I'm running wild with the one I love (I see no evil)

“Okay, what the heck?!” Marley exclaimed. “This should be all the possible combinations! I know I didn’t make a mistake!” She scratched at her hair in frustration, almost like she was trying to spur her brain into coming up with another idea.

Nick frowned. “Marley, I think you’re being too hard on yourself,” he told her. “I agree, your reasoning was correct. There ARE only 6 possible combinations here. Clearly, there’s gotta be something else to this puzzle, we just have to figure out what that ‘something else’ is.”

Marley blinked, and then sighed in relief. “Oh, good… okay… good…” She was glad that she might be overreacting. But after the stressful day she’d had, it was kind of hard not to. An insane amount of stressful things had happened today. At this point, she really, really wanted to just be done with this whole thing already.

“Let’s leave the masks here for now,” Nick said, nodding to the masks hanging on the wall. “And go back through everything we already have. Sound like a plan?”

Marley nodded. “I think you’re right,” she agreed. “Let’s take a look at this rationally.” She glanced back at the masks hanging over the staircase one last time, and headed after him down the stairs and back into the twisted basement.

They stopped in front of the work table where they’d laid out everything.

“So we’ve got a purple crystal here,” Nick said, holding up the purple crystal, “and a skull here with a blue gemstone in its eye. Maybe those two things are connected?”

“It could be,” Marley nodded. “You think? We’ve also got this box here, that we can’t open.” She picked up the box and rattled it. “And there’s definitely something inside.”

Nick nodded. “Okay, what else then? There’s gotta be more than this.”

Marley tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know… but maybe… maybe… Oh, what about this, over here?”

She walked over to the triangle that was carved onto the staircase. “This has gotta be something, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I guess… but I don’t know what,” Nick admitted, shaking his head. He was more interested in the purple crystal. The bottom was rounded… almost like…

“Wait, Marley! I just thought of something! Come here, let’s try this out!” He walked over to the altar in the center of the room, purple crystal in hand, and set it down on the dais. It fit in perfectly to the little divot in the star.

“Oh, wow!” Marley applauded. “Way to go, Nick! It’s a perfect fit!”

“Yeah,” Nick nodded. “Now, the only question is what does that do?”

Just because they’d gotten the crystal onto the altar, that didn’t actually make anything easier. “Is it a lock, maybe?” He suggested. “Maybe the top opens up, and there’s another clue inside?”

He tried pulling on the top of the altar, but it didn’t come off. “No, that’s not- wait, what?”

The rock nudged a little. But it wasn’t coming up. Instead, it was sliding!

“Wow, it’s moving!” Marley watched in excitement. “Way to go, Nick! You did it!”

With the crystal affixed to the dais, that must have triggered something. Nick was able to slowly, gradually spin the star around the center of the stone, moving the crystal along the perimeter of the altar as he did.

But… nothing happened. He made a full spin in a circle, and still nothing actually happened. He tried again, and again, but it didn’t do anything.

Finally, he gave up and sighed. “Well, I found out it’s like a screw,” he laughed, shaking his head. “Maybe it’s been stripped.”

“It’s not the only one,” Marley joked, crossing her arms under her chest to make her breasts bounce a little.

Nick blushed.

“Well… I guess that’s part of some other puzzle, too,” he sighed, shaking his head.

It felt like they kept half-solving these puzzles; they were getting stuff to do things, but nothing actually seemed to be making progress. And that was so frustrating! Shouldn’t they at least get some kind of benefit for getting everything right?

“Nick!”

Nick turned to see Marley waving over to him from one of the cupboards.

“What’s up?” He walked over to her.

“You think this means something?” She asked, holding up a tiny figurine. “I found it in here. Didn’t check before.”

She showed him carved sculpture of a monkey. Clutched in its paws was a round mirror, like something from a compact.

“I-I guess?” Nick nodded. “I mean… the mirror might be useful… maybe we can use it to see writing or something?”

He looked around the room, and that’s when he noticed something else. “Wait, over there, on the altar, that looks like a monkey too, right?”

Marley followed him over to the altar, but instead of looking at the star array drawn on the top, he knelt beside it. A monkey was carved into the stone.

“You saw that?” Marley was impressed. “I thought it was just a strange carving into the rock, I can hardly tell it’s a monkey!”

Nick blushed, feeling a little flattered. “I didn’t notice it at first either,” he admitted. “But seeing the figure, it just made me think about it.”

“So we have a monkey figure with a mirror, and then a monkey altar, with a crystal on it,” Marley considered. “No way that can be a coincidence, right?”

Nick shook his head. It wouldn’t make any sense. “I don’t know… let’s keep looking around. Maybe we’ll find some more monkey stuff.”

They were on the right track. His intuition was screaming at him! But he just wasn’t smart enough to put the rest of the pieces together.

“My bet is that there’s another mask hidden here somewhere,” Marley said firmly. “It would be just like Dakota to put three masks in plain sight, but the fourth one is actually the one we need! You know, like with that potion!”

Nick agreed that made sense. But it also seemed like repeating the same puzzle from the laboratory. Would Dakota be that uncreative?

“I’m wondering about the mural, too,” he admitted.

“Which one?” Marley asked. “There’re two of them.” She nodded over to the one on the wall, the circular one that looked like a child’s drawing of a maze.

“No, the one on the stairs,” Nick said, walking over to the staircase and squinting closely. “We have three masks, and there’s a triangle… you think they’re connected somehow?”

He took a look at the symbols etched into each circle at the point of the triangle. They didn’t really seem to mean anything, but the one on the top looked kind of like an arrow… Nick put his finger on the point, and traced up the wood, wondering where it was pointing to if it really was an arrow.

Then his finger touched something rough and gritty.

“Hey! Marley, come over here!” Nick urged her, and Marley came running.

“What is it?” She asked.

“You still have that flashlight? The one from the laboratory?” He pressed.

Marley reached to her belt and turned pale. “Ugh, no! I must have dropped it!” She groaned. Maybe during the game show, or in the last room when things had gotten so intimate. It had completely slipped her mind until now!

What a mess.

“That’s okay, I don’t think I need it,” Nick said, squinting at the dark wood above his head. “I think… yeah, I think I can make it out… there’s something carved into the wood here!”

Nick was using both hands now to make out the shape. It was rounded, with ears, and a mouth, and…

“It’s a monkey’s face, I think,” he said, feeling the large round ears. “It’s gotta be.”

“So we’ve got three monkeys now?” Marley frowned. “Again, that CAN’T be a coincidence. We’ve got a triangle, with an arrow pointing to a monkey’s face… three monkeys, three masks…”

Nick’s eyes widened. “Oh my gosh!” He exclaimed. “I think I’ve got it! I know what the masks mean now!”

He stepped back from the mural and ran over to the stairs. Marley chased after him, still completely lost.

“You… you know?” She stammered. “What is it? What did you figure out?”

“So do you know the story of the three monkeys? It’s sort of a folklore… or parable… I don’t know, it’s been way too damn long since I’ve heard of it!” He was taking the masks down off the wall and inspecting them while he talked, to Marley’s confusion.

“I have no idea, is it like the Three Little Pigs?” Marley asked uncomfortably. “Sylvia used to read that to me when I was a sprout…”

“No, it’s not like that,” Nick said, laying the masks down at the foot of the stairs. “It’s a proverb. There are three monkeys. One who sees no evil, one who hears no evil, and one who speaks no evil. Don’t you get it now?”

Marley shook her head.

“The masks!” He urged. “Look at the masks! See? Look at that one!” He pointed to the one on the left. It was the blocky one with the snarling mouth. “It’s the only one that doesn’t have defined eyes. Its eyes are little slits, see? In the proverb, the fist monkey covered its eyes, or ‘see no evil’.”

Marley gasped as she instantly connected the dots. “So the one in the middle…” She picked up the center mask, the smaller, bulbous one with a rounded head, that didn’t have any ears.

“That one’s ‘hear no evil’,” Nick nodded. He grabbed the last mask, the first one they’d found, which was devoid of a mouth. “And this one, since it doesn’t have a mouth on it, is ‘speak no evil’! That’s gotta be the order! See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.”

“But we tried that already,” Marley pointed out, handing her mask back to Nick as he hung them up on the wall in the order he’d laid them out in. “That was like the third combination I tried, and it didn’t work.”

“I know it didn’t,” Nick admitted. “But this is the right order, I just know it. No, we’ve gotta do something else.”

He glanced at Marley, and saw her brain working just as fast as his was.

“You don’t think…” Nick’s voice trailed off as their eyes met, and he realized they were both considering the same idea.

“I mean, it’s worth a shot, right?” Marley agreed, coming up to join him on the stairs. They stood in front of the first mask, the eyeless one. “If we’re not supposed to see any evil…”

They both closed their eyes. But they couldn’t hear anything. No clicks or shifts or bell dings or anything. Apparently, it wasn’t working.

“Maybe we’re supposed to do something with the mask itself?” Nick fumbled around blind until he felt the pointed ears of the mask. He pushed and twisted it, and then… it shifted. He gasped and took a step back, his eyes snapping open.

The mask was bent at a 90-degree angle.

Marley and Nick stared at each other for a moment, barely able to contain their glee at solving the puzzle. They were practically jumping for joy.

“Okay, this next one’s going to be hard, though,” Nick said, walking up the steps to the second mask. “We’ve gotta ‘hear no evil’ which means we have to cover our ears.”

It was going to be a pain in the ass twisting the mask without using their hands. But Nick and Marley both cupped their hands over their ears, and Nick nudged against it with his elbow, trying to shift it up. With an unheard click, the mask shifted in place, turning up like the first one with mechanical precision that must have been prepared ahead of time.

They dropped their hands and looked at each other.

One left.

Keeping their mouths shut tight, they walked to the third mask, or “speak no evil” and Nick turned that one as well. All three masks were bent sideways.

A loud click followed by a rumbling noise echoed through the room, and the stairs started to shake. Nick and Marley grabbed the banister and gasped.

Looking down over the side of the staircase, they saw the mural etched into the stairs start to shift. It bent out, revealing that it wasn’t just carved onto the side of the stairs- it was carved into a door built into the stairs!

“It’s a secret passage!” Marley cried out, rushing down the stairs as Nick chased after her. They both stopped in front of the door, swinging it open to see what was inside.

It was another altar. But this one was slightly different. It was tall, as tall as the doorway, and carved into the side of the wall, almost like a shrine. A small protrusion like a table or a shelf extended out of it slightly, fixed into the alcove of that shelf rested another small skull, just like the one that Marley had found.

It had a yellow gem in its right eye.

“Marley, go get the skull,” Nick urged her as he studied the new altar they’d discovered. “I think there’s enough space here where it’ll fit.”

The table jutted out just far enough he thought. Marley returned with the skull, and he fit it into the small alcove right next to the other one.

A perfect fit. The two skulls sat right next to each other, the yellow gem skull on the left side and the blue gem skull on the right, meaning that the two gems were right next to each other.

“Well, we got the skulls to fit into place, we know where that goes,” Marley said, her tone encouraging. “But what do we do next?”

Nick wasn’t quite sure. He was glad that they seemed to be finally making progress, but it seemed like now they were stuck.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I thought for sure that something was going to happen if we put the skull here. Like, maybe we’d get a beam of light from each eye or something. But that doesn’t seem to be happening…”

Marley shook her head. “Well… maybe there’s something else in the chamber, then?” She suggested hopefully, pulling the door open wider. The back of the door was covered with a mirror.

“Maybe…” Nick reached in a little deeper and tried to fumble around with his fingers. He could just barely reach around the alter.

Then his finger brushed against something and he heard a tiny clinking sound. Marley heard it too.

“Nick!” She gasped. “Is that the…?”

Nick nodded, almost-certain. He grabbed what he’d brushed against, and felt it with his fingers. It was a small key. Too small for a door lock, so it must be for a padlock!

“I think this is the key to that box,” Nick said, straightening up and dusting off his pants. “Let’s see what’s inside that.”

He inserted the key into the lock and opened it. He should have known what he’d find the second he opened it.

A third skull.

“Three of a kind again,” Marley whispered, pointing out the obvious theme of this particular room.

“This one’s different, it’s got gemstones in both eyes,” Nick said. “Green ones.”

He didn’t need to be a genius to figure out what that meant. Blue + Yellow = Green.

“There’s a hole in the back of it, too,” Marley noted. “I think I know what to do for this one!” She grabbed the skull from his hand and rushed back to the secret alcove. She knelt down next to the altar, and began to fiddle with the skull.

“You think you’ve found out where it goes?” Nick asked, following after her.

“Yeah,” she nodded. “See? I’ve got it perfect!”

She showed Nick the skull, sitting on the little shelf. She’d turned it back so it was facing the other two skulls. Each gem in its eye was staring into the gemmed eye of one of the other skulls.

Then they saw a flash from the altar. Nick pulled Marley back as a ray of soft yellow light came out of the yellow gem at the same time a ray of blue light came out of the blue one. Each ray of light, from deep within the altar, traveled into the green gems of the third skull. Neither Nick nor Marley knew what happened inside the third skull, but a larger, stronger beam of green light came out of the hole in the back of its head. It shot across the room and struck the wall, forming a light path.

“It’s a laser!” Marley gasped.

“Yeah, it is,” Nick nodded. “But it’s not exactly pointing at anything.”

True. The laser was aimed directly at the back wall. Nick and Marley looked at each other, not quite sure what to make of that.

“The mirror!” Marley suddenly gasped. “Look! We can use the mirror on the back of the door, see?” She grabbed the door and began to move it. As she closed the door, the green laser hit the mirror, and reflected. The further she pushed the door closed, the tighter the laser swept across the room. But even THAT didn’t seem to do anything.

“Where are we supposed to aim this?” Nick asked. “Are we supposed to hit it at the altar? Because that angle doesn’t work.”

“But we’ve got another mirror,” Marley grinned, standing up. “Remember? The monkey!”

That’s right, Nick almost forgot. The monkey figure Marley had found was holding a mirror, too! That had to be involved somehow!

“But where do we put the monkey?” He asked. “There are shelves all over this place.”

Good point.

“Well, you found out where the purple crystal went, since you felt around and found that divot on the dais, right?” Marley pointed out. “Maybe the monkey has something like that.”

She walked over to the figure and picked it up, examining the bottom. Then she made a triumphant fist.

“Yes! I knew it! Just like I expected!” She crowed. “See? Look, right here! At the monkey’s bottom!”

“Can’t you find a better way to phrase that?” Nick pleaded. But he could see what she meant. At the bottom of the figure was a deep hole. A peculiarly-shaped one, at that. It was shaped like a 30-60-90 triangle. A very specific shape.

“There’s gotta be a peg here or something,” Marley considered. “Somewhere in this room! And when we find it, that’s where we put the monkey!”

Sounded reasonable. Nick helped Marley tear the room apart. And once they knew what they were looking for, it didn’t take long. The peg Marley was talking about was on the workbench, the one that had been scuffed up and scratched. The warped surface of the bench had helped hide the small bump of the peg, but once they knew they were looking for a triangle it was easy to spot.

“Okay, so let’s place the monkey here,” Marley said, turning it until the two triangles slotted in perfectly. There was only one way the monkey could face. And when it slid into place, Nick noted that the mirror it was holding was turned at an angle, partially facing the door.

He and Marley glanced at each other and smiled like a pair of giddy teenagers.

“Alright!” They slapped their hands together in a high-five and rushed over to the door.

“Now we just have to get the angles right,” Marley squinted, aligning the mirror on the door to properly aim the laser. “Leave it to me, I’m a pro at this.”

“Do you calculate a lot of angles in your studies to be a botanist?” Nick teased, earning him a playful smack in the head.

“Hush up, you,” she scoffed. “Need to focus…”

She had to angle the door just right. Too wide, and the laser would pass right by the monkey. Too narrow, and it would pass by the other side.

No, she needed to aim it perfectly, and hit the mirror dead-on.

Once she got the angle right, it was like watching a magic trick.

The laser struck the door and bounced off, then struck the mirror in the monkey’s hands and bounced off again. Curving twice, the mirrors sent the beam of the laser right into another wall- and right into the center of the circular mural shaped like a maze of lines.

Marley and Nick looked at each other, and shared crooked grins. This had to be it. They were doing it!