The Box (15 page)
Panic welled up within him. He did not know the way out. He had a sick feeling he was only going in circles, that the two of them would be trapped in this room for hours, unable to find their way either forward or backward.
He wondered if his heart could actually last that long.
“Are we out yet?”
“I can’t find the way out.”
“What do we do?” She spoke in great, wet sobs.
“Just keep your eyes shut. Nothing can hurt you here. I’ll get us out.”
“Hurry. Please.”
Albert knew there was only one way out, and he knew that way might ruin him, turning his brain to mush, rendering him little more than a drooling shell. The terrors in here were never meant to be looked upon. But there was Brandy to think about. Even if it killed him, he had to look. He had to find the door.
He steeled himself and took several deep, calming breaths. He tried to find reason in the madness, some ray of hope, and found one in remembering the sex room. Those statues did not take effect at first. They had time to study the statues, to examine them for what they were before their libidos went into overdrive. He took one more deep breath and, against his every instinct, he opened his eyes.
The door was in front of him, slightly to his right. It was only five or six steps away. But between it and him stood a great, twisted shape that sent a jolt of utter horror straight through his very soul.
It was facing the other way, toward the door, poised to greet anyone coming in. Albert was staring at the twisted, boiling flesh of its back, unable to see its face, and still it terrified him. He might has well have opened his eyes and gazed upon the real thing as it stumbled toward him, inches from rending the flesh from his face.
He squeezed his eyes shut again, but it was too late. His mind was filled with horrors that he could not unsee. It was as if he actually lived through the terrors this statue depicted. The visions in his head (Dead! They’re all dead!) were as vivid as his own memories. He shuddered with fright, fighting to keep his grip on Brandy, trying to keep his own legs from collapsing beneath him. How was this happening? How did these horrible images (So many of them!) get into his head? It couldn’t be real. It had to be (They won’t die!) some kind of hallucination.
Somehow, he managed to take a step forward, and then another. His feet felt numb. He could not feel the floor beneath him anymore. His knees were shaking. He opened his eyes again and tried to stare only at the doorway. That was his only goal. He just needed to reach the doorway. If he could just get Brandy that far, then even if he dropped dead of fright, at least she’d have a chance at getting home.
His stomach boiled with fear. His head pounded. He walked forward, unable to completely ignore the things around him. Even from the corners of his eyes he saw them, those terrible images of death and blood and creatures from a past he was never meant to know.
He already knew that these things would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
Albert emerged from the door of the fear room, stepping over the stone tongue and teeth of the woman whose horrible fate he’d almost shared. Brandy’s frail, trembling body still cradled in his arms, he walked shivering away from the mysteries that lay beyond.
They had forfeited.
Game over.
Albert did not stop when he stepped out of the fear room. He walked on, Brandy’s trembling body still held tightly against him, the flashlight still pressed between them. “It’s okay,” he told her. “We’re out. We’re okay.” He kept telling her this, kept assuring her, but he felt like a liar. It
was
okay. They
were
out. But he did not yet know if
he
would ever be okay again. Images haunted his mind. His head ached. His back ached the way it did when one shivered too hard for too long. His very lungs seemed to ache with fright.
There were things in his thoughts now, shadowy things, like dark memories struggling to surface. He tried to stare forward, tried to look only where he was going, trying to suppress the urge to shriek in utter terror.
The fear did not begin to subside until after he passed the last of the sentinels and entered the passage that led to the next room. It was then that he finally looked down at Brandy and found that she was staring up at him, her blue eyes shadowy in the darkness, but still as soft and brilliant as ever. The expression on her face was impossible to read. It could have been relief, it could have been gratitude, it could have been love or it could have been nothing at all. She made no effort to be put down, and he made no effort to put her down. He walked on through the huge and unsettlingly empty room to the spiraling staircase from which they’d descended, cradling her in his arms, liking the way she felt, letting her body’s weight and softness and warmth occupy his mind so that the terrors could not grow. He climbed seven of the steep steps before finally stopping and lowering her gently onto them, as though unwilling to set her on the same floor as those terrible statues.
For a moment he stood staring at her. She lay before him, staring back at him, her hands clamped around the flashlight at her bosom, one leg dangling off the edge of the staircase, the other bent slightly, her foot resting on the step below her. Her hair was still kinky from their earlier swim and her skin was pocked with gooseflesh. He could see the slit of her sex between her parted thighs, uncovered, unhidden, but he felt not a trace of the sex room’s arousal at the sight. He saw only her beauty, her anguish, her need. He needed to take care of her. She depended on him, just as he depended on her. Without each other they neither one would make it back to the surface. They were right to turn around. The answers weren’t worth it. They didn’t matter. All that mattered was Brandy. All that mattered was Albert. The two of them were the only things down here that mattered at all and he intended to get them both safely home.
He bent and took her hands, wrapping them in his so that she did not have to release the flashlight she was still clutching. Her cheeks were still wet with the tears she’d cried in the fear room, but she was not crying now.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head. “Don’t be.” He smiled the best smile he could manage to reassure her, and it touched his heart when she gave him a little smile back. “Let’s get you home.”
As she let him help her to her feet, she happened to glimpse the blood on his knee. “You’re hurt…”
Albert looked down at his leg. He’d hardly realized. “I bumped into that statue that cut you.”
Brandy looked down at her own leg. Just above her right knee, on the outer thigh, there were three small cuts. The top one had bled a small trail down over the lower two, but those had just barely beaded with blood. The cuts on Albert’s left knee, however, were considerably deeper. A trail of blood ran all the way down to his ankle.
“I’m okay,” he assured her. “It’s not bleeding anymore.”
But she wasn’t entirely convinced. Her cuts had stung. They
still
stung, now that she thought about it. No matter what he said, his
had
to be hurting him.
“Let’s go home.”
She looked down at him from the upper step, her blue eyes soft and caring. “But what about the answers you were looking for?”
Albert smiled. “Fuck it.”
Brandy returned the smile. “Yeah. Fuck it.”
As they climbed, Albert thought about the room they turned away from, that mysterious lair of terror. What fantastic things could lie beyond such a border? Treasure? Maybe, but he doubted it. Besides, more important to him than treasure was
discovery
; the discovery of a secret truth that he felt must lie waiting to be found. The truth of the box alone was worth the adventure. Why? Who? He yearned to know these things, but not at any cost. Not at the cost of Brandy Rudman. Not at the cost of his own sanity. He stared at her naked bottom as they climbed, studied the rhythmic pumping of her buttocks and thighs, and could not help but sigh at the thought of returning this beauty to the surface, where he would have to share her with the rest of the world.
Naturally the trip up the steps was much slower than the trip down, and a deep silence fell between them as they climbed.
It was Brandy who broke this thoughtful silence with a question that surprised Albert: “Are you mad at me?”
“No. Of course not.”
“You were quiet.”
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“This place. And the box.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“You want to keep going.”
“Only part of me.”
Brandy was silent for a moment, thinking. Albert could hear her labored breathing, could see the small beads of sweat that were forming on her back.
Albert said, “The other part of me is scared as hell.”
She looked down at him, smiled, but said nothing. She was pleased that he was scared too. It made her feel better, but still she felt bad for turning back, for leaving this adventure behind. She felt ashamed of her fear, but she wanted badly to go home.
The two of them paused to rest as the top of the staircase finally came into view. They sat down on the stone steps and stared down into the empty darkness below without speaking. Somehow the moment seemed somber, as though they had before been three and had lost their companion into this spiraling abyss.
“My legs hurt,” Brandy complained, breaking the silence for the second time. She rubbed at her sore calf muscles. “So many steps.”
Albert put his hand on her thigh and gently rubbed it. His legs hurt, too, but he could go on. In fact, the pain was almost cleansing. It peeled away the fear, little by little.
She gazed at him, her eyes soft and pretty. “You’re so good to me down here.”
He shrugged, embarrassed. Of course he was nice to her. She deserved to be treated nicely. “It’s my fault you’re down here.”
“No it’s not.” She gazed back down into the hole, her expression thoughtful. “When we were in that room down there, did you see anything?”
Albert nodded. “Yeah. I did.”
“Did you see those statues?”
“Some of them.”
“When I saw them, I felt like I knew what I was seeing, like I’d seen it somewhere before, only in real life, not in stone.”
“I know.”
“What does it mean?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it just means that whoever carved them is damn good. Or maybe there’s something a lot deeper to it than we ever expected.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe those images were real. Somewhere, sometime, maybe thousands or millions of years ago, those things might have actually happened. If so, maybe we still remember. All of us. The way you sometimes remember old movies you forgot you ever watched. Somebody mentions a scene and it’s just there, a memory you didn’t even know you had, locked away in your brain somewhere for years and years. Maybe this is like that. A forgotten memory, passed down in our blood, generation after generation.”
“That’s really creepy.”
“Yeah.”
“If that was true, then what is this place?”
Albert shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it’s the oldest place on earth. Maybe where it all began. The lost resting place of the primordial ooze from which all humanity crawled once upon a time.”
“Right here under Briar Hills?”
“Maybe. Or maybe under some farmer’s field ten miles from Briar Hills. This place is enormous.”
Brandy shivered. “I don’t think I want to think about that.”
“Or it could all be some kind of complex hallucination, some kind of subliminal projection. Either way, that’s a very bad place.” That thing by the door came back to him, a tall, twisted shape, a grotesque perversion of nature with awful, diseased flesh and gnarled limbs. The very thought made his stomach lurch with fright.
Brandy shuddered as she remembered the tortured woman who forever struggled for her life in the front of the second chamber. She forced the thought away and stood up.
Albert stood up too, not saying another word. He followed her up the last of the stairs, unable to keep from wondering what lay beyond that terrible fear room.
Brandy shined the flashlight into the hole she’d marked in the room atop the staircase. It was clear as far as she could see. She turned and held the flashlight out to Albert. “I went first last time,” she said.
“Sounds fair.” He removed the backpack and shoved it in ahead of him. He then took the flashlight from Brandy’s hand and squeezed into the opening. “Stay close, okay?”
“Don’t worry about that.”
The two of them crawled on their bellies along the narrowest stretch of the passage and then rose to their hands and knees when it was high enough. Albert remembered the view he’d enjoyed of Brandy when they first came through this tunnel and found himself embarrassed to think that he was now showing his to her in the same fashion. He supposed it was fitting. Tit for tat, after all.
“Albert?” Brandy’s voice was soft behind him, like the voice of a little girl.
“Yes?”
For a moment she didn’t speak, then, as though forcing the words to come, she said the unthinkable: “What if…whoever brought us down here… What if he doesn’t want us to leave?”
Albert did not stop. He crawled forward, his kneecaps striking the hard stone beneath him over and over again. He hadn’t even considered such a thing. He tried to think of something, tried to come up with some answer, but he couldn’t. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”
“Do you think he can hurt us?”
Probably, was the answer that came to mind. After all, that person—assuming it was a person at all—must have had some reason for wanting them down here. There was a very good chance that their mystery host would not want them going back to Briar Hills and telling everybody what was down here.
“I don’t know,” he answered after a moment, unable to lie. “But after all this I’m not going down without a fight.”
Brandy fell silent and Albert found himself wondering what she was thinking.
Finally, the ceiling rose high enough for them to stand and soon they were walking again. Ahead of them lay the bridge and the maze. Beyond that was the empty room that bothered Albert so much on their way in. And just past that lay the spike pit and then the hate room.
Albert didn’t want to think about the hate room. Theoretically, they should be able to pass back through it as easily as they did the first time. However, the same strategy did not work in the fear room. What if Brandy’s eyes were adjusting to the surroundings or something? What if it affected her through her poor vision? Would they be safe?
They stepped out of the shrinking passage and onto the bridge. Immediately, they both took a longing look at their hanging undergarments. Neither of them had forgotten that they failed to retrieve any of their clothes. Even if they did make it back to the service tunnel entrance, they were still stark naked.
Albert pulled his eyes away and continued on. Hopefully, whoever stole their clothes left the rest of them somewhere on the other side of the sex room. He didn’t want to think about having to streak across campus. He lived in a dorm, for God’s sake. Perhaps at this hour everyone would be asleep, but that didn’t change the fact that his keys were still in his jeans pocket. He’d have to wake someone up to let him into the building.
He pushed these thoughts from his head as he hurried across the bridge. There was no need to upset himself just yet. Right now they were still far from civilization. He needed to save his concerns for more important things, like those things below them in the maze.
He stopped suddenly and listened.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t want to say what was wrong. He hoped he was mistaken. He hurried to the side of the bridge and shined his flashlight down onto the maze.
He could still hear something moving around beneath them, making that strange ticking noise. Farther out, near their clothes, he could hear another one making that strange buzzing-clattering noise that he still couldn’t identify.
“What’s wrong?” Brandy asked again. The alarm in her voice was clear.
“Nothing,” replied Albert. “Just my imagination.” But it wasn’t his imagination. Yes, there were creatures down there, but not as many as there were before. Not nearly as many. And if they weren’t down there, then where were they?
“Albert?”
“Come on.” He took her by the wrist and led her on to the next passageway.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing.” He didn’t want to alarm her. Perhaps it was nothing. Perhaps some of them simply grew bored of the socks and the briefs and the bra and the panties and curled up to sleep in some crevice somewhere. Perhaps they wandered off to some deeper, more interesting part of the maze. But the very thought of some of those things being out there somewhere made him nervous. Right now, he wanted only to be back above ground, safely away from all these horrors.
The empty room was just as empty as the first time they passed through it. There was nothing there, but Albert still felt that gnawing sensation that he was missing something, perhaps something very important.
He paused before entering the next passage and shined the flashlight up at the high ceiling. Nothing. At least nothing he could see.
“Albert, you’re scaring me.”
He turned and looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“What is it? Tell me.”
He looked up at the ceiling again, still paranoid. “I think I’m just a little spooked by the fear room,” he explained at last, and realized that it was probably the truth. “I’m nervous.”
She stared at him with those soft blue eyes, piercing him with a gaze that was almost paralyzing.
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“I’m trusting you.”
Struck from his thoughts, he stared back at her. “You can,” he said after a moment. “I promise.”
“Okay.” After another moment, she turned and shifted her gaze into the next room. Those ominous spikes seemed to be waiting for her. “How do we get past this?”
Albert turned and looked ahead. She meant, of course, the hate room. “The same way we got through it the first time,” he replied. He handed her back the flashlight.
“Do you think we can?”
“We should be able to.”
She looked uncertain. “I don’t think I can.”
“Of course you can. That last room was fear. You were already afraid. That’s probably why it got to you.” He did not know if this was true or not, but it made a certain sort of sense, and he needed her to think positively. “This is different. This is hate. You aren’t capable of hating.”
“Yes I am.”
“Are you capable of hating
me
?”
She stared at him, her lips trembling with words that would not come. Of course she was not capable of hating him. Not after all they’d been through together. Not after he carried her out of the fear room.
“You can do it.”
“But what if I can’t? What if something happens?”
“What else can we do?”
Brandy nodded. He was right, of course. There was no other way back. If they couldn’t go this way they couldn’t. It was as simple as that. All they could do was try. “Okay,” she said at last.
She eased out onto the ledge, still keeping her back to the wall as though it were only inches wide. The thought of what would have happened to her if Albert hadn’t stopped her from stepping out of the hate room still haunted her thoughts and she felt as though just being near these spikes was tempting death.
When she reached the doorway to the hate room, she stopped and removed her glasses. Once they were tucked safely into her purse, she took Albert’s hand and led him inside. The same gray shapes greeted her and for a moment she felt as though she were back in the fear room, surrounded by terrors that pretended to be memories.
Immediately, she became certain that she was going to get turned around and walk right back into that horrible pit. She could almost feel those deadly spikes sliding through her tender body. But as she ventured deeper into the shadows, she discovered that Albert was right. This room was not nearly as frightening as the fear room. The shapes she saw were not familiar. They did not seem to mean anything.
She found this curious. Why should the sex room and the fear room have such profound effects on them while the hate room seemed to have no effect at all? If the fear room was capable of getting past her poor vision, why wasn’t this one? Perhaps Albert was right. Perhaps she was simply incapable of hating.
She sure hadn’t been incapable of fucking Albert, though.
She weaved through the statues, using these thoughts as a distraction. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m okay,” replied Albert. “You?”
“I’m fine. I don’t get it.”
“I don’t either. I guess fear is just more natural than hate.”
“And lust,” she reminded him.
“Yeah. I guess.”
The doorway materialized out of the gloom and Brandy felt an overwhelming sense of relief. She’d made it through. She stepped into the doorway and stopped. She could see the shape of the man’s mouth, the rows of teeth above and below, and she could feel the coarse texture of the tongue beneath her bare feet, but she dared not make any assumptions. For all she knew there could be two openings like this in the room. She did not want to find another pit of spikes.
With her glasses on, she was able to verify that she’d been correct. The angry sentinels stood waiting for them, the nearest pair about to collide just in front of her. “We’re out,” she reported. “Watch your step.”
“Great job.”
“Thank you. You were right.”
“I’m glad. Come on.”
They hurried on, past the many statues to the next passage. Albert felt an odd sort of disorientation as he watched the statues run backward to their posts against the walls and relax once more into their stiff sentinel positions. It was like watching a roughly drawn cartoon.
They made their way down the passageway to the drop-off they climbed on their way in. Albert paused atop it and gazed down. He’d forgotten about it. What was the purpose of such a design, he wondered. And more than that, what caused those strange scratches in the stone. He’d seen nothing like it anywhere else in this place.
“What’s wrong?”
Albert shook his head. “Just wondering about this.”
“I really hate it when you wonder about things.”
“Me too.” He dropped down off the ledge and then turned and helped Brandy down. There was no sense thinking too hard about it. This was their only way out.
They hurried through the tunnel to the round room and from there Brandy headed straight for the tunnel from which they’d originally come. She had taken several steps down it when she realized suddenly that she was alone.
Albert had stopped and was standing on the other side of the statue. He was gazing into the darkness of one of the other passages.
“Albert?”
“Shh…” He was standing with one ear cocked, listening. “You hear that?”
Brandy listened, her heart pounding with fright. At first she heard nothing but her own rapid pulse, then it touched her ears, a small tapping sound, like somebody walking in high heels, except it was too close together to be clicking heels. It was almost a scuttering.
Albert stepped closer to the corridor, trying to see the source of the noise, but the darkness was too thick.
“Albert, come back.” As she said this, she stepped closer to him and shined her light toward the passage into which he was trying to see. With this light, something appeared.
It was just ahead of him, lying on the floor. He stepped cautiously toward it and picked it up as a thousand alarms began to go off in his brain, a few at first, slowly, but picking up speed until his whole world was one huge air raid siren.
It was a small piece of torn and tattered white cotton. It was a piece of a sock.
The image that went through Albert’s mind was of their underwear and socks strung up in the maze below the stone bridge. One of Brandy’s socks had been missing from the assortment, probably fallen to the floor where those noisy creatures were. But if this was Brandy’s sock…
Somewhere up ahead, something in the darkness let out a huff of air and the rattling, shuffling, clattering sound they’d heard from that dark maze began to pour from the tunnel, this time louder and closer than ever.
“
Run
!” He turned and fled after Brandy—who needed no encouragement from him—around the statue and through the passage that would lead them home. Behind him, the noisy creature barreled after them.
Brandy reached the wall and grabbed onto the ledge, desperately trying to scramble up it and into the higher tunnel. Albert caught up with her and, grabbing her by the ankles, shoved her upwards and over the ledge. In the same motion, he grabbed the ledge and swung himself upward with strength and agility he did not know was left in him. Just below him, something large and violent slammed into the wall, narrowly missing his bare foot as he lifted himself out of its path.
A savage sound rose up to them, heard even over that terrible clattering noise, like something simultaneously beating itself against the wall and clawing at the stone.
