Текст книги "The box"

Автор книги: Brian Harmon

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

He could hear Brandy gasping and spitting behind him. It was hard to swim in water this cold. The shivering interfered with breathing, making each breath a struggle and therefore every stroke more laborious than the last.

Suddenly the flashlight fell dark and Albert’s panic was matched only by Brandy’s terrified shriek. She gave it a violent shake and light again flooded the passage.

“It’s okay,” he assured her, but he knew the water wasn’t good for the batteries. A battery-powered flashlight could shine for hours underwater, the charge merely spent faster, but it could possibly cause further blackouts like the one they just experienced, and they needed the light in this place.

It occurred to Albert that the ceiling was again retreating from their heads, and when he tried to touch bottom he found that he could. “Almost there,” he told her. “It’s getting shallower.”

Brandy did not respond.

As the water withdrew from around their necks and past their shoulders to their chests, the air became like snow, chilling their dripping bodies until they were nearly numb with cold. As it sank down his thighs and walking became easier, Albert pulled Brandy forward and walked behind her, trying his best to warm her by rubbing her shoulders, knowing he was probably doing little to help, but trying anyway.

“Oh God,” Brandy stuttered as she stepped onto dry land, her arms wrapped around herself in a fierce hug, clutching the flashlight so tightly that her knuckles had gone white. “So cold.”

Albert dropped the backpack and pulled her into his arms. Her skin was icy to the touch and he worried for her health. He did not know how close they were to hypothermia, and he’d already done enough to the poor girl just by bringing her to this twisted place.

“Freezing!”

“I know.” He looked back at the water they’d just crossed, back into the darkness that shrouded the dangers beyond. The cold was bad, but he had a feeling it was far from the worst thing in these tunnels.

Chapter 12

“I’m sorry about your stuff.”

Brandy shook her head. “Not your fault.” She had dumped most of the contents of her purse onto the stone floor and was picking through them. Her cigarettes and lighter were both ruined, as was a small collection of gum, cough drops and breath mints. Much of her makeup was also among the casualties. But the worst was her cell phone, which was still on, was still glowing, but would probably be ruined long before it could dry. She shook some of the water off it and then turned it off. There was nothing she could do now.

“Do you have insurance on it?”

Brandy nodded. Thankfully she’d decided to pay the extra couple of dollars a month for the protection plan just for such an emergency, but it was still a pain. She gathered her belongings back into her purse, salvageable and ruined alike, and began to rub her hands over her arms and shoulders. The chill was lessening, but it would not go away completely. The shivers remained, like unending aftershocks in the wake of a great earthquake. She was beginning to think she might never be warm again.

Albert closed and locked the box and put it back into his backpack. Its contents had remained dry throughout their frigid swim. “We should probably keep moving.” They had been sitting there for almost fifteen minutes now, warming up as well as they could and listening for telltale splashes that would announce the approach of their mysterious pursuer. “It’ll help us to stay warm if nothing else.”

He stood up and shouldered his backpack. He hissed at the icy feel of its wet fabric against his naked back. Brandy stared up at him, her lovely eyes swimming over his naked body. She looked him up and down, actually looking at him for the first time since he lost his clothes, and she did not care that he saw her looking at him. Her eyes ultimately fell upon his privates. He was of a modest, but not unpleasing size, not big enough to have hurt her in the sex room, thankfully, but certainly large enough. She saw that he was circumcised, and that he had shriveled in the cold. She wondered what it would look like if he were hot instead of cold, and what it would look like fully erect. In the insane lust of the sex room, she had not actually seen him. In fact, she barely remembered any details at all. It was nothing more than a blur of insane and insatiable desire.

Albert felt uncomfortable. He watched her as she stared at him, her expression nearly empty, as though she were staring at some boring piece of art rather than at his personal anatomy. He wanted to turn away, to start walking up the slope and toward the unknown that lay ahead, just to get away from those eyes, but he could not. He was easily as fascinated by her looking at him as he was embarrassed by it. He wondered what she was thinking. With all that had happened down here, he couldn’t imagine what she must be feeling. He could barely comprehend all the things he was feeling.

The truth of the matter was that she was hardly thinking anything at all. Her head still hurt. Her shivering had only worsened the throbbing pain that she awoke with in the sex room. More than anything she wanted to go home, to forget this hateful place and move on with her life. But at the center of all this was Albert, and she still did not know what to think of him. Somewhere deep down, she believed—or maybe just wanted to believe—that he was as much a victim of that horrible room as she was, but she still didn’t know him.

At last she shifted her eyes to his, her face still empty of any perceptible emotion, and nodded. She was ready. She stood up and slid the strap of her purse over her head and arm, still shivering.

They stood for a moment, looking at each other with their teeth chattering and their skin covered with gooseflesh. Albert wanted to speak, but all of the words that came to him were inadequate. He turned instead and looked into the tunnel ahead of them. Their destination waited up there somewhere, undiscovered, unknown. He was afraid of what was ahead. He was afraid of what was behind. He was afraid to stay where they were. Yet he was intrigued. He was fascinated by what frightened him, as all people are to some small extent. All the answers lay there in that mysterious darkness, all the answers to all his questions. Surely, they must be there. He was afraid, he was unsure, he was cold, but he needed to move on. The box. The statues. This whole unearthly labyrinth. He wanted to know. But then again, who said there was a choice? There was no turning back now. There was no way out but in.

Brandy took his hand and squeezed it. Another unspoken moment passed between them, and then they began to walk, leaving the cold pool of water and the mysteries before it behind. They moved slowly, their muscles stiff from the cold, shivering and anxious, toward dangers much worse than hypothermia.

Chapter 13

Albert expected to see another statue waiting where this tunnel ended, but there was none. Instead, the tunnel made an abrupt, six-foot drop. It was almost identical to those in the first room, from which a stone finger helped him to choose. But this time there was only one choice. As he peered into the darkness below, he wondered what the purpose to such a drop might be. It seemed inconvenient, possibly even problematic, yet pointless. He remembered the two in the first room and again wondered what would have awaited them in the other tunnel.

“What’s wrong?” Brandy had seen the concern upon his face, had recognized it for the same expression he’d worn several times before, including when he saw the still surface of the water and realized that their pursuer was still behind them.

“Nothing. Just wondering.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve noticed about you it’s that you don’t ‘just wonder.’”

Albert looked at her, impressed, but trapped. “I don’t know. Just something odd about this drop-off.”

She peered down into it. Now she was concerned, too.

“I’ll go first. You stay back a little, okay?”

“Is it safe?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I’m a little on edge.” He bent down, planted his hand on the floor for support and dropped into the lower passage.

“Here.” Brandy knelt and held the flashlight out for him to take.

“You sure?”

She nodded.

He took the flashlight and turned back to the tunnel ahead. It was only about five feet tall, forcing him to duck down and walk with his back hunched. He took several steps forward and then stopped as his light fell on something that was lying on the floor, next to the wall.

Behind him, Brandy dropped down to follow him. “Wait up,” he warned.

“What’s wrong?”

Albert probed the tunnel with the flashlight, washing the walls, ceiling and floor with light, as far as it would reach, looking for something unusual, some crack or hole or crevice that might indicate some sort of trap.

Brandy looked past him to the thing on the floor. “What is it?” she asked again.

When he could find no signs of danger, he turned the light back to the small object on the floor. It was dingy white, about two inches in length. A second, smaller shard of the same material was lying next to it.

“Bone.”

Brandy was silent for a moment, considering, as did he, the meaning of such a find. “Is it human?”

“I don’t know.”

The pieces were too big to belong to a rat, but they were only fragments. It could have been human or it could have been from a dog or a cat or a dinosaur for all he knew. In a dry tunnel like this, he didn’t know how long bone fragments could last before turning to dust. And if the two of them could make it this far, any number of creatures could have done the same over the years.

Albert started forward again, sweeping the floor with his light. He felt like a soldier who has just realized that he is standing in a minefield.

“Be careful,” Brandy begged him. She followed slowly, keeping some distance, but not too much. To stay behind was to be swallowed in darkness and left alone.

The tunnel was approximately forty feet in length. Along the way, Albert spied several more small bone fragments, all of them swept up against the wall like the dust that gathers around the baseboards where a vacuum cleaner doesn’t quite reach. The two of them made their way to the end, stepping gingerly, holding their breath, hoping like hell that their next step did not bring death swooping out of the darkness. But death did not come. Death in this place was not so obvious.

They found themselves in a round room, standing at the mouth of one of five tunnels that led in five different directions. There were more bones here, all of them shattered fragments impossible to identify, and all of them shoved up against a surface somewhere.

Another statue stood in the center of this room, this one of five faceless sentinels. All of them were bloody and dying, with gory, ragged holes torn into their chests, backs and stomachs. One had bloody stumps for hands and one was clamoring for safety on a shredded foot. They were each reaching desperately toward one of the five tunnels.

All of these sentinels they’d encountered seemed to hold some sort of message, each one vague, but this one was obvious to Albert, and he did not need the crushed and shattered bones that littered this room to illustrate it.

“What is this place?” Brandy was gazing around at the bones and the statues, her heart pounding. She was still cold, still shivering, but she no longer noticed. There was a hot fear rising from somewhere deep inside her, and it was far more commanding than the cold.

Albert stared at the statue. “That last statue,” he said, explaining as much to himself as to her. “It represented faith, sacrifice, that sort of thing. We had no choice but to go on. Something was behind us, but imagine if there hadn’t been. To get this far we would’ve had to have faith in where we were going, in the box and all the things in it. It makes sense, really. Someone else would have turned back, tried to find another way, probably would have gotten killed somewhere along the way. We had to keep going to get this far.”

Brandy nodded. She understood. “And this thing?”

Albert looked at the statue, not liking it for more than one reason. “Decisions. Deadly decisions.”

“Oh good.”

Albert stepped closer to the statue. The message was bad, but that was not all. He looked down at the bones at his feet, then bent and looked closer. Deep groves were carved into them, as though they’d been slashed repeatedly with a knife. As he looked closer he realized that many of them were not just broken, but cut. He stood up and looked at the statue again. It looked more real than the others, more physical somehow, and he quickly realized why. With the exception of the broken-fingered one in the first room, all the other statues were perfect, carved immaculately from stone, without a single flaw. These sentinels were scarred, and not merely by the will of the artist. Two of them were missing fingers not by design. One foot was broken off and was lying against the wall, looking morbid even in stone. They were scratched and chipped all over, as though someone had been hacking at them with a hatchet. He looked at the floor and found that it, too, was covered with faint scratches.

“So which way do we go?”

Albert lifted his eyes to the statue again. That was easy. He lifted his hand and pointed at a piece of gray cloth that hung from a sentinel’s outstretched hand.

“What is that? A coat?”

Albert didn’t know. It was heavy cotton, badly torn and stained. He unwound it from the statue’s hand and held it before him.

“Looks kind of like part of an old Civil War jacket, doesn’t it?” Brandy observed.

“Not sure,” Albert replied. “Could be. Whatever it is, it’s pointing the way.”

Brandy leaned in to take a closer look. “How can you be sure?”

“The buttons.”

And then she understood. The buttons on the fabric were simple brass with no markings, exactly like the one they’d found in the box. A closer look revealed that it was, in fact, missing one.

Albert didn’t need to open the box and retrieve the button. He was certain this was their clue. He studied the garment for a moment longer, considering it. It didn’t have any distinguishing designs, but only a small amount of it remained. Could it actually be a piece of a Civil War uniform? It seemed unlikely, but then again, after what he experienced in the sex room, “unlikely” had apparently taken the night off. Perhaps a unit was sent down here all those years ago to sweep the tunnels for enemy troops or supplies.

But more than likely, even if this was a part of a Civil War uniform, which was by no means a proven fact, it could have been worn down here by anyone in the many years after the war. Perhaps it was an old hand-me-down that kept someone warm in the winter months. Hundreds of scenarios could have brought this particular piece of fabric down here.

He reached up and hung it again on the statue’s hand, wrapping it around the wrist to keep it secure, just as he’d found it.

“You’re not taking it with us?”

“No. I think we should leave it here. Maybe it’ll help us find our way back out if we need it. Come on.”

This next passage was easily twice as long as the one that brought them to the round room. And they had walked a little more than half the distance of the tunnel when a noise stopped them cold.

It was soft, distant, sort of like a wheel slowly rolling over dry leaves, a kind of crackling sound. It came from ahead of them and grew steadily louder, becoming more of a buzzing sound.

Brandy pressed her naked body against Albert. Neither of them spoke. This was the first noise they’d heard all night, with the exception of Albert’s paint can trap, and the sudden manifestation of this unidentifiable noise was, if possible, even more frightening than the noise itself.

They watched, their eyes boring into the darkness, hunched over in the short tunnel, holding their breath and wishing their hearts would not beat so loudly, waiting for the source of the noise to appear. But as it grew closer, they realized that the noise came not from straight ahead, but from the right, on the other side of the wall. It grew until it was nearly beside them, a shuffling, clicking sort of noise that Albert could not place at all, and then it began to grow fainter, as though whatever it was had turned a corner and was now moving away from them. When it died away completely, the two of them let out the breaths they’d been holding and looked at each other.

“What was that?” Brandy did not dare to raise her voice above a whisper.

Albert shook his head. “I don’t think I want to know.”

“Where did it go?”

“Another tunnel somewhere. There must be miles of them.”

“What if it’s in the same tunnel as us? Only farther up?”

“Let’s not think about that.” He took her hand and led her forward, more quickly this time. He could not get the wounded statues off his mind, those deep gouges cut into solid stone. What could have made scratches like that?

A wall appeared out of the darkness ahead of them, six feet high, to the floor of another tunnel. It was identical to the place that had awaited them at the end of the flooded tunnel, but leading up instead of down.

Albert grasped the ledge and lifted himself up into the upper tunnel. It wasn’t easy. He had to get a jump on it. For someone who didn’t have the strength to lift their own body, this could prove a difficult, if not impossible, obstacle. He doubted if someone overweight or elderly would be able to manage it. But then again, perhaps they wouldn’t have gotten this far to begin with.

Once he had his legs beneath him, he turned and took Brandy’s hands, helping her up.

This tunnel was also too short to stand fully erect, so they again stood slightly hunched as they gazed into the darkness ahead. Albert looked down at the floor and noticed that there were no scratches in the stone up here. As he started forward again, he wondered why.

Chapter 14

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.