“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.
Chapter 15
“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.