BLUE ROOM

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Moonlight slices through tall, arched windows, turning the room's blue silk wallpaper into a wash of bruised indigo and pewter. Shadowed gilt frames hang askew on the walls, their portraits' eyes reflecting the dim light like wet coins. Heavy velvet drapes, navy with a thread of silver pool on a dust-frosted parquet floor. Crystal sconces cling to the walls, their candles long burned down to stubs; when a breeze threads the room the remaining embers shiver and gutter, casting staccato shapes that crawl along the ceiling. In the far back of the room lies a silver door. You try the door to no avail. It needs a key!

Antique furniture chairs carved with thorny motifs and a chaise with an impossibly small dent, as if someone had just risen—stands like silent witnesses. The air smells faintly of cold tea and old paper, with a sweeter undernote that makes the tongue itch, sugar bleached by time.

In the center sits a low mahogany table, its surface marred with a web of old rings and a single deep scratch that leaks a darker stain. On a china plate, under no dome or cover, rest three small pieces of cake: one yellow as preserved lemon, one red like a secret wound, and one purple the color of bruises. They seem freshly cut, crumbs sharp and untouched, though a thin film of dust threads among them, as if time cannot decide whether to preserve or consume. A faint, barely audible ticking seems to come from the table itself, syncing with the slow pulse in the wallpaper's pattern. Each tick makes the cakes' shadows twitch, as though something beneath them breathes. Just then, the whispers tell you to eat one of the cakes, but which one?