The Thread
A free online text adventure in five acts. 1785. Six hundred feet of cord, and a gallery that looks exactly like the last one.
In May 1785 a cellar wall on the rue de la Lingerie gave way, and what came through it was not water. The Cimetière des Innocents has been taking the dead of central Paris for six hundred years and its ground now stands eight feet higher than the street it is walled into, and the decision has finally been taken to empty it — at night, by torchlight, into carts, and down a shaft into the exhausted limestone quarries under the south of the city.
You are Étienne Barre, forty-one, vérificateur in the Inspection Générale des Carrières. You letter galleries: you measure a passage, you paint the name of the street above it on the wall at head height, and because of that a man can stand under Paris at four in the morning and know exactly where he is.
Tonight you are also four hundred livres richer, on the private account of a gentleman who wants to know what is in a chamber that appears on none of the Inspection's plans — south of a wall that sheet 94 marks as maçonnerie ancienne, non percée. Old masonry. Not broken through.
The line
South of that wall nothing is lettered and nothing is surveyed. The galleries are the same section, the same stone and the same age as the ones behind you, and there is nothing whatever to tell them apart, because there is no reason there should be.
So you pay out cord behind you as you go, and take it up again as you come back, and the number on the reel is the exact length of the leash you are on. The thread is not a convenience. It is the map.
And six hundred feet turns out not to reach. The thing that makes it reach is the job you already do for a living: measure a gallery, letter it in chalk, and take the cord off it — because a gallery with a name on it does not need a rope to find again. Explore on the line, walk it back, convert the near ground into known ground, and go further. There is one stick of chalk and it does four galleries.
The man who did not sign out
Everyone who goes down signs the register, with the hour, and signs out again. There are two hundred and six descents in four years and two hundred and five returns. On the fourteenth of August 1781 J. Guillemin went down at twenty past six and somebody drew a line across the column.
He is at the end of the east gallery. His cord is tied round him with a bowline and cut square, forty feet away, by a good knife. He had bearings on a tally board and a line to walk home on, and when somebody took the line away he had a number of identical holes and six hours of oil.
How it ends
Four ways, and the game will not choose for you. What is in the chamber is nine feet of vellum listing eleven people who took the King's money before the arrests of 1307 and what each of them was paid, and the eighth name belongs to the family that is paying you. You can carry it up, burn it, put it back where four hundred and seventy-five years of the same archive has quietly turned to pulp, or climb out and say nothing.
Two and a half to three hours. No sign-up, no download, and it saves where it stands.
Stuck?
The hint page gives you one nudge at a time, act by act, without spoiling anything you have not asked about. The full walkthrough is there if you would rather just be told.