Part 11

The bricks reeked of dust and old things, with a faint underlying scent of rot. Mostly it was the musk of rotting plants, but there was something else in there as well... something that smelled a lot like old raw meat, mixed in with a dozen other smells that competed to both cover it up and accentuate it.

And it was getting stronger.

Jones had made his way down the stone hilltop and found himself among the towering stone pillars and massive shapes. They weren't walls, and likewise, the gaps and spaces between them weren't actually corridors. Those words implied some sort of logic or regularity that was not in evidence here. The "walls" were neither regular nor parallel; their seemingly-random arrangement created passages that changed width as he walked, sometimes opening unexpectedly into empty courtyards or shrinking to impassible crevices.

Yet, once he'd started down one of the road-sized gaps, Jones swore that he was in some sort of maze... a maze on a massive scale.

The "corridor" narrowed after the first few turns, and the ground took on a slight downward slope... nowhere near the steep decline of the "hill" where he and the others had awakened... but he was definitely heading down.

That didn't bother Jones. Down or up made no difference to him, as long as he kept moving. Walking helped to clear his head, and he got the feeling that he needed it clear to deal with whatever the hell was going on. The buzzing haze that had been gumming up his thoughts when he first opened his eyes was almost gone now, but he still couldn't fill in the blank space between the argument and...

...and waking up surrounded by eight strangers.

Every time he tried to see into that gap, his mind slid away from it like...

Like the other things. Like the therapy. But this wasn't like that, was it? He didn't remember any doctors this time. No doctors or pills or machines; but there HAD been a necklace-

-thoughts slid into the void, and Jones stopped to blink himself back to reality. If this was, in fact, reality. It felt real.

He ran his hands over one of the walls and pulled them away suddenly. Warm. From what? There was plenty of light from whatever that was in the sky, but it didn't warm his skin and certainly couldn't explain body-temperature stone "walls" around him.

Dark hands returned to the stone, this time seeking the crevices between the rough blocks. He found them, but they were too narrow and too shallow for climbing. And he didn't think he could make himself touch the stones for that long.

He started walking again, rubbing his hands together to get rid of the strange warmth that remained.

The corridor fed into an open area ahead, and three smaller passages branched out from it at odd angles. Jones kept going as straight as he could to make backtracking easier. The new "corridor" looked identical to the last, except that its width narrowed more rapidly as he walked; the nonparallel walls converging toward some not-so-distant point. He wondered if this would be another dead end. There was no way to tell.

He kept going, trying to take in as much as he could. He was still headed down. His thoughts were clearing slowly, but they still avoided the black hole of the past few hours. And his hand was itching.

Jones looked as his right palm, worrying if he'd touched something he shouldn't have. Poison ivy? He didn't see anything on the wall when he'd touched it, and he didn't see anything about the skin of his right hand that was different from the left, except for what he'd caused by unconsioucly digging at it with his fingernails for the past few minutes.

Maybe some kind of mold-

Jones frowned, eyes narrowing as they peered through the gaps between his fingers at the road ahead.

There was something there.