The Box (The Temple of the Blind #1)

  Chapter 16

  The passage was about eight feet tall by five feet in width when they entered, but as they walked, the ceiling sloped gradually downward and the walls slowly closed, narrowing until they could no longer walk fully upright or side-by-side.

  Before the tunnel grew too small, Albert stopped and peered back the way they’d come, a little unnerved by the claustrophobic position they were finding themselves in.

  “Are we going the right way?” Brandy asked, noticing his hesitance.

  Albert shook his head. “We have to be,” he replied. “There was a bird.”

  Brandy giggled a little at how absurd that sounded.

  “It was the only clue we had.”

  “I know.”

  “We have to be going the right way. Do you want to lead or follow?”

  Brandy looked back the way they’d come, and then up ahead at where they were going. On one hand there was the fear of what may lie ahead, the anxious unknowing, the danger, but on the other hand there was the question of what may be behind them, the thought that she may be vulnerable. “How narrow do you think it’ll get?”

  “Hard to say. We may have to crawl soon.”

  She took a deep breath and decided: “I’ll go first.” It was the thought of being blind on two sides, unable to either turn around or see past Albert that ultimately decided it for her. She squeezed past him and pushed forward.

  Albert removed the backpack and followed.

  As the walls closed in around her, forcing her to duck lower and lower, Brandy’s anxiety grew. She was not usually claustrophobic, but she was feeling that suffocating feeling now. What if it grew too narrow to fit through? What if they became stuck down here, perhaps miles underground, in a place no one else on earth even knew existed? She did not like the thought of the irony of narrowly surviving that pit of spikes only to slowly die of thirst wedged between these walls. She shook away the thought, and asked Albert where he thought the other two tunnels led.

  “I don’t know. If I had to guess I’d say probably down to that maze. That seemed like a good place for getting rid of trespassers.”

  “Do you think every choice we didn’t make was a trap?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe not. Whoever took our clothes could have gone a different way. Maybe we got the hard road and he’s taking the easy one.”

  “I don’t like not knowing who’s in here with us.”

  “I don’t either.”

  The ceiling had finally descended too low for them to walk and they dropped to their hands and knees. Albert had to place his backpack on the floor beneath him and drag it along between his hands. This was awkward, but he managed to keep up.

  Ahead of them, the tunnel made a sharp right turn and then continued down the ever-shrinking corridor. It was about now, as they made this tight turn, that Albert became distracted by the view. He was staying close behind Brandy, not wanting to be left behind, and he found himself staring at her round buttocks and the titillating slit of her vagina that her crawling posture revealed. Even without a flashlight he could see that part of her perfectly in the backlight. The muscles of her thighs pumped solidly as she crawled, stretching and contracting in a motion that was incredibly erotic. The sight sent a knot into his stomach and he forced his eyes back down to the floor. He felt guilty looking at her that way. It was ungentlemanly as all hell, but it was also a damn pleasant distraction from his fear of this labyrinth.

  The walls and ceiling closed in around them until they had to give up crawling on hands and knees to continue on their bellies, and Albert’s view of Brandy was thankfully replaced by a much less interesting view of his backpack as he shoved it forward ahead of him.

  “I see the end of the tunnel,” Brandy reported. They were sweet words to Albert. “Only a little farther.”

  “Thank God,” Albert sighed. “I’m starting to get claustrophobic.”

  “Me too.”

  The last few feet were a squeeze, but they managed to make it through without getting stuck. The only truly difficult part was exiting the tunnel itself. The floor of the next room was several feet lower than the floor of the tunnel. Brandy slithered from a hole much smaller than the one they entered, inching her way out until she could plant her hands on the cold floor and ease herself down. It was now that she wished that she had opted to go second so that Albert could have given her a hand, but she couldn’t change that now.

  Albert pushed his backpack through the hole after her and immediately began to pull himself free. Claustrophobia had begun to get the best of him and he wanted out as quickly as possible.

  Brandy grabbed the backpack as she stood and tried to give him a hand, but he was on the floor before she could get a grip on him. She heard something strike the floor way too hard—his elbow, she thought—but he did not seem to notice. He was already studying this newest chamber.

  This room was round, its diameter at least sixty feet. A walkway about ten feet wide circled the room, as did dozens of tunnel entrances identical to the one they just exited. In the center of the room, a steep, spiraling staircase sank down into the darkness below and at the top of these steps stood a lone sentinel statue. It was standing upright and stiff, with its feet together, facing the top of the staircase. Its right hand was at its side, but the left was raised toward the steps, its grotesquely long index finger extended.

  “I think it wants us to go down,” said Brandy. Her eyes fell to the statue’s penis again. There was a grotesque sort of eroticism about a penis that big. It stirred something in her gut, something as unpleasant and unavoidable as a nicotine craving, and she wondered if it was the sex room again. “Do you think we should?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Albert as he clambered to his feet. “So far they seem to be on our side, but we’ll have a look in all the passages anyway. Just in case.”

  “We should mark the tunnel we came in through.”

  “With what? I left the spray paint behind.”

  Brandy handed Albert the flashlight, and then removed a tube of lipstick from her purse. She scrawled a glossy X on the wall on each side of the tunnel and then replaced the tube.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “I know.”

  Albert laughed.

  It took him only a moment to check out all of the passages that led away from the stairs. Nothing but smooth, clean stone could be seen in each of them. But he hadn’t really expected to see anything. The statue was pointing down and he had a strong hunch that if they were going to get through this labyrinth alive, they would do well to trust these faceless beings.

  He turned and peered down into the darkness below, trying to judge how far down it could go, but it was impossible.

  “So why is it that this guy points the way but all the others were all mysterious about it?”

  Albert shrugged. “Maybe he figures by now we’ve earned it.” He handed the flashlight back to her and began to lead the way down the spiraling steps, descending ever farther into the unknown.