Secret of the Labyrinth (The Temple of the Blind #5)

by Brian Harmon

  They backtracked out of the area where all the passages dead-ended and then turned left where they’d previously made a right.

  Soon they found themselves at another intersection and the beams of their flashlights fell on a crooked yellow line.

  “Shit,” Brandy spat.

  “It’s okay,” Albert said. “At least we know we’ve been here.”

  “What do we do?” Nicole asked.

  Albert considered their options, trying to remember how far back the last untaken tunnel was. “Let’s go forward,” he decided. “We’ll take the next unmarked passage.”

  They pushed on, drawing a green line over the yellow, indicating that they had traveled this way twice. The two colors would also help them distinguish the approximate time that they traveled these paths. The yellow lines always came before the green ones. Soon they reached an intersection where they had previously taken a right and turned left. Within five minutes, this newest tunnel abruptly ended.

  “This is impossible,” Brandy groaned. “There’s got to be a better way.” She opened up her dying flashlight and traded the dead batteries for fresh ones from Albert’s backpack.

  “Just relax,” Albert said, although relaxed was one thing he was not. The longer he was in these tunnels, the more anxious he became. “We can’t let ourselves get discouraged. We sure as hell can’t panic. We just have to stay calm. That’s our best bet.”

  Brandy dropped the dead batteries into the backpack and zipped it back up. Hopefully it would be a long time before they needed any more.

  Chapter 17

  Wayne had grown silent as he descended the long, spiraling staircase. The fear room lay ahead, and he grew more anxious with each step he took. It was not merely the thought of all those intolerable statues he would soon have to endure, but all the things that still stood between him and the friends he sought. He was so tired already.

  After leaving the room that had claimed Beverly Bridger’s life and body, the three of them passed through the mysterious empty chamber that apparently hadn’t been empty at all to Beverly, and then followed the next passageway to the stone bridge. There, Wayne had heard the strange and ominous noise of the hounds lurking below him, but it was not nearly as loud as it had been when he first crossed it with Albert, Brandy and Nicole. A fear had begun to grow inside him that too many of the hounds might have begun to roam beyond that maze. Was it possible that they had grown wise to the blind man’s underwear trick? At the very least, they had probably grown bored with such stubbornly elusive prey. If so, they could be anywhere, and before they reached the City of the Blind, they were going to have to travel through their territory again, territory he was sure was rich with Albert’s and Brandy’s and Nicole’s scents as well as with his own.

  He hadn’t voiced his concerns. He didn’t see that it was necessary to alarm the girls. He had already told them about the hounds. They knew the risk. That the odds might be stacked a little more out of their favor didn’t make a lot of difference in the end. Such knowledge would only make a difficult trip even harder.

  He led them into the next passage, just as he had led the others on his first trip. And just like his first visit, he nearly managed to get his big ass stuck. This time he had at least wedged himself within reach of the opening so that he could simply grasp the edge of the passage and pull himself to freedom.

  Now the top of the spiraling staircase had risen well into darkness above them and below them the bottom would be coming into view any minute. Behind him, Andrea was saying again how weird it felt to be walking around naked and he wished she’d stop bringing attention to it. It was the forgetting that he was naked that made the lack of modesty bearable.

  But Andrea could scarcely stop talking at all.

  Though Wayne had only known her for a few short hours, he was rapidly learning a lot about her.

  She was eighteen years old and a senior in high school. She intended to attend Briar Hills University next year, though she still hadn’t decided if she wanted to major in nursing or forensics or veterinary medicine or education or maybe something else. Her best friend’s name was Rachel Penning, and they were supposed to be roommates when they started college but Rachel was apparently acting like a bitch lately, so maybe she wasn’t really her best friend anymore. And she had an uncle who used to tell her stories about the tunnels under the city and she always wanted to explore them but she always thought she’d be too scared. She knew a girl who claimed to have sneaked into some of the tunnels and saw a ghost, but she never really believed her. And she had never been naked in front of anyone until tonight and it was really weird being naked. But maybe not as weird as she thought it would be. And she still couldn’t believe she was doing this.

  Anywhere else and Wayne might have been extremely annoyed. But somehow he found the sound of her voice unexpectedly relaxing. It was nice to have a distraction from all the strangeness of this unearthly temple.

  But he did wish she’d stop bringing up being naked.

  Olivia, on the other hand, was still mostly quiet. She could not believe that she was here in this place. For two days she’d sat perched atop the seat of a dry toilet in a restroom stall without even the slightest glimmer of light to ease her troubled mind. Her legs cramped, her mouth and throat parched from thirst, her stomach aching with hunger, she had never in her life been so miserable. She still had very little strength, far too little to be here in these dangerous corridors, in fact, but she simply could not remain behind. It was the obligation she felt toward this man who had saved her life, her moral inability to let him go on alone into whatever mortal peril awaited him, but it was also more than that. What happened to her was no freak accident. It was not just some lunatic serial killer who murdered those people in Gilbert House. They had been attacked by something that, as far as she knew, should not have existed, something much deadlier than anything her formerly narrow view of reality would have allowed her to imagine. There was something else out there, something far greater than the world she knew. If she was ever going to learn to live with what happened to her, she needed to know that all these terrors were not going to come crashing through her bedroom window while she slept. It might not be possible to find closure, but at the very least, she could find some way to explain it all.

  The long hours she spent inside that restroom stall were nightmarish. She sometimes dozed, sometimes rocked herself comfortingly, but always listened, expecting the door to open and that thing to come rushing in, ready to finish the job it began with Nick’s skull.

  Several times she’d had to pee and had been forced to use the toilet on which she sat, even though there was no water in the pipes, and the whole time she was terrified that the monster would either hear the sound of her urine striking the porcelain or smell it on the air and hunt her down the way it had hunted down Andy and Trish.

  The memory gave her a hard shiver.

  “Are you okay?” asked Andrea, derailing from her ramblings.

  “I’m okay,” Olivia assured her. “Just… You know. Memories.”

  “You went through a lot, didn’t you?”

  That seemed like the mother of all understatements.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “No,” she replied bluntly. “I don’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “But thank you. You’re sweet. I just… I don’t want to talk about it. Not now. Not down here.”

  “Okay. But whenever you do want to talk… I know I don’t sound like I shut up much, but I’m actually surprisingly good at listening.”

  Olivia smiled up at her. “I’ll remember that.” Andrea was such a sweet girl. She was glad she came along. She was a breath of freshness in this otherwise stale dungeon of a place. But she couldn’t put words to all the things that weighed on her mind. Not here, not with a woman’s corpse lying in a pit of spikes behind them and the dreaded fear room looming ahead of them. She could not possibly speak the words aloud.

  Andrea went on talking
, telling them about how this place reminded her of a friend of hers named Helen who used to dare her to do all sorts of scary stuff when they were kids. And as she talked, Olivia found that she could not stop thinking about all the things that had happened to her.

  Particularly, she could not stop thinking about Andy and his friends, all of them dead and lost inside that awful dormitory.

  It was all so pointless.

  The whole damn thing had been pointless. She never should have even been there. She never should have become involved with Andy in the first place.

  Dating Andy Lanott was the worst decision she’d ever made. She still couldn’t believe that she fell for his ridiculous charms. He said he was fascinated by her, that she intrigued him, that she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, and somehow she actually believed him. But what he’d really meant, of course, was that he just wanted to fuck her. The only thing that really fascinated him was her bust size.

  She met him in the hallway while waiting for her Biology class to start. He simply appeared next to her while she was sitting on a bench, reading one of her textbooks. He was cute. And he seemed so smart and charming. He said all the right things. She was delighted that he wanted to meet her for a drink that evening.

  It took only about three days to figure out that he didn’t care anything about her beyond getting into her pants. And to that end, he turned out to be tireless. He made every effort to get her alone. He sweet-talked her. He flirted with her. His hands were constantly wandering. But he took absolutely no interest in her life. He didn’t want to talk about her. He didn’t want to meet any of her friends. He couldn’t even be bothered to walk her to class.

  She was only with him for a week. She could hardly say that she even knew him. (Although she knew him considerably better than he knew her, because if he absolutely had to talk about one of them, it was damn well going to be about him.)

  It was her own fault that she was still with him on that awful evening. She knew it would never work. He never intended for it to work. She should have been through with him the moment she realized this, but for some reason she was lazy about it. She put off telling him it was over, half expecting him to tire of her pushing his hands away and dodging his come-ons and end it for her.

  By Wednesday she had decided to tell him not to meet her anymore, that he simply wasn’t the one she was looking for. She couldn’t say exactly why, but she decided to let him walk her home from the cafeteria one last time before ending it. (He liked walking her home, of course; home was where her bed was.)

  But they hadn’t gone home after dinner. Earlier that afternoon, someone left a curious letter beside his books in the library, a letter that offered to pay him one thousand dollars to poke around someplace called Gilbert House.

  She tried to talk some sense into him. It didn’t add up. Why would anyone just give away a thousand dollars like that? He had no idea what kind of mess he might be getting himself into.

  But he wouldn’t listen to a word of it. He had his sights set on that money. He assured her it would be fine, that he’d invited Nick along, just to be sure. As if that were any kind of improvement.

  Andy at least pretended to be charming. His best friend, Nick Shrewd, was arguably the most annoying person she had ever met. He was rude, vulgar, immature and obnoxious. He thought he was funny, and a lot of the people he surrounded himself with seemed to think so, too, but Olivia found nothing that came out of his mouth the least bit amusing.

  She had no business going with them into Gilbert House. She knew it was a bad idea. She knew that something bad would probably happen. She should have simply walked home and left them to their little adventure. Even better, she should have broken off their relationship (if you could call it a relationship) and then walked home. But she followed them anyway. She was a little curious about Andy’s mysterious letter, after all. And her sister had told her once that doing crazy, stupid stuff was just a part of being in college. But she supposed the real reason she went along was Trish.

  Trish was Nick’s girlfriend, although she couldn’t fathom what it was she saw in him. Olivia only met her twice, but she seemed like a very sweet girl. She liked her much better than any of the other people Andy introduced her to. She seemed genuinely interested in getting to know her. The only attention she ever received from anyone else was when his fraternity pals were blatantly ogling her chest.

  Trish was uncertain about the offer in Andy’s letter. She was scared. Olivia saw it in her pretty blue eyes. And she wondered at the time whether Nick had given her any choice in the matter. It was the idea of those two idiots blindly following the directions in that letter and dragging poor Trish into it against her will that made her hesitate when she was ready to walk away. It just didn’t seem right to leave her alone with them.

  It was stupid. She should have left anyway. It was none of her concern. They weren’t her real friends. She wasn’t responsible for them. And for all she knew, maybe Trish would have refused to go through with it if Olivia hadn’t tagged along to lend her courage. Perhaps she even would have convinced Nick to leave, too. And then maybe none of them would have gone into Gilbert House.

  On the other hand, maybe there was no stopping Andy and Nick from going down that cellar door to their deaths. Maybe what she should have done was take Trish by the hand and walk away with her. At least then she could have saved one of them.

  There were so many things she could have done differently. She wondered if any of them would have changed what happened…or if cruel fate had always had it in for Andy, Nick and Trish.

  She remembered the woman who was waiting for them in the clearing outside Gilbert House. Wayne said her name was Beverly Bridger. Olivia had not liked her from the start. She seemed half crazy. She kept looking up at the empty space above the windowless walls and telling them that all they had to do was go inside, just go inside and look around. Look at everything. She kept stressing that they had to look at everything, yet she would not say what it was that she was looking for or why she could not go in herself. She wouldn’t even tell them her name.

  Even then, she hadn’t been smart enough to run away.

  But she never could have dreamed that there was an actual monster waiting for them inside.

  She couldn’t forget the silence that greeted her when she first sealed herself in that flimsy bathroom stall, trying to calm herself enough to hear over her breathless sobs and the pounding of her terrified heart. It had gone on for so long. Hours and hours, it seemed, though it must have only been one or two. Then the silence was filled with the bloodcurdling sounds of poor Trish’s screams. Olivia had clasped her hands over her ears, but still she heard them. They went on and on, screams so horrible that she was sure to hear them in her nightmares for years and years.

  If she survived that long.

  She remembered rocking herself atop the toilet seat, her hands pressed over her ears, sobbing as she waited and waited for it to end. She could not imagine what that thing must have done to her to make her scream like that for so long. And she never wanted to know. Only Albert had seen her body and she desperately hoped that he never told her what he saw. She never wanted to know what happened in that third floor room of Gilbert House.

  When the screaming finally stopped, there were other noises in the darkness. Thumps. Bangs. Thuds. They would stop for several hours at a time and then start back up again. And her imagination made the noises more disturbing each time she heard them, until she was nearly convinced that the noises were coming from the bodies themselves, that Andy and Trish and Nick were stumbling around the dark corridors, searching for her.

  For a long, long time, Olivia did little more than weep silently, forcing herself to hold back the desperate sobs that wanted so badly to burst upward from her throat. But even then, that little voice was there in her head, telling her to just hold on, to be strong and patient because someone was coming for her. It was an irrational thought, since no one on earth knew where sh
e was. No one except that insane woman outside. And she had probably fled when she first heard the screaming.

  But that irrational voice in her head had somehow been correct. Wayne had come for her. He rescued her, even though he ultimately had to face the Wood to do it.

  And now, after all that, she had followed him into this strange little corner of hell.

  Perhaps she had lost her mind in that bathroom stall after all.

  Below them, the bottom of the stairs finally came into view. Wayne was breathing heavily, his bare body slick with sweat. He needed to rest, but when she suggested it, he refused. He was determined to catch up with his friends and nothing was going to hold him back.

  “How far is it now?” Andrea asked.

  “The fear room’s just ahead,” Wayne replied.

  “The fear room’s the hardest, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can we make it?”

  “I made it through before with my friends,” Wayne said. “But it wasn’t easy then, and I don’t think practice makes it any better.” Besides, he thought but did not say, last time I had Albert with me. I only had to do half of it.

  “We’re going to be okay, right?” Andrea asked.

  Wayne assured her that they would, but he felt like a liar. Who was he to say that they were going to make it? He didn’t know.

  Olivia watched Wayne as he made his way down the last of the spiraling steps. This man, this wonderful, incredible man, had risked his life for her, had walked alone in the dark for what might have been miles to find her, suffered painful injuries and had worn the soles of his feet bloody in places. And even now he continued to push on, determined to catch up to the friends he’d left behind.