The path is straight. The floors, like the walls, are made of ice, and every pearlescent surface shrouds more frozen figures. Casualties, I think, of some forgotten ice age or cruel winter. Casualties of avalanches and glacial slides. Casualties of the maze.
Perhaps I will join them, when I can no longer force one foot in front of the other.
Though the path is straight, the going is treacherous. More limbs now jut through the surface of the walls and floors. I stumble over limbs, a morbid re-enactment of my stumble through the vinous hall.
Each time I fall, I will myself to get up—and each time I wonder if maybe my body won’t listen. Still I trudge forward.
A breeze begins to blow down the tunnel. Gentle at first, but it quickly ramps up in intensity. It blows me back the way I came, as if to deny me passage through this icy cave. It’s a cold wind. A Canadian wind. It bites into my wet clothing.
I imagine that, far away, I can hear the flapping of gigantic wings as they whip this wind into being. At least it’s not hooves, I think.
The path steepens here—turns into a hill. On this hill, I encounter my first human head frozen in the ice. Its eyes are icy bulbs, its hair a shock of frost, and its mouth is open in a scream and packed with snow. Without hesitation, I place my foot atop that frozen skull and use it to reach my next foothold—an outstretched hand.
I begin to boulder odd appendages. I push myself from one to the next, tracking my progress through the body parts I’ve passed. I touch the pieces as I move forward, steadying myself with this helping hand, that leg up.
I catch myself apologizing to the bodies for using them so irreverently. But I don’t stop, I don’t slow down.
• 56 •
I’VE STOPPED SHIVERING. That’s a bad sign. My body’s beginning to go numb with cold and frostbite. My limbs move lethargically, as if swimming through soup. And still I climb—from one poor soul to the next.
The wall stretches away above me—a vertical cliff. I have no safety harness and no spotter waiting below. The ice is almost perfectly smooth and one wrong step would certainly spell my end.
The silver light that illuminated this cavern is slowly fading until only the wall I’m climbing resonates with a soft glow. It feels as if I’m climbing into a void. I grip frozen hands with my frozen fingers and continue to haul myself up. Five metres. Ten. Twenty.
Then the hand I’m holding snaps off.
I tumble into darkness.
I close my eyes. I don’t scream—my breath is a fog in my throat—but my fingers claw at the icy wall as if unwilling to give up. But there’s no purchase to be found. Here I go—the next sorry victim of this icy hall. Icy wind whistles by me. My icy fingers are burned raw by the friction of the ice.
So close. I was so close.
My plummet abruptly ends, but I’m not dead. Instead, I hear a pop and my left shoulder screams in its socket. My watch scrapes a burning trail over my wrist and halfway up my hand.
I look up. Somehow, in my flailing descent, I managed to get my watch caught between a pair of feet frozen close together. As if from a long way off, I remember Willow beside me on a rickety wooden bridge. I won’t let you fall.
I find my footing and pry my arm from between the feet. My arm is dislocated and dangles useless at my side, but I continue my ragged climb. The frozen limbs seem more plentiful here, and I scale them like a steep staircase.
Every breath is a needle in my chest. I can feel hypothermia settling on my lungs. I barely notice my wet clothing now—but there it is! I can see the top.
At the summit, I laugh. The laugh is long and defeated. It saps the adrenaline from my veins and the will from my body. Before it’s finished, the laugh transforms into a wet cough.
All right labyrinth. What’s next?
The answer’s almost a relief. It’s a slide. The world around me is dark, save for the sheer drop behind me and an icy chute ahead. After that labourious climb, my reward is a futile race to the bottom.
I sit on the edge of the slide, remembering a ramp that I built up to my grandparents’ rooftop and the snowbank that I jumped into afterwards. I push myself off, because it almost doesn’t matter what awaits me below.
• 57 •
WALKING THROUGH MY GRANDMOTHER’S HOUSE feels wrong in my adult body. I’m a child, here. I’m a teenager. In none of these tales am I a man grown.
The stairwell creaks as I wander upstairs towards the bedrooms: the master and the one that I still think of as mine. One of my paintings hangs in the stairwell—but it’s wrong. I fish my hand behind her couch and find a replacement—the snowy day she painted.
Ah, that’s better.
In my bedroom there are no posters on the wall. My clothes were cleaned from the dresser long ago. The people have disappeared from the stucco ceiling. And, were I to go into the bathroom, I know that my toothbrush and toothpaste would not sit beside the sink.
Still, there is a blanket speckled with birds here, on the bed. The room is not wholly alien.
My Grandmother’s room is. The master bedroom sits empty. The blinds are drawn. The bed, neatly made. On her headboard, a radio clock still flashes the time and date.
I walk to my Grandmother’s bedside table, and open the top drawer. Inside, there is a photo album. I lift the book from the drawer and flip to the first page.
My Grandmother as a child. The photograph black and white. She stands with her hands behind her back, dwarfed by three brothers on either side. She wears a dress. They wear suspenders.
My Grandmother as a teenager. Her hair tied back, her long braid swinging. She hangs upside down from a tree. I think she looks beautiful, like someone who will love traveling, who will never want to sit still.
My Grandmother at a European wildlife reserve. Her first vacation. Her eyes are upturned, staring at an owl perched on her head. Her expression suggests ecstasy, with maybe a hint of panic.
My Grandmother, holding a carrot out for Aria. Aria is a foal here—both in their prime. The horse is frozen mid-chomp, my Grandmother mid-smile.
My Grandmother—now middle-aged. A baby in her arms. The caption underneath says A GRANDMOTHER AT LAST! Beside that is my name.
My Grandmother, wearing a face I recognize. Rouged cheeks, bleached hair, and cucumber green nail polish. She is walking into the distance, leaving a long trail of footprints in the snow.
I close the photo album and look at the other contents in the drawer. A copy of the New Testament. Her wedding ring. And my first painting, from when I was a child.
I put the photo album back.
The trip back down the stairs takes ages. I linger on the painting again. I linger on every step. The bottom of the stairs takes me to the front door. The front door, outside.
It is canning season, so of course the cellar is open. Those steep wooden steps yawn before me. It is canning season, which for her means preserved jams and pickles. A fresh batch of corn whisky.
But I don’t go down there, because there’s nothing to find. No shotgun. No stuffed moose head. No nesting owls.
Instead, I wander beside the house. It is summer and there are no footprints in the grass. Otherwise, the lawn would be a mess—where the ambulance pulled up, the paramedics rushed out, and my family flooded in the aftermath.
Now there is no one. Nothing, really, to lead me down the path she wandered in the long ago, in the photo beside her bed.
So why do I follow her?
It doesn’t really matter, I suppose. I barely paid attention to the clothes I slapped on this morning—why worry about destination? So follow, I do. I wander over the hill and walk after those ghostly footsteps away. Far away. Anywhere but here.
I walk until the horizon swallows me as it did her.
• 58 •
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE ICY SLIDE LIES the final bridge. Whether or not it’s actually the last is irrelevant—it’s the last bridge I will cross before I succumb to hypothermia. My strength is all but spent.
T
he bridge, like everything else, is made of ice. It spans a massive pit, and from those depths howls the cold wind. The bridge slopes in a gentle arc as it crosses the chasm, and long icicles drip down its length to hang suspended above the void.
I see now that the silver light illuminating my path comes from within the ice. The bridge glows like a sword cutting through shadows. Below the bridge—as above—lies only darkness.
To hell with it. On I go.
The wind hits me with the strength of a gale. It threatens to rip me from the bridge and fling me into the abyss. So I force my way forward on my frozen hands and knees instead. Needles rack every sluggish limb as I crawl and my fingertips burn against the ice.
Halfway across the chasm, I’m struck by a new fear that the bridge will break. When I began my crossing, the bridge was a metre thick or more. Here, it’s only scant centimetres, and still the wind howls. What’s more, it suddenly seems to me that the bridge isn’t made of ice at all, but brittle glass.
I look down and see my haggard reflection staring back at me. My cheeks are sallow and my hair is greasy and streaked with grey. My beard, unkempt and white with frost, bristles out from my face. My eyes are sunken in and bruised navy blue.
I’ve grown old. When did that happen?
I’m paralyzed for long heartbeats—terrified by the stranger staring up at me and my sudden certainty that the bridge will collapse. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t crack or quiver or creak, despite my weight and the wind screaming up from below. After long seconds suspended there, I realize that only my frozen body is at any risk of giving out before the end.
So I crawl forward. I crawl to the end of the bridge, where I see another wall of ice. This one stretches away into the darkness, sheerer and taller than the last. I sit, staring up at this impassable obstacle, and I know that I don’t have the strength to climb it.
So maybe this is it. The final chapter. What a disappointing end.
• 59 •
I DIDN’T TAKE YOU FOR A QUITTER, the silvery voice says in my ear.
Too late. There’s only so much one person can take.
Chicken, she teases. It’s just ice. Do you find ice particularly terrifying?
No. No, my journey’s done. Let me sleep.
No it isn’t. You can still escape this place.
I don’t care if I escape anymore.
Well there’s your problem, dummy.
I open my eyes, her name on my lips, “Wi—”
Willow isn’t here. There’s nothing here—nothing but cold leeching my strength away, and wind threatening to blow me back into the abyss. The world is dark—the ice’s glow is gone. Now only icicles twinkle like stars in the blackness.
But, no—I see something else. There, hewn into the frozen cliff side, is a faint glow—the outline of a doorway. And beyond that door is a staircase carved into solid ice.
I drag myself forward. My legs won’t listen to me—my knees refuse to unbuckle.
The stairs are the green of a frozen river. They’re weather-worn and uneven, broken in places and crumbling. They descend in a tight spiral, so that I can’t see past the next corner.
I tip my weight over the first stair and begin sliding down on my belly. My body responds like a sack of flour. I drip down the stairs one at a time.
I’ve slid down some fifty stairs when I wonder, why? Why belabour this? Why carry on?
Because you are here. Willow whispers. Even if it’s not what you would have chosen.
But here there be monsters.
I hear the slow, heavy clatter of hooves awkwardly climbing down the stairwell behind me. I hear the ominous clip as the monster finds its purchase on an icy step, clop as the beast draws nearer.
I freeze and it’s more than cold and fatigue pinning me in place.
You can handle it, a different voice whispers in my ear.
But I’m afraid. I can hear the hooves descending.
Clip clop. Just above me. Clip clop. Getting closer.
It’s all right to be afraid. It’s smart to be afraid.
No. I can’t move my body, much less face the beast.
There’s a bellow. A heavy snort.
That’s all the fight you’ve got? the voice whispers, soft and chiding. I miss that voice.
I can’t do it.
I hear its horns scrape the ceiling. I feel the ice tremble. Hell above descends towards me.
Of course, there is no monster in this maze.
I drag myself up to crawl on hands and knees. I start moving again.
And from behind, the monster moans.
I brace myself against the wall and stand upright. I place one foot in front of the other.
I hear ice cracking. Something heavy slips and stumbles down a step.
My stride grows longer, my steps more confident. I push myself away from the wall—my legs have strength enough to continue.
The sound of hooves slows. The monster limps. I remember that a maze is no place for a Minotaur.
I turn back, look up. “Come on,” I say. “Just a little further.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe a tremendous thank you to Suzette Mayr, without whom this novel would never have been written. She mentored me, encouraged me, and even shut me in a room and forced me to write when the words wouldn’t come.
I’m also extremely grateful to Kit Dobson, my tireless editor, Aritha van Herk, who taught me how to describe my maze, and Graham Livesey, who made sure my maze wasn’t boring. And to my parents, Mitch and Christina Peters, thank you so much for your constant enthusiasm and encouragement on this project.
Thank you to the University of Calgary, for your tremendous creative writing program, and to the writing groups, both old and new, I found through those classes. The criticism provided by Holden Baker, Andrew Barbero, Dawn Bryan, Nicole Edge, Kye Kocher, Marc Lynch, Tom Miller, and Heather Osborne helped shape this novel along the way.
Finally, my biggest thank you goes to Emily Chin—my partner, my raison d’être, and the author I aspire to me. Thank you for your unflagging encouragement, for your willingness to read and edit every draft, and for pushing me to write this novel in the first place.
STEVEN PETERS was born in Winnipeg and currently works as a copywriter in Calgary. He earned his Master’s Degree in English at the University of Calgary, where he annoyed his creative writing instructors by sneaking fantasy into perfectly serious Canadian Literature. He has an abiding love for coffee, sweater vests, and Sir Patrick Stewart. 59 Glass Bridges is his first novel.
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