It was impossible to understand how much time they had been walking. But what surrounded them was not at all what they expected. Soon, turning on the flashlight, they saw many bas-reliefs, which they barely had time to examine. These images were not like those they had encountered in the village. Here was something alien and mysterious.
Far ahead, a light glimmered, and finally, they found themselves in a huge hall—obviously a temple, whose walls, covered with bas-reliefs, depicted figures and symbols unlike anything earthly.
Or was it something like a temple? John could not be certain of this.
In the depths of the hall, on a pedestal, it stood—the mysterious monolith. Its form was simultaneously simple and inexpressible: a dark monolith, motionless and as if carved from the very flesh of this temple. But what emanated from it deprived one of reason.
Its soft glow radiated a thick crimson light, shimmering as if fire were beneath skin. It did not illuminate the space—it burned through it. In the crimson glimmers, it seemed the air became viscous, like blood spilled in silence.
The light came from within the monolith, pulsing slowly, like the heart of a living creature. Each surge of this radiance echoed in the chest of the uninvited guest with a strange heartbeat.
It seemed that in these scarlet glimmers, silhouettes emerged—either faces, or shadows, or echoes of others' dreams. They flickered and vanished, like a whisper impossible to fully hear.
The crimson glow called, promised, urged forward. But along with the promise, it carried a sense of danger, an inevitable price that would have to be paid for any request. Lewis, without hesitation, stepped toward it, his face expressing strange reverence.
John, bound by fear, followed him, but his legs became heavy, and his body seemed to lose connection with reality. He tried to reach for his pistol, but his hand froze, paralyzed by an invisible force.
The air suddenly became heavy, as if saturated with an invisible substance, and John's flashlight began to flicker, its light fading in the thickening darkness.
Suddenly, deafening them, a voice rang out, amplified to an unseen strength by the temple's walls. Cold and lifeless, it seemed to come from the monolith itself:
"Another set of petitioners has come for their fate!" it said, devoid of emotion, like the echo of a machine. "And once again, I must commit evil, for I have no will of my own…"
The darkness thickened, the walls seemed to swallow the light. A kaleidoscope of images, flashing with incredible speed yet clear and vivid, instantly filled John's mind. Conversations, journeys, nights of love, entire years—flashed through his head in a few seconds. John, in panic, closed his eyes and stepped back a few paces.
And when he opened them again, the temple was gone. He stood in his cozy living room, and outside the window, a faint patter of rain drummed, while logs quietly crackled in the fireplace, filling the room with light and warmth.
The room was filled with a warm red glow. John felt cozy and content. Opposite him, by the window, someone sat in an armchair, illuminated by the faint light of a wall lamp. It was Mary. In a white dress, barefoot, her light hair gathered in a bun, the thin fabric stretched over her chest, her arms bare to the elbows resting downward. Mary gazed at him motionlessly from under her dark eyelashes. John looked at her for a long time and, on the whole, calmly. His very first thought was: "How nice it is to know this is all unreal." And yet, he didn't want her to disappear. John closed his eyes and forced himself to take a few deep breaths, fearing that she would vanish right now, but when he opened his eyes, he realized she was still sitting before him. Her lips formed a happy smile, but her eyes held no joy. Mary looked exactly as she did the last time he saw her alive, and back then she was twenty-four. Now she would have been thirty-two, but naturally, she hadn't changed—dead people always stay young. She looked at John with those same radiant eyes.
"You haven't changed at all," he said quietly, startled himself because his voice sounded so truthful, and the room and Mary—everything seemed as real as one could imagine.
"Why don't you answer?" John asked, noticing he spoke very quietly, as if afraid to scare her away.
Reassured that she didn't vanish, John closely examined Mary. She was illuminated by the lamp hanging above her head on the wall. The soft light reflected off her white dress, and a long shadow from her eyelashes fell across her face. She was lovely. "John," the thought came to him, "you're still the same pedantic John, even on the other side of reality. You notice the movement of light and that she has a dimple where no one else does." And yet, he felt uneasy. He understood this was an alien suggestion, that none of this could be real.
He pressed his temples hard, trying to snap out of it, when suddenly he heard a creak. And immediately opened his eyes.
Mary stood nearby, looking at him closely. She was close and as real as ever, and then John smiled at her, she smiled back and embraced him. The first kiss was light, as if they were afraid to scare each other away. Then John kissed her for a long time. "Can one use human feelings like this?" a faint thought flashed through his mind. He was frightened.
"What do you want?" The voice sounded quiet as a whisper.
But Mary didn't answer. She moved away from him and lightly walked to the entrance of their bedroom, where, after so many years, her things still hung in the closet. She leaned her shoulders against the doorframe. Her dress trembled slightly at her chest in time with her calm breathing. She looked at him with calm interest and invitation.
"How did we end up here?"
In response, Mary formed her lips into a charming smile and invitingly extended her hand, beckoning him to the bedroom.
John, not even trying to resist, took a few steps toward her. And at the moment when he almost managed to touch her hand, the room swayed before his eyes, becoming blurry and losing clarity. Mary's face distorted, and she spoke. It seemed her voice came from everywhere, amplified a hundredfold by megaphones as if they were installed throughout the room.
"Critically low energy level! Initiating emergency shutdown of the psychological barrier program to prevent intrusion! Unplanned deactivation of the engineering hall perimeter protection! WARNING: DANGER OF INTRUSION!"
Everything around swam before his eyes, the room took the form of the temple again, and shadows burst from its walls, taking the forms of people unknown to him. John swayed, feeling he was losing his footing, and sharply opening his eyes, saw he was about to fall into an endless abyss that had opened beneath his feet.
But then Lewis, as if also snapping out of the hypnosis emanating from the monolith, grabbed John's hand, his fingers digging into him, and with the strength of a machine, pulled him onto the pedestal where the monolith stood.
Clearly, Lewis's survival instinct, honed over years in the world's hottest conflict zones, kicked in instantly as soon as the illusion from the monolith shut off.
Struggling to catch their breath and come to their senses, the friends decided to inspect the trap they had nearly fallen into. Before them yawned an open well: a massive slab had silently slid into the floor, revealing a true bottomless abyss into which they were meant to fall under the monolith's induced illusion.
"Well, I felt there was a catch here," Lewis snorted with satisfaction, peering into the black depths and trying to gauge how deep it was.
Without waiting for a response from the still-shaken John, he pulled a signal flare from his backpack, broke it in half, and threw it down.
The bright fire flew into the darkness, illuminating the smooth stone walls of the well. After traveling about a hundred meters, it landed at the bottom, revealing a horrific scene: the floor was covered with white bones, layered in several strata, like a dead blanket.
"Here's the answer to where the village's elders disappeared," Lewis snorted. "They came here hoping the Temple would grant their wishes… And it sent them to 'paradise.' Only this paradise turned out to be surprisingly deep."
John struggled to his feet.
"Alright, let's inspect this monolith. I want to know what this thing is."
They turned—and froze. The pedestal was empty. The monolith had vanished.
"The same illusion as everything else in this temple," John concluded grimly.
Nevertheless, they didn't rush to leave. Carefully examining the arches and walls, the friends noticed a barely discernible opening in the depths of the hall, skillfully hidden in the rock behind the pedestal. Approaching closer, they discovered a narrow door, beyond which a corridor opened. But the path forward was blocked by something far more dangerous than the mystery of the vanished monolith.
The air before them was crisscrossed by dozens of crimson beams. They flashed and vanished in chaotic order, intertwining into a dense web, like a spiderweb of fire. The red glow either illuminated the walls or sharply fell on John and Lewis's faces, giving them an ominous, almost unreal hue.
The lasers emanated from miniature emitters embedded in the walls and floor, their metal still gleaming but covered with a thin layer of rust, indicating the system's antiquity. The lines of the beams blocking their path weakened with each second, and after a few seconds, they went out completely. The path was open.