“Leave us?” she echoed.
“Where are you going?” I inquired.
“We’ve got something else to handle,” Juno answered softly. “I’m sure we’ll see you again.”
With that, the two of them began walking back down the path they’d just led us up. I didn’t make a move to object or stop them. We tended to do a better as a trio than with a group and I didn’t trust either of these people to begin with.
I walked up to the podium so that I could get a good look at the plaque. There wasn’t anything on it. Well, there was nothing on it that I could read.
“What is this supposed to be?” I asked no one in particular.
“They look like symbols or something,” Grace said.
I tilted my head to the side and tried to see them from a different angle. There were three engraved images going in a horizontal row. One looked like a pile of sticks, the second I had no idea what it was, and the third looked like stacked rows of gold. If they were symbols, I still couldn’t read them.
“There’s three paths and three images,” I pointed out.
“Let’s just pick one?” Mel poised the suggestion as a question.
“Okay, which one do you want to try first?”
“The one that isn’t going to get us killed,” Grace replied sarcastically.
I stepped back and studied the center path, it started off like the other two and then wound its way into total darkness. I didn’t particularly care to go wandering down any of them.
“We have to be missing something. There’s always a riddle or a puzzle that must be solved. We need to put our heads together. Think. What do three dead pigs represent that could align with these weird symbols?” Mel asked.
Something about what she said had my mind flashing back to the sanitorium. The feces covered wall had what looked like Piggy, piggy written on it. So, even then this was always some place we were meant to be. It wasn’t random. We were still playing the game, which meant Mel was right. We were overlooking something.
Pigs—three of them. Three symbols. A taunt. Three paths. How the fuck did all of this go together?
I looked from the symbols to the dead pigs and a lightbulb clicked on in my head. The answer to this puzzle was so simple I felt like an idiot for not having figured this out right away.
“It’s the three little pigs,” I announced confidently.
Mel and Grace both looked at the plaque and then the pigs, laughing lightly at our temporary lapse in brain power.
“Then these cubes have to be bricks,” Grace tapped a finger on what I had considered to be bricks of gold.
“So, we need to go that way…” I trailed off, staring down the third path. It didn’t look any different from the center one, but I guess that was a risk we would have to take.
“I’m going first,” Grace asserted firmly.
“Then take this.” I pulled the knife’s handle free from my belt loop and handed it to her.
She accepted it without any objection, but I could feel her questioning stare from beneath her bubblegum pink mask. If she wanted to start asking questions that was fine with me, but we’d be going tit for tat. There were a few things she had yet to tell me.
As if coming to the same conclusion, without saying a word, she lowered the knife to her side and turned away.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
If there had been any sign at all, a premonition of some kind as to what was going to happen to us once we went down that path, I would have taken my chances out on the streets. In hindsight, there were multiple reasons to turn back.
I couldn’t shake this sudden, growing sense of foreboding. I didn’t feel like we were alone. Mel and Grace hadn’t said anything, though, so I kept my thoughts to myself.
At the end of our trail was a small brick house with all its lights on. Off to the side of it a small fire was burning in a round stone pit. A few wooden lawn chairs surrounded it in a semi-circle. The flames cast a soft glow onto the house’s dark red bricks. Whoever had lit this was nowhere in sight. In fact, it was abnormally silent again.
The three of us stepped into the clearing and looked around. Behind the house was a thick wall of darkness. I couldn’t see a damn thing back there, not even the lawn. Seeing into the house wasn’t possible, either. There were curtains covering the front facing windows.
“What do we do now?” Mel asked, spinning in a full circle.
“I don’t see any other reason why we’d come down here unless it was to go inside,” I replied, motioning to the house.
“Do you think anyone’s in there?” Grace asked.