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“It looks... ordinary,” Inez says as we stare at the borehole.
“It isn’t,” I assure her, and hope I’m right, or I’ll look like an idiot.
“Who’s going to cross first?” Hugo asks.
“I’ll go,” Inez says, “in case it links to a zone in Ruby full of assassins.”
“You don’t really think –” I start to say, but she steps through and is instantly lost to sight.
“One,” Hugo counts, smiling.
“Two,” I continue.
“Three,” he says in turn.
“Four.”
“Five.”
“Six.”
Hugo starts to look slightly ill at ease. “How long do we give her?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” I reply, and I’m starting to worry too. “She didn’t –”
Inez backs out of the borehole, and relief takes the place of concern. But she isn’t smiling or scared when she turns to face us. She’s confused.
“What is it?” Hugo asks.
Inez shakes her head.
“Is it special?” I chuckle.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she croaks.
“Is it safe?” Hugo asks.
“I guess,” she says. “It’s...” She shakes her head again. “I can’t explain. You’ll have to cross and see for yourself.”
“Not before me,” I say quickly, and dart through the borehole.
I emerge in a massive room full of statues of heads, carved out of marble. They’re larger than life, each about a couple of metres tall. They stand in rows, thousands of them, facing in different directions. There are gaps between them, so it doesn’t feel crowded, yet there’s an eerie atmosphere and I can see why Inez wasn’t sure what to make of it.
As I’m looking around, Inez steps through. “What are they?” she asks in a low voice.
“I’ve no idea,” I whisper back.
“Have you seen the borehole?” she asks, and I look behind me.
The panel-shaped borehole hovers forty or fifty centimetres above the ground and is attached to several others, which are inactive, in some weird cylindrical shape — I think they make an octagon, though I’d have to walk around it and count the panels to be sure.
“And the ceiling?” Inez breathes.
I look up and see that it’s white, like the borehole, but with dark ripples running through it.
“The walls too,” Inez says, and when I look left and right, I see that they’re like the ceiling. The wall in the far distance, at the end of the room, looks the same as well. I turn and see that the room stretches an equal distance in the other direction – we’re in the middle of the chamber – and ends with a similar wall.
“I’ve seen something like that before,” I murmur, looking at the ceiling again.
“Boreholes to the Lost Zone,” Inez says, and I go cold.
“If we brush against one of the walls...” I moan.
“Try not to,” Inez says drily.
As we’re staring at the deadly ceiling and walls, Hugo steps through and clocks the heads. “What are those?” he asks.
“We don’t know,” Inez says. “And look at –”
Before she can finish, every head in the room starts to swivel towards us. Each face is different, and they’re a mix of men, women and children. All of their eyes are open and all of their mouths are closed, but as the last few statues come to a rest, now pointing in our direction, every mouth opens and the statues make a soft humming noise. It continues for maybe half a minute, then stops. As silence returns, the heads rotate back to their original positions.
“What the hell?” Hugo breathes.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Inez sighs.
“That noise was like –” I start to say, but get no further.
“Family!” somebody shouts. “The one with the moustache is Family!”
That’s when we realise we’re not alone in the room of heads.