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.”