by C Utigard
The Ready Guardian
Copyright 2015 C. R. Utigard
The Ready Guardian
The door closed and filled the temple with darkness, flooding the interior with a thousand echoes. Flinching, Daniel peered over his shoulder nervously. He wasn’t sure he was allowed to be there; he wasn’t sure anybody was around. Maybe the temple was filled with some sort of congregation he was interrupting, and maybe it wasn’t. Whatever the circumstances within, the door closed loudly and mostly everyone is shy of an accidentally-slammed door.
But Daniel wasn’t interrupting—the place was deserted. When he did turn around, he had to squint through the darkness to confirm it, but it was apparent almost at once. The shadows of the expansive room betrayed little besides their loneliness, and Daniel was not accustomed to loneliness, so it put him off. Regardless of how he felt about the slammed door and the lonely hall, he was trapped. The heavy, medieval door wouldn’t budge no matter how he fiddled with its lock or pulled and pushed against its bulk.
Suddenly, Daniel was aware of the thickness of his breathing and felt childish. It was only a dark room after all, but he’d always been nervous of the dark… he saw things in it, things he readily discounted as conjurations of his imagination, but still they were there and they inflated his unease. For a moment, with his back to the dark room, Daniel put his head against the door and contemplated his next move. The answer seemed obvious: on the one hand, go through the building and find another exit, hopefully before he was late to work; on the other hand, he was impeded by a cowardly voice from within pleading for him to stay by the door and wait for someone to come along and open it.
He didn’t like waiting, so he faced the room. Row after row of pew all led up to a front-and-center platform raised by a few steps. Upon the platform there was a podium and behind the podium, a table. His eyes, having adjusted to the dark, were just able to make these things out. They were aided by a thin band of golden light streaming in from beneath the main door and by a faint aura emanating from the stained-glass windows—dark red, black, and blue monstrosities soaking up the light from outside and glowing as though irradiated. Across the room, to the right of the raised platform, there was a small wooden door leading into the back of the temple; its body was outlined by a dull blue from the next room.
Even if it didn’t lead to another exit, the promise of a well-lit room goaded Daniel into crossing the darkness. Like a moth, he kept his eyes trained on the door’s blue-light and strode amongst the pews. He wore a face that was professional and unafraid, but the beading sweat on his brow betrayed him. He was embraced by the unnerving sensation of being watched; the eyes were everywhere and felt just like they'd always been described to him: an uncomfortable pinching between his shoulders and waves of tingles flowing through his arms and legs, as of a sleeping limb awoken. It also gave him a couple of feelings he’d never really heard described, and wondered if they were related. For one, his head felt heavy, a charley horse between his eyes that made his head hurt and stifled the flow of oxygen through his nostrils. For two, he found himself in sudden need of the facilities.
In any case, the peculiarities of his emotional response didn’t push Daniel to peer into the surroundings searching for his unseen watcher. Instead, his focus narrowed on the door and he doubled his pace and subsequently smashed his toes against the lowest step at the corner of the raised platform.
“Dugh!” he cried, collapsing forward onto his forearms. His knee landed first, and the patella screamed when it struck the tile. Gritting his teeth, Daniel grumbled, “Christ…” and picked himself back up. As it was with the “accidentally-slammed door”, he peered over his shoulder again, embarrassed of his clumsiness.
And still no one was there.
With a minor kick, a vengeful tapping of the side of his foot against the protruding lower step of the platform, Daniel got back on track and reached the door just before the darkness caught him.
The small brass handle jiggled in his hand.
After a slight negotiation—whereby Daniel twisted the handle to just the right degree and figured out to push the bottom of the door in before lifting the entire mass upwards, freeing it from the natural prison years of shifting geological force had wreaked upon it—he coaxed the door open and stepped into a brighter room. He left the door open behind him, because if he was chased by anymore darkness he didn’t want to be stuck there trying to work out the delicate balance of forces and pressures needed to open it.
On the other side of the door, he found a cafeteria filling out the back of the building. A series of frosted, unstained windows wrapped around the seating area and illuminated a field of suspended dust-motes sparkling like fireflies. There were enough tables and chairs to accommodate twenty-or-so people, and alongside Daniel there was an oven, a refrigerator, a counter and a sink.
Lastly, he noted three more doors: two doors across the room, along the back wall, mixed in with the windows; and one along the same wall as the door he’d entered through, on the other side of the kitchen area, just beside the fridge.
Checking over his shoulder, Daniel wondered which door he should take. None of them seemed like an exit, but the two along the back wall were better choices than the door by the fridge. He picked one at random and tried it. The door opened easily, but it wasn’t an exit. Staring him in the face was a tiny room, hardly more than a broom closet, with a cot and a lamp with a yellow bulb. He flicked the lamp off and closed the door.
Not far down the wall from that door was the next most likely candidate. It led to the restroom.
“One exit…?” Daniel muttered to himself, shutting the door behind him and stepping back into the cafeteria. It didn’t really make sense that there’d only be one way in or out of the temple—weren’t there building codes or something mandating multiple exits? What if there was a fire?
Still, there was another door he hadn’t checked, but by its placement it looked like it would lead back into the main hall. So he glanced at the windows instead. They were solid panes of glass with no obvious way to open them. Maybe it was worth a try anyway…
…no, they wouldn’t budge. They didn’t appear to be movable at all, short of shattering them anyhow.
For a moment Daniel’s breathing quickened, but then he chastised himself for behaving childishly again. All he had to do was wait for someone to arrive and let him out. He’d apologize and assure them he hadn’t taken anything and had only entered out of curiosity. In the meantime, Daniel calmed himself down by taking some of their things: namely, a tuna sandwich from the well-stocked refrigerator and a glass of water.
“Ah,” he sighed pleasantly, lounging on a bench with his feet up. The water was fresh and cool and the sandwich was homemade. Popping his cellular telephone out of his pocket, Daniel checked the time—he didn’t want to be late for work, after all—and saw that he still had an hour before the start of his afternoon shift.
That’s when he noticed he had no signal and froze. Placing the unfinished half of his tuna sandwich on the table where his feet had been, Daniel gulped down the last of his water and rose up out of his seat. Holding the cellphone aloft, he wandered hither and thither, raising it this-way-and-that, contorting himself in a dozen different reaching positions like an old television antennae. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t get a signal. At least the battery was still good.
On a whim, he decided to try the last door and found a staircase leading into the basement. It was pitch dark down there and the darkness dissuaded him from descending. But, as the hour crept on and his work shift loomed, Daniel grew desperate. He tried everything he could think of to boost his cellphone signal in every location of the temple—everywhere except the basement. At fifteen minutes to the hour, he had t
o leave or else he’d be late, and he needed his job. He tried sending a text message to his boss and several of his co-workers, but it kept coming back, “Failed to send text message.” Then, at last, he stood before the darkened stairs of the temple basement and activated his cellphone flashlight.
The flashlight used the flash bulb for the mobile’s camera, and, as such, it shone a bright white beam into the basement. In the glare, Daniel could see the thin and old grey carpet of the cafeteria slinking down the stairs until it stopped at the bottom and met a concrete hallway. He tiptoed down the stairs and stared down a long tunnel with branching rooms on either side and a set of
