Chapter 21- Together Again

Drake was very confused. He had been wandering in the Shadow Realm for what felt like hours, and he felt like he was walking in circles. He could only hope that the others had been as lucky as he had been, encountering next to no fiends. But this wandering… it was worse than the fiends. The tediousness of it and the fact that he knew Matt was dying in the meantime felt like sandpaper on his sanity. He could feel himself slipping into a crazed frenzy.

Drake pushed a door open and found himself in a large octagonal room that he hadn't been in before. Okay, progress. This is good. A door to his left opened and Drake aimed at it. A figure walked through and Drake opened fire. The figure yelped and ducked back behind the door. Strange, fiends don't dodge that well.

"Hold your fire, Drake! It's me, it's Flynn!" came a voice from behind the door.

"Really? Wait a minute! How do I know you're not a shadow?" Drake said. This is bad! I can't think of anything he might say that could distinguish him!

"Er, uh, no offense, but how do I know that it's you too?" "Flynn" said.

"Uh, let's see…" Drake said, and began to think. A door to his right opened while he was thinking. Another figure stumbled out. Drake brought up his rifle to shoot, but before he pulled the trigger he realized it was Keith and hesitated.

"Woah, for a moment I thought I was going to get shot by my own friend!" Keith said.

"Oh great." Drake said. "Now what am I supposed to do? There's two and I'm not sure if either of them are shadows."

"Yeah, that's a problem." Keith said. "Hm…let's see… how to prove that I'm the real Keith? Let's see… well, spinach freaks me out and I got the 97 on the entrance exam by pure luck."

"Yep. That's Keith." Flynn said.

"So that would mean that your Flynn." Keith said. "No one else knows that. Unless of course the fiends captured the real Flynn and found that out. Now, how to tell that you're the real Drake?"

"Well, uh… uh… gaaaaaaaah!" Drake said. "I can't think of anything!"

"Yep. That's Drake." Flynn said. "No one else would get that aggravated over think like that."

"Yeah, I agree." Keith said. Flynn walked out from behind the door. "Well, now that we have established that we're not fiends, let's move on." Flynn nodded. "How are you guys? Get past everything alright?"

"Yeah, nothing too bad here." Flynn said.

"I didn't have too much trouble." Drake said.

"Shouldn't the others be here?" Keith asked.

"Huh? What lead you to that?" Drake said.

"Well, there are six doors… one would hope that they would get here at about the same time. So, if they don't, they're either having a lot of trouble, or are caught or killed. So, that leads me to assume-"

"Don't say it." Drake said, and looked away from Keith. He didn't want to think about losing Julie, Bentz, or Matt. But mostly Julie.

Keith raised an eyebrow but didn't raise an objection. "And now, how about we get out of here?"

"Where to?" Flynn said. "As far as I can see, the only way out of here is back through one of our doors. They all locked behind us. And they're all locked from the inside. We're trapped in here!"

"Not exactly." Keith said. He walked over to the wall between Flynn's and Drake's doors and placed his hand on it. The wall slid down the reveal another passage. Drake's jaw dropped.

"How did you know that?" He said.

"It was a little lighter than the rest of the wall. I though that it might lead to a secret passage of some kind, like in a video game where all the secret doors are usually stretches of wall that are slightly different."

"And that's the case here." Flynn said.

"Apparently so." Keith said. "Let's get moving."

"Hang on a minute." Drake said. "What if this thing closes and they don't know where we went? I'm not too worried about Matt, but what about the others?"

"You have a fair point." Flynn said, frowning. "How do you plan on remedying that?"

"Hm…" Drake said, and scratched his chin. "How about we mark this wall somehow? With our initials or something?"

"Yeah, that sounds good." Keith said. "Except what are we supposed to mark it with? We don't have a pen or anything like that."

"We have this." Drake suggested, pulling a small knife out of his pocket.

"Where did you get that?" Flynn asked.

Drake shrugged. "I don't know. I noticed that it was in my pocket after I beat a fiend back there." Drake started carving a "DS" into the wall, as deep as he could. It took him a few minutes. "There." He handed the knife to Keith. It took him a little less time. Then Flynn took his turn and carved a "FT" into the wall.

"Now that that is taken care of, let's get moving." Keith said. Drake slipped the knife into his pocket, readied his rifle, and followed Flynn down the hall. They walked without event for what felt like an eternity.

"What's up with this?" Flynn said. "I swear we keep passing the same candle stick every three minutes."

"How can you tell?" Drake asked.

"Well, all the candles are different in here. I don't know why." Flynn said.

"Perhaps you have found a series of similar candles?" Keith suggested.

"I don't think so." Flynn said. "I think something is making us go through the same hall over and over."

"That's not good." Drake said. "We could be trapped here forever!"

"Yes, we could." Flynn said. "Only thing to do is keep walking." And so they did.

It might have been minutes, hours, days that passed as they went down the hallway over and over. Drake couldn't tell. All he knew is that he wasn't getting either tired or hungry. He didn't feel any need to relieve himself. And he had no idea why.

"This isn't right." Keith said. "We have to have walked at least for eight hours, and yet we have yet to feel the urge to eat. I have an idea." Keith looked down at his watch and pressed a button on the side. "I think this is where we started. So, I'll start this now…" He pressed another button. "…we walk." They strode down the hall for what felt like (and probably was) the thousandth time. After a while, Keith stopped. He was staring at his watch, dumbfounded. "This is incredible."

"What?" Drake asked.

"Well… when we got back here, my watch reset itself. I didn't touch it. I think… that every time we get to a certain point, we get sent back in time to another point. And we just get sent back to the time when I started my watch."

"That is very complicated. But wouldn't that mean that we have only walking for five minutes?" Drake said.

"Yes… the same five minutes over and over." Flynn said. "Any ideas how to break the cycles?"

"Not a one." Keith said. "We may as well keep going. After all, we may figure something out!" And so they walked down the hallway again. And they reset again.

"This is boring." Drake said. "And bothersome. Maybe we should just sit here until someone else comes along."

"Well… we can't be sure that anyone else is coming." Keith said.

"He's right. If we're caught in this eternal loop, it would be logical to assume that the others could be too. And since the time here does not affect the time in the real world, it is possible that we will be forced to remain here for eternity while the world is destroyed." Flynn said. The wall behind them slid up.

"Hello there gents." Matt said. "Did I miss something?"

"No, unless you count walking down this hall a thousand times." Flynn said. Matt smiled a twisted sort of smile.

"Repetition Syndrome. It occurs almost at random throughout the Shadow Realm, causes certain parts to be caught in infinite loops. It can be harnessed and controlled, of course. Some of the less scrupulous people would use it to make torture last longer." Matt said. "It's annoying when it happens. Usually you can stop it by drastically changing the starting circumstances. So, with my arrival, the thing should be broken. Let's go." And so they followed Matt.

He was right, of course. They managed to get to a part of the hall they hadn't gotten to before. Unfortunately, it lead to the torture chambers.

"Why does everything lead to these kind of places?" Drake asked, staring at a disemboweled corpse hanging from the wall.

"Because the evil guys think that it will break us." Matt said.

"Of course, it doesn't work on us." Flynn said. He opened a door. "Let's try in- oh my god." He was standing stock still in the doorway, a look of shock on his face.

"What is it?" Matt said. There was a note of urgency in his voice. He pushed Flynn out of the doorway, looked once, then turned around and covered his face. Drake moved past him. He could feel Keith behind him. Drake moved through the doorway. He nearly threw up.

Bentz was lying in the middle of the room, and he was leaking blood at a ridiculous rate. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his one arm and both his legs were lying on the other side of the room. There were about thirty spikes rammed through his body and face. It was quite obvious that he was long dead.

"That's not good." Keith said.