“We’d better search the room,” Richard muttered. “Meet you back here.”
I nodded, breath catching and holding like a fist in my stomach. What if there were more monks just standing there in the pitch darkness of this huge room? “We’ll zigzag back and forward from here to the wall. If you find anything, call out and stay there. I’ll find you.”
“Yeah.” Richard disappeared from view.
I began my search, to and fro, moving a little to the right each time. “Anything?” I called, not so much expecting that he had but just wanting to hear his voice.
The silence before Richard answered seemed an age. “Nope. Nothing here.”
Richard and I met up again, panting.
I looked back over my shoulder at the clock. We’d wasted four precious minutes.
Shooting an anxious glance at Richard, I moved into the monk’s path. “Give us a clue.”
The monk reached inside his clothing and produced a scroll.
“Thank you,” I said, trying to hide my shock.
“Bingo. He responds to commands.” Richard took the scroll and picked at the twine that held it closed. “When we first came in, you said, show us what you’ve got. The guy showed you what he was holding—a candle.”
“Okay . . . okay,” I said, collecting my breath. If it was that simple, we had this challenge in the bag. “Get it open.”
Richard rolled out the scroll on top of the hexagonal box. It contained an illustration of a cave, some people chained up and a fire.
Raising his eyes to me, Richard made a derisive snort. “Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I learned this in the first psychology class I took at college. It’s kids’ stuff.”
I looked closer. In the cave, a line of chained prisoners stared at a wall. Behind them, a fire burned. In between the fire and the prisoners, there was a puppeteer—making a shadow puppet on the wall for the prisoners.
“What does it mean?”
Richard screwed up his face. “Something about shadows. I don’t remember. Hell, I was smashed at the time.”
I whirled around to the monk. “Tell us what this means.”
He didn’t answer.
“Show us what this means,” I demanded.
He remained staring at me blankly.
I looked back at the picture. The mask that the puppeteer was holding up reminded me of the awful faces in the mirror in challenge four. The prisoners’ heads were restricted. They couldn’t turn around and see what was behind them. “So, all the prisoners can see is the shadow, not the real thing?” I asked Richard urgently.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “That’s right. But the shadow pictures I saw back in college were of animals or something. Not that image.”
I could practically hear my heart ticking as I looked at the clock again.
Four minutes left.
“Give us anything else you have to show us,” Richard told the monk.
The monk stared straight ahead, unmoving.
“All right,” Richard muttered. “So, there’s nothing else. This is it. What are we supposed to do? Make our own shadow puppets?” He bent his head as if thinking hard. “Give me the candle, monk.”
Again, the monk didn’t move.
“Richard, you already asked him if he had anything else to give us. I don’t think we’re meant to have the candle.”
Richard jabbed an angry finger at the monk’s chest. “You. Make shadow puppets.”
We waited.
Nothing.
Three minutes.
I could hear Richard breathing now. He pointed at each of the prisoners, of which there were five. “The five senses. Sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. I remember that much. Plato was making a point that they couldn’t rely on their senses to work out what was real and what wasn’t.”
I bent my head over the picture. I should have worked that out. Each of the prisoners was subtly touching a different part of their body with one of their hands—eyes, mouth, ears, nose or body.
The clues were all here, in this picture. Clues that were based on Plato but also clues that were made especially for this challenge.
Two minutes.
The challenges were simple. Designed to be completed within time. Don’t go crazy. Go simple.
But what? What were we missing?
If we couldn’t use our five senses, what was left?
Thought.
Mind.
Brother Vito’s numbers and inevitability.
The monk had nothing left to show us. The answer lay somewhere else. Richard and I had found nothing on the walls or floor. Unless we’d missed something.