Labyrinth g-5

by Kat Richardson

  “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.

  TWENTY-THREE

  It was so narrow and weed-choked that I almost missed it, but I found the road that turned up the hill and away from the railroad track. Once we were on the path, finding the remains of the house was easy. The road went up through a slight fold in the hillside, twisting north and east of the cemetery into what was clearly no-man’s-land until the trees appeared, like the fringe of a pale-green cloak on the shoulders of a giant. The track—it wasn’t really wide or clear enough to call a road—ran along the edge of the thickening grove of trees and then turned suddenly to the left to end in a ragged dirt oval bordered on the east side with trees and on the west with scrub that fell away before rising again to hide the house from the railroad and the cemetery. No one would find this place by accident unless they came down the hill on the northeast, and that was covered in neat, cultivated rows of apple trees above the stark ocher rifts of the miniature valley’s walls that cupped the Rose house in its weathered palm. A lane of trees came right to the edge of the oval and led str
aight back to a pile of fieldstone rubble and half-buried wood, charred and broken among the stones. I used the oval to turn the Rover, figuring it was better to be prepared if we had to leave in a hurry, and got out.

  The ground whispered under my boots like distant earthquakes. I found myself narrowing my eyes, suspicious and expecting trouble. The avenue of old pear trees—their blossoms whiter and more translucent than the apple’s—led directly to what had been the front steps. Now it was two broken marble slabs and a wasteland of ruin beyond the cracked front stoop. I stopped about halfway up the path and studied it. The approach was much too easy.

  Quinton paused beside me, stuffing the two puzzle balls into his backpack. “What?”

  “Something’s wrong. Cristoffer wouldn’t leave it this simple. Am I missing something? What do you see?”

  “I just see . . . trees. Just a mess of trees.”

  I huffed a strand of hair out of my face and crouched down, changing my viewpoint, and let my vision open to the Grey. But I didn’t slip in; if there was something there, I didn’t want to meet it just yet.

  In the silvery world of the Grey, the house rose in blocks with a round central turret like a finger pointing into the sky. The trees tossed their shaggy heads in a spectral wind and cast moving patches of colored light onto the fog-shrouded ground. The thick, vibrant feeder lines of the grid—the leylines and main trunks of magic—throbbed below the earth and arrowed for the back of the house. I couldn’t see where they were leading from here, but I would have guessed they converged at the center of the labyrinth of moving trees.

  Quinton had been right: It was a labyrinth. The apparently concentric rings of trees were strung with lines of light and mist, creating barriers that would confine and control whoever stepped into them, forcing them to wander a single, tortuous route until they reached the center. The ground was a sheet of silver marked with red, black, and white in scattered lines like runes or broken bones. I held Quinton back and inched forward, putting my hand against one of the barriers.