He banged his leg against the statue that cut Brandy a few moments ago and felt the same sharp pain. Whatever it was, it was covered with claws or spikes or something. He could feel the blood trickling down his leg and the pain magnified the fear.
But he couldn’t run. To run would be to lose control. To lose control would be to die. This was no exaggeration and he knew it. Fear alone could kill and this place was terror in its purest form.
A blind man in a tomb of monsters, he walked. His eyes tightly shut against the terrors that surrounded them. Brandy still held the flashlight, and to look would be to invite madness. He stumbled through the dark, guiding himself only with his feet, feeling his way around statue after statue, trying to walk only in one direction, only in the direction from which they’d come, and found only one obstacle after another. His feet struck stone limbs and more than once he bumped Brandy’s shoulder or leg into one of the many solid occupants of the room.
Panic welled up within him. He did not know the way out. He had a sick feeling he was only going in circles, that the two of them would be trapped in this room for hours, unable to find their way either forward or backward.
He wondered if his heart could actually last that long.
“Are we out yet?”
“I can’t find the way out.”
“What do we do?” She spoke in great, wet sobs.
“Just keep your eyes shut. Nothing can hurt you here. I’ll get us out.”
“Hurry. Please.”
Albert knew there was only one way out, and he knew that way might ruin him, turning his brain to mush, rendering him little more than a drooling shell. The terrors in here were never meant to be looked upon. But there was Brandy to think about. Even if it killed him, he had to look. He had to find the door.
He steeled himself and took several deep, calming breaths. He tried to find reason in the madness, some ray of hope, and found one in remembering the sex room. Those statues did not take effect at first. They had time to study the statues, to examine them for what they were before their libidos went into overdrive. He took one more deep breath and, against his every instinct, he opened his eyes.
The door was in front of him, slightly to his right. It was only five or six steps away. But between it and him stood a great, twisted shape that sent a jolt of utter horror straight through his very soul.
It was facing the other way, toward the door, poised to greet anyone coming in. Albert was staring at the twisted, boiling flesh of its back, unable to see its face, and still it terrified him. He might has well have opened his eyes and gazed upon the real thing as it stumbled toward him, inches from rending the flesh from his face.
He squeezed his eyes shut again, but it was too late. His mind was filled with horrors that he could not unsee. It was as if he actually lived through the terrors this statue depicted. The visions in his head (Dead! They’re all dead!) were as vivid as his own memories. He shuddered with fright, fighting to keep his grip on Brandy, trying to keep his own legs from collapsing beneath him. How was this happening? How did these horrible images (So many of them!) get into his head? It couldn’t be real. It had to be (They won’t die!) some kind of hallucination.
Somehow, he managed to take a step forward, and then another. His feet felt numb. He could not feel the floor beneath him anymore. His knees were shaking. He opened his eyes again and tried to stare only at the doorway. That was his only goal. He just needed to reach the doorway. If he could just get Brandy that far, then even if he dropped dead of fright, at least she’d have a chance at getting home.
His stomach boiled with fear. His head pounded. He walked forward, unable to completely ignore the things around him. Even from the corners of his eyes he saw them, those terrible images of death and blood and creatures from a past he was never meant to know.
He already knew that these things would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life.
Albert emerged from the door of the fear room, stepping over the stone tongue and teeth of the woman whose horrible fate he’d almost shared. Brandy’s frail, trembling body still cradled in his arms, he walked shivering away from the mysteries that lay beyond.
They had forfeited.
Game over.
Chapter 19
Albert did not stop when he stepped out of the fear room. He walked on, Brandy’s trembling body still held tightly against him, the flashlight still pressed between them. “It’s okay,” he told her. “We’re out. We’re okay.” He kept telling her this, kept assuring her, but he felt like a liar. It was okay. They were out. But he did not yet know if he would ever be okay again. Images haunted his mind. His head ached. His back ached the way it did when one shivered too hard for too long. His very lungs seemed to ache with fright.
There were things in his thoughts now, shadowy things, like dark memories struggling to surface. He tried to stare forward, tried to look only where he was going, trying to suppress the urge to shriek in utter terror.
The fear did not begin to subside until after he passed the last of the sentinels and entered the passage that led to the next room. It was then that he finally looked down at Brandy and found that she was staring up at him, her blue eyes shadowy in the darkness, but still as soft and brilliant as ever. The expression on her face was impossible to read. It could have been relief, it could have been gratitude, it could have been love or it could have been nothing at all. She made no effort to be put down, and he made no effort to put her down. He walked on through the huge and unsettlingly empty room to the spiraling staircase from which they’d descended, cradling her in his arms, liking the way she felt, letting her body’s weight and softness and warmth occupy his mind so that the terrors could not grow. He climbed seven of the steep steps before finally stopping and lowering her gently onto them, as though unwilling to set her on the same floor as those terrible statues.
For a moment he stood staring at her. She lay before him, staring back at him, her hands clamped around the flashlight at her bosom, one leg dangling off the edge of the staircase, the other bent slightly, her foot resting on the step below her. Her hair was still kinky from their earlier swim and her skin was pocked with gooseflesh. He could see the slit of her sex between her parted thighs, uncovered, unhidden, but he felt not a trace of the sex room’s arousal at the sight. He saw only her beauty, her anguish, her need. He needed to take care of her. She depended on him, just as he depended on her. Without each other they neither one would make it back to the surface. They were right to turn around. The answers weren’t worth it. They didn’t matter. All that mattered was Brandy. All that mattered was Albert. The two of them were the only things down here that mattered at all and he intended to get them both safely home.
He bent and took her hands, wrapping them in his so that she did not have to release the flashlight she was still clutching. Her cheeks were still wet with the tears she’d cried in the fear room, but she was not crying now.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shook his head. “Don’t be.” He smiled the best smile he could manage to reassure her, and it touched his heart when she gave him a little smile back. “Let’s get you home.”
As she let him help her to her feet, she happened to glimpse the blood on his knee. “You’re hurt…”
Albert looked down at his leg. He’d hardly realized. “I bumped into that statue that cut you.”
Brandy looked down at her own leg. Just above her right knee, on the outer thigh, there were three small cuts. The top one had bled a small trail down over the lower two, but those had just barely beaded with blood. The cuts on Albert’s left knee, however, were considerably deeper. A trail of blood ran all the way down to his ankle.