by Brian Harmon
A sound escaped him, a shrill utterance that might have been a scream or might have been a laugh or might have been his sanity fleeing his skull. He held Brandy tightly in his arms and tried to force away the thing he saw, but he couldn’t.
“I want to go home!” Brandy sobbed. She was crying, terrified not only by what she saw but by what she remembered, by what she could not possibly have known but somehow did.
“Okay.” The mystery of this place seemed unimportant now. Nothing mattered now except getting home. He did not care where the box came from or why it and the key were given to them. He did not want to go any farther. “Okay let’s go.”
She did not move. She held fast to him, her naked body pressed firmly against his.
“You have to lead us back out.”
“I can’t!”
“You have to.”
“I can’t! I can’t go! I’m too scared!”
“I can’t get us out of here, Brandy!”
“I can’t!” Her tears coursed down his chest. She was terrified beyond the limits of her courage. She could not turn back and face those things she’d stumbled past again.
He wanted to run, to just turn and flee back the way they’d come. Had he been capable, he might have left her there in the darkness, crying and screaming until she died of fright, but he could not do that. He could not leave her there. He picked her up instead, cradling her in his arms, and began to walk back the way they’d come.
He banged his leg against the statue that cut Brandy a few moments ago and felt the same sharp pain. Whatever it was, it was covered with claws or spikes or something. He could feel the blood trickling down his leg and the pain magnified the fear.
But he couldn’t run. To run would be to lose control. To lose control would be to die. This was no exaggeration and he knew it. Fear alone could kill and this place was terror in its purest form.
A blind man in a tomb of monsters, he walked. His eyes tightly shut against the terrors that surrounded them. Brandy still held the flashlight, and to look would be to invite madness. He stumbled through the dark, guiding himself only with his feet, feeling his way around statue after statue, trying to walk only in one direction, only in the direction from which they’d come, and found only one obstacle after another. His feet struck stone limbs and more than once he bumped Brandy’s shoulder or leg into one of the many solid occupants of the room.
Panic welled up within him. He did not know the way out. He had a sick feeling he was only going in circles, that the two of them would be trapped in this room for hours, unable to find their way either forward or backward.
He wondered if his heart could actually last that long.
“Are we out yet?”
“I can’t find the way out.”
“What do we do?” She spoke in great, wet sobs.
“Just keep your eyes shut. Nothing can hurt you here. I’ll get us out.”
“Hurry. Please.”
Albert knew there was only one way out, and he knew that way might ruin him, turning his brain to mush, rendering him little more than a drooling shell. The terrors in here were never meant to be looked upon. But there was Brandy to think about. Even if it killed him, he had to look. He had to find the door.
He steeled himself and took several deep, calming breaths. He tried to find reason in the madness, some ray of hope, and found one in remembering the sex room. Those statues did not take effect at first. They had time to study the statues, to examine them for what they were before their libidos went into overdrive. He took one more deep breath and, against his every instinct, he opened his eyes.
The door was in front of him, slightly to his right. It was only five or six steps away. But between it and him stood a great, twisted shape that sent a jolt of utter horror straight through his very soul.
It was facing the other way, toward the door, poised to greet anyone coming in. Albert was staring at the twisted, boiling flesh of its back, unable to see its face, and still it terrified him. He might has well have opened his eyes and gazed upon the real thing as it stumbled toward him, inches from rending the flesh from his face.
He squeezed his eyes shut again, but it was too late. His mind was filled with horrors that he could not unsee. It was as if he actually lived through the terrors this statue depicted. The visions in his head (Dead! They’re all dead!) were as vivid as his own memories. He shuddered with fright, fighting to keep his grip on Brandy, trying to keep his own legs from collapsing beneath him. How was this happening? How did these horrible images (So many of them!) get into his head? It couldn’t be real. It had to be (They won’t die!) some kind of hallucination.
Somehow, he managed to take a step forward, and then another. His feet felt numb. He could not feel the floor beneath him anymore. His knees were shaking. He opened his eyes again and tried to stare only at the doorway. That was his only goal. He just needed to reach the doorway. If he could just get Brandy that far, then even if he dropped dead of fright, at least she’d have a chance at getting home.
His stomach boiled with fear. His head pounded. He walked forward, unable to completely ignore the things around him. Even from the corners of his eyes he saw them, those terrible images of death and blood and creatures from a past he was never meant to know.
He already knew that these things would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
Albert emerged from the door of the fear room, stepping over the stone tongue and teeth of the woman whose horrible fate he’d almost shared. Brandy’s frail, trembling body still cradled in his arms, he walked shivering away from the mysteries that lay beyond.
They had forfeited.
Game over.
Chapter 19
Albert did not stop when he stepped out of the fear room. He walked on, Brandy’s trembling body still held tightly against him, the flashlight still pressed between them. “It’s okay,” he told her. “We’re out. We’re okay.” He kept telling her this, kept assuring her, but he felt like a liar. It was okay. They were out. But he did not yet know if he would ever be okay again. Images haunted his mind. His head ached. His back ached the way it did when one shivered too hard for too long. His very lungs seemed to ache with fright.
There were things in his thoughts now, shadowy things, like dark memories struggling to surface. He tried to stare forward, tried to look only where he was going, trying to suppress the urge to shriek in utter terror.
The fear did not begin to subside until after he passed the last of the sentinels and entered the passage that led to the next room. It was then that he finally looked down at Brandy and found that she was staring up at him, her blue eyes shadowy in the darkness, but still as soft and brilliant as ever. The expression on her face was impossible to read. It could have been relief, it could have been gratitude, it could have been love or it could have been nothing at all. She made no effort to be put down, and he made no effort to put her down. He walked on through the huge and unsettlingly empty room to the spiraling staircase from which they’d descended, cradling her in his arms, liking the way she felt, letting her body’s weight and softness and warmth occupy his mind so that the terrors could not grow. He climbed seven of the steep steps before finally stopping and lowering her gently onto them, as though unwilling to set her on the same floor as those terrible statues.
For a moment he stood staring at her. She lay before him, staring back at him, her hands clamped around the flashlight at her bosom, one leg dangling off the edge of the staircase, the other bent slightly, her foot resting on the step below her. Her hair was still kinky from their earlier swim and her skin was pocked with gooseflesh. He could see the slit of her sex between her parted thighs, uncovered, unhidden, but he felt not a trace of the sex room’s arousal at the sight. He saw only her beauty, her anguish, her need. He needed to take care of her. She depended on him, just as he depended on her. Without each other they neither one would make it back to the surface. They were right to turn around. The answers weren’t worth it. They d
idn’t matter. All that mattered was Brandy. All that mattered was Albert. The two of them were the only things down here that mattered at all and he intended to get them both safely home.
He bent and took her hands, wrapping them in his so that she did not have to release the flashlight she was still clutching. Her cheeks were still wet with the tears she’d cried in the fear room, but she was not crying now.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head. “Don’t be.” He smiled the best smile he could manage to reassure her, and it touched his heart when she gave him a little smile back. “Let’s get you home.”
As she let him help her to her feet, she happened to glimpse the blood on his knee. “You’re hurt…”
Albert looked down at his leg. He’d hardly realized. “I bumped into that statue that cut you.”
Brandy looked down at her own leg. Just above her right knee, on the outer thigh, there were three small cuts. The top one had bled a small trail down over the lower two, but those had just barely beaded with blood. The cuts on Albert’s left knee, however, were considerably deeper. A trail of blood ran all the way down to his ankle.
“I’m okay,” he assured her. “It’s not bleeding anymore.”
But she wasn’t entirely convinced. Her cuts had stung. They still stung, now that she thought about it. No matter what he said, his had to be hurting him.
“Let’s go home.”
She looked down at him from the upper step, her blue eyes soft and caring. “But what about the answers you were looking for?”
Albert smiled. “Fuck it.”
Brandy returned the smile. “Yeah. Fuck it.”
As they climbed, Albert thought about the room they turned away from, that mysterious lair of terror. What fantastic things could lie beyond such a border? Treasure? Maybe, but he doubted it. Besides, more important to him than treasure was discovery; the discovery of a secret truth that he felt must lie waiting to be found. The truth of the box alone was worth the adventure. Why? Who? He yearned to know these things, but not at any cost. Not at the cost of Brandy Rudman. Not at the cost of his own sanity. He stared at her naked bottom as they climbed, studied the rhythmic pumping of her buttocks and thighs, and could not help but sigh at the thought of returning this beauty to the surface, where he would have to share her with the rest of the world.
Naturally the trip up the steps was much slower than the trip down, and a deep silence fell between them as they climbed.
It was Brandy who broke this thoughtful silence with a question that surprised Albert: “Are you mad at me?”
“No. Of course not.”
“You were quiet.”
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“This place. And the box.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“You want to keep going.”
“Only part of me.”
Brandy was silent for a moment, thinking. Albert could hear her labored breathing, could see the small beads of sweat that were forming on her back.
Albert said, “The other part of me is scared as hell.”
She looked down at him, smiled, but said nothing. She was pleased that he was scared too. It made her feel better, but still she felt bad for turning back, for leaving this adventure behind. She felt ashamed of her fear, but she wanted badly to go home.
The two of them paused to rest as the top of the staircase finally came into view. They sat down on the stone steps and stared down into the empty darkness below without speaking. Somehow the moment seemed somber, as though they had before been three and had lost their companion into this spiraling abyss.
“My legs hurt,” Brandy complained, breaking the silence for the second time. She rubbed at her sore calf muscles. “So many steps.”
Albert put his hand on her thigh and gently rubbed it. His legs hurt, too, but he could go on. In fact, the pain was almost cleansing. It peeled away the fear, little by little.
She gazed at him, her eyes soft and pretty. “You’re so good to me down here.”
He shrugged, embarrassed. Of course he was nice to her. She deserved to be treated nicely. “It’s my fault you’re down here.”
“No it’s not.” She gazed back down into the hole, her expression thoughtful. “When we were in that room down there, did you see anything?”
Albert nodded. “Yeah. I did.”
“Did you see those statues?”
“Some of them.”
“When I saw them, I felt like I knew what I was seeing, like I’d seen it somewhere before, only in real life, not in stone.”
“I know.”
“What does it mean?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it just means that whoever carved them is damn good. Or maybe there’s something a lot deeper to it than we ever expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe those images were real. Somewhere, sometime, maybe thousands or millions of years ago, those things might have actually happened. If so, maybe we still remember. All of us. The way you sometimes remember old movies you forgot you ever watched. Somebody mentions a scene and it’s just there, a memory you didn’t even know you had, locked away in your brain somewhere for years and years. Maybe this is like that. A forgotten memory, passed down in our blood, generation after generation.”
“That’s really creepy.”
“Yeah.”
“If that was true, then what is this place?”
Albert shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it’s the oldest place on earth. Maybe where it all began. The lost resting place of the primordial ooze from which all humanity crawled once upon a time.”
“Right here under Briar Hills?”
“Maybe. Or maybe under some farmer’s field ten miles from Briar Hills. This place is enormous.”
Brandy shivered. “I don’t think I want to think about that.”
“Or it could all be some kind of complex hallucination, some kind of subliminal projection. Either way, that’s a very bad place.” That thing by the door came back to him, a tall, twisted shape, a grotesque perversion of nature with awful, diseased flesh and gnarled limbs. The very thought made his stomach lurch with fright.
Brandy shuddered as she remembered the tortured woman who forever struggled for her life in the front of the second chamber. She forced the thought away and stood up.
Albert stood up too, not saying another word. He followed her up the last of the stairs, unable to keep from wondering what lay beyond that terrible fear room.
Chapter 20
Brandy shined the flashlight into the hole she’d marked in the room atop the staircase. It was clear as far as she could see. She turned and held the flashlight out to Albert. “I went first last time,” she said.
“Sounds fair.” He removed the backpack and shoved it in ahead of him. He then took the flashlight from Brandy’s hand and squeezed into the opening. “Stay close, okay?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
The two of them crawled on their bellies along the narrowest stretch of the passage and then rose to their hands and knees when it was high enough. Albert remembered the view he’d enjoyed of Brandy when they first came through this tunnel and found himself embarrassed to think that he was now showing his to her in the same fashion. He supposed it was fitting. Tit for tat, after all.
“Albert?” Brandy’s voice was soft behind him, like the voice of a little girl.
“Yes?”
For a moment she didn’t speak, then, as though forcing the words to come, she said the unthinkable: “What if…whoever brought us down here… What if he doesn’t want us to leave?”
Albert did not stop. He crawled forward, his kneecaps striking the hard stone beneath him over and over again. He hadn’t even considered such a thing. He tried to think of something, tried to come up with some answer, but he couldn’t. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”
“Do you think he can hurt us?”
Probably, was the answer that came to mind. After all, that person—assuming it was a person at all—must have had some reason for wanting them down here. There was a very good chance that their mystery host would not want them going back to Briar Hills and telling everybody what was down here.
“I don’t know,” he answered after a moment, unable to lie. “But after all this I’m not going down without a fight.”
Brandy fell silent and Albert found himself wondering what she was thinking.
Finally, the ceiling rose high enough for them to stand and soon they were walking again. Ahead of them lay the bridge and the maze. Beyond that was the empty room that bothered Albert so much on their way in. And just past that lay the spike pit and then the hate room.
Albert didn’t want to think about the hate room. Theoretically, they should be able to pass back through it as easily as they did the first time. However, the same strategy did not work in the fear room. What if Brandy’s eyes were adjusting to the surroundings or something? What if it affected her through her poor vision? Would they be safe?
They stepped out of the shrinking passage and onto the bridge. Immediately, they both took a longing look at their hanging undergarments. Neither of them had forgotten that they failed to retrieve any of their clothes. Even if they did make it back to the service tunnel entrance, they were still stark naked.
