Wayne’s whole body trembled as he approached the doorway between the final chamber of the fear room and the second spike room. His teeth clenched, his knuckles white upon the handle of his flashlight, he fought the urge to vomit. He’d made this second trip through the fear room in much less time than the first, but with no less mental exertion. In fact, he could almost feel himself teetering at the very edge of consciousness. Waves of vertigo washed over him. He could feel things crawling on him. They slithered up his legs, scuttled through his hair and wriggled into his ears. There were even things moving around inside him, burrowing beneath his skin, swimming through his veins, squirming through his guts. But none of it was real. Not anymore. Not to him.
But somewhere out there…a very long time ago…
The worst part was the way the room made it all seem so vividly real. He could not help but believe that these things had actually happened out there somewhere, in some long lost time. And if these horrendous things ever existed…what was keeping them from returning?
He forced himself to focus on the doorway, on avoiding the wicked spikes that jutted up at various angles from the floor on either side of the opening, threatening to gouge out his eyes if he was not careful.
As before, he’d run into one of those damned spikes while trying to feel his way around the monstrous statues, this time taking it in his right arm instead of his belly, and in his state of weariness, he again felt as though he were bleeding to death.
Fortunately, he’d somehow managed to keep from suffering the same, horrifying illusion of being slain that had temporarily crippled Albert when he was last in there. But there were several times when panic nearly overwhelmed him. Many times, he’d had to stop and close his eyes and force himself to calm down. Once, he actually had to bite back a scream as he made himself accept that there was not actually something cold and bony crawling up his back.
He hadn’t realized until tonight just how much willpower he could muster. He might have been proud of himself if he didn’t feel like such an exhausted wimp.
“Are we through?” asked Andrea as she felt her way cautiously toward the door behind Olivia. Three times, something had scraped her as she walked, once on her left arm and twice on her right hip. She had also bumped her head on something and a small red mark was already growing into a bump on her forehead just above her left eyebrow.
“Almost. I’m in the doorway now. There are spikes everywhere, so be careful.” He stepped out of the fear room and leaned against the wall beside the doorway, his eyes closed. He had to calm his nerves. They still had far to go and he would need his wits if he was ever going to catch up to the others.
Olivia, too, had suffered a few little scrapes and bruises as she passed through the winding chambers, but anyone would be hard-pressed to identify them among all the others she had collected during the night. She opened her eyes and peered out at the thousands of stone spines that filled the next chamber, horrified once more at the deadliness of the Temple of the Blind. “Oh my God,” she sighed.
“I know, right? It’s not as bad as it looks though.” He could already feel his heart gradually slowing to its normal pace, but that weariness was not yet letting up. And it still felt as if a swarm of insects was crawling up his legs. “There’re places to step. It’s for tripping up anyone who beat the fear room by doing it blind.”
Olivia nodded. That made sense. She could understand how the two rooms might work together like that. It took a combination of blindness and sight. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just have to rest a minute. That room drains you.”
She stepped away from the doorway and stared into the spiked room. “I can’t believe this place.” She turned and looked at Wayne, her eyes suddenly widening. “You’re bleeding!”
“It’s okay,” Wayne promised. He was still holding his glasses in his hand. The blurry images of the next room were strangely relaxing. “It’s just a little poke.”
“No, it’s not!”
Wayne returned his glasses to his face and looked down at his arm. There was a gash just above his elbow and a steady trickle of blood was running freely down his arm and dripping onto the floor at his feet. “Oh,” he said, surprised. For a moment he stared at himself, watching the blood pool in the palm of his open hand, and then he chuckled at the irony.
Andrea had been feeling her way slowly through the opening, careful to make sure she was well clear of the fear room and all its horrors before opening her eyes. “What happened?”
“I ran into one of those spikes. The same thing happened the first time I was in there, except I took it in the belly.” He chuckled again, feeling a little delirious. Last time he’d been sure that he was badly injured and yet the wound had turned out to be nothing but a harmless scratch. This time, he had erroneously assumed that the injury was just as superficial as the last one, when in fact he was bleeding considerably.
“We need a bandage,” Olivia said. She was quickly approaching a panic and Wayne could hardly blame her. There were no first aid stations down here. No hospitals. No help. They were entirely on their own and at the mercy of the temple.
This was part of the reason he was feeling weak, he was sure. How long had he been bleeding like this? How much had he lost?
Olivia forced herself to calm down. She closed her eyes and took a slow breath. She wasn’t useful to anyone if she couldn’t think straight.
When her head had cleared a little, she remembered the cut on her arm. The monster that snatched her from Gilbert House dropped her into the trees and one of the limbs gouged her as she fell. She’d stopped the initial bleeding with her torn shirt, but after she and Wayne were safely out of Gilbert House, Wayne had cleaned it for her and wrapped it properly with gauze. He went overboard, using far more than the injury required. And she was still wearing all that gauze.
She reached up and untied it. As she expected, she was able to unwind several feet that she had not bled through, more than enough to fix Wayne up for the time being.
“I don’t have anything to disinfect it with,” she told him as she tied it around his arm.
“It’ll stop me from bleeding to death,” he told her. “We can worry about infection later.”
Olivia stepped back and looked him over. Now he had bandages on each arm, one below the elbow, the other above, as well as on both feet. “I’d feel better if we could take you to a hospital though.”
“No deal. You wouldn’t let me take you.”
She smiled at him. “I hate doctors.”
“I hate needles.”
Olivia laughed. For a moment they stood there, looking at each other.
She was beautiful. Her eyes were so deep and dark, yet brilliantly bright, as though a warm glow were breaking through from somewhere within. Even with her face smudged and her makeup smeared and her hair dirty and damp and tangled, she was probably the most beautiful woman Wayne had ever seen. He could hardly believe that he was the reason she was still alive.
And yet, he couldn’t help but wonder if he might merely be the reason she almost wasn’t. He still wondered how things might have been different if he’d followed the instructions in Beverly’s letter and shown up when he was supposed to, the same night Olivia and her friends arrived. Could he have prevented all that carnage? Could his absence that night have been the only reason those people were dead?
“How are you feeling?” asked Olivia.
“Better,” Wayne replied. And it was true. He could already feel the weight of the fear room lifting.
“Good.”
Wayne stood up, ignoring the pain in his arm. It wasn’t hard. He’d been ignoring the pain from his other arm and his feet since escaping Gilbert House for the second time. Compared to being bitten by a zombie, this was nothing.
The three of them moved on, making their way past the menacing spikes and ever deeper into the temple. They were closer now. Not much stood in their way. Soon they’d be in the City of the Blind.
And Wayne had some questions for the local sovereign.