by Brian Harmon
“I can’t…” Beverly began, her voice barely audible. “I can’t go in.”
“What?”
“I can’t go inside Gilbert House,” Beverly said, louder this time. “It’s like…like a bonfire. I can only get so close and then…”
“What?” Albert pushed. “It burns you?”
Beverly nodded miserably. “Yes. Sort of.”
“And you still have to know what’s in it?” Nicole asked, doubtful.
“It lures me,” Beverly explained. “It calls to me. I don’t know how. I don’t know why.”
Albert was at last beginning to understand the situation a little bit.
“Look, I’m sorry those kids are dead, okay! I didn’t want that to happen. I…just wanted to know what was in there…why it calls to me.” She paused, her expression wretched, she was still staring at the floor, still cradling her sore wrist to her bosom. “It’s making me crazy.”
“No shit,” muttered Nicole.
“All we saw,” Albert explained, “was that Gilbert House is completely built on the inside and that when you look through the windows all you can see is a dark forest.”
“Yeah,” Wayne added. “That and a five-hundred-pound midget on steroids.”
“That thing almost killed them both,” Nicole said, less explaining to Beverly than reflecting on how close she and Brandy had come to losing Albert. “It had them. It would have killed them if something bigger hadn’t come along and…” A violent shudder prevented her from finishing.
“Whatever took Olivia was bad enough to scare the shit out of that thing,” Brandy said. “It would’ve gotten me if I’d been closer to the window than—”
“Stop,” Wayne pleaded.
For a long moment, the five of them were silent but for the sounds of Beverly’s wet sniffles.
“That’s all we can tell you,” Albert said at last. “Go back up, get a new shirt on and go get that wrist checked out.”
Beverly shook her head. “I want to come with you.”
“Absolutely not,” Wayne said so quickly that Beverly flinched.
Albert agreed with him. “It’s dangerous up ahead. You’re in no condition to—”
“I can feel it!” she said, turning her wide, dark eyes on Albert again. Her sudden burst of energy startled him. There was an intensity in those eyes that made him want to take a step backward.
“What?”
“What I felt in Gilbert House…that thing that calls to me…I feel it down here, too.”
Albert stared at her, not sure what her words meant.
“I don’t know why I came down here. I guess I thought I could just follow and listen, maybe find out what you saw, but when I got closer, I started to feel it. It’s that luring I felt from Gilbert House, but without the…the burning.”
Albert considered this for a moment, not sure what he should do.
“Do you think she can make it?” Nicole asked.
Albert shook his head. “I don’t know. We can try.”
“No way!” Wayne insisted. “She’s nuts. Dangerous. I don’t trust her.”
Albert ignored him. He looked at Beverly and said, “That’s the sex room up there. If you open your eyes in there you won’t be able to control yourself.”
She nodded. “I know.”
Albert remembered her saying that she dreamt about him and Brandy in the temple and he found the idea more than a little disturbing.
“You’re not really considering this, are you?” Wayne demanded.
Albert turned his eyes on him. He didn’t speak, but the weight of his eyes silenced him. “This goes for everyone here. I think it would be very dangerous to get stuck in there.” He looked down at Beverly, fixing her with his gaze. He did not want to frighten or upset her, but he needed to make sure that she knew what she’d be getting herself into. “If you went in by yourself,” he explained, “you wouldn’t have the willpower to come back out. You’d probably masturbate first, but that wouldn’t be enough. You’d start begging for someone to come help you. At first you might prefer a member of the opposite sex, but it really wouldn’t matter. Anyone would do. You wouldn’t care.”
Beverly stared back at him, her eyes wide and clear. The others were also staring at him.
“Eventually, I think you’d try to do the statues. I don’t think finding one with an accessible erection would be a problem. You’d just pick one. You wouldn’t even care that your uterus ruptures because in there, all you care about is satisfying urges you don’t want and can’t control. In there, you don’t care about anything but the sex. You don’t care about the pain. You don’t even care about the orgasms. You only want more, maybe right up until you bleed to death.”
For a moment there was complete silence in the room, and then Albert asked Beverly, “Do you still want to go?”
Beverly nodded. “I have to,” she said.
“But now I don’t know if I want to go,” Wayne muttered.
Albert did not seem to hear. “If anyone wants to turn back, now’s the time to do it.”
Nobody spoke. Nobody was out.
“Okay, then. Let’s get going.” Albert turned and walked across the room, between the rows of sentinels that so vulgarly saluted him, chasing away the shadows with his flashlight.
Beverly let the others go first and then picked up her flashlight and examined it. A small shake got it glowing again and with the light came a little relief. The batteries probably weren’t the freshest and she did not want to be stuck down here relying on other people’s flashlights.
Albert paused in front of the sex room door and stared at the woman’s face, pondering.
“I can’t,” said Brandy as she and Nicole stepped up beside him. “I won’t make it.” She looked from Albert to Nicole, pleading for understanding. She had been afraid to go in there before, but after Albert’s speech, she could hardly bear the thought of it.
“Yeah,” Albert said. He looked at Nicole. “You don’t wear contacts, do you?”
Nicole shook her head.
“How about you, Wayne? Do you wear contacts?”
Wayne was still walking toward them, his gaze fixed on the statues he was passing. “Yeah, actually.”
“You may have to lead us through the first room.”
“Why can’t Brandy?”
“Because she and I know what’s in there. What little she can see without her glasses is just enough to remember what we saw the first time. I don’t know if the intensity would be the same, but she still may not be able to control herself.”
Wayne nodded, understanding the situation. “But hey, instead of me taking out my contacts, which I really don’t want to lose,” he said, looking at Brandy, “why don’t you lend someone else your glasses. Then they’d see what you see when you take yours off.”
“Hey, that’s true,” said Nicole.
Albert looked at Brandy. He had never considered that. “That might work.”
Beverly was walking warily toward them, her eyes fixed on Albert as though he might suddenly turn and lunge at her.
“So who gets the glasses?” Brandy asked.
Albert looked from Nicole to Wayne and back again. “I might be able to do it. But I don’t know that for sure.”
“I’ll take them,” said Nicole. It was hard to mistake the eagerness in her voice. She’d been fascinated by the idea of the temple, and particularly this room, ever since Albert and Brandy first told her the story.
“And if you start to feel weird at all,” said Wayne. “You can pass them right to me.”
“That’s true,” Brandy said. “We could go in shifts.”
Albert’s expression lit up. “That could get us through the fear room!”
“Okay!” Nicole held her hand out to Brandy. “Give me your glasses and let’s go!”
Chapter 6
As she stepped into the moaning woman’s mouth, Nicole felt an odd sort of anxiety. Through her best friend’s glasses, the world around her was shallow and
featureless, like the faces on the statues. Those around her were reduced to human shapes and colors and the Temple of the Blind became nothing more than shades of gray fading into black. Ahead of her, in the throat of the woman upon whose stone tongue she now tread, there was only thick darkness. It was this darkness that made her heart beat faster with anxious anticipation.
“Remember,” Albert said, “no matter how tempting it is, don’t look around the glasses.”
“Okay.” But she already knew that this would be easier said than done. Brandy’s glasses were small and stylish, with narrow, rectangular lenses. She would have to peer straight ahead at all times, and remember to always turn her head and not her eyes. It would prove difficult if she became scared. Simple reflexes made her want to glance out the corners of her eyes or peer over the top to make sure there was nothing hiding in the shadows around her.
She stepped into the room and tried to focus on the things directly in front of her, on a path that would lead her and her friends through this insane room and to the other side safely. Directly in front of her, on the floor, the first of the sex room’s statues appeared from the gloom. She could see the outline of a person sprawled before her, but so far the lust-inducing details were lost. All that she could discern from this statue was that it was in the shape of a human, a woman, she thought.
Albert and Brandy described some of the statues they saw in this room on one occasion and Nicole, while unaffected by their mere descriptions, was amazed at how uncomfortable they both became. They were unable to sit still and she had even observed with considerable embarrassment the noticeable bulge in the crotch of Albert’s shorts. Even after all that time, the sex room still affected them, the very memory of it strong enough to ignite their lust.
As wrong as it was, she wanted to see it. She wanted to look upon the statues in this room, to see what could make a person do such things without care of consequences, even against his or her own personal principles. She ached to see it, to know that impossible feeling, but she resisted these dangerous urges. She tore her eyes from the statue at her feet and took a deep breath. “Where do I go?” she asked.
“The door’s straight ahead,” Albert replied. “You just have to make your way around the statues.”
“Okay.” Nicole took another deep breath, still resisting the urge to take just a little peek. “Is everyone ready?”
She felt Brandy’s hand grasp the back belt loop of her jeans. “We’re ready.”
“Everyone stay close.” She took one last deep, relaxing breath and began to walk.
All around her, things jutted out at her. Hands and feet and elbows and heads seemed to come from impossible angles. Things came and went before her eyes, emerging from the gloom and then fading back into it again. Some even passed close enough for her to discern considerable detail, but they were only there for a moment.
“You guys said you saw what was in here the first time?” Wayne asked. He was behind Albert, one hand grasping his cotton tee shirt, the other still brandishing his flashlight. Behind him, Beverly was taking up the rear. He had wanted her to go first, not really trusting his back to her, but she refused to go near Albert.
“Yeah,” Albert replied. “We didn’t know.”
“How did you get out?”
“Someone came while we were…occupied…and took our flashlight. When the light faded, so did the urges.”
“Who took the light?”
“The man with no eyes, I guess.”
The man with no eyes? Wayne found the concept impossible, but he had no reason to doubt their word. “So you really would have just kept doing it? Until…what? Until your hearts burst?”
“I think so. Until something happened.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Is it a bad thing?” Nicole asked. “Having seen what’s in here?” To her right, she could make out the shape of a man who appeared to be taking a woman from behind, and she felt something. She wondered if that was just her imagination or if she had actually felt a tiny bit of the sex room’s strange power. Or perhaps it was just her natural reaction to that particular sexual position. It was rather naughty, after all.
“I think it can be,” Albert replied.
“It isn’t for us,” said Brandy. “Not really.”
“It’s sort of good for us, I think,” agreed Albert. “We have each other. We share it. But I don’t know how it would be for someone else.”
Nicole considered this. She wondered what it would be like for someone like her, someone who didn’t have someone wonderful to share it with. Would the memory of a room like this only give her yearnings that she could never hope to satisfy? Would it change her? Would it turn her into something bad, into some kind of shameless sex addict? Would she become some nasty slut begging strangers on the street for cheap sex? She supposed it was possible. She would be a sexually driven creature with no outlet for her urges, whereas Albert and Brandy would always have each other.
The thought was enough to strengthen her resolve to not peek at the statues. And yet, even with strengthened resolve, the statues kept taunting her from her peripheral vision, outside the protective lenses of Brandy’s glasses.
“How are we doing?” Wayne asked. “Are we almost there?”
“I’m not sure,” Nicole confessed. “I think so.”
A woman appeared in the flashlight’s beam directly ahead of her. She was up high, sitting on a man’s shoulders and therefore positioned above the glasses. She was facing the man she was riding, clutching his hair in both hands and forcing her crotch into his face. He was likewise groping her buttocks, pulling her against him. The sight took her by surprise and without thinking she lowered her face and saw that there was another woman on her knees in front of the man, her face buried against his groin as another man seized her from behind.
She closed her eyes and forced the image from her mind. She could absolutely feel it now, that deep aching. She was nowhere near losing control. She still had no desire to turn around and attack Albert or Wayne, but she could almost see how it could escalate out of control. That was only one statue. What if she removed Brandy’s glasses and gazed openly at the entire room?
“How’s everybody feeling?” Albert asked. “Nicole?”
“I’m all right,” she replied. And she was all right. She did suddenly feel a little uncomfortable between her legs, but the very fact that she was not about to admit that to her best friend’s boyfriend was proof enough that she still maintained control.
She wondered if it was possible that Albert and Brandy could have fallen victim to this room more easily because of their particular situation. After all, they were both single that night and already attracted to each other even before they came down here. They’d both admitted as much to her.
Her eyes were drawn to a figure on her right and she caught a glimpse past the glasses of a gray man gripping his swollen penis with one hand as he reached for something with the other. Immediately she forced her attention forward again as that strange yearning swelled deep in her gut. The sight of the man’s penis remained at the center of her thoughts like some lingering odor and her fear of this room grew a little. How little would it take?
“How are the glasses working?” Albert asked.
“They’re okay. A little easier to peek around than I’d like, but I’m still okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“You can switch with Wayne if it gets too bad.”
“I said I’m not horny. God, Brandy, tell your boyfriend it’s just not going to happen.”
Brandy laughed. “Oh, he knows!”
Albert chuckled. “Okay, okay. I’m just making sure you’re all right.”
“I am. I promise.”
“That’s good,” Albert said. “Brandy?”
“I’m hanging in there.”
“Are you going to be okay?” he pressed.
“Yeah. I’m fine. Don’t worry.” And she was. She was in no danger of fall
ing into this trap again. She didn't feel that endless desire that had made her turn and throw herself at Albert the last time she was in here, but the memory of this place alone was enough to fill her with primal wanting. Even with her eyes closed, she could feel her body reacting to what she knew surrounded her.
“Okay," Albert said, trusting her. “Wayne?”
“No sweat.”
“Good. Beverly?”
There was no reply.
“Beverly?” Albert felt a tinge of unease creeping up his spine.
Wayne could feel her right behind him. She had grasped his shirt exactly as he had grasped Albert’s before they entered this room.
“I can see it,” Beverly whispered hoarsely.
“What?” Brandy asked, startled.
“Close your damn eyes!” Wayne demanded.
“They are closed!” Beverly nearly screamed. “I don’t see it with my eyes! I see it with my mind!”
“How?” Albert asked. The five of them had now stopped. Their full attention was now focused upon the sound of Beverly’s quickening breath.
Beverly did not reply, perhaps could not reply. She groaned sickly, almost moaned. She was going to lose control.
“Come on, guys!” Albert gave Brandy a gentle nudge to pass to Nicole. “We need to be moving!”
Nicole continued her blind trek through the sex room, slowly maneuvering around the complex tangle of stone body parts that stood between them and the exit. As the sound of Beverly’s heavy breathing intensified behind her, she lost any urge to see more of the things around her. In fact, she began to grow afraid. She wanted out. She lifted her chin up and peered down through the glasses, eliminating the ability to peek over them. “How will I know the way out?”
“It’s a square opening in the wall,” Albert said. He managed to sound calm, but he was quickly becoming frantic. If Beverly lost control in this room, he could not guarantee that one or more of them would not get separated, turned around and lost.
Wayne stuffed his flashlight into the waistband of his pants and then reached back and gripped Beverly’s wrist hard enough to hurt her. Had it been her bad wrist, the pain might have been intense enough to make some difference, but she was holding onto him with her right hand, still keeping the left one close to her chest, her flashlight pressed uselessly against her breast. A silent rage was boiling up within him, driving his fingers into her flesh. He did not like Beverly Bridger. He did not trust her. She was going to be trouble for them, he was certain. And God help him, if she got anybody hurt down here he would make her pay. He might even kill her.