“The temple was the door,” replied the Keeper.

  “I see.”

  “You are safe now. Rest. Let Wayne rest. And then you can all return to the surface.

  The Keeper did not vanish, as the old man had, but simply turned and walked away. Albert watched the frail figure for a moment, and then asked one more question.

  “Will we ever see you again?”

  The Keeper did not turn back. “No,” it said. “Never.”

  Albert watched until it was gone and then turned and walked over to where Wayne lay.

  Olivia was still bent over him, gently stroking his head. Andrea was holding his hand. Behind them, Albert saw for the first time the bundle that was lying on the tunnel floor. “Are those our clothes?” he asked.

  “I think so,” replied Nicole. She stood up and went to them, digging through them. They were all there, everything except what the blind man had taken from them. She turned and looked at Albert, her expression noticeably sad, even in the shadows. “All except Beverly’s.”

  Albert turned and looked back toward the temple. Those the Keeper had left down there, lost along with her body, never to be seen again.

  Also among their belongings was Brandy’s backpack, which she’d left behind when they disrobed. She’d completely forgotten about it. Inside were the three jackets and the three swimsuits she’d packed, along with the bare basics of her purse, which included her cigarettes and lighter, some makeup and a tube of lip-gloss. Her driver’s license and keys were also in there. Now that she remembered bringing them, she was very thankful they weren’t lost when the temple self-destructed.

  Wayne opened his eyes and looked up at Olivia, who smiled down at him. “Hey there,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.

  “I told you to go on,” he said.

  Olivia looked up at Albert, then down at Wayne again. “What?”

  He looked up at Albert, and then around at the others, trying to focus his eyes. “Take the light and go.”

  Olivia smiled down at him. “Silly,” she said. “We’re done now. You’re fine.”

  He stared up at her, not comprehending. “What?”

  Albert knelt beside him. “Don’t you remember anything?”

  Wayne looked up at him. He didn’t understand.

  “It’s been hours since we left you in that tunnel,” Albert explained. “Don’t you remember any of it?”

  Wayne looked at Olivia and then up at Brandy, as if for confirmation. “I don’t…” He closed his eyes and tried to focus his thoughts. “I had a dream…that’s all. Somebody was talking to me…” He shook his head. “But I can’t remember what the voice said.” He opened his eyes and looked up at Albert. “Something about you and Andrea and… What happened?” He felt something wet on his chest and realized that Olivia was crying again. He reached up and touched her cheek. “I…felt like there was something very important I was supposed to do.” He looked up at Albert again. “But it was just a dream…”

  “Relax,” Albert said, smiling. “Rest for a little while. We’ll tell you everything.”

  Chapter 55

  Scattered about his bare feet were the stones that once concealed the entrance to the great labyrinths of the Temple of the Blind, stones he’d twice tumbled with his bare hand to reveal the first wonders of that ancient place that now was not even a tomb. It was nothing. Before him stood a wall of cracked stone, not gray and smooth like the walls of the temple, but coarse, pale bedrock.

  “Albert?” Brandy stepped out of the shadows behind him, dressed now, except for the items the blind man had taken. Behind her, just out of sight around the next turn, the others sat around Wayne with one flashlight. Albert had taken the other when he went to see what had become of his Temple of the Blind. “I brought your clothes.”

  “It’s gone,” he said without turning. “There’s nothing left. Not even a hole.”

  “Would it matter if there was?”

  Albert didn’t respond. He wasn’t sure if it would or not. He wasn’t sure if anything mattered.

  “Wayne’s okay. Says he hurts, but he managed to sit up okay.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s like a miracle.”

  “Like he never died,” Albert said, almost too softly to be heard. “Pretty soon it’ll be like it never happened, like he was never down here…like none of us were ever down here.”

  “Like there never was a here?” She was beginning to understand what was going through his head.

  “It was all fake. Wayne never died. There was never any end of the world. The whole thing was a bunch of lies.”

  “Not all of it.”

  Albert sighed. “I know. But too much of it was.”

  “Not the part where I fell in love with you.”

  He turned and faced her now. “I know.” He kissed her soft lips, held them, savored them. She was right. That was all that should have mattered. But there were so many things he still didn’t know, things he would probably never know.

  When he pulled away, Brandy sighed lovingly and smiled. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too.”

  She held his shirt and pants out to him. “Put some clothes on, stud, you’re making me horny.”

  Albert smiled. “Yes, Ma’am.” As she helped him into his jeans, his thoughts returned again to the lies they’d all been told. “How much of what we did was really us?” he asked. The question was like a poison, eating away at his thoughts. “How much was us and how much was someone else inside our heads?”

  “Maybe we’ll never know.”

  “Did I really solve the clues on the box or did someone solve it for me? Did I really know to knock down the wall that used to be here or did someone tell me to do it? Was it really us down here?”

  Brandy gazed up at him, her blue eyes soft and pretty. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t us at all. Maybe the only reason I survived my fall from the tower is because someone told me just what to do, just how to fall, just how to land. Maybe that’s the better way. Don’t think so much about it. It doesn’t matter. We’re going home.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because something’s not right.”

  “What’s not right?”

  Again he shook his head. “I don’t know. Just…something.”

  “Come on.” When his shirt was on and his broken arm tucked warmly inside, she took his good arm and pulled him away from the wall of stone that had once been the doorway to the impossible. “I don’t want to think about it for a while.”

  Albert nodded, but as they walked away, his eyes drifted back to the place where the Temple of the Blind had once been.

  Chapter 56

  Wayne drew himself slowly to his full height as he stepped into a taller tunnel. The pain was dull, but relentlessly constant. There was a burning sensation in the muscles where the dark thing entered and exited his body and a general aching inside him, making every step he took feel like an exhausting feat of impossible strength.

  But he was still alive!

  He couldn’t understand how… He’d been run through. The thing in the labyrinth, the dark thing they’d somehow let loose by igniting the inferno beneath the temple and opening the door into the Wood, had chased him down and speared him like a fish. He never even saw it, save for some brief hint of movement in that hellish wall of darkness, some unthinkably black thing in a complete and oily blackness that defied all laws of both nature and God.

  But he was still alive.

  Albert said that it was the Keeper who brought him back to the world of the living, or else someone or something by his instruction. And yet Wayne had never even seen the creature with his own eyes.

  What was it he’d done while he was in that darkness of death? It felt like a distant dream now, a permanent haze. Andrea claimed to have seen him…or felt him…or something… She claimed that he’d called out to her, guiding her along that strange, dark tunnel. She told him that he’d been purposeful, that he’d saved her life and everyone else’s as well. Yet he remembered nothing but brief, distant flickers of things, memories of dreams submerged in his subconscious mind, never floating fully to the surface so that he could examine them.

  Albert had wondered aloud if perhaps his inability to remember the things from his time among the dead had to do with being separated from his human body and therefore his human brain and its biological memory banks. Perhaps he was right. That sounded logical, after all. But he had no idea.

  “How are you holding up?” Olivia asked him. It was a question she’d been asking almost constantly since they first started moving nearly an hour ago.

  He looked down at her, into her beautiful face, and wondered how he could ever have asked her to leave him. Right now he never wanted to be away from her again. “I’m okay,” he assured her, although he felt like someone had repeatedly struck him in the belly with a sledgehammer.

  “We’re almost there,” Albert promised.

  Olivia’s dark eyes lingered on him for a moment before turning forward again, and in that moment Wayne found himself distracted in a way he hadn’t been in several years.

  He watched her for a moment longer and then lowered his eyes to the floor. He thought about all that he’d been through and wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever be the same.

  Laura Swiff’s advances seemed like an eternity ago. He felt as though he hadn’t been inside his apartment in months. Even the Sentinel Queen’s horror tunnel, her “Road Beneath the Wood,” seemed like a distant memory to him.

  But of all the things he’d seen and felt, from his mixed disgust and desire for Laura to the unthinkable nightmares of Gilbert House and the Wood to his struggle with the murderous Caggo, what suddenly lingered in his thoughts were the Sentinel Queen and her unborn child. His unborn child.

  What would such a child have looked like, fathered by a man and mothered by a being like the Sentinel Queen. Would it have been a hairless, faceless freak, but possessing a voluptuousness that would have been irresistible to either sex? Would it have been human? Or would it have been something in between?

  He did not know how to feel. On one hand, he never asked for a child. He never wanted to father a child that way. He had been seduced, even raped, after all, by a woman only half human. But on the other hand, the child was his. It was his genes. It was his blood. It was a part of him, and the Sentinel Queen had no more right to take it with her to her grave than she’d had the right to take the seed from his body. Now, walking home with the friends he’d made in the course of the longest night of his life, he didn’t know whether to feel relieved or to grieve.

  Olivia took his hand and squeezed it and he gave her a smile. “It’s over now,” she said. “It feels weird. I guess I’d started to think it wouldn’t ever end.”

  “Tell me about it,” sighed Nicole. “I can’t wait to be home. I’m going to take a long, hot bath.”

  “Mm. That sounds good,” Brandy said in a voice that was almost a purr.

  Wayne looked around at them, happy to still be alive and surrounded by these new friends, but his eyes fell on Albert and remained there. He didn’t look happy to be done. He was staring at the floor at his feet, his right sleeve dangling beside him. His broken arm was tucked inside his shirt. It must have been torture to travel so far and do so much with a fractured bone. But it wasn’t pain he saw in Albert’s dark eyes. It was concern.

  “What’s up?”

  Albert looked up at him, a little startled, and then shook his head. “Nothing,” he replied, and he even managed a smile for him. “Just daydreaming, I guess.”

  Wayne thought about calling him a liar, but decided not to. What did it matter, really? They were going home. There would be no more danger now. He looked back at Olivia, caught her gleaming brown eyes gazing up at him again, and decided he didn’t really care to know.

  Chapter 57

  Olivia helped Wayne into the back seat of Andrea’s car. It felt strange being in the sun again. It had been days since she last saw it. But it felt even stranger, oddly enough, to be in her clothes. She couldn’t believe how accustomed she’d become to being naked. “You okay?” she asked.

  Wayne nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “I’ll drop you guys off and then I’ve got to go home,” Andrea said. “My mom and dad are probably going to be pissed.”

  “Just tell them what we discussed,” Albert reminded her.

  Andrea nodded. The story they’d agreed on was that there was a little get-together over at Hilltop Park. There were hiking trails over there, and Albert planned to tell the people at the emergency room that he got a little too adventurous and fell down a steep hill and over a bluff. (He still didn’t know what he was going to tell them about the burns he and Nicole had suffered.) “If they’re not too mad, I’ll try and come see you guys.”

  Albert eased into the passenger’s seat of his own car. Brandy would have to drive him and Nicole to the emergency room. Between his broken arm and the hole in his leg, he had no choice. But first she’d have to take them all back to the apartment to clean up. It was going to be hard enough to explain these injuries without smelling of rotting muck and excrement. And they were also going to have to grab a bite to eat. (She simply couldn’t wait any longer.)

  Once the stench was washed off of them, Albert thought he could explain his injuries to a doctor. A sharp, broken branch, a jutting rock. Even the gash on his knee and the cuts on his left arm were easily enough explained by a clumsy tumble down a rough embankment. Nicole could probably get by without having anything looked at, but as long as they were taking Albert, she might as well let a doctor look at her hand. She’d tell them that she punctured it rushing down the hill to help him. But she wouldn’t show them all the cuts and bruises the night tree left on her.

  Brandy, at least, wouldn’t need any medical attention. The worst she had was a broken tailbone, and they couldn’t do much for that.

  Albert looked over at Wayne as Olivia climbed into the seat next to him and a grin touched his face. He was getting around pretty good for a dead guy.

  They’d somehow managed to get out of the steam tunnels without being seen. Albert thought it was a minor miracle, even for a Saturday evening, considering how many people lived and worked on campus. Another miracle was the fact that there had been few people to see them hobbling to the parking lot like they’d just lost a brawl.

  “Give me a call later,” Wayne called over to them. “Let me know everyone’s okay.”

  “Give us your number,” Brandy said, tossing away her cigarette. She took a pen from the glove box and wrote it on the palm of her hand as Wayne told it to her. “And Andrea?” She wrote this number and then Olivia’s beneath Wayne’s. “Okay. Cool.”

  Olivia turned and looked at Wayne, her eyes still a little red from crying. “Is it okay if I stay at your place for a little while?” she asked. “I’m not ready to go back to my room yet.”

  Wayne smiled. “That would be nice. I’d like the company.”

  Nicole tossed Brandy’s backpack into the back seat of Albert’s car and then stood in the open door, finishing her cigarette. The wooden box, now considerably more battered (and a little more charred) than it was when it left his apartment, was stowed safely inside the backpack with the swimwear and the three jackets.

  Albert stared out the window, tired. It was hard to believe they were home. For a while, it didn’t seem like they’d ever make it back.

  “Nothing’s going to be the same after this, is it?” asked Andrea.

  He smiled. “No. It won’t. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

  She returned the smile. “I know it’s not.”

  Nicole finished smoking and slid into the back seat. “You guys take care of yourselves,” she called to the other car before settling in.

  “You too,” replied Olivia.

  Andrea almost didn’t want to go home. After all they’d been through, she felt closer to these five people than she’d ever been to anyone else in her life, and she was afraid that if they said goodbye now, she might begin to lose that even as they drove away.

  “We’re all still going to get our nails done, right?” Nicole asked.

  Olivia smiled. “Of course.” She held her hand up with the broken nail for Nicole to see. “I can’t walk around like this.”

  Nicole smiled. “Good. I’m holding you to that.”

  Brandy and Andrea sat behind the wheels of their respective vehicles and closed the doors. Albert watched the other half of their party drive away and felt the same sort of sadness that Andrea had felt, that all of them were feeling. It was all over now.

  After all that time, after all that wonder, he could hardly believe that it was done. Not only had they conquered the Temple of the Blind, they had brought it down. Never again would they be able to go inside, even if they wanted to.

  “How you feeling?” Brandy asked, and Albert turned to look at her.

  “I’m okay,” he replied. “You?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m exhausted,” announced Nicole as she leaned forward between the front seats. “I’m sweaty. I’m filthy. I reek. And I’m not wearing any panties. You guys throw the coolest parties. Did you know that?”

  Epilogue

  Brandy lay with her head on Albert’s chest, listening to the sound of his beating heart, which had finally slowed to its usual, comforting rhythm. Hers too had finally calmed from the love they’d just made. Lying here now, with his strong arm around her, it was hard to believe how close she’d come to losing him.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32