by Brian Harmon
The others walked on for little ways before noticing that Wayne had stopped. When they did, they paused and looked back, concerned.
“Wayne?” Albert asked. “You okay, buddy?”
Buddy. That was what Charlie called him. Buddy. Not that Charlie really was his buddy, though. He never had been. Not really. They were just two guys who happened to usually get along. “Yeah. Just…reality check, I guess.”
Nicole was closest to him. She turned and climbed back up the steps to where he sat. “What’s up?”
Wayne shook his head. “Too much at once.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just need to rest here a minute, get my thoughts together.”
Nicole sat down in front of him, her lovely eyes fixed fretfully on him. She had crossed her arms over her chest again, but it was a half-hearted effort. Hiding herself just didn’t seem important by now. After this long, what was the point?
Albert and Brandy sat down and listened. Albert was strongly reminded of the last time they were here. They’d stopped to rest on these steps as well, both on the way up and on the way down, and both times they’d talked. This was where they’d gotten to know each other a little better. And this was where they were going to get to know Wayne a little better, too.
“I’m sorry I was hard on Beverly back there,” Wayne said. “I’m usually not a mean person. At least, I don’t try to be.”
Nicole shook her head. “Don’t worry about that.”
“I do worry about it. I don’t have a friend in this world. I watched two people die today.” He lifted his face and looked into Nicole’s lovely eyes. “This morning, I almost screwed my roommate’s girlfriend.”
With several comical blinks, Nicole’s eyes stuttered from sweet sympathy to startled surprise. “Um… Wait. What?”
“Yeah. Almost. I don’t even like her. She’s a pig. A foul-mouthed little slut, to be blunt. She’s trying to seduce me and this morning I almost let her.” He looked back down at his feet again. “That’s what I’m doing here, actually. I had to get away, do some thinking, get my mind off things. I figured I’d check out Gilbert House; find out why someone was willing to pay a thousand bucks to get me to go inside it.” He looked around him, at the enormous, spiraling staircase that vanished into darkness above and below him. “Never bargained for this, though.”
Nicole put a hand on his knee. “It doesn’t sound to me like you did anything wrong.”
Wayne smiled at her. She was sweet. But she didn’t know just how much he had done wrong. He thought about Gail. Sweet Gail. Beautiful Gail. He couldn’t remember the last time he let himself think of her.
“Can you go on?” Albert asked. “Because if you can’t—”
“I can. I just…” Wayne shook his head. “Like I said before. Reality check. Everything just came crashing in all at once.”
“It’ll probably take a while before it all completely sets in,” Nicole offered. “For all of us. I mean, none of us are used to seeing people die. I know I’m still feeling kind of numb from it all.”
“I just keep thinking of you guys,” Brandy said. “I can’t stop and have a breakdown if I still have the three of you to look after.”
Albert gave her a smile and squeezed her hand. That certainly sounded like the Brandy he’d come to know and adore. “I think I became a little numb to it all when I met that thing in Gilbert House. I feel like, even after what happened to Olivia and Beverly, we’ve actually been pretty lucky so far. At least the rest of us are still here. And there’ll be time to think about them when this is all over and we’re back in our own homes.”
Nicole nodded, smiling a little.
Wayne sat there for a moment longer, thinking. Then he stood up, ready to move on. “Sorry, guys.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Brandy said.
“Yeah,” agreed Nicole as she gazed up at him from her place on the steps. “I think we all needed to stop and take a second.”
She stood up and the four of them continued down the steps.
Wayne’s thoughts again drifted to Laura Swiff and he found that he was not as tempted by her lechery as he had been before. It seemed almost funny now, really. He wondered what she was doing at that very moment, but then he decided he really did not care. Instead, he thought about Gail again. For the first time in a very long time, he wondered what she was doing.
Chapter 12
An anxious feeling fell over the group as they walked across the chamber at the bottom of the steps. It was an enormous space, stretching into the darkness all around them. Its emptiness was almost overwhelming, and each step they took made them feel smaller and smaller.
Albert was eager, almost twitching with anticipation. The answers to all the questions he had about the Temple of the Blind must lie on the other side of this obstacle, waiting for him just beyond. And yet he also felt like a prisoner being taken to the torture chamber one last time before being set free. The fear room was not like the sex room. It was not like the hate room. The dangers there were much more real, much more extravagant.
Brandy felt none of Albert’s eagerness. The things she’d seen in the fear room had given her nightmares for weeks. In the sex room, the images had driven them to act upon sexual impulses they’d hardly known were there, but the images themselves had conveyed no real meaning other than the obvious allusions to desire and lust. The statues in the fear room were different. When she’d seen them, even without her glasses, they had reminded her of things she’d never actually known, but things that she somehow knew to be real, things from a past she’d never lived.
She wasn’t sure whether she believed that these memories were real or not. The logical part of her insisted that they could not possibly be real, that they were merely subliminal messages of some kind, cleverly designed to trick her brain into believing these terrible things to be true. Surely they could not be actual events, somehow carried to her through those statues. But they were so vivid, so convincing.
Albert gazed up into the shadows of the high ceiling above them as he walked. This room felt like the one that had killed Beverly, and the emptiness made him nervous.
What happened back there, he wondered. What did Beverly see when she stepped into that room? Whatever it was had been so terrible that she had forgotten the real danger behind her.
Again he thought he heard a distant sound, like chains rattling somewhere very far away, yet the very sound was like a memory, gone before it was recognized, almost before it began.
Ahead of them, a great stone wall appeared, and with it the doorway to the entrance of the fear room.
Nicole felt a knot growing in her stomach. She knew what awaited her ahead, and she wasn’t sure if she had what it was going to take to get to the other side. So far, everything Albert and Brandy told her had been completely true. Every detail was just as they’d described. If anything, it surpassed her imagination.
They passed through the doorway and walked between the first pair of statues without pausing.
“Who’s going first this time?” Nicole asked as she watched the silent warning the sentinels acted out on both sides of the room. It really was like frames in a cartoon. After a while, they began to feel like a single statue actually moving from one pose to the next.
“This one’s worse than the others,” Albert warned. “The fact that it’s the fear room is enough to make you nervous. You start off frightened. And once you’re a little bit scared, it only escalates. Before long you’re in a panic. And we have to remember what was waiting after the hate room for people who lose control.”
Wayne wondered if he’d ever be able to forget it. He watched the sentinels as they lifted their arms and sank to the floor, their freakish hands splayed before them, shielding their featureless faces from some unseen horror. It was eerily reminiscent of Beverly’s reaction to that empty room. “Is there another of those spike traps in here?”
“I don’t know,” Albert replied.
“We neve
r made it through last time,” Brandy explained.
“If I were to guess,” Albert added, “I’d say there’s probably going to be something nasty in there somewhere.” On either side of them, the sentinels arched their backs and lifted their blank faces in silent screams of unthinkable terror. “It’ll probably be something a lot worse than a spiked pit.”
Ahead of them, the door appeared. It was the same as the last time Albert laid eyes on it, a woman with a round, almost pudgy face and a mole under her right eye. The scream in which she was frozen was so fierce, so strained, that it seemed she should fly apart. Her eyes bulged with fright, her lips peeled back in terrible panic. It was easy for Nicole and Wayne to see why Albert and Brandy spoke so fearfully of this place. If this was just the door, then what must wait inside?
“We’ll probably have to trade off,” Albert reasoned as they approached the insanely terrified face. “I’ll go first. Then Brandy?” He looked at her and she nodded agreement. “Then Nicole.” He looked back at Wayne. “You can be last. When we feel like we can’t take it anymore, we’ll pass off. Hopefully by the time you can’t go on, I’ll be recharged and we can start over again.”
“Hopefully it won’t take that long,” whimpered Brandy.
Wayne nodded.
Albert held his hand out for Brandy’s glasses. “We might as well get started. Is everybody ready?”
Everybody was.
He made it his business to hurry. As soon as he stepped into the fear room, Albert headed straight into the jungle of gray shapes, determined to make the most of his turn. All around him, dark shapes appeared and melted. Shades of gray shifted and faded, merging and dividing. It was dizzying, and after just a few steps, he had to pause to focus himself.
Each of these emotion rooms was larger than the last, with more statues than the last. Each became more difficult to navigate. This one was a virtual maze of stone figures. There was hardly room to walk. Navigating with such dim vision was nearly impossible. No wonder Brandy had gotten lost in here.
In front of him, several forms came together and each one seemed unnervingly familiar to him, as though he’d seen it in some long forgotten nightmare. They were like bogeymen from past lives, each one very different but no less frightening than the next.
“Are you okay?” Brandy asked.
“Yeah,” Albert replied, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d remain okay. This room was a scene straight from hell. Even mostly blind he could see that the things in this room were not someone’s idea of scary Halloween ghosts and goblins. These were things so real, so terrible, only the insane or immortal could have captured them in stone. If these horrors weren’t real, then they were designed to make them believe that they were real and that was just as bad.
He went left, then right, and then he had to stop. To his right was something that made him think of sand and screaming, to his left was a vague silhouette of a woman he had a feeling was in the process of dying. A deep uneasiness had settled into him and it was beginning to take root and grow, like a cancer slowly eating away his courage. He wanted to look around the glasses, to take just a quick peek and make sure there was nothing there, staring at him from the shadows, waiting to pounce. But he could not allow himself to do that. He had to remain strong. It was all about willpower over fear.
He tried to clear his mind, blocking out as much distraction as he could, and kept walking. He picked out landmarks to follow, statues that could be spotted from a distance, and then focused his eyes on an imaginary point just to one side of it, trying hard to not look directly at any of the shapes. He thought not about the statues, but about the traps. There must be at least one in or beyond this room, a spiked pit or a sleeping hound or some other unthinkable device.
He squeezed his eyes into small slits and focused fiercely on looking only straight ahead. Soon his head began to ache, but he couldn’t risk letting himself glimpse the horrors that oozed in around the lenses.
He might have gone in circles two or three times trying to gain his bearings. He was beginning to think that he’d gotten them all hopelessly lost in this funhouse from hell, but then he spotted the silhouette of a tall figure, a sentinel, with arms outstretched. It seemed almost to be beckoning him. Was this the way out? He remembered Brandy mentioning that she’d seen a sentinel statue in the first chamber of the fear room. She’d found it curious at the time and now he did too. It seemed to defeat the purpose somehow. He’d begun to think of these deformed and faceless men as symbols of the temple’s honesty. They were always at guard where a dangerous decision was required, even though they refused to help. There were not any sentinels inside the sex room. There hadn’t been one to warn them of the spiked pit, either. Those were trials that they’d been forced to conquer on their own. So why would one be standing here inside the fear room?
But he was in no mood to complain.
He turned toward the sentinel, focusing on it. He almost peeked over the glasses at it, curious about its presence in this room, but he reminded himself that it was surrounded by horrors that he could not allow himself to look upon.
As he approached this sentinel and passed it, he saw the square opening up ahead. “I see the door,” he announced. “It leads into another chamber. How is everybody?”
“I’m fine,” Nicole replied.
“I’m okay,” Brandy assured him.
“No problem,” Wayne chimed in. He sounded almost cheerful. Albert guessed that he was trying to keep himself psyched up for his turn.
Nicole made a sudden hissing noise through her teeth and Albert stopped, startled. “What happened?”
“Something cut me,” she said. “My leg.”
“The statue!” Brandy exclaimed. “That thing cut me last time I was here, too! I forgot all about it.”
Albert remembered. “That’s right. It got me too. On the way out. It’s got a claw or something. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It just stings. Be careful.”
Albert stepped into the next room and paused. His eyes fell upon the statue directly in front of him, and although he couldn’t see it, he already knew what it looked like. His mind produced a perfect image of what he had seen all those months ago, every detail as perfect as if he had taken Brandy’s glasses off his face and boldly stared at it.
The woman’s face was particularly vivid.
Oh, God! he thought, with inexplicable horror. That poor woman! He could see nothing but shades of gray, yet he could see the blood and the pain and the madness and the cruelty. Why were they doing that? Why were they forcing her into that hole? What had she done to deserve such an end? How could they continue doing that to her with her screaming (begging) like that?
“Albert?” Brandy’s voice was frightened.
She begged them. She pleaded with them to stop. She promised them anything they wanted, her money, her body, her soul, and still they dragged her down into the deepest chambers of those awful catacombs with a glee that was actually sexual in its intensity.
“Albert? Are you okay?”
Albert shook away the image. “Yeah. Just…bad stuff in here.”
Brandy did not reply. Her eyes were tightly closed, her heart pounding. She prayed that he would just start moving again. She knew what he had seen. She could almost see that horrible statue too, even with her eyes firmly closed.
Albert began to walk again, turning his eyes away from that awful statue, but unable to tear his mind from it. They were her friends, he thought suddenly, and although he didn’t understand how he knew this, he did not doubt that it was true. They were her friends and they had sex after they shoved her in. All three of them had sex while they listened to her dying screams.
He walked on, trying hard to force these images from his head. This chamber was slightly less crowded than the first one, but still it was difficult to navigate, especially when his head was filled with the terrible screaming of a dead woman.
Brandy held his hand and followed close behind him. “Stop whe
n you need to,” she reminded him. “I can take my turn whenever you’re ready.”
“I know,” Albert replied. “I’m okay.” And he was still okay. He just had to focus on where he was going and not on what was around him. They were just statues, after all, just reminders of bad things, things that might not even exist. As long as he kept his eyes forward, away from the edges of Brandy’s glasses…
But that was so hard. His fear made him want to look, to make sure nothing was lurking among the statues around him. Just a little peek. A mere second. Half a second. Just to be sure there was nothing there. He had to keep telling himself that the fear he imagined was far better than the fear that he would experience if he dared to take that peek.
“Don’t overdo it,” Nicole pleaded.
“Yeah,” agreed Wayne. “If you overdo it, you might not recover to take over for me.”
That was a good point, Albert realized. If he waited until he physically couldn’t go any farther, he might not have the courage to put the glasses back on if it came back to him. For that matter, he might be too afraid to carry on even with his eyes closed. Wasn’t that exactly what happened to Brandy last time? “Just a little farther,” he promised. “Then Brandy can take over.”
“Right,” agreed Brandy, although she didn’t sound very enthused to Albert. He didn’t blame her. She suffered quite a scare last time she was here.
He made his way around another statue, still narrowing his eyes to keep them behind the small lenses.
He almost walked right into it. He was clearing his head, focusing his attention on the task at hand, when he glimpsed the thing that was sticking toward him. It wasn’t any part of a human. It was long and thin. Perhaps it was part of some odd creature, like the thing that was killing the woman in that awful statue that greeted him when he entered this room. He bent toward it, examining it, and when it finally dawned on him what it was, he suddenly felt as if his stomach was filled with ice water.