by Brian Harmon
He glanced at Brandy as she walked beside him. She looked tired, of course. The rest they had taken was not enough. She needed more than a few minutes off her feet. She needed a meal and a night’s sleep in her own bed. She wasn’t cut out for such an exhausting trek. Neither was Nicole. Neither was he. They’d undergone no kind of endurance training. They were not soldiers or athletes. They were just ordinary college students. They were in good shape. They were healthy. They were neither overweight nor malnourished. But they weren’t used to this sort of exertion.
“How you doing?” he asked.
Brandy looked at him, her eyes weary. “I’m okay,” she replied. “Feet still hurt.”
“Mine too.” He glanced back at Nicole, who was keeping pace behind them. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” And she did sound fine, if a little tired. Of all of them, she was probably the most capable. She was the one who worked out. She was the one who spent her spare time in the college gym, the one who actually jogged in the mornings. She was not simply handed that ideal body, after all. She worked for it.
Brandy frequently went with her to the gym. She was no stranger to the treadmill. But she didn’t go religiously. And she wasn’t very fond of jogging. It wasn’t about looking her best. For her it was merely a way to get out and enjoy some girl-time with her best friend.
Albert, on the other hand, hardly ever set foot inside the gym. He grew bored working out. It left his thoughts frustratingly idle. He’d rather spend his spare time engaging his mind with a good mystery novel, or perhaps challenging himself with a puzzle, even if it was only the daily Sudoku.
Did that mean it would ultimately be he who collapsed first from exhaustion? Would the girls be forced to look after him in their final hours should the darkness refuse to relinquish anything more than this same maddening passageway?
Again, he turned his eyes to his girlfriend. He couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to Brandy. Maybe he should turn back. Maybe he should tell the Sentinel Queen to forget it, to find someone else to seek out her mysterious doorway. After all, each step they took was one more step they’d presumably have to take to get home. The farther they went, the farther they were from the warmth and comfort of their own beds.
But it would only be that much farther he’d have to travel when he came back. And he knew damn well that he would come back. His maddening curiosity would never allow him to stay away. The mystery of this place would haunt him for the rest of his life.
The tunnel stretched on. The darkness relinquished nothing, step after step, and Albert began to understand how easily the human mind could be plunged into madness.
With claustrophobia crushing down on him, and a mounting, irrational fear that they were not actually moving at all, he was about to stop and attempt to gather his wits when something finally emerged from the relentless darkness.
For a moment, he thought he was imagining it. For so long there had been nothing there. But it was real. It was a stone archway, exactly like the one they passed through when they first entered this maddening passageway, back when they departed the City of the Blind. It was also identical (or as identical as Albert had the capacity to discern) to the two archways that stood on either end of the much shorter passage that led them from the mud-filled chamber to the south gate of the city.
His eyes washed over the carvings on the stone surface of the arch. All those naked bodies, writhing together in a strange amalgamation of emotions, screaming, moaning, sobbing, laughing, filled him with a strange sense of self-awareness. He was suddenly very eager to see what lay beyond…yet he was afraid of what may await him. He felt the soreness of his feet and legs more than ever, and yet he felt a powerful urge to run ahead. He was newly embarrassed by his nudity…and freshly aroused by the nudity of his companions.
Beyond the archway was nothing. The walls and ceiling and floor simply ceased beyond the intricately carved stone. An enormous chamber lay on the other side, shrouded in the same eternal darkness that crowded the long passageway at their backs.
Albert shined his light into this cavernous space. He could see no solid surface for as far as his light reached.
A few inches from his bare toes, where the floor abruptly dropped into black oblivion, was the still surface of a vast pool of crystal-clear water.
It appeared that they would again have to swim.
Brandy swore bitterly at the sight. She had not felt warm all night, not since leaving her home early that evening. It wasn’t fair. Why did they have to keep suffering like this? What was the point in it? More and more, she hated this insane temple. It seemed that it was designed for no other purpose than to torture anyone unfortunate enough to enter it.
“On the bright side, it should wash off some of this stink,” Albert offered.
“I’d rather stink,” Brandy retorted.
“I don’t think anything can ever wash it off,” Nicole grumbled.
Albert shrugged. “Okay, then. As long as we’re all staying positive.” He peered down into the water. There was no gradual descent in this room, only a sheer drop with no visible bottom. In a way, this should be easier than the first time. He could simply jump into the water and get it over with quickly. It would be far easier than the gradual torture of the slow descent he’d endured in the last pool.
“Where does all this water come from?” Nicole asked.
“I’m guessing the whole temple is fed by an underground river somewhere, piped through a sort of reservoir system built right into the stone. There’s probably an inlet and an outlet somewhere in this room to keep the water level. Or maybe just gravity. I doubt it’s even all that complicated.”
“Why wouldn’t it be complicated?” Brandy asked. “They haven’t made anything else simple.”
“True.” He removed the backpack and handed it and his flashlight to Brandy. “Might as well get it over with.”
Neither Brandy nor Nicole objected. There was no alternative. It wasn’t as if a boat was going to pull up and ferry them across.
Albert stepped into the archway and took a deep breath. He desperately did not want to do this. No amount of psyching himself up was going to make it any easier. But there was no other choice. Going back was no better an option and he knew it.
He braced himself for the worst and leapt out over the water.
He was wrong. There was no easy way to face the water inside the temple. It was cold. Much colder than the stone, colder than it should have been, it seemed, as if it sprang from some unfathomable, frozen depth. In an instant, his body was enveloped in a blanket of brutal cold that gripped every square inch of his flesh. It did not numb him, but rather stung him, almost burning him with its icy touch, as if he had not leapt into water at all, but a great sea of flesh-eating acid. For a moment, he could not even move. His muscles were locked, his heart seemingly frozen in his chest. He couldn’t even open his eyes.
He realized he was sinking. His breath gone, sucked from his lungs in a great fury of bubbles in that first, agonizing instant, he was no longer buoyant enough to stay afloat. Slowly, he was slipping deeper and deeper into the darkness beneath him, as though he were encased in heavy, crushing stone. Panic welled up within him as the seconds ticked by. He was paralyzed by the cold, unable to tell if his heart was even beating. He doubted suddenly that it would feel any different if he had leapt into liquid nitrogen, his body literally frozen, trapped helplessly within himself as death closed its frigid hands around him.
He had just enough time to wonder if he was going to die like this before his heart exploded back to life and he burst free of his paralysis.
Desperately, he scrambled upward, thrashing and kicking until his face broke from the surface and he gasped for air.
“Fucking damn it!” he screamed, his voice echoing throughout the enormous chamber.
“Well that’s encouraging,” mumbled Nicole.
“Are you okay?” asked Brandy.
Albert tried to gather himself,
tried to calm the shaking and the chattering of his teeth, but it was overwhelming. He felt chilled all the way to his bones. “It’s damn cold,” he told her. “Colder than before, I think.”
The concern on Brandy’s face was overshadowed by dread. She did not want to go in there. She did not want to be cold again. It was a miserable feeling knowing that she would have to face that kind of discomfort all over again.
“I’m going to get so sick,” Nicole sighed.
Around Albert, the water had grown murky from the mud that had been caked on his skin. It wafted off him in a foul black cloud as he swam back to the archway and held his hand out for his flashlight.
Brandy knelt down and handed it to him, then dipped her fingers in the water. Albert was right. It felt even colder than the last pool, if that was possible. The very thought of submerging herself in that frigid water made her teeth begin to chatter.
“Good thing we all know how to swim,” Nicole observed, staring down into the black depths.
Albert nodded. It was true. If any one of them had been unable to swim, or worse, suffered an aquatic phobia, this might have proven to be an impassible barrier. He had a cousin who was afraid of water. He refused to go aboard boats and could not even be convinced to put his feet into a pool. Growing up, Albert never understood. It was just water. Surely he could see that it was not dangerous. It was utterly irrational. But as he grew older, Albert began to understand that it was the nature of phobias to be illogical. By their very definition, they were irrational.
Now that he was thinking about it, there were a great number of fears that the temple of the blind encouraged. Water, darkness, small spaces…bloodthirsty hounds…
In fact, he decided it was best not to think too much about any of those things. To say the least, this would be a lousy time to develop an inconvenient phobia.
“Come on,” he urged, taking the backpack and slipping it over his shoulders.
Brandy looked at Nicole and held out her hand. “Go in with me?”
The pitiful look in her eyes told Brandy that she did not want to, that she would rather do almost anything but go in there, but she knew that she had no choice. They had to go forward. Even if they went back, they would eventually have to get wet again.
Albert swam back to give them room. Even shivering so hard he could barely breathe, even with his teeth hammering together with the violence of the cold, he could not help but appreciate how lovely the two of them were as they stood before him, their lean bodies dirty and bare. The sight would have been tremendously arousing if the biting cold hadn’t severed his body’s ability to react to such a thing.
Well… Mostly.
Brandy and Nicole squeezed each other’s hand and then stepped forward and plunged into the water. Brandy pinched her nose with her free hand as her feet left the stone floor. Nicole threw her free arm up instead, as though changing her mind at the last second and reaching for a safety line that wasn’t there. For a brief instant they were in the air, their bodies rigid against the unpleasant shock they knew was imminent, and then they splashed into the water and vanished beneath the chopping surface.
Brandy shot back up like a bobber on a fishing line, a shrill scream on her lips. Nicole remained under for a few brief seconds, possibly having suffered the same paralyzing jolt that Albert experienced, and when her head broke the surface she, too, screamed.
Already, the water around them had become murky with the filth that had washed from their skin and hair. A dark cloud blossomed around their bodies as they struggled to stay afloat.
“Fuck that’s cold!” Nicole exclaimed, her body already racked with shivers.
Brandy screamed a second time, short and shrill, then a third time and a fourth, her arms splashing at the water, fighting the biting cold.
“Oh my god!” Nicole went on. “Oh my fucking god!”
“Oh god!” Brandy agreed.
Albert would have laughed if he hadn’t been fighting the same gnawing cold himself. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get to the other side before we freeze.”
Shivering violently, the three of them made their way across the water, their flashlights in constant motion so that the chopping waves became a disorienting kaleidoscope of light and shadow through which they struggled, barely keeping their heads above the surface. The room itself was at least a hundred yards across. Perhaps more. It was difficult for Albert to estimate it while battling the cold. It felt at least as long as a football field. And there was no knowing how wide it might be. By the time the far end of the chamber came into view, a real fear that they might get turned around and lost had begun to pervade his thoughts.
But somehow they had only veered a few degrees off course. Albert wondered if they were merely lucky or if the psychic abilities the Sentinel Queen claimed he possessed gave him some kind of guidance system down here. He rather doubted that he had such abilities, but he dared to hope. It would certainly come in handy.
The three of them climbed out of the water and into the next passageway. It was identical to the one they just left, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine that they had done nothing more than circle back to where they began. But somehow Albert did not think that was the case.
“Oh god!” Brandy cried as shivers raced through her naked body.
Albert turned around and embraced her, pressing his body against hers, trying to pass what little warmth he had into her. When Nicole approached them, her body trembling with the cold, he took her by the arm and pulled her toward him as well. She did not refuse him. Perhaps she didn’t have the strength. The cold was draining. It overwhelmed them.
Albert wondered how real the danger of hypothermia was down here. Was the water cold enough? It sure felt cold enough. It was agonizing. And yet, they’d survived an extended swim through it, their skin numb but otherwise unharmed. In the arctic seas, exposure to the water for more than a few minutes meant certain death. This water had felt cold as hell, but it wasn’t frozen. It likely wasn’t anywhere near freezing. In fact, it was probably at least ten or twenty degrees warmer than that, making it a laughable choice for a polar bear club, which he was now convinced that he would never join. Not for any amount of money.
For a long time, the three of them stood this way, huddled together in the darkness, naked and dripping, quivering in the cold, their bare flesh pressed together. It was an intimate moment, but it was not at all erotic. There was a bond between them now that was akin to that of a close family. Just hours ago they might have felt uncomfortable huddled together like this, even with their clothes on. But now it was as natural to each of them as a conversation.
“We should get moving again,” Albert suggested after a while. “It’ll warm us up faster.”
“I hope so,” Nicole said with a sniffle. They were all sniffling now. Perhaps she had been right about them getting sick. “I feel like I’m freezing to death.”
“Me too,” agreed Brandy.
But the three of them remained a moment longer, their shivering bodies pressed intimately together.
Chapter 3
Though they were not precisely clean, the swim across the frigid pool had washed the majority of the mud and muck from their skin and hair. In the backlight of their flashlights, their bodies again glowed softly pink in the gloom.
They walked close together, their arms interlocked, their thighs brushing, still attempting to share their warmth. The cold continued to envelope them long after the water had stopped dripping from their naked skin. They shivered hard and deep, as if their very bones were frozen.
This tunnel was not as long as the last. They followed it only a few hundred yards before they stepped into a chamber that was larger than most, but still considerably smaller than many that they had found. Sentinel statues stood tall and alert along the walls, but not as they had in the rooms that preceded the emotion rooms. These were closer together, their elbows nearly touching. Each one was the same. Their feet were together, their legs and backs straight, arms a
t their sides, penises limp. They did not appear to convey any sort of message. They were merely silent sentinels. Nothing more.
At the far end of the room, a short set of steps led up to a large, square opening. Still shivering, Albert moved toward it as he examined the statues on either side of them. They were all identical, and no different from the others they’d seen scattered throughout the temple. There were forty-two of them in all. He wondered if the number was in any way significant.
Inside the opening, the stone surfaces of the next tunnel were carved with strange, incomprehensible markings. They completely covered the walls, ceiling and floor.
“What is all this?” Brandy asked.
But Albert had no idea. He felt as if he were constantly saying, “I don’t know.” But the fact was, he simply did not know. Everything down here was so far beyond his comprehension.
These markings were different from the intricate carvings on the archways leading in and out of the City of the Blind. Those carvings had been of people. These weren’t of anything he recognized. It didn’t even look like language, exactly, just an obscure randomness of shapes and curves. There was no pattern, no flow, suggesting anything as intelligible as words or letters. There were no lines. The eye was not drawn in any discernable direction. If it was meant to be read, he could not tell where he was expected to even begin.
This carved passage stretched several yards and then ended in a T-shaped intersection where the carvings abruptly ended, leaving the stone surfaces smooth and featureless again. From this intersection, they would have to choose left or right, and Albert had no idea how they were supposed to know which way to go.
He examined the two choices. Both tunnels ran as far as he could see without branching, and neither gave anything away. They were empty. They were identical.
“So where do we go?” Nicole asked. She stood beside him, rubbing her shoulders for warmth, her teeth still chattering from the cold of their swim.
