by Brian Harmon
The Temple of the Blind
Book Four
Road Beneath the Wood
By Brian Harmon
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Brian Harmon
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Visit this author at www.HarmonUniverse.com
Don’t miss the first three books in this series:
The Box
Gilbert House
The Temple of the Blind
Chapter 1
Wayne did not know how long he had lain upon the cold, dirt floor of the tunnel before consciousness finally returned to him.
He sat up, struggling to orient himself. He was cold and naked and filthy. He felt dizzy, his thoughts sluggish as he struggled to rise from his unnatural sleep. He did not know what the “gift” was that the Sentinel Queen gave him, but he was fairly sure that it was nothing he’d wanted. His body felt weighted, as though he’d performed some great physical feat, and there was a cold dampness upon his body that made him feel even dirtier than the reeking, rotten sludge that was dried upon his skin and clotted in his thick, black hair.
He’d been through hell tonight already. First, he was attacked by that thing inside Gilbert House. Then he’d walked for hours, naked, through miles of dark passages within the Temple of the Blind, collecting cuts and bruises along the way and battling to the brink of exhaustion his own fear. He’d even trudged through that disgusting lake of foul-smelling mud, only to end up at the mercy of a long, freakish woman with no face.
He was not so much seduced by her as raped, and that feeling was like a vile worm wriggling around inside his guts.
Even his dreams had seduced him. He dreamt of Laura Swiff, naked and lusting, her voluptuous body glistening with sweat. He dreamt about Nicole Smart, her amazing breasts bare and pressed against his skin as she gazed up at him with a naughty gleam in her sexy eyes. He dreamt about Olivia Shadey, her sweet face gazing up at him, pleading with him as he reached out to touch her.
He even dreamt about Gail Porbin.
He hadn’t let himself think about Gail in a very long time, but as his dreams began to break apart and he felt himself rising toward consciousness, he found himself remembering her vividly. She was a time in his life that seemed very far away, though the years between now and then were not so many.
Gail was a confident girl, a member of the volleyball team, well liked by her friends and well admired by the boys. She was petite, with a gorgeous figure, and the most beautiful smile he had ever seen. Back then, she was everything he’d ever wanted. She was beautiful, popular, sexy, free-spirited, easy going…but in the end he’d let her go. It had been much easier to break up with her than to go off to college without her. He’d set himself free of that leash and prepared for a new life with new friends, new women and new opportunities. At least, these were the things he told himself every night as he lay in bed waiting for peaceful, unthinking sleep.
His flashlight was lying next to him, still on, still intact. He vaguely remembered dropping it when the Sentinel Queen advanced on him. He rubbed at a dull pain in his temple and looked around. The walls of this tunnel, as well as the floor, changed abruptly from smooth stone to coarse dirt and rock about halfway between the first and second seals. He was sitting on the dirt, only a short distance from where the stone ended, close enough to see both seals without picking up the flashlight. He was alone. The Sentinel Queen was gone.
Behind him, the first seal was tightly closed again.
He stood up and walked back to this first seal, leaving the flashlight on the floor. This side of the stone was also covered with those odd carvings, but there was no circle like there had been on the other side. He ran his hands over the surface. It was hard and cold. He pushed, but it would not budge. Like it or not, he was locked in. He could only go forward.
He walked back to the place where he’d been lying when he awoke and picked up his flashlight. Ahead of him, there stood another heavy slab of stone, the second of the fourteen ancient seals he had been told about. On the left-hand side, amidst the shapes and lines and symbols that were carved into it, was a single circle, about ten inches in diameter.
He tried first to push outside the circle, to move the great stone slab without the trick he’d been shown. The seal might as well have been a mountain. Several tons of solid stone stood against his bare hands and would not budge. But when he put his hand inside the circle, the seal withdrew as though intimidated, rotating on its center with the ease of a well-oiled gate. There was a sound as it moved, the coarse grinding of tons of stone across the floor, the sound one would expect to hear while performing such a feat, but the effort was absent, as though he were not actually moving the stone, but watching someone else do it.
Beyond the second seal, the tunnel stretched away into the darkness. He could not see the third seal from here, only a dense blackness that hovered ahead of him, almost mocking him.
Always close one seal before opening another, the Sentinel Queen had told him, and he quickly found that he could push the seal closed from the other side without the circle. It turned without effort until it was flush with the wall, and then it would budge no more, regardless of where he pushed. He wondered how these seals worked, but he did not dwell upon it long. Having permanently closed this one, he felt a quiet sort of anxiousness building within him. What exactly was he locking himself inside?
But there was no turning back. From the start there was nowhere to go but forward. The Sentinel Queen made sure of that when she left him in the tunnel and locked the first seal between them.
He turned and began his long walk into the ominous, looming darkness as a feeling of deep apprehension began to grow inside his gut. He had no idea what awaited him ahead. He had no idea if there was anything on the other side of the darkness but lonely death. He had no clothes, no supplies, no weapons with which to defend himself. He had nothing at all except blind faith and desperate hope that somehow he could overcome this challenge and fulfill the promise he made to Olivia Shadey.
Never linger long in one place. Do not touch the roots of the trees that grow in the Wood. If you see something in the darkness, do not investigate it. If anything should call your name while you are down here, do not answer. You must ignore these things. These were the warnings of the Sentinel Queen, exactly as she had spoken them, and remembering them now, Wayne felt an icy shiver run up his back. The things in this tunnel are imaginary as long as you don’t prove them otherwise…
He had a terrible feeling that this journey was going to test his courage far more than the fear room ever could.
Chapter 2
The darkness hung just ahead of and behind him, seeming to close in and recede like a living thing, pulsing, almost throbbing, as though it could breathe. Whenever he shined the light in any single direction, it would advance from every other. This was not like the other tunnels. It was cold and dark, like every set of walls he’d seen since entering the service tunnel behind the field house, but this one was intimidating, like a hallway leading to an execution chamber. Wayne did not think that it was the Sentinel Queen’s warnings that made it feel this way. Nor was it the fact that he was now traveling alone, with no one to lean
on, no one to rely upon, no one to make him feel the need to put on a courageous face. This tunnel was simply intimidating, the way creepy places sometimes were. It was simply born that way.
As he walked, Wayne waited for the things he’d been warned about. Twice he thought he heard something, perhaps whispers or the phantom moaning of an unfelt wind, and was reluctant to dismiss them as his own imagination. Once, he had the odd sensation that something was following him, creeping along behind him, just out of sight, and he was even more reluctant to dismiss this. But dismiss these things he did, because the Sentinel Queen had told him that he must. According to her, everything down here was imaginary as long as he did not prove it otherwise. That strongly suggested that every little thing he heard, saw or felt down here could potentially become real, if only he allowed it. These were facts not easily accepted by the human mind, however. Fear was a strange power, almost an addiction. And Wayne had discovered plenty of things to fear in recent hours. Real things. Things that justified his fear. And yet he survived. He survived Gilbert House and that horrible monster that nearly popped his skull with one bare hand. He survived the fear room, that maze of deadly chambers and unthinkable statues that must have closely resembled some distant corner of hell. And now he had to face this place. The Sentinel Queen said that its name literally translated into “Road Beneath the Wood.” The very name was somehow dreadful to him, as blunt as a swift execution. He felt as though he were trapped in a nightmare that would not end, as though all the sins of his life had been assembled and assessed and he was now being tried and judged by some greater but utterly wicked force.
His imagination would not rest. There was a morbid little collection of horrible things dwelling deep down in the very back of his mind, a collection he had often stumbled onto as a child on stormy nights and when odd noises rose from the baseboard heater in his old room. But this macabre collection was now several horrible things bigger than it was back then, and as he walked through this empty tunnel, it was like a beehive pelted with a baseball. All sorts of terrible things were churning up, trying hard to convince him that every noise and every shadow had eyes that were fixed on him and teeth it was more than eager to use.
Desperate for some distraction, he forced himself to think about something—anything—to take his mind off where he was and what was or wasn’t there with him. What he found was Gail Porbin in her white prom dress, sitting in the passenger’s seat of his old truck with a bottle of Diet Pepsi in one hand and a mischievous sort of gleam in her eyes.
That had been a night to remember, the night the world slowed to a brilliant and magnificent stop, the night happiness and contentment reached its ultimate peak for him, a night he had wished would last forever, a night he still wished had lasted forever. That was the night his buddy Harvey Hodson lost his virginity to Claire Witler, the same, charming redhead to whom he would later give his name. It was also the night Will Detnep got passed-out drunk and Mark Alborne and Sam Nodd played that hilarious prank on him.
Wayne remembered how hard he’d laughed when they told him about it. They drove him all the way to St. Louis, rented a cheep motel room, stripped him to his underwear, stole his wallet and keys and then drove back, leaving him in the hotel bed wearing only his socks and briefs, with his clothes scattered across the floor. The next morning Will called Sam from his cell phone practically in tears, saying that he didn’t know where he was but that he might have hired a prostitute who stole his wallet and his car. “What am I going to tell my dad?” Will kept screaming. “He’s going to kill me! Quit laughing, Sam! This ain’t funny!” But it was funny. It was hilarious.
Wayne grinned in the darkness. He’d forgotten about that. He’d forgotten a lot of things about those days. He didn’t think about those things anymore. He didn’t want to go back there, no matter how happy he had been. The grin faded away almost as soon as it appeared. Those were fun times, but there was something dark about it, too, something he did not care to remember, something he had spent three long years trying to forget.
He and Gail made love that night while Sam and Mark were driving Will to the motel room he would tear apart in the morning, looking for a condom wrapper that he wouldn’t find, terrified that he was going to catch AIDS or syphilis or some other nasty thing. They did it in his truck, way out by White Hollow Cemetery, off the old road that led to Gulfer Lake. The cemetery was small but beautiful, well maintained and elegant, with plenty of shade, a short distance from the church, but not right in its backyard. There were a lot of people who would find that location disrespectful at best, eerily sadist at worst, but it had actually been a magnificent place for intimacy. There was a wonderful peacefulness to the cemetery, and the lack of trees allowed just enough moonlight to pass through the windshield for them to see everything. There were crickets chirping and frogs from a stream in the nearby woods and even the magically endless song of a whippoorwill as they embraced. Besides, it wasn’t like they were doing it on someone’s grave. They were parked behind the cemetery, on the little dirt driveway that circled it, way back in the corner by the trees. It was where Gail claimed to have had her first orgasm, not because it was hot, but because it was slow and wonderful. He’d been so in love with her back then, so addicted to her and everything she did. He could hardly stand to be apart from her. He could not have loved her more.
Wayne had managed to lose himself almost completely in his memories. The tunnel around him had become a silent movie he wasn’t really paying attention to. He did not see the shadow that scurried over his head upon the ceiling, nor did he hear it whisper to him. He was thinking about Gail. His Gail. His angel. His heart.
He remembered the way she had looked that night, with her prom dress folded and pushed up onto the dashboard, still in her little white panties and heels. She’d been wearing a garter with her dress, he remembered. She wore it for him because he once told her he thought they were sexy. And it was. It had nearly driven him wild. The moonlight had been magical upon her skin. It was spring, so she had no tan lines. Her skin was as soft and pale as the moon itself. Holding her that night and making love to her was like embracing a dream so wonderful it could never be real, yet somehow it was.
He realized suddenly that he was aching for her, like he used to do back then when they’d been apart for too long. He wanted her back. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, to say over and over again until he could say it no more that he was sorry, that he never wanted to leave her the way he did, that he did not know what possessed him to ever leave her in the first place.
That was the thing, after all. What had possessed him to leave her? She certainly never knew the reason for his irrational behavior during those final nights with her. He thought about calling her when he got home, trying to find her again, to make right what he put wrong so long ago, but a jewel like Gail Porbin would not still be single. That would require a miracle, and he’d wasted that miracle once already. God was not that giving. Besides, as much as he could love her, he would not be able to look her in the eye. He would not even be able to speak to her.
Wayne stopped and looked around him. He was suddenly drawn back to the tunnel in which he had been walking. His mind had been far off in thought, too far away to see or hear anything that was happening around him, but he felt sure that someone had called his name.
He started walking again, paying no more attention. The Sentinel Queen had warned him not to answer if anyone should call his name, and she did not have to worry about that. Anything that wanted to talk to him in this eerie darkness was nothing he cared to have a conversation with.
He felt very vulnerable. Suddenly, he was far too aware of his nudity, of the chill that had settled into him, and of the drying, stinking mud upon his skin. That beehive of horrible things in his head was still buzzing furiously and every now and then he would be stung by another terrible thought.
As much as he wanted to believe that he was his own enemy, that the only thing to fear was truly fear itself, he coul
d not shake the feeling that he wasn’t alone, that the darkness harbored more than shadows and imagination. Something was watching him, something dark and menacing, something with hateful, yet gleeful eyes.
Chapter 3
By the time the third seal appeared from the darkness ahead of him, Wayne’s nerves were well rattled. This third slab of stone was identical to the last two, as far as he was able to tell. On the left side was a perfect, ten-inch circle. He still did not know exactly how these circles worked, but he knew what they were for and that was all that really mattered.
He paused before opening this seal and looked back the way he’d come, reassuring himself that he was, indeed, alone. Soon, he could lock that darkness behind him and know without a doubt that his back was clear, only to begin doubting it again before he reached the next seal.
Gail had been a good way to get his mind off the road. Remembering those things had hurt like hell, but pain was good. Pain made you forget things like fear and hunger and lust, all those needs of which the human mind was constantly aware. Pain was the cure and the vaccine for the things from which the Temple of the Blind and this nightmarish tunnel had apparently been built. Pain was good. Pain was reality, and a hard slap back to reality now and then might be the only thing that was going to keep him alive and sane.
He put his hand on the third seal and gently pushed open the great stone slab, still amazed at how easily it moved, as though he were not underground at all, but deep in space.
Beyond the third seal, the walls of the tunnel were identical to those before it, less like the smooth, intentional floors and walls of the temple than of some giant animal’s burrow.
