Sallowmere Hall, Halloween, seven o'clock
You are holding the handle of the front door, and it will not turn. Check-out is at midnight, the booking says so, and you and your friends have until then to get out through the front door, though the house has other ideas. If you are still inside at midnight, the house keeps you, the way it has kept everything it was ever told to keep.
It is your last night at Sallowmere, Halloween, and the house has been strange all week. Every night somebody turned the lights off, and every night you were somewhere else: a kitchen with a fire that must not go out, a séance in the library, a wireless school in the blackout. Your friends have stopped laughing about it.
Tonight the lights will not go off at all. Every switch in the house is down and every light is burning, and the old stone fireplace in the kitchen, the one the listing calls a feature, is burning too, although there is nothing in it. The host's messages have been arriving all evening, polite and old-fashioned, each one signed P.
The last one says: check-out is at midnight. Please leave every light on. The house prefers it.
Hour One: the keypad
The keypad by the front door has always taken the four-digit code from the booking. Tonight its little screen says something else, in plain letters: WORD?
On the hall table, beside the host's note, is the glass case you noticed earlier in the week: a log from the war, when this house was a wireless school, open at its last page. The last line is in pencil, and somebody has held a match to it:
23.58 TEAL/ROOK CANCELLED ON THE WORD ~~~~~~~~~~
The word is a brown scorch. You know what it was. You gave it to London yourself.
Give the keypad the word that stopped the drop.
To the history board in the hall.
The log's last line says the drop was cancelled at two minutes to midnight. You were at the telephone when it was.