The Box Page 7

  Albert walked closer to the wall. Something didn’t look right.

  “What now?”

  He didn’t reply. He was staring at this new wall. There was something about it.

  “Did we take a wrong turn?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe we weren’t supposed to go down this tunnel. Maybe this tunnel wasn’t open when the map was drawn.” Her voice was beginning to rise, fear sliding up her throat in great, wet, slithering clumps. All those stories that scared the hell out of her when she was a girl, those stupid stories about the haunted tunnels and the old witches with rotting flesh and appetites for children began to rise from the forgotten depths of her memory. They eat you alive, one of her friends told her years ago when she was just a child. They eat you alive so you can feel every bite!

  “I don’t think so.” Albert reached out and touched the wall. He ran his fingers down it, feeling the rough texture of the stone. It was different from the surrounding walls somehow. He pressed his palm against the cold stone and pushed. The stones tumbled out of the wall with surprisingly little effort and their dead-end collapsed into a pile at his feet.

  Brandy stared at him in disbelief. “How did you know to do that?”

  “Hell if I know.” He peered into the room that was hidden behind the wall, his eyes widening with disbelief.

  “A false wall,” Brandy wondered. “A thousand people could have walked right up to that wall and just turned back. All these walls. All these tunnels. It would be like finding a glass of water in the ocean.” She turned her eyes away from the fallen stones and fixed them on Albert. “But you knew it would fall down.”

  “I didn’t know,” Albert insisted. He did not look at her, did not hear the accusation in her voice. He was looking into the next room, the room beyond the map.

  Brandy glanced over her shoulder again, quickly this time. She could not help but wonder how trustworthy this man really was. She didn’t really know him, after all. She clutched her purse with her free hand, pulling it to her breast like a lifeboat. Now another thought entered her mind. She could too easily imagine him turning on her down here, far below the streets of the Hill, where no one could hear her, and raping her, torturing her, murdering her. Down here he could take his time if he wanted. He could make her suffer for days. A chill ran through her as she imagined him turning to face her with the rotten, grinning face of the witch from her childhood nightmares.

  Albert leaned into the hole he’d made, his head disappearing into the next room and another thought crossed her mind instead. Something would be in there, something dead and evil. It would lunge out and drag Albert into the darkness, tearing chunks out of him with its rotten teeth, eating him alive.

  Suddenly, she did not know which scenario would be worse. Still clutching her purse, she took a step toward him, unable to ignore the shiver that was slowly creeping up her back. “See anything?”

  He stepped into the next room and Brandy followed. What she saw next made her forget the horrors she’d been imagining.

  Chapter 8

  The room was ten feet across and eight feet deep. Its walls, floor and ceiling were all gray stone. There were no light fixtures. There were no doors or windows, only the opening through which Albert and Brandy entered and two smaller openings on the opposite wall. Five strange statues stood in this room, all of them apparently carved from the same gray stone from which the room itself was built.

  Four of these statues were identical. Two stood flanking the entrance where Albert knocked down the false wall. The other two stood at the center of each of the two shorter walls on each side of the room. Each was a very vivid depiction of a naked and grossly disproportioned man. They were nearly eight feet tall and morbidly skinny, with taught flesh stretched over their long bones.

  They had enormous Adam’s apples and shockingly long penises that hung limp against their thighs. Their feet and hands were likewise deformed, their fingers and toes much longer than their proportions should have allowed. Their middle fingers were almost as long as Albert’s forearm. They stood straight and stiff, backs to the wall, hands to their sides, feet together like sentinels at watch.

  Directly in front of them, between the two openings in the facing wall, was the fifth statue. This was again the same elongated and faceless man, again carved from the same gray stone, but unlike the others, this statue was not standing upright and at attention. This one was frozen in motion, seemingly in the process of falling to his knees, hands lifted to what would have been his face, long fingers spread grotesquely in the air. There was something peculiar about the pose it was caught in, not precisely a pose that someone would depict in a statue. It was too random, too spontaneous, too real. It was like a photograph taken candidly in the middle of an action, the kind that never looked right because everything was frozen in transition. This man (or whatever it was) could have been collapsing in a furious fit of agony or in violent throes of joy. Without a face it was impossible to tell.

  Somehow, Albert thought that was precisely the point of the statue. A life-sized and three-dimensional picture of the choice they needed to make.

  “Holy shit!” Brandy was standing in front of one of the statues, her flashlight aimed at its enormous penis.

  “Yeah, they’re pretty messed up.” But he’d already moved beyond the statues. There were no cobwebs in this room, he saw. The stone was free of dust, immaculately clean. He glanced back out into the tunnel from which they just entered. There were cobwebs out there, but not many. How recently had that tunnel been used, he wondered.

  He turned his attention to the openings on the opposite side of the room, shining his flashlight into one and then the other. They were identical. Both dropped about six feet to a narrow tunnel that continued forward into darkness.

  “They’re so real,” Brandy went on. “You can see every wrinkle and vein. They even have fingerprints. It’s creepy.” She backed away from the statue, as though she expected it to suddenly step forward and grab her. “Who do you think made them?”

  “No idea.” Albert was still studying the two passages. His eyes kept returning to the statue between the doors. What do you know? he wondered.

  “What are they doing at the end of a closed up tunnel underneath Briar Hills of all places?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.” An idea struck her then. “Hey, do you think we’re in some kind of basement? Looks kind of like a museum of some kind.”

  Albert thought she was right. It did look like a museum of some kind. But he had never seen anything like these statues before. Besides, to his knowledge Briar Hills didn’t have a museum with anything more interesting than antique tractors. And what kind of basement would have a room with an entrance like this? There was nothing practical about these passages at all. Also, what kind of museum didn’t have any apparent lighting or climate control?

  Brandy walked over and shined her flashlight into one of the passages Albert was studying. “What now?”

  Albert shook his head. He didn’t know. “It’s one or the other.”

  “So, what? Do we just try one?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He had serious doubts about just dropping into one. He could not shake the feeling that the statue’s unusual pose warned them of that, but he did not want to alarm Brandy any more than necessary.

  “What does the map say?”

  “The map stopped where we came through that wall.”

  “So how do we know which way to go?”

  Albert shook his head again.

  “Maybe they go to the same place.”

  “I doubt it.” Albert was looking from one passage to the other, his head and the flashlight slowly turning from left to right, comparing them. Like with the wall, there was something that escaped him, something he was missing.

  He took a closer look at the falling statue, studied it. It was tilted slightly to the right in its falling, but that meant nothing to h
im. His eyes fell on its right hand and he realized that its third finger was broken. He leaned closer and examined the shortened digit’s stump. The stone there was flat and coarse, not smooth. The finger had definitely been broken from the statue, rather than carved this way. But where was it? He swept the floor with his flashlight, checking every corner and around the feet of each statue, but it was not there. He then shined his light down into the tunnel nearest the incomplete hand. There, right next to the wall, was a gray finger, complete with silky-smooth nail.

  He dropped into the tunnel, paused long enough to peer ahead, and then scooped up the finger and climbed back up to where Brandy waited.

  “What is it?”

  “Finger,” Albert replied. He examined it, puzzled, and then held it up to the statue’s hand. As he’d thought, it didn’t quite fit. There was another piece missing. But where was it? He didn’t see it when he picked up the first piece. He walked to the other passage and shined his light into it, but there was nothing there, either.

  “If it’s so important to go the right way, why did the map stop back there?”

  Albert thought about the box that led them here and suddenly he understood. “Maybe it didn’t.”

  Brandy looked at him, curious.

  He tucked the flashlight into his armpit and opened the box. He stirred through the contents for a moment and withdrew the small stone. He held it to the piece he’d found in the left tunnel and found a perfect fit. “Bingo.” He reached up and held both pieces to the stump on the statue’s right hand, completing it. “The game board.”

  “What?”

  “The things in the box. I started thinking they were all pieces to a puzzle. If I could just solve the puzzle, I’d understand what it all meant. But I couldn’t figure out how they all fit together. Now I realize my mistake. I was missing a place to put all the pieces of the puzzle. A game board. That’s what this place is. It’s one big game board.” He shined his flashlight into the left tunnel, the one both nearest to the statue’s broken hand and where he’d found the missing piece. “We go this way.”

  He looked into the tunnel he’d just pointed out and wondered. Did someone break off that finger intentionally? As impressive as these statues were, that seemed awfully rash. Wasn’t there a better way to lead them through than by defacing these…whatever they were? But then again, he didn’t know what the value of these things might be, and even less idea what the value might be to whoever sent them the box.

  “Well,” Albert said, a little nervous. “Let’s get moving. Should I go first?”

  “Yeah.”

  He slipped the stone back into the box, along with the other piece of the dismembered digit, and then slipped the box into the backpack. He also took the paint can from Brandy and dropped it into the bag. Finally, he slung the backpack over his shoulders, dropped into the hole and shined his flashlight into the next passage, chasing away the shadows. “Okay. Come on down.”

  Brandy hesitated for just a moment, wondering about his ability to solve these strange puzzles, almost without thinking, almost as though he already knew the way. A part of her wanted to turn and run, to just leave him here and get the hell out while she still could, but she was afraid to go back alone. She was also admittedly curious about where this strange place would lead them. With doubt gnawing at her mind, she followed Albert deeper still into the darkness.

  Chapter 9

  This next tunnel was too short to allow them to walk upright, but it was not as long as many of the similar passages they’d already traveled. It quickly opened into a large chamber at least twenty feet wide and high. This room was made of the same smooth, dark stone that the first room was built from, and was far too long for the flashlights to penetrate to the other end.

  Along the walls, more of those strange, faceless statues stood like guards.

  “Wow,” marveled Brandy.

  Albert nodded in agreement. Their flashlights could pick up three pairs of the faceless sentinels, but no farther, and the darkness beyond was disturbing to him. He felt that something was there, lying silently in the shadows, waiting for them, perhaps watching them.

  “Somebody was sure proud of these guys.” Brandy was running her flashlight over one of the statues.

  Albert was studying those up ahead. He didn’t quite grasp it yet, but there was something strange about them. They were not all the same.

  He took several steps into the room, his eyes moving from one statue to another, trying to understand what he was seeing. They really were like sentinels, diligently watching, guarding these weird chambers for reasons he could not imagine. As he walked deeper into the room, he found himself remembering what Brandy told him about some of the tunnels being older than the city, carved out of the earth in ancient times, and he shuddered at the thought of standing in such a timeless place.

  The fourth pair appeared from the gloom and he realized exactly what it was that was different about each of them. He stopped and swept his light across the four on his left, then on his right, reassuring himself that he was, indeed, seeing the strange scene he now perceived. With each pair of statues, a single thing changed. They stood in the same position, hands at their sides, feet together, rigid, alert, but as they moved farther into the room, each pair of sentinels was…as odd as it seemed…slightly more aroused than the one before it. Their massive penises were actually growing progressively stiffer the deeper into the room they went.

  “Somebody has a really sick sense of humor,” Brandy said, but there seemed to be more anxiety in her voice than disgust.

  “They definitely had an infatuation with the male body.” Albert continued to walk, amazed at how the statues continued to appear, one pair after another, each more obscene than the last, but only marginally. The subtleness of the change between each sentinel was so slight that it was difficult to see, but as they appeared one by one from the darkness, it was too easy to imagine the stone organs becoming engorged with blood, almost as if it was his and Brandy’s very presence that excited them. His eyes were drawn forward as he walked and he wondered what they would find at the end, when these stone sentinels were no longer mildly amorous but outright horny and wielding full-sized boners.

  Perhaps Brandy wondered the same thing, because just then her cold hand slipped into his and squeezed.

  “You mind?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  She gave him a smile and then turned and examined the sentinels. “This place is so freaky. I hate how dark it is.”

  “I know. There’s no lighting at all. No fixtures. No switches.”

  “Maybe it predates electricity.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. But there aren’t even places to hang torches. It’s almost like this place was meant to remain in the dark.”

  “That’s really creepy,” Brandy replied, squeezing his hand a little harder.

  Albert glanced at her. He didn’t mean to keep scaring her. “I know.”

  On either side of them, the statues stood. Somehow, their blank faces made it easier to imagine that they were watching them.

  “It’s all just so weird,” Brandy said.

  “It is. It looks like the set for an X-rated Indiana Jones movie.”

  Brandy laughed. “It does, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah. All you need is a giant boulder shaped like a woman’s breast rolling down the middle of the room.”

  Again Brandy laughed, and it gave them both courage. It was hard to be afraid of something that made you laugh.

  “Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Happy Sentinels,” Albert said, and Brandy laughed so heartily that she had to stop and wipe away tears.

  Up ahead another pair of sentinels appeared. Albert had lost count by now, but their penises hovered in front of them, almost parallel with the floor.

  “That’s too funny.”

  Albert smiled. He was glad she was laughing. It made him feel better to know that she felt better.

  Brandy tugged at his hand and led
him to the nearest statue. “I can’t believe how realistic they are, even for being all out of proportion.” She ran her fingertips down the chest and stomach of the statue, admiring the craftsmanship of the sculpture. “Who do you think put them here?”

  “Don’t know.” He was studying the statue’s face, that blank, empty void that was all the artist had allowed them of human expression. Even blind, deaf and mute, it retained a strange illusion of wisdom and understanding. In its own faceless way it seemed to be contemplating something, perhaps its own sexuality, with a deepness that was nearly frightening, but that was more his imagination than anything he saw on the smooth, empty curve that was its face.

  “What purpose do they serve?”

  “Maybe none. Maybe no more purpose than a painting on a wall. Just a decoration. Or maybe they’re as important to whoever made them as the cross or a sculpture of Jesus. Or maybe they were to help somebody navigate these corridors.” He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe they serve a very important purpose that we can’t possibly imagine.”

  Brandy touched the smooth surface of the sentinel’s groin, just above the penis, her fingertips sliding over it gracefully, delicately. They had no hair at all. “So realistic,” she observed. She slid her hand down, below the penis to the testicles, which dangled like two heavy plums in their stone pouch. With the tip of her index finger, she followed the folds and wrinkles of its anatomy. It seemed as though it should give to her touch, folding and lifting like real flesh, but it was only stone. At last she lifted her hand to the penis itself. With her thumb and her fore and middle fingers, she softly grasped the giant member and traced its arc all the way to its tip, feeling the wrinkles and the veins as her fingertips slid along its cold, hard flesh.

  Albert felt a nervous knot form in his chest as he watched her. There was something terribly erotic about the way she touched the statue. Though only stone, it seemed that it defied all laws of nature by not becoming instantly and fully erect at her sensuous touch.