by Brian Harmon
A panel of light switches was located near the stairs. Nicole immediately tried them all, but of course there was no power.
As Albert made his way toward the nearest door, Wayne climbed the next flight of steps and peered down the second floor hallway, which was identical to the two hallways beneath it.
“How?” asked Brandy.
“I don’t know,” Albert replied.
“This can’t be here,” Nicole insisted. “It just can’t. It’s impossible.”
Albert shook his head. “Not impossible.” Impossible was already beginning to slip from his vocabulary.
“It has to be,” Nicole pressed. “This can’t be here and that place outside be there too. They’re in each other’s way. They’d have to overlap somehow.”
Wayne turned and descended the steps back to the first floor.
“Impossible,” Nicole said again.
“Impossible,” Albert corrected her, “is a room full of statues that can make you so horny you could literally fuck yourself to death. Next to that, I’d say two different realities occupying the same space at the same time isn’t that much of a stretch of the imagination.”
Wayne paused at the bottom of the steps. “Say what now?”
Albert turned and fixed his gaze on Wayne. He’d almost forgotten that they were still in the company of a stranger. “Are you sure you’ve never seen anything like this before?” He asked. “Anything…strange? Different? Unbelievable?”
Wayne shook his head. It was a slow gesture, first left then right, then left again, his eyes never leaving Albert’s. “Are you going to tell me that you have?’
Albert glanced at Brandy, who returned him only a shrug. He still didn’t know if he could trust Wayne yet, but he was starting to feel as if he might not have the luxury of keeping secrets from him much longer. “There are a lot of tunnels under Briar Hills,” he began hesitantly. “About a year ago, Brandy and I visited some of them.”
Wayne said nothing and waited patiently to see where this was going.
“There are some things down there,” he said simply.
“What kinds of things?”
“Impossible things,” Albert replied mysteriously. “Things a lot like this place.”
Wayne glanced up at the steps above him, steps that should not have been there, and then fixed his eyes on Albert again. “If you know something about this place, I’d definitely like to hear it.”
“I don’t know anything about this place.” Albert had hoped that Wayne was here for the same reason he was, to seek answers for some impossible experience he’d had. But how was he supposed to explain that this wasn’t the first impossible thing he’d seen? And even if he could make Wayne understand, how could he be certain that he could trust him?
“We’re all standing in a building that didn’t exist before we came inside,” suggested Nicole. “I’m not sure we have the luxury of keeping secrets from each other.”
Albert turned and met her gaze. She was right. But he still didn’t like it. He knew far too little to go telling just anyone about the Temple of the Blind.
“There was this place down there,” he began. “A sort of labyrinth. It was…strange. It’s a long story. But there were these rooms down there, filled with statues. You couldn’t look at them or you’d lose control. They played on your emotions, filled you with fear and hate and… that sort of thing,” he finished. He didn’t want to talk about what the sex room did to him. He glanced at Brandy and could see that she felt the same way.
“Statues?”
Albert nodded. He turned and shined his light down the dark hallway ahead. “Statues,” he confirmed. “I don’t know how they worked, so don’t bother asking. But they definitely mess with your mind somehow.”
“So how did you find this…place?”
“Somebody sent me a box. I don’t know who. It was full of random-looking junk and had these weird messages carved into the sides. Brandy and I figured out that it was some kind of map and we followed it down there.”
Brandy looked back at Wayne. “He solved the puzzle. I just sort of tagged along.”
“If it wasn’t for you I’d still be trying to figure out those song titles,” Albert reminded her. Speaking to Wayne again, he said, “One of the things inside the box was a silver pocket watch. This afternoon, somebody delivered an envelope to me with a newspaper clipping about the man who built this place. In the picture that went with the story, Wendell Gilbert was holding that same pocket watch.” He’d been staring into the eerie darkness that hung ahead of them in the hallway as he debated what information he wanted to share and what he wanted to keep to himself for a little longer. Now he turned and looked directly at Wayne again. “That’s why I’m here. Because this place must have something to do with that place down there.”
Wayne looked at Brandy, who simply nodded. “If that was true,” he said, deciding that he would play along for the time being, “then whoever sent you that envelope knows you were down there.”
“Correct.”
“So, who knew you were down there?”
“Three people. You’re looking at us all.”
Wayne looked from Albert to Brandy to Nicole and back again.
Albert said nothing more about it. He turned and stepped inside the nearest room. It was similar to those he’d peered into in the basement, but like the hallway it connected to, it was completed. Its floor and ceiling were tiled, its walls painted. The light fixture was installed. Even the switches and outlets were present and covered. But these were unimportant details, things he only vaguely noticed. The only thing in this room that captured Albert’s full attention was the window.
Unlike those rooms in the basement, this room was not windowless. Instead, the window had been sealed up with red bricks, as hurriedly and sloppily assembled as the cinderblock wall by the first floor landing. Whoever laid these bricks had dripped mortar all over the windowsill and the radiator beneath it. As a final touch, they had nailed several two-by-fours across the window.
The room was otherwise empty. No furniture had ever been moved in.
From somewhere above them there came a soft creak and Brandy looked up nervously. “Old buildings make a lot of noise, right?”
“Oh yeah,” said Wayne. “Especially invisible ones.” He did not trust these people. They were strangers, after all. For all he knew, it was they who gave him the letter that lured him here. He hadn’t found them threatening at first, so he’d decided to take a chance and join them. He’d only wanted to satisfy his nagging curiosity, after all. Now, Albert was talking about mysterious boxes and strange rooms that made you do crazy things. He was tempted to go back down the steps and walk out the way he came in. But again his curiosity made him stay. He wanted to know just how far this impossible building went.
Nicole pulled her cell phone from her pocket and opened it. Unlike Brandy, she’d chosen to bring hers along, deciding that the security of having a phone outweighed the danger of losing it. “No signal,” she reported.
“Big surprise,” said Brandy, but the apprehension in her voice was unmistakable.
“I’d be curious to see just where the signal was lost,” said Albert casually as he stepped back into the hallway. “Somewhere in the basement, I’m sure. Maybe as soon as we stepped through the cellar door.”
“I don’t think I want to think about it,” said Brandy.
Albert turned and walked to the room across the hall. It was identical to the first room, except that instead of two-by-fours, the window was covered with a single sheet of plywood. Splatters of dried mortar on the radiator and floor confirmed that there were bricks behind it, just like in the other room.
“So what’s your story?” Nicole asked Wayne as she turned off the phone and tucked it back into her jeans pocket. “What brought you to this Alfred Hitchcock dimension?”
“Like I said, I got a letter two days ago telling me there’d be a thousand dollars in it for me if I went inside Gilbert House th
at night. I didn’t go then because I didn’t trust anyone who didn’t bother to approach me in person or even sign their name.”
“So what are you doing here now?” Brandy asked.
“I wanted to know why this place was worth a thousand dollars to somebody,” he replied. “That’s all. I figured two days later I probably wouldn’t run into anybody and I could take a look around.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” But he was leaving out the part about his roommate’s girlfriend and the fact that learning about Gilbert House might take his mind off her wanting to sleep with him and whether or not he wanted to let her. That part, he decided, was nobody else’s damn business.
Albert turned and looked back the way they’d come, toward the cinderblock wall that they’d passed on their way up. “If I was going to design a building like this,” he said, “that would be the most logical place for an exit.”
Wayne glanced back, curious. “Are you saying there’s a door behind that wall?”
“Why not? There are windows in these rooms.”
“Windows?” Nicole walked to the door and peered in.
“Bricked up,” Albert clarified. “Sealed. Just like the door back there.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Wayne. “What the hell would a window look out on? There’s nothing out there! I mean we’re literally nowhere, aren’t we?”
“We have to be somewhere,” Albert replied. He turned and started down the hallway. At each door he paused and peered inside. Each one was the same as the first. The windows had all been hastily bricked over and then boarded up for some reason. The only difference from room to room was the lumber. It appeared that they simply grabbed whatever was on hand. He wondered what the point was in using the boards at all. Wouldn’t the bricks be sufficient on their own?
Brandy and Nicole followed after him, not wanting to stray too far. Wayne followed more slowly. He had a bad feeling about this place and he was still unwilling to trust these people.
Near the end of the hallway, on the right, Albert found another shower room. There was no equipment in this one and no window. Neither was surprising. This floor appeared to be finished, so any leftover supplies were probably carried down to the basement or else upstairs to any other unfinished areas. As for the window, the room was located at the inner corner of the two hallways so that there was no external wall in which to place a window. Besides, who wanted a window in a shower room?
He left the shower room and moved on. At the end of the hall, he shined his flashlight to the left. There was another set of stairs. Just beyond the lower landing was another of those roughly made brick walls.
He walked over to these steps and peered up into the stairwell. They were identical to the last set, reaching impossibly into the shadows.
He dropped his eyes from the emptiness above, still trying to comprehend it, and saw that there were more steps leading down. But there had only been the one stairwell in the basement. Where did this one go?
Intrigued, he walked down to the lower landing in front of the desperate-looking cinderblock wall and aimed his flashlight at the at the bottom of the steps. There, he found nothing but a concrete wall. These particular steps seemed to go nowhere at all.
“That’s curious,” remarked Nicole as she peered over the railing to see what he was looking at.
“Yeah.” He thought back to the basement, to how it was laid out. Down there, the middle hallway had merely made a left turn into the third, forming a right angle. If he were to knock down that concrete wall, it would obviously open right into that intersection.
But why was this stairwell inaccessible from the basement? And what was the purpose of building the steps down to that level if there was nowhere to go once you got down there?
He considered the layout of the building. Given that the two sides of Gilbert House mirrored each other, he would bet that there were two more of these stairwells accessible from each end of the far hallway, exactly like the two on this side. That was four stairwells, which was perfectly adequate for a building like this, except only one had a doorway allowing access to the basement. And that door had been meticulously sealed with cinderblocks until just recently.
A faint tingle climbed up his spine and he again lifted his eyes to the darkness overhead. For just a moment, it had felt as if something were watching him from those shadows. But there was nothing there. It was only his imagination. He was letting this place get the better of him. And yet, hadn’t he learned from the Temple of the Blind never to dismiss anything?
Albert ascended to the first floor again and walked past Brandy and Nicole. He did not pause to look into any of the rooms. He focused on the building itself, on the things that were wrong. The bricked up doors and windows bothered him. The manner in which someone chose to seal the only door leading into the basement also bothered him.
Halfway down this hallway, there was a short corridor on the left. This should have led to the front door, the main entrance by which he and the girls had entered Gilbert House above ground while they were looking around, but there was only another of those hurried cinderblock walls.
“Why would someone build this?” asked Nicole. “To keep people out?”
“Out from where?” Wayne asked. “There’s not a building here. The only way in is through the basement.”
Albert turned and looked around. Across the hall, another brick wall blocked the only doorway on that wall, sealing it completely. He remembered that room from when they were outside. He’d assumed that it must have been a common room because of its impressive size. Why seal the entire room, he wondered, but then he realized that the windows in that room were likely either large or many. Sealing the door had probably been the easiest and most efficient way.
“I don’t like it,” Brandy said. She was looking back and forth between the two walls. Something felt incredibly wrong about all this.
“Gilbert really did build it,” Albert marveled. “He spent the money on exactly what he said he was going to.”
“Yeah,” said Nicole, “but he built it in the wrong fucking universe.”
“Give the guy a break,” Wayne remarked. “I’ll bet they never specified in the contract.”
“That’s probably true,” agreed Albert.
“Wait,” said Brandy. “If he really did build it, shouldn’t there have been receipts? You’d think he could’ve proved his innocence.”
“The receipts would only have proved that he bought the supplies, not that he used them,” responded Albert. “Besides, if he’d wanted to prove his innocence, he could have just brought someone down here and shown them. Maybe being thought a thief was better than the truth.”
“Maybe,” accepted Brandy. “But either way, he didn’t build it all by himself. Shouldn’t somebody have been around to say what happened?”
Albert considered this for a moment. “Immigrant labor,” he replied as the answer at last came to him.
“What?”
Albert had wondered about this himself while exploring the basement just a little while ago. “One of those articles mentioned that he used a lot of immigrant labor. Mexicans, mostly. Some of the locals made a big stink about it. Maybe that’s how it all stayed secret. They probably couldn’t even speak English.” He’d forgotten about that article. It hadn’t seemed relevant before he knew what was hidden within Gilbert House. Now that he remembered, it all made perfect sense.
There was another creak from somewhere above them and they all turned their flashlights to the ceiling.
“I think we should go up to the next floor,” said Albert.
“How do we know it’s safe?” Nicole asked.
“We don’t,” snapped Wayne.
“No,” agreed Albert. “We don’t. All we know is what we’ve seen. We know that Wendell Gilbert wasn’t just an architect. He was more than that. He built this place somewhere else, either outside of, or maybe within space as we know it. I want to find out more about
that.”
“What makes you think there’s anything to find out?” Wayne retorted.
“Maybe there isn’t,” Albert admitted. “But why else are we all here?”
“We’re not all here for the same reasons,” Wayne reminded him.
“No,” agreed Albert. “We’re not.”
“I just want to know how we got from those walls in the woods to a five-story building,” interrupted Nicole. She turned to Albert. “I mean, are we really in some kind of parallel world?”
Albert considered for a minute. “Do you remember when we were outside?” he asked. “When we walked around the building and it suddenly felt cooler?”
Nicole nodded. It had been a sudden chill out of nowhere. It felt eerie, like something ghostly.
“If this place had been there, instead of those walls, we would have been standing in its shadow. That’s why it was cooler on the east side.”
Nicole and Brandy glanced at each other. Both of them had felt that chill, as well as the warmth that came as they were circling back around the front of the building. Brandy recalled thinking that it felt as though the sun had just come out from behind a cloud, except that there weren’t any clouds.
“And several times,” continued Albert, “ I looked up at those walls out there and…I wasn’t sure exactly…but I felt like I expected to see something different there, like I’d expected there to be a structure and not just a set of crumbling walls. Also, remember how odd it felt when we were walking around inside those walls. I thought it was a trick of the narrow passageway, but it felt like we were in a closed-in space.”
“So, what?” Brandy asked. “This place exists out there too? To some degree?”
“Yeah. It sort of fits together. It would make sense that you would get a little bit of a blur in a place like that. It might explain a lot of places that feel ghostly.” He stared intently at the ugly cinderblock wall, wondering. Was Wendell Gilbert still in here somewhere? Had this been the solution to his disappearing trick? Was it a tomb?