Labyrinth Gate

by Kate Elliott

  In the intersection, the light turned green.

  “Look at this one,” said Chryse.

  Half-light, dawn and dusk. At the gates to a walled town, a cloaked figure turns away from the lighted gates to follow instead a dim road that leads up into dimmer mountains. Hidden in the hills, the suggestion of a castle. On the back, a wolf.

  She handed him more cards. At least half were of a central figure, a person: a cross-legged woman levitating, a child dressed in rags, a naked archer, a man in chains. Others were of places, a temple of stones backed by a marshland, a fine, high hall backed by burgeoning fields; or of scenes—

  “A wedding feast,” said Chryse. “It’s got to be, the bride and the groom at the head table. Look, her dress is green.”

  Sanjay examined a card with a stone gateway. On its back the same gateway, but of living birch trees. “There’s something about these, almost like there’s another dimension underneath the flat drawing. I almost feel that if I could just see it from the right angle, I could step through it into somewhere else.” He shook his head and realized that a car was pulling up behind them, pausing, and then passing on through the intersection. He gave the card back to Chryse and started the car forward. “I don’t know,” he finished. “It’s probably my imagination.”

  “Do you think someone—there’s no signed card, of course. It must have gotten misplaced—did them ’specially for us? Who could it be?”

  “Especially for us? I don’t think so.”

  “Here’s a grim one. A woman in her nightshirt running through the forest. But what a forest! Snakes and bugs and horrible little faces—it’s a nightmare. But she can’t see any of it because she’s blindfolded and—yuck—she’s stepping on a snake.”

  “That’s nice. What’s on the back?”

  Chryse gave a little laugh. “A nightmare, of course. A black mare. I wonder how many there are—”

  She began to count. By the time they reached the hotel she had triple-checked: fifty-two. Sanjay maneuvered into the underground garage and found a parking space.

  “Well,” he said as the motor died. “We really did it.”

  She laughed. “You’re giving me that ‘now what’ look. What did we get married for, anyway?”

  “So you can support me in the style to which I should be accustomed, wasn’t it?”

  “And I thought it was to assuage your broken heart.”

  Watching her, he reflected that it was this quality as much as any other that made him love her: an ability to take both the failures and triumphs of life with a grain of salt, a quality that some might call light cynicism if they did not recognize that it sprang from a true and deep love of life. He shrugged. “After all,” he said, “if I have to give up my professional freedom in two weeks, I might as well give up my other freedoms as well.”

  “Oh, Sanjay.” Her voice took on the half-disgusted tone of one about to embark on long, familiar, and overused arguments. “You didn’t have to apply to the master’s program in architecture, and once you got in, you didn’t have to agree to go. You’re such a martyr to your parents’ wishes sometimes. And I hate to see you get so depressed about the prospect of three more years sitting in a classroom drawing suburban tract homes and urban office boxes when you really want to be hacking through the jungle with a machete uncovering some marvellous old city that you can draw.”

  “Don’t forget to mention the picturesque native inhabitants whose portraits may, as my father says, strike a chord of humanity in all of us, but won’t pay the rent.” His tone was uncharacteristically, if softly, caustic. “I have to make a living somehow.”

  Chryse laughed ruefully. “I don’t know. We’re making enough to live on from my job.”

  “You can’t work there forever. You know it’s not what you want to do—even what you should be doing. You’re the one who should be going back for a master’s, not me. You know you can get into the music school at the university.”

  “And do what? It’s no good getting a performance degree—there’s no future for me there.” She blew out her breath on one sharp gust. “What can I do with my music? I feel like that year we spent travelling around Britain as itinerant folk musicians was the apogee of my music career.”

  “Chryse,” he said with some exasperation. “You’ve been in music since you were a girl. I think you’re just afraid to make the real commitment to it now.”

  She made an impatient movement with one hand. “I don’t want to talk about it. What I should do is smash every camera in the world.”

  “What?”

  “Then you’d have a profession. Before cameras they needed professional illustrators for archaeological digs and geological sites and newspapers and magazines.”

  His hands were still on the steering wheel, the high lights of the garage shading their length in the kind of detail he might have drawn into a sketch of the scene. “Like Catherwood at the Mayan sites. All those beautiful ancient images coming into the light again.”

  “Listen to us.” She leaned across to kiss him on the cheek. “No wonder we got married—it was supposed to take our minds off our trivial problems for at least one night. I for one would like to get my dress off.”

  He smiled. “So would I—your dress, that is.”

  “Shall I leave your hat in the car?” she asked as they got out of the vehicle.

  “No! I want to wear it.” He took it from her. She rolled her eyes, and he laughed. “You’re right. I’ll just forget it in the hotel room.” He set it down on the passenger seat and shut and locked the door.

  Their footsteps echoed in the deserted cavern of the garage as they walked towards the corridor labeled Exit and Elevator. He had their coats and the hamper, looking almost like a Victorian gentleman on an outing. The overnight bag clashed culturally with her 18th-century gown. She held the bag awkwardly, out away from the stiff circle of her skirts. In her other hand she still held the cards and the pouch.

  “Why are you bringing those?” Sanjay asked as they went up a dim hallway and stopped by the elevator to the lobby.

  “I thought we’d lay them out on the bed, see what we’ve got.”

  He smiled. “Then I’ll tell your future. I think it starts with kissing the handsomest man in the room.”

  The elevator arrived, opening for them with a light chime.

  “They’re going to think we’re in a masquerade,” said Chryse as they entered the elevator. “Here, let me put your ‘Peace’ button in the suitcase before you forget you’re wearing it and leave it on the tuxedo.”

  As the doors shut, Sanjay set down the hamper and coats and took the suitcase from her. A shudder signaled the beginning of the elevator’s ascent. With a movement almost startling in its abruptness, he embraced her, this time letting one hand caress her intimately.

  Chryse gasped and started and laughed, and dropped the cards. They fluttered down around the couple, like the pattering of hard, slow rain, and as the embrace tightened, she let the last card, still caught in her hand, go as well, and gathered her husband closer to her.

  The card struck the floor with a light tick.

  The lights went out. Dead black, without a trace of light. A barely perceptible shuddering vibrated through the floor.

  For a little while there was only soft laughter and the rustling of cloth and half-heard whispering.

  “I’m dizzy,” said Chryse finally into the blackness.

  “I know,” said Sanjay; and before she could retort, “so am I.”

  Her petticoats rustled down around her. as she crouched and began to count, picking up cards.

  “… ten, eleven—Sanjay. Was the floor of this elevator wood?”

  He had crouched as well. “It is strange,” he said. “Here’s ten more. Let me see—”

  She had gotten to forty-three when with a snap a tiny flicker of flame wavered to life. It was hardly enough to illuminate more than a face on a card: an old woman’s face. Hooded and cloaked, she sat on a bench, or an old lo
g; behind her the gateway, sinister, yet inviting; a lamp stood, unlit, by her feet.

  “Henry and Margaret,” said Sanjay, reading from a white matchbook cover. “November 19. And to think I thought it was a silly custom.”

  “Forty-four,” said Chryse. The match snuffed out, followed by a snik and a new, brighter flare—two matches. “Five. Six. Seven. Over there—thanks. Eight and nine. Fifty.”

  The flame went out, catching her in darkness as she reached for the fiftieth card and slipped it with the others into the velvet pouch.

  “Chryse,” said Sanjay suddenly in an odd tone of voice.

  She looked up. He struck two more matches. Centered in the dim light was a brass door handle. He lifted the matches, tracing up from it, outlining, instead of an elevator door, an old, thick wooden door reinforced by heavy crossbeams. For the first time they realized that the slightest nimbus of light, the barest of diffuse glows, edged the door as well. And that a sound came from beyond, a low blending of voices in a kind of hymnal chorus, unfamiliar and eerie.

  The matches dimmed and died. For a long moment, drawn out in silence and in a force as strong as physical tension, they stared at each other through the darkness.

  “Do you ever get a feeling,” said Chryse in a faint voice, “that the ground beneath your feet has suddenly vanished, and you’re just waiting for the realization to hit you before you fall?”

  Sanjay knelt. “We’d better find those last two cards.”

  New matches revealed a floor of old wood, split and shrunk to reveal gaping cracks beneath which they could detect nothing at all.

  “Lift up your dress,” said Sanjay. Immediately the light found a card, the gateway, just before the match smouldered and failed. He tucked the card into his suit pocket and rose. “Just one. The other must have fallen through.”

  “Sanjay,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  He handed her her coat, put on his own, and picked up the hamper. She buttoned the pouch into the inside pocket of her coat and picked up the overnight bag. First they kissed; then he opened the door and stepped through.

  The light was inconstant enough that it took some moments to fully distinguish their surroundings, to separate wall and window, floor and furniture, into discrete parts. They stared: at a high, vaulted ceiling of carved wood; at patterned windows that lanced up into darkness; at a ring of candles standing in tall sconces that illuminated an altar of white stone, a large portrait of a serene woman who, seated on a throne, held a haloed child in her arms and, below the portrait, a stone effigy of a young man pinioned in death.

  Sanjay put out a hand blindly and gripped the nearest thing that came to hand. It proved to be a long wooden bench, first in a row of benches. “Now I’m falling,” he murmured.

  Chryse simply gaped. Her face had lost several shades of color.

  For a space there was only their breathing.

  “This is not—” began Sanjay finally. He broke off to turn back abruptly, and Chryse spun as well, as if fearing what might be behind her.

  There was nothing. No door—however impossible that was since they had moments before come through one. In the mellow glow of lantern light they could discern a mural, a painting of figures larger than life that stretched along the long wall, easing into shadow at its height.

  A woman and a man dressed in exotic, unfamiliar clothing handled, or constructed, a series of small, rectangular objects.

  “Sanjay.” Chryse’s voice died away into the vast stillness of the air. The chorus they had heard so faintly had vanished as utterly as the door. “Those are our cards—the same pictures on them—”

  He began to reply. Broke off at the sound of soft footsteps.

  From down the dim aisle between the benches came a silent figure holding a light. Sanjay put out a hand, found Chryse’s, and gripped it, hard. But the figure metamorphosed into an elderly woman clothed in a severe habit of unbecoming lines, like the clothing worn by members of religious orders.

  “It is a fine set of murals,” the woman said. The very ordinariness of her voice seemed somehow the greatest shock of all. “The only remaining sixteenth-century murals that can be conclusively traced to Master Van Wyck’s studio when he resided here during the reign of Queen Catherine the Eighth. The subject matter is perhaps a touch heathenish for a cathedral, but none of the bishops has had the heart to order them painted over with a more pious tale. And I have always maintained that one can gain moral instruction even from such legends as the fall of Pariam, for the princess Sais certainly did the honorable and Christian thing in offering to sacrifice herself to save the city, although the skeptical might opine that as she only did it out of her illicit love for her sister’s husband, who was the cause of the whole thing and ought to have given himself up for the death he was marked for—which I’m sure he would have done had he been a godly human and not of the unnatural blood of elvinkind—” She halted and lifted the lantern a little higher. “But perhaps there is some way I can help you. We don’t usually get visitors at such a late hour.”

  “We’re lost,” said Chryse without thinking. “And I’m beginning to think that we’re far more lost than we think we are.”

  “Ah.” A reassuring smile lit the woman’s features. “Spiritually or physically, I might ask.”

  “Both,” said Sanjay abruptly.

  Chryse began to speak, but thought better of it.

  The woman examined them a space longer, and at last lowered her lantern and moved away, gesturing at them to follow. “I fear it is beyond my powers to help you,” she said rather cryptically over her shoulder. “But I can show you to the door.” She led them down the aisle toward a large set of double doors at the far end of the cathedral.

  “But where are we?” asked Chryse as she and Sanjay followed helplessly in her wake.

  “In the church of St. Cristobal of the Gates, patroness of travellers. Of course.” She reached the end of the aisle and set a lined hand on the latch of a smaller door set into the right half of the great carved pair.

  “But—”

  The woman shook her head. “I am the keeper here, nothing more. You must find your own way.” Her tone was kind, but final. She lifted the latch.

  From beyond the door they could hear, muted, a rumbling roar of sound punctuated by an occasional penetrating human voice.

  “Fare you well.” The woman pushed the low door gently open. “And may Our Lady be with you.”

  “Thank you,” said Sanjay reflexively. He looked at Chryse, she at him; together they looked back into the gloom of the great church interior that lay behind them. What they wanted to know, what they needed to ask, seemed unknowable and unaskable in the face of the overwhelming strangeness of their surroundings and the implacable, if gentle, determination of their companion.

  “Thank you,” Sanjay repeated, as if it was the only phrase he could remember.

  Having at last accepted that she was not in fact dreaming, Chryse found herself too stunned to speak.

  The woman opened the door a little wider, and smiled once again.

  Chryse and Sanjay had no choice but to turn and walk outside.

  *A description of all cards in the “Gates” deck appears in the Appendix.

  Chapter 2:

  The Wanderer

  THEY CAME OUT ONTO snow. For an instant they could believe it was the parking garage corridor, the dirty white concrete, until they looked up and saw stars, cold and silent in the night sky. Buildings rose on either side, close and high. Where the snow had melted or been cleared away, cobblestones showed through.

  The noise came louder here, recognizable as a rabble of shouting and cries and the roar of humanity massed and agitated. Far down, at the end of the alleyway, torches flared and gathered and separated. In the flare of light shapes moved.

  A single, tenuous piece of light split off from some corner of the turmoil and began to grow as it approached them.

  Both of them stepped back instinctively towards the wall. S
anjay stopped so that he stood a little in front of Chryse. He put down the hamper.

  The light resolved into a smoky torch, carried by a small, cloaked, long-skirted figure.

  “Trouble, trouble,” it muttered in a voice dry as an old woman’s but somehow altered. “They’ll be callin’ out the troops ’fore long.”

  The figure halted abruptly, seeing Chryse and Sanjay. A hood shadowed her face. “Bless me, Mother,” she wheezed. “Nobs, ain’t you? Come down to Goblinside to get yer fortune told after a fancy-dress, I reckon. You chose the wrong night, lovies. You’d best be running back to St. Solly’s.”

  She shifted her torch to survey them. The smoky light fell for an instant on her face.

  Chryse gasped.

  The old woman turned and fled onward, up the alley.

  Sanjay reached back and gripped Chryse’s hand. Cold fingers entwined together.

  “Sanjay,” said Chryse in an unsteady voice. “She wasn’t human.”

  “Did she say Goblinside?” asked Sanjay in a voice no steadier.

  In that brief glimpse they had seen a face vaguely mouselike, but leathery and pouched and punctuated with two alert, inhuman eyes.

  “Maybe there was something in the champagne.” Her fingers tightened on his to the point of pain. “Let’s go back.”

  Sanjay turned, hesitating as he set his hand on the door latch, and then opened the door. In the inconstant flare of distant torchlight, they saw, not the vast interior of a great church, but an empty room no bigger than three meters square. Its dim, dusty corners flickered in and out of view in the unsteady illumination.

  Sanjay dropped the hamper abruptly and took three tense, angry steps into the middle of the tiny room. He swore, words Chryse did not recognize.

  “Maybe there’s a secret door,” she said quickly, but her voice shook. “There must be.” With her free hand she pounded a circuit all the way around the dark room, rattling old, decaying boards, even prying one loose, but it was obvious there was nothing beyond, except, perhaps, more tenement rooms as decrepit as this one.