59 Glass Bridges

by Steven Peters

  Two minutes into the cornfield, I encountered my first horror: a scarecrow dressed up like a reaper. I jumped as I rounded the bend, but managed not to scream. Then I laughed. A scarecrow. This wasn’t so scary after all.

  A minute later a man wearing a Jason Voorhees mask and brandishing a bloody axe leapt from the stalks, roaring incoherently. I fell hard against the corn on the far side of the wall and got tangled in the yellow tape. I screamed myself hoarse as he stalked ever so slowly towards me, running a finger over the jagged axe head. I didn’t have the presence of mind to realize that his slow saunter gave me all the time my numb fingers needed to untangle myself, and the opportunity to run blindly into the night.

  I was lost, so I began taking turns at random. I stopped once, hearing screams from my right. I crouched behind the corn and watched as a man and a woman, holding hands and giggling, ran past me, with Freddy Krueger hot on their heels.

  When I stopped to catch my breath in the glow of six pumpkins, my nerves were frayed. Now, even scarecrows made me jump. This wasn’t helped by the one time a scarecrow lifted himself off of his cross and moaned as he shambled after me.

  The maze was supposed to take between one and two hours to traverse. How long had I been here? I was too proud to cry out for a maze warden, so I groped for the exit with tears streaming from my face. I followed trails that looked familiar, that I half-remembered wandering down. I forgot about the checkpoints and just wanted out.

  The last horror I faced before escaping the maze was an enormous shirtless man with a bull’s head and burning eyes. In the gloom, his pants—they must have been pants—looked like unkempt fur with the backwards bend of a bull’s legs.

  He chased me faster than any of the others, his breath hot on the back of my neck. I ran and screamed my way around every corner and bend. Finally, as I felt his fingers brushing the back of my clothes, I dove off the marked trail and into the grey corn. I heard the hooves skid to a stop behind me, and then come crashing through the corn in pursuit.

  On the path, his long legs easily overtook mine, but here my smaller frame was an advantage. I wove through ears of corn, the fibrous stalks slapping me with their leaves. I could hear the monster behind me, bull rushing through the plants I’d sidestepped.

  I ran and I ran and I ran … until, at last, I stopped running. Only then did I realize that I’d lost my pursuer. For the last few minutes, the sound of pounding hooves had been nothing but blood pulsing in my ears and the cold spittle on the back of my neck was just a trickle of sweat down my spine.

  Somewhere behind me I heard a bellow of frustration. There were no words in that roar, nothing human. I heard the clump of heavy hooves resume their stalking—seeking to punish other boys who’d lied about being brave and being twelve years old.

  When I emerged from the maze, my hands and arms were scratched and dirty, my vision blurry with tears. I tripped over cornstalks and between trysting couples until at long last I found my Grandmother, sitting on a bench by the entrance, licking her sticky fingers.

  She stopped as I ran up to her, said nothing as I buried my head in her shoulder. Instead, she folded me into her arms and let me sob out my terrors until my heartbeat slowed and my adrenaline drained away.

  “You were in there for a long time,” she said gently, and stroked my hair. “You’ve lost your hat.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered into her neck, her scent more comforting than her embrace. “I wasted your ten dollars.”

  “It’s all right to be afraid,” my Grandmother told me. “It’s smart to be afraid. Because, you see, I forgot to tell you that there is one real monster in any maze. Only one creature that can find its way around. I forgot to warn you about the Minotaur.”

  • 4 •

  WHAT IF I’M THINKING ABOUT THIS MAZE all wrong—what if there’s no exit whatsoever? Wouldn’t it be easy to hide a doorway behind some fresh drywall? Maybe I’m on a reality show, or maybe some Italian stranger that I pissed off is exacting an elaborate revenge.

  So here’s the new plan: I’m going to smash through the walls in a straight line, Wile E. Coyote style. The drywall can’t be more than three or four centimetres thick and I’ve yet to see any support beams.

  So what the hell, let’s take a lesson I learned from the gerbil I’d owned as a child. I’d built mazes for him on my bedroom carpet. Cereal boxes formed the walls and masking tape the mortar. The mazes were replete with dead ends and cul-de-sacs, paper towel tube bridges and false trails.

  I perched above the maze to watch his progress and judge him. He was less than keen. Usually, he simply sat where I set him, protesting my maze with pellet-sized turds on my rug. Sometimes he ran for a time, but the simplest of obstacles seemed to stymie him. And once, he decided to break all the rules by chewing a hole through the cardboard wall.

  Time for a gerbil-inspired jailbreak. I slam my heel into the nearest wall.

  A spray of white powder and drywall explodes around my foot. I kick the same spot again, with more force. Then again. I peer through the hole I’ve created.

  On the other side, I see more white walls. Well, shit.

  I bring my hands to the hole and pry at the surrounding drywall. Ripping paper echoes down the corridor as the wall spills its dusty innards onto the linoleum and the soft bed of red wool. My fingers and clothing turn flour-white.

  As soon as I can, I wedge my upper body through the opening, brace my arms on the other side and then bodily haul myself through. I stand in this, my new hallway, which is almost indistinguishable from the last. No spiderweb of red yarn, though. I’m not sure if that’s an improvement or not.

  I don’t even bother smashing through the next two walls, I just throw my weight into them after a running start and go exploding out of the other side. But every corridor looks goddamn identical and I seem to be making no progress at all.

  For the umpteenth time, I stop to collect myself. I pat the dust from my hair and clothing—only to realize that in the last collision, the Bible has fallen out of my pocket. I step back through the hole I just created and pick up the fallen book.

  I look down at the Gideon New Testament, looking for solace in the foreign red letters. The page I flip to, midway through the Book of Matthew, has three short lines scribbled beneath the Bible verses and an arrow pointing up at the passage. Unfortunately, I still can’t read Italian.

  I slump against the wall and try to think my way out.

  This maze may have no exit. That thought’s been haunting me. Maybe I’m dead. Perhaps I’m in hell and hell is boring. Or purgatory—this place seems to fit the bill. No torture, but no paradise. Doomed to wander forever, unless I can earn my way into heaven.

  And this Bible in my pocket—irony? Were the notes left by the last poor unfortunate, trapped in my place?

  I close my eyes and listen to the fluorescent lights humming overhead. I’ve read that they’re bad for you, that they cause migraines and insomnia. I’ve heard that fluorescent lights are linked to cancer too. An ex told me they disrupt regular menstruation.

  It figures, I suppose, that hell would have fluorescent lights.

  I look back down at the Bible: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened….”

  I knock on the wall I’m leaning against, but nobody answers. Maybe I need to find an actual door first, before this advice will work.

  But no, I don’t believe in hell. Or purgatory. Or heaven, for that matter. Human-made seems more likely than afterlife. And I’m not dead—I’m a white rat, running laps. Or a gerbil.

  My eyes skip past the Sunday school parable material and drift down to inked-in Italian.

  Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai,

  tant’ era pien di sonno a quel punto

  che la verace via abbandonai.

  I pluck out the word “abandon” from the red letters, but little and less otherwise. And there’s the arrow, the arrow pointing up.

  I look
up. Those damn fluorescent lights. I close the book, stuff it in my pocket. I look up again. Fluorescent lights. And a corkboard ceiling.

  I smack my palm into my forehead. For Christ’s sake, I haven’t been thinking in three dimensions. What if I try to climb my way out?

  I stand and walk over to my recently vandalized wall. I rest a foot in the hole and test the drywall with my weight. More white dust crumbles to the floor, but it seems to hold me, so I ease myself upward. I reach up and knock one of the corkboard panels askew.

  I’m too low to see above them, so I kick a second hole into the wall a little higher up. I rest my other foot in the second hole and slowly ease my weight onto my other leg, so that I don’t go ripping through the drywall. I move deliberately and, blessedly, without incident. I pull myself up to look through the ceiling …

  I’m staring down another white-washed corridor. The panel I’ve knocked askew is a square of linoleum tile, lying on the floor beside me.

  I blink and duck my head back down. Corkboard. Fluorescent lights.

  I poke my head up again. Hallway. Linoleum. More fluorescent lights further overhead. What the fuck.

  I perform a little experiment. With my head sticking through the ceiling, looking out at the “second floor” I’ve broken into, I feel my left hand along the bottom of an adjacent piece of corkboard. I rest my palm against the bumpy surface and push up—and I see a square piece of tile beside my head bounce on my fingertips.

  Well then.

  Experiment number two: I bring both hands up through the ceiling and put my weight on what appears to be linoleum tile, fully expecting it to cave down around me. It doesn’t. In fact, it affords me enough purchase to hoist myself through the opening and scramble up. The tile, if it is that, smells of dust and floor wax, and feels as hard as, well, linoleum.

  I loiter here. I walk around the hole in the floor at least a dozen times. I stamp at the ground, knowing logically that it’s wafer thin and that I should be falling through. I stick my head back down, stare at the light fixtures, then back up to see if I can find any evidence of them. I even poke a finger at the plastic case covering the lights, but those don’t seem to budge.

  I wander over to the floor tile I’d moved to climb up and flip it over and over in my hands. This side linoleum. That side corkboard. Weird.

  Well. What now. I’ve climbed a little higher, I suppose, so if I really am underground, I’m that much closer to escaping.

  I look up at my new ceiling, with its new corkboard and new light fixtures that I absolutely cannot distinguish from the old. If I keep going up…?

  No, not yet. Let’s explore this new floor first.

  I set off again, but I’m uncomfortably reminded of my gerbil. When he lost his will to wander the halls I’d created, I lured him deeper with rewards of sunflower seeds and carrots. And when he manufactured his freedom by chewing a hole through the cardboard, I responded by placing more walls around him.

  • 5 •

  I’M A LITTLE PARANOID when I find the red thread again.

  I almost wish I hadn’t found it at all, that I’d just walked obliviously on by, my thoughts preoccupied by that stupid ceiling-floor. I found it when I crossed to the far hall in yet another four-way intersection, and spied the finger of red on my right. Sure enough, there I found the unravelled end of another red mitten.

  Oh god, I haven’t moved at all—I’m stuck in an endless loop. Maybe this is hell.

  I’m ready to throw my hands in the air and succumb to thirst or starvation, when suddenly the string moves. It pulls away from me, a little further down the hall. Then it jolts to life again and slides still further.

  I run after the string. Maybe it isn’t mine. I’d woken up with only one mitten—its mate could still be out in the world. Could this … could this belong to my Italian friend, or mugger, or whatever he or she proves to be? Maybe they’re also trapped here and trying to Theseus their way out.

  “Hello?” I shout down the hall. “Anyone there?”

  Nobody answers me, but the red vein on the floor leaps to life, so I quicken my pace. Is the person tied to the other end running? Are they in a blind panic, as I had been? Corridors race by, but I’m only watching the string. It wriggles like an eel and wends its way around corners.

  The red string picks up speed. It’s gradually leaving me behind. I break into a full sprint, but the thread picks up its pace too, and continues to slide just slightly out of reach. Soon, I’m only turning corners in time to catch a glimpse of it at the end of the hall, before it races out of sight.

  “Stop!” I shout. “Let’s work together!”

  There’s still no answer and the thread doesn’t slow down.

  The last I see of the red thread, it writhes through a hole smashed in the drywall—a hole that looks suspiciously like the one I’d created. But by the time I follow it through, it’s long gone.

  “Come back!” I shout down the corridor “Bastard! Give me my pants!”

  There’s no answer, because of course there’s no answer.

  A set up? Is this the carrot, meant to lure me through the maze? That must be it.

  There’s someone behind this—maybe a corporation’s worth of someones—and I’ve played right into their twisted game. It’s The goddamn Truman Show and here I am, jumping through hoops, to the delight of the easily entertained.

  I can’t help myself. Frustration finally rips from my throat. A low groan turns into a growl as I throw a fist into the drywall, then a foot. I punch, kick, and stomp at the wall as if this one piece of drywall is responsible for everything: the maze, my missing clothes, and—

  I’m crying. When’s the last time that happened?

  I break my knuckles open. Red specks of blood pimple the drywall wherever my knuckles grace it. Clouds of white dust choke the corridor, turn my red fists pink.

  Finally, when my hands are too sore to form a fist, I tear off my stupid cowboy hat, throw it onto the ground, and kick it through the hole in a spray of white.

  Then I sit, panting, before the huge wound I’ve ripped into the maze. Once again, the chalky powder settles in my clothes and hair and clings to my fingers.

  The white hallways seem unfazed by my wanton destruction or my quickly slumping shoulders. I puddle into a small, sobbing heap on the floor. Apart from my heavy breathing and the lights humming overhead, the maze lies utterly silent.

  “I think,” I say aloud, my voice hoarse, “I could use some help.”

  • 6 •

  MY GRANDMOTHER TOLD ME fragmented mythologies in lieu of bedtime stories.

  After Halloween, she described Theseus’ Minotaur with the same tender words she used to describe her old, speckled mare. Subsequently, the monster’s burning eyes took on cataracts, its shaggy body became mottled brown, and its glossy mane was obviously brushed daily. In my version of the myth, the Minotaur limped through its maze.

  My grandparents dwelled in the Albertan countryside on a spacious acreage. I remember my grandfather shaving the lawn of their property and snoring on the couch against the white noise of the Masters Tournament on TV. I don’t believe he ever stepped foot in the stable.

  “Horses need horseshoes, because humans need roads,” my Grandmother told me, months or years later. I sat on an upturned bucket in the stable, while she stroked a thick brush through Aria’s mane. “Asphalt streets and compact dirt roads unnaturally wear down the hoof. But old Aria, she’s earned her rest. She deserves to put her feet up.”

  My Grandmother filled my head with other stories too—I learned Lewis Carroll and C.S. Lewis and Bible stories by the bucketful.

  Meanwhile, my Grandmother filled her house—I always thought of it as her house, though my grandparents never divorced—with succulence. Borscht bubbled on the stove, ham and cherries simmered in the oven, sugar cookies cooled on the counter. She made half of her masterpieces in the kitchen. I devoured them all—except for the cabbage soup.

  The other half of her master
pieces lay drying in the living room. Still-life paintings leaned against the fireplace, lay stacked atop the coffee table, and sat propped against the sofa. The smell of oil-based paint overwhelmed the food smells from the next room.

  And god was omnipresent. An antique Bible took pride of place on the mantelpiece. A crucifix hung on every wall. And even as she cooked and painted, she filled the air with Sunday morning’s hymns. My Grandmother insisted that Jesus suited the everyday the same way cabbage paired perfectly with every meal.

  But most of all, my Grandmother filled her home with owls. My Grandmother was a fervent traveller and she commemorated each new, exotic locale she graced by buying souvenirs—souvenirs that always featured owls.

  Brazil yielded a set of four mugs, each carved from fragrant rosewood into the likenesses of burrowing owls. A needlepoint tapestry featuring two Australian barking owls hung on her living room wall. A stuffed eagle-owl from India was even shoehorned onto the dinner table as a disconcerting centrepiece. Its eyes judged me whenever I let the borscht cool and coagulate, untouched.

  Even the bathroom, bedecked in Target’s Awesome Owls Bath Collection, wasn’t immune to her obsession. And, while most of the house featured an uninspired wallpaper of blue vines and leaves creeping up the wall, the “kids’ room,” where I slept, featured a white wallpaper polka dotted with different owls and their common names.

  I remember lying in bed, studying those birds, while the morning light seeped through my window blinds. I listened to my Grandmother down the hall, as she completed her morning ritual of smoothing out her wrinkles and moisturizing her drying flesh. She fought Father Time with everything at her disposal.

  Around the house, my Grandmother wore colourful sundresses and jewelry. Nine rings emblazoned with birthstones sparkled on her fingers, and her earlobes sagged beneath the weight of silver earrings. In the garden or the stable, she dressed more practically, with overalls and triple-padded gloves.