The spinning zap had vanished.
I looked down into my palm, at my snail's curling shell, but now, when I tried to follow that inwardly curving spiral, my eyes got lost in The Maze's beckoning edge. And my snail felt warm. It wiggled its little eyestalks at me. In bewilderment?
My portal was bound.
I lay in the grass, too relieved to stand. I held my hand curled near my chest, keeping my life rare hidden and safe, while around me, he shouted at them in annoyance. "Did I tell you to stop? Get your crew back to the south side! Get out of the way! Yes, I still want it done! And this time, don't you move forward a goddamn inch until I say go."
My father squatted in the grass in front of me. "Do I have to call the police?"
I closed my eyes. "No," I murmured. "I'm done here."
"That's for goddamn sure." He gripped my arm, cruelly. "Do you have any idea what I had to miss this morning, just so I could stand out here and make sure you didn't try anything stupid at the last minute? What is it with you? Really, Ramshead?"
"Nothing." I pushed myself up into sitting with my free hand. "I'm fine now. I'll go."
"And what have you got there?"
Slowly, I raised my head. I pulled my hand closer to my chest.
"I asked you a question!" He grabbed my elbow and yanked. "Jesus Christ. You aren't still trying to pull that endangered-snail bullshit, are you?"
"No." I jerked back.
"You are !"
I roared. I rolled over and cu an unusual number of shouldor television—rled into a ball, holding my snail close to my chest. He roared back and threw himself on top of me. "You stubborn son of a bitch!"
He grabbed my wrist and, like an animal, bit into it.
I yelled. My hand jerked. His fingers slid into mine like a knife blade, and he pried apart my grip and plucked my snail from my grasp. "No, Dad!"
He scrambled back from me and stood. With a sneer of disgust, he threw the snail onto the grass, then ground its secret shell into oblivion with the heel of his John Lobb Oxford.
Finis.
The bound strings ripped. The portal began to disperse, but so close to its former home, it just snapped back into place and restabilized. And the ambient zap once again charged the air.
And beneath it, the chainsaws waited, all over again.
"Okay," said my father coldly, wiping his heel on the grass. " Now you're done here."
Inside me, something much more terrible than magnetism began to rise.
"Well?" he demanded. "Get up. And for Christ's sake, go take a shower before anyone sees you. What have you been doing all night? Wallowing in a pigpen? You look like shit."
Higher.
"And on second thought, I think I will call the police. If I ever see you on my property again, I swear to God I'm going to have you arrested. I have had it with your selfish, manipulative crap. Enough is enough."
Higher.
"Do you think I'm kidding? Look at me. Do you think I'm kidding? Do I look like a man making a joke?"
I stood.
"Well?"
I said, "Duck."
"And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
I punched him in the face.
His head snapped back. His eyes widened and a hand flew to his nose. The other flailed uselessly for balance before he tumbled backward onto the grass.
Then I jumped on top of him and went for his eyes.
I fought with zap. I spun it into the first, the second, the third degree of visible, arching and sizzling, inflicting damage on what should have been his soul. I went for his confidence and faith, mangling them. That is, I meant to.
But when he fought back, he used zap, too.
We tried to maul each other. Ripping, tearing, shredding, destroying, breaking and pounding and bleeding. Hair. Teeth. Skin. But when we reached each other, fingers slid uselessly over flesh and clothing, rarely landing a real blow. The protective properties of zap. How did he know? How did he know?
We rolled into the opening of the hedge maze.
I was half-blinded in one eye. I tasted blood. Something in my foot hurt. I didn't know where I was, couldn't even pay attention to where I was, because I was too busy—no, not even trying to shield myself anymore—but trying to murder him.
Above us, the single sun smeared into an uncertain polynomial of light.
He spat blood. He favored his left fist. His jacket was shreds of useless fabric. I went for his eyes again, he went for mine, and I snapped at deadly fingers and clawed his face, my assaults deflected with zap's oily smoothness.
We rolled over something that purred.
He tried to smother me with his body, to lock me up in his limbs and rip off the flesh from my face and neck with his teeth, but I was too strong. I wriggled away, over mud, then over something hollow that rang out like a xylophone.
I was getting weaker. So was he. My gouges got clumsy; his punches, weak. He tried to pull my hair, and it slipped through his fumbling fingers. The zap around us thinned and cooled.
Somewhere, I heard children singing.
I took a swing at his face. He was too exhausted to block, and I was too exhausted to hit. My loose fist bounced uselessly off a shoulder.
We collapsed onto a bed of moss.
I breathed, my body throbbing and on fire. Above our heads, The Maze breathed too, sculpting a roiling canopy of branches, vines, flowers, fruits, and birds, melting into each other as fast as they separated into anything distinct. A frantic kale for hundreds of years. cikhe innkeeperb bidoscope of light and shadow played over our bed of moss as the canopy danced. At our sides, the jungle behaved the same, as the trunks of the trees mingled with the sudden hides of elephants.
The moss beneath us did not shift. One of us had screwed it in place, and it wasn't me.
"You son of a bitch," he rasped.
I realized that we were entangled, like shoelaces tied by a frustrated child.
"You son of a bitch," he rasped again. "How long have you been hiding this?"
"Hiding what?"
He made a sound of pain. "This." He tried to gesture around himself. "Why didn't you tell me you knew?"
"I— what ?"
"Why do you never answer any of my goddamn questions!"
"You knew about this place?" I panted. "You knew ?"
"I knew." He tried to move and moaned. "Get off of me."
I rolled away, onto my back, wincing. He pulled himself up into sitting, his back against a large and unshifting rock. His expression creased in pain. "I knew."
"Jesus."
"Of course I knew."
"How could you?"
"I'm sorry."
"How could you?"
"I didn't know you'd been here."
"How does that change anything?"
My father looked down at me. Somehow, he seemed more human, exhausted and beaten like this. He raised a trembling hand to his mouth and wiped away some blood with the cuff of his shirt. "I've never been in here. Do you know that?"
I stared back at him.
"I never actually went inside," he said. "She just taught me some things when we stood close—how to defend myself, mostly, in case anything unwelcome came out. The closest I ever came was standing in the entrance, when she—"
"Who?"
His head dropped forward. Exhaustion or defeat? He didn't answer me.
"Dad. Who?"
He shook his head.
I closed my eyes. We let the silence stretch. As The Maze resettled itself, its sounds overlapped and mingled too: birdsong, wind in leaves, children singing, water chuckling over stones; lions roaring, monkeys chattering.
"Listen," he said. His voice was thin. "I didn't know. What do you do in here?"
"What?"
"Damn you, Ramshead—"
"I work."
"You work?"
"I'm on a Trail Crew. I help maintain things. I make everything behave how it's supposed to... it's complicated."
"Have you seen her?"
"
Who?"
Silence again.
He asked, "What is this place?"
"You don't know?"
"No."
I spat out some blood. "It's the place between worlds."
He closed his eyes. "So she could be anywhere."
I didn't bother asking again. He said nothing else. I made my painful, laborious way to the big rock, pulling myself along, and then up into sitting beside him.
He coughed. "What else do you know about this place? What can you tell me?"
"Why do you want to know?"
He rolled his head over the surface of the rock to look at me. "Because I'm finally ready to know."
"But—what do you know?"
"Let's start with you, okay?"
"Let's not. 'Finally ready to know'? What are you hiding?"
"Ramshead." His eyes closed, in pain. Physical or emotional? "This is hard enough as it is. Okay?"
"This is my place. You understand me?" I raised a hand, weakly, to gesture at the swallowed path we'd used to come here. "That place back there? That world? Where you already have everything? That's yours. You can choke on it. You can live in it and die in it. I stopped caring about it a long time ago.
"This place is mine. In a sense you can never understand. And if you try to destroy my one way into it—and everyone else's way into Earth—I will kill you."
The pain on his face sharpened. "I can see that," he said. "But even though it's yours now, it was your mother's, first."
The second of my shock stretched into ten. "Wait."
"Your mother's," he repeated.
"No. Oh no. You—"
"Shut up for hundreds of years. cikhe innkeeperb b." He tried to resettle himself and winced again. "You never listen to me. You know that? What have I been saying all this time, about letting go and moving on? What exactly do you think I'm trying to do here, for myself, by doing this? Do you think I'd plow a link to a place like this under if I really knew exactly what it was? What do you take me for?
"No, don't answer that. I know exactly what you take me for.
"You know what the sum total of my knowledge is about this place? Only one thing: this is where your mother came from. And she didn't even tell me that until later. At first, I just thought she was a tourist, lost in my backyard somehow.
"You know the rest. I could never tie her down. She told me she liked California, but she still came and went, and was never around much. And the last time she went, she just never came back.
"And I'm ready to give up hoping she ever will."
I didn't know what to say.
"Do you think this is easy? Do you think it's easy knowing that something from beyond this Earth, and probably better than this Earth, once thought you and the children you shared were worthy of attention, and then changed her mind?"
Okay—now I really didn't know what to say.
"I know you hate me. Okay? I know all of you hate me. And believe it or not, I don't blame you. I'm trying my damndest to give each of you the world and a strong role in it, but for her, a place in this world wasn't enough either. Okay?
"Okay?"
I didn't know how he expected me to digest all of this so fast. But maybe it wasn't about digestion—just acknowledgment—so I said, "Okay."
He nodded.
We listened to The Maze a while longer: chirps and song, rumbles and laughter. Twigs breaking. Distantly, the beat of drums. Above our heads, the branches entwined, melted, and separated again, in a reiterative, never-ending net, needing each other to exist.
"Okay," I finally said. "I'll tell you everything I know."
WE STEPPED OUT of The Maze almost three hours later, limping and holding onto each other. Most of the workers were still there, waiting, looking bored and pissed off in turns, their chainsaws silent in the grass. My father had a short talk with the foreman, and twenty minutes later, the bulldozers and trucks were rumbling away up the service road.
"Should we go to a hospital?" I asked him.
"Probably. If you looked like shit earlier, you look like reheated shit now."
In the aftermath of this, as one might expect, things changed. In a way, it was more terrifying than before. Then, I knew what to expect, but now the pattern had been broken and there were no maps.
I suppose it began in The Maze, with my father's unusually quiet attention, but became truly noticeable in the hospital. Instead of phoning Juan from his room, my father read a number of newspapers and took no calls. And over the next few weeks I got a trickle of further reports from Alan. Our father was quieter at the office, too. His violent temper had not changed, but now he'd only stare at the offender and say, "I have no time for you," before turning away.
Alan broke his own pattern. Instead of determinedly living as my father's desperate, bitter echo, he began to drift from his designated life. Perhaps because he saw something different in our father's silence than I did—something forgiving, or at least tolerant. I saw Alan at the house more often on weekends. A couple of times, I saw him head out with a shy smile on a Saturday night, to try moving in the exotic world he'd always been so jealous of me for being told to inhabit.
Hanna's pattern was something I had never fully understood, so perhaps it changed and perhaps it didn't. However, I did see her at the house again, often grinning and whispering things in the male staff's ears.
A few times, I saw Alan and Hanna actually talking.
A few other times, I saw Hanna and my father actually talking. "For God's sake, cover yourself wondered what acb the womanb b—you're supposed to be elegant," he'd said, but at least they were speaking again.
And me?
I broke my own silence. Once home, I recounted my three-hour-long talk in The Maze to Hanna, which spawned more talks in turn. I talked with Alan, too, although these conversations were far more painful. I suspected that his childhood, year-long nightmare of the hedge maze eating everyone was a distorted memory of our mother's final exit, and easing that pain would take more than just words.
I tried to talk about The Maze again with my father, but it was not successful. I still wanted to feel some kind of cathartic honesty. I still couldn't bring myself there. All the final things I had to say could only be said within an entirely new pattern, one which neither of us yet knew how to move in.
We did agree, however, that for the sake of convenience and his peace of mind, the portal ought to be moved.
So, I hired a landscaping company to build a hedge maze in my own backyard. I drew up no blueprints, and told the foreman to design it himself. When it was ready, I had Hanna's source bring me one Morro Shoulderband Snail, and I bound the old portal. In my backyard, by the new hedge maze's entrance—the place beneath the white-leaved silver maple—I released the corners of the net, and unbound the strings.
A WEEK AFTER I transplanted the portal, Hanna came over.
"Ready, Rammykins?" she asked.
We stood in my backyard. Around us, the day was sunny and warm. I heard Javier and his friends in the side yard, playing Frisbee, though from where we were, I couldn't see them. Above Hanna and me, the boughs of the silver maple drank in the sun, the snowy leaves somehow photosynthesizing anyway with the aid of the ambient zap.
Before us, the opening to my hedge maze receded into shifting infinity.
Hanna cleared her throat. "Do they have cigarettes there?"
"Sort of."
She peered into the portal. "What are they like?"
"You'll be fine."
"Daddy's right—you really don't like to answer questions, do you?"
I shook my head in dismissal. Hanna pulled out her wallet and flipped it open to our mother's picture, as if she hadn't memorized her face by now. "Well, we'll find some cigarettes somewhere. It'll be a heck of a lot easier than finding her, anyway."
"It was your idea."
"I'm not saying it's a dumb idea. It'll just be hard."
"No doubt. She probably won't even be in her human form."
Hann
a's expression turned uncomfortable. She put away her wallet. "And on that creepy note...."
I smiled. "I'm ready. We better go before I attract too much zap anyway."
"Wait!"
We turned. Alan, wearing beat-up Levi's, work boots, and a man's work shirt—more or less the same outfit Hanna and I wore—came huffing over the wide lawn, his backpack flopping up and down with his clumsy strides.
"Wait." He stumbled to a stop near us, then leaned over and placed his palms on his knees as he gasped, "Wait. A second. Okay?"
Hanna smiled at him, almost shyly. "Al'ligator. I thought you didn't want to come."
"Changed. My mind."
Her smile widened. "Rammy says it's kinda rough in there. You sure you don't want to just join a gym instead?"
He freed a hand to give her the finger.
I pretended I hadn't seen this, and resettled my familiar slouch hat (Yuri: "It's a cowboy hat, right? And you're a hero in space, right?") on my head. "Al, don't listen to her. She's going to spend the whole time asking if there are any cigarettes."
"Will not."
Alan straightened, still breathing hard. "Forget it. Let's just go."
I nodded.
"What do we do?" he asked.
I glanced between them, then turned to face the way home. I extended my hands. "Each of you, take a hand. Close your eyes and run with me. I'll pull you through this first time."
I felt them glance at each other behind my back, but they took their positions, Alan on m for hundreds of years. cikhe innkeeperb by right, Hanna on my left. I took their hands: broad and sweaty, slender and fine.
We closed our eyes. I led them forward, and together we turned side.
* * *
The Way It Works Out and All
By Peter S. Beagle | 6665 words
To raise money for a local Bay Area bookstore, Peter S. Beagle augmented 393 copies of the original 1969 hardcover edition of Avram Davidson's The Phoenix and the Mirror with a special story featuring his old friend Avram as the main character. This printing (quite appropriately done on twenty-six unique postcards) was extremely limited, and everyone involved thought the story deserved a bigger audience.
Avram Davidson edited this magazine from April 1962 through November 1964, leaving a personal mark on it that still resonates decades later. Those of you who knew him will probably find this story true to his memory. You readers who never had the pleasure of dealing with him should know that he both had character and was a character.
F&SF July/August 2011 Page 17