“What’s wrong?”
She realized that she was standing motionless, completely distracted by those creepy thoughts. “Nothing,” she replied. But it wasn’t nothing. She started forward again, walking around the stone creature. She did not look at it again. She kept her eyes aimed firmly forward, yet it was still there, tempting her. She could see things in her mind, horrible things, things (screaming, terrible screaming) that could only be from her own imagination but somehow weren’t. These things were all real. She slipped around the statue, turned to avoid another one and was suddenly in a corner of stone. Blurred faces stared back at her, all of them screaming, some in terror, some in terrible glee, others in complete madness. Panic shot through her like an electric bolt.
“Albert!”
“I’m here.” He could feel her rapid breathing. He pulled her back against him and felt the hammering of her heart.
“The path is blocked!”
“It’s okay. Just backtrack a little.”
“I can’t!”
He let go of her hips and slipped his arms around her, hugging her. “They’re just stone. This room’s just an obstacle. We can get past it.”
Brandy shook her head. “I’m too scared.”
“It’s okay.”
“I can’t.”
He hugged her closer. “You’re braver than this. I know you are. You’re the bravest girl I’ve ever known. Look what you’ve already done. Don’t let some stupid statues get the better of you.” These were big words to speak for someone as scared as he was. He told her to go on, begged her to get a grip and keep moving, but his own brain was screaming at him to turn back. He could not see the statues at all, and still he was afraid. He could not imagine how terrified she must be, seeing all the things she saw, even with her eyes in her purse and the world a permanent cloud of haze. “I know you’re stronger than that,” he whispered into her ear.
Brandy sniffed back the tears that had formed in her eyes. The terror was intense, but Albert was right. They were just stone, and reason was reason. They could not hurt her. “Okay.”
Albert dropped his arms from around her and grasped her hips again, and then the two of them turned and backtracked.
The statues in the sex room were a jumbled mess, but it was a mess that was reasonably easy to navigate. The hate room was worse, but she had assumed it was because she was blind. Now she realized that the rooms were getting more complicated, each one designed to be more of a maze than the last. She wondered what would happen if they could not find their way back and quickly forced that thought away.
An odd form appeared ahead of her and to her right. It seemed human, but oddly stretched out of proportion. She stared at it for a moment before it occurred to her that this was one of the sentinels. He stood amid shorter statues, straight and tall, his arms outstretched over the heads of those formless things around him.
She went toward him, wondering. There were none of these statues in the sex room. Those were all human.
But she did not dwell on the statue’s presence for long. Behind it, she saw another statue that was clearly not human. It was close to the floor, spread out across the space it occupied, and there, just beyond this creature, was a square opening, barely visible to her poor eyes in the pale light.
“I found the door!”
“Look first.”
Brandy was already taking her glasses from her purse. “We’re not there yet.” She stepped around the sentinel, forcing herself to move slowly, watching each step, knowing that to forget the hate room was to forget to survive.
She edged around the last statue, a beast that reminded her of an animal, but seemed twice as wide as it should have been. She brushed it with her leg and felt a sharp pain.
“Ouch!”
“What’s wrong?”
She touched her leg where the pain was and lifted her finger in front of her face. She was bleeding, but not badly. “I cut myself.”
“What?”
“It’s not bad,” she assured him. “It was a statue. It’s got a claw or something. Be careful.”
“Okay.”
She pushed forward, encouraged by the sight of the door just ahead of her.
“We’re here,” she announced.
“Be careful.”
She slipped the glasses onto her face and peered into the next room as she did in the hate room. She knew her mistake at once, but there was no undoing it. She turned, her eyes squeezed fiercely shut against the image that was already burned into her brain, and threw herself into Albert’s arms.
Albert stumbled backward a step, startled, and his eyes flew open.
He saw what Brandy had seen. He saw it clearly, even though the flashlight was sandwiched between their bodies, its beam reduced to a narrow slit.
This door did not exit the fear room. It entered another chamber of it.
The next room was narrow and curved, filled with more statues like those that surrounded them. One stood out from the others, the first in the room, looming in front of them. He closed his eyes at once, frightened so badly he could not bear to look upon it, but still he saw the horrible image. In his head it went on and on, his mind unable to close its eye.
The statue showed a woman, naked like all the rest down here. Her face was contorted into an expression of terror and agony. She was up to her waist in a hole in the floor. Curved spikes rose from the rim of this hole and dug cruel gouges into the flesh of her hips and waist. Three other people, two men and one woman, each as naked as the day they were born, were shoving her down into the hole from where grotesque things that looked like something between tentacles and talons clawed at her, pulling her to her death below. The statue could have been the work of any artist obsessed with the macabre except for the terrifying detail. The terror and pain on the woman’s face and the mad glee in the eyes of her murderers were too intense, too real for anyone other than a madman to recreate. But there was more to the statue than just the intensity and the reality. There was something much deeper than just the image. What startled him, what terrified him beyond his imagination, was the familiarity of the statue. This scene was not something merely imagined by some mad artist. This was a life-sized portrait of the past. Somewhere, sometime, lost in eternity, this event really took place. The murderers were real. The woman was real. The thing in the hole was real…
A sound escaped him, a shrill utterance that might have been a scream or might have been a laugh or might have been his sanity fleeing his skull. He held Brandy tightly in his arms and tried to force away the thing he saw, but he couldn’t.
“I want to go home!” Brandy sobbed. She was crying, terrified not only by what she saw but by what she remembered, by what she could not possibly have known but somehow did.
“Okay.” The mystery of this place seemed unimportant now. Nothing mattered now except getting home. He did not care where the box came from or why it and the key were given to them. He did not want to go any farther. “Okay let’s go.”
She did not move. She held fast to him, her naked body pressed firmly against his.
“You have to lead us back out.”
“I can’t!”
“You have to.”
“I can’t! I can’t go! I’m too scared!”
“I can’t get us out of here, Brandy!”
“I can’t!” Her tears coursed down his chest. She was terrified beyond the limits of her courage. She could not turn back and face those things she’d stumbled past again.
He wanted to run, to just turn and flee back the way they’d come. Had he been capable, he might have left her there in the darkness, crying and screaming until she died of fright, but he could not do that. He could not leave her there. He picked her up instead, cradling her in his arms, and began to walk back the way they’d come.