I was lying on a wooden bench. My back ached, probably due to the hard, flat boards underneath me, although I had long since gotten used to waking up in pain. It moved around a bit, sometimes in my knees, sometimes in my joints. I was in a fairly good shape for a woman my age, in that most of my body was in serviceable condition most of the time. I couldn't imagine what might have possessed me to lie down on anything harder than a sofa.

I looked around. I was in what looked like a jail cell. Not a modern one though, an old-fashioned one, with irregular stones composing the walls and floor. There were no windows; the whole place was dimly lit by torchlight coming in from beyond the bars. Inch-thick, rusty, iron bars provided an obstructed view of the torch-lit hallway beyond. Waking up in an unfamiliar place can give anyone a turn of fright, but the sheer cartoonishness of my surroundings made it impossible for me to take it seriously. Where was I? Some kind of amusement park was my first guess. I couldn't remember going to any such place, but days often melted together in my memory these days.

“Hey, Gramma is awake.” it was Elizabeth's voice.

“Finally.” answered Kyle. He then realized that he was about to be rebuked, and amended his statement. “I mean, good morning Grandma, how are you feeling?”

“Fine, thank you dear. Where is this? I don't remember coming in here.”

“We don't either. We just woke up here about an hour ago.” answered Elizabeth.

“Well where is your mom?” These are Charlotte's kids, after all. I hated when she left them with me. It's not that I don't enjoy spending time with them (especially Elizabeth, if I'm being honest), but I don't enjoy trying to keep them under control. They were always getting into fights and then calling in an adult to referee. If Charlotte wants to waste her life mediating a lot of pre-teen angst that's her business.

“Don't know. Haven't seen her.” answered Kyle dismissively.

“Well that's absurd. Elizabeth, how did we get here?” Kyle would say anything to get a rise of his grandma, but Elizabeth was the honest one. I called Elizabeth Elizabeth because I knew my granddaughter loved her name and refused to accept any abbreviation of it. I had been given the name Patricia at birth, and it had always been a struggle to prevent it from being reduced to a mere Patty. Kyle called his sister Liz, because his parents had given him a short, unimpressive name and he wanted to spread the pain.

“It's true Gramma. Kyle was asleep when I woke up. Before that there were dogs outside.” said Elizabeth.

“I saw them too.” said Kyle quickly, as though trying to claim credit. “They came back, then left, like they were on patrol.”

“Is there a door?” it sounded like a daft question even as I asked it, but the idea that we were genuinely trapped in this silly-looking parody of a prison was too remote to even consider.

“It has a big lock on it. On the other side. There's no way out, we checked.” answered Kyle, as though this was all an oversight on my part.

I could see that it was time for me to be a positive force in this situation. I got to my feet (a slower and more painful operation than it had been even a few years earlier), rubbed my eyes to clear them, and approached the bars. I saw that the bars formed a rusty iron gate, with a padlock securing the gate on the opposite side. The padlock also looked like something out of a medieval dungeon, a fist-sized cast-iron monstrosity that looked like it had been banged together by a village blacksmith. I rattled the gate a bit, but I soon accepted that if that big lock wasn't removed the gate would not open.

“Hey, Hellooo!” I shouted down the hallway. Whoever was running this place had to be within earshot. “We're locked in here! Yoo Hoo, anyone!”

My call attracted the dogs, as Elizabeth had generously described them. They came charging in all at once, barking their heads off like they had just spotted a squirrel. There were three of them, and they were enormous. They weren't pit-bulls, which is what I was expecting from their barking. They looked a little like dobermans, with lean, muscular bodies and long, narrow muzzles. But they were monsters, pure and simple. They had actual fire sitting in the sockets where their eyes should have been. They had bony spikes protruding from their spines and shoulders. They looked like they ought to be guarding Satan's back yard. I let out a shriek as I jumped backward from the bars. The huge things continued to bark, snarl, and growl at us as they gnawed at the bars. The children were huddled behind me, I could hear that Elizabeth was on the verge of crying. After a few minutes of barking themselves hoarse, the beasts seemed to calm down and lose interest. One by one, they drifted down the hallway and out of sight.

We sat on the wooden bench together for a time. My heart was still pounding away long after they had left.

“How did we get here? If you know, you have to tell me. Grandma is frightened.”

They were silent, which scared me even more. Kyle, in particular, was not a child accustomed to silence. They both usually had the air of knowing everything, or at least everything that they thought was important, which wasn't much. They had their cellphones, after all, which meant that they had the knowledge of the ages ready at any moment, to be summoned as needed and dismissed just as easily. That had not been one of Charlotte's better parenting decisions, in my humble opinion. A twelve year old with a cell phone was ridiculous enough, but a nine-year old with one is beyond the pale. Wait...

“What about your phones? Can you get a signal?

“They're gone.” answered Kyle. This was clearly the part of the situation that bothered him the most.

“Our pockets were empty when we woke up.” clarified Elizabeth.

This was bad. This was serious. These two were looking to me to figure out this situation, and I was at a total loss. None of it made sense. There was no conceivable explanation for how we could have ended up here, and those dogs looked like they meant business. They weren't just scary, they were actual monsters, as in members of a species not of this world. They were hell-hounds, creatures of myth, like something out of a movie.

“You''re sure there's no other way out?” I asked.

“Yeah, we checked everywhere for a secret passage. Places like this always have secret passages.” Kyle rattled this off as though it should be obvious, which made me curious.

“What places like this? I've never been anywhere like this.” I asked.

“You know. Medieval dungeons, like in a game. There's always a secret passageway, or a tunnel, or a guard you can bribe, or something, cuz otherwise, you wouldn't get out.”

“Isn't not getting out the whole point of a dungeon?” I asked.

“Don't start with that, Gramma. I tried to tell him while we were looking for secret tunnels.” supplied Elizabeth.

“How do you even look for a secret tunnel?” I knew I was desperate when I was asking Kyle for information, he was probably just making it up. It just goes to show that without real information, you're willing to accept any substitute.

“You tap.” he demonstrated by wrapping his knuckles against the floor, like knocking on a door.

“If it sounds hollow, that means there's a secret passage.”

“And you already tried this everywhere in here?” I was really beginning to wonder how I had managed to sleep through all this racket.

“Yeah, we tried all over the floor and the walls, everywhere but around the bench, cuz we didn't want to wake you up.” explained Kyle.

“Well, we might as well look there, its the most obvious place.” I answered.

A puzzled look spread on Kyle's face, which meant that I had scored a point. “Why do you say that?”

“It's the best place to hide something from the the guards. You cover the bench with your blanket, if you have one, then you can dig at the wall where the guards can't see you.” I explained. Kyle's face displayed the mild frustration of the perennial know-it-all.

I held up the bench while the children checked under it. It was held to the wall by a pair of chains. Kyle and Elizabeth set aside a stoneware water jug and a ceramic chamber pot (hopefully we would escape before I had to explain what that was for) that had been stored there, and began tapping around. The tapping didn't reveal anything, mainly because it soon became clear that the children had no real idea of what a hollow sound actually sounded like. The two of them began arguing about it, but I was struck by something I saw in the dim torchlight, and began feeling around. Sure enough, the mortar around one of the stone blocks looked slightly different; a bit lighter in color and crumbly. I pressed hard on this one, and it slid back a little.

“Good job Gramma. You found it!” said Elizabeth excitedly.

I was glad that Elizabeth was pleased, but frankly, this was more than a little suspicious. This prison was obviously some kind of mock-up, like something a movie studio with a massive budget but very little interest in authenticity would build. The fact that there was a secret passage in a fairly easy-to-find spot confirmed that this jail was built specifically to allow the occupant to escape with a little effort. Those canine monsters were awfully convincing, though. I would be certain that this was all some elaborate prank my grandchildren were playing on me, were it not for that. I noticed a pensive look on Kyle's face.

“What is it? What are you thinking?” There was a long pause as he considered.

“Look, me and Liz were just playing. I didn't think we were actually gonna find a secret passage. I'm not an idiot.”

Elizabeth crossed her arms and blew a raspberry at the implication of this announcement.

“And you wonder what it means.” I prompted.

“Yeah! No one would ever build a prison like this.”

“Well somebody did!” said Elizabeth.

“Maybe.”

“What do you mean, maybe? It's here, so somebody built it!” Hard to argue with that logic, but Kyle did anyway.

“What if it isn't? I mean, when I first woke up here, I thought I was just having a weird dream. This place, those fucked-up looking dogs...”

“Watch your language, young man.” I warned.

Kyle ignored me. “They're just like the prison. They look real, but they can't be real. I don't think I'm dreaming, I never have dreams like this.”

Again, I couldn't argue that point. I've had plenty of dreams where I thought I was awake, but when you're awake, you know it, and I was definitely awake now.

“What this place makes me think of, is a video game. I think we're in virtual reality.”

That idea hadn't occurred to me, mainly because it was bonkers.

“You mean those things where you put on really expensive goggles, and you see things in 3-D? This isn't one of those. They're never good enough to actually fool you.”

As I said this, I started wondering if it was actually true. It's not as though anyone in my usual social circle keeps up with the latest tech trends. Silvia was still bragging about that cell phone she got a few years ago. If some company or other had made a machine that could do this, the first person to tell me would probably be...Kyle. That's a depressing thought. How did an ill-mannered twelve-year-old boy become my main source of information about the modern world?

“Not that, exactly, but something like it. It would have to be something reeaaalllly cutting edge, like something the government built in a secret skunkwork lab somewhere. Like in that movie.”

“What movie?” asked Elizabeth.

“You remember, the one where there's like this guy, and he goes into that...thing... with the...look, it doesn't matter. Point is, I don't think this is really real.”

Sad. For a second there, Kyle sounded like he might know what he was talking about. I had always seen glimmers of intelligence coming from him, but they never lasted long. He was the kind of kid who excelled at anything he was interested in, and only in things he was interested in. It had been dinosaurs for a while, and fighter planes, and then WWII battles. And yet his grades in school were mediocre at best. He could absorb knowledge, but he usually didn't see the point.

“That doesn't really make sense” Again, I was by no means certain that this was the case.

“It's the only thing that makes sense! I bet we're really lying on hospital beds in some secret government lab with wires connecting our brains to a big computer.”

What a creepy idea. What was worse, I had no way of ruling it out.

“This isn't getting us anywhere. Let's just focus on getting out of this phony dungeon, and see if if we can find someone who can tell us what's going on.” I replied.

Kyle and Elizabeth seemed to accept this, or at least, they decided to discuss it later when I wasn't around. I knew they both thought of me as a daft old lady. At least Elizabeth didn't go out of her way to make me feel like a daft old lady.

“Kyle, see if you can push that loose block out of the way. Its too heavy for me.”

“Okay.” Kyle seemed pleased to have something useful to do. He squatted down and gave the stone a hard shove, and sure enough, it slid backward with a loud grinding noise. I glanced back to see if the dogs had heard, but they were nowhere to be seen. The opening that the block left behind was less than a square foot in area. Kyle poked his head in.

“Ah, crap!” he muttered.

“Kyle!”

“Sorry.” said Kyle, insincerely. “But it isn't a way out. It just leads to another cell like this one.”

That wasn't ideal, but it might well be better than nothing.

“Do you think you can get through?”

“Yeah, give me a second.”

In fact, it took a bit of writhing and scraping for Kyle to get through. Elizabeth managed it in less than half the time. Soon I was alone on this side of the stone wall. Knowing I would regret it, I slowly dropped to one knee.

“Do you see anything?” I whispered through the opening.

“Yeah, I think I see the key. It's on the wall over there, next to the skulls.” whispered Elizabeth.

“Skulls? What skulls?”

“Just crawl through, Grandma. It's not too bad.” hissed Kyle.

“I don't think so. I won't fit.” This was a lie, of course. If anything, Kyle was a little bigger than me. I just didn't fancy the idea of crawling on my belly over those flagstones and grinding my knees and ribs and shoulders against the sides.

“C'mon Gramma, you can do it.” said Elizabeth, one of nature's optimists.

She must have spoken a little too loudly, however, because soon I could hear nothing except the mad barking of the those horrible dogs. The thought of my grandkids over there, facing those monsters where I couldn't see or protect them was unbearable. I dove through the opening, wincing in pain as the rough stone mangled my body. I was sure I would be covered with bruises, but I was all those poor children had right now. With the sound of tearing cloth in my ears, I hauled myself to my feet in the next cell.

Of course, by the time I was done, those accursed mutts had grown bored and buggered off again. I could see now that this cell was just as protected as the last one had been. Kyle and Elizabeth were gawking at me.

“Wow, Gramma, you got through quicker than Kyle did!” I smiled at Elizabeth's words, but I had really hurt myself, especially trying it so quickly. The sleeve of my sweater was torn, and I was sure my arms and legs would be peppered with painful welts the next time I looked.

I looked around the cell. It was much like the previous one, only dirtier and emptier. There was no bench, water jug, or chamber-pot. The bars were just as thick, but seemed more heavily corroded. The hallway outside was more brightly lit. I could see several torches burning merrily in wall sconces. I wondered briefly who had lit the torches, and how long they could possibly last. I hadn't seen any human jailer around, and if it were the middle of the night there would be no sense in keeping the place lit. Any real medieval dungeon would have had barred windows to supply light, things like candles and lamps would have been too expensive.

As Elizabeth had said, there was a key hanging on the wall just outside (another forehead-slapping oversight on the part of whoever had designed this place). Next to it, sitting on a wooden shelf fixed to the stone wall, were three human skulls. They actually would have been pretty creepy, were it not for the fact that their eye sockets were burning. They had some kind of oil lamp inside them that produced reddish-orange flames where their eyes should have been. I was curious to see how this was accomplished, but the overall effect was of a very expensive Halloween decoration.

I poked my head through the bars and peaked down the corridor. The cells continued down the hallway to the left and turned the corner at the far side. I realized the the dungeon was composed of two rows of cells, arranged back-to-back, with a hallway wrapped around the outside. Down the well-lit corridor I could see our trio of canine guards, heading off on their constant patrol. They would be back before too long, and sooner if we made any noise. To the right, I could see that the hallway came to an end, and there was the dungeon's entrance (or exit, as the case may be. It was a large set of double doors, made from wooden planks reinforced with iron bands.

“Hey, Grandma, check it out!” said Kyle, who was crouched down in front of the bars.

“Shhh..we don't want to bring those dogs back.” I whispered.

“Sorry.” he whispered back. “But look at this bar. I bet we could get it loose.”

I examined the bar that he had indicated. It was an especially rusty one, and the mortar that anchored it to the floor was cracked and broken. Maybe if if we worked together, we could pull it free.

“I think you're right, but if we go yanking on that thing, those dogs will hear, and they'll be on us in a trice.”

Kyle seemed to consider this. I stopped to give it a think as well. Maybe Kyle had a point when he called this a game, even it wasn't much fun. This dungeon was never meant to actually hold us, it was meant to inconvenience us as we escaped. No one who actually wanted to keep people from escaping would design a dungeon like this. This was a puzzle, and when you looked at it that way, the solution became clear. Kyle and I both turned to Elizabeth.

“Liz, you have to distract the guard dogs while me and Grandma bend this bar.” supplied Kyle, beating me to the punch.”

“What! Why me?!” demanded Elizabeth.

“Neither of us is fast enough.” I answered. “Someone has to crawl through the hole, make a lot of noise to get their attention while we pull the bar out of the way and get the door open. Whoever does it has to able to crawl back through the hole before the dogs can run around the corner and get us. You're the only one who can possibly do that.”

Elizabeth assumed her “serious” face, and nodded. I was so proud of her.

“We have to time this just right. We should wait until the dogs are right at the corner before Liz starts yelling. That will give us as much time as possible to bend the bar and open the door. I'll give you the signal.”

We went over the plan again, to make sure we had the timing right. Elizabeth crawled through the opening and took up her position. Kyle and I watched patiently as the hell-hounds trooped past us, turned and began their long return journey. As soon they were as far way from both cells as possible, Kyle hissed to Elizabeth to begin. We heard a sharp intake of breath as she prepared herself.

An ear-piercing shriek filled the air, loud enough to hurt my ears even at this distance. I was half prepared to run and make sure Elizabeth was alright, even after all that preparation. Elizabeth was doing her level best to cover any noise Kyle and I made, and she was doing great. I don't think we could have made more sound than her if we had tried. We took our positions and pulled as hard as we possibly could on the thick iron bar. At first it didn't budge, and I thought our plan would stop cold right there. But with a crack, a chunk of mortar shot loose, and the bar was free of its base. With my foot braced against another bar, the piece of iron began to slowly give way. I didn't kid myself that my efforts were adding much to the progress, but none the less I pulled for everything I was worth.

I wasn't sure how long it took, but Elizabeth had stopped to inhale several times as we slowly bent the iron bar backward. All at once, I felt the tension in the metal suddenly give out, and Kyle and I fell backward onto the stone floor, holding a meter of rusty iron that had suddenly snapped. Kyle lept to his feet and helped me to mine. I winced at the addition to my collection of bruises. There was just enough of a gap in the bars now for us to slip through with some difficulty. Kyle snatched the key from its peg and ran to unlock the gate, while I called to Elizabeth.

“That's great honey, we're through! Move! As fast as you can!”

I wasn't sure if Elizabeth had heard my cries, but the dogs certainly had. I could hear their barking grow a little fainter, then start to become louder again. Elizabeth's high-pitched wail cut off, and I soon saw her emerge from the opening in the cell. The dogs rounded the corner, coming on much faster than I had expected.

“Hurry, there isn't much time!” Elizabeth was on her feet, heading for the gap in the bars. I turned to see how Kyle was doing with the lock. To my horror, he was visibly struggling with the key in the lock.

“It doesn't work, it won't turn!” he snarled. The dogs were nearly here, and not only was our path to escape blocked, but we had destroyed our own place of refuge. I wasn't sure if those hounds could get through the secret opening, but they would definitely fit through the gap we had made in the bars. They would tear all three of us to shreds before we could get back through anyway, we were trapped.

I reached through the bars and snatched the piece we had torn away. It was only a little thicker than a length of re-bar, and so heavy that I could barely carry it, but it was as close to a weapon as we had. I would be more likely to hurt and anger the beasts than to actually injure them, but my grandchildren were in harms way and I had to defend them however I could. I raise my make-shift cudgel above my head as the three monsters bore down on us.

“Fetch!”

Elizabeth's shout from behind me caught me completely by surprise, as did the sight of a flaming skull sailing past me and into the charging dogs. It shattered itself against one of their heads, and as soon as it did, one the dogs collapsed into a pile of smoldering ashes. Even more surprising, the one that had suddenly disintegrated wasn't the one that had been struck. The two remaining monsters had wheeled around to to investigate their fallen comrade, completely arresting their progress. By the time I had made any conclusion about this, Elizabeth had already grabbed another skull off the shelf. Rather than throwing it, she simple smashed it against the ground, causing another hound to fall apart like Dracula in a sunbeam. The remaining creature, made a mad dash for Elizabeth, and I swung the iron bar like a baseball bat, catching it right in the muzzle. Before I knew what was happening, the massive thing had pounced on me, knocking me to the ground with a crunch. I knew I was done for as the enormous teeth descended toward my face.