Todd sat with Linda in
front of the monitors, watching Shana and Sam roam through the rooms, while
Mike and David scrambled over each other to be the one closest to Carl. He was
amazed at the sophistication of the computer system as it responded to the
actions of the participants.
Once someone entered a room, a switch on the
monitoring system clicked to close that door and conceal it into the wall. At
the same time, a second door was revealed in the room. When the second door was
opened, another switch was activated to make the first door resurface again.
Once the second room was entered, a switch clicked to close and conceal that
door while revealing a new door in that room. The doors opened and closed to
indicate the path that they were supposed to have taken at the party: a path
that would have led them in a perpetual circle through the same sequence of rooms.
They watched Sam and
Shana—with Mike, David, and Carl following close behind—retrace their steps
through the rooms. When they held both doors to a room open at the same time,
the switches weren’t triggered. This enabled them to backtrack through the
rooms—just as they had done last night: by doing it in reverse and bypassing the system.
Afterward, the group
grudgingly left the house without
uncovering any new evidence on the identity of the perpetrator of the
elaborate scheme. However, Todd felt less crestfallen than the others. He was
thrilled to have figured out how and where the rooms had been controlled. The rooms
rotated in a circle around the trap door to the attic. Now he was able to
formulate a few new ideas about who had been behind the fake party.
