by Brian Harmon
Brandy shivered, her whole body actually jolting with the reality of where they were and how much danger they were in.
“You okay?” Albert asked her.
“I'm fine. I’m just ready to be out of here, that's all.”
“I know,” he said. “We'll get there eventually. Just don't give up on me, okay?”
Again she nodded. It was hard. She had arrived at the point where she was ready to leave this awful place and just go home.
But she was stronger than this. After all they’d been through tonight, she wasn’t about to give up on Albert and Nicole. It was that awful shriek. She kept hearing it in her head, echoing through the darkness.
What was the Caggo? The Keeper made it sound as if it were more than merely a vicious beast. It said that slaughtering intrudes was its only joy, as if it were a sadistic killer that took perverse pleasure in disemboweling its victims. It sounded more like a sociopath than a monster. They weren’t dealing with any kind of animal. This was certain to be more like the thing that attacked them inside Gilbert House. Except that she was sure the Caggo would be considerably worse somehow.
Lost in thought, she almost ran into Albert when he abruptly stopped in the middle of the next intersection. For a moment, she did not understand what he was doing, but then she saw what he was looking at. A single yellow line ran down the wall of the intersecting passage. They’d circled back to their own trail again. And an old one, at that.
For a moment, no one spoke. The discouragement of the labyrinth’s size and difficulty was beginning to take its toll on them. They were tired. Their feet hurt. They were afraid and thirsty and hungry. They’d had only a small supper. Had they known that such hardships awaited them, would they still have come here?
They probably would have. Albert had no doubt in his mind that he would have. He would have come alone if need be.
“What now?” Brandy asked. The only choices were left or right, which would have them retracing steps they’d taken earlier in the night, or else back the way they just came.
“We keep going,” replied Albert. “Take the next unmarked path we find.”
“Do you think we’ve had time to get completely lost yet?” Nicole asked. The question was more a whine than an inquiry.
“Probably,” Albert said. “But give me another fifteen or twenty minutes and I think we can be sure.”
“Fabulous,” Nicole replied.
“We’re still okay,” Albert assured her.
As they started walking again, Albert’s blue line neatly drawn just above the yellow one, Brandy began to think about her first trip to the temple and the sex room. It wasn’t the most romantic of circumstances for the memory of the first time they had sex. But it had been unavoidable. And perhaps if they hadn’t come down here they wouldn’t be together now. Therefore, she refused to regret the events of that night. Instead, she remembered it fondly. And it was an incredible thing, really. A wonderful thing. Not like how she lost her virginity. That she did regret.
It was not that she hadn’t wanted to do it. It was more the fact that she gave in to Ben Anshen before she realized that she simply did not and would not ever really love him. It was because when it was all said and done it was not making love. It was just having sex. It was just being a slut.
She was fifteen at the time, so young. It had seemed like such a good thing when they started. They were friends first. Then they became more than that. She made out with him because it seemed okay and she had sex with him because she thought she wanted to. She was curious. But as soon as it was over she found that she was not satisfied. It had hurt, for one thing, and she found that, rather than feeling something special, she had merely resented both him and herself for it. She knew as soon as it was over that someday she would be holding the man she really loved and she would hate herself for doing that.
But she didn’t really hate herself. She didn’t even hate Ben, as easy as that would have been. She accepted it. And later, when she was a senior in high school, she also gave herself far too soon to Kevin Lefreys. She told herself at the time that she thought she loved him, but really, she only let it happen because she’d already given herself to Ben. If she and Ben had never happened, she probably would have waited longer before giving into Kevin. After all, it wasn’t as if her virginity was at stake.
She and Kevin remained together for a few short months and they made love half a dozen times during those months. But it was never real. It was never satisfying. And he always seemed to want more than she was willing to give.
She didn’t love him any more than she’d loved Ben. She loved him less, in fact, because at least Ben had been her friend before he was her lover. She walked away from that relationship wondering if there was something wrong with her, if she was incapable of distinguishing petty lust for real love.
But the sex room had shown her that lust could be every bit as overpowering as hatred and fear. The experience had been horrifying. It had been humiliating. Right after it happened, she felt briefly as if her world had fallen apart. Ironically, the only comfort she could find was that she was not a virgin. That awful room, for all the things it made her do, hadn’t taken that away from her.
But that was precisely what it took from Albert. He had gone inside perfectly innocent, and while the room was raping her of her dignity and self-respect, it was tearing from him all the wonder and beauty that might have been his first time. It was making her do to him what she let Ben do to her.
But it wasn’t really like that at all.
She didn’t realize it until after that night was over, but there was something different about doing those things with Albert, something besides the obvious perversity of those statues. There was something there, something that was missing that day with Ben and each time she was with Kevin.
She remembered lying on the cold stone floor in front of the sex room door while Albert lay atop her, kissing her as if he meant to devour her lips and thrusting himself violently and painfully into her as the sentinels watched on with their massive erections. It was the second time they passed through the sex room, the second time it made them do these things. And like the first time, there was nothing romantic about it. It was pure, animal lust. But this time Albert had managed to get them through the statues and out of the chamber before losing control, and as the intensity of the sex room’s desires began to fade, so did the fierceness of their sex, until Albert’s kisses became tender and sweet, and the motion of his hips slowed to a gentle rhythm.
That was the first time she’d ever felt satisfied being with a man. Though she hadn’t realized it yet, that was the first time she truly made love.
Ahead of them, another intersection came into view. The yellow line went straight ahead into the darkness. The passages that led left and right remained unmarked and unexplored.
Albert turned right without speaking and Brandy and Nicole followed him, their flashlights prodding the passages they left behind, half expecting to see a pair of sinister, glowing eyes peering back at them.
In the eerie silence, Brandy continued to think about the sex room and whether or not she would have Albert in her life today if they had not been driven together by its insatiable urges.
Chapter 30
“What’s that smell?” Nicole groaned, her face scrunching into a sour expression of revulsion.
The air in this passage had grown rank. A deep, pungent odor was permeating the air in the narrow space through which they walked.
“The hounds,” Albert said. “Or if not them then some sort of animal. Smells like the zoo down here.” Although he never remembered the zoo smelling this bad. Not even at its worst. Down here, there likely weren’t any animal keepers to clean up the exhibits.
“It’s disgusting!” Nicole complained.
“One of the hounds’ tunnels must be just ahead,” Albert surmised. But as he walked forward, he found that the passage went on much farther than he expected, and likewise, the stench grew much strong
er. By the time they reached the next intersection—which was, indeed, a crossing of one of those lowered passageways—the air was so pervaded with the pungent, ammonia-stench of animal waste that it brought tears to their eyes and threatened to strangle them.
The floor of this reeking passage bore the same scratches as those in all the other areas where the hounds were allowed access, but it was considerably more damaged than any they had encountered so far. The center was worn nearly to sand. Something about these creatures was obviously hard on the stone. Albert assumed that they must walk on incredibly formidable claws to do such damage. After hundreds of years, or thousands, or even tens of thousands, it wasn’t unthinkable that the floor would eventually wear beneath the feet of such creatures, whereas the rest of the temple likely suffered very little traffic and therefore remained pristine. And this passage, for some reason, endured significantly more traffic than others.
“What is this place?” Brandy coughed.
“A lot of animals always do their business in the same place every time they go,” Albert explained.
“So this is a giant litter box?” Nicole asked. Her hand was pressed over her mouth and nose, muffling her voice.
“Something like that.” Albert shined his flashlight left and right. Once again, no hounds were in sight. But this was obviously a place they frequented. If the smell was any indication, somewhere very near this spot was a passage or chamber that was the equivalent of a sewer.
Directly across from them, the passage they were traveling continued forward.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go quick, before one of them comes back.”
Brandy and Nicole didn’t like the idea of crossing another of these passages, but they already knew that Albert wouldn’t backtrack as long as there was an alternative. He was probably saving them hours of walking in the long run, but it still seemed like an unnecessarily dangerous risk. None of them knew how fast the hounds could run. If one caught their scent, there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t be on them before they could climb back up to higher ground.
Quickly, the three of them dropped down and rushed to the other side. Albert gave Brandy and Nicole each a gentle boost and then heaved himself up and over the ledge, once again managing to avoid being mauled.
Coughing on the noxious stench, Albert did not even bother to glance back in hopes of glimpsing a hound. He pressed the chalk to the wall and hurried on, hoping the air would soon clear.
A few minutes later, the left wall of the passage opened up, revealing another lower passageway running alongside them. The same, foul stench filled the air and the same, telltale scratches covered the floor.
The Sentinel Queen told them that her children acted as caretakers for the Temple of the Blind. Albert had assumed that part of their job was keeping the place tidy, explaining the immaculate cleanliness of the corridors. There had not even been any dust to dirty their bare feet. He had also assumed, then, that their work must extend to cleaning up after the hounds, but this area suggested the hounds to be very clean animals that likely required little effort on the part of the Sentinel Queen’s blind brood. Given that he had not detected any foul odors in other areas where the floor was scarred, it seemed likely that the hounds preferred to keep most of their territory clean.
Perhaps that meant that this was a fairly safe place for them to be. Clean animals usually didn’t like their food too near their waste. If a hound should appear in that lower passage while they were passing through, it might not even be interested in them.
On the other hand, just because it was picky about where it evacuated didn’t necessarily mean it was particular about where it came by its food. And the things might be violently territorial, in which case hunger wouldn’t have anything to do with it. They would kill anything that wandered into their labyrinth on pure instinct.
However, he had to keep reminding himself that he knew nothing of these things. They could have been engineered specifically to break all the rules of nature. Someone, somewhere, designed the fear room, after all. There was no guessing what kinds of monsters someone like that might be capable of breeding.
They moved on, each of them keeping near the wall as they walked, their flashlights repeatedly drifting down into the shadows of the lower passage, their eyes watering from the pungent stench that pervaded the air.
The two passages parted again less than a hundred feet from where they met and the stench finally began to dissipate a little as they moved away. About forty yards ahead, they turned left at an intersection and immediately crossed another section of the hounds’ labyrinth (this one mildly less rank than the last) and again there were no hounds to be seen.
Albert was beginning to think that there was something unnatural about their luck. Once again, he wondered if the Sentinel Queen had done something to distract the hounds beyond hanging up their undergarments, since they had surely grown wise to that trick by now.
They came upon another intersection and Albert turned right. Several yards beyond, Albert heard the curious noise of a hound drifting toward them from somewhere up ahead.
“I don’t like it here,” Brandy said. “There’s way too many hounds.”
Nicole agreed. “I keep thinking we’re going to find ourselves trapped between two of those passages and they won’t let us leave.”
Albert had to admit, that was not a pleasant thought. But so far there had not been any two junctions between the two labyrinths with nothing between them. He would not, however, rule out that there might be such places somewhere down here. In fact, something like that would be just the thing to trip up someone like him, who was choosing to cross those junctions rather than spend extra time backtracking through the labyrinth. It made sense, even, when he considered the twisted logic of the temple. It seemed that for every advantage they found, there was an equal disadvantage. Entering the hate room blind protected one from the overwhelming emotions. But exiting the room blind could mean sharing Beverly’s gruesome fate.
The Temple of the Blind had a way of punishing those who learned its tricks.
At the end of the passage, as expected, was another sunken tunnel. The noise of the hound was still droning on, but the creature itself was not within sight. It seemed to be lingering somewhere to the left, concealed in shadows.
“Tell me you’re not planning to cross this one too,” said Nicole as she gazed nervously toward the noise. As the chilling sound went on and on, it sounded deceptively like purring to her, as if the hound might be nothing more than a happy, napping cat, if a terrifyingly large one.
Albert glanced at the opening across from them. It was so close, and yet so incredibly far. “No,” he replied. “Not this time.”
The hound was right there. It was making its noise, which might mean that it was agitated or at least that it was awake and probably alert. It would be only a matter of time before it caught their scent. It didn’t take much time to drop down and climb back up, but when danger was so close, and so obvious, the risk became too great to justify. Perhaps if it was only him down here he might have considered taking the risk, but there was no way he would so blatantly risk Brandy’s or Nicole’s life just to save a little backtracking.
“So we go back to that last intersection,” said Brandy, relieved that she didn’t have to talk him out of risking it.
“Yeah.” But Albert did not turn back. He lingered there, his light aimed toward the droning racket of the hound. It was becoming more than he could bear. He wanted to see one, wanted to know what to expect in case they had to deal with these things later. But it remained stubbornly out of sight.
“So let’s go,” Brandy urged.
Albert nodded, but still he lingered for a moment, waiting, watching. He wanted only a glimpse, just a fleeting flash of the creature. He began to walk only when Nicole started back ahead of him and Brandy took his hand and pulled him away.
Chapter 31
Rachel was never going to believe this. Not in a million years. There wa
s simply no amount of swearing that could ever convince Andrea’s best friend that there existed a place like the City of the Blind hidden deep inside a colossal Temple of the Blind that itself existed right beneath the very streets of Briar Hills. Rachel was also not going to believe that Gilbert House, those eerie, but otherwise boring walls practically in Andrea’s own backyard, was actually an entire building that was somehow invisible and acted as a portal between their world and an endless, black forest populated with shambling, undead corpses. She was never going to believe there was any such thing as a hound or a Sentinel Queen or whatever that thing was that attacked everybody in Gilbert House. She was not even going to believe that always-modest Andrea took her clothes off in front of a guy.
Even Andrea wasn’t sure she believed all of it. It was so much to take in. Even the things she’d seen with her own eyes seemed far too spectacular to possibly be real. As she gazed around her now at the walls of gray stone that stretched on and on into the relentless darkness before them, she could not help but marvel over all the things she’d discovered since that envelope first appeared on her window screen.
She couldn’t stop wondering what she was doing here. What business did a girl like her have in a place like this? She was only eighteen, still just a kid. Had she really followed these two complete strangers into this terrifying underground labyrinth just because a mysterious voice in the forest told her to do it?