Seventh Hour of Investigation

The safe door looked very sturdy. It had a little turn dial with numbers surrounding it.

Thump!

Nervously he took a step back. Something was moving inside there. But how? There were no air holes of any kind. How could anything survive in that metal sarcophagus?

He needed to get it out of there quickly. Whatever “it” was. But the combination was a tough nut to crack. Without any leads it would be impossible to get this thing open.

Standing back up, he thought about good hiding spots. Efficiently he searched through the two desk drawers. Nothing. Just the typical stationery one would expect. Patting down the sides of the wooden drawers he looked for a secret compartment, but he couldn’t find anything.

“Damn it!” he murmured. So he had to go through the books after all. But finding a specific number in these rows and rows of books would be a near insurmountable task.

Panic began to set in. It was impossible, completely impossible.

This would be the end of the line. What ever was moving around in there would long be dead, before he had managed to open that blasted door.

Exhausted he sat down in the armchair and studied the book spines for clues.

Cooking crazy? No. American megafauna? Surely not. Memory loss in dementia patients…

He stood up and walked up to the shelf. Could it be…? Yes! There was a whole section in one of the shelves dedicated to the study of memory loss. Grabbing a few, he skimmed the first few pages.

Something itched in the back of his mind. This had to be it. It had to be.

But which one was the right book? Could he read them all? Ethan roughly estimated that there were about 50 books on the topic. How would he decide where to start? He could never read all fifty of them in a short amount of time, especially because most of them looked like scientific textbooks. One doesn’t read scientific textbooks quickly.

Where to start, where to start? It was no use. If he didn’t know where to look, it would make sense to read them all. He started grabbing handfuls of books and carrying them to his desk. If he didn’t know where to begin, he would just take all of them and work through them one by one. It’s what felt most natural.

After a few trips he was almost done. He was about to grab the final three books, when he saw it. There was something etched into the wood of the self. On the back wall. Very thinly, almost invisible. The only reason he saw it was a tiny ray of sunlight, fighting its way through the curtain slit.

Getting closer he could make out the etchings. They were numbers. 18.92.13