The Box (12 page)
The next room was unnervingly familiar. It was about twenty feet wide and high, far too long to see across. Like in the last room of this size, statues stood against the wall on either side, faceless sentinels posing out a dire warning.
“Oh fuck no!” blurted Brandy.
Albert stared at the statues. He could see three pairs of them, and already he knew they were different from the others. They changed, like the ones prior to the sex room, but not in the same way. These did not grow more aroused. Their penises remained limp, but their hands changed, slowly lifting from their sides, their freakish fingers curling into fists.
They moved forward, watching with mounting horror as each new pair of sentinels appeared from the gloom, acting out their warning for what lay ahead. One by one, frame by frame, each sentinel curled his hands into fists and lifted them, their long biceps swelling, straining beneath flesh of stone. The veins in their wrists and forearms popped, practically pumping with the silent pulse of a pounding stone heart. They tilted back their heads in utter rage, a silent, faceless scream, a noiseless shriek, with the cords straining on their necks and their bodies seeming to ripple with uncontrollable anger. Then they stepped away from the wall. They actually ran at their opposites, motionless frames from a horribly realistic movie, the final pair frozen in mid-stride, hell bent with murderous rage, three more steps each from killing each other.
The face that waited on the far wall did not startle them, but only because they expected it. The expression that waited there, however, scared the hell out of them. This was a different face from that in the last chamber. This was the face of a man with blazing eyes, wild hair and a lush beard. Like the face that framed the door to the sex room, it was perfect in every detail, from the hair to the eyelashes to the spittle on his lips. He looked as though he could lash out and swallow them both.
“Fuck.”
Albert found Brandy’s choice of words perfectly appropriate.
“Well, my dear Rudman,” said Albert, doing a fairly lame Sherlock Holmes impression. “What do you surmise might happen if we enter this fellow’s oral cavity?”
“I’d say we’ll probably try and kill each other.”
“Not good.”
“No. How do we get through there?”
Albert thought for a moment, remembering the sex room and the things it made them do. They could not enter this room. If they did they’d kill each other. He couldn’t imagine how, but they would, whether they meant to or not. It’s what the statues told them, and so far they had not lied. “The sex room was filled with statues. It was like a big, three-dimensional porno. It got us all turned on and we couldn’t control ourselves.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to lie, I’ve seen pornography before. It really doesn’t have that effect on me.”
He stole a glance at her, wondering. He could not imagine her sitting down to watch porn. Although the idea of her doing so was strangely arousing. Or perhaps that was just the sex room. “Maybe there was something else,” he offered. “Pheromones, maybe, or something subliminal.”
“Maybe all of those things to work.”
“But it stopped when the lights went out,” he wondered.
“Maybe it takes all those things.”
“Yeah. Or maybe it’s all visual.” He looked at her, wondering. “Either way… When you take off your glasses, how well can you see?”
“Hardly at all. I have really bad eyes.”
Albert nodded. “Nearsighted?”
“Yes.”
“How far?”
“I don’t know. I can see stuff, it’s just all fuzzy.”
“How far away are things clear? Three or four feet?”
“More like one.”
“When I shined the light back in on you in the sex room, did you feel anything?”
“No. But I was scared.”
“Me too, but I could have come in and done it all again as soon as I looked in there.”
Brandy stared at him, shocked. She was unnerved by the fact that he felt that yearning while she was blind and scared. Could he have forced himself on her? Could he have attacked her right there and had his way with her? That would have been worse than the first time. That would have been
rape
, nothing more, nothing less.
Would someone else have done it?
“So if you take off your glasses and I close my eyes, do you think you could navigate us through this room without getting crazy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Seems logical. I guess.”
Albert looked at the man’s face, considering. “That might just work.” But there was something else. “The big question is, why have another one of these rooms? If we got through the other one, we’re bound to know how to get through this one.”
“Do you think there’s something else in there?”
“Something else, something different, I don’t know. I just think whoever built this place would be smarter than that.”
Brandy took off her glasses and slipped them into her purse. The world around her was reduced to blurry shapes and colors. And with the exception of Albert, all of those colors were gray. “Well, I guess we have no other choice.”
“Right.” He took her hand and squeezed it, a sort of mental fastening of the seatbelt. “I’ll keep my eyes closed. I’ll be relying on you. Try not to look at anything, even if you can’t see it very well.”
“Okay.”
Albert handed her the flashlight. “Be careful. Don’t hurt yourself. Go slow and easy.”
Brandy squeezed his hand in return, fastening her own mental seatbelt, and they began to walk. They stepped over the man’s lips and teeth, onto his tongue and ducked into the next room. Immediately the world in front of her was a jumbled maze of gray shadows and forms. Her heart was pounding. “Still have your eyes closed?”
“Yeah, but it’s tempting.”
“Don’t you dare!”
“Don’t worry. I just mean, think about it. In our society, sex is such a big deal. Nudity is taboo. Pornography is considered filthy. We teach our kids modesty and tell them not to look at the naked women on HBO. But what if you visited a society of people who don’t blush at the sight of naked bodies, who aren’t ashamed of being naked or seeing someone else naked? If people just walked around naked all the time, just sat and watched people having sex all the time, had sex whenever they wanted with whomever they wanted, there would be no fascination with it. People wouldn’t care. Just like seeing people kiss is no big deal to us. In a society where kissing was taboo there would be all sorts of fascination with it. So I can sort of understand that last room. I think that everybody is turned on by pornography to some small degree, even if they don’t want to admit it. Even if they’re more horrified and disgusted by it, they’re probably still just a little turned on by it, even if that only disgusts and horrifies them more. If you were bombarded with that, life-sized, three-dimensional and in your face, and probably combined with other stuff, maybe something subconscious, something subliminal, maybe, I can almost see how that would drive us into a fit of lust and make us lose control. But this room, I don’t understand. What could possibly drive us to hate? Especially if it’s merely by sight?”
“I’d say it’s probably best not to know.” She was using the flashlight to feel her way around one of the statues. Their progress was slow, but they were getting there, and so far she felt not a shred of hate, not for Albert or otherwise.
“Yeah, you’re right. The effects might be somewhat permanent.”
“What do you mean?”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Think about what we did back there. Just think about it a little. Are you at all turned on by that?”
Brandy blushed heavily in the darkness. She could feel the heat in her neck and face. Even so cold that she could not stop shivering, the feeling was awful. “No,” she said quickly. “It was scary.”
The tone of her voice told Albert he was treading on bad soil. “Oh. Okay. I could be wrong.”
The two of them made their way around another large statue. They were weaving around the room, probably taking the longest possible way through it. Shadows flowed in and out of the darkness, statues in odd poses, of various heights and widths. Occasionally, a hand or a foot would materialize out of the gloom and then disappear again, and once, a face emerged, the cruel, laughing visage of a man that nearly made her scream. The very sight of that face made something stir deep in her belly, something that was not quite hatred, but something close. Resentment, perhaps, or indignity.
She pushed forward, trying to forget the disturbing face, and continued on through the strange gallery of hateful stone. It seemed to her that there were more statues in this room than there were in the sex room.
“Yes.”
Albert almost opened his eyes, but was able to stop himself. “What?”
“Yes it turns me on. Really bad. But it scares me.”
Albert squeezed her hand reassuringly. “Me too.”
“Will we always feel like that?”
“Maybe. But if we’re lucky it’ll stop scaring us.”
“It’ll fade, too, right?”
“I’m sure it will. But whatever’s in this room. That’s a feeling we should never feel. Not even once. Sex can be a good thing, but hate never is.”
“Do you write poems?”
“No. Why?”
“You should. You’re very poetic.”
“Is that a good thing?”
“It’s a very good thing. It’s romantic.”
“Even in a hate room?”
“Yes.”
Brandy felt past some stone limbs to a square opening. “I think this is the door.”
“Good.”
She started to go forward, but Albert pulled her back.
“Wait.”
“What?”
“Don’t move. Keep your back to me, don’t look back, but put your glasses on and look ahead. If you see any statues, close your eyes right away and take your glasses back off.”
“Why?”
“Something just feels wrong about this.”
Brandy took her glasses from her purse and slid them on, then gazed through the opening and into the next room. There were no more statues. The hate room was behind them. But what she saw made her blood run cold. “Oh
god
!”
She stepped back, shoving her body against him, and he opened his eyes. Had he looked left or right he would have been face to face with the statues of the hate room, but he only looked forward. He could not take his eyes off what lay before them.
Just beyond the door, the floor dropped about ten feet into an open pit. Wicked spikes rose up from the bottom. It was a trap. Had he not stopped Brandy from going forward when he did, she would have stepped over the ledge and at the very best been speared through in a dozen places. He could not imagine her going in there and not puncturing something vital. Even if she survived the fall, it would only have been to suffer slowly until death caught up with her.
“Albert…”
“I know. It’s okay.”
This room of spikes was only about eight feet across, round, with a narrow ledge circling the left side, allowing access around to the next door, which was shorter than the one entering the room, no more than four feet tall.
“How did you know?”
“Like I said before, why have another room like this when, if you got past the first one, you probably knew the secret?”
“You just saved my life.”
“I nearly got you killed.”
She turned around and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him so hard it hurt, and then kissed him firmly on the cheek. “Don’t you dare say that!”
Albert held her, his heart pounding. Any other place, any other time, the feel of Brandy’s naked body pressed against his would have made everything else in the world seem like a distant and unreachable future. He could feel her breasts against him, the subtle poke of her erect nipples, even the soft tuft of her hair against his thigh, but he noticed none of these things. He hardly even registered the kiss. All that would occupy his mind was the stone skewers rising up from the floor of that pit.
“Oh god!” cried Brandy. The words came out in a great wet sob.
“It’s all right,” he assured her, but he could not stop staring at the spikes.
“Let’s keep moving.”
Brandy had been holding onto him for several minutes now, and she held him for a moment longer before moving. But she
did
begin moving, and Albert was impressed by her courage. She was scared as hell down here and had every right to be, but despite all that had happened, she just kept pushing on.
“Remember, don’t look back.”
She turned away and opened her eyes again. The sight of the spikes made her feel sick. The sex room was a terrible thing, an emotionally threatening trap, but this was just plain deadly. She could not help but imagine them piercing her skin, glancing off her bones, gouging her eyes, tearing her throat. The very thought made her nearly vomit with horror. How would she have gone in? Forward? Sprawled across them, the bloody tips protruding from her back in a dozen places, through her hands and thighs and head? Or would her bones have stopped her from going clear to the floor, leaving her hanging like a towel thrown over a rack to dry? Or would she have gone straight down, the spikes ramming through the arches of her bare feet, entering the meat of her calf or thighs and sliding mercilessly up the bones? Would it have killed her instantly, spearing her brain or her heart? Or would she have hung there, twitching and gagging while blood gushed from her mouth, the pain unbearable but unending? The scenarios would not end.
Had she taken just one more step…
Albert measured up the path around the spikes. The ledge was narrow, but it wouldn’t be a problem. It was designed to trip up someone stepping out of there in the dark. For someone who knew what they were doing, it was simply a matter of walking around it.
Brandy stepped out of the hate room, her thoughts still lingering on the death she’d narrowly avoided. With her back to the wall, taking no more chances than necessary with the deadly pit, she began to move around the narrow ledge, circling the left side of the room to the doorway on the other side, which was actually a short tunnel, about three feet long.
The next room was about twice as large as the pit room with an identical doorway on the other side and a tall ceiling. It was completely empty. Brandy looked at Albert and noticed the expression on his face, that same concerned look that said something was not right. Looking at the room, she understood why. Before now the only places without something in it, be it statues or a pit of spikes or a pool of water, were the corridors that led from one room to the next. So why leave
this
room empty?
“Another trap?”
Albert shook his head. “I don’t know.” He looked around the room, searching for something different, some stone out of place or unusual holes or slots, but that did not seem right either. The traps Indiana Jones faced in the Temple of Doom were extravagant, consisting of stone mechanics dating thousands of years in the past. He honestly did not expect to have arrows fly out at him or the walls to begin moving, but what else could a seemingly empty room contain? He steeled himself and stepped forward.
“Albert, no!”
“It’s okay. Just wait there.” He was scared. He was damn scared. With every step he expected to be impaled or crushed or worse. It was the same fear he’d felt before removing the bags from the praying statue’s hands. Back then he’d felt silly afterwards, wondering how he could expect such deadly consequences, but that was before he discovered what lay beyond the hate room. This place was getting more dangerous by the minute. But Brandy was the one who almost paid the price for pushing forward, and he would be damned if he was going to let her take any more chances.
No spikes impaled him. The ceiling did not come down on top of him. No fireball set him ablaze. The room was just a room and nothing more. Beyond it, the next passage was identical to the one that led back to the pit.
He paused in the middle of the room, gazing down the next corridor, wishing he’d taken the light from Brandy so that he could see how far the next tunnel went. It was now that he felt something, a paranoid sense that they were not alone in this small room. He lifted his gaze upward, into the darkness above him.
Brandy saw him look up and quickly shined the light up to the high ceiling.
There was nothing there. Not a thing.
Yet Albert would have sworn…
Nothing.
He turned and walked quickly back to where Brandy stood. Still waiting for the end to fall upon him from some unseen crevice, he took her hand and the two of them crossed the room and entered the next tunnel.
Albert looked back as they left the chamber behind. It wasn’t right. There was something terribly wrong about that room. He could feel it. Yet they passed through it without harm.
Perhaps he was only being paranoid.
As they approached the end of the corridor, they heard the same shuffling, clicking, crackling noise that frightened them in the earlier passage. The sound was more distant than before, but grew louder as they walked. It was enough to tear their thoughts from both the deadly spikes and the mysteriously empty room.
“Albert…”
“I know.” Albert squinted into the darkness ahead. Whatever that noise was, they were walking straight toward it.
When they reached the end of the tunnel and stepped out into the next chamber, neither of them were able to quite believe what greeted them. Stretched out before them was what appeared to be an enormous stone bridge, nearly thirty feet wide, vanishing into the darkness ahead. On each side ran a low wall, beyond which was nothing but darkness. And it was impossible to tell just how high up the ceiling was. The flashlight simply didn’t reach.
Without speaking, they turned and walked over to the edge of the bridge and peered over with the flashlight. Stretched out below them, as far as the light would reach, was an enormous stone maze.
“Wow,” exclaimed Albert. He could only see the tops of the walls, but that was enough to reveal that the passages were narrow. It was impossible to see a path through it from up here, much less from within those high walls.
It was from this maze that the strange noises came.
“I never would have imagined that something this big could be down here.” He looked up at the darkness above them. “How far underground are we?”
Brandy was staring down at the maze. She did not really care how far down they were. What she was concerned with was that noise. “What’s down there?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“I don’t know, but I hope it can’t climb. Come on.”
The two of them began to cross the bridge, but something far to their right caught Albert’s eye and he stopped.
“What is it?” Brandy stopped and followed his gaze. When she shined the flashlight at it, her stomach began to churn again. “Albert, those are our clothes!”
It wasn’t all their clothes, but it
was
their undergarments. An enormous pillar, at least as big around as a city water tower, stood just within the reach of the flashlight. Three white socks were hung on the side facing them. Above these, hanging side-by-side, were Albert’s white briefs and Brandy’s flowered white panties. Higher up hung Brandy’s bra. The last sock must have fallen into the shadows with the things that were making the noise.
“How do we get to them?” Brandy caught herself trying to cover her nakedness again. Apparently, just the sight of some of her clothing was enough to remind her that she was stark naked and her male companion could see her most private parts.
Albert shook his head. “I don’t think we do.”
There were things moving down there, unseen in the shadows. Albert could hear them prowling the narrow passageways in the dark. It was impossible to say how many there were.
“Why would somebody put them there?”
“Maybe to give those things our scent.”
Brandy glanced at him and then looked back at their unreachable undergarments. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Neither do I.” He also didn’t like how the clothes were hung as they would be wearing them if they were down there. It looked to him as though someone had tried to simulate their presence.
Scent doubles
, he thought, and shivered.
He took Brandy’s hand and led her across the bridge, trying not to look at the maze below. But he could not forget those undergarments. Why only those items? Why not use all their clothes?
Three passages awaited them, framed by four sentinels. All four were identical, feet together, hands at their sides. They were neither in motion nor amorous, but they were also not helping them.
“So which one do we take?” Brandy asked.
“I’m not sure.” He removed his backpack, knowing well where the answer would be if there was one.
The finger and the button had been used, and he doubted if they would come into play again, but he kept them just in case. This left only the knife blade, the watch and the feather. He removed these three items and examined each of them. But nothing about them gave him any clues.
He walked to the nearest passage and peered inside, looking for anything out of place. Brandy followed him, lending him light. “You figured all the others out. You can get this one.”
“I hope so.” He moved on to the second passage and then the third. Nothing.
Brandy turned her light to the statues, searching them for any slight difference. So far, they seemed to each have all their parts. None of them were missing a finger.
Albert shook his head. “So far they’ve been pretty easy clues. Whoever gave us that box wanted us to get this far, and I don’t see why we should stop here.” He gazed out at the darkness that loomed over the maze beyond the side of the bridge. Somewhere, one of the things began making its strange shuffling and clicking sound. There was also a sound like stone striking stone, over and over again, very rapidly.
He turned away from the maze and began examining the statue on the far left.
“Hey.” Brandy was standing on her toes beside the statue on the far right, shining her light up at the statue’s neck. “Look at this.”
Albert hurried to her side and stretched up on his own toes to see what she was looking at.
“See it? Something’s scratched into its neck.”
“Yeah, I do.” He grasped the statue’s arm and craned his neck to see. It looked as if someone had taken a sharp tool and etched something into the stone there, almost like a tattoo. “It looks like…”
Brandy lifted the light up as high as she could and focused it on the mark.
“It looks like a bird,” he decided at last. It was a crude image, but once he wrapped his head around it there was no denying. He could make out what was supposed to be wings and a beak.
“Bird,” Brandy repeated. “Bird feather!”
Albert nodded. “I think so. Good eyes. You rock.”
“Naturally.” She gave him a cool wink and he again felt a spark of arousal. Was that the sex room lingering in him? Or was it just him? At that moment, he could not say. She was proud of herself for finding one of the clues and for that moment she seemed more confident, more in control. And it looked damn good on her. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been crushing on her even before they entered the sex room. Maybe it was just his natural attraction to her. Or maybe the sex room simply amplified that.
“Must be the tunnel on the right then,” he surmised, suppressing his feelings. Walking around naked didn’t leave any room to be turned on, not when you were a man in flesh and blood. He almost envied the statues for that advantage.
“I guess so,” Brandy agreed.
Below them there was a violent outburst, a rapid clattering arose, as if a great many things were clashing together over and over again at high speeds. It sounded eerily like hundreds of blades beating together, as though there were an intense battle raging far below them without a sound but for the swords clanging upon one another.
“We should go,” Albert urged.
Brandy glanced one last time toward the sprawling maze and then followed him into the tunnel, leaving the noises for the darkness.
