.
We faced a door. The cave ended abruptly, and it was evident that it was a dead end with nothing but the door. It looked kind of old, but the words were clear on it. They were carved in and painted with gold, in fancy script. On the inscription, it said “Take one out and scratch my head, I am now black but once was red.”
I stared at it. “What the heck?”
“It’s a riddle,” Melody reasoned. “I guess we have to figure it out.”
“I hate riddles,” Elise said. “What can you scratch and it becomes black?”
“Maybe it’s one of those stickers,” Melody guessed. “You know, on those lottery tickets, you scratch it off, and it’s a new color, or has something underneath it.”
“Scratch tickets?”
“Yeah, that.”
I looked at the door inscription. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s it. Gosh, I thought this place only tested our tying skills. Now it’s testing our brains too? Great.”
“Maybe it’s like that watermelon riddle,” Elise said. “It goes like ‘What’s green on the outside, red on the inside, and black when you spit it out?’, and it’s a watermelon.”
“Yeah, but a watermelon starts out green,” Melody pointed out. “And I guess if you scratch it out, it becomes red and black.”
“It only becomes red.”
“You get my point.”
“Great,” I said. “I was never good with riddles.” I remembered a boy at my school, Thomas. He was always telling riddles. He was a nice guy, but he always expected me to answer them and I never could. Like maybe one or two, but I never really did very well on the majority of them.
I watched the torch burn slowly, the fire going on indefinitely. I wondered if it would ever go out, that orange flame burning with the dark, black center.
I blinked. Of course that was it. “It’s a match!”
“A match?” Elise said, mildly surprised.
“Yeah!” Melody said, realization dawning on her face. “That was fast, good job Jami! You scratch a match on something, then it’s red top becomes black with flame! That makes so much sense!”
We turned as the door unlocked by itself. Looks like they heard us. We walked through, the torch lighting our way. I beamed at myself. I was surprised that I figured it out with pretty much no help. I had never been good at that stuff, so it kind of came as a surprise for me as well.
We hadn’t taken ten steps before the door slammed behind us and it locked swiftly. I guess that’s why it was called “One Way Cave.” I looked to see that another twenty steps away was another door, identical to the other one. But the inscription was different, and it was smeared with what looked like blood, or really dark red paint. It was completely gross, and made my stomach feel queasy.
I walked up to it. “With a knife, cut open my head,” I read aloud. “Then weep besides me while I am dead.”
Elise groaned. “Great. More riddles.”
“Evidently.”
Melody studied the inscription intently. “What can you cut, and makes you cry?”
“Or,” I suggested. “What only makes you cry when you cut it?”
“This one’s simple,” Elise said. “It’s an onion.”
I got it. Onions made people cry, and you cut them open. I was mildly impressed with how fast Elise had figured it out. When hadn’t even been staring at it for a minute before she came to that conclusion. Maybe she had onions on the mind or something.
“Wow,” Melody said as the door flung open and we proceeded as it shut behind us. “That one was ridiculously easy.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “We might have had to think about that one if Elise hadn’t just gotten it.”
“It wasn’t too hard,” Elise said. “When Melody said that onions popped into my head.”
We trudged on, but instead of a door with a riddle, a girl stood in our path. Or kneeled was more like it. She had glassy blue eyes, hardly focused. She barely noticed us. Her hair was maybe two inches below shoulder level, and wavy at the end. Her hands were chained to the walls and her ankles were chained to the floor. She was dressed in ragged, dirty clothing, and looked thirteen to fourteen years old.
She looked up, slightly. She was cleave-gagged, but from the looks of it, she couldn’t speak even if she wanted to. A sign was around her neck. It read “A father and a son are in a car, and they get into a crash. The father dies, and the son is badly injured. The son is put in the hospital, but when the doctor comes, the doctor says, ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son’. Who is the doctor?”
We paused, staring at the sign.
“Well,” I said. “This one doesn’t rhyme.”
“We gotta help her!” Melody said. She ran forward but abruptly stopped and rebounded, crashing as if there was a force field. She clutched her nose and groaned a little bit.
“Ouch,” She said. “Screen.” I blinked. It must’ve been pretty good. I didn’t see anything. I walked forward and indeed, it was as if there was an invisible wall. We couldn’t help her. Well, we probably could if we solved the riddle.
“This riddle business is getting frustrating,” Elise muttered. “I wonder, if the girl can’t make it before we solve the riddle, do they just let her die?”
“What a depressing thought,” I remarked.
“It was just a thought!”
“They probably wouldn’t let her die. Probably.”
“Oh, I really don’t want to get stuck here on this island.”
Melody studied the girl. “I’m guessing that we should probably figure this out. I kind of don’t want her to die, and plus, we probably need to figure it out if we want to get forward. Get it?”
“What I don’t get,” I said. “Is why do they even leave her out like that? Why even show her, why don’t they just put a door?”
“Maybe it’s to get us moving,” Elise suggested. “Maybe they don’t want us to just camp out in the caves. Or maybe there’s something else. She could be our first ally in the island. I’m pretty sure that if we save her, she’ll join us, and those people on the island told us that we should get as much help as we can get, right?”
“I know,” I said. “But this is all so fishy. The people here are supposed to be trying to stop us, not help us.”
“I think they’re still trying to stop us,” Melody said.
“No, think about it,” I said, on a roll now. Something wasn’t right here. “They’ve given us clothes, food, and pretty much didn’t capture us when they easily could. And now they’re pretty much handing us our first ally. It’s almost as if they want us to keep going.”
The girl’s eyes was focusing. “Mmmmmmm. Mmph.” That snapped me back. She was still a real person, and probably wasn’t appreciating how we weren’t really trying to figure out her riddle. Oops.
“Okay, back to the present,” Melody said. “What do you think this is? In the riddle, the father dies but then he treats his son.”
“Uh, no,” Elise said. “I’m thinking that you can’t treat people while you’re dead. It’s kind of not done.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Maybe the father didn’t really die?”
“Riddles don’t work that way,” Elise said. “Usually, riddles have everything that they need in the riddle, along with some basic knowledge that most people should know. I have a feeling that this one is just as solvable as the last ones.”
“Well, you guys solved those,” Melody said. “I didn’t do so well on them. What do you think?”
“Still thinking,” I replied. Elise was right. Riddles functioned in a certain way, like trick questions. There were two types of riddles. One, which focused on careful wording and puns, which seemed a lot like jokes to me. Like “When is a door not a door?” and the answer would be “When it’s ajar”, which didn’t really seem very riddle-like in my opinion. Then, there was the second type of riddle, which required thinking and not missing details, and probably a creative imagination. Like this one. Either way, riddles were puzzles.
I looked at the sign. It stated that the son was badly injured, so that would require him to go to the hospital, which would require the doctor, but the doctor seemingly died in the car crash as well. Or maybe not. The identity of the doctor could be someone else. The meaning of son…. Of course. The doctor wasn’t the father.
“The father did die in the car crash,” I stated out loud. “He couldn’t have treated his son, because of obvious reasons. It makes sense doesn’t it?”
“What?” Melody said, confused. “I’m not getting it so far.”
Elise’s eyes widened. “Whoa, duh. The doctor isn’t the father. The doctor is the son’s mother.”
In the end, it matters not how many breaths you took, but how many took your breath away.
-shing xiong
We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction
-General Douglas MacArthur
Fall down seven times, stand up eight
-Japanese Proverb