by Brian Harmon
Up ahead, a drop-off appeared. Albert and Brandy gazed apprehensively into the lower tunnel. It was from here that they had been chased thirteen months ago by what must have been one of the hounds the blind man warned them about. The round room with the statue of the dying sentinels waited a short distance ahead. Beyond that was the hate room.
Albert dropped down into this lower tunnel and shined his light into the darkness ahead. There was nothing but the few scattered bone fragments he’d observed long ago. The floor was still marred by the scratches he remembered agonizing over. The hounds, he thought. Did they have something to do with those scratches? The hounds are fast, but they cannot jump. That explained the wall behind him. If they could not jump then they could not get from the lower stretch of this tunnel to the higher. It would also explain why it stopped chasing them last time.
Once he was convinced that the path was clear, he placed his flashlight on the ledge beside him and then held his hands up to his waiting girlfriend. “Come on down.”
Brandy sat down with her feet dangling over the ledge in front of him, and took both his hands. With a swift and graceful motion, she hopped down in front of him.
Albert then turned and held his hands out to Nicole.
She hesitated for a moment, standing at the edge of the upper tunnel, looking down at him, her hands crossed over her private areas. She did not want him to help her down because to do so, she would have to give him her hands and that would allow him see her. He had certainly seen what she had by now anyway, but her modesty was stubborn. She braced herself and sat down in front of him, just as Brandy had done. She reminded herself that they were at least on an even playing field. She only had to lower her eyes a few degrees to get a good look at him. And what did it really matter in the greater scheme of things if she let him see her naked? It wouldn’t really change anything, would it? Biting her lip, feeling just like the virgin who once stripped her clothes off for her high school boyfriend, Josh, she held both hands out to him.
He took her hands and she hopped down into the lower tunnel with him. When she was on her feet, she smiled sweetly at him and then walked past him to make room for the others. He had looked her right in the eye, with the same respect, tenderness and love with which he always looked at her, and she found that she loved Albert Cross like she might have loved her own brother if she had one, perhaps even more.
Albert turned and held his hands out to Beverly, who had approached the edge and was looking down at him. When she saw him reaching, she backed away, her eyes wide and terrified. The very thought of him touching her seemed to fill her with inexplicable panic. And yet he had not once even spoken harshly to her. He pulled his hands back, holding them up as if to say, “Okay, have it your way,” and backed away.
Beverly sat down and dropped into the tunnel, turning a little on her right side as she did so to keep from hurting her left wrist any more than she already had. Wayne dropped down behind her, not bothering to sit down as the others had, but merely leveraging himself on one hand. It was very manly, but he winced when he landed. Perhaps he’d forgotten that he was no longer wearing his tennis shoes.
Albert retrieved his flashlight from the ledge. “This is where the hounds are,” he warned. “We should hurry.”
The five of them moved quickly through the tunnel, their bare feet slapping the hard stone as they walked. Up ahead, the round room—the decision room, as Albert thought it—came into view.
Albert hardly looked at the statue in the center of the room. The blue cloth was still there, wrapped around one of the sentinels’ hands, right where he’d left it, but he didn’t need it. He turned left and headed straight for the first tunnel clockwise of the one from which they exited. “Come on,” he urged the others. He remembered the way he and Brandy had lingered at this crossroad, pondering the statue and its meaning, the destination of the other tunnels and the scratches on the floor. He remembered hearing the thing in the next tunnel and wondered how close they’d come to being just more scattered bone fragments in these passages. Their scent was probably what lured it. The risk of their lack of speed was sickening now that he was aware of it.
They hurried up the next passage to the wall that supposedly kept the hounds bound to these passages. Albert stopped and helped Brandy up, then Nicole. Like before, he held a hand out to Beverly, not really thinking anything, but merely trying to be courteous, and like before, she recoiled from his hand as if it were a venomous snake. He stepped back—still not understanding her terror of him, but yielding just the same—and simply watched her help herself.
Once all of them were in the next tunnel, Albert gazed down into the lower one from which they’d just climbed. He remembered wondering why those scratches were down there, but not up here. Unless there was something else down here that was restricted to only these corridors, they almost certainly were somehow related to the hounds.
The hounds.
Albert felt his flesh crawl at the thought of the very word.
“The hate room’s just up there,” Brandy said to Albert. “Do you think we can get through it again?”
“I don’t see why we can’t,” he replied, meaning the two of them. “We got through it last time. We didn’t feel a thing.” He also thought Nicole would have no trouble passing through the hate room, but he was not certain about Beverly or Wayne. He was still not sure how these rooms worked, if they simply put visions into your head and subliminally told you to do things, or if they somehow heightened what was already inside. Perhaps he and Brandy had felt nothing because neither of them was capable of feeling hate toward each other. If that were the case, then he worried about Wayne. His rage had not gone unnoticed, after all. Beverly, on the other hand, was a wild card. He was not sure what would happen when she went in there, regardless of how it all worked.
As they stepped into the entrance of the hate room, its size and shape identical to that of the entrance to the sex room, the five of them marveled again at the impressiveness of its very existence.
Beverly stopped walking as she took in the vastness of the chamber and Wayne, with his eyes fixed on the statues to his left, bumped into her. She stepped away from him, flinching, and for the first time he seemed to not have any violence in him.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. “My fault.” Perhaps it had been her eyes that kept him from telling her to watch what the fuck she was doing, that look of a frightened child who’s just spilled a glass of Kool-Aid on the carpet and knows she’s in for a scolding, perhaps even a beating. Suddenly he felt very ashamed of himself.
Beverly did not speak to him. She merely shrank away from him, although careful not to go in Albert’s direction.
“Who gets the glasses this time?” Nicole asked as she walked toward the far wall, curious to see the face that would lead them into hate.
“I might be able to do this one,” Albert volunteered.
Ahead, the enraged face of a man materialized out of the darkness and Nicole paused, as if startled by it. Albert did not doubt that she was. The face had not lost a bit of its ferocity in the last thirteen months.
Chapter 9
“This room isn’t much bigger than the last one,” Albert told the others as he peered into the shadows beyond the angry man’s open mouth. “I think if we keep our eyes closed we should do okay. But the room on the other side is a spiked pit. If one of us goes through that other doorway without looking…well, you don’t need me to tell you.” He held his hand out to Brandy, who removed her glasses and handed them to him. “We’ll take it slow and easy. I’ll tell you all when to stop. There’s five of us, so we can’t just pile out of there, okay?” He took Brandy’s hand as he donned her glasses. “How do I look?”
Brandy leaned close to him so that she could see and then giggled at the sight.
Nicole, without thinking about it, dropped her eyes from Albert’s face to his privates and then blushed furiously. She did not know what possessed her to do such a thing. She would never
have thought herself capable of sneaking a peek at her best friend’s boyfriend like that, but there it was. Literally. She was immediately filled with guilt, yet she realized that, even as she was thinking this, she was still looking at that part of him! She tore her eyes away and looked at Brandy instead, terrified that she’d seen her in spite of her nearsightedness, but Brandy was still looking at Albert and grinning at how silly he looked wearing her glasses and nothing more.
Wayne was looking back at the last pair of statues in the room. These sentinels were running at each other in a blind rage, frozen mid-stride as they raced murderously toward each other. Even without faces, their fury was unmistakable. They were going to kill each other. “So what’s the plan in case you’re wrong about Beverly? What do we do if she turns psycho on us?”
Albert removed Brandy’s glasses and looked at Beverly. She stood apart from the rest of them, her hands balled into fists at her sides. He could tell by the look on her face that she was scared. He supposed there was only one answer to that, but he did not want to say it aloud.
“The rest of us will be blind,” Brandy reminded him. “If she loses control…”
“Wayne can stop me,” Beverly said.
Nicole looked at Wayne. “Can you?”
“I don’t know,” Wayne confessed. He glanced back at the statues. “If she’s completely consumed by rage… I’m not confident I can hold her.”
“I didn’t say you can hold me,” Beverly corrected him. “I said you can stop me.”
Wayne stared at her, hardly believing what she was suggesting.
“Any way you have to.” She was staring intently at him. “You can hurt me. You already did it once.”
“That was—”
“Justified,” she finished for him. “Just remember what happened to those kids in Gilbert House. I deserve it.”
Wayne stared at her. He did not know what to say. He did not really want to hurt her. He was not proud of himself for how he’d treated her, regardless of whether she deserved it or not. But he also did not want anyone else to get hurt.
“You can stop me,” she said again. “I don’t want to hurt anyone else.” She held her hand out to him and he wrapped his strong fingers firmly around her wrist.
“We’ll see,” was all Wayne could think to say.
Albert nodded. “Okay then. You two will take the rear again. If anything happens, we’ll all be counting on Wayne.”
Wayne didn’t look very confident, but it seemed like the only option they had.
Albert slipped Brandy’s glasses back onto his face and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze as he turned to face the hate room. “Ready?”
Everyone was. Brandy had no belt loop for Nicole to grasp the way Brandy had done in the sex room, so she put her free hand instead on her friend’s waist and followed. As she ducked into the angry man’s mouth, she felt Wayne’s hand fall upon her shoulder, and when she glanced back, she saw that he was still gripping Beverly’s good wrist. If she began to lose control, she would have to wrench herself free of his hand, which would give him the opportunity to turn on her.
Wayne felt incredibly uncomfortable. He did not know what he’d do if Beverly went crazy. He supposed the simplest thing would be to tackle her to the floor and hold her there while the others made their way safely past the spike pit in the next room. But then what would he do? He was just going to have to play it by ear.
Connected by a touch, the five of them made their way slowly into the hate room.
Through his girlfriend’s glasses, Albert saw shades of gray fading in and out of the darkness. Shapes reached out to him from the gloom, many visible enough to be recognized for what they were. He saw hands and faces and sometimes whole human forms of various sizes and frozen in many different poses, but none possessed any real detail through these lenses, and were therefore unable to infect him with their rage. This was what Brandy had seen all those months ago, while his eyes were firmly closed. He marveled at this, thankful that he had the opportunity to walk in her shoes (or in her eyes, as the case may be).
He made his way around a statue that was certainly human, but could have been of either sex and doing almost anything. Brandy’s glasses worked, but Nicole was right. They were a little too small for this. He had to consciously force his eyes to remain straight ahead. It was far too easy to peek around the sides or over the top. “How’s everybody doing so far?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Brandy replied.
“Me too,” Nicole reported.
“I think I’m okay,” Beverly said, sounding reassuringly confident. “I don’t see anything yet.”
“Good,” Albert replied. “Wayne?”
“I’m okay,” Wayne assured him, and Albert felt a wave of relief. If it was going to do anything to them, it at least hadn’t started yet.
Albert pushed forward. As he moved deeper into the chamber, he became more and more aware of the space around Brandy’s glasses. No matter how hard he tried, his eyes kept twitching toward the edges of the lenses. From the corners of his eyes he could see the statues around him, and had to force himself to stare straight ahead, knowing that terrible things could happen if he let his eyes stray left or right. For all he knew, just one peek could fill him with hatred every bit as insatiable as the lust that overwhelmed him on his first visit. He squinted his eyes almost closed, trying to rid himself of as much of his peripheral vision as he could, and lifted his chin to keep from peering over the glasses.
“Beverly,” Wayne began, “why did you pick me to give that letter to?”
“I told you, you just looked the part. I needed someone with some muscle.”
“But there’s lots of people in this town bigger than me.”
“But lots of people didn’t leave their stuff unguarded in the library where I could drop that letter off without them seeing me.”
“I see.” And he did. He had expected as much, after all. “I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“I’m sorry,” she said and he actually believed that she was sincere. “I gave you and two other guys those letters. I thought that if three big guys like you showed up and went in there, you would probably come back out. Only one of you came, though, and he showed up with three friends. I…know I shouldn’t have let them go in…but I had to know…and I thought they might be okay. Only one of them was big like you, but I thought…maybe since there’re four of them…”
“But why,” asked Albert, “would you even bother with three random people if you had that picture of Wendell Gilbert? Why didn’t you just send me the envelope? Why not just come find me? If you’d been honest with me I’d have gone in.” The truth of this actually sent a shiver through Albert. Had she come to him instead of bothering with Wayne and the others, things probably would have turned out much differently. And not likely in a good way.
For a moment, Beverly did not speak, and when she did finally reply, it was not an answer: “I…couldn’t do that.”
Albert did not know what she meant by that, but he did not push the matter.
The five of them walked on, moving slowly through the darkness. Albert focused on keeping his eyes forced straight ahead, trying not to look around the glasses, no matter how paranoid he grew or how curious he became. But it was not easy. Whenever a shape emerged from the darkness, his first instinct was to peek, to see what it was, whether it was important, if it had any meaning. After all, wasn’t it his skill with puzzles that led him here in the first place? He loved to solve mysteries. He prided himself on his skills of observation. It went against his nature to intentionally ignore details.
A shape took form on his left and his eyes twitched toward it. He glimpsed a woman’s face with a cruel grin and laughing eyes. There was something odd about this face, but he refused to focus on it. He forced his eyes forward again and tried to ignore it, but even after it was behind him and out of sight, the face lingered in his thoughts. He didn’t like that face. It was the expression, he thought,
something about that mocking sneer.
Something hot began to grow in his stomach. It was subtle, but he could feel it. It wasn’t all that different from what he’d felt in the sex room, but this wasn’t lust. This was anger.
He forced the woman’s face from his thoughts. It was so easy to fall into that trap, but he refused. Instead, he thought about the other room, the sex room, what he and Brandy did in there the last time they were here. He remembered how she looked just before she lost control, her blue eyes wide as she stared upon that furious orgy of stone men and women, her knees bent, her hand pressed against the front of her jeans, unable to control the furious desire that was sweeping through her like a wildfire.
The hot anger in his gut was lost beneath a hotter feeling now, and he welcomed it. He reminded himself that Brandy was naked again, just like last time, her lovely body fully exposed. Then he reminded himself that Nicole was naked, too, that her incredible breasts were right there, completely uncovered. He could look at her if he wanted. Her eyes were closed. She’d never see him as he studied her in the beam of his flashlight, memorizing her luscious curves.
He’d never do such a thing, of course, and not just because he’d risk seeing more of the hate room’s statues. He wouldn’t do it because he had more respect for Nicole than that, because he was her friend and he cared about her, because he loved Brandy far too much, but it didn’t hurt to think about such things. In fact, it helped. That sick feeling in his belly was completely gone now, replaced by something considerably more pleasant (although with the rather embarrassing side-effect of giving him a noticeable erection).