The Maze - the Lost Labyrinth (3 page)

Once in the parking lot, I sat in the car for a while, listening to the whir of the engine. My palms were sweaty, and I ran through a hundred different scenarios in my head. What was I doing here? Deep down, I knew the answer. I wasn’t here to tell Karen to leave me alone. I was here because there was a nagging part of my brain that wouldn’t stop asking that one simple question that has caused so much damage throughout history: What if?

I thought about Amy for a moment, considered how devastated she would be, and quickly pushed the thought out of my mind. I couldn’t focus on that. If this was it for me and Amy, could I afford to pass up a chance to rekindle a flame with the first true love of my life?

All I wanted to do was spend a few minutes talking with Karen so I could satisfy my curiosity. I wanted to see if the old spark was still there. Part of me hoped I could prove to myself that the feelings were dead and buried, and I could gain a certain amount of closure on a situation that had never truly been resolved. Part of me hoped the old spark was still there.

Although I hadn’t done anything that couldn’t be reversed at this point, I found myself looking over my shoulder as I got out of the car. I wondered if there was anyone nearby I might know, anyone who might drive by and see me in the parking lot of Karen’s apartment building. The world around me, however, didn’t seem to care.

I trudged up the stairs to the second floor, wondering what I would do or say once I arrived at the door. The rational, logical part of me knew the best thing was to turn around right away, get in my car, and drive back home. I didn’t want to do that.

Did I really want to go through with this? There was still time to turn back. Did I really want to knock on that door?

I thought about it for a moment and realized that I did want to be here. I drove here with a defined purpose-my mind was made up.

Your wife never has to know.

Something else made me hesitate before knocking, something I hadn’t considered on the way over here. It wasn’t some random passerby I needed to worry about seeing me here. Someone very specific was out to get me. They had gone to the trouble of leaving Amy a note in an attempt to prove that I was being unfaithful. I still wasn’t sure of the motive, but I was sure that I was being watched. Maybe they were watching me now.

I looked around frantically; a dog’s bark made me jump. I then heard a steady clicking sound that made me stiffen in fear. I knew that noise all too well. Although Peter was only two, I had taken hundreds if not thousands of photographs of him, and I was all too familiar with the sound that a camera makes with each new exposure. I turned toward the sound and saw him. A figure wearing an angel mask stood at the end of the walkway, snapping picture after picture of me. The figure waved at me playfully, and then turned to flee.

I ran after him like my life depended on it. I needed to catch him and ruin the photographs before he had a chance to send them to Amy and seal my fate. I didn’t want someone else writing my future for me, and Angel Face was doing his best to assert some level of control over my life. It angered me, and made me chase him with every bit of energy I had. I was in good shape, and Angel Face was portly and slow. Yet, what he lacked in speed and agility, he more than made up for in cleverness. I was just about to turn the corner at the end of the walkway and head down the stairs in pursuit when I realized he had been waiting for me the entire time. The moment I turned the corner and noticed him standing there was the moment I saw the gun in his hand.

I tried to retreat, but I was too close. I heard an explosion and felt something like a sledgehammer rip into the side of my head. I remember hitting the concrete, thinking that this wasn’t the way I was supposed to die, and trying to say one last prayer to ask for forgiveness. I felt blood pooling around my face, spilling my life out in hot, crimson bursts.

My arms and legs went numb, and one lonely tear traced its way down my cheek until it dripped into the sticky blood. I waited to see a tunnel filled with light like so many people reported when on the verge of death. Then, I remembered where I was and what I had been about to do, and I wasn’t sure that I could expect that sort of scenario. A place with wailing and gnashing of teeth might have been more suited to me.

At first I wasn’t sure what I was hearing. It was almost like a ringing in my head, but the noise wasn’t internal. It sounded like hammers banging away. I heard the chuffing of machinery. I heard laughter and whispers. I heard a door open, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw something reflected in my own blood that frightened me almost as much as the prospect of death. Like something from a dream, I saw a maze, wavering in and out of focus on the surface of the scarlet puddle.

One moment I was there at Karen’s apartment, gunshot and dying. The next I was lost inside that dreadful labyrinth with no idea what to do.

Chapter 8

The walls pulsed with indigo light, calling to mind icy winter, bleak barren landscapes, and a frigid chill that invaded the bones. The walls were smooth like newly blown glass, but I couldn‘t see my reflection in them. I ran my fingers over the slick, polished surface and noticed a strange series of glyphs, letters, numbers, and pictograms that lit up beneath my touch. It was like looking at a space-age version of the Egyptian pyramids or something designed by aliens. Karen’s apartment was nowhere to be found; if it was there, it was buried underneath a neon cryptogram.

I studied my surroundings for a moment, confused as to how I’d gotten here. I’d heard of people entering fugue states before and making trips through town that they didn’t remember. but this was different. For starters, this place looked nothing like the town where I lived-or any town for that matter.

For a moment, I wondered if I had been abducted by extraterrestrials, but I realized that I wasn’t on a ship of any kind. Or if I was on a ship, it didn’t seem to be moving. I didn’t really think that was the case anyway. This felt more like a structure of some sort than a craft capable of movement. And since I had never heard of anyone being taken to an alien city or an intergalactic prison outside of pulpy sci-fi novels, I disregarded that explanation. Besides, I didn’t believe in aliens.

Then, I remembered the photographer…and the gun. I raised my hand to my temple and expected to touch blood, but there was no wound. How was that possible? I distinctly remembered the life leaking out of me and the light fading from my eyes. There was no way I had healed so quickly. Was I dead? If so, that left only two options.

Was this Hell? I didn’t know, but I didn‘t really think so. It was an odd place for sure, yet I wasn’t miserable. I knew that Hell was a place of agony and torment. This wasn’t that sort of place. It certainly wasn’t Heaven either because I was far from happy. Which left what? Purgatory? Like aliens, I didn’t believe in Purgatory. So where was I? And how had I gone from a gunshot wound in the head to this dark labyrinth?

I ran my fingers along the smooth surface of the wall to prove to myself that it was real. I was surprised: the temperature had dropped about twenty degrees since the last time I touched it. The wall felt like it was covered in solid ice. I shivered and hugged myself for warmth.

Everything about this place felt strange and foreign, but there were familiarities which made it all the more confusing. I studied the characters that were embedded in the walls, and watched the way they pulsed with light. I saw one shaped like a star and gently pressed it with my index finger.

Gears began to grind behind the walls, chains creaked under pressure, and the room began to revolve. The movements of the room weren’t pronounced enough that I had trouble keeping my balance or feared for my own safety. It was more like riding an escalator or an elevator, only in a circular motion rather than up and down.

Gradually the room completed half a revolution, and the gears locked into place with a cold, iron clank. Convinced that whatever I had set into motion was complete, I decided to try another symbol. This time I chose a trapezoid.

The end result of my experimentation wasn’t as noticeable as before. Somewhere in the darkness, I heard doors opening and closing. I also heard what I thought were walls shifting and sliding into place, but I couldn’t be sure of much because it was hard to see anything.

This certainly wasn’t Karen‘s apartment.

But if I wasn’t at Karen’s apartment, dreaming, dead, or on some extraterrestrial spacecraft, then where was I? In my college days, I had done a little experimenting with the usual drugs, and nothing I had ever experienced compared to this.

I took a step forward and was confused to see several layers of sand beneath my feet. Glass bottles with messages in them were scattered around me like a series of chain letters written by castaways. Looking down, I saw that I had unknowingly kicked one of the bottles over.

“This is too weird.” I thought that I had somehow gotten myself stuck inside the artwork of Salvador Dali. Looking for answers, I knelt down to pick up the bottle and read the note inside.

“Hello Jamie. Welcome to the maze. Sorry to interrupt your ‘visit’ with Karen, but it was necessary to arrange this little gauntlet as you‘ll soon see. We sincerely hope you enjoy your stay here, but doubt you will. You will face all sorts of problems here. That is the purpose of your visit. It’s up to you to figure out what to do about them.”

I frowned and read the message again, wondering if this was someone’s idea of a joke. No one, not even Karen herself, had known that I was going to show up at her doorstep. I thought for a moment about the photographer wearing the angel mask. He obviously knew my destination. But how? I was confused about all that, but didn’t really think he had anything to do with this maze. However, I couldn’t be sure of anything. Maybe Angel Face kidnapped me after shooting me in the head. I had no idea why he might have wanted to do such a thing. Then again, I wasn’t sure why he was so intent on destroying my marriage either. Was he also responsible for the message in the bottle? Maybe the photographer was working with someone else. I wondered if the person who had written this note was responsible for the message that was delivered to Amy.

It made me furious to think that I was a pawn in someone’s twisted little game. Someone was toying with me, and I didn’t like that one little bit. I was the type of guy who liked to face trouble head on. My adversary, whoever that might be, seemed to be made of a different sort of cloth.

I grabbed another bottle and read what was written on the scrap of paper inside.

“Hansel and Gretel used breadcrumbs to mark their path. What will you use?”

“Hansel and Gretel?”

It had been many, many years since I had read fairy tales, and I hoped that a detailed working knowledge of The Brothers’ Grimm wasn’t a prerequisite to survival here.

I crossed my fingers that things would become clearer if I read more of the notes and picked up another bottle. I pulled the cork and fished out the scrap of paper. The words were written on a very old sheet of yellowed parchment.

“Use this note as a guide and keep it with you at all times. The doorway to this labyrinth is opened with sinful intent, and you walked in brazenly. You will find the exit at one turn or another---or not at all. The walls will show you the way if you‘re smart enough to figure them out. A word of caution: beware the minotaur. He feasts on transgression.”

The note was signed ‘The Architect.’

I read the short message a couple of times, pondering its meaning. Like the note about Hansel and Gretel, it seemed to be a riddle of some sort. I had never been any good at riddles. Although I considered myself to be fairly well educated in a variety of subjects, I couldn‘t decipher any meaning in the messages.

My mind screamed at me in denial, but everything around me was real. I wasn‘t going to wake up and realize that it was all just a game created in my mind. I broke one of the bottles and pricked my finger with a sliver of glass to prove that point. The cut bled, and the pain was as real as any I’d ever felt.

A host of scenarios played in my head, and none of them had happy endings. I imagined that I had been kidnapped by terrorists and thrown into this prison. I thought about movies I had seen in the past and wondered if this was all part of a psychopath’s sick game.

I didn’t have any enemies that I knew about. There were a few people I’d rubbed the wrong way over the years, but not to this extreme. Besides, this seemed a little elaborate for something as mundane as a grudge.

Having eliminated all of the possibilities I could conceive of, I trembled with fear of the unknown.

“Get hold of yourself!” I shook my head to clear the cobwebs. “There has to be a simple explanation for all of this.”

I blinked my eyes in rapid succession and wasn’t surprised to see that nothing changed. The walls were still scintillating, and I was still standing there, bathed in a blue glow.

“Beam me up, Scotty.” I tried to lighten my own mood with levity. If anyone or anything heard me, they didn’t respond.

I unrolled the small scrap of parchment again and read it a second time, thinking that it must have some answers.

“The doorway to this labyrinth is opened with sinful intent.”

The last thing I remember before arriving here was bleeding out only a few feet from Karen’s door. Was this maze a punishment for the sin I had planned to commit? Or was this a schism in my psyche, a break from reality that could only be repaired through intense psychotherapy and psychotropic medications? The wall beneath my hand certainly felt real enough. Of course every successful lunatic has managed to convince himself that his delusions are real. That’s why they’re delusions.

The thought didn’t make me feel any better. Neither did recalling the reason why I had gone to Karen’s apartment in the first place. Although I didn’t want to admit it, I hadn‘t tried very hard to resist the trappings of the flesh. I had gone to Karen’s hoping to rekindle an old flame. Amy had accused me of cheating, and despite all my protestations, I had decided to prove her right. That decision led me here, but where was here? And what sorts of things did I face because of that one indiscretion?