The Box

by Brian Harmon

Albert shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked around the room, searching for something different, some stone out of place or unusual holes or slots, but that did not seem right either. The traps Indiana Jones faced in the Temple of Doom were extravagant, consisting of stone mechanics dating thousands of years in the past. He honestly did not expect to have arrows fly out at him or the walls to begin moving, but what else could a seemingly empty room contain? He steeled himself and stepped forward.

  “Albert, no!”

  “It’s okay. Just wait there.” He was scared. He was damn scared. With every step he expected to be impaled or crushed or worse. It was the same fear he’d felt before removing the bags from the praying statue’s hands. Back then he’d felt silly afterwards, wondering how he could expect such deadly consequences, but that was before he discovered what lay beyond the hate room. This place was getting more dangerous by the minute. But Brandy was the one who almost paid the price for pushing forward, and he would be damned if he was going to let her take any more chances.

  No spikes impaled him. The ceiling did not come down on top of him. No fireball set him ablaze. The room was just a room and nothing more. Beyond it, the next passage was identical to the one that led back to the pit.

  He paused in the middle of the room, gazing down the next corridor, wishing he’d taken the light from Brandy so that he could see how far the next tunnel went. It was now that he felt something, a paranoid sense that they were not alone in this small room. He lifted his gaze upward, into the darkness above him.

  Brandy saw him look up and quickly shined the light up to the high ceiling.

  There was nothing there. Not a thing.

  Yet Albert would have sworn…

  Nothing.

  He turned and walked quickly back to where Brandy stood. Still waiting for the end to fall upon him from some unseen crevice, he took her hand and the two of them crossed the room and entered the next tunnel.

  Albert looked back as they left the chamber behind. It wasn’t right. There was something terribly wrong about that room. He could feel it. Yet they passed through it without harm.

  Perhaps he was only being paranoid.

  As they approached the end of the corridor, they heard the same shuffling, clicking, crackling noise that frightened them in the earlier passage. The sound was more distant than before, but grew louder as they walked. It was enough to tear their thoughts from both the deadly spikes and the mysteriously empty room.

  “Albert…”

  “I know.” Albert squinted into the darkness ahead. Whatever that noise was, they were walking straight toward it.

  When they reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out into the next chamber, neither of them were able to quite believe what greeted them. Stretched out before them was what appeared to be an enormous stone bridge, nearly thirty feet wide, vanishing into the darkness ahead. On each side ran a low wall, beyond which was nothing but darkness. And it was impossible to tell just how high up the ceiling was. The flashlight simply didn’t reach.

  Without speaking, they turned and walked over to the edge of the bridge and peered over with the flashlight. Stretched out below them, as far as the light would reach, was an enormous stone maze.

  “Wow,” exclaimed Albert. He could only see the tops of the walls, but that was enough to reveal that the passages were narrow. It was impossible to see a path through it from up here, much less from within those high walls.

  It was from this maze that the strange noises came.

  “I never would have imagined that something this big could be down here.” He looked up at the darkness above them. “How far underground are we?”

  Brandy was staring down at the maze. She did not really care how far down they were. What she was concerned with was that noise. “What’s down there?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “I don’t know, but I hope it can’t climb. Come on.”

  The two of them began to cross the bridge, but something far to their right caught Albert’s eye and he stopped.

  “What is it?” Brandy stopped and followed his gaze. When she shined the flashlight at it, her stomach began to churn again. “Albert, those are our clothes!”

  It wasn’t all their clothes, but it was their undergarments. An enormous pillar, at least as big around as a city water tower, stood just within the reach of the flashlight. Three white socks were hung on the side facing them. Above these, hanging side-by-side, were Albert’s white briefs and Brandy’s flowered white panties. Higher up hung Brandy’s bra. The last sock must have fallen into the shadows with the things that were making the noise.

  “How do we get to them?” Brandy caught herself trying to cover her nakedness again. Apparently, just the sight of some of her clothing was enough to remind her that she was stark naked and her male companion could see her most private parts.

  Albert shook his head. “I don’t think we do.”

  There were things moving down there, unseen in the shadows. Albert could hear them prowling the narrow passageways in the dark. It was impossible to say how many there were.

  “Why would somebody put them there?”

  “Maybe to give those things our scent.”

  Brandy glanced at him and then looked back at their unreachable undergarments. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Neither do I.” He also didn’t like how the clothes were hung as they would be wearing them if they were down there. It looked to him as though someone had tried to simulate their presence.

  Scent doubles, he thought, and shivered.

  He took Brandy’s hand and led her across the bridge, trying not to look at the maze below. But he could not forget those undergarments. Why only those items? Why not use all their clothes?

  Three passages awaited them, framed by four sentinels. All four were identical, feet together, hands at their sides. They were neither in motion nor amorous, but they were also not helping them.

  “So which one do we take?” Brandy asked.

  “I’m not sure.” He removed his backpack, knowing well where the answer would be if there was one.

  The finger and the button had been used, and he doubted if they would come into play again, but he kept them just in case. This left only the knife blade, the watch and the feather. He removed these three items and examined each of them. But nothing about them gave him any clues.

  He walked to the nearest passage and peered inside, looking for anything out of place. Brandy followed him, lending him light. “You figured all the others out. You can get this one.”

  “I hope so.” He moved on to the second passage and then the third. Nothing.

  Brandy turned her light to the statues, searching them for any slight difference. So far, they seemed to each have all their parts. None of them were missing a finger.

  Albert shook his head. “So far they’ve been pretty easy clues. Whoever gave us that box wanted us to get this far, and I don’t see why we should stop here.” He gazed out at the darkness that loomed over the maze beyond the side of the bridge. Somewhere, one of the things began making its strange shuffling and clicking sound. There was also a sound like stone striking stone, over and over again, very rapidly.

  He turned away from the maze and began examining the statue on the far left.

  “Hey.” Brandy was standing on her toes beside the statue on the far right, shining her light up at the statue’s neck. “Look at this.”

  Albert hurried to her side and stretched up on his own toes to see what she was looking at.

  “See it? Something’s scratched into its neck.”

  “Yeah, I do.” He grasped the statue’s arm and craned his neck to see. It looked as if someone had taken a sharp tool and etched something into the stone there, almost like a tattoo. “It looks like…”

  Brandy lifted the light up as high as she could and focused it on the mark.

  “It looks like a bird,” he decided at last. It was a crude image, but once he wrapped his head around it there
was no denying. He could make out what was supposed to be wings and a beak.

  “Bird,” Brandy repeated. “Bird feather!”

  Albert nodded. “I think so. Good eyes. You rock.”

  “Naturally.” She gave him a cool wink and he again felt a spark of arousal. Was that the sex room lingering in him? Or was it just him? At that moment, he could not say. She was proud of herself for finding one of the clues and for that moment she seemed more confident, more in control. And it looked damn good on her. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been crushing on her even before they entered the sex room. Maybe it was just his natural attraction to her. Or maybe the sex room simply amplified that.

  “Must be the tunnel on the right then,” he surmised, suppressing his feelings. Walking around naked didn’t leave any room to be turned on, not when you were a man in flesh and blood. He almost envied the statues for that advantage.

  “I guess so,” Brandy agreed.

  Below them there was a violent outburst, a rapid clattering arose, as if a great many things were clashing together over and over again at high speeds. It sounded eerily like hundreds of blades beating together, as though there were an intense battle raging far below them without a sound but for the swords clanging upon one another.

  “We should go,” Albert urged.

  Brandy glanced one last time toward the sprawling maze and then followed him into the tunnel, leaving the noises for the darkness.

  Chapter 16

  The passage was about eight feet tall by five feet in width when they entered, but as they walked, the ceiling sloped gradually downward and the walls slowly closed, narrowing until they could no longer walk fully upright or side-by-side.

  Before the tunnel grew too small, Albert stopped and peered back the way they’d come, a little unnerved by the claustrophobic position they were finding themselves in.

  “Are we going the right way?” Brandy asked, noticing his hesitance.

  Albert shook his head. “We have to be,” he replied. “There was a bird.”

  Brandy giggled a little at how absurd that sounded.

  “It was the only clue we had.”

  “I know.”

  “We have to be going the right way. Do you want to lead or follow?”

  Brandy looked back the way they’d come, and then up ahead at where they were going. On one hand there was the fear of what may lie ahead, the anxious unknowing, the danger, but on the other hand there was the question of what may be behind them, the thought that she may be vulnerable. “How narrow do you think it’ll get?”

  “Hard to say. We may have to crawl soon.”

  She took a deep breath and decided: “I’ll go first.” It was the thought of being blind on two sides, unable to either turn around or see past Albert that ultimately decided it for her. She squeezed past him and pushed forward.

  Albert removed the backpack and followed.

  As the walls closed in around her, forcing her to duck lower and lower, Brandy’s anxiety grew. She was not usually claustrophobic, but she was feeling that suffocating feeling now. What if it grew too narrow to fit through? What if they became stuck down here, perhaps miles underground, in a place no one else on earth even knew existed? She did not like the thought of the irony of narrowly surviving that pit of spikes only to slowly die of thirst wedged between these walls. She shook away the thought, and asked Albert where he thought the other two tunnels led.

  “I don’t know. If I had to guess I’d say probably down to that maze. That seemed like a good place for getting rid of trespassers.”

  “Do you think every choice we didn’t make was a trap?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. Whoever took our clothes could have gone a different way. Maybe we got the hard road and he’s taking the easy one.”

  “I don’t like not knowing who’s in here with us.”

  “I don’t either.”

  The ceiling had finally descended too low for them to walk and they dropped to their hands and knees. Albert had to place his backpack on the floor beneath him and drag it along between his hands. This was awkward, but he managed to keep up.

  Ahead of them, the tunnel made a sharp right turn and then continued down the ever-shrinking corridor. It was about now, as they made this tight turn, that Albert became distracted by the view. He was staying close behind Brandy, not wanting to be left behind, and he found himself staring at her round buttocks and the titillating slit of her vagina that her crawling posture revealed. Even without a flashlight he could see that part of her perfectly in the backlight. The muscles of her thighs pumped solidly as she crawled, stretching and contracting in a motion that was incredibly erotic. The sight sent a knot into his stomach and he forced his eyes back down to the floor. He felt guilty looking at her that way. It was ungentlemanly as all hell, but it was also a damn pleasant distraction from his fear of this labyrinth.

  The walls and ceiling closed in around them until they had to give up crawling on hands and knees to continue on their bellies, and Albert’s view of Brandy was thankfully replaced by a much less interesting view of his backpack as he shoved it forward ahead of him.

  “I see the end of the tunnel,” Brandy reported. They were sweet words to Albert. “Only a little farther.”

  “Thank God,” Albert sighed. “I’m starting to get claustrophobic.”

  “Me too.”

  The last few feet were a squeeze, but they managed to make it through without getting stuck. The only truly difficult part was exiting the tunnel itself. The floor of the next room was several feet lower than the floor of the tunnel. Brandy slithered from a hole much smaller than the one they entered, inching her way out until she could plant her hands on the cold floor and ease herself down. It was now that she wished that she had opted to go second so that Albert could have given her a hand, but she couldn’t change that now.

  Albert pushed his backpack through the hole after her and immediately began to pull himself free. Claustrophobia had begun to get the best of him and he wanted out as quickly as possible.

  Brandy grabbed the backpack as she stood and tried to give him a hand, but he was on the floor before she could get a grip on him. She heard something strike the floor way too hard—his elbow, she thought—but he did not seem to notice. He was already studying this newest chamber.

  This room was round, its diameter at least sixty feet. A walkway about ten feet wide circled the room, as did dozens of tunnel entrances identical to the one they just exited. In the center of the room, a steep, spiraling staircase sank down into the darkness below and at the top of these steps stood a lone sentinel statue. It was standing upright and stiff, with its feet together, facing the top of the staircase. Its right hand was at its side, but the left was raised toward the steps, its grotesquely long index finger extended.

  “I think it wants us to go down,” said Brandy. Her eyes fell to the statue’s penis again. There was a grotesque sort of eroticism about a penis that big. It stirred something in her gut, something as unpleasant and unavoidable as a nicotine craving, and she wondered if it was the sex room again. “Do you think we should?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Albert as he clambered to his feet. “So far they seem to be on our side, but we’ll have a look in all the passages anyway. Just in case.”

  “We should mark the tunnel we came in through.”

  “With what? I left the spray paint behind.”

  Brandy handed Albert the flashlight, and then removed a tube of lipstick from her purse. She scrawled a glossy X on the wall on each side of the tunnel and then replaced the tube.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “I know.”

  Albert laughed.

  It took him only a moment to check out all of the passages that led away from the stairs. Nothing but smooth, clean stone could be seen in each of them. But he hadn’t really expected to see anything. The statue was pointing down and he had a strong hunch that if they were going to get through this labyrinth alive, they would do wel
l to trust these faceless beings.

  He turned and peered down into the darkness below, trying to judge how far down it could go, but it was impossible.

  “So why is it that this guy points the way but all the others were all mysterious about it?”

  Albert shrugged. “Maybe he figures by now we’ve earned it.” He handed the flashlight back to her and began to lead the way down the spiraling steps, descending ever farther into the unknown.

  Chapter 17

  “God, I need a cigarette,” gasped Brandy. She paused and gazed up at the dizzying spiral of steps above them. It felt like they’d descended at least twenty stories. The steps were both steep and narrow, demanding careful treading to prevent a deadly fall into the abyss below, and her legs and back ached from the effort.

  Albert went a few steps farther and then stopped and sat down. He looked up above him at the distance they’d covered, huffing exhaustedly. He wished there was some way of knowing just how deep they were. It felt like they just kept going down.

  “It’s unbelievable,” gasped Brandy. “How much deeper can we possibly go?”

  Albert shook his head. He had no idea.

  She sat down on the steps to catch her breath. “We can’t just go down forever, can we?”

  “You wouldn’t think.” Albert gazed down into the darkness. There was no telling what might lie at the bottom of this hole, but he was certain of one thing: there were still two clues left in the box. He was sure they would have to use both of them before they reached the end of this labyrinth.

  He turned and looked at Brandy, who was leaning back on the steps with her arms at her sides and her knees together, staring up into the darkness from which they’d come. She was slick with perspiration and her breasts were rising and falling with her labored breath. He watched her for a moment, taking in her beauty, and then turned his gaze back to the emptiness below.

  “Thank you,” he said after a moment.

  Brandy sat up and looked down at him. “Why?”

  “For not leaving me back there after the sex room. I would’ve let you.”