I can feel the rumble in my teeth as we get close to where the hall should be. It is obvious to me by the way they are rubbing their jaws that Benny and Mary feel it too.
“What is that?” Mary asks.
“Probably some processing plant or something,” Benny says.
We round the final corner that the map says is between us and the Walking Rocks and I laugh. The rumbling is causing pebbles to bounce across the floor. I bend down and catch a few in my palm, where they sit, either well behaved, or completely inert. I look around, we are in what may have been an old service corridor, there is a small branch off of the main tracks that ends not fifty feet from the junction.
“Well, that was a bit anti-climactic,” Mary says.
I dump the rocks back on the floor. “Through the Walking Rocks it says,” I recite what I had been told so long ago again. “Well, here it goes.” I walk through the room, feeling the rocks as they bounced against the side of my boots. I make it to the other side of the tunnel, to where the tracks continue into a smaller tunnel. The rumble gets stronger as I get closer to the smaller opening. I hold my sphere aloft and immediately have to jump back, as a rock the size of a Volkswagen passes not five feet from me.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Mary says, stepping on many of the pebbles in her haste to join me.
I look over my shoulder and watch Freak Beans eye the pebbles cautiously, walking across the room as if he was on a balance beam, cringing every time one of them touched his shoes.
The three of us stood on the brink of the real hall of Walking Rocks, our lights shining in and illuminating their sliding movements, the friction against the floor not seeming to slow them down.
“That must be what’s causing the rumbling,” Mary said, and then she holds her breath as two of the massive stones narrowly avoided colliding with each other. They pass by each other, and I hear the scratching as their edges barely touch but it does not seem to effect their direction.
We stand there, silently watching the rocks moving, trying to establish a pattern that will allow us to pass through the room.
“Can you see the other side?” I ask, and Freak Beans shakes his head no. “So this could be twenty feet or two hundred.”
“Is there a pattern? I mean, are we just going to play Frogger?” Mary asks and I can’t help but laugh at the apt comparison.
“I guess so, but there are no retries if we get eaten by the alligators.” I say, winking at her.
“Or the piranha,” Freak Beans adds, scowling at me behind Mary’s back.
“Ok, I’ll go first,” I volunteer.
“No, we go all at once.” Mary says.
“Fine,” I say rather than arguing. “Next time this one passes,” I say as the Beetle-sized rock scoots by again. We wait a minute before the rock shoots back by us and we cautiously walk behind it, looking both directions as if we were crossing a street above.
“This is surreal,” Benny says, reaching out and touching a passing stone. “They’re cold,” He adds.
We make it passed two more without a problem before we come to a spot where, not only do the rocks seem to be moving faster, but there seems to be more of them. I see a gap coming that I think we can rush through, like dodging traffic on a city street, but it brings the rock we are in the path of awfully close to where we stand. I point it out to my companions, and they nod, although the looks on their faces show me they are having the same doubts.
“One, two three…”
We dart out behind the next rock, and I feel the rock we had just dodged brush my coat. We have to pull up short as the next one speeds past. We charge through the opening in its wake and I look back over my shoulder. I can see the hallway we came through in between speeding boulders, but looking forward I still cannot see another opening.
Mary pulls Benny and myself past the next rock and then the next, tugging us to follow her as she jumps in the space left by a third passing stone.
I stop short, even as Freak Beans follows her, and have to jump to avoid a small watermelon sized rock that nearly takes my feet out from under me. Once my feet are back on solid ground, I step forward, joining my two companions.
“It’s calm here, “Mary says, and I have to concur. We appear to be at the eye of the spinning vortex of rocks, our entrance is now no longer visible, but neither is out destination.
“Let’s catch our breath,” I say and sit down on the floor. “Um, look at this,” I say, pointing at a circle of small moving rocks near my right foot.
“Is that?” Freak Beans says, watching a number of small rocks spin around three tiny pieces of wood.
“Only one way to find out,” I say as I stand up, my eyes still on the wood, and take a few steps forward, watching the larger rocks out of the corner of my eye.
“Yep,” Mary says, as I nod, watching one of the pieces of wood shift in the same direction I just had.
“And we just came from over there,” I say, walking towards the way we had come in.
“And this must be the tunnel we came in through,” Mary says, pointing at a scratch in the ground. It looks to be in roughly in the same spot I suspect our tunnel was, so I agree and begin searching for a similar scratch somewhere on the other side.
“I don’t see anything,” I say.
“Ok, so whats next then?” Benny asks.
“Well, I guess we go out that way,” I say pointing toward the far wall, “And hope we find an exit.”
“And if we don’t?”
“We can always go back the way we came.”
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