As I closed the journal and was about to tuck it under my armor, for lack of a proper unburned pocket, I noticed that one page was sticking out from among the rest. The paper was more yellowed and burnt around the edges. I gently turned the pages and removed the loose sheet. Interestingly the entry was in a very different handwriting, still elegant but in a more commanding and pretentious way.
[https://i.imgur.com/V81A175.jpg]
I took this to be an entry from Clarissa, although it didn’t appear to have been in the journal originally. If being around Dante had taught anything it was that contractors were never honest. This note seemed too honest, like Jonas had been meant to find it if ever he had second thoughts. He wasn’t exactly a collector, at least it didn’t seem like it based on his journal entries, so Clarissa would have had to have been more subtle in controlling him. Sure enough when I checked the back of the paper the world “Lies” was written across it in large bold letters. At least Jonas hadn’t been stupid, if anything he’d handled his situation fairly well, from what I could tell at least.
I turned to the last page that had writing in it. The handwriting definitely belonged to Jonas but it was clumsier than it had been before. Smeared in places as if his hand had become unbearably heavy, his final entry was legible but just barely.
[https://i.imgur.com/kGQTTal.jpg]
“Wow. That really is how it has to end, isn’t it...” I could hardly imagine it ending well for anyone. I knew what happened to collectors when they became too difficult to be worth their contractor’s time, they got staked and buried, or crushed in a pillar of red velvet smoke. I would have called myself lucky, but I was still so new to this world and I was already on the edge of being discarded because I was too stubborn to be an emotionless puppet.
It still made me wonder though, something had lit the fire earlier. Julian had lasted for nearly two thousand years and was only mildly insane and suicidal. Jonas sounded like he had the kind of mind to withstand the tortures of the lifestyle he was being forced to live. It was possible he had survived his decision to confront Clarissa, that didn’t change the fact that if he was alive he would be trying to kill me, if he hadn’t tried already. The more I thought about it the riskier staying in once place seemed. I tucked the notebook under the metal plate on my armor and after some deliberation picked up the hammer and chisel as well. Despite its age the blade on the chisel was still very sharp. It obviously wasn’t designed to fight with, so it would be a lot harder than using a knife, but it was better than nothing.
I knew where I was going now, so that was nice. The other end of the rope was the best place to look for whatever it was I was supposed to kill, whether it be what was left of Jonas or Clarissa, or something I didn’t know about. I assumed as soon as I saw it it would be obvious, Dante wouldn’t have dropped me in the maze without any information if he didn’t think I could do it. Probably. I was being punished though, so he may have expected me to die because of my lack of information. I did already die in the fire, I had recovered from that though. Just thinking of it made me take a step away from the still burning rope as I made my way through the maze. I felt as though I had to keep my eyes on it or I would spontaneously combust, that being the case I found myself tripping over the uneven ground on more than one occasion.
I was expecting it to take longer, maybe I was just walking faster than normal, but I came across the meager water source Jonas mentioned in his journal. Just looking at the small pool that had built up made my skin feel like it was on fire again. I jumped over the burning rope and didn’t put much thought into what I was doing as I cupped my hands together to scoop some out. I knew the second my skin touched the surface of the liquid something was wrong. It was warmer than it should have been and it didn’t have the consistency I expected. When I brought my hands up closer to the burning rope, and after a moment of hesitation and disbelief, I could see what I had really just stuck my hands into. It most certainly was not water. I considered it a bad sign that one of the first thoughts that had crossed my mind was that it was blood. No normal person should have to worry about whether or not they just stuck their hands into a pool of blood. What was marginally worse was that that was exactly what I had just done. The red stain it left behind was only just discernible on top my still splotchy reddish skin that had grown back after being burned.
I didn’t want to soak what spare fabric I had on me with blood and the idea of wiping my hands dry on my bare skin disgusted me. I shook them clean as best as I could and held them away from my body as I walked, wiping them on the walls when I could see them clearly enough to do so without worry. Oddly, the longer I walked through the corridors of the maze the more tame it felt. My eyes had adjusted enough for me to see where I was going and there were no more sounds of movement from somewhere just out of sight. I didn’t expect any traps to block my way while I was following the rope, at least I hoped there wouldn’t be any, surely Jonas would have written about them.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The moment I reached the door to what I knew would be the center of the maze I was both eager to be rid of the maze and hesitant to return to what I knew would await me after. I also had no clue what I would be walking into apart from the possibility of Jonas or Clarissa, although from the way the journal’s final entry was written it sounded like Jonas was aiming for a murder suicide. Thinking about the possibilities only made my imagination draw crazier and more horrific conclusions. Mangled corpses, blood stains splattering the walls, Clarissa's timeless figure behind glass and Jonas’ dead body lying at her feet. The monster too, or whatever it was that had been lurking in the maze, probably skulking in the shadows somewhere. I tried to shake off the countless images as I forced the door open, but I couldn’t shake the fear that was growing in my mind.
“Oh…”
It was all I could manage to whisper as I choked to keep my stomach out of my throat. I couldn’t remain silent though, the scene that lay before me was almost as bad as I had imagined. It left me gagging for a while.
The only thing I had really gotten wrong when I had pictured the scene behind the door was the lighting. The brightness of the room was almost blinding compared to the absolute darkness of the maze. It made every horror stand out. The broken and gnawed human remains littering the floor at random as if a dog had had his way with them. Bloodstains, blackened and dark spattered and smeared across the walls, the floor, the tables that lined the walls of the square room. The bloody rusted instruments, somehow more sinister than what they might have looked like clean and sharp, protruding from more human remains and lying loose on tables. In the very center of the room was a sight I hadn’t been able to imagine, even if I had waited at that door for a year I never could have worked up that kind of image. I even dropped the hammer and chisel as I wandered closer, horrified but unable to look away like a train wreck.
A woman’s body still fresh as though she were still alive, even though it couldn’t have been possible, lying at the foot of a shattered upright glass case. It looked like every muscle had been impaled with a long shard of glass and pinned to the ground. That wasn’t the worst part though. The ground, that was the worst part. The stone floor had grown up around her like roots and sunk into her skin. A soft crimson glow shimmered off the tendrils giving them the appearance of veins pumping her blood into the maze itself, and that may have been the case. Jonas had described the maze as a living thing in his journal, he was right. Even if he hadn’t known it at the time.
Out of nowhere Dante’s words popped into my mind, echoing through my skull as if he were telling them to me again. Kill it before it kills me. If he hadn’t meant the maze itself I couldn’t see anything else that could be killed, at least not in that room. I cringed as I approached the woman’s body, it had to have been Clarissa’s, which meant Jonas had seriously snapped when he’d gone to confront her. Nothing else made sense. The glass spikes were more gruesome up close. The wounds had stopped, or rather they didn’t bleed, but the glass gave a good look inside them. Very carefully I yanked one out of her arm and positioned it over her heart. I couldn’t think of a better method, it was the most effective thing against me, but I had no clue what made contractor’s tick. I didn’t bother trying to avoid being cut, it would heal soon enough, but that didn’t stop the pain or the uneasy feeling in my stomach as the glass dug into my hands.
“No!”
The sudden scream caught me off guard entirely. The blood on my hands had made the glass slippery and being startled had caused me to completely lose my grip on it. I dropped it, but it never made it to the ground. That was not the first thing I noticed, however, it was the scream. Raspy and high pitched like a frantic wild animal. The sound was accompanied by the appearance of a figure, sweeping in from around the pillar the glass case had been attached to. It was blurry and out of focus continuously moving in a writhing, almost hungry looking sort of way. The odd appearance of the figure confused me, it took me a second to see that my eyes weren’t out of focus, it was just a writhing black mass roughly the same size as a full grown man… and it could talk, or at least scream.
“No.”
It was quieter now, almost a whisper. Being so close to something else that was, even sort of, alive felt so unusual for some reason. It created an awkward silence that reverberated throughout the large room. The figure wasted no time forcing the glass shard I’d removed back into the woman’s arm. I saw a twinge of pain pass over the woman’s face as the glass was replaced and a hiss like a suppressed scream escaped her lips. The shadowy mass, with what I assumed was its arm, covered her mouth, silencing her once again. Strangely, it seemed almost gentle as its hand brushed against her cheek.
“Jonas?” I was almost certain I was right, but a small portion of me wanted to be wrong about it. If Jonas had ended up a monster, my future didn’t look too bright either.
He lifted, what I assumed was his head, and stared me down. He didn’t exactly have eyes, but there were two small blue writhing dots that seemed to burn right through me. That was when I put it together, he wasn’t anywhere close to human anymore. He was just a lost soul.
“So if you don’t mind, I’ll just leave you to this then.” I stood slowly and without breaking eye contact I walked backwards toward the door I’d come in. He stayed absolutely still the entire time, he almost looked like a statue. It was obvious I wasn’t going to be able to do anything to Clarissa while he was around, so I would need to get rid of him first. As my back hit the door I turned quickly to open the door and pick up Jonas’ hammer and chisel. I had half expected him to have taken them while I wasn’t looking. That I’d ever dropped my only real weapon amazed me.
I stood and turned back quickly, the entire set of movements had taken only a second but when I turned back he was right in my face. I had all of half a second to react before he surprised me again by bursting into blue flames with another earsplitting screech.