by Brian Harmon
“Are we through?” asked Andrea as she felt her way cautiously toward the door behind Olivia. Three times, something had scraped her as she walked, once on her left arm and twice on her right hip. She had also bumped her head on something and a small red mark was already growing into a bump on her forehead just above her left eyebrow.
“Almost. I’m in the doorway now. There are spikes everywhere, so be careful.” He stepped out of the fear room and leaned against the wall beside the doorway, his eyes closed. He had to calm his nerves. They still had far to go and he would need his wits if he was ever going to catch up to the others.
Olivia, too, had suffered a few little scrapes and bruises as she passed through the winding chambers, but anyone would be hard-pressed to identify them among all the others she had collected during the night. She opened her eyes and peered out at the thousands of stone spines that filled the next chamber, horrified once more at the deadliness of the Temple of the Blind. “Oh my God,” she sighed.
“I know, right? It’s not as bad as it looks though.” He could already feel his heart gradually slowing to its normal pace, but that weariness was not yet letting up. And it still felt as if a swarm of insects was crawling up his legs. “There’re places to step. It’s for tripping up anyone who beat the fear room by doing it blind.”
Olivia nodded. That made sense. She could understand how the two rooms might work together like that. It took a combination of blindness and sight. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just have to rest a minute. That room drains you.”
She stepped away from the doorway and stared into the spiked room. “I can’t believe this place.” She turned and looked at Wayne, her eyes suddenly widening. “You’re bleeding!”
“It’s okay,” Wayne promised. He was still holding his glasses in his hand. The blurry images of the next room were strangely relaxing. “It’s just a little poke.”
“No, it’s not!”
Wayne returned his glasses to his face and looked down at his arm. There was a gash just above his elbow and a steady trickle of blood was running freely down his arm and dripping onto the floor at his feet. “Oh,” he said, surprised. For a moment he stared at himself, watching the blood pool in the palm of his open hand, and then he chuckled at the irony.
Andrea had been feeling her way slowly through the opening, careful to make sure she was well clear of the fear room and all its horrors before opening her eyes. “What happened?”
“I ran into one of those spikes. The same thing happened the first time I was in there, except I took it in the belly.” He chuckled again, feeling a little delirious. Last time he’d been sure that he was badly injured and yet the wound had turned out to be nothing but a harmless scratch. This time, he had erroneously assumed that the injury was just as superficial as the last one, when in fact he was bleeding considerably.
“We need a bandage,” Olivia said. She was quickly approaching a panic and Wayne could hardly blame her. There were no first aid stations down here. No hospitals. No help. They were entirely on their own and at the mercy of the temple.
This was part of the reason he was feeling weak, he was sure. How long had he been bleeding like this? How much had he lost?
Olivia forced herself to calm down. She closed her eyes and took a slow breath. She wasn’t useful to anyone if she couldn’t think straight.
When her head had cleared a little, she remembered the cut on her arm. The monster that snatched her from Gilbert House dropped her into the trees and one of the limbs gouged her as she fell. She’d stopped the initial bleeding with her torn shirt, but after she and Wayne were safely out of Gilbert House, Wayne had cleaned it for her and wrapped it properly with gauze. He went overboard, using far more than the injury required. And she was still wearing all that gauze.
She reached up and untied it. As she expected, she was able to unwind several feet that she had not bled through, more than enough to fix Wayne up for the time being.
“I don’t have anything to disinfect it with,” she told him as she tied it around his arm.
“It’ll stop me from bleeding to death,” he told her. “We can worry about infection later.”
Olivia stepped back and looked him over. Now he had bandages on each arm, one below the elbow, the other above, as well as on both feet. “I’d feel better if we could take you to a hospital though.”
“No deal. You wouldn’t let me take you.”
She smiled at him. “I hate doctors.”
“I hate needles.”
Olivia laughed. For a moment they stood there, looking at each other.
She was beautiful. Her eyes were so deep and dark, yet brilliantly bright, as though a warm glow were breaking through from somewhere within. Even with her face smudged and her makeup smeared and her hair dirty and damp and tangled, she was probably the most beautiful woman Wayne had ever seen. He could hardly believe that he was the reason she was still alive.
And yet, he couldn’t help but wonder if he might merely be the reason she almost wasn’t. He still wondered how things might have been different if he’d followed the instructions in Beverly’s letter and shown up when he was supposed to, the same night Olivia and her friends arrived. Could he have prevented all that carnage? Could his absence that night have been the only reason those people were dead?
“How are you feeling?” asked Olivia.
“Better,” Wayne replied. And it was true. He could already feel the weight of the fear room lifting.
“Good.”
Wayne stood up, ignoring the pain in his arm. It wasn’t hard. He’d been ignoring the pain from his other arm and his feet since escaping Gilbert House for the second time. Compared to being bitten by a zombie, this was nothing.
The three of them moved on, making their way past the menacing spikes and ever deeper into the temple. They were closer now. Not much stood in their way. Soon they’d be in the City of the Blind.
And Wayne had some questions for the local sovereign.
Chapter 23
For more than an hour, Nicole had been leading the way through the tunnels of the labyrinth for no reason other than that she had wound up in front when they turned away from the meadow. Behind her, Albert dragged the chalk along the wall, carefully laying the trail that he hoped would prevent them from walking in circles, thereby helping them find their way more quickly to the exit.
Or at the very least back to the entrance.
She didn’t know where she was going. The choices she made were entirely random, and even with Albert’s blue chalk line leading the way back (the green ran out about a hundred yards back) she felt terribly uncertain about these walls, unable to shake the feeling that with every turn they were becoming more and more lost.
She chose left and then right, and then went straight through two more intersections. The passage then began to curve to the right and they soon found themselves staring in at the meadow again.
“Shit,” she spat. “Another circle.”
“No,” Albert corrected her. “A circle would be if we were right back where we were the first time. We’re in a different place, looking in from a different angle. We’ve gone around it a little.”
From here, they could see neither the small pond nor the tree. There was nothing beyond the end of the passage but coarse, black soil.
“So we’ve gone, what, fifty feet? A hundred?” Brandy asked.
“Maybe. But in a maze, fifty feet could be as good as fifty miles.”
“Or as good as fifty miles backward,” Nicole argued.
“Don’t think that way. Come on. At least we know we’ve made some progress. At least we haven’t seen the Keeper again.”
Nicole and Brandy said no more. That was true. The worst-case scenario would be if they exited a tunnel and found themselves right back at the entrance to the labyrinth, looking out at those two rows of sentinels.
Well, the worst-case would be turning the corner and finding the Caggo or a pack of hounds or so
me other voracious beast.
Albert turned and led them away from the meadow, not willing to remain too close to it for too long. He did not know what was in there, but it sure as hell wasn’t kittens. Something was wrong with that room, and he didn’t intend for it to take hold of him again like it did the last time he stood this close to it. More than that, he had no idea if the things that scurried and slithered through the dirt were specifically bound to that room or if they could be drawn out into the labyrinth.
“What do you think it is?” Brandy asked. “A trap?”
“I think so,” replied Albert. “That’s what it feels like.”
“I still don’t understand why all this is needed,” Nicole said. “It’s impossible. No one could find their way through this place alone.”
Albert considered this. Maybe she was right. Maybe that was precisely the point. Maybe this place was not supposed to be found. Maybe only someone hand-picked by the Sentinel Queen would have enough of an advantage to pass through all of these obstacles.
But if so, then why choose them? Of all the people on the planet, why Albert Cross, Brandy Rudman and Nicole Smart? Why were they so special?
When they had returned to the previous intersection, Albert turned left and then made his way through each one that followed, forcing himself to think as little about each decision he made as possible. It did no good to over-think his decisions. It was a labyrinth. He was supposed to get lost. Analyzing each decision would only waste time and probably drive him crazy.
About ten minutes later, they found themselves looking in at the meadow for a third time.
Nicole and Brandy both swore.
“I don’t like that we keep coming back here,” Nicole groaned. The place gave her the creeps the first time she saw it. Now it almost seemed as if it were intentionally luring them back to it.
Albert peered into the enormous chamber. A large, leafless tree branch was visible on the left side, its naked branches spread out over the black soil. “What kind of tree can survive down here?” he wondered.
“Maybe it’s dead,” Brandy suggested.
“For how long?” Albert countered. “It should rot away if it’s been dead for any amount of time.”
“Frankly,” said Nicole. “I don’t give a shit. Let’s go.”
Albert did not dare to linger any longer. Risking the chance of being lured into that nightmare chamber was bad enough. But Nicole’s tone warned him that she did not intend to tolerate his annoying curiosity for another moment.
They retreated back down their blue line.
Again, Nicole found herself in the lead. She still had no idea where they were going or how they were going to get out of this insane labyrinth, so she continued to choose her paths without thought. It didn’t seem to matter anyway. They were hopelessly lost down here.
Albert had begun to wonder how much longer they could possibly avoid the Caggo. They’d been in here for so long now that he could scarcely comprehend why it hadn’t already caught their scent and tracked them down. He was reluctant to believe that it was mere luck.
Maybe the Sentinel Queen had something to do with it. She sent the man with no eyes to take their underwear, after all, so that he could distract the hounds and make it safer for them to travel in the first chambers of the temple. Maybe the blind man was doing something similar to distract the Caggo. That would be a comforting thought.
But even so, how long could they possibly hope to keep avoiding it?
Ahead of them, the passage opened once more into a large chamber and Nicole nearly cursed her luck again. But it was not the meadow that was waiting for them at the end of this stretch of tunnel. Instead, they found themselves back inside the temple’s vast reservoir system.
A narrow channel of water lay before them and ran beyond their sight both right and left. A bridge spanned the water from the mouth of the passage to the walkway that ran along the other side.
“Which way?” Nicole asked, as if she expected anyone to have an answer.
Albert peered down into the water as he crossed the bridge and glimpsed something swimming past in the gloom way down where his flashlight’s beam faded. “What was that?”
The three of them paused and peered down into the water.
“I don’t see anything,” reported Brandy.
“Gone now,” Albert explained.
“What did it look like?” asked Nicole.
“It was too quick. I couldn’t tell.”
“A fish?” suggested Nicole.
But Albert wasn’t sure. There was no reason why there wouldn’t be ordinary fish down here. There could be an entire ecosystem in these waterways. Or, for all he knew, one of these chambers could be connected to a lake or river somewhere and the creatures that lived down here could simply wander in and out as they pleased.
But no answers presented themselves in the depths below, so they turned and continued on their way.
Since nobody had an opinion about which way to go, Nicole turned right at the other end of the bridge and followed the channel past two more passageways and into a large chamber very much like the first one they came across. In fact, Nicole had to wonder if it might be the same chamber. It had the same layout: a wide ledge along the wall, multiple openings leading back out into the labyrinth, and a large, deep pool of water stretching out as far as her light would reach. If she could somehow illuminate this entire room, would she be able to see their yellow chalk line from here?
They turned left and ventured deeper into the reservoir.
Albert continued to shine his light down into the water, curious about what else might inhabit these mysterious waterways.
Something splashed a short distance ahead of them and sent waves racing past them. Albert probed the gloomy depths with his flashlight, trying to get a glimpse of the mystery creature as it swam away, but there was nothing to be seen.
Brandy, however, was less interested in what might be beneath the water than in what might be hiding in the darkness that shrouded the chamber all around them. For all they knew, the Caggo could be somewhere in this very room, watching them from the darkness, preparing to pounce.
She walked a few steps ahead of Albert and Nicole, carving at the darkness with her flashlight, and another heavy splash arose from the water’s edge in front of her.
This time, Albert did see something beneath the racing ripples. “Did you see that?” he asked.
Nicole did. But there was little to be made of it. It was nothing more than a dark shape deep down in the gloom, visible for only a second and distorted by the waves.
Brandy did not even glance back at them. “Come on you guys. Let’s go.”
Albert knew she was right. Lingering here would not help them. He was sure that catching a glimpse of the mysterious jumpers in the reservoir would do nothing to help them escape. But after all this time, it was frustrating how the creatures down here continued to elude his sight. At the very least, knowing what they looked like would put to rest all the things that his imagination insisted on suggesting. More often than not, the monsters in movies and books became a lot less frightening once they stepped out of the shadows and revealed themselves.
Brandy shined her light out over the surface of the water, but there was nothing to be seen out there. When she aimed it at the floor in front of her again, however, she caught a glimpse of something small and black darting across the floor.
She stopped, frozen in mid-step. Her heart was suddenly racing. It was only there for a second, but she didn’t dare dismiss it as her imagination.
“Guys?” she called, but she didn’t dare look away from where she thought she saw the thing to see if her hushed voice reached anyone. Could it have been a mouse? Or a rat? It wasn’t the most pleasant thing she could imagine running into, but she could deal with that much more easily than something unknown. In her sudden fear, however, she couldn’t help but remember the small, black shapes they’d seen scurrying across the grimy soil of the meadow.
>
Albert must have heard her because he was suddenly at her side. “What is it?” he asked.
“I saw something.”
“What kind of something?”
“I don’t know. It was…just something. Small. And dark.”
“Be careful,” Nicole whispered. She was standing a few steps behind them, adding her light to theirs.
Albert crept forward, pushing farther into the darkness, trying to see what was there.
Brandy seized his arm and clung to him, moving forward with him, not daring to let him out of her reach.
“The floor’s wet over here,” he observed. Something from the water had recently crawled up onto the walkway.
“Something’s here,” Brandy breathed.
Albert was about to point out that the water on the floor proved only that something had been here, that there was no proof it was still with them, but at that instant something splashed into the water nearby and all three of them swung their lights toward the sound, startled.
“You guys…” Nicole whispered.
“It’s okay,” Albert assured her. “Nothing to worry about.” Although he knew no such thing. Not really. He turned back to the wet floor he’d been examining before his attention was redirected and his light fell across something strange. It looked like a lumpy piece of pale, rubber tubing with black, bristly hair growing all over it. As he watched, it slithered back into the shadows.
Brandy took another step forward, thrusting her light ahead of her, trying to see what the darkness was hiding, and several more of these meaty, hairy coils spilled across the floor into view and immediately wriggled from sight again. At the same moment, there was a wet, gurgling noise and a stream of brown fluid squirted from the shadows where the creature had disappeared, striking the ground next to Albert’s bare foot.
Before either of them could react, two more jets shot at them. The first struck Brandy on her right thigh, splashing up onto her belly and down her right leg. It was cold and vile. The second, only an instant behind the first, struck her in the face just as she opened her mouth to scream.