The Box (The Temple of the Blind #1) Read online

  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.

  “I’m okay,” he assured her. “It’s not bleeding anymore.”

  But she wasn’t entirely convinced. Her cuts had stung. They still stung, now that she thought about it. No matter what he said, his had to be hurting him.

  “Let’s go home.”

  She looked down at him from the upper step, her blue eyes soft and caring. “But what about the answers you were looking for?”

  Albert smiled. “Fuck it.”

  Brandy returned the smile. “Yeah. Fuck it.”

  As they climbed, Albert thought about the room they turned away from, that mysterious lair of terror. What fantastic things could lie beyond such a border? Treasure? Maybe, but he doubted it. Besides, more important to him than treasure was discovery; the discovery of a secret truth that he felt must lie waiting to be found. The truth of the box alone was worth the adventure. Why? Who? He yearned to know these things, but not at any cost. Not at the cost of Brandy Rudman. Not at the cost of his own sanity. He stared at her naked bottom as they climbed, studied the rhythmic pumping of her buttocks and thighs, and could not help but sigh at the thought of returning this beauty to the surface, where he would have to share her with the rest of the world.

  Naturally the trip up the steps was much slower than the trip down, and a deep silence fell between them as they climbed.

  It was Brandy who broke this thoughtful silence with a question that surprised Albert: “Are you mad at me?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “You were quiet.”

  “Just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “This place. And the box.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?”

  “You want to keep going.”

  “Only part of me.”

  Brandy was silent for a moment, thinking. Albert could hear her labored breathing, could see the small beads of sweat that were forming on her back.

  Albert said, “The other part of me is scared as hell.”

  She looked down at him, smiled, but said nothing. She was pleased that he was scared too. It made her feel better, but still she felt bad for turning back, for leaving this adventure behind. She felt ashamed of her fear, but she wanted badly to go home.

  The two of them paused to rest as the top of the staircase finally came into view. They sat down on the stone steps and stared down into the empty darkness below without speaking. Somehow the moment seemed somber, as though they had before been three and had lost their companion into this spiraling abyss.

  “My legs hurt,” Brandy complained, breaking the silence for the second time. She rubbed at her sore calf muscles. “So many steps.”

  Albert put his hand on her thigh and gently rubbed it. His legs hurt, too, but he could go on. In fact, the pain was almost cleansing. It peeled away the fear, little by little.

  She gazed at him, her eyes soft and pretty. “You’re so good to me down here.”

  He shrugged, embarrassed. Of course he was nice to her. She deserved to be treated nicely. “It’s my fault you’re down here.”

  “No it’s not.” She gazed back down into the hole, her expression thoughtful. “When we were in that room down there, did you see anything?”

  Albert nodded. “Yeah. I did.”

  “Did you see those statues?”

  “Some of them.”

  “When I saw them, I felt like I knew what I was seeing, like I’d seen it somewhere before, only in real life, not in stone.”

  “I know.”

  “What does it mean?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it just means that whoever carved them is damn good. Or maybe there’s something a lot deeper to it than we ever expected.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe those images were real. Somewhere, sometime, maybe thousands or millions of years ago, those things might have actually happened. If so, maybe we still remember. All of us. The way you sometimes remember old movies you forgot you ever watched. Somebody mentions a scene and it’s just there, a memory you didn’t even know you had, locked away in your brain somewhere for years and years. Maybe this is like that. A forgotten memory, passed down in our blood, generation after generation.”

  “That’s really creepy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If that was true, then what is this place?”

  Albert shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it’s the oldest place on earth.
Maybe where it all began. The lost resting place of the primordial ooze from which all humanity crawled once upon a time.”

  “Right here under Briar Hills?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe under some farmer’s field ten miles from Briar Hills. This place is enormous.”

  Brandy shivered. “I don’t think I want to think about that.”

  “Or it could all be some kind of complex hallucination, some kind of subliminal projection. Either way, that’s a very bad place.” That thing by the door came back to him, a tall, twisted shape, a grotesque perversion of nature with awful, diseased flesh and gnarled limbs. The very thought made his stomach lurch with fright.

  Brandy shuddered as she remembered the tortured woman who forever struggled for her life in the front of the second chamber. She forced the thought away and stood up.

  Albert stood up too, not saying another word. He followed her up the last of the stairs, unable to keep from wondering what lay beyond that terrible fear room.