The handle slowly turned and a girl's head peeped inside. Once confident that it was empty, she entered. The girl seemed to be about sixteen or seventeen. In her messy hair and wrinkled night-dress, she cautiously looking around once more and tiptoed into the room. Her wary eyes darted left and right as she moved about, flinching at the faintest sound on the carpet.
Coming to the shelf, she began sliding it.
Right. Left. Pause. Right. Pause. Right. Left. Right. Left. Right. Pause. Pause. Pause. Centre.
The wall with the painting moved backwards and sideways, giving way to a pitch-dark opening. There was no way to tell if it was just void. The girl timidly inched near it and stood still for a moment. Then, put a hesitant foot forward only to quickly retract it. She turned back and went to the shelf and slid it in the opposite pattern. The wall moved back into place and she left the room.
Some time later, she returned, holding a rectangular thing in her hand. Re-opening the passage, she tapped on it. Light flashed out. It was her phone. Slowly and heedfully, she moved closer to the space illuminated by the flashlight. About five steps ahead, was an escalator, going downward. As the girl slowly descended, the light grew fainter with her, ultimately returning the passage to its former darkness.
While she was busy in her quest, a pair of eyes was surveilling her. Once the passage was completely dark, a silhouette emerged from behind the recliner. Olivia looked at the opening with interest.
The escalator took her to a place Olivia believed to be under the ground. It was so dark that she could not even see her own hands. If she ignored the hard step beneath her feet, it would not be difficult to imagine floating in the vast sea of darkness.
'Is this thing even moving?' Olivia tapped on the step.
The escalator moved really slowly in the pitch-black, dead silent environment. After what felt like an eternity, it finally came to a stop. Olivia stepped down and listened intently. Faint footsteps sounded somewhere behind her. She followed it, treading carefully in the darkness. After a lot of turns, the footsteps became louder and someone's loud breaths could be heard. Olivia spotted the girl from a distance.
She looked over her shoulder every now and then while her chest heaved up and down from nervousness.
'Dude, breath softer! You dare plan to sneak around while breathing that loudly?' Olivia berated her.
It took them quite a while to reach their destination, or rather the girl's destination as Olivia was only tailing her.
They stopped near a door. As the girl hovered the light above it, Olivia saw that there was a manual password system near the handle. The girl entered the password while shining the light on it.
'Dam*, is the universe in a good mood today? It suddenly became so helpful! So uncharacteristic.' Olivia thought delightfully as she did not have to go through the trouble of finding the password.
The door opened with a creak. Normally it would be nothing but it felt especially loud in the eerie silence. The lights inside turned on automatically when the door was unlocked. Seeing the room empty, the girl slid inside.
Olivia stood a safe distance from her, hiding in the darkness. She could see the room clearly.
It was pretty big and well-lit. There were wall-mounted tables and basins on three sides. Test tubes, flasks, breakers, burners and many other things were kept on the tables. Covering almost half of the fourth wall stood a glass cabinet. Inside it were three racks. The top one was full of syringes, the middle one had numerous vials and the last one was stacked with all sorts of lab garments.
Under the light, the girl's face became clear. It was Deepa. Olivia saw her moving towards the basin and cleaning her hands thoroughly, following all the twelve steps. Putting on gloves, she took out a syringe and a vial. After disinfecting the needle, she injected the liquid into her brachial artery.
Right when she was proceeding to properly dispose everything, her phone vibrated. The sudden sound made her flinch, causing the vial to slip off her hand. It fell on the floor with a crash, making Deepa jump out of her skin. She took out the phone, which was still vibrating. A panicked look marred her face as she saw the screen. She quickly took off the gloves and threw them in the bin along with the needle without burning it. She looked around in alarm trying to get something to clean the glass shards but when the phone vibrated again, she just rushed out of the room.
Olivia came out of the shadows. When Deepa came out, the door had already auto-locked itself. But Olivia had already seen the password, so re-opening the door was a piece of cake.
She gazed around the room. Coming near the cabinet, she peered at the vials, which were arranged in sets according to the colour of the solution they contained.
'The green one huh?' Her eyes caught sight of the set where one row was uneven.
Squatting near the shards, Olivia studied each piece. A few drops of solution were still sticking to a shard. Using a fine needle she collected them in a small tube. Then she opened the bin and used another tube to collect blood, tissue and solution samples from the syringe. Putting everything safely in a secret pocket inside her shirt, she exited the room.
Going back to the escalator was easy. While coming here, she made sure her watch registered the path she followed. Now all she needed was to trace it backwards. With the direction coming from her earphones, she easily navigated the path.
Reaching there, Olivia halted. She stretched out her hands and felt around.
'...'
She did so with her feet too.
'...'
There was nothing before her. All her hands felt was air and her feet, the ground. The escalator was gone. Olivia checked her watch to see if she got the location wrong. But no, it was showing the same place. Since going back that way was out of the option, she tried looking for another exit.
Olivia strolled aimlessly for a long time. It felt like walking inside a black hole, going deeper and deeper by the minute, reaching nowhere.
'F*ck. This darkness is messing up my sense of direction.' Olivia frowned wondering if she had just been walking in circles.
'Hm?!'
Suddenly, she bumped into something. Feeling it around, Olivia realised it was a door. While travelling around, she had already surmised that so far no one was following her. So, without delaying, she turned on the flashlight on her watch over the door.
'Oh? Interesting. Another one.' She raised her eyebrows seeing the same kind of manual lock.
The keys were scanned, and a picture popped up, showing fingerprints on specific numbers. Studying it some more, she figured out the combination. It was easy. She just had to look where the prints had a deeper impression, figure out which number was repeated how many times, then calculate all the possible combinations and recall all the information on Mr Singha Roy. Finally, based on that, she simply needed to imagine herself as him and get the correct password in one go because entering the incorrect one may activate some self destruction mechanism.
'So... I'm Roy, and I want to put a password on this door which hides some secret. I know the numbers I wanna use...'
She focused on the lock and slowly pressed on the keys.
When the final number was pressed, a click was followed by some beeping sounds like those on time bombs. Olivia stared at the lock intently. After some time it finally became silent and the door slid sideways.
There were heaps of bygone stationeries. Books and notebooks made from natural paper, graphite pencils, ink pens and so on. All stacked neatly in separate ceiling high shelves. But Olivia's brows furrowed tightly because of something else.