by Brian Harmon
She tore her eyes away, only to be met by a second statue, a man, sneering with lecherous delight as he mounted a woman from behind. He was frightfully skinny, with lean, taut muscles, and the woman was much plumper, with huge, meaty breasts that hung toward the floor beneath her as she moaned with obscene pleasure.
She closed her eyes, but she could not block out the images she had seen. Even with her flashlight off, they had burned themselves onto her memory. They lingered in her mind, as vivid as if she were still staring at them, imprinted on her thoughts like a tattoo, utterly inescapable.
She felt a hot blush fill her cheeks.
She wouldn’t lose control. She wasn’t like that. No matter what Wayne said, she’d never do anything like what he described. But there was a hot feeling spreading deep in her gut. Her body began to betray her. She remembered the things Wayne had told her, about Albert and Brandy coming here and wandering into the room unaware. It was such a carnal image that he had painted. It was so dirty. It was so wrong.
And yet, it was strangely alluring… She found herself trying to imagine the two of them in here, forcing themselves on each other, tearing at each other’s clothes. The thought was surprisingly sexy. She was suddenly dwelling on the idea of the two of them down here, naked and alone, furiously attacking each other. It was such an easy thing to visualize.
It was so hot.
She was suddenly curious about what other awful, fascinating scenes surrounded her, inviting her to look upon them. She wanted to see them, wanted to see what naughty things they were doing. It was intriguing.
She squeezed her eyes closed as tightly as she could. This was wrong. This wasn’t who she was. This wasn’t how she behaved. She didn’t want to see the things that were in this room. These things were disgusting.
But the truth was that she was incredibly turned on by them.
What was it doing to her? She’d never felt like this before.
She should have listened to Wayne. She should not have peeked. Now there were dirty thoughts in her mind. There were naughty ideas. And worst of all, she liked the way they made her feel.
“Here we go,” Wayne called back to them. “Watch your head.”
Olivia stepped out of the sex room behind him and opened her eyes, relieved to be free of the darkness again. In front of her, Wayne was returning the glasses he’d retrieved from his bedside earlier that night to his face. He looked good with them on. He looked gentler.
“Are you two okay?” he asked, blinking through the lenses as his eyes readjusted.
“I’m fine,” Olivia replied. And she was.
Andrea merely nodded, her face lowered toward the floor.
“Andrea?” Wayne asked.
“Yeah,” she replied quickly, nodding again. “I’m fine. No problem.” She dared not meet his eyes. She studied her flashlight carefully instead, inspecting it, hoping he would just turn around and start walking. She didn’t want to tell him she’d disobeyed him. She didn’t want to acknowledge what she’d done. It was embarrassing.
She didn’t even want to think about it, but it was right there at the front of her mind, tormenting her.
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” She forced herself to lift her eyes from the flashlight and meet his gaze. He was remarkably handsome, with the dirt on his face and his hair all messed up like that. He looked sexy. “It’s just…weird down here,” she told him as her face flushed even hotter than before.
Wayne nodded. “It is.” But his eyes lingered on her and she could meet them no longer. She looked down at the flashlight in her hands again, embarrassed. She was sure he could see the color in her cheeks, sure that he knew what she had done.
But he said nothing more. He turned away and started down the next passage with Olivia right behind him.
Andrea turned her flashlight on and followed, her eyes washing over Wayne’s cloaked body as he led the way ahead of her.
Chapter 11
Shortly after leaving the last water chamber behind them, Albert noticed that the tunnel they were in had begun to spiral to the left. He almost turned around right then, not wanting to waste time, strength or chalk on a dead end. But a spiraling path did not necessarily have to go nowhere, and he soon found that this one did not. At the center was a small room into which three tunnels opened.
The three of them stepped out of the middle passage and considered the other two. They circled back out together, all of them wrapped around the same central point that was the room in which they now stood. Their choices were to spiral back out from this room on the inside of the tunnel they had just exited or on the outside.
Albert chose the outermost tunnel.
“I don’t get it,” Brandy said. “The Sentinel Queen brought us here. She sent us the box and showed us the way to the city. She even sent her son to make sure we were doing it right. She went to all that trouble and said it was because she was running out of time. So why didn’t she tell us how to get through this?”
Albert could not even begin to speculate. “None of this makes much sense to me,” he admitted.
“I mean, it was so important to her that we got to the labyrinth. Why? So we could die down here?”
Albert still had no idea.
They reached the end of the spiral and followed the tunnel around a sharp left turn. Ahead of them, it split into two separate passages. Albert chose the left one, marking it as he went with the same yellow line that had been following them since the labyrinth’s entrance.
He was nearly out of yellow. He’d have to choose a new color soon.
“Do you think she knows what she’s doing?” asked Brandy.
Albert looked at her, curious. “The Sentinel Queen?”
She nodded.
“Yeah. I think she must. She knew enough to know how to get both of us down here in the first place. She knew how to get us this far.”
“Do you think she could be wrong?”
Albert shrugged. “Maybe. Everybody’s wrong about something, right? I mean, maybe the reason she didn’t give us any help getting through the labyrinth is because she doesn’t know the way.”
The tunnel curved to the left and then turned sharply right, where it intersected another passage. They went straight across the intersection and in a few minutes they found themselves standing on another stone bridge, staring around them at the chasm they had crossed on the other side of the City of the Blind.
“We’re back here again?” Nicole asked.
Albert stared up into the darkness above them, as amazed by the sight as he had been the first time he saw it.
“Which one of these bridges did we cross earlier?” wondered Brandy.
“Probably none that we can see from here,” replied Albert. “There’s no telling how far this thing could stretch.”
There were a lot more bridges visible from this vantage point than there had been when they were last here. They spanned the chasm above, below and to either side, and to Albert the sight was abysmally discouraging. This place was enormous beyond comprehension. They stood over a veritable canyon with no visible bottom or top. There was no way to know how far or how high or how deep it went.
What was even the purpose of such a thing?
How were they supposed to get through a maze this size? They would be lucky if they did not starve to death in here, much less get eaten by the Caggo.
Nicole stared out into the darkness. She could not help but wonder if a pair of eyes might be watching them from some distant bridge.
“I don’t like this place,” Brandy decided.
Albert continued forward without replying. He wished that he had not chosen this path, that he had gone a different way at the last intersection. It was overwhelming. It was impossible to look out over that vast space and not feel defeated by the magnitude of their task. Surely they would never find their way out of here. They were utterly lost.
The three of them walked on, each of them feeling more lost with each step they took.
Chapter 12
Andrea Prophett had done a lot of things in her young life. She’d always wanted to be different. She wanted to be unpredictable. She wanted to be held back by nothing, least of all by other people’s meaningless expectations. She’d begged her mother for years to let her get her nose pierced and her mother, always understanding, always encouraging, had finally allowed her to do it for her seventeenth birthday. When she turned eighteen, only a few weeks ago, she’d surprised her mother by coming home with not just her eyebrow pierced but her navel as well, both of which she’d saved up and paid for herself. She liked surprising people. In ninth grade, she’d surprised her best friend, Rachel, by boldly asking out Greg Pobson, whom she’d had a crush on for some time. (He said yes, actually, but he turned out to be a very boring person and she broke up with him just a few days later.) Tonight, however, she was surprising even herself.
She hadn’t really intended to take off her clothes down here. She was neither an exhibitionist nor a slut, and until this night, no one who hadn’t changed her diapers had ever seen her naked. She was still a virgin, with the intention of saving herself for her wedding night. But here she stood, covered only by her trembling hands, wearing nothing but her jewelry.
She could not have said what it was that she planned to do when the time came to disrobe. Wayne warned her over and over again that she would have to do so and still she hadn’t listened. Somehow, she just hadn’t believed that it would actually happen. Perhaps he was lying to her for some reason. Or perhaps she thought they might find another way, a way that would not require them all to be nude. Or perhaps she merely thought that she and Olivia would simply refuse to do it.
Then they reached the pool of water. Five sets of clothes lay discarded on the floor. At the very sight, her stomach had rolled over. She actually thought she might vomit for a moment.
Jeans and shirts, shoes and even a backpack, all lay in little piles, waiting for their owners to return, but no socks, underwear or bras were to be seen. The man with no eyes had taken those, she remembered. It was a part of Wayne’s fantastic story, a story that was vividly playing out before her eyes.
She recognized all of these clothes. Albert, Brandy, Nicole, Wayne and Beverly had all been wearing these items when she spied on them from her hiding spot in the trees near Gilbert House. It was odd to see them lying there like that. It was such a small detail, yet it felt incredibly profound.
She remembered the way Wayne’s eyes lingered on the black shirt and khaki pants that had belonged to Beverly. She saw the deeply sad look of regret in his eyes. That was one pile of clothes whose owner would not be returning. She was gone forever, utterly lost to the madness of the temple.
But there was no time to feel sad. At that moment, Wayne turned away from the orphaned clothes and yelled into the silent darkness as loudly as he could, startling both her and Olivia. He called for the man with no eyes, telling him to come and get their undergarments, to clear the way for their passage as he had done before. In the empty corridors, his voice echoed like thunder, trampling the silence.
But the blind man did not come.
Wayne had stared out over the water, looking both puzzled and troubled, and Andrea understood why. This eyeless man of whom he had spoken was supposed to take their underwear into the maze, where their scents would distract the hounds and keep them from catching wind of the real prey. If he did not come…
But of course Wayne would not be stopped by the mere absence of the blind man. He unfastened his cloak and dropped it to the stone floor, leaving himself stark naked before her startled eyes.
“This is it,” Wayne told them. “If you’re not coming with me, I don’t blame you. I really don’t want to put either of you in danger.” He kicked his sandals off next to the shoes he left here on his first trip and then turned to face them, his body utterly exposed. “This water’s freezing. And if you don’t turn back now, you may not be able to later.”
Andrea had just stared at him, unable to believe that he was naked right there in front of her. She could actually see his penis! More startling had been the realization that she was simply staring at that part of him, unable to take her eyes off it, even though she could feel her face burning bright red.
She couldn’t possibly do this. Especially not now, not after she had peeked in that awful sex room. She could still feel that queasy, unwanted longing burning deep in her belly. And now she was looking at Wayne naked!
A strange excitement was building within her, like an electric charge. She could feel her body reacting to her unwanted arousal and fresh fear sprang from within her. She especially couldn’t take her clothes off now!
“We have to be naked?” Olivia asked.
“Even if you didn’t,” Wayne explained, “you’d be miserable walking around in soggy clothes.”
That, Olivia supposed, was true. Perhaps naked was the best way to make any trip like this one. What were clothes, anyway, besides a tool for warmth and modesty? Wet clothes would not keep them warm and perhaps modesty was a concept that simply did not exist to the kind of people who were capable of constructing a place such as this.
Wayne turned and stepped into the water. Andrea heard him hiss at the icy touch of it on his bare skin.
“Wait!” called Olivia. In one quick motion, she stripped off her shirt. “I’m coming.”
Wayne turned and looked at her. Andrea expected some amount of interest in his expression. Olivia was a gorgeous girl and she was stripping naked right in front of him, but there was no eagerness, no lustful leer, not even bashful admiration. All she saw on his face was a sort of deep sadness, as though someone had just strapped an enormous burden onto his back.
Andrea did not want to disrobe. She did not want Wayne to see her breasts, much less that other part of her. Especially now, especially while the sight of the sex room’s horrible statues were still so fresh in her mind and her body was doing embarrassing things.
And yet the mysterious voice in the woods had told her to follow Wayne and Olivia. She was instructed specifically to go wherever they went, that she was important to them, that they would need her. She could not simply abandon them and run away. Besides, the last thing she wanted was to be alone down here. She was afraid of these tunnels. She was afraid of getting lost. She was afraid of losing her light or running into a nest of rats. And more than anything else, she did not want to go back into the sex room again.
Why hadn’t she listened to Wayne in the first place? He was right. It hadn’t mattered that she was not the sort of person who wanted to throw herself at every handsome man she met. The sex room still affected her. She understood now how Albert and Brandy could do the things they did in there. She could have been made to do that too. She was convinced that if she’d kept her eyes open for any longer, she might have done something unthinkable.
Even now, well after leaving that horrible room behind her, she wasn’t sure she’d have the willpower to resist Wayne—or any almost man for that matter—if he should suddenly decide to turn around and try to take her. For the first time in her life, the thought of a man forcing himself on her actually made her feel excited!
What was happening to her?
Olivia stripped off her panties and bra and dropped them to the floor with the rest of her clothes. She was probably fifty or sixty pounds heavier than Andrea, but she was by no means fat. Her body was not flabby, but soft and curvy. She was very pretty, with a narrow, hourglass waist and breasts that were considerably larger than her own. Her body did not remotely compare. She felt like a skinny child standing next to her, with her bony hips and shoulders. She couldn’t possibly do this.
But Olivia turned without hesitating and charged stark-naked into the water after Wayne, squealing at the water’s icy touch, and Andrea was left staring after her, alone on the dry stone, unable to put it off any longer.
Strip down to her birthday suit or remain behind, alone in this awful darkness.
Whimpering
under her breath, she began to take off her clothes.
Now she stood naked and trembling at the water’s edge, her arms crossed over her private parts, blushing furiously and hoping desperately that no one could tell that her body was burning with unthinkable desires.
Bracing herself, she waded out into the cold water.
Chapter 13
The cold was almost overwhelming, but Wayne welcomed it. The cold drew his thoughts from the discomfort of the situation. Both girls followed him, remaining with him even past the part where they had to leave their clothes behind. They would not turn back for anything now. Like it or not, they were with him to the end.
And he had no idea what kind of danger he might be putting them both in. The absence of the man with no eyes at the water’s edge was extremely bothersome. Why hadn’t he shown up? Was the old man right? Did the Sentinel Queen refuse to help him? It certainly did not appear to be a move in his favor. Would they be able to reach the City of the Blind without his help? Or would the hounds be drawn to them as soon as they set foot in their territory?
He supposed he would find out soon enough. The first of those lower passages waited directly ahead. There was nothing he could do but press forward and hope for the best.
He glanced back as he stepped onto the dry stone to make sure they were both okay. Immediately, he wished he hadn’t. Olivia was just a few steps behind him, hugging herself fiercely across her ample breasts. The bandage was still taped to her shoulder, protecting the bite, and her arm was still well wrapped, but the rest of her beautiful body was uncovered to his eyes.
A little farther back, Andrea was doing a better job of covering herself. She was very thin compared to Olivia, whose full and gorgeously curvy figure almost made the subtle shadows of the girl’s ribs appear unhealthy. She was also very pale in comparison, her complexion much whiter. Without her clothes, all the jewelry she wore jumped out at him. Her pigtails now sagged, dripping over her shoulders, almost black in the combination of the wetness and the gloom, and he was struck by how childlike she looked. Covering herself that way and shivering, she looked like a girl barely touched by puberty.