You find yourself in darkness.
"Hello?"
"Right here," comes a small voice – a child's voice.
You pull out your cell phone and switch on the light. The jagged, rising ceiling above you tells you that you're underneath a stairway. The walls aren't drywalled and the floor you're sitting on is bare cement. The dark-haired little girl huddled in the corner can only be Inez.
"Where are we?"
"The basement in the house where I grew up," she says. She can't be older than six, but her tone and phrasing tell you that a much older Inez is speaking to you through her. "There was a crawlspace under the stairs. I used to be terrified of the place – but for some reason this is where I always came to when I was scared." She looks up like she can see through the ceiling. "More scared up there than I was down here, anyway."
A dozen possible responses flip through your mind before you settle on one. "Would you like to talk about it?"
She fixes you with an intense glare, her face expressionless. "Not particularly, no."
"Fair enough."
"The other you," she says, with a vague wave of her hand, "my you, knows all about it." She's looking at the bare floor now, her tone apologetic.
"It's okay." You glance around the dark, empty space again even though you know there's nothing else there to see. "Why did you bring us here?"
"It's time that we talk about the House.”
She shifts her weight, coming out of the corner to kneel across from you. Her whole demeanor is different. Gone are the playful teasing and cryptic babble. Now she's all business. You can tell that you’re nearing the destination that she’s been leading you to this entire time.
“I’ve always found the House to be a fascinating place,” she says, in the voice of a child but the words of a woman. “I mean: a time machine? Who wouldn’t find that fascinating? Every time that we visited your father over the years, we would get a chance to play. The night you took me to see the same ballet three times over was . . . magical. And considering we’re talking about a magic House, that’s really saying something.”
She sighs. “But a couple of months ago, when you suggested we actually move in.... To actually live there in the House. To spend the rest of my life there – day after day, with the whole of my life, both before and after, spread out around me….” She sucks a breath in through her teeth. “I started thinking about the House more deeply. The entire idea of being able to go back and relive a moment until you get it right.... I mean, who hasn’t dreamed of that?”
“So you stole a house key.”
She nods. “Our second day there. I knew better than to try anything large-scale – anything your father might notice. So I chose little things instead. I cooked the same egg thirty times. Drew a picture, over and over and over again.” She cocks her head sideways. “And over and over and over and over and over again. I kept trying, but I could never …" her face twists in frustration "… get it quite right.” She meets your eyes again and smiles. “A couple of nights ago, you and I had a dozen different versions the same conversation.”
“What about?”
Her smile vanishes. “None of your business.”
“But it was with me,” you find yourself protesting – but of course that isn't true. Her conversation wasn’t with you at all.
Child Inez goes on like she hasn’t even noticed. “I kept experimenting, trying to get everything exactly right. One perfect day. You have no idea how much work that ended up being. Every time I turned history in another direction, another twenty doors would open up….” Her voice drifts off again, and she pauses, staring off into space. Her eyes dart back and forth like she’s watching a dozen movies play out before her all at once.
You sit there waiting patiently, for two full minutes.
Then, at some silent cue, she comes to herself again. Her head snaps up and she locks eyes with you. “And then one day it occurred to me that the entire exercise begged the question that there was only one ‘right’ way for things to be. If I cooked the perfect egg or drew the perfect drawing, then what? What would that accomplish? What exactly was it that I was trying to do?" Her tiny face twists up into a frown. "I was following some sort of natural impulse – only I had no idea what that impulse was or even what it was making me search for. That alone told me that I was onto something – something huge, something important. But I was missing a piece of the puzzle.”
She’s still staring, and you realize that she isn’t blinking. Her gaze pushes into you like a physical force.
“And then one day I was doing a sudoku. It was a tough one, and I was on my third time trying to break into it when it occurred to me: you don’t keep doing puzzles over and over and over again until you get them ‘right.’ You do them over and over and over again until you’ve sorted through all of the chaos to find the patterns hidden underneath. And that’s when I got it."
"What you were saying before about patterns," you prompt.
She nods, but her eyes drift away from yours now. "Solving puzzles is a way to discern order among the chaos. And the House does the same exact thing for reality. It’s a tool for teasing out the order of the Universe."
"But what if there's no order?" you ask her. "What if it's just chaos?"
"A puzzle with no patterns has no solution," she snaps, her voice suddenly hot with anger.
The statement is such a non sequitur that you're at a loss on how to respond.
But Inez's anger vanishes again as quickly as it appeared. "And so I started tinkering again, but this time with a purpose. I would tug a bit here, shove a little there, looking for the signals hidden in all of the noise.”
"And did you find any patterns?"
Inez laughs – a mix between joy and mania. "Hundreds of them. I found them everywhere! Hundreds of them. Thousands. I found nothing but. The entire Universe is woven out of a patchwork of patterns. And then I started finding patterns within the patterns – it was dizzying." Her eyes start scanning back and forth across the bare concrete between you. A single tear rolls down one cheek. "You have to understand," she says. "For you, we moved into the House only a little more than a month ago. But I've spent that month jumping back and forth through time. What was a month for you was a subjective decade for me."
"A decade?"
"At least," she says. "I mean, you can't help but lose count, of course, with all of the jumping around. And I had the entire span of my life to search in." And with that, her whole body slumps sideways, her weight coming to rest on one hip with her legs curled up underneath her. She sits perfectly still, except for her tiny chest rising and falling.
This time, you let several minutes go by, overwhelmed by all of the things she's just said and the heavy silence that's fallen between you.
Those minutes drag into half an hour. Frankly, after all of the jumping of your own that you've been doing, you're grateful for the pause.
"Inez," you say finally, gently.
She pulls in a sharp breath, meeting your gaze again. "Where was I?"
"The patterns of the Universe."
"Yes, the patterns. And where there are patterns, there is information. There are messages."
"Messages?" you ask. "Are you saying that there are messages programmed into the structure of the Universe?"
She nods eagerly, a gesture that makes her look like the small child she appears to be. "Yes. And I started to be able to read them."
She pauses, looking up at you expectantly. You're starting to feel dizzy following her down this rabbit hole, and it takes you a few seconds to collect your thoughts. "And – and what did the messages say?"
"Lots of things," she answers, her eyes dropping out of focus again. "Lots of different things. It was like a thousand people shouting in my ear at once."
"Inez, why don't you just come back with me? I think you need to take a rest."
"So I started looking for some structure to it all. Something they all had in common."
"Inez –"
"And when I started to figure it out, it frightened me – frightened me more than anything else I could have found there. I didn't want it to be true. I searched for months – years – for another answer. But finally I couldn't deny it."
"Deny what?" you ask. "What did you find?"
"The one thing that all of the messages had in common," she says, with exaggerated slowness, like a teacher belittling a particularly slow student.
You fight down your frustration. "And what was it that they all had in common?"
Inez scowls, turning her face slightly away from you and staring at you side-eyed. "I have to be sure, first."
"Sure about what?"
"That you'll be able to see it. That you can recognize hidden patterns when they're presented to you."
She reaches into the single pocket sewn into the front of her dress. She's had to fold the envelope into thirds for it to fit. "Find the patterns in these three puzzles and you will learn the same thing I learned."
She doesn't simply vanish this time, like before. She holds the envelop out to you. You reach forward and take it gently, and then give her a reassuring smile.
"Goodbye," child Inez says. And then she's gone.
Your fingers tremble as you pull open the envelop and unfold the sheet of paper inside.
Each sequence of letters clues a two-letter answer. Find the set of all three answers together on the Solution Page to determine where you go next.
Or you can