by Brian Harmon
“It reached for me.” Nicole’s voice was trembling. When Albert looked up at her, she was staring into the far corner, her eyes distant and afraid. “Grabbed at my arm.”
“We should get out of here,” said Brandy.
Albert nodded. “Yes.” He kissed her, held her lips for a moment, cherishing the fact that she was still safe. Why the hell didn’t he just turn around and leave? He had no business being here. He certainly had no business bringing Brandy and Nicole here.
“Just let me think,” he said, releasing her and looking around. These rooms were so tiny. If that thing were to burst through the door right now, as big as it was, there would barely be room for them to even fight back.
He walked to the window and peered out into the darkness as he replayed the attack in his mind. “We don’t want to run into it again, if we can help it. But we don’t know where it might be.” He shined his flashlight out at the naked ground below. “It was following us, playing with us, maybe. We could hear it moving around above us. But it didn’t chase after us,” he recalled. “I wonder why?”
“Maybe because we got the fuck out of its way?” spat Nicole, and Albert smiled a little in spite of his fear.
But the smile faded as he gazed out into the darkness. The first time he peered out, from the second floor, he thought he saw something. This time he was seeing something, and it was definitely not the wind. Several things were moving out there, in and out of the trees, stalking along the side of the building.
“What is it?” Brandy asked. She stepped up beside him and joined her flashlight’s beam to his.
Albert shook his head. “Natives?”
“This just keeps getting better,” she groaned.
Nicole joined them at the window. “Do you think they’re dangerous?”
“Probably,” Albert said flatly.
They could not see what was moving out there, only that there were several of them, perhaps as many as a dozen. Albert was reminded of the maze in the temple, with those strange shadows prowling its narrow corridors, and wondered if they would hear that same rattling-clattering noise if the glass wasn’t there.
“What are we going to do?” Nicole asked.
“I’m going to go back out and see if it’s safe,” Albert decided.
“No!” The fear in Brandy’s voice was obvious. She did not want him to leave her.
“I just need to take a look around. I think it went the other way, back up the stairs. I think we might have startled it. I just need to look around for a minute and then I’ll be right back.”
“Let’s just all go then,” Brandy said.
Albert shook his head. He was already moving toward the door. “No. You two stay here, keep the door closed.” He could not allow them to take any more risks. They would be safer here in this room. And he could make sure that thing on the stairwell was really gone. “And try to stay away from the window,” he added. “Just in case.”
He turned and opened the door. He half expected to see the creature standing on the other side, patiently waiting for him to emerge, but the hallway was deserted.
“Please don’t go!” begged Brandy.
“I’ll be right back,” he promised, and he closed the door behind him before she could protest any further.
Chapter 22
Wayne’s heart was pounding. He hadn’t quite reached the top of the stairs when something dropped out of the stairwell and landed between him and the others. He staggered backward, falling back onto the landing, barely catching himself against the wall. He saw a great, pale form lurching toward Nicole, only barely missing her as she and the others fled screaming down the third floor hallway. As the thing uttered a terrible, ear-splitting howl, he turned and fled back down the steps to the second floor.
It had been his only option. After all, in order to follow his companions, he would have had to have somehow run past the thing that was occupying the entire width of the steps in front of him. But he still felt like a coward, abandoning them like that. He hoped that they were all safe.
He was standing at the far end of the second floor hallway, staring back the way he’d come. In his state of panic, he had actually been headed out of Gilbert House when he finally caught himself and stopped. He could not abandon them here. If their pictures appeared in next week’s paper he would never sleep again.
He heard a noise from the stairwell behind him and turned to face it.
If it was Albert or one of the girls, he should be able to see their flashlight beams. But there was only ominous darkness. Furthermore, he realized that if it was the monster, it could probably see his flashlight as he stood there shining it at the stairwell like an idiot.
He turned and fled back down the hallway, away from the noise. But at the other end of the hallway was the stairs where the thing had attacked them. He certainly didn’t want to go near those steps. He turned the corner and darted into the nearest room, which happened to be the second floor restroom. He moved behind the partitioning wall and turned to face the door.
He held his hand over the end of the flashlight, too afraid to turn it off and bathe himself in perfect darkness, but terrified that the thing from the stairs would see it and come after him.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed, but only allowing himself a whisper. He looked down at his flashlight as he struggled to let a good balance of light pass between his trembling fingers. All four of them had been holding flashlights. They might as well be yelling out “Marco” as they walked around. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Why the hell did he come here tonight? He wished he’d never received that letter, or at least that he’d just gone ahead and fucked Laura. He might have felt bad about it, but he might not be hiding from a monster in a bathroom in some parallel dimension either. If he had never seen those three people he met at Gilbert House, he would not have lost any sleep seeing their faces in the local paper when they turned up missing. After all, it wasn’t his fault. He didn’t bring them here. He’d wanted to come alone.
He stared at the doorway, waiting, expecting something to burst through at any moment.
When his heart finally began to slow down—no less afraid but a little less panicked—he regretted wishing such things. First of all, having his way with Laura had nothing to do with it. If he had, he would probably be standing here now anyway, wishing he were safe and regretting that the last memorable thing he did before being eaten by a monster was fuck his roommate’s slut. Secondly, good or bad he had shown up. And he couldn’t abandon those people upstairs. He had to go find them.
“Fuck,” he sighed again, wishing he was holding more than a flashlight to protect himself.
A creak froze him. It came not from above him, or even from the hallway. It came from directly behind him, from one of the stalls. He turned, his heart hammering in his chest again. All but one of the stall doors stood open. The last appeared as empty as the rest, but the door was slowly swinging inward.
He straightened himself up and began to back away from the stall, toward the door through which he’d entered. For the first time, it crossed his mind that perhaps there was more than one monster lurking in the darkness, and his stomach twisted into a burning knot.
The door swung inward a little more and then stopped. From his angle, he could not see in. He aimed the flashlight at the floor, but there were no feet to be seen. There were no breezes in here. There was no explanation for why the door would be moving. Something was inside and it was getting ready to come out.
Then a face appeared. An eye was looking back at him. A lock of long, brown hair fell into view. For a second, nothing made any sense to him. He forgot everything else for a moment as he tried to contemplate what he was seeing.
Two sneaker-clad feet dropped to the floor and the door swung all the way open. A young woman in a pair of khaki shorts and a dark blue polo shirt emerged, staggering a little as she lurched from the stall. She was very pretty, with a smooth, round face and long, wavy brown hair. She was not dirty or b
lemished, but her hair was messy and her eye makeup had been smeared by uncountable tears.
As Wayne stared at her, she stumbled a little and then rushed toward him, her face turned down in a miserable expression, a childlike mask of crippling emotion. She plowed into his arms with enough force to rock him back on his heels and hugged him fiercely.
He was dumbstruck. All that had been running through his mind was gone. She was not nearly as skinny as Brandy and Nicole, but easily as pretty, and she was far more beautiful than Laura. She was lovely and soft, curvy, with a large bosom and fair features. With just one look, he thought that he could fall in love with a face like hers. As he held her in his arms and felt her sobs against his chest, he found himself struck with an overwhelming feeling of obscurity. He simply could not comprehend how he came to be here.
A moment later, the girl took a quivering breath and pulled away. She ran the back of one hand across her eyes to wipe away her tears and he noticed that she had very lovely manicured nails. They were pink. “Are you here to save me?” she asked.
Wayne melted.
“That…that’s not what I came here for,” he confessed. “But I will… I will now that I’ve found you.”
She hugged him again and Wayne felt the knot that had been loosening in his stomach tighten in a new and pleasant way and he silently prayed for the strength to do what he needed to do.
“My friends…” the girl said, “…I think they’re all dead.”
“You’re friends?”
“There were four of us.”
Oh, God, Wayne thought. “Are you sure?”
She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure one is. And I heard the others screaming.” She looked up at him, her eyes glistening with tears. “I ran away and hid in here. I couldn’t help them.” She wiped her eyes again and said, “That was Wednesday.”
“Wednesday? You’ve been here for two days?”
“Is that all it’s been?” The question contained almost no emotion, and Wayne found the words immensely eerie, even under these already creepy circumstances.
Wayne stared at her. Wednesday? Wednesday was the day he received his letter.
“What is this place?” the girl asked.
“I don’t really know.”
“Can we get out?”
“I think so…but we have to go upstairs first.”
Her expression exploded into one of utter dread. “Upstairs?”
“My friends are up there. There are three of them. I can’t leave them.”
He expected her to refuse, to beg him, to start crying, something, but she only looked into his eyes for a moment, her lips quivering, then nodded. She understood. Bless her heart, she understood.
“My name’s Wayne,” he told her. “Wayne Oakley. I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”
She nodded again. “I’m Olivia Shadey.”
“It’s wonderful to meet you. Come on.” He took her by the hand and started to lead her out of the bathroom, but she stopped.
“Wait.” She turned and ran back to the stall from which she first appeared. Wayne noticed a little limp in her step, probably from crouching in that stall for untold hours. She must have been seated with her feet up on the seat for him not to have seen them under the stall door.
A second later she reemerged, this time with a flashlight in her hand.
“Good,” Wayne said. “Come on, let’s try and find my friends.”
The two of them stepped out into the hallway, their flashlight beams swinging one way, then the other. Wayne had no idea which way to go. Any one of the building’s four stairwells could be hiding the monster. But as he peered down the center hallway, he saw the glow of someone’s flashlight at the far end.
Chapter 23
Slowly, and with his eyes peeled for any sign of the thing that had attacked them, Albert made his way down the hallway to his right, away from the stairwell where they encountered the monster. Wayne had gone back down the steps, he was sure of it. With any luck, he would be able to spot his light moving around down there.
He could not have said exactly why he felt that he needed to go back out into the hallway by himself. As he aimed his flashlight back into the dark hallway behind him, he realized just how irrational this decision was. He was only separating himself further, making himself more vulnerable. Furthermore, he was making Brandy and Nicole more vulnerable in his absence. What the hell was he thinking? He’d only wanted to keep them safe, but if something happened to him, they would only remain in that room, waiting for the monster to find them.
But it was too late now. He wanted to make sure the hallway was clear before he and the girls attempted to make the trip back down the steps. He also wanted to find Wayne if at all possible. He would just take a quick look around and then come back. If only he could find a weapon…
As he turned to look behind him again, his eyes fell on the door across from the one behind which Brandy and Nicole were hiding. So far, the general shape of the hallways was the same on every floor, and in the basement, that door had led to the shower room in which he’d found the building supplies. If there were also supplies in here, he might at least be able to find a piece of lumber suitable for a club. He walked back and peered inside, wincing at little at the creak of the hinges. It was, indeed, another shower room, but there were no building supplies stored here. The room was empty.
He let the door swing closed again, hating how loud those old hinges were, and nervously surveyed the hallway around him. When nothing jumped out at him, he moved on toward the stairs at the far end of the hallway. That stairwell was the only one that led to the basement, and was therefore their best chance of getting out in one piece.
But what were they up against, exactly? What was that thing? There were no animals around here that size capable of moving like that. A bear might be that big, but it couldn’t bound up and down stairs so gracefully. And he hadn’t seen any fur. What little he’d seen had appeared pale and fleshy.
But he didn’t expect there to be a rational explanation. After all, they were no longer in their own world. In their world, this place didn’t exist. And it wasn’t his first encounter with something unknown. After all, that thing that chased him and Brandy in the Temple of the Blind was not likely to be found on any cover of National Geographic. And with no idea what might share these hallways with them, how could he possibly hope to protect his friends?
However, he had noticed one thing about the thing that attacked them. When Nicole screamed, it turned and went the other way, bounding back up the stairs. It fled so quickly, in fact, that none of them were able to get a good look at it. This did not seem like the behavior of some bloodthirsty horror movie monster, which he knew was exactly what everyone was imagining. He hoped that, whatever it was, it was harmless.
But his optimism was swiftly dashed as he approached the end of the hall and found the body.
It was lying crumpled on the floor near the stairs, so strangely misshapen that at first he did not recognize it as the body of a man. Still swinging his flashlight around, alert for the creature responsible, he approached the miserable form.
The smell struck him then. It was not the overpowering stench he would expect, suggesting that this person had not been dead for very long. It was faint enough, in fact, that he had not noticed it until he was almost on top of the corpse.
He observed a number of things about the scene before his lurching stomach forced him to turn away. There was a bloody stain on the wall by the landing of the stairs. Two long trails had run down the wall beneath it to a dried pool of blood on the floor. A six-foot-long, gory smear led away from the puddle and then abruptly ended, as though something had dragged the body away from its original resting place and then lifted it off the floor, but not before the blood had begun to congeal. There was a second bloody spot across the hall from the first. This one had not run down the wall as the first had. Instead, clumps of dried and clotted blood clung to the wall and ugly smears covered
the floor below it. The body itself was in a heap in yet a different place.
Covering the floor all around the scene were huge, bloody footprints, as though something had made many trips through the blood before it dried. Albert eyed these footprints anxiously. They were almost human, but the feet that made these tracks would not have fit any shoe he’d ever seen. They were almost as wide as they were long, each bigger than both his feet put together. The big toe was nearly as big as the ball of the heel and yet the smallest toe made a print only about the size of a dime. They belonged to no human being.
He looked back up at the blood-stained walls and shivered as he realized just how brutal the scene was. Whatever killed this man killed him fast, apparently by smashing his head into the brick, because that was where the blood had run freely down the wall. But it looked as though the killer returned later, well after he was dead, and moved the body. But it didn’t just move it. It looked as though the thing had played with the corpse! The body appeared to have been dragged away and then picked up and thrown at least twice. The body itself was mangled almost beyond recognition.
He turned and looked back over his shoulder, certain that the thing that did this was even now charging down the hallway to do the same to him, but there was nothing there. When he looked forward again, the stairwell was also empty. He was alone with the body.
What kind of creature would kill, apparently only for pleasure, and then treat the corpse like an oversized rag doll?
He could not bear to look at this scene any more. He turned and walked away from the mess, back the way he’d come. It wouldn’t be wise to disturb the scene. He did not think the police would ever find the body, but he didn’t want his footprints in the man’s blood if they did.
As the darkness behind him swallowed its horrors again, Albert could not help but wonder who the victim was. Given the less-than-overpowering stench and the coloration of the flesh, the man had not been dead for very long.