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 him. 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. C
ome 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.