WHISPER IN THE DARK PART TWO

I could tell that I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up.

HE IRON DOOR SEEMED FUSED to the stone, an immovable barrier between me and what hides on the other side. I pull on the blackened handle with heaving force but the monstrous door refuses to budge. My other hand joins the first and, with both secure, I plant a foot against the wall. My muscles tense and burn as my leg straightens and my upper body extends. A rough groan is forced through clenched teeth as every ounce of my strength is poured into one final, desperate pull.

Suddenly metal screeches like a dying animal and begins moving toward me. Off balance I fall to the floor but quickly move away as the slab of metal fans toward me on croaking hinges. Air rushes from the darkness within, a stagnant exhalation of time immemorial that instantly raises gooseflesh on my arms.

I get to my feet and cautiously step forward to the precipice to find only the beginning of an ancient stairwell, squat and narrow, lined with gray stone that meets overhead in an arch. Where it leads I cannot tell, for after only three steps it plunges into a bottomless darkness. Though my eyes cannot discern shape or detail, the longer I stare the more a feeling comes over me that chills my spine, a feeling that I am being watched, but I cannot turn back. The Entity will not let me.

I grab a torch from the wall of the anteroom and then, with a deep breath, I begin my descent into the unknown. The quivering light suffuses the passageway with an orange glow but the dark resists, refusing to let me see more than an arm’s length ahead. My eyes are so fixed on each stunted step bleeding from the receding shadow, out of fear of missing one and tumbling uncontrollably to the bottom, that I discover strange runes chiseled into the stone.

I pause long enough to bend down and inspect the symbols, expecting to see characters from the Germanic alphabet given the location and history of the grounds. However, the chaotic scrawls of sharp angles and disturbing curves are beyond my knowledge and the longer I gaze upon them, the more a chilling fear needles the back of my neck. Without my phone to take pictures I attempt to commit some of them to memory for later identification.

I rise to my feet and continue my journey into the unknown. After a short distance, the tunnel curls downward into a spiral. The silence would be deafening if not for the soft crackle of fire and the scrape of my boots.  Like Dante, I feel a weight of profound spiritual oppression, and it grows only more powerful the further into the abyss I travel.

A damp coldness seeps into my bones, growing more profound with every step I take. The curving walls disorient me and I long lost count of the number of times I have rounded the stairwell. Twice? Five times? Twenty? How much further to the infernal heart of this place, I wonder. How deeply have I plunged into the earth’s boundless depths.

The light flickers, as if disturbed by some unfelt gust of wind. My eyes lock on the flame. It’s struggling to stay lit. For several heart-racing seconds, I stare at it unblinking, my inner voice begging it to not leave me to navigate the stairs alone. After several hurried breaths, the fire regains its strength and its light steadies. Relief settles over me, softening the edges of my unease and renewing my resolve to face what lurks below.

After a final turn around the column the stairwell terminates with a jarring suddenness, spilling me into a massive hexagonal chamber, at least 30 feet across and equally as tall. Light billows from a great hearth roaring with orange flame, and from the wrought iron chandelier suspended above the room and its hundreds of burning candles.

It’s a six-sided panorama of death and depravity. Heads of bears, lions and other apex predators are mounted at eye level. Their glassy-eyes, glowing from the fire, seem to follow me intently as I step further into the unsettling symmetry. Above them towering canvases are hung in gold frames, depicting acts of torture, Old Testement fury, cannibalism and grotesque sexual acts.

This isn’t architecture. It’s a manifestation of a broken psyche and unquenchable desire. I wonder how much time my father spent down here. Why didn’t he tell me about it? We had no secrets, or at least I believed we didn’t. What else was he keeping from me?

In the center of the room, a six-sided slab rock dominates the space, so massive and singular that I cannot comprehend how it arrived in this room. Other than the small stairwell, I see no other opening, leading me to conclude that it must have been chiseled in place from the original bedrock. The polished black surface is etched with more of the mysterious symbology I observed in the stairwell. These however are inlaid with gold that shimmers from the firelight.

Twelve chairs, tall and gaunt, surround this unsettling centerpiece. Each is less a piece of furniture and more a sculpted nightmare, a fusion of cold iron and organic bone that is both alluring and profoundly unsettling. Rib-like bars curve to form their frames, intersecting with what appears to be spinal columns supporting the backs, giving the impression that the occupant is sitting within another creature. The armrests reach forward, each ending with skeletal hands curled into fists, and are covered in the same stretched red leather as the seats and backs. There is no doubt that these are thrones not fit for ordinary men.

A crunch under my boot makes me stop and look down to see something unexpected. Pills. A dozen at least. Small tablets that are strewn about the floor. I bend down to one knee and pick one up with my fingertips. It’s small and round. Could be anything but where’s the bottle? My eyes move across the floor quickly in search.

Aha, there it is under one of the chairs. On my hands and knees, I crawl forward until I reach the chair, then bend down to peer at the orange bottle resting on its side. I lay flat with my face resting on the floor and reach through the space between the chair’s boney crossbars. Once in hand, I carefully extract it while sitting up on my knees. I immediately note the English text and the logo of an American pharmacy chain. My heart quickens as I slowly turn the label, my mind knowing that the bottle can only belong to one person. The only person who had unfettered access to my father’s castle after his death. The only person I know diagnosed with schizophrenia.

GREY, NATHAN
Zyprexa 20 MG
Take 1 Tablet Per Day By Mouth

My brother.

What the fuck was he doing here? He never mentioned any of this to me, not that we were close. He might have assumed all of this was some insane delusion created by his psychotic brain. Maybe he was right. Maybe none of this is real. Maybe this is a nightmare created by the Other Yelenas and I am nothing more than a marionette dancing to tug of strings with the Entity as my puppeteer.

I place the bottle on the table and then push myself to my feet, groaning from a spike of pain in my side from Aurora’s liver kick. Did the Entity make me feel that as well, to remind me of how I still came up short of victory?

Once on my feet I look at the bottle again, and for a fleeting moment I’m taken back to the hospital the night Nathan passed away from the stroke, to remember the unexpected heartbreak his death brought me and how angry I was to feel it.
Pssh, I mutter in disappointment with myself. My eyes then drifted away from the label and past the bottle to the table, where a handwritten note now rests that I’m certain was not there before. I put the bottle down and lift the paper to catch enough light to discern the scribbled letters.

Rage. Unmitigated rage. Of which I have only one. I understood all these years why my father kept my existence a secret, especially as a child. He had enemies abound and none of them would hesitate to use his daughter against him. Meanwhile my brother grew up with another family in Arizona, unaware of who his father even was.

I never questioned these decisions and yet I stand here now reading my father’s words which so callously dismiss my identity and I cannot fathom why. He wrote this knowing Nathan would find it after his death. After I sat at his bedside for weeks watching the cancer feed on his withered body, until he was nothing but a lifeless husk. I was there. Not Nathan.

My eyes dance back over the text. With dad dead there was no longer any reason to worry about my wellbeing. Perhaps I missed some detail of me he hid under clever wordplay. Quickly I go line by line but as I arrive at the last sentence once more I realize how pointless it was to allow myself a sliver of hope.

“Once The Box is opened there is no closing it again,” I read aloud. The Box. What box? Was it something dad left Nathan? Did Nathan leave here with it? I put down the paper and begin searching for anything that could fit the description. I check the fireplace first, but there’s nothing on the mantle but deformed figurines fashioned from small bones. Next I search for shelves, perhaps under the animal busts, or other tables that might display such a precious gift, but there are none. Nathan must have taken whatever it was and I have no clue where it could be now. Maybe he sold it with the rest of our father’s possessions.

No, it must be here. The Entity brought me down here for a reason. It wanted me to find that letter. It wanted me to know that Nathan was here. It wanted me to know about—

THE BOX.

The breath catches in my throat when my eyes return to the table to see it. Where once there was nothing now rests a hexagonal prism of absolute blackness, a hungry void that reflects not even the faintest glimmer of light. I come to stand over it, almost defiantly, and cast my eyes down to see it pulsing with a subtle, internal darkness.

I do not look away. I cannot. My mind is bent to its purpose, drawn toward what terrible secrets lie within. My hand moves without my direction, daring to touch despite my gnawing apprehension, and places itself on The Box.

Heat radiates up my arm—not painful but still wrong—yet I do not recoil. Fear has long given away to desire, an absolute need that compels my fingertips to glide across the surface, to savor the unnerving smoothness and the slight organic give. I cannot begin to determine its composition but somehow it feels both unfathomably ancient and impossibly advanced.

I feel… pulled… not outward but inward… toward an irresistible gravity in the furthest reaches of my subconscious. The Box begins to hum with an oscillating murmur… rippling with some sort of dark energy… the buzz buried in low frequencies… nearly imperceptible… but then abruptly intensifying to a bone-shaking thrum of percussive blasts that attack me with chaotic energy. I can sense my physical self begin to fade from the world around me… losing solidity… dissolving into the landscape of fractured psyches… spiraling me into a timeless vortex where I am rid of the distractions of corporal existence and reduced to a disembodied mind.

But I am not alone.

All names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this story are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.