The box

Brandy looked past him to the thing on thefloor. “What is it?” she asked again.

When he could find no signs of danger, heturned the light back to the small object on the floor. It wasdingy white, about two inches in length. A second, smaller shard ofthe same material was lying next to it.

“Bone.”

Brandy was silent for a moment, considering,as did he, the meaning of such a find. “Is it human?”

“I don’t know.”

The pieces were too big to belong to a rat,but they were only fragments. It could have been human or it couldhave been from a dog or a cat or a dinosaur for all he knew. In adry tu

Albert started forward again, sweeping thefloor with his light. He felt like a soldier who has just realizedthat he is standing in a minefield.

“Be careful,” Brandy begged him. Shefollowed slowly, keeping some distance, but not too much. To staybehind was to be swallowed in darkness and left alone.

The tu

They found themselves in a round room,standing at the mouth of one of five tu

Another statue stood in the center of thisroom, this one of five faceless sentinels. All of them were bloodyand dying, with gory, ragged holes torn into their chests, backsand stomachs. One had bloody stumps for hands and one was clamoringfor safety on a shredded foot. They were each reaching desperatelytoward one of the five tu

All of these sentinels they’d encounteredseemed to hold some sort of message, each one vague, but this onewas obvious to Albert, and he did not need the crushed andshattered bones that littered this room to illustrate it.

“What is this place?” Brandy was gazingaround at the bones and the statues, her heart pounding. She wasstill cold, still shivering, but she no longer noticed. There was ahot fear rising from somewhere deep inside her, and it was far morecommanding than the cold.

Albert stared at the statue. “That laststatue,” he said, explaining as much to himself as to her. “Itrepresented faith, sacrifice, that sort of thing. We had no choicebut to go on. Something was behind us, but imagine if there hadn’tbeen. To get this far we would’ve had to have faith in where wewere going, in the box and all the things in it. It makes sense,really. Someone else would have turned back, tried to find anotherway, probably would have gotten killed somewhere along the way. Wehad to keep going to get this far.”

Brandy nodded. She understood. “And thisthing?”

Albert looked at the statue, not liking itfor more than one reason. “Decisions. Deadly decisions.”

“Oh good.”

Albert stepped closer to the statue. Themessage was bad, but that was not all. He looked down at the bonesat his feet, then bent and looked closer. Deep groves were carvedinto them, as though they’d been slashed repeatedly with a knife.As he looked closer he realized that many of them were not justbroken, but cut. He stood up and looked at the statue again.It looked more real than the others, more physical somehow,and he quickly realized why. With the exception of thebroken-fingered one in the first room, all the other statues wereperfect, carved immaculately from stone, without a single flaw.These sentinels were scarred, and not merely by the will of theartist. Two of them were missing fingers not by design. One footwas broken off and was lying against the wall, looking morbid evenin stone. They were scratched and chipped all over, as thoughsomeone had been hacking at them with a hatchet. He looked at thefloor and found that it, too, was covered with faint scratches.

“So which way do we go?”

Albert lifted his eyes to the statue again.That was easy. He lifted his hand and pointed at a piece of graycloth that hung from a sentinel’s outstretched hand.

“What is that? A coat?”

Albert didn’t know. It was heavy cotton,badly torn and stained. He unwound it from the statue’s hand andheld it before him.

“Looks kind of like part of an old Civil Warjacket, doesn’t it?” Brandy observed.

“Not sure,” Albert replied. “Could be.Whatever it is, it’s pointing the way.”

Brandy leaned in to take a closer look. “Howcan you be sure?”

“The buttons.”

And then she understood. The buttons on thefabric were simple brass with no markings, exactly like the onethey’d found in the box. A closer look revealed that it was, infact, missing one.

Albert didn’t need to open the box andretrieve the button. He was certain this was their clue. He studiedthe garment for a moment longer, considering it. It didn’t have anydistinguishing designs, but only a small amount of it remained.Could it actually be a piece of a Civil War uniform? It seemedunlikely, but then again, after what he experienced in the sexroom, “unlikely” had apparently taken the night off. Perhaps a unitwas sent down here all those years ago to sweep the tu

But more than likely, even if thiswas a part of a Civil War uniform, which was by no means aproven fact, it could have been worn down here by anyone in themany years after the war. Perhaps it was an old hand-me-down thatkept someone warm in the winter months. Hundreds of scenarios couldhave brought this particular piece of fabric down here.

He reached up and hung it again on thestatue’s hand, wrapping it around the wrist to keep it secure, justas he’d found it.

“You’re not taking it with us?”

“No. I think we should leave it here. Maybeit’ll help us find our way back out if we need it. Come on.”

This next passage was easily twice as longas the one that brought them to the round room. And they had walkeda little more than half the distance of the tu

It was soft, distant, sort of like a wheelslowly rolling over dry leaves, a kind of crackling sound. It camefrom ahead of them and grew steadily louder, becoming more of abuzzing sound.

Brandy pressed her naked body againstAlbert. Neither of them spoke. This was the first noise they’dheard all night, with the exception of Albert’s paint can trap, andthe sudden manifestation of this unidentifiable noise was, ifpossible, even more frightening than the noise itself.

They watched, their eyes boring into thedarkness, hunched over in the short tu

“What was that?” Brandy did not dare toraise her voice above a whisper.

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

“Where did it go?”

“Another tu

“What if it’s in the same tu