Suddenly, she did not know which scenariowould be worse. Still clutching her purse, she took a step towardhim, unable to ignore the shiver that was slowly creeping up herback. “See anything?”

He stepped into the next room and Brandyfollowed. What she saw next made her forget the horrors she’d beenimagining.

Chapter 8

The room was ten feet across and eight feetdeep. Its walls, floor and ceiling were all gray stone. There wereno light fixtures. There were no doors or windows, only the openingthrough which Albert and Brandy entered and two smaller openings onthe opposite wall. Five strange statues stood in this room, all ofthem apparently carved from the same gray stone from which the roomitself was built.

Four of these statues were identical. Twostood flanking the entrance where Albert knocked down the falsewall. The other two stood at the center of each of the two shorterwalls on each side of the room. Each was a very vivid depiction ofa naked and grossly disproportioned man. They were nearly eightfeet tall and morbidly skinny, with taught flesh stretched overtheir long bones.

They had enormous Adam’s apples andshockingly long penises that hung limp against their thighs. Theirfeet and hands were likewise deformed, their fingers and toes muchlonger than their proportions should have allowed. Their middlefingers were almost as long as Albert’s forearm. They stoodstraight and stiff, backs to the wall, hands to their sides, feettogether like sentinels at watch.

Directly in front of them, between the twoopenings in the facing wall, was the fifth statue. This was againthe same elongated and faceless man, again carved from the samegray stone, but unlike the others, this statue was not standingupright and at attention. This one was frozen in motion, seeminglyin the process of falling to his knees, hands lifted to what wouldhave been his face, long fingers spread grotesquely in the air.There was something peculiar about the pose it was caught in, notprecisely a pose that someone would depict in a statue. It was toorandom, too spontaneous, too real. It was like a photographtaken candidly in the middle of an action, the kind that neverlooked right because everything was frozen in transition. This man(or whatever it was) could have been collapsing in a furious fit ofagony or in violent throes of joy. Without a face it was impossibleto tell.

Somehow, Albert thought that was preciselythe point of the statue. A life-sized and three-dimensional pictureof the choice they needed to make.

“Holy shit!” Brandy was standing in front ofone of the statues, her flashlight aimed at its enormous penis.

“Yeah, they’re pretty messed up.” But he’dalready moved beyond the statues. There were no cobwebs in thisroom, he saw. The stone was free of dust, immaculately clean. Heglanced back out into the tunnel from which they just entered.There were cobwebs out there, but not many. How recently had thattunnel been used, he wondered.

He turned his attention to the openings onthe opposite side of the room, shining his flashlight into one andthen the other. They were identical. Both dropped about six feet toa narrow tunnel that continued forward into darkness.

“They’re so real,” Brandy went on. “You cansee every wrinkle and vein. They even have fingerprints. It’screepy.” She backed away from the statue, as though she expected itto suddenly step forward and grab her. “Who do you think madethem?”

“No idea.” Albert was still studying the twopassages. 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 closedup tunnel underneath Briar Hills of all places?”

“Don’t know.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.” An idea struckher then. “Hey, do you think we’re in some kind of basement? Lookskind of like a museum of some kind.”

Albert thought she was right. It did looklike a museum of some kind. But he had never seen anything likethese statues before. Besides, to his knowledge Briar Hills didn’thave a museum with anything more interesting than antique tractors.And what kind of basement would have a room with an entrance likethis? There was nothing practical about these passages at all.Also, what kind of museum didn’t have any apparent lighting orclimate control?

Brandy walked over and shined her flashlightinto one of the passages Albert was studying. “What now?”

Albert shook his head. He didn’t know. “It’sone or the other.”

“So, what? Do we just try one?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” He hadserious doubts about just dropping into one. He could not shake thefeeling that the statue’s unusual pose warned them of that, but hedid not want to alarm Brandy any more than necessary.

“What does the map say?”

“The map stopped where we came through thatwall.”

“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 onepassage to the other, his head and the flashlight slowly turningfrom left to right, comparing them. Like with the wall, there wassomething 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, butthat meant nothing to him. His eyes fell on its right hand and herealized that its third finger was broken. He leaned closer andexamined the shortened digit’s stump. The stone there was flat andcoarse, not smooth. The finger had definitely been broken from thestatue, rather than carved this way. But where was it? He swept thefloor with his flashlight, checking every corner and around thefeet of each statue, but it was not there. He then shined his lightdown into the tunnel nearest the incomplete hand. There, right nextto the wall, was a gray finger, complete with silky-smoothnail.

He dropped into the tunnel, paused longenough to peer ahead, and then scooped up the finger and climbedback 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 wasit? He didn’t see it when he picked up the first piece. He walkedto the other passage and shined his light into it, but there wasnothing 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 themhere and suddenly he understood. “Maybe it didn’t.”

Brandy looked at him, curious.

He tucked the flashlight into his armpit andopened the box. He stirred through the contents for a moment andwithdrew the small stone. He held it to the piece he’d found in theleft tunnel and found a perfect fit. “Bingo.” He reached up andheld both pieces to the stump on the statue’s right hand,completing it. “The game board.”

“What?”

“The things in the box. I started thinkingthey 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 howthey all fit together. Now I realize my mistake. I was missing aplace to put all the pieces of the puzzle. A game board. That’swhat this place is. It’s one big game board.” He shined hisflashlight into the left tunnel, the one both nearest to thestatue’s broken hand and where he’d found the missing piece. “We gothis way.”

He looked into the tunnel he’d just pointedout 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 defacingthese…whatever they were? But then again, he didn’t know what thevalue of these things might be, and even less idea what the valuemight be to whoever sent them the box.

“Well,” Albert said, a little nervous.“Let’s get moving. Should I go first?”