Chapter 12

An anxious feeling fell over the group as they walked across the chamber at the bottom of the steps. It was an enormous space, stretching into the darkness all around them. Its emptiness was almost overwhelming, and each step they took made them feel smaller and smaller.

Albert was eager, almost twitching with anticipation. The answers to all the questions he had about the Temple of the Blind must lie on the other side of this obstacle, waiting for him just beyond. And yet he also felt like a prisoner being taken to the torture chamber one last time before being set free. The fear room was not like the sex room. It was not like the hate room. The dangers there were much more real, much more extravagant.

Brandy felt none of Albert’s eagerness. The things she’d seen in the fear room had given her nightmares for weeks. In the sex room, the images had driven them to act upon sexual impulses they’d hardly known were there, but the images themselves had conveyed no real meaning other than the obvious allusions to desire and lust. The statues in the fear room were different. When she’d seen them, even without her glasses, they had reminded her of things she’d never actually known, but things that she somehow knew to be real, things from a past she’d never lived.

She wasn’t sure whether she believed that these memories were real or not. The logical part of her insisted that they could not possibly be real, that they were merely subliminal messages of some kind, cleverly designed to trick her brain into believing these terrible things to be true. Surely they could not be actual events, somehow carried to her through those statues. But they were so vivid, so convincing.

Albert gazed up into the shadows of the high ceiling above them as he walked. This room felt like the one that had killed Beverly, and the emptiness made him nervous.

What happened back there, he wondered. What did Beverly see when she stepped into that room? Whatever it was had been so terrible that she had forgotten the real danger behind her.

Again he thought he heard a distant sound, like chains rattling somewhere very far away, yet the very sound was like a memory, gone before it was recognized, almost before it began.

Ahead of them, a great stone wall appeared, and with it the doorway to the entrance of the fear room.

Nicole felt a knot growing in her stomach. She knew what awaited her ahead, and she wasn’t sure if she had what it was going to take to get to the other side. So far, everything Albert and Brandy told her had been completely true. Every detail was just as they’d described. If anything, it surpassed her imagination.

They passed through the doorway and walked between the first pair of statues without pausing.

“Who’s going first this time?” Nicole asked as she watched the silent warning the sentinels acted out on both sides of the room. It really was like frames in a cartoon. After a while, they began to feel like a single statue actually moving from one pose to the next.

“This one’s worse than the others,” Albert warned. “The fact that it’s the fear room is enough to make you nervous. You start off frightened. And once you’re a little bit scared, it only escalates. Before long you’re in a panic. And we have to remember what was waiting after the hate room for people who lose control.”

Wayne wondered if he’d ever be able to forget it. He watched the sentinels as they lifted their arms and sank to the floor, their freakish hands splayed before them, shielding their featureless faces from some unseen horror. It was eerily reminiscent of Beverly’s reaction to that empty room. “Is there another of those spike traps in here?”

“I don’t know,” Albert replied.

“We never made it through last time,” Brandy explained.

“If I were to guess,” Albert added, “I’d say there’s probably going to be something nasty in there somewhere.” On either side of them, the sentinels arched their backs and lifted their blank faces in silent screams of unthinkable terror. “It’ll probably be something a lot worse than a spiked pit.”

Ahead of them, the door appeared. It was the same as the last time Albert laid eyes on it, a woman with a round, almost pudgy face and a mole under her right eye. The scream in which she was frozen was so fierce, so strained, that it seemed she should fly apart. Her eyes bulged with fright, her lips peeled back in terrible panic. It was easy for Nicole and Wayne to see why Albert and Brandy spoke so fearfully of this place. If this was just the door, then what must wait inside?

“We’ll probably have to trade off,” Albert reasoned as they approached the insanely terrified face. “I’ll go first. Then Brandy?” He looked at her and she nodded agreement. “Then Nicole.” He looked back at Wayne. “You can be last. When we feel like we can’t take it anymore, we’ll pass off. Hopefully by the time you can’t go on, I’ll be recharged and we can start over again.”

“Hopefully it won’t take that long,” whimpered Brandy.

Wayne nodded.

Albert held his hand out for Brandy’s glasses. “We might as well get started. Is everybody ready?”

Everybody was.

He made it his business to hurry. As soon as he stepped into the fear room, Albert headed straight into the jungle of gray shapes, determined to make the most of his turn. All around him, dark shapes appeared and melted. Shades of gray shifted and faded, merging and dividing. It was dizzying, and after just a few steps, he had to pause to focus himself.

Each of these emotion rooms was larger than the last, with more statues than the last. Each became more difficult to navigate. This one was a virtual maze of stone figures. There was hardly room to walk. Navigating with such dim vision was nearly impossible. No wonder Brandy had gotten lost in here.

In front of him, several forms came together and each one seemed unnervingly familiar to him, as though he’d seen it in some long forgotten nightmare. They were like bogeymen from past lives, each one very different but no less frightening than the next.

“Are you okay?” Brandy asked.

“Yeah,” Albert replied, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he’d remain okay. This room was a scene straight from hell. Even mostly blind he could see that the things in this room were not someone’s idea of scary Halloween ghosts and goblins. These were things so real, so terrible, only the insane or immortal could have captured them in stone. If these horrors weren’t real, then they were designed to make them believe that they were real and that was just as bad.

He went left, then right, and then he had to stop. To his right was something that made him think of sand and screaming, to his left was a vague silhouette of a woman he had a feeling was in the process of dying. A deep uneasiness had settled into him and it was beginning to take root and grow, like a cancer slowly eating away his courage. He wanted to look around the glasses, to take just a quick peek and make sure there was nothing there, staring at him from the shadows, waiting to pounce. But he could not allow himself to do that. He had to remain strong. It was all about willpower over fear.

He tried to clear his mind, blocking out as much distraction as he could, and kept walking. He picked out landmarks to follow, statues that could be spotted from a distance, and then focused his eyes on an imaginary point just to one side of it, trying hard to not look directly at any of the shapes. He thought not about the statues, but about the traps. There must be at least one in or beyond this room, a spiked pit or a sleeping hound or some other unthinkable device.

He squeezed his eyes into small slits and focused fiercely on looking only straight ahead. Soon his head began to ache, but he couldn’t risk letting himself glimpse the horrors that oozed in around the lenses.

He might have gone in circles two or three times trying to gain his bearings. He was beginning to think that he’d gotten them all hopelessly lost in this funhouse from hell, but then he spotted the silhouette of a tall figure, a sentinel, with arms outstretched. It seemed almost to be beckoning him. Was this the way out? He remembered Brandy mentioning that she’d seen a sentinel statue in the first chamber of the fear room. She’d found it curious at the time and now he did too. It seemed to defeat the purpose somehow. He’d begun to think of these deformed and faceless men as symbols of the temple’s honesty. They were always at guard where a dangerous decision was required, even though they refused to help. There were not any sentinels inside the sex room. There hadn’t been one to warn them of the spiked pit, either. Those were trials that they’d been forced to conquer on their own. So why would one be standing here inside the fear room?

But he was in no mood to complain.

He turned toward the sentinel, focusing on it. He almost peeked over the glasses at it, curious about its presence in this room, but he reminded himself that it was surrounded by horrors that he could not allow himself to look upon.

As he approached this sentinel and passed it, he saw the square opening up ahead. “I see the door,” he announced. “It leads into another chamber. How is everybody?”

“I’m fine,” Nicole replied.

“I’m okay,” Brandy assured him.

“No problem,” Wayne chimed in. He sounded almost cheerful. Albert guessed that he was trying to keep himself psyched up for his turn.

Nicole made a sudden hissing noise through her teeth and Albert stopped, startled. “What happened?”

“Something cut me,” she said. “My leg.”

“The statue!” Brandy exclaimed. “That thing cut me last time I was here, too! I forgot all about it.”

Albert remembered. “That’s right. It got me too. On the way out. It’s got a claw or something. Are you okay?”

“Yeah. It just stings. Be careful.”

Albert stepped into the next room and paused. His eyes fell upon the statue directly in front of him, and although he couldn’t see it, he already knew what it looked like. His mind produced a perfect image of what he had seen all those months ago, every detail as perfect as if he had taken Brandy’s glasses off his face and boldly stared at it.

The woman’s face was particularly vivid.

Oh, God! he thought, with inexplicable horror. That poor woman! He could see nothing but shades of gray, yet he could see the blood and the pain and the madness and the cruelty. Why were they doing that? Why were they forcing her into that hole? What had she done to deserve such an end? How could they continue doing that to her with her screaming (begging) like that?

“Albert?” Brandy’s voice was frightened.

She begged them. She pleaded with them to stop. She promised them anything they wanted, her money, her body, her soul, and still they dragged her down into the deepest chambers of those awful catacombs with a glee that was actually sexual in its intensity.

“Albert? Are you okay?”

Albert shook away the image. “Yeah. Just…bad stuff in here.”

Brandy did not reply. Her eyes were tightly closed, her heart pounding. She prayed that he would just start moving again. She knew what he had seen. She could almost see that horrible statue too, even with her eyes firmly closed.

Albert began to walk again, turning his eyes away from that awful statue, but unable to tear his mind from it. They were her friends, he thought suddenly, and although he didn’t understand how he knew this, he did not doubt that it was true. They were her friends and they had sex after they shoved her in. All three of them had sex while they listened to her dying screams.

He walked on, trying hard to force these images from his head. This chamber was slightly less crowded than the first one, but still it was difficult to navigate, especially when his head was filled with the terrible screaming of a dead woman.

Brandy held his hand and followed close behind him. “Stop when you need to,” she reminded him. “I can take my turn whenever you’re ready.”

“I know,” Albert replied. “I’m okay.” And he was still okay. He just had to focus on where he was going and not on what was around him. They were just statues, after all, just reminders of bad things, things that might not even exist. As long as he kept his eyes forward, away from the edges of Brandy’s glasses…

But that was so hard. His fear made him want to look, to make sure nothing was lurking among the statues around him. Just a little peek. A mere second. Half a second. Just to be sure there was nothing there. He had to keep telling himself that the fear he imagined was far better than the fear that he would experience if he dared to take that peek.

“Don’t overdo it,” Nicole pleaded.

“Yeah,” agreed Wayne. “If you overdo it, you might not recover to take over for me.”

That was a good point, Albert realized. If he waited until he physically couldn’t go any farther, he might not have the courage to put the glasses back on if it came back to him. For that matter, he might be too afraid to carry on even with his eyes closed. Wasn’t that exactly what happened to Brandy last time? “Just a little farther,” he promised. “Then Brandy can take over.”

“Right,” agreed Brandy, although she didn’t sound very enthused to Albert. He didn’t blame her. She suffered quite a scare last time she was here.

He made his way around another statue, still narrowing his eyes to keep them behind the small lenses.

He almost walked right into it. He was clearing his head, focusing his attention on the task at hand, when he glimpsed the thing that was sticking toward him. It wasn’t any part of a human. It was long and thin. Perhaps it was part of some odd creature, like the thing that was killing the woman in that awful statue that greeted him when he entered this room. He bent toward it, examining it, and when it finally dawned on him what it was, he suddenly felt as if his stomach was filled with ice water.

“Oh shit,” he breathed. Panic welled up inside him, threatening to overwhelm him.

“What?” Brandy asked, alarmed. “What is it?”

Albert had wondered what could make the fear room more deadly than the hate room with its spiked pit. Now he knew. And now that he knew, he was terrified to even move.

“Albert?”

“Spikes,” he replied. “Coming up from the floor. Don’t anybody move.” He tried to focus his eyes on what was around him. He could see a few sticking out from the wall now that he was looking for them.

“Like the ones Beverly fell on?” Nicole asked.

“Yeah. But more of them. They’re coming up from the floor at an angle. On the walls, too.” Albert could not see well enough with Brandy’s glasses on to spot them all, yet if he took them off he would surely panic at the sight of the statues that stood around him. If he panicked, he could run himself right through, which was exactly the reasoning behind these horrible things, he was sure.

“Okay. We have to take our time in here. If we don’t, if we let ourselves get scared and we start to hurry, one or more of us will wind up just like Beverly, but vertical.” It was a horrible image, but hopefully it would prove to drive home the point…or not, as the case may be.

“Well then let’s all just remain calm,” Wayne said. “How’re you doing?”

Albert steeled himself mentally. “I’m holding in there.” He began to walk forward, moving slowly, with deliberate cautiousness. He focused on watching for the spikes and found them to be an easier fear to deal with than the mysterious statues. He reminded himself that as long as he kept his pace slow, those giant needles could give only an annoying poke. And with Brandy’s glasses on, his eyes would be protected. “Stay right behind me. Try not to veer to the sides.”

His pride also helped to hold back the fear, he found. He wanted to be brave. He didn’t want to look like a coward, no matter how justified his fear may be. It was not so much for Brandy, who knew the horrors of this room as well as he did, or even for Nicole. Ironically, it was a childish, petty urge to prove that he was braver than bigger, stronger Wayne, who had now seen his girlfriend naked. It was silly, to say the least, but it helped a little, so he embraced it.

This second chamber of the fear room was curved. It wrapped around the first, circling to the right. The statues were many, but not as many as there had been before, and these were somehow not as bad. Most were formless, hunched shadows or vague, human shapes, with no real meaning to his handicapped eyes. Only one caught his attention: an unusually tall and slim figure far to his right.

It was not a man or a woman, but something else, something not human, but upright, just the same. As his eyes swept across this, he thought for some reason about fog. Dense fog. Fog so thick that he could barely see his own hand. There was something terribly creepy about this image, something incredibly unsettling. (They’re everywhere!) He turned away from the tall thing and the image of the fog became a hazy memory, but the eeriness it had instilled remained.

God, it was hard not to hurry.

“Is everyone still okay back there?” Albert asked, trying to focus his attention away from that strange eeriness. This room was like that fog, thick and gray and full of nasty, hiding surprises.

Brandy had let go of his hand and was holding onto his waist, her flashlight still in one clenched fist. She pressed her face against his backpack and said, “I’m okay.”

“I’m fine, too.” Nicole had her free hand on Brandy’s shoulder.

“Me too,” Wayne reported. “We’re all fine. Just take care of yourself up there.”

“You’ve already gotten farther than we got before,” Brandy told him.

“I know,” Albert said. He was moving toward the end of the room. Ahead he could just see the square outline of the door. “We’re almost through this room.”

“How many are there?” Nicole asked.

“I don’t know,” Albert confessed. “Could be just these two. Could be a hundred. Down here I don’t doubt anything.”

In the corner of the room, to the left of the door, there was a statue of a man with his arms outstretched. For just a moment something surfaced in Albert’s mind, something (he won’t die!) every bit as eerie as the image of the fog, but much more distant, much more vague. He focused on the doorway itself. He could see more of those narrow spikes jutting up from the floor on either side of it, angled inward. “Be careful going through the door. Follow me as close as you can or you’ll get cut.”

He stepped up to the doorway, but paused before entering it. “I’m going to try and see if this is the way out.”

Brandy squeezed his waist, afraid for him.

Albert closed his eyes and removed the glasses. He then lowered his head so that he would be looking only at his feet when he opened his eyes. For a moment he stood that way, steeling himself for the fright he would likely see, wondering if there were things down here that could frighten a man so badly he could drop dead at the very sight. A childish paranoia ran through him, a horrible urge to quickly look around and make sure they were really alone, and he had to bite his lip to hold it back. At last, he lifted the hand he held Brandy’s glasses in as if to shield himself from sunlight, and opened his eyes. He stared down at his own bare feet on solid stone. He held his eyes there, willing them not to move, then lifted them slowly, raising his hand as he did so, using it as a visor. There was no pit of spikes, no trap of any other sort, but as he lifted his head, he saw a stone foot.

More statues.

Another chamber.

He closed his eyes immediately and returned Brandy’s narrow glasses to his face. When he opened his eyes again, he found that could make out a large, awkward form standing in front of him. It was not shaped like a man, but more like three, huddled strangely close together. Looking at it sent an odd tingle up his spine.

More shapeless forms loomed behind this statue. “It’s a third chamber,” he reported. “Come on. Be careful.”

As he walked past the first statue in this third chamber, his eyes fixed on the empty darkness ahead of him, he suddenly felt a piercing pain in his right arm. He drew back, hissing a little.

“What happened?” Brandy’s voice was tinged with panic.

“Spike,” he replied as he gazed down at the long, almost invisible thing that was jutting out from the statue. “Some of them are sticking out of the statues. Watch yourselves.”

Brandy was not concerned with herself. “Are you okay?”

Albert assured her that he was and continued walking, his left hand pressed against a shallow, bleeding gash in his right arm, just below the elbow.

The statues in this third chamber were in greater numbers than in the second, but were not so many as were in the first. As he walked, he saw that there was another doorway immediately ahead and to the left, behind a large, animal-like statue. “I think I see the next door.” The room continued on past this doorway, curving toward the right as the last one had, and he wondered, not for the first time, if one of these rooms could have more than one exit.

“Already?” Nicole sounded skeptical.

“It seems sort of random,” Albert explained, “sort of like a maze, hard to navigate, especially blind.” As he approached this new door, he found the statue that stood between it and him disturbing. It reminded him of a forest somehow, thick and lush, almost a jungle. As he grew closer he imagined a noise, like the chirping of a squirrel, but louder, lower, more menacing. A feeling of overwhelming panic was welling up inside him and he had to stop and close his eyes. His every instinct told him to run, to hide, to just get the hell out of there before… Before what? He had closed his eyes, had blocked out the sight of that horrible statue, but still that feeling of impending doom remained.

“Albert?” Brandy’s voice again, trembling, fearful.

Albert focused his thoughts on her, on keeping her safe. He stood there, silent and still, trying hard to focus on something other than the fear, on something other than this damned room. Why the hell had he wanted to come back here so badly? Nothing was worth this. Nothing.

“Albert?” Brandy again, the fear in her voice sharper than before.

“Albert?” Nicole’s voice this time, sounding equally concerned.

“Okay,” Albert tried to assure them, but his voice was soft and dry, almost inaudible. He took a deep breath, then another. “Okay,” he said again, this time loud enough to be heard over the pounding of his heart. He took a third deep breath, held it, and then opened his eyes.

It came up from his right, lunging out of the darkness. In the space of a heartbeat, everything was blood and chaos. Something sharp entered low on his right side and jolted up and back, severing his spine with the speed and power of a machine. He screamed and fell to the floor, his lower body seemingly gone from beneath him.

“Albert!” Terrified, Brandy fell onto him, clutching him in her arms. Her eyes had flown open, but she saw only Albert, his limp form lying sprawled beneath her. “Oh god!”

Nicole, too, had opened her eyes when Albert screamed, and instantly she wished she hadn’t. She was looking right into a great, snarling face, a beast with more teeth than head, covered with a thick, gray coat of stone fur. She staggered backward, into Wayne, and dropped her flashlight onto the floor. Then a huge arm wrapped around her waist and a thick hand fell over her eyes. She screamed out, terrified, kicking frantically.

“Calm down!” Wayne yelled. “Just calm down! I’ve got you! It’s okay!”

Brandy was screaming Albert’s name. She didn’t understand what happened.

Albert felt light, like a balloon. The world around him was slowly spinning and seemed to be drifting away from him.

Brandy ran her hands over him, sliding them down to where he’d been speared, trying to understand what had happened. She was crying, terrified. “Oh God!” she cried. “Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!”

But she seemed so far away to Albert. Her touch didn’t hurt. In fact, he could not feel her touch at all once her hands fell below the middle of his waist. He was numb down there, completely without feeling. Darkness grew around him, slowly swallowing him into its black belly, and he felt deep sleep beckoning him.

Nicole’s kicking grew less frantic as she realized who it was that was holding her, and she began to wilt, embracing Wayne’s big, comforting arms. This isn’t happening, she thought as her best friend begged God for some kind of miracle. Please say this isn’t happening.

Wayne had not opened his eyes when Albert screamed. He froze in place, squeezing his eyes tightly closed. If asked, he could not have said why or how. Perhaps it was the thought of those random spikes sticking out from the statues and walls all around him, ready to impale anyone who panicked in these dark rooms, or perhaps he had just gotten lucky and froze in pure fright. Either way, he’d managed to remain in control throughout the chaos that had suddenly erupted around him. Now he stood, clutching Nicole against him, still holding his hand over her eyes as he listened to the drama that was unfolding before him.

Brandy didn’t understand. The confusion was almost a physical thing, dark and slippery. She took Albert’s hand, but it was weak. She called his name, but he did not answer.

Albert slowly faded, sinking toward a darkness that was deeper than any sleep.

Brandy fell over him, holding him in her arms. “Albert…” she begged, sobbing. “Albert…no…”