Picking up skulls and random other bones with horror ever slow on leaving our expressions, we walked down the middle aisle of the grocery market from hell. I brushed my hands on my jeans as we approached the thrones themselves. From all the disgusting skeletons laying around the room, some in withered, paper-thin clothing and others in silver knight armor that has been rusted and fractured to the point where a breeze could wash it away, a smile teased Chase's lips when he looked at the thrones up close. Well, throne, because the queen's chair was nothing more than a small stub. The upper right half of the kings chair was missing, leaving a jagged crack where it used to be connected to the rest of the chair. It sent more cracks through the back of the throne. It didn't help that dirt and heavy amounts of dust layered it too.
Chase had to step through a couple heads and some rocks to get to it, but when he did, he took a long gulp of air and released it onto the top of the seat where cushion used to take hold. Dust particles flew into the air and curled back to him, rolling around in the air and becoming circular funnel as he blew to the left and right. Instead of taking another breath, he waved his had around the dusty air to flash some more out of the way as he coughed and covered his nose and mouth with his free arm. All the dust was clearly visible because the powerful rays of light pouring in through the mostly nonexistent roof and the narrow, but glass-missing windows on the right side of the room.
"I can't believe I'm seeing this right now," I stammered as I approached. "It's astonishing."
"This isn't my first castle, but it still is pretty mind blowing." Chase bragged as he dragged a finger across the engraved detail on the glorified chair, leaving a single line of revealed detail on the chair among the the faded grey blur that smothered the rest.
"All ways gotta ruin a moment, huh?"
Shocked that I didn't expect this earlier, Chase jumped on the seat of the chair that was clearly meant for someone much larger than him. He looked at me as he sat up straight straight and put on a serious face like he was actually running a kingdom. As if I was some simpleton that was totally in awe of his presence, he looked down at me without moving any other part of his body but his head. "You there!"
I played along. "Y-yes, King W-winters?"
"Take my picture." he said overly mighty. I cracked out laughing as I took several steps back, watching out for age-old corpses behind me. I pulled out my phone and swiped for the camera.
In my shot was Chase, leaning back slightly in the battle damaged chair with a rock hard face surrounded by piled bones and multiple wedges of rock mixed in with light flooding in from the side, illuminating his features. It was actually a pretty epic picture if I say so myself.
I got a second picture of him busting out in laughter while leaning over the ledge. I put the camera away to see roughly the same image happening in motion as his the laughing slowed. He looked over at me, nodding with a soft smile that was inundated in sunlight, making his eyes seem even bluer. "Your turn"
"Oh no," I crackled. "I'm never in the pictures I take."
"Come on," he urged. "It'll be great, trust me."
With a bit more convincing and partially dragging me to the seat, I curled up in the chair and leaned on the armrest with my feet tucked next to each other on the other side. My phone didn't make any noise as he pulled down the camera, still staring at the picture. "Beautiful" he whispered.
"Was it that bad?" I asked, smiling wildly. I never heard his comment and I got up and began to walk over to him. He then pulled up the camera again to take another picture. "Nooo, don't do that!" I called though fits of laughter. I put a hand over the lens as I took back my phone while smiling uncontrollably. "I probably look hideous!"
"Nah, there...ok, but not like great or anything." he joked and I socked him in the arm. I shut off the phone and clicked it back into my wrist band.
"We have to search for that secret entrance now." I said, mocking a jolly adventurer while he looked at me with an expression I haven't seen before. It was like he was in awe of me. Either way, I began to walk past the thrones and had to waddle through some half-standing tables and smaller chairs to get to the back wall.
It was a huge fireplace with two or three framed pictures still on the wall around it. I noticed that I was even stepping on a fallen portrait of what I assumed to be the king because of the massive gold crown atop his balded head. Everything, of course, was layered and layered in thick dust and an uncountable amount of cob webs hung from the walls and around the old furnace that still had some coal inside.
Chase caught up behind me and while I observed the upper left, he found himself interested in the right side of the wall. Old torches lined the walls too and four were sitting, disturbed only by webs and dust, right on the wall. That, along with the torn up wall paper that showed the molded cedar wood beneath. There were many other ornaments on the wall and on top of the extended granite fireplace like smaller pictures, crosses, a twin set of swords and shields, many, many candles, along with a small bookcase on both sides.
Chase picked up one of the old books. "But you never seen one of these before, huh?" he teased. "This must be blowing your mind right now."
I took a moment to consider if being petty was the answer here. Of course it was. "That thing," I pointed at it and knocked it out of his hand. "I seen entire libraries; if I see another one I might puke."
"Is that so?" he asked, blown away himself. He was genuinely shocked and saw that the book completely ripped apart rather by my hit, the impact of the ground or both. "Because I know you must be lying, books are like one of the rarest things on earth."
"Oh trust me, I've seen and read plenty."
He wasn't having it. "Where could you have found such a place?"
"You mean an original library?" I mocked, stalling to come up with a lie, knowing I couldn't tell him about the farm; it would raise far to many questions. "Is that what you're talking about?"
He picked up another one, holding it away from me. "The only other type is on my tablet, so I would think so."
The way sarcastic people word their sentences will never cease to amaze me. "Long ago, my grandfather knew of one and all ways took me there." I lied through my teeth. Sadly, all my grandparents were dead before I was even born.
"Oh." he nodded, feeling his victory slip away. He slightly began to blush but I didn't call him out for it. It was just far too adorable.
"Ok, now for this secret entrance." I pointed out. I walked over to the fire place and ran an arm along the top, knocking off everything that wasn't nailed down. Seeing all that gold, silver and other priceless artifacts a modern architect would kill for slam onto the ground mercilessly made Chase jump to action.
"What are you doing?!" he shouted as he was too late to stop me from finishing.
"Making sure that nothing here had to be moved in order to find the entrance." I told him.
"What?"
"Well if..." I picked up a small picture frame and set in on the surface I just wiped clean. "If this had to be pulled forward in order to activate any sort of mechanism then it would be attached to something we couldn't see, so therefor--"
"If you tried to knock it off, then it wouldn't budge because it would be connected to the fireplace." Chase finished, nodding. "You're one smart little cookie aren't you?"
"Well thank you," I charmed with a hair flip and a flashy smile. "Now lets rip everything off of this wall until we find a way in."
The wall was stripped clean and we even ripped off the rest of the wall paper to make sure there wasn't any sort of pressure sensor underneath. Even though it was obvious that they didn't have such technology, we still had to try.
Next, we wiggled the torches in every direction since they were all bolted to the wall and then we ran a hand across every bump and grind on the wall. That was after we finished pulling out every book from the shelves.
"Well there goes all the classic entrances to a secret room." Chase moaned in sorrow as he plopped to a cleared part of the floor because he didn't trust any of the tables or chairs to sit on.
"We gotta find it," I pushed. "We're losing sunlight."
"Relax, it's like four in the afternoon and the days are much longer than the nights in this dessert," Chase eased, yawning for the third time. "We'll find it."
I figured taking a break was the only thing that would stop me from going insane right now. I walked around to the throne and took a seat, laying down sideways with my head on left armrest and my legs hanging over the right one. I looked up to the soft blue sky as the sun was just barely shining right down on me, like a phantasmagorical image from a magician. "This is surreal."
"What?" Chase asked me, still sitting in his spot near the wall while string at one of the many stone knights along the walls. He was busy shoeing away a snake with a stick.
"Are you joking?" I exclaimed. I threw my hands in the air. "All this!"
"Yeah, I guess it is," he seemed a little distant, but I didn't bother probe. "Imagine ruling an entire kingdom."
"I know right!" I agreed, trying to picture it in my head. "Having all that power, all that..."
"Responsibility," he finished. "I would kill myself."
"Well that's what the wife is for," I joked, making him laugh. "That beautiful maiden to make it all worth it."
"I can only imagine what that is like," he dazed. In his head, he knows I could have taken that in multiple different ways and quickly added something to dilute it's effect. "To be able to rule over so many and do all those things, right from that throne you're sitting on right now."
I laughed, more to myself as I watched the thick clouds hover above us and cover up the sun once more. For some reason, I churned his words over and over again in my head like a spitroast. "Wait, repeat that."
"What?" he replied. He tried to tread carefully thinking that I was elaborating on how he just divulged that he wishes he had a girlfriend. "I can only imagine what--"
"No, not that," I waved my hand, gesturing for him to skip that part. "After that."
"Being able to rule from that throne you're sitting on?"
"That and do so many things..." I hoped off of the large chair and gave it a hard stare. "From the throne..."
Chase got up and hoped over a large slab of rock to join me and my train of thought as I inspected every inch of that chair. "Here!" he shouted, jumping up in the process.
"What did you--"
With a click, coming from inside the evil goat's mouth on the end of the armrest, the mouth and eyes of both goats somehow lit up red and a small rumble erupted from the wall we stripped down.
He and I slowly stood up as the large fireplace disconnected from the rest of the wall. This device hasn't been used in over centuries and is just now being activated so one could understand why is was making so much damn noise. The entire room began to shake violently as some loose pieces of the red and white checkerboard ceiling rained down in showers of dust and small rock, only visible through the luminescence of the sunlight.
Dust also poured from the fireplace as it pushed out further and the moment it came to a stop, it's mouth, where the fire is supposed to be burning, parted. It revealed all long tunnel of darkness leading into something only the king and queen of a long forgotten kingdom knew about.
The whole process took about twenty seconds, but to us, it felt like it was moving as slow as the clouds were in the melting sky.
"Well it looks like I found the entrance to a secret room in the middle of a dessert kingdom," I smiled. "Scratch that off of the bucket list."
"But it was I who found the actual switch," Chase interrupted. "So really, I'm the one who found it."
"But I figured that it was on the throne." I argued back, smiling while crossing my arms.
He crossed him arms too. "From something I said."
"Ok, fine, we found it," I gave in. "Together."
"Yeah, I'm liking the sound of that."
We stared down the entrance of the tunnel and then each other.
"Ladies first." Chase smirked.
"Wow, what a gentleman." I scoffed sarcastically as I crawled first into the hopefully short black hole.
"Hey, I was kidding." he said back.
"No, it's alright," I admitted. "My curiosity is killing me."
In the hole, I had to crawl on my hands and knees and my long hair fell over the right side of my shoulder as my knees bumped the could-have-been-smoother stone. I had a terrible thought of someone using the furnace and in turn, trap us in a heating oven. It would burn us on every end, melting our skin rapidly as we fall over to our sides and cause our backs would melt to the bone. I shuddered at the thought and shook my head to stop imagining it. The thing about the mind is that when one is tempted to think of something no matter how terrible, it's right there to stay.
A couple minutes in, I got to thinking on saving my father and that was enough to end all random death thoughts altogether. That was when I heard a shudder that, for once, didn't come from me.
"You think that this place is going to randomly heat up too?" I jested, laughing at my pain. "Don't worry because I think we would taste pretty terrible."
"No not that." he...whimpered.
I stopped and rolled onto my butt, in a seating position and blocking his path. He stopped too and stayed on his knees. I leaned forward. "Are you alright?"
"My dad used to laugh at this, but, I'm a little claustrophobic."
"A little?" I questioned. "You're sweating worse than you did when you nearly fell off the side of a mountain."
"I'm fine," he pushed. "Let's just get to the other end."
I obeyed and after a little while longer, he fell to his side.
I whipped around, nearly bumping my head as I held a hand over his cheek, trying t subdue the fact that he was jerking back and forth. Though it didn't seem life-threatening, I was still worried. "Oh my, are you alright?"
He closed his eyes and when he opened them, his body movement slowed and he seemed okay again. "Peachy."
"Just hold out, okay?" I begged. "Can you do that?"
"I'm not a lost puppy, Skylar," he shot back. "Just keep moving."
I tried to speed up as I now saw that this was a touchy subject for him. He was quite embarrassed about his situation and was not about to admit to it.
Minutes passed and I could hear him breathing heavily behind me. I wanted to ask him if he was alright, but I knew the answer to expect. He had to stop several times, but pushed through as much as he could to the point where he just about screamed in the opaque midnight walls surrounding us.
"When the hell does this tunnel end?!" he screeched. I didn't reply and I was sure he had no idea how much this was affecting him. He yelled out again, but tried to mask it as much as possible, which resulted in grunts and moans. He banged on the walls too with the shouts of a wounded animal.
When I was just about to bust into tears, I saw the exit. "Just a little bit longer, Chase" I tried to ease him while he was freaking out behind me. His world was spinning out of control and he was beginning to lose sense of direction. He smashed into the walls on both sides, yelling deliriously. I think he was about to start drooling when I came out the other end.
Without a second thought, I threw my arms back inside the tunnel to grab Chase and pull him out. Since I couldn't carry his weight, he fumbled out of the hole and crash landed on the ground harder than I expected. I dragged him to the wall next to the hole and fanned him as I looked around for something to help.
"Oh god." I moaned as I saw the creaky-looking dark hallway that lead down into the distance. The ceiling was high above our heads so I was glad for that especially. I looked back at the twitching Chase. In my arms, his head was bobbling into his chest and his arms slumped at his side. I shook him over and over again. "Chase! Chase!"
He head bobbled less and then stiffened up as his arms came back to life. His eyes fluttered awake and immediately looked up at me, who was on the ground, standing with my knees to be just about level with him.
"Skylar..." he moaned. I put both my hands around his jaw as I watched him become aware of his surroundings. With my hands still on his face, he looked around slowly at first then it swiveled wildly. He scrambled to his feet and looked down the pathway. "Where the hell are we?"
"Well," I straightened out my shirt. "This is the other end of the tunnel."
"Please don't say tunnel right now," He begged, shaking his head.
"Sure," I said as I walked to where he was standing. "But I will ask if you are okay, for real this time."
"Hey, um, I probably got kind of ticked off in there..."
"Oh, I could definitely tell."
"Was it that bad?" He asked, looking down with his hands behind his back.
"Yah, it was, well lets call it a side I never would have guessed was inside you." I tried to put it as lightly as I could.
"I was a complete ass," he confirmed, no longer looking at me. "Way to go Chase."
I decided that the both of us couldn't be against him. "Hey, it--"
"I'm so sorry for the way I treated you," he said. "You were only trying to help and..."
"It's fine, really, it is." I picked up. "You were...under some intense pressure and the fact that you're embarrassed over it."
"What? No. I..."
"Yah, you tried to pretend it didn't exist," I told him. "You nearly drove yourself crazy in there."
"Sorry," he apologized again. "Lets hope we don't have to go back out that way."
The moment after he said that the door on the other side of the tunnel slammed shut. I jumped back a gasped. "You're joking!"
"This just keeps getting better." he scoffed, both of us almost completely in the dark because that was our main source of light even it provided the bare minimum.
"I hope you're not afraid of the dark too." I joked. When I got no response, I immediately felt terrible.
"We need your phone light." was all I got back from him, in a flat tone. I obeyed and pulled out my wrist flash light that easily cut through the darkness.
"I can't burn out the battery like this," I stated. "Unless we really get moving."
"Shine it over here." he told me, a little character flowing back into his voice from hearing my horrible comment. I shone it past Chase as he pulled out his and pointed it where he was telling me to. The spot on the wall was mounted with a wooden torch. I flashed the light to the other side of the hallway and found another one.
He picked up a different one. "Now how are we going to light these suckers?"
Smiling, I whipped out my high-tech lighter that I plan on using for the arrows that I made. I lit his torch and grabbed mine, repeating the process. I quickly shut off my phone after seeing that the battery was stooping below the halfway point.
We waved the torches back and forth, clearly able to see through the very, very bright yellow-orange flames due to the lighter.
Chase stepped forward first. "Well, here we go."
We started walking down the passageway and a little bit further down was another small tunnel, like the one we just crawled through in the wall. I pointed it out to Chase.
"There isn't a way in hell I'm going through that again."
"Fair enough, but what does it lead to?" I asked blatantly.
"I have no idea and I don't plan on finding out," he warned me. "And we are most defiantly not splitting up."
I stood up straight from trying to look through it and stared at him with an expression that said, excuse me?
"Well, if you...um...agree that splitting up is a bad...idea," he mumbled, scratching his head. "So do you...want to..."
"Calm down," I smiled, now knowing my power over him. "I don't want to spit up, that would be insane."
"So we stay the course," He pointed the torch down the pathway. "No matter how...creepy."
Taking a deep breath, we continued down the path and kept our torches on a constant pivot as we could see that the walls and the creaking ceiling had to be made of rock and stone. What I didn't notice until now was that for the first couple of feet, the floor beneath us was also made of rock and stone, but when every step caused a soft creak, I looked down to see beige colored floor boards. Sometimes, the walls would become boards of wood too and it looked like whenever there was a gap in the ceiling, they would turn to plywood and boards of wood to shoddily patch it up. This passage was pretty wide, maybe a bit smaller than ten feet across and we had plenty of room to move around thankfully.
We were walking a fast but cautious pace and so far this place just looked terrifying and I couldn't wait to reach the other end and find this thing and leave. All this heart attack was starting to get to me.
Chase stepped on another creaky wood plank. "I think we can just run--"
A spiked hammer the size of a tracker came swinging in from the ceiling, tied to the long bar it was connected to by rope and it seemed a large anvil was roped to the front, pointed end sticking out as it swung down at me. At the very last second, Chase tackled me to the other side and it swung past us. After the initial swing, it cradled back and forth like a pendulum until it sat still.
Chase and I sat there on the ground, completely terrified and breathless as our hearts thumped frantically in our chest even after my screams ended. He was still on top of me and when he slowly rose to his feet, so did I. We walked around the...trap and even though it was completely still, when I tried to touch it, I jumped back. "Chase, this is real"
"This place is booby trapped, wonderful."
"You say it like you've 'been there done that'." I exclaimed.
"Once, years ago," he told me. "Barely got out alive; we're going to have to tread very carefully."
"Yeah, no shit."
Little did we know, that the little tunnel we decided to skip was how Queen Angela, the one who had to hind the amulet and escape the oncoming war all those years ago, got through this very passageway...
Alive.
***
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