by Brian Harmon
He wondered what she was thinking. Perhaps she was remembering Olivia and Beverly. Or perhaps she was thinking about the blind man and the sentinels. Or perhaps she was thinking nothing at all but that she was tired and ready to go home.
Maybe they should just turn back. Was it really worth it? It was a thought that had crossed his mind more than once since watching the pool of blood slowly spread across the floor beneath Beverly’s motionless body. He could still vividly remember that tragic scene, and it was far too easy to picture Brandy in her place.
He looked back at Nicole, not wanting to think about such terrible things. She had stopped rubbing her feet and was now just staring at them. She looked so tired. What the hell was he doing to them? He lowered his eyes, not wanting to see that weariness on her face, and found himself looking at her feet. She had pretty feet. She had slender, well-groomed toes and her skin was soft and smooth. The soles of her feet looked soft, almost pink in the light, and something tickled way back in his brain again.
He looked at Wayne, still feeling that odd little tickle. He was staring down into the box, trying to think. Unlike the girls, he didn’t appear weary, merely frustrated as he tried to locate a solution to their situation from the puzzling array of objects before him. In the glow of the flashlights, his body was very pale, almost white, except for those places on him that were dark: his hair, his eyes, the dried blood on his belly.
Something was wrong. He stared at Wayne, trying to grasp what it was that he was missing. It seemed to be barreling toward him like a freight train, but still he couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t understand it. He looked at Brandy. What the hell was it?
“What are we going to do?” Brandy asked. She was still staring up at the ceiling, her skin soft and milky in the pale light.
Another tickle.
Albert closed his eyes for a moment, squeezing them tightly as if to shake away a bad image, and then opened them and peered over at the sentinel that faced the water. It was obvious that they were supposed to go in one of those three directions, but how were they supposed to know which one? They needed a clue, and yet all of his clues had been used up.
He considered the coins. The man with no eyes had gifted them to him at the end of their first adventure down here. They did not seem like a clue at the time, and he could think of nothing now that might connect them to any of these chambers. Yet they were the only items left in the box, which that same, eyeless man specifically told them to use before scurrying away with their clothes.
When he looked back at Nicole and Brandy, they were both looking at him, waiting for him to reveal the answer, as he always did. Looking back at them, he felt that tickle grow a little.
They had four choices. They could go forward, wade through mud, perhaps get swallowed in the muck, never knowing if they were going the right way. They could go left, swim through freezing water, never knowing if there was another end to be reached, perhaps drown in those cold, still depths. Or they could go right, into whatever that other stuff was, swimming for all they knew in a pool of pure poison. The only other way was back the way they’d come. A long, hard journey back home was all that awaited them there, with no answers, no closure. It was only home. And the phone would probably be ringing.
He looked again at Nicole. She was beautiful. Her complexion was slightly darker than Brandy’s, because she had spent more of her summer tanning, but her skin was still a soft and lustrous color in the dimness around her. He looked at her feet again, at the soft, clean skin of her soles and toes, and that tickle grew into a tingle and then a roar.
He looked down at his hands. They were pale and soft in the light, except for his fingers, which were dirty from handling the items inside the box and brushing the dirt from Beverly’s envelope. He looked down at the rest of his naked body, then at Wayne and Nicole and then at Brandy, who had sat up to watch his odd behavior. It had been there the whole time and he hadn’t seen it for its subtleness.
“What is it?” Nicole asked. She could tell that he knew something. She could see it in his eyes. Something was stirring up there. He’d found some more pieces to this puzzle and they were all flying together in his mind.
Albert reached over and took the box back from Wayne. He withdrew the pocket watch and ran his fingers across its tarnished lid. There was a thin, gritty film on it that clung to his clean fingertips. He reached inside the box and ran his fingers all the way around its smooth interior. They came away nearly black with grime. He remembered when he first opened the box in the second floor lounge with Brandy, months ago. He remembered noticing how dirty the contents of the box had been, as though someone had gathered the objects off the dirty ground…
“There was another clue…” he said, almost in awe.
“What?” Brandy was staring at him, confused.
Albert held his hand up for her, showed her the dirt on his fingers. “Look. The box was dirty.”
All three of them stared at him, waiting for him to continue.
He put the box down and rose to his knees in front of Nicole. He grabbed her foot and lifted it, making her cry out in amused surprise. “Look at your feet. Look at your hands, your knees, your butts. You’ve all walked, sat and crawled on your bellies through this place!”
Brandy looked down at herself, remembering the tight squeeze through the tunnel just past the maze. “We’re clean,” she said.
“Exactly!” He kissed Nicole’s foot, as much for emphasis as in excitement and she jerked it away with a giggle. It had tickled.
“But the clues were all filthy, like someone threw dirt in with them.”
“Or mud…” said Wayne, finally understanding. He turned and looked back into the passage behind him. “Mud from that passage.”
Albert remembered the way he’d shaken the box when he first received it, wondering what was in it, probably reducing a clump of dried mud to a fine dusting of dirt. Then, when he and Brandy opened it and examined the contents, he had simply wiped away the dust and dirt without even thinking, assuming that the items had simply been filthy when they were gathered together and locked inside.
But why would items taken from a place as clean as this be dirty?
Wayne turned back and looked at Albert. “And you’re a computer science major? Did you ever consider forensics?”
“Yeah. But I found it too disturbing.”
Wayne smiled. “Yeah. Disturbing.” He remembered the fear room and the pit of spikes and would have laughed if not for the seriousness of those things.
“So how do we know it’s the mud and not the oil, or whatever that other stuff is?” Nicole asked.
“I don’t know what that stuff is,” Albert replied, “but I think we could tell it apart. I’m not sure that stuff would ever dry into dirt.” He remembered the hard crust he had poked his fingers through when he first examined the mud. A small chunk of that stuff would have fit nicely into the box.
“So we have to go down there?” Nicole asked, not sounding particularly pleased by the discovery.
“Come on.” Albert stuffed the envelope back into the box, then the box back into his backpack. He was already walking toward the next tunnel as he slipped it back over his shoulders.
Chapter 18
The flashlights could not reach across the mud. There was no way to know if this room contained a pool, a lake or a sea. Albert stared down at the black surface, wondering. The rest of the temple had been solid stone except for the one pool of water. Elsewhere, there had not even been a thin layer of dust to dirty their feet. Where would something like this come from? Was it actually carried in here, perhaps bucket by bucket? Or was there some sort of inlet? And for what? Just to make them suffer through it to get to the end of this strange journey? It was like something out of a bad movie.
“This isn’t going to be pleasant, is it?” asked Wayne.
“Probably not,” Albert replied bluntly. He had no idea what could be in sludge like this. He didn’t even want to know. He stepped forward,
planting his bare foot into the mud. The surface had dried into a thin, brittle crust, but beneath it, the mud was cold and wet. It squished beneath him and oozed up over his foot and between his toes.
“I don’t know if I can,” Brandy said. “This is way worse than the water.”
“We don’t know what could be in there,” Nicole agreed.
Albert could hear the dread in their voices, and when he turned, he could see it clearly on their faces, too. “We don’t have a choice,” he reminded them. “This is the right way. We can’t turn back now.”
But Brandy wasn’t convinced. She stared out at the black and putrid path before them, her eyes filled with fear.
“Just take my hand,” he urged. “I’ll be right beside you.”
Reluctantly, Brandy took his hand and followed his lead. She said nothing, but grimaced terribly as her foot and ankle sank beneath the surface.
“All the clues led us here,” Albert said, trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. “That means this path is safe. There’s no telling what might have happened if we’d gone into one of those other rooms.”
“It’s absurd, if you ask me,” Wayne said as he watched Albert and Brandy step out into the mysterious muck. With each step, their feet came up black. “First, we have to get naked and now we have to swim through mud? What’s next? A wrestling arena? I’m seriously starting to think somebody’s filming this.”
Nicole stepped in next and let out a long, soft squeak of disgust. “It’s awful!” she squealed as she waded deeper and deeper into the frigid sludge behind her friends. It quickly crept up her legs to her knees and she reached out and grabbed Albert’s elbow as much for physical support as mental. It sucked at her feet, resisting her with each step.
Wayne followed behind them, barely able to hold back a cry of disgust as his foot sank and a foul smell rose up around him. He watched those in front of him, the way they pushed on together, clinging to one another, and was reminded that he was, after all, just a stranger to them. He wished he had someone to cling to him that way, giving him strength, but it had been a long time since he’d had anyone like that. So he stayed back, pushing on alone.
“Not so bad,” Albert urged through chattering teeth, trying to keep his companions’ spirits up, but it was pointless. For one thing it was that bad. The mud was thick, especially near the bottom, and as it rose up their thighs, it became clear that it would not be an easy trip. And the stench was unbelievable. It reeked like rotting garbage. Could this be some kind of giant compost heap?
“Oh god this is gross,” Nicole groaned. It was easily as cold as the water they swam through earlier that night, perhaps colder. It numbed her skin and sent a shiver deep into her body.
Brandy said nothing. She looked to Albert as though she were barely biting back a scream.
“Why would someone make something like this?” Wayne asked.
“There’s got to be a reason for it,” Albert assumed. “Maybe it’s some kind of test. Maybe it’s just to see how much we want it.”
“You’d think they’d have been satisfied after their fucking fear room,” Wayne grumbled.
“You’d think,” Albert agreed.
As it became stirred up beneath them, so was its odor, and soon a dank, moldy stench of decay surrounded them. And as the filthy stuff squished against the sensitive flesh of their exposed genitals, not one of them could repress the groans and whimpers that rose from their throats. The awfulness of that cold, reeking sludge oozing into the folds of their soft skin was almost more than any of them could stand.
“Maybe it masks our scent from the hounds,” Albert suggested, trying hard to find a positive thought.
“That would make more sense than just water,” Wayne agreed.
It grew steadily deeper as they went, sliding up over their hips and waists to their bellies. And as it grew deeper, it grew more challenging. Soon they were struggling for every step. It seized their legs and sucked at their backs, like a living thing, attempting to impede their progress. Furthermore, it churned around them, belching and squelching against their naked flesh, spewing that putrid stench with every step they managed.
It was now that Albert had an awful thought. What if that stench was not of rotting garbage but rotting corpses? What if this room was some sort of hellish graveyard? He could almost picture his foot sinking through the mud and into the putrid skull of some rotten carcass, squashing black jelly that used to be a brain between his bare toes. It was a thought that almost made him gag, but one he would have to keep to himself. It would do no good to speak such horrors aloud, as it would have done no good to speak any of the horrors that had crossed his mind today.
He wondered if it was healthy to keep so many terrible thoughts bottled up inside, and immediately remembered the corpses he’d found in Gilbert House. Nick and Trish. Was it normal, he wondered, to walk away from such a thing without being sick? He thought of Beverly Bridger’s body, sprawled on those horrible spikes, and how he had turned away from her and just kept going. He had simply buried those disturbing things within himself and moved on. He wondered if that said anything about the state of his mental health.
Soon, they were up to their chests in the black muck and the half-submerged sentinel was swallowed in the darkness at their backs. Nicole’s breasts seemed almost to float upon the surface as she struggled forward, barely keeping her balance. She was holding Albert’s arm up high, not wanting to dirty her hands.
Brandy, however, had already tumbled forward a couple of times and was covered to her neck in stinking sludge. Her flashlight had gone under with her each time and now the light shined out in a broken beam through a filthy lens.
Albert had feared that this obstacle would prove impossible, that it would get deeper and deeper until it swallowed them, that they would drown with their mouths and lungs filled with reeking sludge, but as they pushed on, the mud grew no deeper. It seemed that the sentinel had shown them the deepest part. Furthermore, the mud remained thin enough to allow them to move through it, although not without considerable effort. It remained dense only at the bottom, where it continued to suck at their feet, resisting each step they took.
Nicole’s feet caught in the mud and she fell forward with a yelp, barely keeping her face above the surface. Her flashlight vanished into the muck and with it went her share of the light. When she had gotten her feet back under her, she was a mask of darkness from her chin down. Her hair, the backs of her shoulders and her face were the only parts of her that remained clean.
Albert glanced at her and then at Brandy. “Well, at least we’re not exactly naked anymore.”
Nicole made a sick noise in her throat. “I think I’d prefer to just let you and Wayne stare at my tits, actually.”
“I don’t think I was staring, was I?” Albert asked.
Brandy gave him a sharp jab with her elbow and he was amused by the dirty look she shot him. At least she wasn’t so overwhelmed by the mud that she couldn’t still put him in his place.
“I might have been staring once or twice,” Wayne said. “Sorry.”
Nicole grinned a little in spite of her disgust.
They’d gone just a few steps farther when Brandy lost her balance and vanished all the way to her bangs in the sludge. She scrambled to stand up, spitting and clawing at the revolting mess that clung to her face and spewing an obscene barrage of curses.
For a moment, her glasses were gone, swallowed by the mud, but she located them quickly and was still trying to wipe the mud away with her filthy hands when the light at their backs vanished and they heard Wayne gagging and spitting.
A little farther along, Nicole stumbled again, this time taking Albert with her. It oozed into his mouth and the taste was indescribably awful, bitter and grimy, more like metal than dirt, but with the grotesque sweetness of something long rotten. He pulled his face from the mud and spat viciously, gagging violently as his brain again tried to bring up the image of a soupy corpse lying beneath hi
s feet.
If not for the nauseating stench and the biting cold, these events might have been comical, like the antics of a children’s comedy. But not one of them felt like laughing. If the other side did not come into view soon, sheer exhaustion would drag them down with Albert’s imaginary corpses, and the only idea that Albert found more repulsive than walking on them was becoming one of them.
But they would not end up that way. At last, as their legs and backs began to ache from the exertion of pushing through the thick muck, it began to recede. It slid back down their chests and bellies and thighs, but left a thick skin upon their bodies so that they resembled black, lumbering beasts trudging through the darkness.
They could no longer see the walls on either side of them. The room had widened into an immense cavern. Ahead of them and slightly to the right, a doorway appeared in a great wall of smooth, clean stone. A large, stone archway surrounded the door, intricately carved with images they could not yet make out.
The four of them stepped out of the mud, wiping at the stinking mess with their filthy hands, unable to clear it all away but trying nonetheless.
“Any chance there’s a shower down here?” Nicole asked through chattering teeth. She wiped the majority of the mud from her arms, grimacing at the nauseating stench that now wafted from her entire body. She shook the mud from her slender fingers, splattering the clean wall and floor with globs of wet, black goo, and then turned and spat onto the floor.
Brandy groaned. “I’ll never feel clean again.” She raked the goop from her chest and belly and flung it to the floor. Then, in an uncharacteristically unladylike display, she bent and clawed the disgusting muck from between her legs. She hated the feel of it on her bare skin. She wanted it off of her and she wasn’t concerned with being dainty about it.