“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.
Chapter 16
The passage was about eight feet tall by five feet in width when they entered, but as they walked, the ceiling sloped gradually downward and the walls slowly closed, narrowing until they could no longer walk fully upright or side-by-side.
Before the tunnel grew too small, Albert stopped and peered back the way they’d come, a little unnerved by the claustrophobic position they were finding themselves in.
“Are we going the right way?” Brandy asked, noticing his hesitance.
Albert shook his head. “We have to be,” he replied. “There was a bird.”
Brandy giggled a little at how absurd that sounded.
“It was the only clue we had.”
“I know.”
“We have to be going the right way. Do you want to lead or follow?”
Brandy looked back the way they’d come, and then up ahead at where they were going. On one hand there was the fear of what may lie ahead, the anxious unknowing, the danger, but on the other hand there was the question of what may be behind them, the thought that she may be vulnerable. “How narrow do you think it’ll get?”
“Hard to say. We may have to crawl soon.”
She took a deep breath and decided: “I’ll go first.” It was the thought of being blind on two sides, unable to either turn around or see past Albert that ultimately decided it for her. She squeezed past him and pushed forward.
Albert removed the backpack and followed.
As the walls closed in around her, forcing her to duck lower and lower, Brandy’s anxiety grew. She was not usually claustrophobic, but she was feeling that suffocating feeling now. What if it grew too narrow to fit through? What if they became stuck down here, perhaps miles underground, in a place no one else on earth even knew existed? She did not like the thought of the irony of narrowly surviving that pit of spikes only to slowly die of thirst wedged between these walls. She shook away the thought, and asked Albert where he thought the other two tunnels led.
“I don’t know. If I had to guess I’d say probably down to that maze. That seemed like a good place for getting rid of trespassers.”
“Do you think every choice we didn’t make was a trap?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Whoever took our clothes could have gone a different way. Maybe we got the hard road and he’s taking the easy one.”
“I don’t like not knowing who’s in here with us.”
“I don’t either.”
The ceiling had finally descended too low for them to walk and they dropped to their hands and knees. Albert had to place his backpack on the floor beneath him and drag it along between his hands. This was awkward, but he managed to keep up.
Ahead of them, the tunnel made a sharp right turn and then continued down the ever-shrinking corridor. It was about now, as they made this tight turn, that Albert became distracted by the view. He was staying close behind Brandy, not wanting to be left behind, and he found himself staring at her round buttocks and the titillating slit of her vagina that her crawling posture revealed. Even without a flashlight he could see that part of her perfectly in the backlight. The muscles of her thighs pumped solidly as she crawled, stretching and contracting in a motion that was incredibly erotic. The sight sent a knot into his stomach and he forced his eyes back down to the floor. He felt guilty looking at her that way. It was ungentlemanly as all hell, but it was also a damn pleasant distraction from his fear of this labyrinth.
The walls and ceiling closed in around them until they had to give up crawling on hands and knees to continue on their bellies, and Albert’s view of Brandy was thankfully replaced by a much less interesting view of his backpack as he shoved it forward ahead of him.
“I see the end of the tunnel,” Brandy reported. They were sweet words to Albert. “Only a little farther.”
“Thank God,” Albert sighed. “I’m starting to get claustrophobic.”
“Me too.”
The last few feet were a squeeze, but they managed to make it through without getting stuck. The only truly difficult part was exiting the tunnel itself. The floor of the next room was several feet lower than the floor of the tunnel. Brandy slithered from a hole much smaller than the one they entered, inching her way out until she could plant her hands on the cold floor and ease herself down. It was now that she wished that she had opted to go second so that Albert could have given her a hand, but she couldn’t change that now.
Albert pushed his backpack through the hole after her and immediately began to pull himself free. Claustrophobia had begun to get the best of him and he wanted out as quickly as possible.
Brandy grabbed the backpack as she stood and tried to give him a hand, but he was on the floor before she could get a grip on him. She heard something strike the floor way too hard—his elbow, she thought—but he did not seem to notice. He was already studying this newest chamber.
This room was round, its diameter at least sixty feet. A walkway about ten feet wide circled the room, as did dozens of tunnel entrances identical to the one they just exited. In the center of the room, a steep, spiraling staircase sank down into the darkness below and at the top of these steps stood a lone sentinel statue. It was standing upright and stiff, with its feet together, facing the top of the staircase. Its right hand was at its side, but the left was raised toward the steps, its grotesquely long index finger extended.