Rosemary Kane

Most people’s idea of a fun night out involved a fruity drink, a cute outfit, friends, a fun locale, with dancing, maybe, or karaoke… and yet, Diana had found her fun night out in a series of weirdly themed Netherville caves with a complete and utter stranger, courtesy of Dungeons and Cragons. After all, what more was an escape room than a giant timed puzzle? She needed this, Diana had told herself. She needed a break from all the little terrors that had rooted their way into her every day. 

The only problem was she wasn’t alone. 

The kid at the counter had insisted each cave escape embark with a minimum of two people. Which left her and a woman dressed in pink who seemed confused as to where the rest of her group had went. Rosemary. The only comfort in the whole situation was that the Rosemary woman had not seemed phased by her and was not looking at her like she was planning on cold clocking her over the head with her flashlight and leaving her for dead. 

A wall of skulls stared at the pair as they scrounged around the first cavern, looking for a clue forward. It felt a little too ostentatiously macabre—an excessive catacomb, with candles dripping wax on nearly every surface and canned chanting piped in from a hidden speaker. “Do you think they’re real? The skulls, I mean… they can’t all be real, not that many…” Diana mused, breaking the awkward silence as she played around with a coffin lid. Something had to open up…

—

So much for team bonding. 

The administration in charge of Mother Morta’s Nursing Home had decided that their employees needed a morale boost. And instead of something logical, like a pay increase across the board for their employees, they settled on a mandatory team bonding event. Rosemary would have preferred a check, or at least free pizza in the break room, but of all the mandatory out of work activities it could have been, an escape room wasn’t completely awful. What was awful, was the fact that no one had waited for her. The staff at Dungeons and Cragons had grouped all of her colleagues together, and no one had bothered to warn them that their pastel pink compatriot was running five minutes late. They’d all gone in, and Rosemary had arrived to a near empty lobby, save one woman trying to get into an escape room alone. 

Diana, as it turned out, seemed to be treating the escape room as a form of stress relief. The witch could think of about a dozen better ways to get out the pent up stress and anxiety of the day, but she wouldn’t have picked escape room to top her list. She was too competitive for something like that to be relaxing. Rosemary’s fingers curled reflexively around threads of magic that no longer hummed in the air at the question. She deflated a touch, the reminder that magic was gone feeling like an encore performance of a gut punch. She sighed, looking at the skull instead. “Possibly? I’m not going to do it, because gods know how many people have put their grubby hands on them, and also it would be weird and we’d waste so much time— but, archeologists lick rocks to see if they’re rock or bone. Bone is porous. You lick it, and it absorbs the saliva and is just… sticky. Unlike a rock, which just becomes a damp rock.” The witch said, pulling at the myriad books on a femur-lined book shelf, looking for a trigger, or to see if any of the tomes were hollowed out to hold goodies inside. “What’d the kid say this room was called again? Maybe there’s a clue in the title.”

—

At least Rosemary wasn’t a useless escape room partner. Diana had been partnered with random people before. There had been one undergraduate winter break she’d spent in Boston with her on-again-off-again partner at the time rather than going home to see the hollow eyes of her father or the rage-filled ones of her aunt. They had gone to an escape room as a fun date night, and the pair of them had gotten stuck with an utterly idiotic and drunken blond-haired frat boy appropriately named Ken. Ken had the genius idea to try running into walls like the Kool-Aid Man while screaming ‘OH YEAAAAAAH’ as a means of escape. When the three of them managed to escape the room, it was in absolutely no part due to his puzzle prowess. 

Rosemary, thankfully, seemed to at least have a mind for these things. The warden watched as the woman worked her way down a shelf of books held snugly on shelves framed in bone. It was as methodical as it was quick. Much better than someone running full tilt and smashing their face into a door for the sixth time in a row… 

A smile flickered on her face as she looked back down at the coffin. R.I.P was carved into the dark wood top. “I know way too many people who pick up random fragments to see if they’re bone or stone to think that’s weird.” Diana rapped on the coffin lid. Hollow. Yeah, definitely something in there… She leaned against the great wooden piece, pinching at the bridge of her nose as she tried to force the name of the room back to the forefront of her mind. “Um… Spirits of the Dead… or something like that—” Wait… It wasn’t just the cavern name, it was a title… “Do you see any Poe on there?”

—

Rosemary let out a little huff of a laugh as she continued running her hands across the spines of books to see if she could uncover some of the room's mysteries. “Okay, you can’t just say that and not expect follow up questions. Are you an archeologist, or just friends with them.” There was the off chance that it was something weirder, or more insidious, but any clues the witch would have had if her escape room teammate was undead were like the dead air on the other end of a telephone line. Her fingers still flexed for them every time, hoping something had changed since her last attempt. 

“Um…” the witch looked at the tome in her hands. “Byron,” she mumbled, shoving the book back on the shelf. Her fingers ran across the rows of books as she scanned the authors names. “Poe…. Poe, Poe, Poe— ah! Edgar Allan, here we go. The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum— am I looking for a specific one, here?” Rosemary grabbed a copy of Berenice from the shelf and examined it. Nothing. She sighed as she put it back with the others and moved on to the next. 

—

“Not an archaeologist, no.” Diana stopped fussing with the coffin lid. If it was part of the puzzle (which, it would be a poor use of space if it wasn’t), then there were more steps between the two of them and it. She moved beside Rosemary, fingers skimming across a shelf of dusty leather spines. “Getting a doctorate in anthropology with a focus in religion and mythology… so every once in a while I have a little academic overlap with the bone-lickers…” Henri would probably be displeased with the nickname—especially since Wicked’s Rest was filled with real bone obsessed weirdos, not just archaeologists. 

Whoever had shelved the books had a vendetta against any sort of logical classification system. There were medical texts in with poetry, reference books with fiction. At least the authors were near each other. Rosemary found the Poe first, rattling off a list of titles. All good reads; none housing Spirits of the Dead. “It’d be in Tamerlane and Other Poems. It’ll be small, if it’s here.” Poe, Poe, Poe… “Ah! Here we go—” She tugged what could really only be described as a leather bound pamphlet off the shelf. The gilding on the embossed title had worn away with time, and the shiny letters now read merla Ot Poe. Diana flipped it open. Only it wasn’t Poe’s work inside the book. “... Latin. Very appropriate.”

—

“Bone-lickers.” The witch snorted, shaking her head as she kept pulling books. She let out another laugh the longer she thought about it, until she was in a fit of giggles. “I’m so sorry, I swear I’m focused on this room, but now I’m just thinking about a gorgeous academia setting, and showing up to an archeology one-oh-one class, and having the professor be called Doctor Bone-Licker.” Rosemary cackled as she grabbed a copy of The Raven from the shelf, flipping it open, and giving it a good shake, just in case an envelope lay hidden between the pages. Nothing. She sighed and continued on her quest for clues. “Religion and mythology… interesting specialization. What made you pick it?” 

Diana pulled a tome from the shelf, and Rosemary perked up, her eyes twinkling with excitement. “Latin? Did you just say the clue is in latin?” The witch imagined most other groups that passed through this particular escape room would have groaned at the sight, or accepted defeat before they’d even really begun. “Diana, how do you feel about trying to set a new record time for this room? Because I can read Latin.”

—

Thank god, Rosemary had a sense of humor. Diana tried to stifle her own laughter, but the cackling paired with the image of Doctor Bone-Licker, professor of Archaeology 101, lesson one, is it rock or bone forced a wheezed peal of laughter out of her. She wondered for a moment when the last time was that she’d laughed with a stranger. Before everything was covered in a shroud of suspicion, probably. Maybe she’d forgotten how good it was to laugh, or how lovely an ache it was to smile too hard, to giggle so hard you could hardly breathe. It was intoxicating. “I—heh—I grew up with— my dad’s a classics… professor, and my mother was— sorry, Doctor Bone-Licker!” She snorted. Brown eyes flew wide, and a hand slammed over her mouth before she burst out laughing again. 

The Latin was enough to start to sober her up. This was serious. They needed to figure out the cavern and solve the puzzle. However, she wasn’t prepared for the delight that seemed to spark in the other woman’s eyes at the mention of a dead language. The words Rosemary spoke next were music to Diana’s ears. An impish grin slowly stretched across her features. “Oh, they have no idea what they just unleashed on this place… I teach Latin… how fast do you think we can escape?”

—

Rosemary let out a noise that was somehow both an excited squeal and another peal of laughter. “Right? Doctor Bone-licker, and his assistant, Professor Parietal-Taster. In like, a super stuffy, dark wood, ivy covered institution where learning is sacred. And a bunch of freshman going ‘you want me to lick what?’” Diana had a sense of humor— another point in her favor. The woman was practically folded in half as she giggled over the witch’s idiocy while attempting to pull herself together. 

The laughter died down, and the slow grin that unfurled across the other woman’s face had a matching one appearing on Rosemary’s. Game on. “Oh, they don’t know what they did, putting us in a room together. Want to see if we can set the new record? The sign said thirty minutes outside. I think we can do it in half that.”

__

It was funny how quickly a friendship could flicker to life. Yes, maybe friendship was a strong word to use for a person she had only just met, but Diana could see a world in which it was a word of truth. How long had it been since she’d really laughed, or found someone outside of work who was just as big of a fucking nerd as she was? How often could she say someone made her giggle til her sides ached over a line like Professor Parietal-Taster? No, Rosemary was not her friend… yet. There was always a way for such things to start, though. 

In their case, the seeds of friendship could be planted by setting a record for breaking out of an underground escape room while cackling over a fictional bone licking archaeology professor. Weirder seeds had been sown. And they could probably water those seeds with a few cocktails once they were done…

“Less than half— come on, we’re professionals.” A Cheshire Cat grin curled across Diana’s face. “And if they ask who broke the record, we’re Doctor Bone-Licker and Professor Parietal-Taster. Escape room extraordinaires.” 

—

Less than half seemed to be a pretty on the nose estimate. The “clue” in the Poe tome actually turned out to be more of a user manual for the set up of the room. Whoever had designed it had assumed leaving the reset manual in the room would be fine, so long as it was in a dead language. Clearly, they’d never counted on Rosemary or Diana. The witch took the book and started skimming through the directions, and started issuing matching orders. 

It was pretty normal at first: locate the key hidden on the top shelf of the book shelf, use it to unlock a bone and gold inlaid box (that Rosemary wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been cursed) fetch a series of gems from the inside, arrange them in the mouths of the skull arch above the door in Roy G Biv order, and— Rosemary paused, looking at the last sentence again. “Hey um… I might be losing my mind but… lingere. Do we have to lick the skulls to get out, or am I in translation hell?”

__

It had become less of an escape room and more of a ‘follow these steps to exit’ room. The perks, Diana decided, of learning Latin. Most every clue they found had bones or skulls on it (though, she supposed it was thematically appropriate for the spooky catacombs to be laden in skeletal design and scripted in a dead language…. She’d just finished slotting a violet gem into the mouth of a skull on the doorframe when Rosemary spoke up. Lingere was not a verb she heard every day. After all, there wasn’t usually a lot of licking in Latin texts. Usually it was brutal warfare (read: all the different ways to say kill).

Diana leaned over the woman’s shoulder and peered down at the foxed pages of the Poe book they were working off of. She mumbled out the line out loud, wondering for a moment if she, too, was reading this wrong. Lick the bone, no longer stuck. Stuck… stick… sticky… “Oh my god.” A bark of laughter escaped her. “Oh my god, it’s a sticky bone pun. The clue is Doctor Bone Licker.”

Without so much as a second thoughts, she went looking for a door-knob-like protrusion on the wall of mixed bones. It wasn’t a skull that stuck out—rather, an almost shell-shaped triangular bone stuck out a bit awkwardly from the wall. She had never been good in college level biology—she didn’t need to know different ligaments to understand fae culture—but she remembered what the knee cap looked like. Diana crouched down to get to eye level. If there was a list of truly bizarre shit that the warden had done in her lifetime (and in the back of her mind, there was), this wouldn’t make the top ten… but it was still pretty fucking weird. “I’m gonna need the biggest cocktail we can find after this…. Ooookay—“ With eyes scrunched tight, Diana stuck her tongue out and Iicked the patella. It was sticky. She hated that she knew that. Something from within the cavern wall rumbled, shaking the floor beneath them as a passageway out revealed itself. A tinned little victory toot came from some hidden speaker somewhere just outside. A digital clock mounted to a cave wall read: COMPLETION TIME— 12 MIN 27 SEC 32 MIL. 

Yeah, that was probably a record.

“So…” Diana gave her watch a quick glance as she stepped out of the cavern. “You’ve probably got an hour or two before your people catch up… I think—since they were rude enough to go on without you—we go without them to the nearest place with Aperol.”