by Brian Harmon
At last, he opened the door and stepped out into the cool mist, his mind still caught in the endless loop that revolved around the dark corridors he once traveled.
The apartment building was a rectangular, two-story structure that was about as uninteresting as Albert thought that any building could be. Two perpendicular hallways intersected in the middle, segmenting the floor into four equal parts, consisting of six apartments each. He lived on the first floor, in apartment number one-twenty.
As he unlocked the door, he wondered if he would ever go back down there, if he would ever know the truth about that place, about the things that lay waiting in that darkness, about the box that led him there. As with every time he let himself think too much about that place, he became frustrated with his ignorance. It almost made his head hurt. He let himself into the apartment and closed the door behind him. He dropped his backpack (the same green backpack that accompanied him into the service tunnel that night) onto the ugly, blue armchair his grandparents gave him when he moved into this apartment, and then sank into the matching sofa with a sigh.
For a moment he just sat there, his head against the cushions, his hands lying limp at his side, his legs stretched out in front of him.
From the hallway came the subtle sound of a cleared throat, the sort of sound one made when the intention was to draw ones attention. Albert turned his head, drawn from his circling thoughts. Immediately, those lingering memories of dark corridors and silent stone sentinels were dashed from his mind. For a moment, his head was blissfully empty, and all he could do was stare at the sight before him.
Brandy stood in the doorway, her hands on her hips, her eyebrows lifted in a “you’re in trouble” look. She was naked except for her new glasses, slimmer than the ones she’d been wearing for the past few years, the ones he’d been used to seeing her in. Her long, blonde hair was still damp from a shower and he could smell the scent of soap and shampoo wafting across the room. “You’re late,” she said crossly.
Albert sat gazing at her. They’d been inseparable since returning from the temple, and he’d seen her naked enough times to have her body engraved in his memory. He'd been living with her since August, even. And yet she still took his breath away every time he saw her undressed.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to come home?” she asked him angrily. She never broke a smile. Her no-nonsense, you’re-in-deep-crap disposition was like steel.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” Albert said, playing along, but unable not to smile. He did not have her talent for acting. “It won’t happen again, Ma’am.” He hadn’t expected her to be here. She must have come home early from work. It wasn’t often that her hours were cut short, but she did occasionally find reasons to leave early, especially if someone pissed her off. She worked at the Old Navy in the Briar Hills shopping mall and for the past three months her new boss had been rubbing her the wrong way.
Not that it mattered. There was no place else on earth he’d rather her be than with him.
“You’re damn straight it won’t!” snapped Brandy. “Now get your cute little ass over here!”
“Yes Ma’am,” Albert said, and stood up.
As he approached her, she grabbed him by his shirt and gave him a gentle tug. “Making me wait for it… What do you think I keep you around for, anyway?”
“My engaging personality?”
She laughed. “Fuck that!” Now she, too, was smiling.
Albert put his arms around her and kissed her softly. “I love you.”
“No changing the subject.”
Albert laughed.
Had he realized that she was already home, he would not have taken his time getting back from his own job. For the past six weeks he’d been working part-time at the local Staples. He couldn’t say that he enjoyed it, especially at minimum wage, but the extra money was nice and at least he got along with everyone there. Besides, he didn’t want to stay home alone while Brandy worked. He always missed her terribly when she was gone.
And she felt the same way when he was gone. Even waiting on each other to get home from class sometimes seemed like an eternity.
They retreated to the bedroom and made love. It was long and tender, romantic, blissful, but it was also exhilarating, overflowing with intense passion. It was how it was supposed to be, a perfect melding of true love and primal lust, of adoration and desire. And when they were done, they lay pressed against each other, unwilling to let go, wishing it could go on and on. Naked and breathless, they held each other in dreamy silence.
It was always like that. For both of them. Their very touch was intoxicating to each other. Every moment that their bodies were in contact was euphoria. Their love was absolute and had been since that day they ventured together into the tunnels beneath the city.
Once her heart had finally slowed to its usual pace, Brandy lifted her face from Albert’s warm chest and gazed up at him. “Nicole came over this morning,” she said as she studied his handsome face. “Before work.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Her and Earl broke up again.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She was in tears.”
Albert shook his head. “I never have liked Earl.”
“I know you haven’t.” She reached up and stroked the light stubble that had grown on his face since that morning.
“Can’t figure out why she does.”
Brandy sighed that sigh that meant she was repeating something she did not like to repeat and said, “Because he’s the kind of guy who likes to push around the type of girl who doesn’t quite realize he’s a jackass and because Nicole’s that kind of girl. We’ve been over this before.”
“I know. I just don’t think she’s really that kind of girl. She knows what kind of person he is. She just settles for him and I don’t understand why. She’s gorgeous. She doesn’t need to put up with someone like him.”
Brandy nodded. He was right, of course. “I invited her over for dinner tonight. I hope that’s okay.”
“Of course it’s okay. I love Nicole, you know that.”
“I know.” She loved the way he stood up for her. Nicole really was too good to settle for less than the perfect man, but for some reason she did not have any confidence in her ability to find Mr. Right. Each guy she dated seemed worse than the last. And now there was Earl, who for some reason just would not go away. Brandy had never known her to keep taking a guy back like this.
“What time’s she coming over?”
“Seven.” It was still not yet six by the clock on Brandy’s nightstand. There was plenty of time.
For a moment, they were bathed in silence again. Albert held her against him, relishing, as he always did, the feel of her naked body against him. He held one hand against her, softly cupping the tender swell of her breast, savoring the gentle rhythm of her beating heart.
She continued to trace the features of his face with her fingertips, exploring him, attempting to memorize him in this one wonderful moment.
“You’re so quiet lately,” she said after a while.
Albert looked at her, surprised. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be.”
“You’re thinking about the temple, aren’t you?”
“The Temple of the Blind” was the name Albert had given to the labyrinth they’d found the previous year. Down there were whole rooms that only Brandy with her poor vision could navigate, because to see was to be driven mad with emotions and desires. It was a place they often spoke about, whether reminiscing how they came to fall in love or speculating about its undiscovered secrets. But she made it perfectly clear that it was a place she did not yet want to return.
“Yeah,” he confessed. “I guess I am.”
“You want to go back down there.” It wasn’t a question.
“I always want to go back down there,” he admitted. “It’s partly my new Western Civilizations class. We’ve been talking about ancient societies. The Egyptians and Greeks. There are so many things we
don’t understand about them, so much that’s been lost to time. It just makes me think, you know? We never found out what that place was. Why it exists. How it can exist.”
Brandy nodded.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going back.”
“I don’t want it to be a wedge between us.”
“There’s no such thing.”
She gave him a smile and then kissed him. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
She rolled onto her back beside him and gazed up at the ceiling. “So how do the Egyptians and Greeks compare to the Happy Sentinels?”
Albert laughed. “Well they weren’t as healthily endowed as our friends underground, that’s for sure.”
Brandy giggled. She never seemed to grow tired of joking about the statues Albert referred to as “sentinels” and their absurdly long penises.
Albert rolled onto his side, facing her. His hand slid gently across her naked belly, exploring her soft skin. “But today we were talking about the religious significances of Greek architecture and art. In my head, I kept comparing everything we talked about to what we saw down there. I kept wondering if those faceless statues were supposed to be somebody’s gods, or if those emotion rooms were designed to be some sort of divine test or maybe sacrificial chambers. Even the temple itself must have some kind of purpose. The pyramids in Egypt were just enormous tombs, you know. Complete with booby-traps. I wonder if that’s what the temple is.”
“Never considered that.”
“Me either.” Albert’s fingers glided across her skin, down her lovely thigh and back up again.
“Someday we’ll go back,” she promised.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I want to know what’s down there, too. I’m just a little—”
There was a knock at the door and Brandy sat up as suddenly as if she’d been stung. A soft curse escaped her lips and she hopped off the bed and opened her dresser drawer.
Albert looked at the clock and saw that it was just past six. “Seven, huh?”
“You know Nicole. Sometimes seven is seven, sometimes it’s eight, sometimes it’s six. She’s a little upset right now, you know.”
“I know. I’m only joking.”
“Get dressed.”
“I will.” He lay there on the bed for a moment longer, watching as she stepped into a pair of panties, admiring her lovely curves for as long as he could.
Chapter 4
When Albert stepped out of the bedroom, Brandy and Nicole were sitting at the dining room table, each with a bottle of beer in her hand. When she saw him, Nicole gave him that genuine, happy-to-see-you smile that he dearly loved about her.
“How you doing?” he asked her, and to this she merely shrugged. He could see the redness in her pretty eyes from the crying she’d done and the sight was truly heartbreaking.
Nicole and Brandy were brilliant contrasts to one another. While Brandy possessed a soft and lovely figure, Nicole was blessed with the sort of body that made most women jealous. She had long, gorgeous legs, a tiny, hourglass waist and large, full breasts. Although she was virtually the same size as Brandy, her shapely build made her look both taller and thinner.
Brandy’s hair was fair, straight and silky, trailing a little below the collar of her shirt, while Nicole’s was full and kinky, as dark as Brandy’s was light, a rich shade of brown that was nearly red, and cascaded all the way down to the middle of her back. Today, it looked somewhat careless, as though she’d barely bothered to brush it.
They both possessed soft and pretty faces, Nicole’s slightly less rounded, her eyes a little closer set and her lips much more full, almost pouty. And While Brandy’s eyes were a soft shade of blue, Nicole’s were dark with sparks both blue and green, shimmering. They were sexy eyes, even in spite of her tears.
Brandy had thrown on a tee shirt and some shorts, the kind she reserved for wearing around the house, and Nicole was wearing snug jeans and a blouse still dotted with the raindrops she collected when she walked between her car and the building.
The two of them had been best friends since their first day of kindergarten, when they were seated next to each other, and in only a few short months, Nicole had become as much a part of Albert’s life as Brandy. He could barely imagine life without either of them now.
“I’ll start dinner,” said Albert. “You two stay right there.”
Brandy looked up at him, surprised. “You sure? I can do it.”
“I’m positive.” He went to the refrigerator and removed a package of chicken breasts, placed them on the counter and then bent to search the cabinet for a pan. Baked chicken breasts, frozen rolls and scalloped potatoes from a box were what he was thinking. He would also make either some green beans or corn, simply because those were his favorites. It was going to be as simple as possible. He wasn’t the cook in the household by any means. He could not hold a candle to Brandy’s most modest dish; she even made macaroni and cheese better than he did and they both followed the same directions on the box. If she were making dinner, she probably would have made homemade potatoes or rice and would certainly do more than open a can of vegetables from the cabinet and dump it in a pot. But he would do his very best.
The phone rang and Albert grabbed it from the wall by the refrigerator on the second ring. As he lifted it to his ear, he paused. Suddenly, he pictured a bed of stone spikes, rising threateningly from a shadowy hole, wickedly thin and as sharp as needles. For a couple of seconds, he stood there, a time too short to draw attention to himself, but long enough for him to remember in agonizing detail how close Brandy once came to tumbling into those very spikes. Suddenly, he wanted to run back to the dining room and embrace her.
He shook away the thought, promising himself he would hold Brandy later, and spoke into the phone. “Hello?”
Nothing. For a moment he waited, listening, expecting some telemarketer to begin an insulting, obnoxious spiel about how he should consider gold or platinum benefits for his credit card. (Albert despised telemarketers.) But there was no one there. “Hello?” he asked again and again there was nothing. He listened to the silence a little longer, for some reason thinking about a statue of five dying men, all unnaturally tall and without faces, standing in the center of a round room with five doorways.
What caused those scratches? he wondered absently.
He hung the phone back up, his thoughts still lingering on that statue and how it and the floor around it were chipped and scratched, as though someone had been hacking at it with a knife.
“No one there?” Brandy was looking at him over her beer, curious, but only a little. After all, everyone received dead phone calls now and then.
“No one there,” Albert confirmed, and went back to cooking. Where were the scalloped potatoes? He knew there was a box somewhere.
Chapter 5
At a little past nine on the same evening as Nicole’s visit, in another apartment building not far from Albert and Brandy’s, Wayne Oakley was just getting home from his evening Psychology class.
“Hey, Wayne.” Charlie Broker, Wayne’s roommate, sat stretched out on the couch in front of the television. Beside him sat his girlfriend, Laura. She did not speak, but her eyes did. They followed him as he crossed the room.
“Hey,” Wayne replied, trying to ignore those muddy green eyes.
“Did you get rained on?”
“Little bit.”
“That sucks. There’s some pizza in the fridge if you’re hungry.”
Wayne glanced back at Charlie, but like a magnet, Laura’s eyes pulled his gaze. “Not right now, but thanks.”
“Better hurry,” Charlie urged, still not taking his eyes from the television. “Laura ate two-thirds of it by herself.”
Laura elbowed him hard in the arm. “I ate two-thirds?” She retorted. “You’re the fucking bottomless pit!”
“I’ll be fine,” Wayne said humorlessly as he started down the hallway toward his room. He could almost feel Laura’s eyes follo
wing him, like the tongue of something vile crawling over his back. Even as she continued to argue with her boyfriend, he knew that she was watching him walk away.
Once his bedroom door was firmly closed between him and those shameless eyes, he dropped his backpack on the floor, removed his shoes and changed out of his rain-dampened shirt. He then sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. He had plenty of work to do. A paper was due on Tuesday. There were two chapters to read for Microeconomics before tomorrow. There was also a term paper that he should get started on. But even as he waited for his computer to boot up, he knew he’d get none of that done. Not tonight. He was too distracted by the envelope.
A burst of laughter suddenly rose from the living room. Laura’s voice, loud and throaty. “No fucking way! No!” More hearty laughter followed this. “You’re such a fucking freak!”
Wayne gritted his teeth, frustrated. Laura Swiff was not on Wayne’s list of favorite people. But then again, neither was Charlie Broker lately.
He and Charlie met in English Composition their freshman year. Having quite a lot in common, they quickly became friends. But they made much better college buddies than roommates. As classmates, Charlie was charming, reliable and intelligent. While living under the same roof, however, Wayne discovered that Charlie was annoyingly particular about how he wanted things. Of course, this wasn’t the worst thing in the world. He knew when he made the decision to share the responsibilities of an apartment that he would have to make compromises. But it quickly felt to Wayne like he was the only one making any sacrifices and he soon grew a little irritable with Charlie and his peculiarities.