The Escape Room

Built sometime in the early 1900s, the old barn on the Cook family farm was already in bad shape some twenty years ago when we first discovered it. Lizzie’s parents must have known it was on the property, but they never mentioned it. They probably didn’t want us getting ourselves into trouble. And, judging by the building’s poor condition, that was the right call. Still, they should have expected that we’d find it eventually. And we did, one balmy summer evening with the smell of backyard barbecues on the wind and the glow of lightning bugs flickering through the long grass.

Even for a farm of this size, the barn was small -- large enough to house a pair of horses or a few goats, at most. But to us, two young children stumbling upon the mysterious structure tucked away in a wild, unkempt back corner of the property, it was monumental. And it was ours.

Just as Lizzie’s parents hadn’t told us of the barn’s existence, we didn’t tell them that we had found it. We also didn’t tell them that we kept going back there, day after day, week after week, all summer long. Had they known, they’d have forbidden us from going back. It’s too dangerous, her father would have cautioned. That’s no place for children, her mother would have agreed. But we knew better.

To the grown-ups, the lofted barn with its sagging roof, fading chipped paint, and rotting boards would have seemed less than the sum of its parts. A relic of the past that no longer served a purpose. A cautionary tale of the harsh dangers of time. For us, it was anything but.

One day, that barn was a spaceship that took us beyond the stars, deep into the blackness of uncharted space where no human had ever traveled before. The next, it was an Arthurian castle filled with knights and nobles dressed up in their finest for a grand, royal feast. Another time, it was a Victorian mansion hosting a grand vampire ball. It was even a hidden volcano lair, filled to the brim with superhero gadgets and trophies we’d collected from legions of villains.

As we got older and our imaginations matured, the barn changed with us. It became a place of safety where Lizzie and I consoled one another after learning the stinging pain of broken hearts. It was where we tried out first bitter sips of her father’s homebrewed moonshine -- which stung just as much as the broken hearts, albeit in a very different way -- and where we recuperated the morning after, having not learned our lesson. And it was where we buried the poor little bunny that Lizzie accidentally ran over just two months after she got her driver’s license.

As the years went by, we visited the old barn less and less. And we drifted apart, ourselves -- moving to separate parts of the country for college and starting our own separate lives. But we kept coming back, year after year, mostly on holidays. And we’d always meet up at that old barn.

We were in that barn, one snowy Christmas Eve when Lizzie told me that she was engaged. And we met there again, surrounded by the vibrant reds and yellows of late Autumn, so I could tell her about my upcoming firstborn. We made the trek to that secluded corner of her family farm after my mother passed, still dressed head-to-toe in black formalwear. And we drank our fill of moonshine again, sitting on the barn’s worse-for-wear porch once Lizzie’s divorce was finalized.

But then, Elizabeth Ann Cook stopped coming home.

When I got the call, I didn’t even pack; I just drove to the airport, bought a ticket, and returned to her family farm. At the funeral, her children told me it had been quick and painless. Family and friends spoke about how odd it was to be in the Cook home without her. And her parents, still married after all these years, wept together, seemingly not a word spoken between them throughout the service. But all I could think about was that old barn, still tucked away in that wild, unkempt back corner of the property.

I had intended to let the crumbling edifice rot in peace, leaving it an isolated, decrepit monument to the past. But once the service was over, I found myself drawn toward it, beckoned to the edge of the woods by that familiar balmy summer weather, the smell of food cooking over charcoal fires, and the glow of fireflies darting amongst wildflowers.

And I made the lonely trek out, unbeknownst to Elizabeth Ann Cook’s family and friends, to that secret place we had kept to ourselves for all that time.

In spite of the creeping ruin of time, the old barn looked to me just as it had all those years ago with its sagging roof, fading chipped paint, and rotting boards. Only the surrounding foliage had changed -- old-growth replaced by new weeds, familiar tree trunks covered in unfamiliar tendrils of ivy.

With my heart in my throat, I trudged through the wild vegetation and climbed the three rickety steps up to the porch, the boards now creaking just as much as my old bones, and stepped inside.

Beyond the threshold, the old barn was anything but an old barn. It was an interstellar spacecraft. It was an unbreachable fortress. It was a sprawling Transylvanian estate. It was a magma-filled hideout. It was just as it had been when we were kids. And there, waiting for me in the middle of it all, exactly as I remembered her, was my best friend Lizzie.