THE LAST HOUR - a short story
A
short mystery, with a twist at the end
It was the last Saturday before university started. Even though the summer season was drawing to an end. Edinburgh’s historic Royal Mile was still busy and the late shops were still open. Street performers were packing up as the day's last tourists wandered back down from the famous Castle.
.
Ellie and Jamie, who'd been friends since childhood and were both about to start university, were walking slowly back in the direction of the car park near Tollcross.
“I still can’t believe you’re going off to Manchester tomorrow,” Ellie said, adjusting her backpack.
“It’s not that far. I’ll be back most weekends, whenever I can, ” Jamie replied.
“It’s not about the distance. Things are going to change, we won't be together,” she said, without looking at him.
Jamie didn’t reply. They kept walking, then stopped to watch a street performer juggling flaming torches. After a short routine, the performer passed round a hat, before disappearing into a side alley down towards the Grassmarket.
“Let’s follow him,” Ellie said.
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Why not? Because it’s our last night before everything changes. Let’s do something different.”
The alley led into a quiet courtyard they hadn’t noticed before. A wooden sign stood by a doorway:
The Last Hour – Pop-up Escape Room. One night only.
"That sounds fun!" Ellie exclaimed.
Jamie read the small print on the sign. “No good, you need to be booked in, in advance.”
As if on cue, the man from earlier appeared, now holding a clipboard. “You’re lucky. We've just had a cancellation. Want to play?”
Ellie grinned. “Definitely.”
Jamie hesitated, then nodded. “Alright.”
The man handed them blindfolds. “Put these on. The game starts here!”
When they removed the blindfolds, they were in a dimly lit study that looked like something out of the 1800s - wooden bookshelves, an old clock, and heavy curtains.
A voice came through a speaker: “You have one hour to solve the mystery of the vanished friend. Only one of you may leave.”
Ellie frowned. “That's a bit dramatic!”
They started working through the puzzles. One clue was hidden in a drawer full of old newspapers; another was written in faded ink across the inside of a cabinet door.
Jamie felt slightly uneasy.. “You know, this place looks real,” he said, holding up a photograph that seemed to have been sitting there for decades.
Ellie examined it. It was in black and white, and showed two teenagers standing by a car. A date scribbled on the back was from the 1970s.
“Yes, it's creepy,” she said. “This room feels more like someone’s actual study than part of a game.”
The air smelled faintly of old books and something harder to place - maybe damp wood or cigarette smoke.
“I thought escape-rooms were supposed to be full of hidden tech and fake walls,” she added. “This just feels… abandoned.”
Jamie nodded. “Yeah. And have you noticed? No cameras. No clues on a screen. Nothing digital. Is this really an escape-room? Or just an old abandoned flat? ”.
Eventually, they found the final clue: an envelope with both their names on it.
Jamie opened it. Inside was a single sentence: Only one of you exists.
He read it again to make sure he hadn’t misunderstood.
“Okay,” said Ellie. “That’s clearly part of the game. Some kind of psychological twist.”
But Jamie didn’t answer right away. Something felt wrong.
“Ellie… what’s your first memory of us together?”
She paused. “You mean like, ever?”
“Yeah. Just tell me.”
She shrugged. “Feeding ducks in the botanic gardens.”
Jamie froze. “I told you that story. That was my memory.”
She stared at him. “No, I remember it too.”
The voice returned. “One of you is a memory. A reflection. Created out of habit, grief, or guilt. Ten seconds left. Only one may leave.”
Jamie looked around the room, suddenly unsure of everything. “This isn’t just a game, is it?”
Ellie didn’t answer. Her expression shifted, as if something inside her had changed.
“I don’t want to go,” she said quietly.
Jamie moved toward her and hugged her. “I think you already have.”
The lights flickered.
********************************
Jamie woke up alone on a bench near Greyfriars Kirkyard. The sun was rising, and the streets were mostly empty.
He checked his phone. One message. "One year ago today: Remembering Ellie – Gone but never forgotten." He opened the photo. It was the two of them, taken a month or so before the fatal crash from which he'd been lucky to come out alive. The caption read: “Best friends forever, even if one of us doesn’t make it to uni.”
And then it all came back to him.
All he could do was sit in the quiet, thinking about the last words she'd spoken as the medics tried to get her out of the car.
“I don’t want to go.”
Maybe part of her never really had.
As for the escape-room, whether it was a dream, a glitch in time, or something else, he didn’t know.
performers: artists, musicians, players - backpack: rucksack - juggle: throw up and down - alley: small narrow street - popup: temporary - escape-room: escape rooms are popular for fun nights out, birthday parties, and team-building activities. they are like role play games, where users have to find the answer to problems. booked in: reserved - clipboard: board with papers clipped to it - cancellation: return of tickets - blindfold: a band covering the eyes - vanish: disappear - clue: key, indication - actual: real - fake: false, unreal - twist: unexpected moment - right away: at once - guilt: a feeling that one is responsible for something bad - kirkyard: churchyard, cemetery, a kirk is a Scottish word for church - glitch: problem, jump
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STUDENTS' WORKSHEET
Short story: the last hour
1. Comprehension questions:
Type your answers into the box, which will expand to take as much as you want to write.Why were Jamie and Ellie out in the city that Saturday night?
What reason did Jamie give to reassure Ellie about his move to Manchester?
What made it possible for Ellie and Jamie to join the escape room without booking ahead?
How did the escape room differ from what Ellie expected?
What details in the room suggested it might be a real, abandoned place rather than a game set?
How did the final clue hint at a past event in Jamie’s personal life?
What did Jamie realise when Ellie described her first memory of them together?
What event from a year earlier explained why Ellie could not have been physically present that night? Describe what actually happened.
2. Vocabulary - words and meaning:
Select the closest equivalent of the following words and expressions as they are used in the story: click the arrow buttons to see the options.
- historic:
- wandered
- exclaimed
- uneasy
- flickered
- scribbled
- vanished
- dimly
- clue
- crash
3 Fill in the missing words exercise:
Fill in the missing words in this short extract from the story : you will need to add one word in each space. In most cases, the first letter of the word you need is givenHe
For teachers
This is a new story, for the 2020s. It features phenomena of today's urban culture – tourists, a street performer, a pop-up location, and an escape room, a popular kind of problem solving visitor attraction. Can your students say anything about these? There are escape-room attractions in most UK cities, and in a growing number of cities in Europe, such as Paris, Berlin, or Barcelona. This mystery story takes readers into a fictitious escape-room that maybe exists for real, maybe only in the mind of Jamie, the chief protagonist. It also take us to Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland, and mentions some of it significant locations - the castle, the Royal Mile, the Grassmarket, Greyfriars Kirkyard..You will note that in the audio version of the story, Jamie and Ellie speak (of course) with Scottish accents. Your students are probably unfamiliar with these accents, but as the short bits of dialogue show, they are not hard to understand.
There are a couple of small differences between the written and recorded texts.
Class discussion
What do your students make of this story? From the information provided, it should be possible for them to build up a picture of the events that led up to Jamie's experience that Saturday night in old Edinburgh. Have your students explain to each other the real course of events, over the period of a little more than a year.Language points
Note the use of -ing forms in this story. They occur in present and past continuous verb forms, in the future with going to, and other contexts. In the story's pivotal sentence, Ellie says "things are going to change." This is an interesting sentence, insofar as the use of "going to" is the only (or at least normal) way to express the type of (pretetermined) future implied by this sentence.The story also contains a collection of useful vocabulary about human expression and feeling - raise an eyebrow / exclaim / nod / shrug / grin / frown / feel uneasy / freeze / stare /
Finally take note of the use of negation in this sentence: " And have you noticed? No cameras. No clues on a screen. Nothing digital." And if you're listing to the recording, note how in a standard Scottish accent no is pronounced with a monophthong, as opposed to the [oʊ] diphthong in standard English.
Other ideas?
EFL teachers: Help develop this resource by contributing extra teaching materials or exercises
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Reading comprehension in the English class
(Version française : Petite méthodologie de la compréhension écrite )
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