by Gene Wolfe
I nodded, just to show Howie I was listening.
“She was a whole lot younger than him, nineteen or twenty. But she loved him—that’s what I always heard. Probably he was good to her, and so on. Gentle. You know?”
I said a lot of young women like that preferred older men.
“I guess. You know where Clinton is? Little place about fifteen miles over. There had been a certain amount of trouble around Clinton going on for years, and people were concerned about it. I don’t believe I said this Jackson was from Clinton, but he was. His dad had run a store there and had a farm. The one brother got the farm and the next oldest the store. This Jackson, he just got some money, but it was enough for him to come here and buy that place. It was about a hundred acres then.
“Anyhow, they caught him over in Clinton. One of those chancy things. It was winter, and dark already, and there’d been a little accident where a car hit a school bus that still had quite a few kids riding home. Nobody was killed as far as I heard or even hurt bad, but a few must have had bloody noses and so forth, and you couldn’t get by on the road. Just after the deputy’s car got there this Jackson pulled up, and the deputy told him to load some of the kids in the back and take them to the Doctor’s.
“Jackson said he wouldn’t, he had to get back home. The deputy told him not to be a damned fool. The kids were hurt and he’d have to go back to Clinton anyhow to get on to Mill Road, because it would be half the night before they got that bus moved.
“Jackson still wouldn’t do it, and went to try and turn his pickup around. From the way he acted, the deputy figured there was something wrong. He shined his flash in the back, and there was something under a tarp there. When he saw that, he hollered for Jackson to stop and went over and jerked the tarp away. From what I hear, now he couldn’t do that because of not having a warrant, and if he did, Jackson would have got off. Back then, nobody had heard of such foolishness. He jerked that tarp away, and there was a girl underneath, and she was dead. I don’t even know what her name was. Rosa or something like that, I guess. They were Italians that had come just a couple of years before.” Howie didn’t give Italians a long I, but there had been a trifling pause while he remembered not to. “Her dad had a little shoe place,” he said. “The family was there for years after.
“Jackson was arrested, and they took him up to the county seat. I don’t know if he told them anything or not. I think he didn’t. His wife came up to see him, and then a day or so later the sheriff came to the house with a search warrant. He went all through it, and when he got to going through the cellars, one of the doors was locked. He asked her for the key, but she said she didn’t have it. He said he’d have to bust down the door, and asked her what was in there. She said she didn’t know, and after a while it all came out—I mean, all as far as her understanding went.
“She told him that door had been shut ever since she and Jackson had been married. He’d told her he felt a man was entitled to some privacy, and that right there was his private place, and if she wanted a private place of her own she could have it, but to stay out of his. She’d taken one of the upstairs bedrooms and made it her sewing room.
“Nowadays they just make a basement and put everything on top, but these old houses have cellars with walls and rooms, just like upstairs. The reason is that they didn’t have the steel beams we use to hold everything up, so they had to build masonry walls underneath; if you built a couple of these, why you had four rooms. The foundations of all these old houses are stone.”
I nodded again.
“This one room had a big, heavy door. The sheriff tried to knock it down, but he couldn’t. Finally he had to telephone around and get a bunch of men to help him. They found three girls in there.”
“Dead?” I asked Howie.
“That’s right. I don’t know what kind of shape they were in, but not very good, I guess. One had been gone over a year. That’s what I heard.”
As soon as I said it, I felt like a half-wit; but I was thinking of all the others, of John Gacy and Jack the Ripper and the dead black children of Atlanta, and I said, “Three? That was all he killed?”
“Four,” Howie told me, “counting the Italian girl in the truck. Most people thought it was enough. Only there was some others missing too, you know, in various places around the state, so the sheriff and some deputies tore everything up looking for more bodies. Dug in the yard and out in the fields and so on.”
“But they didn’t find any more?”
“No, they didn’t. Not then,” Howie said. “Meantime, Jackson was in jail like I told you. He had kind of reddish hair, so the paper called him Redbeard. Because of Bluebeard, you know, and him not wanting his wife to look inside that cellar room. They called the house Redbeard’s Castle.
“They did things a whole lot quicker in those times, and it wasn’t much more than a month before he was tried. Naturally, his wife had to get up in the stand.”
I said, “A wife can’t be forced to testify against her husband.”
“She wasn’t testifying against him, she was testifying for him. What a good man he was, and all that. Who else would do it? Of course when she’d had her say, the district attorney got to go to work on her. You know how they do.
“He asked her about that room and she told him just about what I told you. Jackson, he said he wanted a place for himself and told her not to go in there. She said she hadn’t even known the door was locked till the sheriff tried to open it. Then the district attorney said didn’t you know he was asking for your help, that your husband was asking for your help, that the whole room there was a cry for help, and he wanted you to go in there and find those bodies so he wouldn’t have to kill again?”
Howie fell silent for a mile or two. I tossed the butt of my cigar out the window and sat wondering if I would hear any more about those old and only too commonplace murders.
When Howie began talking again, it was as though he had never stopped. “That was the first time anybody from around here had heard that kind of talk, I think. Up till then, I guess everybody thought if a man wanted to get caught he’d just go to the police and say he did it. I always felt sorry for her, because of that. She was—I don’t know—like an owl in daylight. You know what I mean?”
I didn’t, and I told him so.
“The way she’d been raised, a man meant what he said. Then too, the man was the boss. Today when they get married there isn’t hardly a woman that promises to obey, but back then they all did it. If they’d asked the minister to leave that out, most likely he’d have told them he wouldn’t perform the ceremony. Now the rules were all changed, only nobody’d told her that.
“I believe she took it pretty hard, and of course it didn’t do any good, her getting in the stand or the district attorney talking like that to her either. The jury came back in about as quick as they’d gone out, and they said he was guilty, and the judge said sentencing would be next day. He was going to hang him, and everybody knew it. They hanged them back then.”
“Sure,” I said.
“That next morning his wife came to see him in the jail. I guess he knew she would, because he asked the old man that swept out to lend him a razor and so forth. Said he wanted to look good. He shaved and then he waited till he heard her step.”
Howie paused to let me comment or ask a question. I thought I knew what was coming, and there didn’t seem to be much point in saying anything.
“When he heard her coming, he cut his throat with the razor blade. The old man was with her, and he told the paper about it afterwards. He said they came up in front of the cell, and Jackson was standing there with blood all running down his shirt. He really was Redbeard for true then. After a little bit, his knees gave out and he fell down in a heap.
“His wife tried to sell the farm, but nobody wanted that house. She moved back with her folks, quit calling herself Sarah Jackson. She was a good looking woman, and the land brought her some money. After a year or so she got married again and h
ad a baby. Everybody forgot, I suppose you could say, except maybe for the families of the girls that had died. And the house, it’s still standing back there. You just saw it yourself.”
Howie pronounced the final words as though the story were over and he wanted to talk of something else, but I said, “You said there were more bodies found later.”
“Just one. Some kids were playing in that old house. It’s funny, isn’t it, that kids would find it when the sheriff and all those deputies didn’t.”
“Where was it?”
“Upstairs. In her sewing room. You remember I told you how he’d said she could have a room to herself too? Of course, the sheriff had looked in there, but it hadn’t been there when he looked. It was her, and she’d hung herself from a hook in the wall. Who do you think killed her?”
I glanced at him to see if he were serious. “I thought you said she killed herself?”
“That’s what they would have said, back when she married Jackson. But who killed her now? Jackson—Redbeard—when he killed those other girls and cut his throat like that? Or was it when he loved her? Or that district attorney? Or the sheriff? Or the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of the girls Jackson got? Or her other husband, maybe some things he said to her? Or maybe it was just having her baby that killed her—baby blues they call it. I’ve heard that too.”
“Postnatal depression,” I said. I shook my head. “I don’t suppose it makes much difference now.”
“It does to me,” Howie said. “She was my mother.” He pushed the lighter into the dashboard and lit a cigarette. “I thought I ought to tell you before somebody else does.”
For a moment I supposed that we had left the highway and circled back along some secondary road. To our right was another ruined gate, another outdated house collapsing slowly among young trees.
A Solar Labyrinth
MAZES MAY BE MORE ANCIENT THAN MANKIND. Certainly the cavemen constructed them by laying down football-sized stones, and perhaps by other means as well, now lost to us; the hill-forts of neolithic Europe were guarded by tangled dry ditches. Theseus followed a clew—a ball of thread—through the baffling palace of Minos, thus becoming the first in what threatens to be an infinite series of fictional detectives. The Fayre Rosamund dropped her embroidery with her needle thrust through it, but forgot the yarn in her pocket, thus furnishing Queen Eleanor’s knights with the clue they required to solve Hampton Court Maze.
Of late, few mazes have been built, and those that have been, have been walled, for the most part, with cheap and unimaginative hedges. Airplanes and helicopters permit rampant mar-sports to photograph new mazes from above, and the pictures let armchair adventurers solve them with a pencil. Gone, it might seem, are the great days of monsters, maidens, and amazement.
But not quite. I have heard that a certain wealthy citizen has not only designed and built a new maze, but has invented a new kind of maze, perhaps the first since the end of the Age of Myth. To preserve his privacy I shall call this new Daedalus Mr. Smith. To frustrate the aerial photographers in their chartered Cessnas, I shall say only that his maze is in the Adirondacks.
On a manicured green lawn stand—well separated for the most part—a collection of charming if improbable objects. There are various obelisks; lamp posts from Vienna, Paris, and London, as well as New York; a pillar-box, also from London; fountains that splash for a time and then subside; a retired yawl, canted now upon the reef of grass but with masts still intact; the standing trunk of a dead tree overgrown with roses; many more. The shadows of these objects form the walls of an elaborate and sophisticated maze.
It is, obviously, a maze that changes from hour to hour, and indeed from minute to minute. Not so obviously, it is one that can be solved only at certain times and is insoluble at noon, when the shadows are shortest. It is also, of course, a maze from which the explorer can walk free whenever he chooses.
And yet it is said that most of them—most adults, at least—do not. In the early morning, while the shadows of the hills still veil his lawn, Mr. Smith brings the favored guest to the point that will become the center of the maze. The grass is still fresh with dew, and there is no sound but the chirping of birds. For five minutes or so the two men (or as it may be, the man and the woman) stand and wait. Perhaps they smoke a cigarette. The sun’s red disc appears above the mist-shrouded treetops, the fountains jet their crystal columns, the birds fall silent, and the shadowy suites spring into existence, a sketch in the faded black ink of God.
Mr. Smith begins to tread his maze, but he invites his guest to discover paths of his own. The guest does so, amused at first, then more serious. Imperceptibly, the shadows move. New corridors appear; old ones close, sometimes with surprising speed. Soon Mr. Smith’s path joins that of his guest (for Mr. Smith knows his maze well), and the two proceed together, the guest leading the way. Mr. Smith speaks of his statue of Diana, a copy of one in the Louvre; the image of Tezcatlipaca, the Toltec sun-god, is authentic, having been excavated at Teotihuacan. As he talks, the shadows shift, seeming almost to writhe like feathered Quetzalcoatl with the slight rolling of the lawn. Mr. Smith steps away, but for a time his path nearly parallels his guest’s.
“Do you see that one there?” says the guest. “In another minute or two, when it’s shorter, I’ll be able to get through there.”
Mr. Smith nods and smiles.
The guest waits, confidently now surveying the wonderful pattern of dark green and bright. The shadow he has indicated—that of a Corinthian column, perhaps—indeed diminishes ; but as it does another, wheeling with the wheeling sun, falls across the desired path. Most adult guests do not escape until they are rescued by a passing cloud. Some, indeed, refuse such rescue.
Often Mr. Smith invites groups of children to inspect his maze, their visits timed so they can be led to its center. There, inlaid upon a section of crumbling wall that at least appears ancient, he points out the frowning figure of the Minotaur, a monster that, as he explains, haunts the shadows. From far away—but not in the direction of the house—the deep bellowing of a bull interrupts him. (Perhaps a straying guest might discover stereo speakers hidden in the boughs of certain trees; perhaps not.) Mr. Smith says he can usually tell in advance which children will enjoy his maze. They are more often boys than girls, he says, but not much more often. They must be young, but not too young. Glasses help. He shows a picture of his latest Ariadne, a dark-haired girl of nine.
Yet he is fair to all the children, giving each the same instructions, the same encouragement. Some reject his maze out of hand, wandering off to examine the tilted crucifix or the blue-dyed water in the towering Torricelli barometer, or to try (always without success) to draw Arthur’s sword from its stone. Others persevere longer, threading their way between invisible walls for an hour or more.
But always, as the shadow of the great gnomon creeps toward the sandstone XII set in the lawn, the too-old, too-young, insufficiently serious, and too-serious drift away, leaving only Mr. Smith and one solitary child still playing in the sunshine.
Love, Among the Corridors
HER OWN FOOTFALLS ECHOED AFTER HER, reverberating from stone floor to ceiling of stone, so that she felt herself pursued, though she knew herself to be the pursuer. The ticking of the clocks told the footsteps of time.
The walls were lined with pictures and carvings, with dusty furniture and old vases bellied like the cupids on a Valentine. She looked at all and walked on. She could not bear to think of where she had begun to walk (for that was nothingness) or where she went (for that was to the grave).
When it had grown late, and all the windows of the palace were darkened by more than ivy, she saw, among the other statues and figures, a Harlequin cast of bronze standing upon a marble pedestal. There was nothing about him, perhaps, to take her interest, and yet take it he did; and with one small, white hand, she touched him.
At once it seemed the sun had broken through the ivy and the evening. An aureate ray pierced the wind
ow nearest the statue and touched it too, so that she saw immediately that, cobwebbed though it was, it was not a statue at all but a living Harlequin, dominoed and costumed as in the old plays.
When the sunlight had faded—as it did in an instant—the ruddy glow of health remained in the Harlequin’s cheeks and the light of life in his eyes.
He moved and sneezed at the dust, raising a great, gray cloud of it; then sneezing again, leaped from his pedestal. She started back in fear.
“What is your name?” he said, wiping his nose upon his sleeve.
And she, “Amor …”
“I too. But who are you, and how came you to walk in this palace?”
Taking courage, she told him, “That is the question no one can answer. Rather, recount to me how you, who appeared but an image a moment ago, are now a man.”
“By stepping down,” he said. “At least, that is how it seems to me when I reflect upon it. For a long time—oh, very long, longer than your whole dear life, I feel sure—I stood …” He hesitated.
“Why, right up there, wasn’t it? Right up on that stone block, that seems so ordinary now. Ten thousand times, at least, I watched the sun come in at those windows and go out, and Night come with her cats and wolves. Many a hundred walkers have I seen go up and down this corridor before yourself, my darling. It seems to me now that at any moment I might have stepped down, and yet I did not, nor even thought on it. And now it seems to me that I might mount up again and pose as I did before, and yet that would be too laborious for me to stand. But tell me more; who are you, and who are your father and mother?”
“My name you know,” Amor said. “But let me confess at once, lest you should discover it in time after, that I was born out of wedlock. The noble Chivalry was my father, and Poetry my mother.”
“Ah, brave old Chivalry.” Harlequin cocked his head, finding as other men do that to concentrate his thoughts it was needful to make them run to one side. “I saw him often, long since, but not for many a year now.”