by JB Dutton
* * * * *
Tension filled the air as we stood in my kitchen. Just the fact that Cruz was there, in my home, made me excited. What kind of trouble could we get into? He flipped the claw hammer he was holding into the air then caught it, as though he wanted to show me how relaxed he was.
“Who goes first?” he asked.
“You decide. You’re the one who...” I tailed off, not wanting to mention his claustrophobia.
“Me first,” he said firmly, pulling a slim red flashlight from his pocket.
I opened the cupboard door and took out the bag of cat food. Mom couldn’t bear to throw it out, hoping against hope that Flash would waltz through the door.
“It’s through here. There’s a false wall at the back that swings up.”
He crouched down and shone the flashlight inside, reaching in with his other hand and pushing. I hadn’t realized how much tighter a fit it would be for his larger frame than mine, and suddenly got worried that he might change his mind. Or worse, start off, then freak out, with me blocking the way behind him.
Then, without saying a word, he crawled inside. I stuck my head in too and called after him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” he grunted and shuffled forward on his elbows.
As we made our way through the cramped tunnel I kept trying to encourage him. All I could see was, well, his ass! It kinda took away some of the stress, but I was imagining him gritting his teeth and hoping the ordeal would be over soon. The problem was, I figured that when we reached the grille it would be even worse for him – like a prison or something.
When he reached the intersection, he paused. Because the tunnel was wider here he was able to look back at me. Even though the light was dim I could see in his eyes that he was terrified.
“Left, right or up?” he said, his voice a dry whisper.
“Left,” I answered. “But we can go back if you like.”
He ignored me and took the left turn. Soon we were climbing the incline and I knew that the grille wasn’t far ahead.
Cruz reached the top and I heard him whisper, “I see it!”
My heart was pounding. Then it struck me – what if Cruz was too big to even fit through the grille? It was wide, but low. Maybe too low for him. Oh well, it was too late for that now.
Within a few seconds we were at the grille. I could barely see it past Cruz’s body. Man, it was gonna be a tight squeeze for him, even if he managed to open it.
“Hand me the screwdriver,” he said.
“Any sign of life in there?” I asked anxiously as he unscrewed the first of four corner screws holding the grille in place.
“Nope,” he grunted.
There was a clinking sound.
“What was that?”
“The first screw fell out.”
His breathing was getting shallower. Was it because he was breathless from the physical effort or about to have a panic attack?
A few seconds later all the screws were out, and before I could say anything, Cruz was hauling himself through the opening. I was impressed. It was almost like watching a cat squeeze through a crack that you’re sure it’s too big for.
I followed, and a few seconds later we were both standing in a musty dining room. The blinds were drawn, but our eyes, used to the darkness of the tunnel, were drawn to the large Temple of Truth symbol on the wall.
“What the eff is that?” said Cruz.
“Shhh!” I said, putting my hand on his back. His rugby shirt was drenched in sweat. He’d gone totally above and beyond to help me, but oddly enough, now we were standing there, I felt like something had snapped. The electricity I’d sensed in my kitchen had evaporated.
Either side of the ToT symbol stood two tall oak bookcases filled with leather-bound volumes, big and small. I was drawn to them, but Cruz had already wandered out of the dining room.
“Wait up!” I called in a loud whisper and followed him out.
The dining room had two exits: one was clearly to a kitchen, the other led to a hallway with several rooms branching off it, just like at mine and Mom’s place. Cruz was standing in the middle of the hallway, brandishing the hammer.
“Hello?” he said loudly.
I almost jumped out of my skin.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
He just stood there, listening for a few seconds. “See. No one here. We can stop whispering.”
I shook my head at him, smiling. There was something kind of crazy about him, maybe even fearless.
“Okay, can we just be as quiet as possible?”
Cruz smiled with a mischievous puppy dog look in his eyes. We opened the first door together. Behind it was a very plain room with a neatly made single bed in it. And when I say plain, I mean very plain. The only furniture was a simple wooden chair that looked about two hundred years old. What was weird was that it was placed directly across from the foot of the bed, so that if someone was sitting in it, they could have a face-to-face conversation with the person in the bed. Both the bed and the chair were centered in the room, and above the head of the bed was the only artwork on any of the walls: an engraving of the Temple of Truth symbol on a thin slab of stone. I opened the door of the built-in closet. Shelves inside with men’s sweaters and neatly pressed shirts. A rack of pants and jackets. All black. I mean, every single item of clothing was black. Black shoes and boots on the floor.
“Simple tastes,” I remarked.
“Uh-huh.”
We tried the next room. It was identical. Not only was the position of the furniture the same, so were the items in the closet! One was creepy enough, but two...
There were eight bedrooms in all, and I realized that the layout of the apartment was the same as mine but with six more rooms along the central hallway. And they were all the same inside: symmetrical. It was like a monastery or something. The only variation was when we explored the three rooms that were clearly occupied by women. In those the clothing had a bit more variety. Well, there a few white items as well as black.
“I’m gonna do a show called Temple of Truth: Extreme Makeover Edition,” I laughed nervously.
Cruz wasn’t laughing though. “Man, these guys are a bunch of total freaks. Let’s get outta here.”
I still hadn’t found the clue I was hoping for. Something that would help me track down Noon.
“Just a few more minutes,” I pleaded, heading toward the entry way.
Again, there was almost no furniture. One coat stand (empty), one shoe rack with three pairs of black men’s shoes neatly arranged on it. No mirror, no table to throw your keys on. On either side of the entrance were two closed doors. I opened the one on the right. It was a kind of living room. But man, I don’t think much living went on in there. There were two long couches facing each other, again centered on opposite walls. No TV, no plants, no coffee tables. Opposite a window that looked out onto 9th Avenue below was a wide, tall bookcase filled with old-looking volumes. I picked a large one off a shelf at random. It was bound in mustard-brown leather that had been worn shiny in places over the years, and even the name on the cover and spine had rubbed off.
“You know what’s weird?” I murmured.
“Yeah. Everything. Can we go now?”
“There’s no dust.”
“So the freaks have a good cleaning lady. So what?”
“Even in the pages of this old book.”
I ran my finger across the tops of a few other books on the shelf.
“No cleaning woman in the world is this good. Cruz, these books are super old. They smell old. But there isn’t a speck of dust on them.”
“Alright, I got it.”
“And do you know where dust comes from?” I asked.
“Dust bunnies poop it out?”
I laughed. This was actually very funny.
“No, it comes from skin. From human skin. And with eight people living here, there would have to be dust.”
“Well, there’s no one here now. Maybe they
’re in some other country, converting people to their cult or whatever. Maybe that’s where Noon’s gone.”
Maybe. I laid the book down on one of the couches and opened it somewhere around the middle. The pages were stiff and yellowed. What were they made of? And they were filled with uneven, foreign writing. Totally filled – no spaces to show where one word started and another ended. The letters looked like English capitals, but many of them were weird. I could see H’s, M’s, P’s, E’s, T’s, but also a bunch of other ones that I didn’t recognize. A bit like Russian.
“Check this out,” I said to Cruz, who was looking out the window.
He came over and crouched down beside me.
“What language is this?” I asked him.
“Well, it sure ain’t frickin Puerto Rican.”
Smartass. I don’t know if it was the stress that was affecting us or what, but he was suddenly kind of charming. He flashed a sexy smile at me and I looked away, back at the book. I flipped the page.
“Oh. Wow.”
This left-hand page was filled with the same strange writing, but the right-hand one showed a picture. A full-page illustration of a minotaur. Or The Minotaur (I think there was only one). Roaring with rage, covered in blood, the half-man/half-bull creature was devouring a young woman – literally holding her like a rack of lamb and sinking his teeth into her side. Behind them in the cave or hall or whatever it was, about a dozen other young men and women were cowering and watching in horror. It was gross but somehow incredibly beautiful. I mean, the way it was drawn or painted was like no picture I’d ever seen before. Something about the colors, the brushstrokes... I didn’t know much about art, but it was fascinating.
Cruz was staring at it, wide-eyed. “Madre de Dios,” he exhaled after a few seconds.
I grabbed my phone and took a photo of the page, then of the page next to it filled with the strange capital letters. I flipped some more of the pages. Was it even paper, I wondered? A new full-page picture. The same wow factor. This one showed a young warrior plunging a huge sword into the heart of the Minotaur while a woman in white robes looked on fearfully.
I had a flash. “It’s Greek!”
Cruz just shrugged.
“The Minotaur was a Greek mythological being.”
“Yeah, a pretty bad-ass one from what I can see.”
“And he was trapped in a labyrinth and eventually killed by a prince or something who found his way out because his girlfriend brought a ball of yarn with her that they had unrolled on the way in.”
“That’s one crazy tale,” said Cruz, standing up.
“Yeah – I used to have a book with these stories in.”
“Whatever happened to Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs?”
I ignored him, entranced by the picture.
“Alright, Kari, can we go now? Can we just go back to your place and make out or something? There’s nothing here.”
I looked at the young man slaying the Minotaur. His face... what was it about his face? And then it struck me like a tsunami. It was one of those moments – and now I know how to recognize them – when your lizard brain realizes before your conscious brain that your life is about to change forever. Because the man in the picture was Noon. Undoubtedly. One hundred percent.
My mouth went dry.
“L... Look...” I stammered.
He sighed and bent down to where I was pointing. But he wasn’t really paying attention.
“What is it? Some dude with a sword is – ”
And then he saw Noon too and just stopped speaking, mouth open.
“Holy...”
I tried to take a photo but my hand was shaking. Cruz held onto my wrist to keep it steady while I pressed the shutter button. I zoomed in on the face on my phone. What did it mean?
Cruz wiped the sweat from the palms of his hands onto his jeans and stood up again.
“Put the book back, Kari,” he pleaded, trying to sound calm, but failing.
“We can’t go now. This is incredible.”
I flipped through the rest of the book. There were other images of mythological beasts – a many-headed hydra, a lion with wings, a centaur, the deadly Medusa.
This last picture grabbed my attention and a whole bunch of thoughts tumbled through my mind in a matter of seconds. The story came back to me from my own book – the goddess Aphrodite was jealous because Medusa and her sisters were stunningly beautiful, so she gave them snakes for hair and made them so ugly that any man who looked at them would be turned to stone. The picture was as lurid as the one of the Minotaur. The sisters were cowering in a corner, transformed and furious, with Aphrodite looming over them.
“Alright, this is way too whacked-out,” said Cruz, and I instantly knew why.
In the picture Aphrodite looked exactly like Aranara.
Who the hell were these... people?
I took another photo with my phone while Cruz shifted nervously from foot to foot. He had managed to get over his claustrophobia to crawl through the tunnel, but I guess this was weirding him out way too much.
“I need to get out of here,” he said gravely.
I kissed him on the cheek and replaced the book on the shelf.
“Two more minutes? Please?”
He looked at me, eyes darting from side to side. “Sure. But don’t ask me to look at no more of those creepy books.”
“Thanks,” I said, and kissed him again.
He left the room and I picked a smaller book off a different shelf. This one was written in Latin and looked old, but not as old as the large Greek one. The cover was leather too, but the pages felt like paper. Fragile, but still paper. And on the pages were ancient-looking graphs and scientific diagrams. I pulled out the book next to it. This one was old, but newer than the others. And I could tell that it was written in French. Something about the revolution. Were any of these books even in English? I was scanning the spines when Cruz called me from the entry way.
“Come here!”
I put the books back on the shelves and went to see what he wanted. He was crouched down, looking through the keyhole of the door opposite the living room door.
“It’s locked,” he said. “But check this out.”
He moved away from the lock so I could see through it. These old buildings have thick doors, so the view through the keyhole was kinda restricted. But what I could see was a room unlike any of the others. It was huge. I don’t know if it was an illusion, but I don’t think there was even a ceiling. I mean, it was twice as high as the other rooms in the building. The walls were white, the floor was tiled, and it stretched far away to the right.
It was empty except for one feature. A gray... something. I could see an inclined surface made of dark metal at the right-hand side of my view. It sloped upward and disappeared. It had a corner or an edge where another inclined surface joined the first one.
Then I saw someone.
I recoiled instinctively.
“What?” said Cruz. “What’s up?”
I put my hand on his lips to shush him.
“There’s someone in there,” I whispered in his ear.
“Fu... okay, we gotta get outta here!”
He moved toward the front door, but I pulled him back.
“Wait!” I hissed. “We can’t just run out – we have to put the grille back or they’ll know we were here.”
“The what?”
“The grille. The grating that you unscrewed from the entrance to the tunnel.”
As what I was saying started to make sense to him I could see that he didn’t want to go back there. His eyes were searching for an alternative. He must have been worried that the person in the locked room would emerge into the apartment hallway while we were fixing the grille and we’d have to go back through the tunnel.
A loud noise came from inside the locked room. I couldn’t wait any longer. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him quickly back down the long hallway, trying to tread as quietly as possible.
We reached the dining room. The grille was lying on the floor with the screws scattered around. Cruz bent down and fitted it back over the opening. I looked behind us, straining to hear if someone was coming. The grille fell out with a clatter.
“Cruz!” I exclaimed
“My bad,” he groaned.
“What are you doing?”
“The screws need to go in from the inside.”
I put my hands on my hips. What were the options?
“Okay, so you go in first again,” I suggested. “Then I’ll back my way in and tighten the screws. I’ll crawl down the slope backward and be able to turn around at the bottom.”
His lips tightened. “I’m not going back in there.”
I felt like slapping him and telling him to snap out of it.
He looked ashamed. “I just can’t do it...”
There was another noise at the front of the apartment.
I relented. “Then you’d better hope that you can get out the front door before whoever that is leaves that room.”
“Alright.”
He hesitated.
“What now?” I asked, exasperated.
“It’s just... well, I didn’t think about it before, but...”
“What?” I almost yelled out in impatience.
“It makes no sense in the first place for a grille to be screwed in from the inside.”
I was trying to compute, but my nerves were messing with my brain.
He went on. “When you make a duct or tunnel or whatever, you fit the... the grille on from inside the room, not inside the tunnel, or you’d have to crawl out along it.”
He was right. So the tunnel wasn’t made by the occupants of the Temple of Truth apartment. There was another sound at the front of the apartment. This one was unmistakable. It was a door opening. Not the front door, but the locked one leading to the oversized room. And then there were footsteps.
“Come on!” I whispered, the desperation almost making my voice inaudible.
I bent down and picked up the screws and grille. Cruz backed away.
“What are you doing?” I demanded, now thoroughly scared.
He was shaking his head. “I have to try to sneak out the front door.”
“Come on, I’ll help you through the tunnel – you’ll be okay.”
“It’s not the tunnel. I left the hammer in the living room.”
“What?!!!”
“For real. I put it down next to the couch when you were showing me that book.”
More footsteps. Getting closer. Another door opening.
No choice. Time to stop thinking and act.
“Okay, go!” I said, and crawled backward into the tunnel holding the grille and screws. Our eyes met for a millisecond that felt like an hour, then he disappeared from view.
I tried to stay calm as I turned the first screw. My palms were so sweaty that I had to grip the screwdriver super tight. Okay, one done. I didn’t need to screw them all the way in. In fact I realized that I only needed to put in the top two screws for the grille to stay in place. Thank you for coming through when I really needed you, brain!
Before backing down the slope, I strained my ears to see if I could hear anything. I don’t know whether it would have been worse if I had done, but all was silent in the apartment.
I shuffled backward. After a minute I felt the slope level out and turned on my phone’s flashlight. I just managed to turn around at the corner, and before long I was back in my kitchen.
Then what? I couldn’t call or text Cruz. What if he was hiding somewhere in that apartment and his phone gave him away? I was hoping against hope that he’d made it out okay.
The minutes crawled by like a video loading when you’ve only got one bar. I sat on the kitchen floor with my phone in my hand, staring at Flash’s empty, unused food bowl.
Finally, it rang. I saw Cruz’s name pop up on the caller ID before the ringtone sounded and answered it feverishly.
“What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m walking down the stairs,” he answered breathlessly. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
I ran to the front door and flung it open. I rushed out and ran toward the stairwell door. Cruz came through it just as I got there, the hammer at his side.
I fell into his arms. “I’m so happy you’re okay!”
He hugged me tight and kissed my hair. I don’t think I’d ever felt so relieved as at that moment, with my head on his chest and his muscular arms around me.
After a few seconds I pulled away. “Come back inside and tell me what happened.”
“Sure, but there’s just one thing.”
“What?” I enquired, worried again.
“I’ve really gotta pee.”
I laughed and gave him a playful punch on the chest. A minute later I was opening two cans of soda, perched on the kitchen counter waiting breathlessly for Cruz to tell me how he’d gotten out of that apartment. He walked in, looking about a million times more chill.
“Thanks,” he said, grabbing one of the cans and gulping it down.
“So??!!!”
“Alright, so this is how it went down. I crept along the corridor and heard the front door closing. Was it someone leaving or someone coming in? I stopped and waited. Nothing. So I kept going. There was no one in the entry way and the living room door was still open.”
“What about the other one?” I asked.
“It was closed, so I went in the living room and grabbed the hammer.”
“And then you left?”
“No, I realized that if someone was still inside that room, it would still be locked. And if they weren’t there anymore, maybe it wasn’t locked anymore.”
I couldn’t believe that he hadn’t just gotten the eff out of there. But that explained some of my attraction to him. He was crazy enough to make me want to do things with him, go places with him.
“So I tried the door,” he continued. “And it wasn’t locked.”
“You’re shitting me.”
He smiled at my potty-mouthed exclamation and I felt myself blush.
“Nope. I ain’t shitting you,” he answered with a big grin. “I opened the door and went inside. And man, what a frickin whacked-out room. It was huge, just like we thought. Maybe a thirty-foot ceiling. And it was as long and wide as the whole rest of the apartment, like someone just took the apartment next door and the two above it and knocked out all the walls and ceilings to make a kind of big hall.”
“Wow,” was all I could think of to say.
He took another gulp of soda and carried on. “All the windows were boarded over and there was nothing in the room except...”
“Except?”
“A pyramid. A huge, gray metal pyramid.”
This must have been the object with the sloping sides that I’d seen part of through the keyhole.
“Just, like, sitting there?” I asked.
“Uh-huh,” he nodded, and hopped up onto the counter beside me. “I walked all around it. It must have been twenty-five feet high. When I touched it, it was smooth like metal but felt kinda warm.”
“And there was nothing else in the room?”
“Nada.”
“Just this solid pyramid?”
“Hey – I never said it was solid. If it was, it would have weighed a ton. I don’t think the floor could even have supported it.”
“That’s so totally effed-up. Were there any markings on it? Or, like, a door or something?”
He shook his head.
What could this possibly mean? The Temple of Truth had suddenly gotten a whole heck of a lot more sketchy.
“Did you take a photo of it?”
“I heard a noise and realized I had to get outta there fast,” he said. “I opened the front door q
uietly and peeked out. There was no one there, so I ran down the stairs.”
I had a sudden flash of worry. “Did you close the door to the pyramid room?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said and kissed me on the forehead.
A wave of relief swept over me and I crumpled into his chest. We hung out for a while, talking about what we’d seen that afternoon. What were the next steps? I looked at the photos I’d taken of the ancient books. Wait a sec – maybe there was a way to find out something from them. There was a Greek kid in my Math class. What was his name? Jordan? No, George... I opened my Facebook app. There he was – George Soulis. I made a swift friend request. It would be amazing if he could shed some light on the mysterious book.
Then the excitement of the afternoon got the better of us, and Cruz and I made out for a while, sitting there on the counter. I loved every second of it. He was warm and safe and loving. Yet as we kissed I couldn’t stop thinking about the apartment. Noon must have slept in one of those sparse bedrooms. What kind of life did he live? Was he happy? And why was I thinking about him now while my lips were pressed tightly against Cruz’s? I opened my eyes. Cruz was looking at me.
He pulled away, frowning. “What were you thinking about right then?”
Oh man – I felt super guilty.
“Nothing.”
“Really?”
Now I felt more guilty.
“No. I was thinking about...”
I looked down. He lifted my chin up gently with his forefinger.
“About Noon?”
I looked hard into his eyes. The same expression he’d had before entering the tunnel. He was scared, but trying with every ounce of mental strength to overcome his fear.
Cruz swallowed and squeezed my hand. “I have to get going.”
I felt terrible, and all I could say was, “Sure thing.”
I knew I wouldn’t see him for a couple of weeks because Mom and I were heading down to Florida to stay with my grandparents. Today had brought us a lot closer though. We’d shared an intense experience. We had real feelings for each other. There was definite physical attraction. Yet I couldn’t deny that the thought of Noon was tugging at the back of my mind.
We said our goodbyes and he left. I knew I’d miss Cruz.
And I also knew I had to go see this pyramid for myself.