However, the guy must have heard our footsteps, as he whipped back around to face the door, he foolishly just let us in through.
“Hey! You can’t go in there!” he shouted after us, making me have no choice but to yell back.
“Sorry, gotta go!”
Then I slammed the door shut and pushed the large metal bar down across the door and into the slot that kept it from opening.
“What the hell’s bells, girly!?” Bo complained, making me shrug my shoulders before telling him,
“What? We don’t have all night… now come on, it’s time to… oh my.” My sentence trailed off when I turned to face the opposite way from the entrance.
“Okay… so not what I was expecting,” I admitted as soon as we were faced with the gothic-looking hallway, one that looked as if we had just been transported into a much larger building. Almost like the building outside had some kind of veil on it, hiding the true, dark nature of the place inside. But just to be sure, I found myself uttering,
“How is this possible?”
“Oh, girly, you have no idea what you have just walked us into,” he told me, making me frown at our strange surroundings.
The hallway looked more like I had just stepped into some bad guy’s ‘not so fairytale’ castle.
The walls were a series of Gothic stone arches that were heavily decorated. Each held an elaborate keystone at the highest point, and in the center was a different gold-painted symbol. As for the pillars, these were carved in such a way that they looked as if they had been taken from a garden after first being frozen in time. Stone roses and vines entwined around each one, carved with such painstaking detail that I might once have believed they had drawn breath, as if they were now frozen mid-bloom.
As for the ceiling, this looked more like something out of a cathedral, with its ribbed, vaulted construction, named this because it looked like stone ribs of a skeleton that all connected to a spine. It looked like something straight out of medieval times, and the dark green and light green checkered floor only managed to give it an eerier vibe.
At the far end of the room stood what looked like a stone altar, and suspended above it,wasa black wrought-iron candelabra which hung from the high ceiling on a thick chain. It was positioned so that its flickering candlelight spilled downward, illuminating a stone face on the far wall. Six thick black rings, each crowded with candles, hovered one beneath the other, growing larger as they descended, until they looked less like fixtures and more like floating rings of fire.
I started to walk closer, unable to stop myself from looking beyond the arches, trying to make out anything with evil intent. But all there seemed to be were statues on plinths, figures stood motionless in the dark. They made me shiver, as if any moment I expected one to move. Like those street performers who painted themselves like living statues down on Hollywood Blvd and only moved into a new position when they received more money.
They freaked me the hell out, but nowhere near as much as these did. Perhaps it was because I couldn’t make them out and therefore couldn’t tell just how frightening they could be.Oh, who was I kidding? I hated statues, no matter how dark it was. It was a phobia of mine and was called Automatonophobia. The fear of human-like figures, which included anything from mannequins, wax figures, statues, todummies, animatronics, or even robots.
Now, most of the time, I pushed through it and fought against the reaction to run from them. I had taught myself to see them as just things that would never hurt me, so it wouldn’t affect my everyday life. But there was a vast difference between a plastic personstanding frozen in a shop window wearing the latest fashion to…well… this.
“Having second thoughts, girly?” Bo asked as I glanced nervously at the dark alcoves beyond the archways we passed.
“If you must know, I don’t like statues.”
At this, he started laughing, making me narrow my eyes at him.
“I’m glad my fear amuses you,” I commented dryly.
“It’s not the fear, it’s the reason for it,” he told me.
After shivering again when we passed the last one, I asked,
“What do you mean by that?”
“Girly, you have no idea what kind of place you are about to walk into, and you’re more worried about the statues when the only thing you should be fearing is anything with a heartbeat behind these walls, not what decorates them.” Well, I guess he had a point there.
“You know my name is Eliza, right? Even my nickname, Lily-pad, I would take over, Girly.”
“Yes, and my name is Boruta, but you are yet to call me it…or get it right,”he mumbled this last part, making me sigh in realization.
“Okay, so, fair point… Whoa! Goddess, that’s not exactly welcoming,” I commented, my apologies quickly cut off when turning around and finding myself suddenly faced with thecreature that was at the end of the hallway. It turned out that it wasn’t an altar at all, but an elaborate stone niche, with a scalloped canopy above and a terrifying stone head of some demonic creature filling the space in between.
“And nor would it be, seeing as it wants your blood,” Bo said, making me snap my head down to his.
“What?!”
“Answer me this, girly, do you see any doors here? Any welcome mats or neon signs telling you where the bar is?”
