She remembered. The next gear in the Keeper’s machine is turning, he told them, way back in that gawdy red room while that naked, psychotic little goth witch watched on. These are his rules. And everyone is subject to his rules.

  “When Warner and Kneede were arguing,” recalled Albert, “Kneede said to tell us the truth. ‘None of the Keeper’s self-righteous rules,’ he said. And last time we saw Warner, he told us the Keeper’s rules kept him from helping.”

  (I’m not allowed to help. The Keeper forbids it.)

  Brandy nodded. “And Kneede said the same thing just now. About how Warner wouldn’t help us because he follows the Keeper’s rules no matter what.”

  “Yeah…” He stood there a moment, pondering it all. “But what are the Keeper’s rules? Everyone keeps talking about his rules, but no one’s explained them to us.”

  Brandy stared at him, letting that process.

  He turned and met her gaze. “Are we bound to any rules?”

  “The Keeper’s rules forbid interference,” said a woman’s voice from behind them.

  They turned around to find an older woman in a one-piece bathing suit and sunhat walking toward them, her shoulders still damp from her morning swim. Her eyes were a familiar and eerie black.

  “They are there to protect those who do the Keeper’s work,” explained Warner, “not to govern them. Your free will is an integral part of the process. It’s what ensures that each new world belongs to mankind and not those who built it for them.”

  “Where the fuck have you been?” snapped Brandy.

  Albert glanced over at her, surprised.

  But she wasn’t holding back. “That psycho woman tried to kill us! And you were no help at all!”

  “I was doing my job,” replied Warner. “You’re not the only ones seeking the shadow road. I’ve been busy keeping the other two out of the enemy’s sight.”

  “Shadow road?” asked Albert.

  “Other two?” wondered Brandy. She glanced at Albert. The cat lady said there were others like them out there. Twelve of them, in fact. “What other two?”

  “You’ll meet them soon enough. First, you must confront the mistress of this hotel. She’s waiting for you ahead, as you’ve already been made aware.”

  Brandy was confused. “Yeah, because the other weirdos basically told us so. The cat lady warned us that Lucianna wasn’t what she seemed. And the pervert told us where she was hiding. Why can they tell us what we need to know, but not you?”

  “The ‘cat lady,’ as you call them… They cheat. They can do that with little repercussion. That’s the perk of being an elder deity.”

  “She’s a god?” gasped Albert.

  “For lack of a better word, yes. They are.”

  “They…?” wondered Brandy, recalling the way the woman’s voice kept drifting around the room, as if it were really the many cats that were talking to them…and those pale, bony hands…so like the frail hands of a cold corpse…

  “As for the shaman…” Warner went on. “He made the book legible only to those who reached the goals he set. You earned the right to view those pages. And he only gave you information you already had. Lucianna Estrane pointed you toward the moaning wind when you first arrived. That’s why she’s chosen to wait for you there.”

  “I did say we should start there,” Albert reminded her.

  “I know you did,” she grumbled. “What do you want, a cookie?”

  “And in regards to the Keeper’s rules,” Warner added. “They state that you have to find your own way to the doorways. I can intervene when your path is blocked by an external force, but I must otherwise stay out of it. That means I can’t answer any questions that aid you directly, but I can warn you when I think someone is scheming against you.”

  “Like you did when you told us there was an ‘enemy of the cycle’ in Mysteria,” Albert realized. “And that ‘beware the ruin’ warning. Because you knew those bogey things were prowling around the crossroads and that they wouldn’t follow the rules.”

  “Exactly. And now that you understand the rules…” He tipped the woman’s head to one side and waited for them to catch on.

  Brandy looked over at Albert again, her eyes widening. “We’re not obligated to follow them!” she realized.

  The woman’s mouth twisted into a smile. It wasn’t a very charming smile. Warner didn’t seem to be very good at doing it. It just sort of made her look insane… “The Keeper is wise beyond comprehension. He plans everything to the very last meticulous detail. It gives him the illusion of omnipotence. It gives him the illusion of control. But he isn’t the one in control of what happens here. You are. You should remember that.”

  “Is that the ‘truth’ Kneede wanted you to tell us?” asked Albert.

  “No. But it’s the first step in finding the truth.”

  Albert and Brandy exchanged a confused look.

  “What does that mean?” asked Brandy.

  When they looked back at Warner, however, he was gone. The woman was staring back at them, bewildered. “Hello,” she said, smiling a much more charming smile in her puzzled state than Warner had managed with the same mouth. Then she frowned and glanced around. “I think I forgot where I was going again…”

  Chapter 57

  They arrived at the end of the hallway and stood at the stairwell door.

  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary here. Should they go down to the ground floor? Or up to the third or fourth?

  Albert doubted it would be nearly as simple as just exploring the stairwell. The answer was sure to lie somewhere they could only find using his pervy psychic powers.

  Brandy had come to the same conclusion. She crowded closer to him and whispered, “What do you need me to do?”

  He glanced back down the hallway. It was a quiet time of day. There weren’t many people around. The only guest in sight was a man dragging a rolling suitcase back toward the lobby. But there were two housekeeping carts parked within sight, both surrounded by bustling staff. A vacuum cleaner was droning away. “Can you tell if any of these rooms are vacant?”

  “I was still sensing people when we were in the bar, but it’s faded. I’m not really getting anything right now. I doubt if Trixie’s gonna be any help again. She’s probably gonna need a nap after that workout session…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said quickly, blushing a little.

  “Okay…” He looked back at the empty stairwell and sighed. “Is it weird that I’m not really in the mood for sexy stuff right now?” he wondered.

  “I think that’s called being human, you freak.”

  He chuckled.

  “Seriously, it’s a good thing we’re both like this. You’d have killed a normal woman years ago. The fact that I can still walk is a fucking miracle.”

  He narrowed his eyes and considered that. “Can’t decide if I should apologize or feel proud.”

  “Both, I think.”

  “Gotcha.” He stepped into the stairwell and looked up at the ascending steps above him. Like all stairwells, it reminded him of Gilbert House…which wasn’t exactly sexy… But it did have a hint of privacy to it. And it was quiet. They’d be able to hear someone walking up or down.

  Brandy didn’t need him to suggest a course of action. She pulled him to the side, away from the door, out of sight of the Lucianna Mysteria’s housekeeping staff, and then pressed herself against him. “There’s got to be something here, right? Something hidden? Like in the gallery?”

  “I think so.” He closed his eyes and tried to feel the space around him. He wasn’t getting any of that strange significance. Did that mean they weren’t close enough to it? Or that it was just well-hidden?

  She laid her head against his shoulder and grasped the front of his shorts.

  Albert looked down at her, the bored expression on her face, the distracted way she looked back toward the doorway, watching to make sure the coast remained clear. “You know, the shaman called it ‘sex magic,’ but this stuff feels like it’s gonna take all the magic out of sex.”

  She giggled wearily. “No shit.” She leaned back, peering back down the hallway, then pulled her shirt up, revealing her perfect breasts for him. “This better?”

  “Always,” he replied, smiling. Her body was so beautiful. He could stare at her for hours. But he reached up and tugged it back down again, covering her back up. “But I think I need a minute.”

  She frowned up at him, concerned. “Okay?”

  “It’s starting to feel like it’s a job or something, you know?” He reached up and rubbed at the back of his neck. “And that doesn’t feel real. Does that make sense?”

  She nodded and pressed herself up against him again. “Yeah. It does.” She looked up at him, those pretty blue eyes shining behind her glasses.

  How did she always look so cute? Even when she was clearly exhausted and well past ready to go home?

  “It gets harder when you kind of don’t want to find what you’re looking for,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yeah. I totally understand that.” He glanced up at the stairs again. “But we can’t check out of here for good until we find whatever it is.”

  She groaned and pressed her mouth against his sleeve. “Stupid…” she murmured into the fabric.

  “I know.” He took her hand from his shorts, then brought it to his mouth and kissed it. He held it there for a moment, his arm curled around her, savoring the feeling of her body pressed against him. “It doesn’t have to be about sex,” he reminded her. He kissed her forehead and then closed his eyes.

  It didn’t have to be about sex…. The Shaman said so. And why should it have to be about that? It wasn’t really the sex that he treasured when he was with his wife. It was the closeness. The intimacy.

  It was about the love.

  He loved Brandy more than anything in the world. He couldn’t live without her. He couldn’t even bear the thought of trying. And it had nothing to do with the temple or the sex room. Somehow, from the moment they set foot in those steam tunnels six years ago, he knew she was the only one for him. No one else even came close.

  Sex was only one way of expressing that love.

  Most of the time, there’s no actual sex involved at all, he recalled Shanzer telling them. It’s all about the emotions involved.

  He didn’t say it was about sexual emotions. All he said was “emotions.”

  He closed his eyes and held her, focusing on that. On the love he felt for her. The way he felt when she laid her head against him like this. The way he felt when he made her laugh until she snorted. The way she always reached across the bed or the couch or the table when they were too far apart for two long, and brushed her fingertips across the back of his hand.

  He remembered standing there at the wedding, staring into her beautiful eyes. The way she stared back at him. The way she smiled. The way she made him feel like there was no one else in the world…

  It was happening right now. An entire universe surrounding them, and yet she was all there was. Never mind the stairwell. Never mind the housekeeping staff in the hallway. Never mind the Lucianna Mysteria and its sprawling grounds. None of that existed. All there was…was her.

  She was his universe.

  He pressed his lips against her forehead again. The feel of her skin… The smell of her hair…

  Nothing else.

  …except…

  He frowned. No. There was something else. Something below them.

  Brandy remained the center of his universe, but when everything else faded, something remained.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the lower landing. “There it is,” he whispered.

  Brandy lifted her head, surprised. “What? How?”

  He squeezed her hand and led her downward.

  “You don’t even need me now?” she asked.

  “Exactly the opposite,” he replied. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “That’s sweet,” she told him. “But I’m not looking forward to whatever it is your dragging me into.”

  “Understandable.” He held tight to her hand, focusing on the feel of her skin against his, clinging to that idea that she was the only thing in the universe that mattered.

  It was the stairs, themselves. There was another floor below this one.

  He couldn’t see it, exactly. It looked like they were at the bottom. But there was another flight, hidden in the shadows. “Close your eyes,” he warned her as they stepped onto the landing.

  Brandy did as he said without hesitation. She trusted him.

  He needed to be careful. One misstep and they could both take a dangerous tumble down to whatever horror-filled basement might lie beneath their feet. But if he hesitated, he might lose it again.

  He held his breath and plowed straight toward the wall…

  Chapter 58

  It was jarring. Brandy felt the floor disappear beneath her feet and let out a startled yelp as she felt herself falling.

  But then she was in Albert’s arms again. She opened her eyes to find that they were still descending the stairwell, heading for an even lower level. “That’s never not going to be weird!” she gasped.

  The space before them wasn’t a dark and dingy basement. Instead, it was bright and sunny. A pair of dusty glass doors awaited them at the bottom, leading out into an overgrown courtyard that neither of them had ever seen before.

  In fact, she found herself quite sure as they stepped out into the hot sunshine that no guest of the Lucianna Mysteria had ever seen this place before.

  On either side of them were tall stone walls almost completely overrun with ivy. The grass was knee-deep and bursting with wildflowers. Bugs leaped into the air as they waded through it. Birds and cicadas sang a chorus in the trees all around them.

  “It’s so pretty…” she marveled. She looked back over her shoulder. The hotel was there, its outer walls towering over them. She could see balconies and windows of the westernmost rooms, but somehow she knew without a doubt that anyone standing on those balconies or looking out those windows wouldn’t be able to see them.

  This was the secret side of the hotel. This was Mysteria. The Mysteria that wasn’t infected by the ruin.

  What a nice change of pace!

  Or so she thought for a moment. Then the wind picked up and a strangely ominous sound rolled through the forest, like groaning voices calling out. “That’s kind of unsettling…” she whimpered, clinging more tightly to Albert’s hand.

  “That’s the moaning Lucianna was talking about.”

  “You think?” she muttered. “God, it sounds creepy as shit…” It was a deep and strangely throaty sort of sound that did, in fact, have a lustful quality to it, breathy and longing, almost desperate. But she couldn’t decide if she only heard it like that because the pervert put the idea in her head.

  The path they were following curved to the left. The wind seemed to be coming from that direction, carrying the haunting moan from somewhere beyond, so they set off through the tall grass, pushing a path through it, sending scores of bugs springing from their feet in the process.

  “Do you think this was some kind of garden, once?” wondered Brandy.

  “Sort of looks like it might’ve been, doesn’t it?”

  She wondered if it was once a part of the regular grounds and then somehow slipped away into this other place, sort of like Gilbert House did. Or was this always a part of Mysteria? It seemed like a lot of work for something that no one ever saw.

  The ivy-covered walls took them left, then right again, then curved back to the left. Then, barely a hundred yards from the door, they found the source of the strange moaning noise.

  It was another hollow man.

  Or, more precisely, it was two of them.

  They stood in the center of a round clearing, surrounded by those same ivy-covered walls. They were long and thin, like their brother beneath the gallery, but instead of sitting on the ground, they were sort of squatting, their knees spread and bent. They were holding hands, their long, jointless fingers enlaced at their sides, and they were leaning forward, facing away from each other, with their butts pressed together for some reason. Those featureless, limp sausage penises were far more visible on these guys than it was on the first one. And strangely, she found that the lack of detail somehow made them look even more obscene than their sentinel cousins back in the temple.

  Instead of in the backs of their heads, the holes were in the front, where their mouths should have been, making them appear to be yawning impossibly wide, pushing those basic, triangular noses high up on their heads. Their eyes were just two carved arches, giving them that silly cartoonish look again.

  The moaning sound was, indeed, the wind. It entered one mouth, circled its way through their hollow insides, and exited through the other mouth so that one or the other of the hollow men seemed to be uttering the noise.

  It didn’t go unnoticed by her that this strange, anatomical arrangement meant that the breeze had to pass from one of these men to the other, most likely through their butts. “That’s not cute art,” she criticized.

  “Let’s just be glad the wind is blowing through their mouths,” decided Albert. “Given some of the things we’ve seen today, I know it could be worse.”

  “Good point…” She reached up and grasped the medallion. “So you think we’re just supposed to shove it down one of their throats this time?”

  “I don’t see anywhere else to stick it.”

  She giggled. It was a tired giggle, without much emotion, but it was a giggle. “Is it wrong that I kind of want to see you have to stick it up one of these guys’ butts?”

  “Yes,” he replied, taking the medallion from her. “Very wrong.”

  Again, she giggled. No one else made her giggle like that. She supposed Lucianna had a point back in her office. They really were a perfect fit.

  Albert faced the nearer of the two statues. On its feet as it was, even bent over, it was higher than the one under the gallery. He wasn’t tall enough to stick his whole arm in there.

  “Be careful,” she groaned. “I still don’t like this. It feels like that thing’s going to come to life and bite your arm off or something.”

 

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