Mirror Maze j-4

by William Bayer

  "Do you think that makes it all right? Just give it back and everyone forgives?"

  She shrugged again.

  "You're a pretty strange girl."

  "Think so?"

  "That's how you style yourself." He stared at her. "Isn't it?"

  She touched one breast, then wriggled slightly in her chair. He found the gesture pathetic. Cornered, desperate, she was trying to extricate herself the only way she knew by seduction. Still, feeble as it was, the attempt told him he had engaged her. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the Omega mock-up, tossed it into the air, caught it in his fist.

  "What did you do with it?"

  "If I tell you, you won't believe me."

  "Try me."

  "I smashed it into pieces, then worked the crumbs into a painting, the one at Erica's."

  He believed her. After seeing what she had downstairs, he knew nothing she could say would surprise him.

  "The guy who killed Dietz killed him for that. How does that make you feel?" She looked at him, stunned; she didn't answer. "What's the matter?" "On TV you acted like you thought I killed Dietz,"

  "You got me mixed up with the reporter. Thing is, the guy who killed Dietz will kill you, too, if he finds you. He could have been the one who showed up this morning."

  She pouted. "Right, I should be ' grateful' it was you instead."

  "Tell me something, Gelsey?"

  "What?"

  "Why?"

  "Why what?"

  "Why do you drug guys and rob them? If you aren't interested in their money, what are you interested in?" She shrugged again. "Trophies."

  "Trophies of what?"

  "My adventures, you know.. "No, I don't. Tell me about it?" She smiled scornfully. "Why should I? What's it to you?

  Are you some kind of cop-shrink or something?"

  "I want to understand it. Why did you put all those guys to sleep?

  Explain it to me… if you can."

  "Oh, I can explain it!" "So explain," he demanded. She didn't answer.

  She's ashamed. "You wanted to humiliate them, right?" She smiled. "Maybe something like that."

  She looked uncomfortable. Another probing question and he felt she might clam up. He didn't want that, but he was getting tired of her nonsense.

  He decided to give her a little smack.

  "You're a clever little actress," he said, contemptuously.

  She snickered. "I don't see myself that way."

  "How do you see yourself?"

  "I'm an artist."

  "Right"-he stood-"a pretty good one, too-not that I know all that much about it. So, tell me-why's the Great Artist going around drugging guys and robbing them? What'd you do-show them some leg, a little tit, get them going that way then play them for fools? You've been trying to do that to me ever since I showed up here, squeezing yourself into that slinky little dress, then playing peekaboo with me down in the maze."

  "Don't flatter yourself, Janek!" Their eyes locked. He thought: She's ready to fall. I can take her down anytime. "One,,'ve made a study of your technique," he said. thing struck me."

  "Oh? What's that?"

  "The men you go after-you always give them the option. You never ask to go up to their rooms. Always wait till they ask you. That's when your act gets real good. ', I really shouldn't, you being married and all…

  And then, of course, they ask you again. So, when you get up there and squeeze a few KO drops into their drinks, it's all their fault. Isn't it? Their fault. Never yours." During his attack, he observed her growing progressively more angry.

  Now, suddenly, she turned away. But he continued, relentless.

  "Oh, you're so much purer than Diana's other girls." He spoke with studied scorn. "You don't care about money. Uh-uh. It's the head trip that turns you on. Prey on guys' weaknesses. Put them to sleep.

  Then shame them with your mirror-writing messages. Know what I think, Gelsey? I think Diana and the others are the purer ones. I detest what they do, but I understand it. Money drives people to do a lot of things, legal and illegal. But to mind-fuck someone just because it gives you a buzz-I've got no respect for that at at all."

  She shrieked at him: "I don't give a shit about your respect!"

  "Angry, aren't we? Maybe because I'm right. Because at bottom you don't respect yourself Could that be it? Hmmmm?"

  She gasped, outraged. Still he kept at her:

  "I met Diana. A cold woman who cares only for herself, who enjoys taking advantage of people, enjoys hurting them, too. But you-you're an artist!

  That's the part I don't get. Have you any idea what a privilege it is to have talent?" He walked over to her paintings, looked at them. "Last night, when I saw your Leering Man portrait, I was actually moved. Ever since I've been asking myself. How could the person who painted that do the things she does? Why isn't the art enough for her? Why does she have to hurt people? Destroy?"

  Wanting to sound more sympathetic, he altered his tone:

  "Remember Kirstin Reese? She liked you, said you were a special person.

  That kind of person doesn't do those kinds of things. Unless..

  "Unless what?"

  "The only answer I come up with is that you hurt a lot inside." He looked closely at her. "I can see it in your eyes. You need help.

  You're crying out for it. That's what your painting says. Your bar adventures, too. They all say the same thing: ' me! Please help me before I break! ' "

  She stared at him with something akin to the smirk she'd worn before, but he could see that it was a masking smirk. He peered back at her with all the concern he felt, and then he watched her break, slowly, before his eyes. Her smirk slipped away, her eyes enlarged, she changed position, became awkward in the chair. The vulnerability he'd observed in the police sketches now showed itself without confidence.

  She looked to be on the verge of tears. The troubled little girl stood revealed.

  He didn't want to hit her again so soon, but he knew no other way. He thought: Rub her face in it. Make her see! "Kirstin's dead. Did you know?" She brought her hand up to her mouth. "Tortured first. By the same guy who killed Dietz."

  "But why?"

  "To make her tell him where you live."

  "She didn't know!" "He thought she did. Anyway, she knew how to find Diana. After he got that out of her he killed her. Which is just what he'll do when he finds you, especially when he discovers you smashed up his precious chip."

  She'll cry now. When she does she'll turn away. That'll be all right.

  But Gelsey surprised him. She didn't turn, just stared at him and began to weep without lowering her eyes. It was an extraordinary thing to witness. And he believed he understood why she was doing it-she wanted to show him her pain.

  Later he would not remember how long he watched before he moved toward her and took her hand. It was a paternal gesture and she responded to it, leaning tentatively against him.

  Looking down at her, feeling her body tremble, he asked himself what the hell he thought he was doing. This was not the way he dealt with criminals. But then, he realized, Gelsey was not like any criminal he had ever met.

  After Gelsey let him see her cry, she didn't care what else he saw. She thought: In some strange way he owns me now.

  And it also felt good to lean against him, feel his warmth and strength.

  She had never touched Dr. Z-shrinks, she'd read, weren't supposed to touch patients, although sometimes shrinks transgressed. But this tall man beside her with the searching eyes was no more a shrink than he was a mark. She wasn't sure yet what he was. A detective-what kind of man was that?

  "Ever try and imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a drugged drink?" he asked her. "The terror as you're going down?" "I know all about terror," she said. She didn't want to listen to a fucking lecture. She could give him lessons in terror if she wanted to.

  "We're not talking about you," he said. "We're talking about your victims." He paused. "Oh, I get it-you just feel
sorry for yourself."

  She peered at him. She knew she should put up a defense. But her heart wasn't in it. He had made her cry… so what was the use?

  "Who else is going to feel sorry for me?" she asked.

  "Jesus!" He stood, offered her his hand. "Come with me. "

  "Where?"

  "Get up! Come on!"

  She stood, then allowed him to draw her across the room to the area where a dozen unframed mirror panels were stored in a wooden rack. He led her to within a foot of the first mirror.

  "Look at yourself."

  She turned away.

  "Go on! Look!" He placed his hand on top of her head, then gently forced her to peer into the glass. "Instead of playing with mirrors, why don't you use one once in a while? Take a good, hard look."

  She glanced quickly at herself and then at his image in the mirror.

  "Not me! You! Why's that so difficult?"

  She squeezed her eyes shut.

  "Look at who you are, Gelsey. You might see something you don't like.

  Then you might want to do something about it. You might want to change."

  She opened her eyes- She felt his eyes on her as she gazed at herself.

  Then she mouthed some words.

  "Speak up. I can't hear you."

  "I did try to do something about it," she moaned. She stared at him and wondered: Does he like me? Does he like me even a little bit?

  Janek listened as she told him about a psychoanalyst she'd gone to in Manhattan, a wise, sympathetic, elderly man who'd tried his best to help her. For a long time, she d, she didn't tell Dr. Zimmerman about her drug-robbery activities, confessing only that she picked up men in bars and went home with them for sex. When she finally told him the truth, he was shocked, but still willing to help.

  "We were going to get to the bottom of it," she said. "Then the next time I came in a woman was there. She told me Dr. Z had died of a heart attack. She offered to continue the analysis. I never went back."

  She turned to Janek. "I worshiped him," she said. "I thought he could be … " She turned away, embarrassed.

  "What?" he asked.

  She smiled, then shook her head. "My good father," she said quietly.

  "The one I never had."

  She made coffee for him. Watching her prepare it, he wondered: Will she try to spike it? Then he thought: We're way beyond that now.

  They sat facing each other, sipping from mugs. Both her parents, she told him, were dead. Her father had been employed at Richmond, where he'd managed and kept up the fun house. Then he'd quarreled with management and quit to go on the road, driving a rig, hauling a fun-house-on wheels to carnivals all over the Northeast. His mobile fun house contained a mirror maze, too, a puny one made of a few Mylar panels.

  "He only cared about the maze downstairs," she said. "He spent all his free time working on it. Spent all his money on it, too." "Funny," Janek said, "I used to come out here as a kid, but I never heard anything about it."

  "It wasn't open to the public. it was just for us. For him."

  A private mirror maze: Janek was astonished. "He built that whole thing just for himself?" "You have no idea how big it is," she said. "You went through less than half of it."

  Clearly it had been her father's obsession, just as the image of the Leering Man was hers.

  "My mother worked at Richmond, too," she said. "She managed the tunnel of love."

  "I used to ride through there."

  She nodded. "So did I. With my father… "What was wrong with him?"

  She looked away.

  "Did he abuse you?"

  She nodded again, then gestured toward the floor.

  "In the maze?"

  She stared past him. "It's an ugly story," she said.

  She led him to her sleeping area, rolled up a rug beside her bed, exposed a trapdoor beneath. do "This," she said, raising the door, "is the secret way down."

  He nodded casually even as it occurred to him that by offering to show him this secret way, she was inviting him to enter her world.

  He followed as she descended a ladder to a series of narrow catwalks.

  She told him to stand still while she went to a switchboard to turn on the lights. He stood in darkness, until, suddenly, the entire maze was set ablaze. And then, for the third time that morning, he was astounded.

  The mirrored ceilings were transparent. The labyrinth lay bare beneath, all its intricate winding corridors revealed.

  Gelsey moved back to his side and began to point things out:

  "There's where you came in. You wandered through there, the Corridor.

  See! There's the row of trick mirrors that took you apart. And there's the row that put you off balance. Over there's the Chamber.

  See the blue room?" Janek nodded. "That's where I was sitting."

  "I figured you were hiding in a little room somewhere. But why weren't you reflected in all the mirrors?"

  "Ha! You want to know our tricks!"

  He shrugged. "If it's a secret..

  But she was eager to explain: "First, you probably figured this out, the ceilings are made of one-way glass. When you're down there they look like mirrors. From up here they're transparent-when the lights are on below." He nodded. "Now you want to know why you only saw me in some of the mirrors and yourself alone in others." She smiled. "The maze mirrors, the ones that reflect a visitor, are all set at sixty or one hundred twenty degrees. The ones where you saw me, too-there're fewer of those-are angled to one another at forty-five degrees. So those are the only ones in which you can see a person sitting in the blue room.

  One of them, of course, isn't even a mirror-it's a plain sheet of glass.

  But down there there's no way to tell."

  He thought he understood it. "Did your father figure that out?"

  She shook her head. "Dad was smart, but he wasn't an inventor. He played around with other people's ideas. Some nineteenth-century guy came up with the notion of interlocking sets of differently angled mirrors. Dad discovered it when he researched maze patents. Then he built it."

  "My father was a builder, too," Janek said. "He could repair anything.

  He repaired accordions for a living." She peered at him closely, as if she thought she'd finally found a link.

  "So," he asked, "how did you make yourself disappear?"

  She giggled. "That's called the Blue Room Effect. If we move over there, I'll show you how it works."

  They moved along the catwalks to a spot above the blue chamber. Gelsey pointed out that the little room was actually divided on the diagonal by a large mirror. She explained how, sitting on a stool at one side, she could control the large mirror with an electric switch, making it move back and forth. When the mirror was inside the chamber, it reflected her where she sat, projecting her image throughout the maze into any other mirror angled to it at 45 degrees. But when it was retracted, she would seem to disappear, and the chamber would appear empty.

  There was more. She guided him above other sections, first to a winding, tortuous snakelike sequence of mirrors called the Fragmentation Serpent, where, she told him, the visitor, entering the serpent's mouth, faced a parabolic mirror that turned him upside down. Then onto a vast section that took up more than half the building-her father's masterpiece, the Great Hall of Infinite Deceptions.

  It was here, she told Janek, that her father had abused her. The Great Hall had been their love nest.

  "He would bring me down on rainy afternoons. Richmond was always closed when it rained. Then he'd make love to me. I'd see us reflected everywhere. At first I didn't know how to escape, then I learned to enter mirror world." She looked down, shook her head. "Once inside the glass nothing could touch me," She stared at Janek. "Trouble is, mirror world wasn't as safe as I thought. There was a monster wandering around in there."

  What's she talking about?

  "I saw it now and then. My father called it the Minotaur. You know, the mythological creature, half-man, half-bull, that sup
posedly lived in the center of the ancient Minoan maze. Dr. Z was going to help me figure out what the Minotaur was. Then he died." She shrugged sadly.

  "Want to go down and walk through the parts you missed?" As he followed her he asked himself why he was feeling so warm toward her. She had done terrible things. She had drugged, robbed and frightened people. Clearly she was dangerous. And he knew that if she didn't get help, she would most likely do such things again. But he couldn't make himself think of her as a twisted, antisocial offender.

  Rather he saw her as a deeply troubled person, compelled by an irresistible impulse. He now understood the Leering Man portrait, and all the preliminary sketches and paintings he'd seen up in her loft, as a struggle against the forces that drove her to the bars.

  He hesitated when he saw the gym rope. My Tarzan days are over. When she reached the floor, in a kind of backstage area between two segments of the maze, she seemed to sense his reluctance to shin down. She called to him that if he preferred, he could descend by a steel ladder built into the wall.

  He took the ladder. When he reached the floor he found himself in an oddly shaped space surrounded by narrow angled black walls. A few moments later, one of the walls folded open. Gelsey appeared in the doorway and reached for his hand.

  "Come," she said. "I'll lead you."

  Beneath the mirrored ceilings, he could see nothing above except strange, confusing multiple reflections. The clarity he had obtained on the catwalks-the overview that had allowed him to comprehend the maze, follow the paths of its numerous, intricate corridors-was supplanted now by bafflement. He had no idea where they were or where they were heading. And she confused him more when, every so often, she would push at a mirror, cause it to spring open like a door, pull him into another backstage area, then reenter the maze through another door mirrored on its maze-side face.

  She seemed to know every corner of the labyrinth, every secret entrance and exit. And although each mirror looked the same to him, to her each was evidently unique.

  "I think I liked it better upstairs," he said.

  "Relax," she goaded. "You'll have more fun."

  He tried, but he didn't experience the maze as fun. He found it painful.

  But then, of course, he realized, bafflement was not his favorite state-of-being.