Labyrinth

TWENTY-TWO

The hotels were full and we ended up sleeping in the Rover at a campground east of downtown Leavenworth—probably just as well since using a credit card for the deposit would have left a trace of our presence. Beside us the river gurgled to itself in the dark, lending a descant to the singing of the grid. The back of the Rover was a bit crowded and smelled of dog, but it was acceptable and Quinton fell asleep with ease. I lay on my side, tired and wanting to sleep but afraid to. The strange voices of the grid were increasingly present and increasingly loud. They chilled and compelled me, drawing me too close to the warp and weft of the Grey.

I was certain that anyone I asked would say, “Just don’t listen to them; don’t do what they say.” But that wasn’t so easy and the voices, singing in ever-closer harmony, hadn’t always been wrong. If my dad’s advice was what I thought, then I needed to listen—to “know” what they sang. And yet . . . those voices had urged me to kill Goodall and to do something to Will. One of those I had recoiled from and the other hadn’t worked. I had destroyed Alice, but that didn’t seem to me the same as killing Goodall. But it was difficult for me to articulate the difference and why one was acceptable and the other wasn’t. I hated the hard shell of ice that seemed to be growing around me, dragging me away from compassion where it seemed most deserved.

And I wondered what was I going to do once I got to Dad. Supposedly he would tell me Wygan’s plan and how to stop it. But what if he didn’t? What if it was a trap, as Mara had suggested? Or a wrong turn? Ghosts don’t know much and what they do know may be wrong or incomplete. I wasn’t sure why I assumed my father’s shade was different, but I did and I hoped that meant I hadn’t become a ruthless machine of some unknown retribution. “Paladin of the Dead” was what Carlos had called me. . . . What dread thing did that make me . . . ? In the dark, lying beside Quinton and yet feeling alone, I did not know what to do, which instinct or voice to give ear to. I felt I was not myself anymore, that my decisions were those of a foreigner in my skin.

I’d thought I understood who and what I was two years earlier, before I’d died in an elevator. I’d thought I had control of my life—at last—that I was the person I wanted to be, doing the job I wanted. Part of that certainty had been torn away from me when I ceased being blind to the Grey, when I became something I did not want to be and didn’t understand. I thought I had regained some equilibrium since then. I had come to accept what I was and what I did and make the best of it. Sometimes I’d even gotten a little smug about it. But I’d still been wrong. I wasn’t what I’d thought, nor had anything about my life been what I’d believed. Deceptions, manipulations, and illusions had shaped the fabric of my life and I had not been blameless in making it—I’d destroyed my own memories and lived in the bitter confines of my anger at my parents. I’d clung to my beliefs without questioning them and learned I was wrong. I’d reacted, rather than acting. I’d done the predictable thing and run the maze like a good little rat. Was I still a rat, still going where I was pushed?

Now I was further away from what I’d been—or thought I’d been—than ever. I felt something powerful and frightening coiling under my skin. This ability everyone pushed me to embrace would change me fundamentally. I knew this without any question; the rising, clarifying song in my mind and the cold electricity across my nerves told me it was so. It was one of the few certainties I had, and yet I did not think I had a choice to reject this power. Among the dozens of questions I couldn’t answer, one occupied and terrified me most: Would I, if I survived this, still be human? And if not, would I be able to stave off destruction of all that was dear? This sleepless horror held me until dawn.

By the time Quinton opened his eyes to the morning light, I was damned tired of being damned tired. He noticed I was dragging.

“Didn’t sleep?” he asked, sitting up and putting his arms around my shoulders.

I rubbed at my eyes. “No. It’s awfully noisy in my head these days.”

“I keep thinking I should be able to help you, but I’m not sure how.”

I gave him a weak smile. “You do. Just keep on doing what you already do.”

He made a rueful face. “You say so. . . .”

“I do. Now, let’s get moving and see if we can find this maze.”

We were still a bit ahead of the Maifest crowd, and the Upper Valley Museum, which housed the Upper Valley Historical Society, wasn’t open yet, so we were able to get some breakfast first and wait on the stonework terrace that surrounded the old house that was now the museum. It sat well back from everything else on the north side of the Wenatchee on a large swath of high riverbank land at the end of a small street that marked the eastern edge of Leavenworth’s Bavarian theme. The building itself—a fieldstone craftsman bungalow with a low, arched roof and lots of wood and windows—predated the theme by at least fifty years. Most of the houses and shops on Division Street were plain late-Victorian clapboard structures and a few much later condos, so the gracious low lines of the museum stood out even more as it rested in green isolation at the end of the road. From the back terrace I could see the willow trees where we’d stood the night before with Dru Cristoffer, but there was no sign from this distance across the river, other than a thin red haze in the Grey, that there was anything magical on the opposite bank.

Quinton and I had done some reading up on the museum and historical society during breakfast. The building had been the summer home of the Lamb-Davis sawmill’s owners, and then the local banker’s house for many years before becoming a bed-and-breakfast, and then the museum. There’d been some information about it online, but not much else about any other buildings, much less one with a labyrinth—plenty about Spring Bird Fest, though, which was upcoming at the museum in a week. I couldn’t say I was sorry to miss it, since I was just as glad not to be eyed by the wild raptors of the local bird rescue group or surrounded by children in songbird costumes. The old house was far enough removed from Front Street to still be peaceful that morning and the clear, constant babble of the river seemed to calm the chorus in my mind, so sitting and waiting suited me fine.

Two women in their late fifties arrived on foot at 10:45. They smiled at us and waved. “We’ll be open in just a few minutes,” one of them called to us. “Just sit tight a bit longer.” They began unlocking and setting up the museum to welcome the day’s visitors. One of them struggled out carrying a sandwich board events sign and Quinton jumped up to help her take it down the steps to the driveway. I drifted toward the door she’d left ajar and slid inside the building.

The house wasn’t very large, at least not on the main floor, and I imagined the one basement floor didn’t add much living space. I found myself in a wide, shallow entry with doors on each side and an open post-and-beam arch ahead of me. The remaining woman stepped out of the doorway on my left, which was labeled “Gift Shop.” She was a soft-looking woman, a little round everywhere without being fat, her blond hair fading but not to silver. She was wearing a brown sweater set over camel-colored trousers and brown loafers that cost more than I made in a week.

She jumped with surprise when she saw me. “Oh, we’re not quite open yet. . . .”

“Actually, I’m looking for some information about an old house in the area. It must have been torn down or otherwise destroyed about two years ago.”

“Oh. A house. We don’t knock down many houses around here, you know. Most are historic one way or another.”

“This one may have been historic in its way. Apparently it was very old, at least two stories, in one of the orchards, and it had a maze or labyrinth on the property.”

“Oh. A labyrinth. In the orchard. My, my. That must have been the Rose house.”

“Rose house? Was that a family name or did that refer to roses on the property?” Maybe I needed to look for rosebushes as well as apple trees. . . .

“No, no. I’d have to look it up to get the family name of the owners, but the house was called Rosaceae originally and it got shortened over time to Rose.”

An electric current seemed to run through me when she said the original name. That was one of the words I’d heard from the voices of the grid: “rosaceae.” I could feel the humming delight of the chorus tingling over my nerves. “That’s a funny name for a house,” I said, coughing a little on the grid’s excitement.

“It’s the scientific name for the plant family both apples and roses belong to.”

“Apples and roses?” I wouldn’t have imagined them to be related.

She smiled a bit smugly. “Yes. Roses, apples, hawthorn, cherries . . . they’re all part of Rosaceae. My family planted some of the earliest apple trees in this valley.”

I noticed she didn’t say “the first.” I shook my head as if amazed. “You must know a lot about the area, then—and the fruit trees.”

“Oh, I do!”

“Why did the owner give the house such an odd name?”

“I don’t think anyone’s sure. Except that he was very eccentric. He didn’t lay out his orchard in the usual way, either—not in square rows but in a kind of crazy radial pattern around the house and the maze. So the most efficient way to harvest the fruit was to spiral out from the middle or in from the edge. Except you couldn’t, since the house took up a big square in one quarter of the array. And the orchard wasn’t all apple trees, either. Some pear and cherry were mixed in, too, though that isn’t really wise if you’re producing commercial fruit.”

The other woman reentered with Quinton at her heels. Up close, she was plainly the subordinate of the pair: Her hair was cheaply dyed, her clothes weren’t so expensive or well maintained, and her complexion bore the ruddy marks of a harder, more outdoor life, though they were otherwise much alike. “Janice,” she puffed, “this young man—oh.” She caught sight of me and came to a sudden halt. “Oh, well, here she is, then.” She turned and looked at Quinton. “Here she is! This is your lady friend, isn’t it?”

Quinton nodded. “Yep, that’s her. Thanks for helping me find her.”

The other woman blushed. “Oh, it’s nothing. Thank you for your help with the sign and the garage doors—they’re so heavy!” This last declaration came with a sharp look askance at Janice.

Janice ignored that. “Belinda, do you remember the Rose house?”

“The house in the crazy orchard on North Road? I sure do. They finally tore the old wreck down about two years ago.”

I turned to look at her more directly. “Why was it torn down?” I asked her.

She rolled her eyes and made half a grin of shameful pleasure. “The upper story caught fire once—don’t know why it didn’t light the trees—but after it was put out, it just sat there for years. No one lived in it and it was turning into a real danger. The kids from the high school would come out and dare each other to go in at night and do something foolish like take something or paint their name on something. Crazy things like that. I did it too when I was a kid, but Nils and I—he’s my husband now—we got chased off before we could get in trouble.”

“Who chased you off if no one lived there?”

“Well, that’s why it was such a big dare. People said the house was haunted. There was always strange stuff going on around there. Lights at night in the trees, wolves and bears and rabid raccoons running around. And oh my God, the crows! Crows used to nest all over the orchard, even when there wasn’t any fruit, and they’d dive-bomb you if you tried to walk through it.”

“Animals chased you off?” I asked.

She nodded. “Oh, yes. I think it was a bear—just a little bear, mind, but a bear all the same. I couldn’t swear, because I didn’t see it very well in the dark and it’s been a long time, but it smelled bad and it growled and charged us, and we ran like the dickens!”

“Oh, Belinda, it couldn’t have been a bear all the way down there,” Janice chided.

Belinda dropped her eyes to the floor for a moment. “Well, I said I wasn’t sure. It might have been a dog, maybe. . . .”

“I don’t know,” Quinton speculated. “It’s not that far from the hills. If the deer come down, why not the bears?”

“Well, yes. Now, that’s what I thought,” Belinda said, shooting a defiant glance at Janice.

Janice sighed as if indulging a child, but said nothing.

“Where was this house?” I asked Belinda.

“Out near the old cemetery.” This just got better and better, didn’t it?

“Could you tell me how to find it?”

“Certainly!” She crossed the room in a few strides and grabbed a handful of flyers about donating to the museum and wrote on the back of one. “See, you go up Division here to Highway Two. Turn right. Then you go just a little ways to Two-Oh-Nine—that’s Chumstick Highway—and you turn left, which is going to be northerly. Then you go on up Chumstick just a mile, past the county shop yard, and turn right onto North Road.” Belinda drew and lettered a map as she talked. Her printing was precise and very quick, her demeanor entirely confident as she worked. I hated to interrupt her.

“What’s a shop yard?” I asked.

Belinda looked up just long enough to give me a smile. “It’s the county’s equipment maintenance shop and storage yard,” she explained before she returned her gaze to her map in progress. “After the yard, you cross the railroad tracks and then take the first left—that’ll be the cemetery road. It’s not much of a road and it’s not marked too well, but you’ll see the sign for the graveyard. Stay to the left, ’cause the orchard there is private property. Pass the graveyard and stay on the orchard road along the railroad tracks until you get past the end of the orchard boundary. There’s a real small road there on the right—it’s hard to see but look for a pair of lightning-burned trees standing side by side. That’ll be the road. Go up that and follow it around the hook to the old orchard. You’ll have to walk up from the edge of the property. You’ll know you’re there ’cause there’ll be an alley of pear trees and then a lot of old stone lying around. That used to be the house foundation. And then the trees start up all around, like a big circle with a slice out of it, and you’re there.”

Belinda looked up and handed me the map. “Why do you want to go out there, anyway?”

“Uh, ghost hunting.”

She paled. “Ugh. Well, better you than me. Be careful out there. There’s still bits of that maze out there and you can fall into it if you’re not keeping a sharp eye out.”

That was an interesting caution—how could one fall into a maze? We thanked Belinda and Janice for their help and set out to find Rosaceae.

I drove this time, holding the noisy grid voices at bay a little more easily now that I was doing what they wanted.

Quinton was frowning and about the time I turned onto Chumstick Highway I asked him why.

“It’s bugging me: What did Belinda mean about a circle of trees?”

“The other one—Janice—was telling me the orchard around the house is planted in a circle or circular area with the trees arranged in irregular radii, not in regular rows. Apparently, it was hard to harvest unless you worked in a spiral.”

“Ahhh . . . that’s what I was wondering. I’ll bet the center of the spiral coincides with the center of the labyrinth.”

“Why?”

Quinton paused, ordering his thoughts. “This mystery turns on keys, puzzles, and a labyrinth. But really, it’s just the keys and the puzzles because a classical labyrinth is the visual expression of a key as a circle.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“OK, look—turn right.”

“What?”

“This is North Road. Turn right.”

I did and the road began to climb quite steeply. I had to concentrate on the grade. Even as we crossed the railroad tracks, the angle barely eased and the road curved sharply to the right. I made the curve and almost missed the road to the cemetery. The sign marking it was faded and small, but I saw it in time and made a hard left onto the steep path, not much wider than the Rover itself. The truck’s tires were so close to the edge that they pulled on the ruts rather than falling into them, making the ride a thumping, twitching misery until we passed the neat rows of fruit trees on the right and found a grove of old oaks shading a small slope dotted with crumbling headstones and strange monuments enclosed in rusted iron fences.

Although it was quaint from most vantage points, I found the cemetery unsettling and odd. Most of the graves were old enough to lie quiet, but a few were literally giving up the ghost in spires of colored mist and restless shapes. A disproportionate number of the restless forms were tiny: evidence of high infant mortality. There was a strange cluster of shady forms around the trees at the north end of the small graveyard. The voice of the grid urged me to ignore them and I agreed. I kept my eyes to the right where the last row of graves on the orchard side petered out as the road took a sudden dip down. The Rover lurched a bit at the change of grade but had no problem keeping to the hard-packed dirt surface.

I tried to put the conversation back on track so it would be easier to ignore the curious stares the ghosts turned on us as we passed. “So . . . how is a key a labyrinth?”

“Not just any key: a Greek key—a meander.”

Yet another chill of recognition rolled over me. “Maiandros” was also one of the words the Grey chorus had spoken into my dreaming ears. “Wait—what? A meander is a key? I thought it was piece of a river.”

“It is, but it’s also the Greek word for an ancient, endless shape—the Greek key or fret. Mathematically it’s a relatively simple structure of two connecting, single-turn spirals, one coming into the center and the other going back out, kind of like an outline of an ocean wave. But it’s usually shown squared off instead of rounded, so it looks a bit like the wards on an old-fashioned key. You see it all the time on Greek and Aztec art; I think the Hopi and Anasazi used it, too, but that’s off the point. You know the shape I’m talking about, right?”

I could see it in my mind, running down the hems of ancient clothing and along the edges of dishes at the Greek diner in Fremont, bordered in lines so the squared-off wave shape was contained. “Yes, I can see it.”

“All right. If you think of the outer lines of the shape as solid bars and the inner ones as elastic, then you can grab one of the bars and swing it around over the top of the other so the two bars are now resting back to back. The lines of the spiral elastics will describe the path and shape of a classical, round labyrinth with a circular center, just like the famous labyrinth at Knossos where the minotaur lived. So a key and a labyrinth are reflections of each other.”

A sudden flash of vision or memory made me step on the brake and bring the truck to a halt in a small flurry of dust. In front of me, formed in silver mist, I saw an image of my father’s strange key flexing and twisting in and out of the shape of a classical labyrinth. Then it flew apart into glittering shards that re-formed as a smaller version of the puzzle balls that shifted and rolled across an invisible surface, leaving strange trails of color on the mist of the Grey. “That’s a little freaky.”

Quinton couldn’t see it, so he continued on his own conversational course. “Not so much. It’s just math. But here’s an interesting detail most people leave out of the whole labyrinth myth: A Lady presided over the labyrinth at Knossos and she was viewed with such awe that she received the same tribute each year as all the other gods combined. She must have been a pretty powerful woman to be treated that way.”

I shook away the Grey’s persistent show. “Please don’t suggest that Dru Cristoffer might be an ancient goddess. . . .”

“I’m not thinking so, but . . . it’s an interesting idea and maybe that’s part of the reason for this crazy system of puzzles and keys. Maybe she used that model, scaled down.”

“So that makes my dad the minotaur?”

“That makes him the prisoner. The Labyrinth of Knossos was a prison for the Minotaur of Crete.”

“If I remember correctly,” I added, “Theseus slew the minotaur. . . .” Quinton gave me a long, sober look. “You didn’t think everyone was going to get out of this alive, did you?”

I snapped at him, feeling grief-stricken and unreasonably enraged at the thought, “Don’t say that!”

He sighed, closing his eyes a moment before he said anything more. “He’s already dead, and you can’t bring your dad back. He’s a ghost. Do you think he wants to stay? Given what you’ve told me, do you think that’s a good idea? The best thing you can do is let him—and that poor bastard you’ve got tucked into your pocket—go. Maybe that’s all it’ll take, though I doubt it. Between Cristoffer and the vampires, blood’s going to spill. If it comes down to saving a dead man or a live one, pick the one who’s breathing.”

I gaped at him. Not because he was upsetting me—that wasn’t his fault—but because the voices were talking, babbling in swift and rising harmony that shifted the silvery mist of the Grey like an immensely complex game of Tetris, dropping images and pieces of sound and magic into a glittering mosaic of information. My silent stare unnerved him and Quinton started to reach for me. I held my hand up to ward him off, quivering and drinking in the growing fractal vision. Then it jerked to a halt, frozen and dangling in the ghostlight, silent until it broke apart in a thousand chiming pieces that fell away into dust.

I gasped and tried to clutch the shards and hold them together, but they had no substance and only stung my hands like ice and melted away. Quinton lurched forward and caught me by the shoulders.

“What is it?”

“I . . . don’t know. I almost had it. . . . I almost knew something. . . .” I shook my head in frustration.

“Maybe you’ll know more when we get to the maze.”

“Maze?” For an instant I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“We’re heading for the maze in the labyrinth.”

“In the orchard,” I corrected, concentrating on calming my shaking and getting the Rover back in motion.

“No . . . I was getting to that. The classical labyrinth has a single long path that goes into the center and back out again. We use the word as if it’s a synonym for ‘maze’ but it’s really not. Mazes have multiple paths or multiple possible paths to the solution. But if the orchard is laid out in a spiral, then it may be the labyrinth and there’s something else at the center—another way out. Possibly another maze.”

“Then we’ll have to find out,” I answered, turning over the ignition. The Rover growled sullenly but started, and I drove on, looking for the lightning-struck trees that marked the path to Rosaceae and its labyrinth.