Yellow Room.

The first thing I noticed about this room was the smell: moldy and stale, probably a result of all the mildew and cracks along the walls. I figured I could tolerate it for a little while though. It was also a lot darker than the “treizuro.” The door I entered through remained open just to shed a little ambient light into the place. It was completely empty, and there was nothing particularly distinguishing about it other than a small crawlspace along one of the side walls. That area was totally darkened and even a little bit creepy. In fact, the whole tone of this room was a lot more frightening than the last one, but nevertheless, I stayed where I was and hoped to find a way into another area.

I quickly realized I was still holding onto the book from the chest. Thinking back to the maps, I turned to one of the last pages that showed this room extending from the last one, as well as yet another room coming away from here. I looked upwards to see if there were any more high, unreachable doors. To my dismay, that was a dead end idea. That’s when my attention turned to the crawlspace in the back.

Hesitantly, I approached the dark, musty-odored spot. Fortunately for me, there was nothing waiting there to jump out at me; just several bunches of soaked, raffia-like reeds, bundled together in “X” shaped patterns. Through the messy pile of wet reeds, I could see light emanating from an unknown source. I wasted no time digging through the pile to see what was on the other side creating it. One by one, I picked up the “X” shapes and tossed them onto the floor behind me until I finally found the answer was looking for. It was another door, only this time the light was being generated from the other side through a small keyhole. At that point I was presented with another mystery. Where was the key that would let me through?

I exhaled a defeating sigh and lumbered back to the middle of the room amidst all the things that I just cleared away. I felt like I was just back where I started. “I might as well just go back out the way I came in,” I thought. “I’m not getting anywhere in this place anyway.”

Suddenly, I noticed that a few of the reed bundles resembled each other. They were all basically the same, but I kept spotting some that were identical. In fact, they were exactly the same in length, shape and thickness. With nothing better to do, I started arranging them into groups. First I tried it with all the thick, fat ones in one pile, and the small, skinny ones in another, but it just didn’t seem organized. I even tried two more piles – long ones and short ones, but I got nowhere with that either. However, as I was going through them a third time, I discovered that they would easily fit together in groups of two, so I started putting them out in front of me in pairs.

“One, two, three…” I counted off to myself. I eventually hit twenty-three. “With two in each group, that made forty-six,” I announced proudly. Forty-six of those little things fit easily into twenty-three groups. Hmmm…just like chromosomes. I wondered if there was a connection, so I pulled the small black book back out to see if it mentioned anything about these whatever-they-were. Ironically enough, the answer was on page 46. “Bendo” is what the book called them. I couldn’t tell if that was singular or plural. Regardless, the illustration featured one pair looking exactly as the ones I found did, but the picture also showed people standing next to it, pointing to it in awe, and they were considerably smaller that the Bendo figure in the image. The ones here…well, they were just tiny in comparison.

I closed the book and looked back at the pairs of Bendo bundles. They almost looked like dolls. Their Human-like shapes resembled arms and legs, and I even considered calling them “Bendo Buddies.” I chuckled at the thought of it, but I was glad I could laugh at the whole thing although I was still clueless as to their purpose. Even though I learned more about them, I still didn’t understand their significance or why they were just piled in that crawlspace anyway.

I counted them one more time for good measure, but this time I saw that something was a little off. Instead of the forty-six figures I originally counted, there were actually forty-six and one half. Basically, there was only one left. It wasn’t shaped like an “X,” but rather a single column – more like an “I.” Wondering why that one was the odd thing out, I took it back to the door from which I entered to look at it some more. I picked apart the thing a little at a time. This definitely didn’t resemble the Bendo sculpture from the picture in the book either. As I pulled back more of the reeds, I saw something hard and shiny tucked away deep into its interior. I picked at it some more until it started poking outward. I pinched the miniscule object between my fingers and retrieved…a key. It was a small, bronzish skeleton key. My immediate thought was that it fit the keyhole in the door that was hidden over in the dark crawlspace, so I jumped up and ran over to the door to try it.

Presto! The key fit exactly, eliminating the stray light that attempted to filter in from the next room. I was surprisingly excited to see what was awaiting me in the next chamber. More Bendo objects? More riches? No. Much to my shock and horror, the first thing I saw as I entered was a wrinkled and old, naked and emaciated, motionless body lying on the floor in front of me.

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