The Temple of the Blind (The Temple of the Blind #3) Read online

  The Temple of the Blind: Book Three

  The Temple of the Blind

  By Brian Harmon

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2011 by Brian Harmon

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Visit this author at www.HarmonUniverse.com

  Don’t miss the first two books in this series:

  The Box (Book One of The Temple of the Blind)

  Gilbert House (Book Two of The Temple of the Blind)

  Chapter 1

  The cellar door stood open at the far end of the tunnel, the last of the day’s sunlight pouring down from above, welcoming them back from the hell they had somehow endured.

  Wayne Oakley stopped and gazed back into the darkness one final time before climbing the steps. Back there was Gilbert House, in all its impossible, sprawling madness. There was a monster in there somewhere, a pale, hulking, murdering thing, but he felt that another monster had come back with them, a monster that made promises and did not keep them, who offered protection when he could not deliver.

  A warm hand slipped into his as he gazed despondently back, and he turned to meet Nicole Smart’s sympathetic eyes. “I’m sorry about Olivia.” He knew by the sadness on her face that she was sincere, but it did not change how awful he felt. How could he have failed so completely? He doubted if he would ever forget the sound of the poor girl’s terrified screams as she was sucked into that awful darkness.

  “We’re all sorry,” agreed Albert as he and Brandy started up the steps.

  Nicole tugged softly at his hand and he began to move again, willingly following her up the steps and out of the nightmare.

  Here, as the four of them squinted into the dwindling evening sunlight, they were greeted by a startling sound. It was the slow and repetitive concussion of a single pair of hands clapping together.

  “Impressive.” The woman appeared to be in her late forties or early fifties. She was standing in the deepening shadows beneath a nearby tree. She was skinny, almost unhealthily so, and her raven black hair was likewise fine, flat and limp. Her face still retained remnants of a beauty that she must have possessed in her youth, but her dark eyes were framed by fine lines. She wore very little makeup, if any, and was dressed in loose-fitting khaki pants and a black, short-sleeve shirt. “When I heard the screaming, I thought for sure you wouldn’t come back.”

  “Who are you?” Albert demanded.

  The woman smiled at him, but it was not a pleasant smile. “Beverly Bridger, as if you didn’t know.”

  Albert stared at her, confused. As if he didn’t know? He had never seen this woman before in his life.

  “I think you have something of mine.”

  “I do?”

  Beverly glared at him. As he gazed back at her, he found something about her eyes oddly unsettling. “My file?”

  “Your file…?” Albert realized that she meant the envelope. When Andrea Prophett gave him the envelope, she told him that someone sneaked up to her window in the middle of the night and taped it to the screen. Was Beverly the mystery courier? Now that he thought about it, Olivia had informed them that an older woman was waiting for them when she and her friends showed up here Wednesday evening. That woman, she’d told them, gave her boyfriend a letter that sounded exactly like the one Wayne received the same day. Beverly fit the description perfectly.

  “I don’t know how you did it, and I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I just want some answers.” There was a gleam in her eyes that Albert didn’t care for at all, like girlish glee tainted with strained desperation.

  “What are you talking about?” Albert asked.

  Beverly ignored him and turned her eyes to Wayne. “I didn’t think I’d see you again.”

  “You gave me my letter, too?”

  Beverly nodded. “You were one of three. Only one of you showed up the night you were supposed to.”

  Wayne barely suppressed a shiver. Three of them? He wondered who the third was. “Why me?”

  “Why you? Look at you. Gilbert House isn’t safe. I needed someone big and strong, someone tough enough to get in and back out.”

  “Then why me?” asked Albert. He liked to think that he was pretty tough, especially since his trip to the Temple of the Blind last year, but he knew he certainly didn’t look as formidable as Wayne.

  Beverly looked at him, less amused than shocked. “What do you mean, ‘Why me?’” she snarled.

  “I don’t…” Albert shook his head, confused. “You sent me that envelope, didn’t you?”

  Beverly’s expression shifted to shock and then to anger. “Sent it to you? You stole it from me!”

  “What?” This was from Brandy. “You’re fucking crazy.”

  “A girl dropped it off at my house this afternoon,” Albert explained. “She said someone taped it to her window in the middle of the night.” His voice was calm, not defensive, but it set her off nonetheless.

  “Don’t lie to me!” snapped Beverly. “No one else knew about my file!”

  Albert looked at Brandy, confused. When he looked back, he said. “You don’t even know me.”

  Beverly’s eyes were sharp and stabbing. “You’re Albert Cross.” She spoke both his names as though they were vulgarities, almost spitting them at him.

  “How do you know him?” asked Nicole.

  Beverly did not look at her. She only stared straight at Albert, as though half expecting him to lunge at her. “I know where he was last September,” she said, as if she were revealing some filthy secret.

  Albert and Brandy looked at each other, surprised. “How did you know we were down there?”

  “I saw it,” Beverly replied.

  “You saw it?” Brandy asked, horrified by the idea of anyone seeing the things they’d done in those dark chambers.

  “Dreamt it, actually,” Beverly clarified. “Look, I didn’t camp out up here for the past three days to talk about you people. Now tell me what you found!”

  The four of them exchanged worried looks. This conversation was becoming very uncomfortable.

  “What’s so special about this place?” Albert asked, avoiding her question. “Why do you want to know about it so bad? And why not just go in and see for yourself?”

  The woman’s expression hardened, her eyes narrowing. It was clear that she possessed little patience, but she granted them her reply. “It’s special to me because it’s been torturing me my whole life. I feel it every day. It’s like poison ivy that won’t go away. It just keeps itching and itching but you can’t scratch it.”

  “And you want us to scratch it for you,” Albert said. His tone was intentionally mocking. He did not like this Beverly Bridger any more than he had liked Gilbert House’s squat bouncer.

  “Yes,” Beverly replied, clearly losing her patience now. “I want you to scratch it for me. Now tell me what you found, you little freak!”

  “You keep talking to him like that, bitch” said Nicole, “and I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.”

  Beverly shot her a hateful look, but only briefly. Her eyes fluttered immediately back to Albert as though she expected him to charge her at any moment.

  Albert glanced at his friend, surprised. He’d never heard Ni
cole stand up for him like that. But then again, he’d never been confronted like this in front of her before, either. For that matter, he’d never been confronted like this at all.

  He stared at Beverly for a moment without speaking, considering the situation. He did not like this woman at all, and he’d begun to doubt her sanity besides.

  “I don’t know if we should,” Wayne said. “I don’t trust her.”

  Beverly glared at him, her dark eyes hateful.

  “Yeah,” Albert replied. “I know.”

  “Let’s just go, guys,” Brandy pleaded.

  Albert could see the woman’s rage growing. “You never told us why you couldn’t just go in and see for yourself,” he reminded her, further pushing her tolerance.

  Beverly seemed to have to draw all her mental strength to calm herself. Through clenched teeth, she replied, “I just can’t.”

  “Why?”

  The woman growled, frustrated. “Just tell me what you saw!”

  “You sent four people in there Wednesday night,” Wayne said, and Albert was pleased to hear the fury in his voice. “None of them came out and you still let us go in there. Now you expect us to tell you what we saw?” He stepped forward, brushing past Albert.

  Beverly took a step backward, obviously afraid of him and rightfully so. Wayne clearly outweighed her significantly.

  “Because of you, they’re all dead! And all you care about is what we saw?”

  “I did what I had to do!” Beverly screamed at him.

  This was clearly the wrong reply because Wayne’s eyes suddenly grew very large. With speed uncharacteristic of his size, he lunged forward and grabbed the woman before she could turn and flee.

  Albert’s heart leapt when he heard the woman scream. He did not know what was about to happen, but he could not imagine any good coming from it.

  Wayne hauled the skinny woman off the ground and over one shoulder. She shrieked as if she were being murdered—and perhaps that was exactly what she thought was happening. He spun around, hardly noticing the wild kicking of the woman he now held like a sack of laundry. “You want to know what’s inside there? I’ll show you!” In the wake of his grief and fury, he wanted to carry her all the way to the farthest corner of the basement. He wanted to drop her behind the door and then pile the cinderblocks in front of it and leave her there to suffer the fate to which she’d doomed Olivia’s friends two days ago. The sound of her pleading and begging behind that door would be horribly satisfying.

  But when he began to walk toward the cellar door, the woman went crazy. She screamed to be let down, shrieked so loudly the whole city must have heard her, as though she’d read the terrible thoughts straight from his brain.

  Brandy and Nicole both clapped their hands over their mouths and watched in disbelief as the woman came apart in Wayne’s grip.

  Albert wanted to stop him, wanted to tell him to just put the woman down before she shrieked herself into cardiac arrest or something, but he was frozen in place, too shocked to speak.

  Fortunately for Beverly, Wayne’s determination to send her into the hell she’d served to Olivia was not quite as strong as her utter terror of it. She pounded him with her fists and kicked and thrashed and when her balance finally began to topple, she grabbed a handful of his thick, black hair and yanked so hard she actually tore a lock of it out. He cried out in pain and then stooped and dropped her.

  As soon as her feet hit the ground she tried to run away, but it was no good. Before she could escape his reach, he seized her by her shirt.

  Albert would later remember the moment in vivid detail. Wayne held onto the back of Beverly’s shirt with both hands and spun her like an oversized doll. She actually came off the ground as she sailed almost a full three hundred sixty degrees. There was a loud pop that was the sound of all the buttons on her shirt letting go at once. And when Wayne released her, she flew through the air for a brief moment before her feet touched the ground and she toppled forward into a thick patch of thorny brush.

  Wayne growled and started toward her again, still hell bent on dragging her into Gilbert House.

  “Wayne, stop!” Albert called, finally finding his voice. And to his surprise, Wayne did stop. “She’s done! Don’t hurt her.”

  “Any more,” added Nicole. She could not believe she’d just witnessed such a spectacle.

  Beverly lay in the brush, sobbing into the dirt. Her shoulders ached, her knees and hands stung and her wrist was throbbing.

  “Come on, everybody,” Albert said. “We should go.”

  “Wait!” Beverly pushed herself up and rolled over onto her back. Her shirt fell open and her white, silky bra shimmered in the diminishing daylight. She did not try to hide herself. There was a shallow cut on her belly and another on her cheek. She held her left wrist in her right hand as though comforting a pain. “Tell me!”

  “I can’t believe it!” Wayne hissed and Beverly shrank away from him at the sound of his fury. No one there could have blamed her.

  “Forget about it,” Albert told him. He looked at the woman, surprised she could even speak after being flung around like that, much less that she still possessed the audacity to push the very subject that had enraged Wayne in the first place. “Do you need help?”

  Beverly shook her head. “I need to know,” she said. “Please!”

  “Monsters,” he told her. “There are monsters in there.” He took Brandy’s hand and the two of them walked away.

  Nicole stared at Beverly for a moment and then followed her friends.

  Wayne lingered the longest. He stood staring at her, hating her and pitying her at the same time. “I’m sorry,” he said flatly, and then he too walked away. He wouldn’t have really locked her inside to die. He merely wanted her to grasp the horrors she had brought upon innocent people. It was her fault they were dead. She deserved to feel worse than he did, and he felt like nothing less than a murderer.

  They left Gilbert House behind as the sun sank low behind the trees. Behind them, Beverly Bridger began to sob again.

  Chapter 2

  Andrea Prophett watched in amazement as the drama unfolded before her eyes. Albert and his friends were walking away now, vanishing into the trees from which they’d come.

  The older woman was still lying in the brush. She could hear her weeping, soft and long, pitiful. For a moment she actually thought that guy was going to kill her.

  Rachel was never going to believe this.

  She had no idea what went on inside Gilbert House, but twice she’d heard screaming. Strangely enough, it seemed to her that the screams were coming not from underground or from the hole by which they’d entered, but from somewhere above her, from somewhere over those creepy, windowless walls. But of course that had only been her imagination. Wherever they’d gone, something bad happened in there, something scary…and did Albert say something about monsters before he left? She thought that was the word he used, but she couldn’t really hear him from where she was hiding.

  After the four of them had been gone for a moment, the older woman stood up and left in the same direction. Andrea waited until she was out of sight and then followed after them as well.

  She kept to the trees, circling the clearing, aware that there could still be more people hidden in these woods. She wanted to move faster, to catch up with everyone, to see where they were going, but she did not dare risk being seen. Not after what happened to that woman.

  By the time she reached the parking lot of H & M Tires, there was no one in sight. Even the woman had vanished. They must have all been parked down here somewhere and she was too slow to catch up to them before they drove away.

  For a moment she lingered, disappointed. It was all over now. She doubted that any of them would be back anytime soon, and she knew little more than she did when that envelope first appeared at her window.

  She thought about the cellar door. She could sneak inside while no one was around and see for herself where they had gone. There must be some kin
d of room down there or something, someplace where they had spent all that time. Perhaps the answer to this whole weird mystery was right at the bottom of those steps.

  She started back up the hill, not toward Gilbert House, but toward home. She knew she did not possess the courage it would take to go down into that creepy hole, especially with night falling. Maybe tomorrow she could gather the nerve to sneak inside, but not now. These woods were already giving her the creeps.

  But as she approached the clearing where Gilbert House stood, she abruptly stopped. Something was there. A large, pale shape loomed in front of the cellar door. It looked vaguely human, but horribly disproportioned. It stood facing away from her, revealing only its broad, fleshy back in the fading daylight, but she saw enough to fill her instantly with icy terror.

  Without warning, all the strength left her body. She fell forward onto the forest floor, suddenly and completely paralyzed. She tried to cry out, to scream, but nothing would come. She could not make her voice work. She could not even blink.

  “Don’t be afraid.” The voice came not from any particular direction, but from everywhere at once, as though it were all around her. It was the voice of a man, but different from any man’s voice she’d ever heard before. It was deep and small, gentle and yet strong. It seemed coarse and gravelly, but also somehow musical.

  She tried to ask who was there, but the words would not come. She could not even move her tongue. It lay useless against her teeth.

  “Who I am is not important. Relax. Wait. The creature is leaving, moving away from you.”

  The creature? What did it mean by “creature”? What was that thing by the cellar door?

  What’s happening to me? Unable to form words, all she could do was think these things, but the strange, alien voice could apparently read her mind.

  “You will be fine, but you must remain still. If it sees you, it will kill you.”