Ashgrove — hints

Correct, and it is deliberate. Act I is fourteen honest rooms and your nerve is held above seventy no matter what you do. Learn the house while it behaves: pace every room, chalk here to number them, and talk to all four of them including the dog.

Because in two days you will be in a cellar where the room tells you it is somewhere else, and a number you wrote on the floorboards yourself is shown back to you in its own line under any description the house invents.

The plan of 1841 from the long drawer in the estate room. Everything else can wait; the plan cannot, because Act II is a subtraction and the plan is the other number.

The board of arms over the hall fire, the eleven bells in the back passage, the shelf of eleven read-to-pieces books in the library, and the photograph in the morning room in the frame that is polished when the two beside it are not.

Pace the five rooms on the first floor — the landing, the best bedroom, the master's room, the blue room and the foot of the nursery stair — and then consult plan. That is the act, and it takes about twenty minutes.

Pacing gives you the figures. The answer is a subtraction and the other number is on Topham's plan, so get the plan out and look at it.

Read the household accounts in the estate room and count the plates. Read the margins of the library books. Put the back of your hand on the west wall of the blue room, which the plan says has weather behind it.

Yes. Your nerve has gone below twenty and at that point Ashgrove will rename rooms. It will also leave real exits off the list and put ones on it that are not there. The game prints the rules the first time you set foot on the landing at night — steady puts your nerve back and costs one turn.

Three ways, all free and all honest. test north holds the candle to the wall — the flame leans if there is air behind it. call tibb and the dog goes and stands at a real door. Or simply walk at it: if there is a door, going that way goes through it whatever the game said.

Then there was never a door there, you now know it, and it cost you eight of your nerve. That is the price of the fastest method and it is a fair price.

Up. The nursery stair, the nursery passage, and the nursery — and then hold the candle to the chimney breast in a room with no chimney over it.

Chalk every room the moment you enter it, before you do anything else. Five ways lead off the main vault and you will come back into it from one of them in the dark and not know which. This is the act the chalk exists for.

He is at the top of the cellar steps. call tibb and he comes down, and he will stand at a real door on request, and he will not enter two of the rooms down there.

A name. The muniment room has the parish transcripts — baptisms and burials for this parish from 1660 — and the household accounts from 1794. One of those has an entry in 1841 and the other has no entry at all, ever, and that is the whole of it.

The well. Four feet across, uncovered since 1863, in the one room the dog refused to enter, and you were in it with the candle out. Going back the way you came is always allowed; any other direction in the dark in that room is not. It is the only way to die in this house.

Three, and the game does not think any of them is obviously right. open the wall and let it be a room. keep it — learn Mrs Braddock's arrangement and take it on. Or go down to the hall and tell nall, and it goes into the record and the county and the newspapers and there is no putting it back.

Two things first: read the wall inside the room, and then go and stand in Mrs Braddock's kitchen and say his name to her out loud. She has done it twice a day for thirty-one years. That is not sentiment, it is the only decent order to do this in.

He told you on the first evening what he needed: something he can measure. Have the name and have the account books in your hands, and say it to him in the hall.