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

by Brian Harmon

  She hoped she could be half as brave for him.

  Chapter 18

  Brandy groaned as she finally reached the top of the incline.

  “I know,” said Nicole between labored breaths. The hill that was now behind them was the steepest they had encountered and must have taken them up at least four stories. “If there’s a dead-end up here I swear I’m going to scream.”

  “Please don’t do that,” Albert gasped. He was out of breath, too, his body aching. “We don’t need to draw anything’s attention.”

  Nicole nodded. “Right,” she panted. “Maybe just some choice words then.”

  “That should be fine,” Albert agreed.

  Nicole turned and leaned against the wall, pressing her back to it. The coldness that had settled into her from their frigid swim had finally passed and she had even begun to perspire a little. With her eyes closed, she stood there, trying to catch her breath, and Albert found himself distracted for a moment by her lean, muscular build and the rhythmic heaving of her full breasts.

  He turned his eyes away from her and gazed down into the darkness behind them. He didn’t want to see Nicole that way. He didn’t want to think about her like that. But her beauty was distracting. It was difficult. Ever since he and Brandy returned from the temple after their first adventure, the experience they shared in the sex room had lingered in him. It did something to his libido, permanently increasing his sex drive so that it took very little to make him aroused. Though he had never before been all that preoccupied with sex, he now found himself frequently distracted by it. Everything seemed to turn him on. Fortunately, it was the same for Brandy and together they could release their sexual tension as often as they needed.

  But down here he had no such luxury. Down here there was no time for sexual games. They had to stay focused. They had to stay aware, alert for the many dangers that awaited them throughout the labyrinth. And even if the urge became too distracting to ignore, it wasn’t as if they were alone together.

  He had to keep his mind on the task at hand.

  It wasn’t even as if he had any interest in Nicole. He was in love with Brandy. He adored her. He was happy being with her. He wanted no one else but her. He didn’t lust after his girlfriend’s best friend. He didn’t have fantasies about her.

  Well… Maybe one or two about his girlfriend and her best friend… But he was pretty sure that was normal male thinking… He was even pretty sure that was normal female thinking, too. They just refused to admit it.

  Besides, it wasn’t as if Brandy was any less distracting. If anything, the sight of her naked body was even harder to ignore. She was, after all, his lover. If they were alone (and not lost in a terrifying labyrinth with a deadly monster), there would be nothing to stop him from walking over to her and running his hands over her supple body.

  He had thought that as he grew wearier, he would become less distracted, that by now he would simply be too tired to even notice the two gorgeous bodies that were constantly passing before his tormented eyes. But it was exactly the opposite. Apparently, the more exhausted he became, the more difficult it was to muscle his thoughts away from them.

  Searching for something to focus on besides beautiful, naked women, he considered the urges themselves. He contemplated how the sex room had changed him and Brandy, enhancing their sexual appetites so that they lusted after each other like they never lusted for anyone before that night. He supposed it could be argued that it had nothing to do with the sex room besides thrusting them together in the first place. He was, after all, a virgin before he entered that chamber. Some would say that he simply didn’t know what he was missing, that when the statues worked their unusual power on them, it showed him how pleasurable sex could be and how much he enjoyed it. Even Brandy, who had been with two other boyfriends before him, might simply not have had as strong a connection with them. Perhaps they hadn’t been good at it. They were both merely teenage boys, after all. Or perhaps there was something about the way Albert made love that was much more alluring to her. Perhaps Albert was simply much better at it than both of them. (There was an appealing thought.) It could be that the sex room merely drove them into each other’s arms and they discovered quite by accident that they very much enjoyed making love to each other. Very much enjoyed it.

  But Albert wasn’t sure that was true. It didn’t feel like just something they enjoyed doing. It was practically an obsession. Sometimes the two of them would come home after a long day apart and be so madly horny for each other that they never made it to the bedroom. They frequently made furious love on the couch, the chair, the floor, the table, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the dining room. More than once they did it in the hallway on their way to the bedroom. Almost every morning and night they made love in their bed. Rarely did either of them finish a shower without sharing a soapy quickie. They even occasionally left the table in the middle of a meal.

  More than that, Albert wasn’t sure that other men were capable of having sex as often as he did. He could usually be ready to go again within five or ten minutes. Sometimes considerably sooner.

  “I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” Brandy groaned.

  “I know,” agreed Nicole. “I’m dying for a cigarette.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’d settle for some Taco Bell, though. I’m starving.”

  “I think I’m too tired to eat. I just want my bed.”

  “Lucky. I’m never too tired to eat.”

  Brandy rolled her eyes.

  Albert turned and faced them both. Nicole was bent forward, resting her hands on her knees, her magnificent breasts pulled gently toward the floor and swaying voluptuously as she lifted her face and gazed forward into the darkness ahead. Brandy had stood up straight and was stretching, her lean arms crossed over her head, her pert breasts lifted sensuously, her belly flattened, her legs lengthened as she lifted herself onto her toes. The small tuft of fair, blonde hair where her thighs met was softly illuminated by the beam of his flashlight so that it glowed almost golden in the darkness.

  He wondered for a moment if they might both be doing this to him on purpose.

  Without speaking, he walked past them and led the way forward. He liked being in the lead. The darkness that lingered ahead was unnerving, but at least there were no gorgeous, naked women to distract him.

  If he kept getting distracted, he would eventually lose his focus. And he desperately wanted to avoid the embarrassment of an ill-timed erection. He was fairly sure that Nicole would not let him forget it. She was so fond of trying to make him blush.

  The tunnel that stretched out in front of them leveled off and then converged with three more in an eight-way intersection.

  “Any suggestions?” asked Albert.

  “Like we know any better than you do,” Brandy said, a little too grumpily. “We’ll never find our way through this.”

  “Just pick one,” Nicole agreed. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  “I guess not,” Albert replied. He picked the path to the right of the one straight ahead and soon they found themselves walking downhill again. At the bottom of this hill, the path converged with another and they continued forward. Soon, this passage made a sharp left turn and Albert spied a large room looming at the end of the passage ahead of them. He swelled with hope that they had somehow lucked into finding the end of the labyrinth, but he knew better. What awaited them ahead was most likely one of any number of large chambers scattered throughout the temple. Perhaps they had circled back to the reservoir or maybe to that disturbingly enormous chasm.

  Instead, they walked out into an open darkness.

  They stood there for a moment, gazing out at the enormous chamber. The floor continued forward into the room, but everything else receded into the darkness, far beyond the reach of their flashlights, so that nothing but a flat, stone walkway could be seen.

  Again, Albert cursed himself for not thinking to pack flares. Here was yet another place he could
have dropped one to get an idea of what might be below them.

  Brandy seized his elbow and squeezed nervously. She wasn’t exactly afraid of heights, but neither was she terribly fond of them. She was usually fine, but she disliked climbing on ladders and standing on precarious ledges. The walkway before them was plenty wide enough to safely cross, even side-by-side, if they wanted, but there were no rails of any kind and it was disorienting in the darkness. Not being able to see anything beneath them was especially unnerving.

  “I don’t like this,” she whimpered, pressing herself closer to Albert.

  “This place is stupid,” Nicole growled, but there was more apprehension in her voice than anger. “Everything about this place is just fucked up.”

  “It could be worse,” Albert offered.

  “Oh, I’m sure it will be.”

  Brandy stared out at the walkway, her stomach sinking. She didn’t want to do this. The very sight of it made her feel queasy. She couldn’t even see what was holding it up.

  “We might as well get it over with,” said Albert, and with Brandy still clinging to his elbow, he started forward. Almost immediately, the wall behind them dissolved into the shadows and left them walking through the darkness with nothing to be seen but the small strip of floor beneath their feet.

  “Seriously,” grumbled Nicole, “whoever designed this place was not right in the head.”

  Albert didn’t disagree. There was something definitely twisted about the temple. He wished he could see what was around them. It made him nervous not knowing what might be out there.

  He couldn’t help but wonder if the Caggo was here, watching them, stalking them.

  In a sort of optical illusion, the floor seemed much smaller than it had in the confines of the labyrinth’s many passageways, making him feel as if he might teeter off balance at any moment. And with the bottom of the chamber hidden beyond their vision below them, it was easy to magnify that feeling by imagining that they were suspended over a bottomless abyss.

  But this chamber was definitely not bottomless.

  From somewhere directly below them, the furious clamor of a hound suddenly burst from the silence and Brandy and Nicole screamed.

  Chapter 19

  Albert, Brandy and Nicole each stood motionless, their hearts pounding in their chests, as the strange and threatening roar of the hound rose up from beneath them, filling the chamber and echoing off the walls so that it took on a terrible, warbling tone that was indescribably menacing. Then other hounds joined in. Dozens of them, it seemed, though it was probably only four or five, and it felt as if there were a thousand monsters roaring at them with their awful, clattering voices.

  Brandy held Albert’s arm in a death grip. And the instant the noise began, Nicole pressed herself against him as well, so that they stood in an intimate huddle, terrified.

  Had they wandered into a den of some kind? There was a very subtle reek to the air that he hadn’t noticed at first, a stale and musty animal stench.

  Brandy shouted something at him, but it was impossible to hear her over the imposing roar of the creatures. What the hell was that sound they made? He just couldn’t grasp how they were doing it. It didn’t sound like any kind of animal call that he had ever heard. It didn’t even sound organic. As if they were not beasts at all, but unthinkable, murderous machines.

  The creatures were directly beneath them, perhaps only twenty or thirty feet down. This walkway obviously passed right over a large chamber in their territory. But they should be safe up here out of reach. There was no evidence that the hounds had any means of climbing up to them. The two parts of the labyrinth had been kept separate so far and Albert was fairly certain that they would remain that way.

  Knowing this, however, did not make it any less challenging to move forward. With the very real and very deadly threat of the hounds to frighten them, and with the creatures’ enraged racket assaulting their ears from every direction, the walkway seemed to become even narrower, threatening to spill all of them off the side and into the snarling jaws of something unthinkable.

  It was almost dizzying.

  Step by step, Albert crept forward, his eyes fixed on the platform at his feet, reminding himself over and over again that there was plenty of room, that he was in no danger of falling to his death.

  Brandy continued to cling to his elbow, digging her nails into the flesh of his arm. He welcomed the pain as a distraction from the disorienting roar that practically shook the chamber around them.

  Nicole, too, remained attached to him. Her hand on his shoulder, she pressed her body against his bare back whenever he paused. Suddenly, he was no longer aware that she was naked. His only awareness was of the floor beneath his feet and the hellish din of the hounds.

  But as they clung to him, afraid of the monsters that filled the chamber around them with their terrible noise, they threatened to throw him off balance. Albert had to pause and focus himself to keep from staggering.

  Was it only his imagination, or could he also hear the underlying sound of menacing snarls? There was no doubt in his mind that if they should stumble and fall from this platform, they would immediately be set upon and slaughtered by whatever those things were, and yet he remained fascinated by their mystery. What were they? What did they look like? How did they make that unusual noise?

  Eventually, they reached the other side of the chamber and hurried into the passage that awaited them on the other side, breathing a sigh of relief as the noise of that chamber began to fade into the shadows behind them.

  “Okay, that was terrifying,” squealed Nicole when it was quiet enough to again be heard.

  “I think we stirred them up a little,” said Brandy.

  “You think?” retorted Nicole.

  Brandy ignored her. “You don’t think all that noise they’re making will lure the Caggo, do you?”

  “It could,” he admitted.

  “Oh god,” sighed Nicole. “I don’t know if I can take much more of this.”

  An intersection appeared ahead of them and they turned left. At the next intersection they turned right. Then right again. Albert barely thought about it now. It made no difference. It seemed that the quickest way through this labyrinth now was to cover as much ground as possible. At some point they would have to stumble across the exit.

  He turned left and then stopped as another dead end emerged from the darkness ahead of him.

  “You know,” he said as he turned to retrace his steps. “For a maze this size, there haven’t been as many dead ends as you would think.”

  “That’s true, I guess,” agreed Brandy.

  “Most passages go somewhere, even if it’s just to another passage,” Albert continued.

  “So, what?” Nicole asked. “Instead of getting hopelessly lost and running into one dead end after another, we’ll get hopelessly lost and just go in circles?”

  “Pretty much,” Albert replied. “Except that we have the advantage of our chalk line. Because we know where we’ve already been, we should be able to find our way through. It’s just a very long process of elimination.”

  “Too long,” decided Brandy. “We’re supposed to stay lost in here until the Caggo can hunt us down and kill us.”

  “I think so,” Albert admitted. It was a grim thought, but perfectly accurate, he was sure.

  From somewhere ahead of them, they heard the distant droning of hounds again.

  “Are we circling back to that same room?” Nicole asked.

  “It’s possible,” Albert replied. “Or somewhere near it.”

  The noise grew louder, and when they reached the end of the passageway they found another dropped tunnel crossing theirs. Twice as wide as the ones to which they had been confined, it looked like another major thoroughfare for the hounds. The stench was much stronger here. It reminded him of the zoo, where some the habitats always inevitably smelled foul no matter how well the animal keepers cared for them. It was the very nature of wild animals. They stank. And th
e hounds were likely no exception.

  The noise was coming from somewhere to the right. Albert felt certain that if they were to follow the sound, they would probably find that it sloped into a ramp that led down to the unseen chamber beneath the precarious walkway.

  But that was no place they wanted to be.

  “Let’s just go back,” Brandy suggested.

  But Albert was already looking at the passage across from them. “I don’t like to backtrack unless I absolutely have to.”

  “The hounds are right over there,” Nicole argued. “We don’t know how far away they are or how fast they can get here.”

  “We can make it.”

  “I don’t care if we can or not,” snapped Nicole. “It’s a chance we don’t have to take.”

  “I don’t think we’ll get out of here alive if we avoid taking chances,” Albert said as he turned and fixed his eyes on hers.

  “You don’t know that,” she said, but it was hard to meet his gaze.

  “Maybe I don’t. But it feels right to me. The more time we spend going back through passages we’ve already taken, the longer we’re stuck down here and the more likely we are to attract the Caggo.”

  Without waiting for more arguments, Albert dropped down into the passage and hurried across to the other side.

  Brandy and Nicole followed quickly, unhappy, but unwilling to risk being separated from him should a hound come racing toward them. And in a mere few seconds they were all standing on the other side, safely out of reach.

  “I’m going to bet that we’ll stir those things up again,” Albert said as he shined his light down the passage in the direction of the noise. “And we won’t be able to cross these intersections if they get too riled up. That’s reason enough to explore as widely as possible now.”

  “I guess,” said Brandy.

  “I just want to see one,” Albert said. “I want to know what they look like.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get your chance,” Nicole assured him. “Now come on. I’m not hanging around here to wait for one to come begging for a treat.”