“Albert, no!”

“It’s okay. Just wait there.” He was scared.He was damn scared. With every step he expected to be impaled orcrushed or worse. It was the same fear he’d felt before removingthe bags from the praying statue’s hands. Back then he’d felt sillyafterwards, wondering how he could expect such deadly consequences,but that was before he discovered what lay beyond the hate room.This place was getting more dangerous by the minute. But Brandy wasthe one who almost paid the price for pushing forward, and he wouldbe damned if he was going to let her take any more chances.

No spikes impaled him. The ceiling did notcome down on top of him. No fireball set him ablaze. The room wasjust a room and nothing more. Beyond it, the next passage wasidentical to the one that led back to the pit.

He paused in the middle of the room, gazingdown the next corridor, wishing he’d taken the light from Brandy sothat he could see how far the next tunnel went. It was now that hefelt something, a paranoid sense that they were not alone in thissmall room. He lifted his gaze upward, into the darkness abovehim.

Brandy saw him look up and quickly shinedthe light up to the high ceiling.

There was nothing there. Not a thing.

Yet Albert would have sworn…

Nothing.

He turned and walked quickly back to whereBrandy stood. Still waiting for the end to fall upon him from someunseen crevice, he took her hand and the two of them crossed theroom and entered the next tunnel.

Albert looked back as they left the chamberbehind. It wasn’t right. There was something terribly wrong aboutthat room. He could feel it. Yet they passed through it withoutharm.

Perhaps he was only being paranoid.

As they approached the end of the corridor,they heard the same shuffling, clicking, crackling noise thatfrightened them in the earlier passage. The sound was more distantthan before, but grew louder as they walked. It was enough to teartheir thoughts from both the deadly spikes and the mysteriouslyempty room.

“Albert…”

“I know.” Albert squinted into the darknessahead. Whatever that noise was, they were walking straight towardit.

When they reached the end of the tunnel andstepped out into the next chamber, neither of them were able toquite believe what greeted them. Stretched out before them was whatappeared to be an enormous stone bridge, nearly thirty feet wide,vanishing into the darkness ahead. On each side ran a low wall,beyond which was nothing but darkness. And it was impossible totell just how high up the ceiling was. The flashlight simply didn’treach.

Without speaking, they turned and walkedover to the edge of the bridge and peered over with the flashlight.Stretched out below them, as far as the light would reach, was anenormous stone maze.

“Wow,” exclaimed Albert. He could only seethe tops of the walls, but that was enough to reveal that thepassages were narrow. It was impossible to see a path through itfrom up here, much less from within those high walls.

It was from this maze that the strangenoises came.

“I never would have imagined that somethingthis big could be down here.” He looked up at the darkness abovethem. “How far underground are we?”

Brandy was staring down at the maze. She didnot really care how far down they were. What she was concerned withwas that noise. “What’s down there?” Her voice was barely awhisper.

“I don’t know, but I hope it can’t climb.Come on.”

The two of them began to cross the bridge,but something far to their right caught Albert’s eye and hestopped.

“What is it?” Brandy stopped and followedhis gaze. When she shined the flashlight at it, her stomach beganto churn again. “Albert, those are our clothes!”

It wasn’t all their clothes, but itwas their undergarments. An enormous pillar, at least as bigaround as a city water tower, stood just within the reach of theflashlight. Three white socks were hung on the side facing them.Above these, hanging side-by-side, were Albert’s white briefs andBrandy’s flowered white panties. Higher up hung Brandy’s bra. Thelast sock must have fallen into the shadows with the things thatwere making the noise.

“How do we get to them?” Brandy caughtherself trying to cover her nakedness again. Apparently, just thesight of some of her clothing was enough to remind her that she wasstark naked and her male companion could see her most privateparts.

Albert shook his head. “I don’t think wedo.”

There were things moving down there, unseenin the shadows. Albert could hear them prowling the narrowpassageways in the dark. It was impossible to say how many therewere.

“Why would somebody put them there?”

“Maybe to give those things our scent.”

Brandy glanced at him and then looked backat their unreachable undergarments. “I don’t like the sound ofthat.”

“Neither do I.” He also didn’t like how theclothes were hung as they would be wearing them if they were downthere. It looked to him as though someone had tried to simulatetheir presence.

Scent doubles, he thought, andshivered.

He took Brandy’s hand and led her across thebridge, trying not to look at the maze below. But he could notforget those undergarments. Why only those items? Why not use alltheir clothes?

Three passages awaited them, framed by foursentinels. All four were identical, feet together, hands at theirsides. They were neither in motion nor amorous, but they were alsonot helping them.

“So which one do we take?” Brandy asked.

“I’m not sure.” He removed his backpack,knowing well where the answer would be if there was one.

The finger and the button had been used, andhe doubted if they would come into play again, but he kept themjust in case. This left only the knife blade, the watch and thefeather. He removed these three items and examined each of them.But nothing about them gave him any clues.

He walked to the nearest passage and peeredinside, looking for anything out of place. Brandy followed him,lending him light. “You figured all the others out. You can getthis one.”

“I hope so.” He moved on to the secondpassage and then the third. Nothing.

Brandy turned her light to the statues,searching them for any slight difference. So far, they seemed toeach have all their parts. None of them were missing a finger.

Albert shook his head. “So far they’ve beenpretty easy clues. Whoever gave us that box wanted us to get thisfar, and I don’t see why we should stop here.” He gazed out at thedarkness that loomed over the maze beyond the side of the bridge.Somewhere, one of the things began making its strange shuffling andclicking sound. There was also a sound like stone striking stone,over and over again, very rapidly.

He turned away from the maze and beganexamining the statue on the far left.

“Hey.” Brandy was standing on her toesbeside the statue on the far right, shining her light up at thestatue’s neck. “Look at this.”

Albert hurried to her side and stretched upon his own toes to see what she was looking at.

“See it? Something’s scratched into itsneck.”

“Yeah, I do.” He grasped the statue’s armand craned his neck to see. It looked as if someone had taken asharp tool and etched something into the stone there, almost like atattoo. “It looks like…”

Brandy lifted the light up as high as shecould and focused it on the mark.

“It looks like a bird,” he decided at last.It was a crude image, but once he wrapped his head around it therewas no denying. He could make out what was supposed to be wings anda beak.

“Bird,” Brandy repeated. “Bird feather!”

Albert nodded. “I think so. Good eyes. Yourock.”

“Naturally.” She gave him a cool wink and heagain felt a spark of arousal. Was that the sex room lingering inhim? Or was it just him? At that moment, he could not say. She wasproud of herself for finding one of the clues and for that momentshe seemed more confident, more in control. And it looked damn goodon her. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been crushing on her evenbefore they entered the sex room. Maybe it was just his naturalattraction to her. Or maybe the sex room simply amplified that.