Masters of the Maze

by Avram Davidson

  One of his problems seemed to be a growing disorganization of his professional life. Whereas formerly his working day had consisted of five hours of utter togetherness between himself and his typewriter, broken only by occasional trips to the bathroom; followed by a few hours of proofing and correction, note-making regarding the next day’s work, and jotting down of notions for future articles; and at the stroke of five he covered his typewriter, tidied his desk, stacked the outgoing mail, and prepared to go down and celebrate the cocktail hour — but no longer.

  Habit or inertia was still strong enough to carry him through a few paragraphs beginning, “The drums of the drug-Crazed dervishes of Marakesh were getting pretty damned loud now as they approached the stinking hut where I was hidden in the harem of Ibn al-Idd with his half-naked houri, Farina — “ but after that things slowed down to a semicolon. Crocodiles continued to lay submerged with only their wicked little eyes showing above the water, and mass gang-bangs in the Sunda Seas never got past the “Tuan, tonight full moon, more better you and Men take boat and go quick” stage. He could tell the hawk from the handsaw now, and both were turning rusty … or something.

  After a few futile hours of this, he would arise now and make a cup of coffee or tea and ease his fundament and then sit down again, resolved to try good stuff. It is traditional to say that first novels are traditionally autobiographical — though tradition is silent concerning first novels in which the protagonist solves series of murders, which baffle the fuzz, or takes off in his patent spaceship for Proxima Centauri — so Nate dutifully considered novelizable elements in his own background. His paternal grandmother, he reflected, used to go away once a year for two weeks in Bermuda (whatever became of Bermuda?), and this event invariably produced in his mother, who had never been farther offshore than the Philadelphia ferryboat, symptoms of incipient hysteria; the result always being that Nate and his older brother Jerry were packed off to an aunt in Passaic, N.J., regarded by them as the boundary of the known world; and there they once saw a muskrat — or, at any rate a rat … What next? he asked himself, hunched over the mill. Sex, sexual initiation, supposedly either (a) squalid, or (b) glorious. Well. Actually, it had taken place next door on a well-made bed, and lasted about 35 seconds, Greenwich Meridian Time: “That wasn’t very zonky, was it?” the girl said. And, “I must remember not to believe everything I read … not on the floor, for Heaven’s sake! In the toilet!”

  Nate sighed.

  He had been in college and out of college, in the army and out of the army, now he was in love and even if he was to be out of love, still, it wouldn’t be the same. Peggy was, in this case, just the trigger, the catalyst. He fumbled in his files, came out with a little piece about the Chinese New Year’s Celebration in (of all places!) Chinatown. The paper dragons, he had realized, were actually paper lions, and were toted about by teen-aged boys who took turns and used a distinctive jerky sort of motion. He never found out what this was supposed to mean, but it seemed that a tradition carried on by kids and not old people was not likely to be dying off … There was more. It had a sort of nice, dry, observant feel to it. What was he going to do with it? He was still thinking in terms of market. This had no market, not as it was, not by N. Gordon, alias Pierce Taraval, Henry Dempsey, Jack Nydecker, Captain W. D. Lauterbach, etc. etc., and sic C. But it was sort of the thing he felt with increasing certainty that he would like to do — and do in Europe.

  And there he came to that again, like a passenger on a train forever returning to the same station. Once in Europe, he would be, so he was sure, liberated to write what he wanted. But the money to get to Europe could only be gotten by writing what he didn’t want — grammar or not. Almost, he thought, he could hold out long enough to raise the money, grind out the minimum number of articles — but not here. So, then, where? Not, certainly, even if he was sure where it currently was, at the home of his brother, Jerry, a cheerful tosspot who worked occasionally as a wool buyer. He’d never allow Nate to stay sober long enough. It was off season at all the beach resorts, but Nate would freeze to death at any place he could afford. No.

  • • •

  It had to be some place entirely different, some place not too far away, some place warmed or at least warmable, furnished — merely “furnishable” wouldn’t do — some place he could fit into with a minimum of effort and cost, allowing him to use all his nervous energy to accomplish for the last time the writing he still needed and had come to loath. And Darkglen seemed to fit the description to a nicety.

  Surprisingly, Jerry Gordon was still living at the same place and had still (or again) a connected telephone, and was home.

  “Jerry? Nate.”

  “Nate!” — great good cheer. “I haven’t got the money to lend you for an abortion, but, tell you what, I’ll marry the girl for you instead, how’s that?”

  “Thanks a lot, but wait till you’re asked. No, I called to ask you who Joseph Bellamy is? Didn’t you once — ”

  He paused until there should have ceased the still recognizable and once very familiar sound of Jerry standing on his head and whistling Dixie, while the change and keys and pens and pencils and combs fell out of his pocket. Jerry, a trifle breathless, came back on the blower. “How’s that, weanling? As long as I still can, I’m safe. Better than yoga and lots more fun than A.A. Jo-seph Bel-lamy. He isn’t dead, is — ? No, hey. Well, not that I wish him — He’s not a bad old futz, but an old futz is really what he is. He’s Aunt Mabel’s brother. Remember Aunt Mabel? Six miles of hair and long mauve dresses? Before your time, I guess. Uncle Charley’s wife, before they both went down on the Titanic or the Lusitania or was it a motorboat on Lake George.

  “Anyway, Joe Bellamy has or had or has had more money than God and he lives in a house, if that’s the precise word, cross between Penn Station and the Chateau Frontenac, designed by the Brothers Grimm, way the Hell off in the woods. And a couple of years ago he wrote me a letter like something out of one of those old English novels where they have girls and crusty old guardians, you know? Anyway, it was all a fake, no pussy whatsoever, and he gave out with a lot of mysterious hints or so it seemed to me, but meanwhile there was all this great brandy up from the cellar and so I got crocked. Naturally. And the next morning the manservant, or, to be precise, some local Kallikak that pushes the lawn reaper around with his six-fingered hands, he drove me down back to the station where I like to have froze my balls off waiting for the train; why?”

  Nate explained why, mentioned something of his present problems, collected his brother’s good wishes, declined to make the trip to Darkglen via Jerry’s apartment, and hung up.

  He understood what Jerry meant about the letter, if it was, as it probably was, anything like the one he’d gotten himself, it did seem faintly old English-novelish, with its references to “family connections, which, while not close, are perhaps not very distant,” to Mr. Bellamy’s interest in him “ — though not previously expressed,” the “healthy, country air” around Darkglen, “a house which some have found interesting … hunting … terrain said to be good for skiing … a quite large library …” and so on. City life tended to be rather dull and often unpleasant at this time of year. Since Mr. Nathaniel Gordon might, in view of his profession, be, to a certain extent, master of his time and movement, etc., etc….

  At any rate, Mr. Bellamy invited him to visit Darkglen for as long as he liked, with only the necessary warning that social life there was nil and that he might find the company of the master of Darkglen “neither exciting, nor, indeed, interesting.” But he need have no more of that company than he desired, for the guesthouse, “a cottage of ample but not ungainly” size would be gotten ready for his stay.

  Complicated instructions for reaching Darkglen by road and by railroad followed. If Nate came the latter route, Bellamy would arrange for transportation from the station; as for notifying him, the service for which General Telephone charged outrageous fees was outrageously bad; but a telegram “will almost inva
riably reach me, by one way or another, within two days …”

  “I do indeed hope that you will accept,” the letter concluded.

  It seemed just the ticket. Doubtless Joe Bellamy was an old futz, as Jerry Gordon had said; doubtless he would complain about everything from the government to the fact that his children (if he had any) never came to visit him; but what the hell. At least he had enough savvy to appreciate that a younger guest would not want to be with him most of the time, and listening to his complaints an hour or two a day would be worth the opportunity Darkglen offered. For opportunity it was! New surroundings! Civilized comforts! Free room and board! Solitude! Yes, it was a great opportunity. Nate could write his ten (or twenty, depending on the word-lengths) set pieces at his own pace, unbugged, unbothered — when reaction set in, a brisk hike or even a dead run through the countryside — then to work again. In the evenings, the novel, if not entirely rapturous, experience of dinner at a large old country mansion, followed by a browse in the library for a book to go to sleep on.

  In short, a stroke of luck, this letter was not to be passed up.

  It had been years since Nate rode on any but a very few — in fact, one or two — main route trains, and the deterioration of service on the smaller, branch lines was an unpleasant surprise. The trains grew dirtier and later and older with each successive change … and four changes were involved. However, regarding the journey as (a) a fun thing in itself, and (b) practice for tripping and touring in Ruritania and Graustark, he was able to regard the worsening and the waits with equanimity. If the train was too hot, he took off his jacket and if it was too cold he put it back on, also his overcoat. He regretted most of all that the filthy-dirty windows prevented his observing most of the scenery. The railroads might still have to carry passengers, but they didn’t have to let them look out at their own country. As for making available food and drink (except sometimes a trickle of dirty water), ha ha.

  The final train was, as a baggage-smasher at the transfer point predicted, “some late.” It was also the oldest, dirtiest, smelliest, most rust-eaten one of all. But it was the only game in town, so N. Gordon boarded it, and, after a gloomy, chilly, jerky ride, was let off at a goat shed in the snow-covered foothills. Fortunately, he was awaited.

  “You, Mr. Jordan? I’m Ozzie Heid, work for Mr. Bellamy, let’s get in the car. Lordy, it’s cold out here, gimme your grip: there.”

  The warmth of the automobile was worth a mispronunciation, Nate thought; though the car seemed almost as old and worn and untidy as the railroad coach, it seemed somehow infinitely less nasty. The upthrusting springs of the front seat were covered well enough with old blankets and sheepskins; in the back, jammed with groceries and a pair of snowshoes and a shotgun, an old red setter bitch helped a pile of winter apples to mature.

  “Long time since I picked up any visitor there at Fishokan,” Ozzie said, wiping the inside of the windshield. “Man from the bank, doctor, and repairmen and such, they come by car. Fellow of your name and about your general type appearance, picked him up at the depot a few years ago, he wasn’t feeling no pain, like they say, stood on his head and whistled Dixie, nice sparkly young fellow, didn’t stay long, though, mmmm, well …”

  Ozzie’s face resembled one of those bas-relief maps which children are sometimes encouraged to make out of papier-mâché or plaster or whatever it is, and then color, instead of being taught to read and write and cypher, the little bastards; there were ranges and ridges and riverine systems and coastlines and valleys, in a surprising variety of colors — red, white, orange, yellow, purple. It seemed rather unfair to describe him as a Kallikak and he had only five fingers on each hand.

  “That’s Nokomas,” he said, by and by, as they passed through a cluster of old-looking houses dotted with new-looking gas stations and a lunch-wagon; “that’s where we live, the people that work for Mr. Bellamy, used to be Nokomas Mills, first woolen mills in this here entire part of the state, used water power, but that’s all been done away with now, oh, years and years ago. Next place we hit, Fisher’s Crossings, nothing but the roadhouse there and that’s closed this time of year, and the old Fisher house, after that, why, just woods and hills till we get to Darkglen. Ought to make it just about at dark, too. More or less I just unload you and pick up Glory, that’s Mrs. Smith, turn around and drive back to home. Only body else that works there this time o’ year, that’s Keren, she drives her own Buick.”

  “Drives it where?”

  “Why, back to Nokomas, too — there, see there, that’s where my boy and me cut most our wood for this winter, I burn wood, that’s what I burn, wood. Takes us a lot of time to cut enough cords, I can tell you, there’s people who laugh at us, got an oil burner, a person I could name, ‘All I do is switch a button,’ he says. Yes, and come one good storm, down go the wires, down goes the electricity, his oil tank might just be a puddle of piss for all the good it does him, but I just go out and get another armful of wood; here we turn off the county road, lie down, Beauty, lie down…. Smells something in the woods, dog has a nose that you wouldn’t believe, she used to cut up something wonderful at the big house from time to time, seems to get terrible excited and then scared half to death, so I don’t bring her no more, except for just a short trip like now.”

  Second-growth timber began to give way to thicker stands of higher, older trees, and the land commenced rising more steeply. It had been weeks since it had snowed in New York City, and that fall had long since been churned into a greasy black muck and washed away by rains. But here it still lay “white and smooth and even” — or, Nate mused, was it “white and crisp and even?”

  The question was perhaps not so much why there were no more such houses as Darkglen but why there ever had been. They really had no natural source in the United States at all. A case might be made for possible origins in the southern “plantations” or the relatively fewer “manors” of the Hudson Valley patroonships, but it could be a case only for the sake of argument. No — the American country mansion did not descend from anything, but neither was it original. It was imitative, artificial, conspicuous construction, neither useful nor ornamental, and often not even picturesquely ugly. No owner of Darkglen or any of its fellows had ever cultivated his fields for sustenance or even profit. It was one of the examples of giganticism which so often herald the coming extinction of a species, a great prostrate dinosaur of a house, sprawled in the glade which had given it its name, neo-Tudor out of mock-Gothic, with outbuildings wallowing about it like whale calves.

  “There she be,” said Ozzie Heid. Nate interrupted his socio-philosophizing to catch back at something Ozzie had answered earlier.

  “You and Mrs. Smith drive back to Nokomas and so does Mrs. — you mean, nobody stays here overnight but Mr. Bellamy?”

  Ozzie braked to a stop beside a smaller phenotype of the big house. “That’s right, but we’ve got the guest place all fixed up for you, it’s nice and warm there.”

  It was, indeed, even though it smelled of recent cleaning and of having been long closed up. The furniture was dark and heavy and the lamp shades had art nouveau designs in colored glass, the bathroom sink was marble — but it produced hot water. Nate unpacked, looked around some more while the long tub filled, and then took a long, slow bath. After that he remembered his mother’s warning about the danger of exposing himself to the cold air after a hot soak (“Your pores are open!”) and, bundling up warmly, he went off to see for the first time the master of Darkglen.

  • • •

  Certainly he had never met anyone exactly like him before.

  The difference lay in small things — he used a cocktail shaker — he had the dry, rather quiet, rather sexless look of an old, male librarian — the alert air of a hunter in the season of his chosen game — he quoted Paracelsus — his manner was old-fashioned, courteous, decisive — his skin seemed to show an inner unhealth as well as an outer pallor — and so on and on.

  “You are fortunate in your profession,”
Mr. Bellamy said, as they drank their cocktails. “For one thing, it indicates … and I suppose it must tend to cultivate … the possession of inner resources, thus leaving you less dependent on the outer world for stimulus.”

  Nate said, “I hadn’t thought about it that way.” He at once began to think of it in that way, and this brought him back, of course, to the problems he had brought along with him.

  “But it can happen … it has been known to happen … that a certain attention away from the outer world has brought forth an outward-turning which proves in the long run much richer.”

  Nate made a brief attempt to grapple with this statement, which his host had made rather intently, even leaning forward a bit; but it only made him think of monasteries, and this in turn made him wonder if he ought to visit any monasteries on his European trip … Mount Athos seemed always good for an article … if he ever got to make a European trip … perhaps he might do a piece out here … hmmm … Buddhist monasteries … evil Buddhist monks, the public might go for that just at the moment: Evil Buddhist Monks Tried to Burn Me Alive, It all began one mad, marijuana-merry night in a Zen “coffeehouse” in —

  “ — I don’t know that the concepts of duty and of self-gratification are incompatible,” Joseph Bellamy was saying, surveying the heavy glass held in his hand, “and — ”

  “ — I don’t, either,” Nate replied, to the surprise of both.