by Brian Harmon
He forced himself to turn away, embarrassed, but before he could face forward again, his eyes were captured by the spreading bruise on Olivia’s thigh. He turned toward her now, looking only at the big purple blemish so that he did not see her eyes flash across his naked body and then flit away, embarrassed.
“Your leg…” he said, surprised that his voice could escape the shivers that racked his chest. “Does it hurt?”
She looked at him again, directly into his face, and saw that her bruise had caught his eye. She might have laughed at his insistence on worrying about her injuries if that bruise hadn’t been so close to that other place, where she now dropped a hand to shield herself from his eyes.
Wayne saw the motion, glimpsed for just an instant the soft, dark tuft of hair between her thighs, and then looked away from her altogether, ashamed that his eyes should wander like that for even a moment. “Sorry…” he stuttered.
“It’s okay.” And it was. How could she expect him not to see her? She’d removed her clothes of her own free will, despite the offer he’d given her of turning back and going home. She glanced down at her thigh. The bruise had grown some, as she’d known it would. “It’s a little sore to touch,” she said. “But it’s fine. Really. It never even broke the skin.”
“That’s good.” He glanced back at her, careful to look only into her face, and for a moment she held his eyes. “I was worried.”
She smiled at him, her lips quivering with the cold. He was so kind to her. “Don’t be. You’ve already rescued me.” She looked down at herself now and saw that there were other bruises, too. Lots of them. Her back was probably covered with them from her fall through those trees into the Wood. She had always bruised easily.
He smiled at her. “Okay.” He glanced at Andrea and saw that she had turned away from them and was rubbing her hands up and down her arms for warmth. He could see the gooseflesh that ran all the way up her naked back. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s keep moving. We’ll stay warmer.”
“Oh god I hope so!” Andrea sighed through teeth that Wayne could hear chattering even over the hammering of his own.
As Wayne turned away, Olivia put an arm around her. “Come on,” she said, her own voice racked with shivers. “In a little while we’ll probably be sweating.”
“That would be nice,” Andrea stuttered.
Chapter 14
Albert smeared the last of the yellow chalk onto the wall and then paused to give his tired hand a quick shake. It lasted longer than he expected it would. He’d done a good job of conserving it.
“No more yellow?” Brandy asked.
“No more yellow,” he confirmed. “From now on, if we come to an intersection and see a yellow line, it’ll mean we were there sometime before now.”
“Do you think that’ll help us?” Nicole asked.
Albert shrugged. “Who knows?” He unshouldered the backpack and removed the tube of sidewalk chalk. For a moment, he examined the remaining choices. There was blue, red, purple and green remaining. “I guess we’ll go with green,” he decided. “We’ll just go in order of the rainbow. That way, we’ll remember which trails are older.”
“Roy G. Biv,” Brandy said, nodding.
“Who?” asked Nicole.
“It’s an acronym for the color spectrum,” Brandy explained. “Roy G. Biv. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. We use that term at work when we merchandise clothes by color.”
“Except we never had any orange or indigo chalk,” Albert observed. “So we’re already down to just four colors.” He replaced the plastic tube and returned the backpack to his back. Then he pressed the new stick of chalk to the wall and started walking again.
For a moment there was silence among them, and then Nicole asked, “Do you guys think Wayne’s okay?”
“Sure,” Albert replied. “He’s a big guy. He’s strong. He’s definitely smart enough. He can take care of himself.”
“I just wish I knew how he was doing,” Nicole said. “He’s all alone out there. That’s got to be scary. Even without all the other stuff we’ve seen, just being alone like that has to be really scary.”
It did not cross her mind that Wayne might already be working his way back through the temple, already nearing the hate room, in fact, much less that he was no more alone than she was.
Brandy nodded. “And he’s just one guy.”
“Come on,” Albert urged. “We can’t let ourselves think that way. We’ll see Wayne again later. The Sentinel Queen seemed to have faith in him.”
Nicole said no more. That was true. (Assuming the Sentinel Queen could be trusted.) How far had he gotten, she wondered? Had he reached the Wood yet? Was the journey hard on him? A part of her wished that she could have gone with him, but that would have meant separating from Albert and Brandy and she did not want that.
Ahead of them, the road forked into two tunnels, each of which held the promise of new choices for them to make. Somewhere, hidden deep within this collection of lefts, rights and straight-aheads was a formula that would take them exactly where they needed to be. (More than one, if the Keeper was telling the truth.) But finding it, finding any correct path, was like blindly navigating the stars. The odds that they were going in the right direction in such a place were too slim to even consider.
They fell into silence and Albert led them on through the labyrinth, choosing directions at random, hoping to find what they were looking for merely by blind chance, since they had no other way to navigate.
Chapter 15
Wayne led the way through the hate room without incident. It was easier than he could have hoped, in fact. As soon as he set foot in the angry man’s mouth, he saw the light from Beverly’s flashlight illuminating the square opening on the other side. All he had to do was turn off his own light and dodge the statues.
It was a stroke of luck, as was navigating the decision room with its scarred floors for the second time tonight without encountering any hounds, regardless of the blind man’s failure to help them. But he hated that this small bit of fortune originated from such a grim tragedy. He would have gladly given up this advantage to have caught her when she fell. It seemed wrong to reap any sort of luck from someone’s untimely death.
But even navigating by Beverly’s flashlight alone, he was unable to ignore all the features of the statues. Things still crept through the shadows. Never before tonight had he ever wished for poorer eyesight, but right now he envied Brandy’s more profound nearsightedness.
Surrounded by shadowy human shapes, he found himself reminded of childhood bullies and some old friends he’d grown to strongly dislike. He was brought to the brink of something that was probably grumpiness, but thankfully never felt anything he would consider hate.
Olivia clung to his hand, her eyes pressed tightly closed. She gnawed nervously at her lower lip as she waited for him to tell her she could open her eyes again. It was torture not being able to look around. She was half-convinced that there were monsters waiting to seize her with every blind step that she took.
She had no idea how she was ever going to sleep again.
Andrea, on the other hand, had no problem keeping her eyes closed this time. The sex room had sufficiently frightened her. She wanted nothing to do with this awful-sounding “hate room.” She was more than happy to live the rest of her life without knowing what these statues looked like.
“I can’t believe I’m actually naked down here,” Andrea said, breaking the unnerving silence that had settled around them. She hated the silence. The silence let in too many frightening thoughts. It was why she kept talking. She couldn’t bear to let herself think too much about what she’d gotten herself into. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
“I know,” agreed Olivia. “Me either. It’s strange.”
“It’s so strange.”
“I just want to hide.”
“I know.”
“At least you’re a skinny little thing. I feel like a cow.”
“Oh, please. I’d love to have your body. I feel like a boy standing next to you.”
Olivia gave a huff of a laugh. “Believe me; you don’t look like a boy.”
“Well I’d still rather look like you. You’re so pretty.”
“No I’m not,” replied Olivia, embarrassed.
“Yes you are.”
“You’re prettier than I am.”
“No way. I have, like, no butt or boobs.”
Olivia laughed. “If I could, I’d give you my boobs. All these things’re good for is dropping the IQ of every guy in the room.”
“Huh,” said Wayne suddenly. “Is that why I keep forgetting where I’m going?”
Olivia smiled, her face flushing red in the darkness.
Andrea giggled.
“I didn't mean you,” Olivia apologized. “You've been a perfect gentleman.”
Wayne laughed. “Yeah. Especially the part where I drag you both into the sewers and make you get naked. That was real classy of me.”
“You didn't make us get naked. We made our own decision.”
“That's right,” Andrea agreed. “You told us to go home.”
“I did, didn't I?”
Olivia gave his hand a squeeze and had to resist the urge to open her eyes to look at him. He was such a nice guy. He was nothing at all like Andy...
But she didn’t want to think about Andy right now.
She forced herself to concentrate on keeping her eyes closed.
As soon as he was in the doorway between the hate room and the spiked pit beyond, Wayne returned his glasses to his face and prepared himself to look upon Beverly’s body once again.
She was right where he’d left her, impaled on the stone spikes, staring up at the ceiling with lifeless eyes. When last he looked upon this scene, her life’s blood was still flowing from her motionless body, onto the stone floor beneath her, and her eyes had grown glazed and distant, void of that brilliant glow that was too often underappreciated in the living until death scrubbed it away.
Now her body had grown ashen, her life’s color washed from her in a great pool of tacky blood.
So much blood.
The air was heavy with the smell of it.
“Brace yourselves,” he cautioned. “It’s ugly.” He could not take his eyes off the stone spikes that protruded cruelly from her skin.
“Oh god!” gasped Olivia. Wayne warned them both of the gruesome sight that awaited them before they entered the hate room. She had prepared herself for the worst, but it was still a tremendous shock. “That’s her…” she said, her voice quivering. “She’s the one who sent us into Gilbert House.”
Andrea stared at the body and the pool of congealed blood below it. This was the woman who had written the notes and collected the newspaper clippings inside the envelope that had appeared at her window. Beverly Bridger. She turned away, unable to look any longer. The only other dead body she had ever seen had been her grandfather’s, and he’d been embalmed and resting serenely in his casket. He had looked wrong to her, she recalled, not quite like she remembered, but he had at least looked peaceful. This was different. There was no peace here, no illusion of sleep, only death, cold and harsh and raw and violent.
Suddenly, this thing felt a lot more real to her.
Olivia, on the other hand, could not seem to pull her eyes away. That woman had nearly gotten her killed. She had sent Andy, Nick and Trish to their violent deaths. She hated that woman, despised her...but she never would have wished this upon her.
“She was insane,” Wayne said, also unable to remove his eyes from her body. “Completely nuts. I was so mad at her. I hurt her. I sprained her wrist, maybe broke it, I don’t know. And then…” He shook his head. “I tried to catch her. I really did.”
Olivia finally was able to look away. She turned her face to him and then took his hand and squeezed it. “I know,” she soothed.
“It was Gilbert House,” he said. “That place drove her crazy.”
“Can we keep going?” Andrea asked. She did not want to look upon this woman’s body any more. It upset her. It made her feel sick.
“Yes.” Wayne tugged softly at Olivia’s hand and the three of them made their way carefully along the ledge to the next passage.
As Olivia followed Wayne out of the room, she found herself looking back at Beverly’s body one last time. The stained spikes and congealing blood beneath her reminded her too much of the blood she’d seen oozing down the wall in Gilbert House.
Nick’s blood.
She wondered if there would ever be a night she would not have some sort of nightmare about watching him die.
Chapter 16
“What do you think it is?” Nicole asked. “The Caggo, I mean.”
“Could be anything,” replied Albert. “After the Sentinel Queen and the Keeper and that thing in Gilbert House, I couldn’t even begin to guess. Probably something really nasty. Or, for all we know, ‘Caggo’ could just be another name for a bear. That wouldn’t be much worse, really.”
“Hopefully we’ll never find out,” Brandy said.
The three of them had not seen any sign of the reservoir system or the hounds’ passages since leaving the chasm behind them half an hour ago. Instead, they had encountered several more hills, some climbing, others descending, a few rising and falling like the backs of mythical sea creatures, until they no longer had any idea how high or how deep they might be.
They walked on for a few minutes without speaking and soon the silence began to feel uneasy to Nicole. She wanted to jump at every little noise they made, thinking that the Caggo was right behind them or waiting just beyond the next turn. “Do you have any ideas about where we’ll end up if we solve this thing?” she asked, hoping to take her mind off the monster.
“I assume it’ll take us to wherever the Sentinel Queen wants us to go. To whatever place those fourteen pregnant women were coming from when they passed through the City of the Blind. To ‘where all humanity began,’ wherever that is.”
“What does that mean, exactly?” Brandy asked. “Where did humanity begin?”
“In some primordial ooze just like everything else,” Albert replied. “No one really knows. Africa, I thought, but apparently it was a tunnel in the Midwest of what would eventually become the United States of America.”
“That’s a little odd, since the earliest civilizations were on the other side of the world,” Nicole added.
“That’s true,” Albert admitted.
“Is history wrong?”
“History before records is just speculation and scientific guesses,” Albert explained. “I think the margin of error has always been there and if you throw in something like the City of the Blind, then I think that margin of error grows quite a bit.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with history and science,” Brandy suggested. “Maybe this is about the Garden of Eden.”
Albert shrugged. “Just as likely, I suppose.” Although he’d never really believed in an actual, physical Garden of Eden. He always thought it was a metaphor. But was it any less believable than the Temple of the Blind? Thinking about it now, he realized it wouldn’t surprise him at all if that was exactly what awaited them at the end of this journey.
“Wherever it is we’re going,” Nicole said, “they spared no expense in keeping people away from it.”
“This place is unreal” Albert agreed. “Without help, I can’t imagine anyone ever even finding their way in, much less back out.”
“Why even have all that if no one can get through it?” Nicole asked.
Albert again shook his head. He did not know. No one knew. If they were lucky, they’d live to be the first to find out.
He walked on for a while in silence, watching his flashlight beam as it slowly gave up its struggle against the darkness. “That’s it for my batteries,” he said as he stopped and removed his backpack.
“I’m so glad we have more than one of these,” Nicole observed. “Can
you imagine being down here by yourself and having to change the batteries in your flashlight?” She shuddered at the idea of having to sit down here in the dark for even a moment.
Brandy compared hers to Nicole’s. “I think mine’s going, too,” she worried.
“We’ve still got plenty of batteries,” Albert assured her. “We’ll get as much use as we can out of each one and hopefully they’ll last long enough for us to find our way out of here.”
“And if they don’t?” Brandy asked.
His light shining at full strength again, he slipped his arms back into the backpack and resumed walking. “We’ll worry about it when we get there, I guess.”
They followed the current passage as it curved to the left and chose left when it ended in an adjoining tunnel. In just a short amount of time, the path dead-ended and they had to back up and make a right instead. This tunnel curved to the right and led them to a fork at which they chose right. About fifty paces later, they found themselves exiting from the left side of the fork, having gone only in a small circle. They were going nowhere at all.
Brandy closed her eyes as Albert led them back the way they’d come, squeezing his elbow and trying hard not to be discouraged. She was beginning to feel as though she were in a dream. It seemed so long ago that she woke in her own bed, fearful of a ringing phone. It felt like days ago, perhaps weeks or even months, yet it had been only a matter of hours. Back then, she had never heard of Wendell Gilbert or Gilbert House. She had never dreamed of a City of the Blind or a Sentinel Queen. Yet here she was now, lost in an ancient labyrinth, trying to find some mysterious doorway she knew nothing about. It was impossible. There was no way this nightmare could be real, yet it was because of this place, because of the Temple of the Blind, that she had Albert in her life. If not for the sex room and the hate room and the fear room and all those other chambers they explored the last time they were inside this underground hell, she would not have him in her life. So if the dream was real, why shouldn’t the nightmare also be real?