59 Glass Bridges

by Steven Peters

  And then I hear it. The sound of water, dripping. Somehow, it’s followed us from the bridge and down the gauntlet of hallways we’re running. Clip, clip, clip.

  But no, I realize, the sound is sharper. Not dripping. It’s something clattering across linoleum. It’s a sound that doesn’t belong in hotels, or office buildings, or the downtown of any urban core.

  It sounds like hooves.

  Willow is fast, faster than I would have given her credit for. She’s an arm’s length in front of me, then two. Soon, I’m barely turning corners in time to see her disappearing around another up ahead. I can’t tell if she still knows where she’s going, or if she’s simply fleeing the sounds of pursuit, but I’m not sure if I care.

  “Wait,” I pant, as a stitch threatens to tear open my side. “Willow, wait!”

  I open my mouth to shout at her, to ask her to slow down, but then shut it again. Are we running from something? What if it hears my voice?

  Willow’s footsteps still don’t make a sound. Oh god. I’m going to lose her.

  The hooves—I’m convinced they’re hooves—clip clop across the linoleum somewhere behind me. The sound isn’t fast so much as persistent.

  I can’t shake them. It sounds close enough to grab me now. I glance over my shoulder as I spin into a new hallway, but can’t see my pursuer.

  Then I turn a corner and Willow isn’t there. I stop. The sound of hooves does not.

  • 18 •

  I DIDN’T KEEP MY PROMISE to my Grandmother. I stopped painting altogether.

  Only in church was I still an author, an artist. Every Sunday morning, wedged between my grandparents on a wooden pew, my mind craved entertainment. I stole the visitors’ pamphlets tucked behind the seats in front of me, and I turned their comments card into a canvas.

  I’d been admonished for this in Sunday School, before graduating to the “Adult Service” on the church’s main floor. “You should listen,” the youth pastor had said, “or read the Bible.”

  So I learned to hide my transgressions. I sat with a Bible propped open and sketched on the church’s comment cards, wrote sentence fragments, composed malformed poems. Religion found its way into my writing, weighing my words down with metaphors and spiritual sounding phrases that meant nothing at all. My sketches remained abstract—lines through the snow.

  Eventually my writing solidified into something more substantive. I wove fantasy stories on the loose leaf meant for the guilt-laden to confess their sins. My heroes blasphemously outperformed Jesus.

  My sketches also took on new life. Geometric shapes solidified into skyscrapers. Streets began flowing between them like rivers. I drew impossible landscapes that ringed the paper on all sides, and married landmarks like Stonehenge with the Eiffel Tower. When the Twin Towers fell and our church service sat in sombre silence, I resurrected those monuments in immortal ink and paper.

  I sketched texture into the stonework, traced cracks in the sidewalk, and then allowed trees to squeeze through the pavement. Forests sprang up. Vines crawled across my cities. The landscape morphed.

  Once, after a service, the woman who’d sat behind me for two hours complimented me on my drawing. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “You’re talented. You should add some people to your city.”

  No. I couldn’t draw people—their faces could never rival my Grandmother’s portraits.

  My failed creations all melted into grimacing visages with unnaturally extended smiles and dripping eyes. My presidents and celebrities were caricatures, Lovecraftian horrors, all bemoaning their existence from the page. I secreted my people away to spare myself from the judgment of their bulbous eyes and puddling jowls.

  But, for some reason, my Grandmother loved my people, in a way she’d never loved my endless cities.

  The first one she discovered, mid-service on a Sunday morning, was the pastor—with a beard that gobbled up his neck and a forehead three times as big as the rest of his face. My Grandmother let loose a bark of laughter that drowned out the sermon for a moment, loud enough to draw the stares and scowls of the entire room. My Grandmother waved them back to work and sat chuckling beside me.

  The next week, she bought me a small sketchpad to smuggle into the sermon and snorted my concerns away when I asked if my drawings might not be heretical. “Do you think I can paint without God?” she said. “Who gives you that gift?”

  But with my head bowed over my anguished figures, I never did answer.

  • 19 •

  “JESUS,” I RASP. Nobody answers.

  Throwing caution to the wind, I let Willow’s name rip from my throat. I scream it again and again and again. But she doesn’t come to save me either.

  I sprint to the end of the hall, assuming Willow must have beaten me there, and I’m faced with a choice: left or right. A cold, familiar dread trickles down my neck, still trapped, but it’s accompanied by an unfamiliar fear. From behind me, I can hear the clip clop of something hoofed in hot pursuit.

  I glance down one, then the other hallway, but Willow is nowhere to be seen, so I throw myself down the left-hand passageway at random. I start screaming, “You left me! You left me! You left me!” as I run.

  I jog past doors and potted plants and weave down every new intersection, desperate to lose the sounds still trailing me. When I turn a corner and again see the blue light of the sleeping city, I lunge for it.

  It’s the first bridge I encounter without my guide. The rain outside deluges the glass panes, creating the illusion of a tunnel spanning a sunken city. As I race by, I imagine fabled Atlantis, but the thought is fleeting, as hooves clatter onto the bridge behind me.

  I look back. Nothing’s there. I don’t stop running, and I quickly leave the waterlogged bridge behind.

  I take a right-hand turn at my next fork, panting as I go, “Of course. Of course. There is no monster—” when suddenly the sound of pursuit isn’t behind—it’s further ahead, coming down the corridor.

  I claw at the wall, skid to a stop, and turn hard on my heel. I race back to the intersection, choose a different fork.

  But I’ve only gone about twenty paces when I realize that the sound is still in front of me. I might be screaming, I’m not sure. All I hear is the slow, methodic placement of one hoof in front of another, bearing down on me, closing the gap—

  I run to the nearest door, tug on the handle, and hammer on the door when it doesn’t open at my touch. I run to a second door, then a third, and by the time I’m at the fifth and it’s still locked, I’m screaming, “Willow! What kind of guide are you?”

  The eighth door I assault miraculously does open, but I’m not expecting it to. I turn the handle and throw my shoulder into it and go spilling through in an unceremonious heap, my already battered body hitting the hard tile like a sack of hammers. My Stetson falls off and lies upturned against the wall, two feet away.

  I pick myself off the ground and scuttle to the open doorway on my hands and knees. Whatever is following me, still so close, hasn’t materialized outside of my doorway yet, so I ease the door closed and hope that my pursuer may pass me by. I sit with my back against the door.

  Now with one ear pressed against the door, I finally breathe.

  Whatever’s been chasing me paces nearby. It sounds like it’s right outside. But it’s not getting nearer or further. It’s the same rhythmic sound over and over and—

  I sit, frozen against the door-frame. I’m terrified that if I try to creep away—if I so much as reach for my fallen hat—then the monster will hear me move. I sit for ten minutes, at a stalemate with my pursuer.

  My windbreaker’s bulky pocket digs awkwardly into my back. I relax my vigilance long enough to adjust my clothing and pull the Gideon New Testament from the offending pocket. The sound outside the door doesn’t change.

  The book is worse for wear, having been pinned behind me. The cover now sports a large diagonal crease and a number of pages are loose and wrinkled. The Bible flips open when I set it on the ground, to an
other one of the defacer’s Italian stanzas in red ink:

  Oh pietosa colei che mi soccorse!

  Tu duca, tu segnore e tu maestro

  Gibberish. I close the book, and wish that Willow would somehow find me, save me.

  More minutes pass. I press my ear hard against the door, incredulous that whatever’s chasing me is still stomping around outside. Sure enough, I can hear the clip clop, clip clop from the hall I’ve left behind.

  I sigh. Then I stop and listen again. I listen harder and try to ignore the blood pounding in my ears. No, it’s not a clack of hooves on linoleum … it’s more of a hmm—a mechanical sound. And it’s too consistent, a steady kcht kcht as opposed to a clip clop.

  I put the Bible back in my pocket and gently peel myself from the doorway. I ease the door open ever so slightly and stick my eye to the crack, peering out at the empty corridor I’d fled down half an hour beforehand. But I can’t see the source of the noise from my angle. It’s coming from somewhere down the corridor to my left, behind the door.

  I open the door further ajar, but there still seems to be no reaction from my pursuer. In a fit of bravery—or is it stupidity?—I yank the door wide and stick my head out.

  No monster. Of course there’s no monster.

  I can still hear the sound, but the more I listen, the less it sounds like hooves. It sounds entirely artificial, in fact. I leave the door open behind me, and creep towards the sound.

  There is no horror around the next corner.

  Instead, I see a photocopier. It spits out sheet after sheet, and issues forth a steady, consistent kcht kcht sound. The copies it’s making have overflowed its outbound tray and now litter the floor, forming small mounds of paper beneath the photocopier.

  Plain white paper echoing through the halls had me running for my life.

  My heart starts beating again in relief. I exhale the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I laugh.

  I’m delusional! Too long alone! Too long without food and water, maybe! Christ, I’m so accustomed to silence that a photocopier has me panicking. I walk over to the machine, soaking in relief and cold sweat. I pick up a page to inspect what someone is so keen to make so many copies of….

  “YOU ARE HERE.”

  Three words, typed in a plain font in the centre of every page. Over and over again … hundreds of copies. You are here.

  Willow finds me there. I look up from the page to see her peering wide-eyed around the corner I’d peeked out from moments ago. She storms down the hall and cuffs me over the head.

  “You jerk!” she says. “I can’t believe you lost me.”

  Then she locks me in a hug and I’m too surprised to return the gesture. Instead, I flap an accusatory piece of paper at her. “You left me behind! Aren’t you supposed to be my guide?”

  Willow snatches the page from my hand and scans the words typed on it. She says, “You—you had to stop to make photocopies?”

  “Photoco—no. This is the Minotaur. We were being chased by a photocopier.”

  Willow looks down at the piece of paper, reads aloud, “You are here.” She looks up at me. “What Minotaur?”

  I realize that I’m not sure what Willow was running from. I open my mouth to change the topic back to my abandonment, but Willow shakes her head and interrupts me before I start.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Not really important. What is important is this: I’ve found another bridge, and there’s something you need to see.”

  “I crossed a bridge. Without you.” My voice carries an accusation, but at this Willow smiles broadly and puts her hand on my arm.

  “Well then,” she says, “there might still be hope for you. Who knows, by the end of all this, maybe you’ll be able to make it on your own.”

  • 20 •

  THE BRIDGE WILLOW FOUND has rails running underneath it. The bridge itself is empty, save for Willow and me, a blue-backed plastic chair with steel legs, and a gumball machine. The glass around us is composed of multicoloured panes, lending the world a motley appearance. Though I cannot see the sun, its reflection glints off the windows of the buildings around us.

  “But it was raining,” I protest. “And midnight. Or something.”

  Willow shrugs, as unhelpful as ever.

  The sun is high and the day is hot. This glass tube feels like a greenhouse, and beads of sweat sprout on the spritely moustache growing on my upper lip.

  Mere hours earlier, the city looked like it was basking in a cool spring, but now the day exemplifies summertime. I take off my windbreaker and tie it around my waist.

  “You’ve lost your hat,” Willow says.

  She’s right. Somewhere in my mad dash away from the ‘Minotaur’ I’ve misplaced my Stetson. I rub a hand through my greasy hair and take stock of my dirty, wrinkly t-shirt. I point outside to distract Willow from my disheveled appearance.

  The building that this bridge leads to is, thankfully, different than any I’ve yet encountered. It’s several storeys tall and layered like a cake—the exterior of each floor is markedly distinct.

  The building’s top floor features decorative stonework jigsawing around each of its arched windows. Its third storey features a squared pilaster façade spaced every few metres. Glass panes dominate the building’s second-floor exterior, separated with metal beams that splay out in all directions like spider legs. And, on the ground floor, dark grey stonework overshadows shop fronts and doorways.

  “Look,” I say, “Once we cross this bridge, we can get out!”

  Willow points behind us in response, to the building we just left, and the entrance clearly visible from here. “Didn’t have much luck finding that one, though, did you?”

  It’s true. “What are these buildings? Mazes? They have the most bizarre layouts I’ve ever seen.”

  Willow puts a hand on my shoulder and I’m surprised by the sadness in her wide eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “No one finds this path easy.”

  “You’ve led others.”

  “Three, personally. And the road changes every time. Many more besides you have come here and been led by others. Some never have a guide.”

  “You didn’t answer my question as to what these buildings actually are.”

  I expect another shrug, but instead, Willow sucks her teeth in deep contemplation and stares at the ceiling for a moment. Then she says, “Think of this city like a snow globe.”

  “Because we’re on a bridge encased in glass?”

  “Not quite. Imagine a snow globe with a little house in it. Now imagine we’re in that house. We’re running around the hallways, checking the rooms, looking for a way out, and whenever we look outside, we can see the snow-filled world outside of our window.

  “What we can’t see is that this ‘world’ is confined to a small space, and that outside of it, our snow globe is in another, bigger house, and outside of that house, is another world, and so on and so forth—”

  “So, we are in a lab? This is just some room, inside of another room, inside of a facility meant to—what? Test human endurance?”

  “I—no. Is that what I said? No, we’re in a snow globe.”

  “That still doesn’t answer my question.” I stamp my foot. “Where are we physically? In space? Under the ocean? A secret bunker buried beneath the Nevada?”

  “We’re on a bridge.”

  I throw my hands up in frustration and stomp three paces away.

  My mood is suddenly dark—a stark contrast against the sunny streets. Lonely trees jut from the sanctioned holes in the sidewalk in front of the building we’re about to enter, their branches upraised like praying hands towards the sun I only see second-hand. To my left, a set of street lights flick from red to green and a pedestrian walk sign switches to a forbidding red hand.

  “Well, I know where we aren’t,” I say. “A real city. There are still no people.”

  Broad daylight. Not a single soul in sight. Willow tilts her head, and she too contemplates the street below.
/>   “No people,” I repeat.

  A sudden frenzy takes me, a panic at being the only person in the universe—not including ghosts, of course. I lift the chair from where it rests, metal legs pointed skyward over my head, and prepare to send it careening through the glass.

  Why didn’t I do this sooner? It’s only fifteen feet. All I have to do is smash the window, make a dash for freedom, and escape this crazy ‘snow globe’ that I’m caged in.

  But Willow touches my arm, and her grip is tense and painful. I can feel her hand shaking as her nails dig into my skin. She points, with her other hand, below us. “I said I had something to show you,” she says, her voice low. “So please, stop.”

  I trace the line of her finger and see a figure sitting below us.

  Something lurks in the shadow beneath the bridge.

  It’s large. Too large. Like a troll, hunched in the shadows. I can barely see it, tucked away in the darkness beneath the bridge, but I can see breath fogging in front of its face, despite the summer day. And then its head moves, and I know it’s looking up at me.

  Chair still suspended overhead, I back slowly away from the glass, out of sight of whatever is staring up from below. And I remember the sound of hooves chasing me through labyrinthine halls.

  I exhale slowly and place the chair down. Willow quietly says, “In case you thought we were alone.”

  “What is it?” I whisper, still not fully believing in monsters. “The Minotaur?”

  Willow doesn’t confirm my suspicions one way or another. Instead she says, “He’s another denizen of the labyrinth. The same as you.”

  Willow points again, but this time her finger aims down the street. “Watch,” she says.

  So I do. I wait and I watch, out of sight of the creature hunkered beneath the bridge. I watch the tracks that run out from underneath this bridge. As I do, I notice something moving in the distance.

  A snake? No—a train.

  It crawls along the tracks, growing ever closer. The train is coloured white, red, and grey, and two metal arms feel their way along a series of cables overhead. A light rail transit system. Nothing new, or extraordinary, save that I haven’t seen anything like it in the maze thus far. And then I notice—