by Brian Harmon
He remembered seeing the signs of previous entry: the open doors, the dismantled cinderblock wall. He supposed he had found the unlucky person who beat them to Gilbert House. He’d been dreadfully wrong in assuming that the previous visitor had not felt any need to replace the bricks in the basement when he left. The awful truth of the matter was that he’d simply never left.
As he passed by the next stairwell, he saw that there was light down there. It had to be Wayne, unless that creature also carried a flashlight. He started to call to him, but a noise shattered the silence and he froze. For a moment he couldn’t place it, and even when he realized what it was, he wasn’t sure he believed it. It was the sound of a cell phone ringing.
He turned and followed the sound of it down the hall. Perhaps the man had dropped his cell phone before he died, or perhaps whatever had been torturing his body had packed it off.
A door stood ajar, and as he approached it, he realized that it had been forced open. He paused in front of it, not wanting to look inside. The loud, digital music of the cell phone continued from within. The tune was almost haunting.
His hand trembling a little, he grasped the knob and opened the door.
He uttered a single sound, something that was perhaps supposed to be a “Dear God!” or “Jesus!” or perhaps just one of Brandy or Nicole’s favorite profanities, but only a sick sort of groan made it from his throat to his ears.
The body in the hallway had been bad, but this was worse. He stared for a moment in frozen terror. The body in here belonged to a woman. She was in pieces. Her body was scattered throughout the room. She was not chopped up, he saw, but actually ripped apart. Pieces of her clothes lay around the room. Blood was actually splashed onto the ceiling and walls, indicating that her heart had pumped the blood out of her body even as she was being dismembered. She had still been alive!
Her head was lying on the floor, one side caved gruesomely in, her glazed eyes bulging. Her jaw had been disconnected and her tongue lay in a pool of dried blood on the floor. Once upon a time she might have been pretty, but now she was nothing more than rotting meat.
The smell was considerably worse in here, but it still wasn’t as bad as it could have been. She must have died around the same time as the man by the stairwell.
He backed away from the room, hardly able to pull his eyes away from her mangled body. He needed to get back to Brandy and Nicole. He couldn’t bear to think of them ending up like this.
The woman’s purse was near her mangled right hand. The phone would be in there, he was sure, but he was not going to get it. It had stopped ringing by now anyway.
As he finally turned away, he heard footsteps on the stairs and saw that the flashlight beams were now illuminating the hallway. “Wayne?”
“Albert?”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.” He stepped into sight and Albert saw that he was not alone.
“Who’s this?”
“Olivia Shadey,” Wayne replied. She was clinging to his hand, as if terrified that something would reach out and tear her away from him. It was clearly not an unjustified fear. “I found her hiding in the bathroom. She says she’s been here two days!”
“My god!”
“I know. Are the girls all right?”
“Yeah. They’re over here. Come on.”
As they walked back toward the room where Albert left the girls, Wayne said, “Olivia says she came with three friends and she thinks they’re all dead.”
“I found two bodies,” Albert reported. “I’m sorry.”
Olivia shook her head. “It’s okay. They…” She seemed to struggle with her words. “We weren’t really close, actually.”
That’s good, Albert thought, remembering the way the bodies had been mutilated. “Can you tell us what happened?”
Olivia nodded. She looked up at him with heartbreakingly lovely eyes, deep and brown and wet with countless tears. “We need to get out of here though.”
“I know,” Albert told her. “Come on.”
Chapter 24
“Do you think he’ll be okay?”
Brandy did not look at Nicole. She was standing against the wall, her eyes fixed on the floor, lost in thought. Of course Albert would be okay. He was strong, so much stronger than she was, so much stronger than any of them were. He was her hero. He had been her hero since the night they entered the temple. He saved her life that night. He took care of her. He held her. He made her feel safe, even in a place like that. “Yeah,” she replied, and although her voice was even, her eyes were filling with tears.
Sure Albert was strong, sure he was smart, but she loved him and she was terrified that, even as strong as he was, he would not be walking back through that door. She felt almost sick with guilt. If only she’d been less of a coward, if only she’d insisted on going with him. What the hell sort of woman was she? What sort of woman would let the man she loves go into something like Gilbert House alone? Why had she ever let him come here in the first place?
She remembered saying goodbye to Albert the night they found the temple. When he asked her if she’d like to go out sometime, she told him that she did not want to think about it, but in truth, she’d only wanted him to ask her somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t a dark parking lot and not while she wore no bra or panties. Not when she was in desperate need of a shower. She didn’t want their first day to be so raw. She didn’t want the start of their relationship to also be the night they spent in the tunnels. She gave him a kiss, the very least she could offer for all he had done to protect her, and then she went home. She took a long, hot shower. She went to bed. And there, in the silence of her empty bedroom, she missed him. She missed his comfort, his courage, and it was then, when she could not stop thinking about him, could not stop seeing him in her mind’s eye, strong and naked and handsome and determined, when she could not sleep for thinking about him, that she knew for certain that she was in love with him.
The next day, in their Chemistry lecture, Albert asked her out again, and she gladly accepted. They went out that night, in fact, and the next night they made love for the first time without an audience of stone and it was the most incredible experience of her life. Since then, she had only grown more in love with him each day.
Brandy’s anxiousness did not go unnoticed. Nicole watched her, saw the fear and the pain in her expression. She had not meant to voice her best friend’s deepest fears.
Nicole first met Albert just a few days after he and Brandy started dating. At first she’d been skeptical. He was very cute, but nearly a year her younger, and Brandy had never been interested in men younger than her before. She’d naively believed that the two of them would never last, but in just a few weeks, she discovered why Brandy fell in love with him. He was smart, for one thing. Clever, was the word Brandy used. He was also honest, kind and modest. But most of all, he was strong and brave. Most of the time, she forgot that he was the youngest of them. In fact, she would have fallen in love with him herself had he not been Brandy’s.
“He’ll be fine,” Nicole said, and although it hurt to think that he might not be, she found it hard to believe anything else. If Satan himself were loose in those halls, he’d have one hell of a fight on his hands with Albert. Of this she was certain.
Brandy nodded. “I just wish he’d hurry.”
Nicole began to say more, to assure her again that Albert was the strongest, most courageous man she knew, that nothing could harm him. But she did not have to. At that moment, there was a soft knock at the door, followed by Albert’s voice.
“It’s me. Let me in.”
Brandy rushed to the door and jerked it open. When Albert stepped in, she hugged him fiercely and gave him a hard kiss on the lips. “I was worried!” she snapped.
“I’m sorry.” He was speaking in a hushed voice, not daring to be heard.
Nicole was moving toward him also, so thankful that he was safe, but she stopped short as she realized that he was not alon
e. He’d found Wayne, thankfully, but there was also someone else with him.
“You girls okay?” Albert asked.
“We’re fine,” Nicole replied. “What’s this?”
“This is Olivia,” Wayne introduced. “I found her hiding in the bathroom. She says she’s been here since Wednesday.”
“Oh my god!” Nicole went to her. “Are you okay?”
Olivia nodded. “Just…really thirsty, mostly.”
“I’ll bet.”
Albert looked at Brandy. “Didn’t you grab some sodas before we left?”
Brandy’s expression lit up. “Yeah! I forgot.” She removed her backpack and opened it. She’d grabbed three cans of soda as they went out the door. It was just an afterthought. She’d almost not taken them. She removed one and handed it to Olivia. “Here you go.”
“Thank you so much.” Olivia opened the can, which immediately spewed from the shaking Brandy had given it when she fled from the thing on the stairs. She didn’t seem to notice. She drank it down greedily.
“Wow.” Brandy reached into her backpack again. “I’ve got two more. Take all you want.”
“How did you get to be in here?” Albert asked.
Olivia lowered the can from which she drank and grimaced as the acid burned her parched throat. Then she covered her mouth and belched. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “Excuse me.”
“That’s okay, Sweetie,” Brandy assured her. “Soda does that.”
“It was Andy,” Olivia said once she’d caught her breath. “He was my boyfriend. Well, sort of. We just met last week. He asked me out last weekend and I decided to give it a shot.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t really working. I was going to break up with him.” She looked around at each of them and then lowered her eyes to the soda can. “I guess I don’t have to now.”
“He brought you here?” Wayne asked.
Olivia nodded. “He got some kind of letter.”
The others exchanged looks, but Olivia did not seem to notice.
“Said he’d get a thousand dollars if he showed up that night…Wednesday night…and come inside this place.”
Wayne took a step back and leaned against the wall. He suddenly felt as though all the blood had drained from his veins.
“I told him not to come, but he wouldn’t listen. Him and his buddy, Nick, and Nick’s girlfriend, they all came. I think her name was Trish. I’m not even sure about that. I really barely knew any of them. When we got here, there was some woman hanging around.”
“A woman?” Albert considered this for a moment. He knew nothing of any woman. Did she mean that girl who delivered his envelope? Andrea?
Olivia nodded. “Yeah. Older lady. Long, black hair, sort of straggly. Almost…haggish. She said she had our money, but we’d have to go inside and have a look around first.”
Albert frowned at this. That certainly wasn’t the cute girl who showed up at his door that afternoon. “Did she tell you what you were looking for?”
“No. She just said she wanted us to report anything we found. We found quite a bit. This place is impossible.” She looked around at them. “But you already know that, don’t you?”
“What did you find?” Albert wasn’t looking at her. He walked to the window and peered out as he took in everything she said.
“Only the thing that attacked us. It was horrible. We were getting ready to go up to the fourth floor when it came down the stairs. We never saw it coming. It grabbed Nick by his head and slammed him against the wall really hard. There was this awful sound… I think he’s dead. There was blood.”
“That thing killed him?” Brandy asked, startled.
“I found Nick,” Albert said. He vividly remembered the bloody spot on the wall. “He didn’t make it.”
Brandy stared at him. He’d actually seen the body?
Olivia shivered. She could still see it in her mind, that thick, dirty hand rushing out of the shadows, gripping the side of Nick’s head. It moved so fast. He didn’t even have time to scream. Then he was on the floor and there was blood on the wall. “That was when I ran. We all sort of scattered. I wound up in the bathroom where Wayne found me. I just went into the stall and stayed there.”
“My god,” Nicole sighed.
“I heard Andy screaming when I was running to the bathroom. At least I think it was Andy, unless Nick got back up.”
Not likely, Albert thought.
“Then later I heard Trish screaming. That was the worst. It seemed to go on forever. I just knew it was going to come and get me next, but it never did.”
“I found Trish, too,” Albert said solemnly. He had to force back a shiver. It seemed to go on forever… He remembered the blood on the walls and ceiling. It kept her alive for a long time. “But I never saw Andy.”
“You must have been terrified down there,” Brandy said.
Olivia swallowed the last of the soda in her first can and took a second from Brandy. “Thank you. I was…but not as much as I should’ve been. It was weird. I just stayed in that stall and I kept thinking to myself over and over again, ‘You’ll be all right. Someone’s coming to find you. You’ll be all right. Someone’s coming to find you.’ I don’t know where I got it from. I just sort of curled up on top of the toilet and started thinking that.”
“Wow.” Nicole was amazed. Had it been her, she would have lost her mind sitting in the darkness for two long days, waiting for something to come along and kill her.
“That was all there was,” Olivia said. “I’ve been in that bathroom ever since. I crept out of the stall a few times, but I never left the bathroom. I just couldn’t do it. I was too scared.” She looked at Brandy and saw that she was offering her a candy bar. “Oh, god! Thank you!”
“I should’ve been there,” Wayne said. He’d slid down the wall to the floor and was now sitting with his back against it and his knees bent in front of him. “I got that same letter. I didn’t come Wednesday night. I should have. I might have been able to help.”
Olivia turned and looked at him.
“Or you could have been the one to get your head bashed in,” Brandy said. “Don’t you dare punish yourself over that!”
“None of us should have come,” Olivia said.
“But we did,” said Albert. He was still staring out the window. “You and your friends came and then the rest of us came and if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have found you. Maybe that’s why we were sent here. Maybe that’s what the phone calls were for.”
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” said Nicole, “but I vote that we definitely found what we came for, so let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“That would be a good idea,” Albert said as he stared out the window. There were now at least a hundred of those things moving around out there. Though he still could not make out what they were, he felt certain that their presence was a bad thing.
“Are we going to be able to get out?” Olivia asked. “Will that thing out there let us?”
No one had an answer.
Albert watched the things outside with as much dread as interest. It was the flashlights that were attracting them, he realized. Ever since they arrived, they’d been shining their lights into every room they came to, illuminating the windows, just begging for outside attention. His stomach began to tighten as he realized why Wendell Gilbert bricked up the first floor doors and windows. He even understood why he used the lumber. It was in case something tried to force its way in before the mortar dried. “We should all go right now,” he said.
Chapter 25
Albert stepped into the hall and shined his flashlight in both directions. “Looks clear,” he reported. “Remember, stay close and stay alert. If it appears, don’t panic. There’s five of us and one of it.”
Brandy, Nicole and Olivia followed Albert into the hallway and to the left. Wayne took the rear and kept his flashlight aimed behind them. The plan was simple. They would all make their way to the nearest stairs and then work their way down to the basement. From
there, they would head straight for the cellar door.
The third floor hallway was empty and the five of them made their way to the steps without incident. Albert intentionally avoided the stairwell that led directly to the basement door because that was where Nick’s body lay. He wasn’t sure if it was a very tactical move, but the idea of letting anyone else see what the monster was capable of seemed unwise, especially Olivia, who had actually known the victim. He picked the next nearest stairwell, instead, which was also the closest to the room in which they’d been hiding. From there, they would descend to the first floor and then make their way back down the hallway to the stairwell that led to the basement.
“Is everybody okay?” Albert asked. He did not look back at them, but instead kept his eyes open and alert for the slightest movement ahead of them.
“We’re okay,” replied Brandy. She, Nicole and Olivia were walking close together, hand-in-hand between him and Wayne.
“Just peachy,” reported Wayne. He felt as though his heart was about to leap from his chest.
Albert stepped up to the stairs and shined his flashlight up into the darkness. Instantly, he was paralyzed with terror. It was there. He was looking directly at it.
“Guys…”
It was near the top, hunched down in a great pile on the steps, staring down through the railing at them with eyes that shined cat-like in the glow of his flashlight. “The other way,” he said, his voice slow, calm, cautious. He never took his eyes off the thing atop the stairs. “Now. Go.”
He took a step back.
“It’s there, isn’t it,” Brandy said, her voice soft. She sounded almost sick with dread.
Albert nodded. “Let’s just go the other way. Wayne, you lead.”
Without question, Wayne turned and hurried down the next hallway, along the glass wall of the solarium and toward the opposite stairwell. The girls followed him. Albert remained where he was for a moment, his eyes still fixed on the creature crouched above him.