Masters of the Maze

by Avram Davidson

  There, in the little plastic vial, were the tablets.

  There, in the wall behind, was the signal.

  He did not know which to do first. Perhaps he might manage to do both together.

  Perhaps …

  • • •

  The sound, so faint and strange, at first made Nate Gordon think of sleigh bells. He paused, his pants half off, drew them on again, lit the lamp, went to the window, rubbed away the mist or frost, and peered out, holding his hand against the reflected light. But no cheery, picturesque Christmas-card scene of Pickwick types in a one-horse open cutter met his eyes. Nothing met his eyes except the frozen ground and, up and ahead, a light gleaming in the black hulk of Darkglen House. The sound ceased, began again, ended abruptly.

  Nate pulled on the huge old bathrobe which had been provided him and went to the door. The wind blew chill in his face, but no one was there; as he looked about, shivering, he saw that there was no doorbell — just a knocker. He closed the door and considered. If the noise had not come from outside, then, it must have come from inside (unless someone was overhead in a balloon, ringing a hand bell). It had seemed like a bell. His glance went up — Sure enough. There, high up, was an old-fashioned electric bell-clapper. Even as he looked at it, a long loop of dusty matter detached itself and dropped silently to the floor. This, evidently, had muffled the sound and made it seem so curious and distant.

  There was only one place the bell could have been rung, and that was in the main house; and it could mean only that he was for some reason wanted there. Nate dressed again, muffled and bundled himself up, took a quick shot from the bonded bottle, and trudged into the night.

  It took several minutes of, first knocking, then pounding, then calling, at the side door he’d left by to convince him that no one was going to come and let him in. He deliberated a moment. The cold was numbing, and he wanted to return to his cottage. But then the bell might ring again, and — Besides, it was possible that something was wrong. The old man might have fallen and broken a bone or something. Nate shrugged and shivered and started trudging around the outside of the house, looking for another way in. Salt crystals crunched underfoot. Better that than snow to flounder in. The windows of the house were too high up for him to reach, and the basement windows were all shut tight. The house had many doors, as was to be expected.

  What was not to be expected was that one of them, low down and opening upon a set of sunken steps, should be wide open; or that upon the lowest step should be an incongruous wad of steel wool.

  Nate had lived long enough in Manhattan to recognize this, jimmy-marks and the other signs of burglary. It was, he realized, extremely unlikely, however, that here in the wilderness, miles and miles from bloody woof-woof, a Manhattan-type burglar had jimmied open the door of Darkglen House in hopes of snatching up a radio or a typewriter or a record player to convert into quick fix-money.

  And a country-house break-in implied a much bigger job … and it implied, too, more than one man.

  Swiftly, he considered. Loop around and look for the car they must have come in and drive it away for help? No: the car might be parked a mile away and have someone waiting in it. Get upstairs as quickly as he could? For one thing, he had no light, he could spend forever groping in the basement looking for the stairs. Perhaps the best thing was to get back to the guest cottage and have the operator get the nearest police (state, probably) on the phone, and then ask them what to do while he was waiting.

  Half irresolute, he turned to go, turned back, the door blew open a little bit more than it had been; and on the ground, just before it swung back to where it had been, he saw a pale little patch just about the size of a book of matches. He stooped, groped, found it. That was what it was.

  Common sense told him never to mind the matches but go on and carry out his program of calling for help. Slowly, Nate shut the door behind him and, not so much ignoring common sense as allowing it to wait a bit, he stood with his back against the door and struck a match. As far as he could see, advancing cautiously in the accompanying circle of scant, pale light, the floor was clean and bare of obstacles. The flame came close to his fingers. He blew it out, and listened and lit another. It seemed to him that he could hear faint noises above. He lit another match, and went on ahead.

  Someone — Ozzie Heid, probably — had thoughtfully left a flashlight looped with a piece of cord hanging from a nail at the foot of the stairs. It was old and battered and bound with black tape, and its beam was feeble. But it served. Nate passed through the large kitchen still faintly warm and faintly smelling of the last meal cooked, passed through several large pantries and anterooms. Massy old pieces of furniture filled with china and cutlery and linen and glass enough to serve, probably, the entire population of Nokomas at a sit-down supper, lined the walls. And ahead, at last, he recognized the huge double-doors which opened onto the great living room. He turned off the flashlight.

  Faint light spilled out somewhere ahead. Nate waited for his eyes to adjust. It didn’t take long. And so he came, finally, to the room where Joseph Bellamy lay, his grey face to the side, one palm pressing the rug, the other hidden from view somewhere beneath his chest.

  There was no doubt in Nate’s mind that the man was dead.

  He looked around for the telephone. The room was in disorder. He saw the phone, but, before going for it, he quickly — as silently as he could — closed the door and turned both lock and night-latch. Then he picked up the phone and dialed 0. The thought occurred to him that he owed it to the man on the floor, his host and not-quite kinsman, to try artificial respiration. He knelt, taking the phone down with him; turned Bellamy on his back and looked once, quickly, into the intent and puzzled face. Then he pinched shut the cool flesh of the nostrils, covered the dry lips with his mouth, and breathed in. He released his fingers and listened to the whisper of the twice-used air, closed the escape and breathed in again.

  He did this for some time, without observing the slightest effect.

  And then he realized that the telephone signal had been droning on without once having been interrupted by the voice of the operator. He filled the lungs once more, but held the nostrils shut a second more than usual as, with his other hand he broke the telephone connection by pressing the stud; then he dialed 0 again. He resumed the mouth-breathing efforts. After a long while the buzz of the signal suddenly ceased. He grabbed for the phone and got hold of it just in time to hear the silence conclude and the signal’s drone commence again.

  Dizzy from his efforts, his pulse drumming heavily, he let the phone slip, slipped himself, and fell across the body. He heard a sound of surprise, too low to be an exclamation. A wild hope and excitement flew up in him, he glanced quickly at Bellamy’s face … but it had begun to go loose and flaccid and it was more than ever the clay-gray face of a corpse …

  There was no other sound he was aware of hearing, but he twisted his head around and up, so quickly it was painful, and he saw, standing in a doorway, a man who was perfectly strange to him: a young man perhaps a few years his senior, with a dark, outraged, astonished face.

  For a few seconds they thrust stares at each other. Then, “I guard. I serve. I seek,” said the other man. He seemed to say it unwillingly, dubiously and threateningly, somehow in the manner of a dog circling around and uncertain if it will be friend or foe.

  Nate Gordon said, “What in the hell — ”

  The dark young man’s face turned darker yet. He took a step forward, pointed a finger, stopped, clenched his fist, breathed noisily. Nate started to scramble up, the other man’s head sunk, he crouched. Then, face twisting, he turned and ran back behind the door he stood in. His footsteps suddenly ceased. Nate ran after him. There was a thud. And there was no one in the room when Nate got there. No one in the room without windows, the room with no doors except the door he now stood in.

  Someone else, perhaps, might have retreated — not necessarily out of cowardice, but out of helplessness. But Nate Gordon had not o
nly read much cheap fiction, seen so many cheap movies and TV shows, he had himself written so much of it that he could no more stop doing what he now proceeded to do than he could have stopped breathing. He began to rap the paneled walls of this inner room from as high as he could reach right down to the floor. Nothing sounded hollow: this was not part of the script, the necessary, logically following sequence of mart-events: but then almost at once something happened which was: Nate, stooping low and rapping near the floor, noticed a faint line of discoloration on the rug as it met the wall. Neither voice nor instinct that he could think of, but a vigorous imagination responding to the pressures of this new familiar situation, directed his next action.

  He slid his fingers, knuckle-sides down, back along the rug … the tips of them did pass under the paneling … he levered and jerked … the paneling slid up …

  The wall behind was solid.

  Or —

  Was it?

  Perhaps the thing was just a trick of the lights, perhaps he was still dizzy, but — He came up closer to it and it seemed to quiver and recede, folding in upon itself in the manner of an optical illusion; and then it was gone. Beneath his feet Nate Gordon still felt the rug and the chill air of that windowless inner room in Darkglen House, but before and all around his face he saw —

  But, did he see?

  Once, before he had perfected his infallible sub-literary formula, Nate had written an article for an occult magazine on the subject of “eyeless sight,” that singular but often-attested phenomenon “whereby the faculty of vision is situated elsewhere than in the retina of the eye.” It did not come to him, therefore, as a complete surprise — merely as surprise enough to raise his short hairs and, seemingly, liquefy his heart — for him to realize he “saw” nothing while his eyes were open and that the moment he closed them he “saw” with what was apparently the entire epidermal surface of his face …

  • • •

  What he “saw” in that astonishing millisecond of a blink was too infinitely unfamiliar to register upon his unprepared mind. Shock. Blink. Shock. Blink. He screwed his eyes tight shut and turned his head, blazing with strange new vision, from side to side. And it was then he saw something immediately recognizable, but in its own way equally frightening: the stranger of only a moment ago, “staring” at him with the man’s own eyes tight shut, and a short and ugly rifle in his hands. The weapon came up and out, Nate’s mind said, quicker, probably, than it had ever said anything, He can’t sight that, so he’ll fire from hand level; and the thought was not complete when Nate saw again in his old sight the outer surface of the wall — and fell over backward from the sudden motion with which he had pulled in his head.

  Aware, in some separate compartment of his confused mind that no bullet had followed him, wondering — in that same little mind-niche — if this was because nothing could pass through from there to here or if the rifle had not been fired after all, Nate righted himself and came forward on his hands and knees as if prepared to butt at the false wall (all an illusion, someone assured him, calmly, in another mind-niche; not even a trick mirror, over-oxygenized or -nitro-genized, rapture of the depths from breathing too much plus the shock of breathing into a dead man’s lungs: you’ll come to in a minute) and thrust his head into and through it and saw —

  — saw the figure of his sudden and unknown enemy, vanishing backward as though falling down a vertical well, spinning and dwindling and (here the well simile ceasing) darting off at angles and then — oh, small end of the telescope indeed! — though shrunken, but still well within the range of “vision,” he seemingly turned to the right and ran upside down at an angle of about eighteen degrees and vanished.

  Nate stared a long while but there was no reappearance. He withdrew his head. Whatever was there (wherever there was!) was going to have to wait. Death, try at resuscitation, something very close to attempted murder, and then … That. A place which defied or ignored the laws of solids, optics, gravity, and who knew what else. It was too much. Too much for now. So Nate stayed on his knees a while, and, while he was there, said a short prayer of little cohesion but great intensity. Then he got up and pulled down the shell of wooden wall which fitted the “wall” which was not. The fit seemed as close as oil on water.

  Back in the adjoining room again, he looked at the body of Joseph Bellamy. Surely, any further attempts at mouth-breathing would be more in the line of necrophilia than life-saving. Suddenly Nate felt very sick and cold. He sat down quickly in the deep, leathery chair and lowered his head. It didn’t make him feel very much better, but by and by he felt well enough to try the telephone again. He had completed dialing before he realized that it was Peggy Stone’s number … and that it wasn’t ringing. There was nothing in his ear but the steady drone of an open — a supposedly open — telephone line.

  So, once again he tried to get the operator. This time he timed it by the old Seth Thomas clock on the wall: fifteen minutes. No response. Then, methodically, he dialed every number he could think of, including some from years back which he knew were no longer occupied by those who once had held them. If he could just reach somebody, anybody, he could ask that body to call his/her local police with the message. The … ah … message? Mr. Joseph Bellamy of Darkglen House was killed by an intruder who vanished into a wall, and to prove it I’ll show you the wall he vanished into or rather through …

  No. No, that wouldn’t do. For one thing, he, Nate, didn’t know, didn’t know at all that the man he saw had killed Joseph Bellamy. It might be a good idea to see if there were any — Oh God! — life imitating cheap fiction again! — any signs of violence on the body. On the other hand, it might be a good idea to do nothing of the sort. Don’t touch anything until the police arrive. Poor old lonely man there on the rug — already and for some time past, now: a thing. Very possible, though, he had just, well, died. Certainly he had looked unwell, unhealthy; certainly he had taken pills … well, tablets; capsules … Nate saw him. In fact, there were some right there, there on the table.

  And still no reply from the buzzing telephone. Try to walk? To Nokomas? Twenty miles? In this weather? It might start snowing or storming before he even reached whatsitsname Corners. He didn’t know and Ozzie hadn’t said if anyone lived there now. No, no. Nothing to do but sit up with the dead until dawn, or whatever time the hired help arrived. He put the phone back on the table. From time to time he’d try it again. Meanwhile … He deliberated, rubbed his chin. He’d go and look for something to cover the body. And for something, Christ yes! something to drink.

  • • •

  “I was swept up by events,” he said to himself later. And, “Oh, Gordon, you’re a magnificent stylist and a great coiner of phrases as well.”

  Things seemed to arrange themselves around him, was what had happened. Keziah hadn’t exactly screamed on seeing the covered form on the floor when Nate, awakened by her knock, opened the door. She had given a loud gasp and put her red hands to her red face and then she began to talk and talk and talk —

  “Oh. my Lord. Oh, my Lord! He’s dead, it’s happened, I knew it, I knew it. I knew it the minute I walked in the door this morning, I just felt it, ‘Something ain’t right,’ I said to myself — Glory! Ozzie! Oh, were you here, were you here? Mr. Jordan? When it happened? Ozzie! Ozzie! Glory! Oh, what a shock it give me, here, let me sit down. Not that it’s a surprise. Poor man! I’m going to start crying in a minute, thirty-five years I worked here for him, and before that, too, his uncle — Oh, it’s no surprise. Here they come, I better go out and tell Glory, her nerves ain’t — ”

  Her nerves weren’t. It was quite a while before Ozzie and Keziah — and, for that matter, Nate — could compose her sufficiently for Ozzie to drive the both of them off. The phone still would not respond and Glory refused, with signs of renewed hysteria, to remain behind. “I can’t help it, I can’t help it!” she declared, loudly, her nondescript face working. “You know that, Oz. Ever since George was taken that time. You leave me off at h
ome, Emma’ll have to quit work and stay home with me today, I don’t say it’s right, he was a good man, a good boss, but I can’t help it I’ll ask Sadie Snyder can she come up and help you, Kezzy, but — I — can — not.”

  So the old car started off, and not without difficulty. Keziah from somewhere had produced a second glass. She seemed as calm as Glory Smith had not “Oh, there’s so much to do. I would hardly know where to begin. You said a prayer, didn’t you, Mr. Jordan? That’s a good thing. Well, another one won’t hurt … Yes, she was right, he was a good man and a good boss. He knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming. First of all, we had eyes, didn’t we? And then besides he did tell us. ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said. ‘Comes to all of us,’ he said. Said something I guess he read in a book, not the Bible, though, but it was a kind of a nice thing anyway. Said — ‘Joining the great company of the dead, for they increase around us as we grow older.’ I don’t feel it just yet, you know. Oh, I’ll feel it by and by. Don’t you worry. It’s too bad this had to happen to you, won’t be much of a vacation for you. Won’t be for me, either, can tell you. Remember when old Mr. Bellamy, oh dear, we were busy for months — ”

  She broke off abruptly, finished the drop of brandy, got up and padded over to the desk. “Here it is,” she said, taking a sheet of paper from the drawer. “Just where he showed me. ‘Phone these people,’ he said. ‘See that they are informed at once.’ And — Mm-hm. Name with a line around it,” she had proceeded to dial a number while Nate sat watching, too numb and tired to remind her that the phone was out of order.

  Only, it seemed, it wasn’t.

  “Mr. Ralph Wiedemyer, please,” she said, reading. “Speaking? Over in Roman Hill, New York? Well, now, I’ve got a sad duty to perform, Mr., and maybe you better sit down. You knew Mr. Joseph Bellamy over in — Oh. Well, yes. Not a surprise to you, either, I guess he — Well, we don’t know yet, Mr. Wiedemyer. But he had this bad heart in addition to everything else and oh about eleven last night he rang this buzzer in his room that connects with the guest cottage here and Mr. Jordan, young man from — Jordan. That’s right — from New York, he was staying there and he come right over but by the time he got here our poor dear Mr. Bellamy, he had passed away …? Why, he had a list, that’s how. Your name was on it, you was to be called first. I guess I better hang up now and call these other names. Yes. Yes. Well, I’ll give it to his lawyer and I guess he will call you again when the arrangements have been all made. Not at all. Good-bye….”