Spoiler
Chapter Two - finally!
This one's a bit rougher than Chapter One was, so any nitpicks would be very welcome. I'm also interested in hearing how I did as far as capturing Mason's (decided on a name at last) surprise when he firsts enters the Labyrinth.
This one's a bit rougher than Chapter One was, so any nitpicks would be very welcome. I'm also interested in hearing how I did as far as capturing Mason's (decided on a name at last) surprise when he firsts enters the Labyrinth.
My foot landed on metal.
I’m not sure what surprised me more - the fact that I was no longer inside the church, or the brightness of the white walls that enclosed me. A long hall spanned before me. Doors - metal doors, unlike the one I had come through, dotted its sides. Everything gleamed, and at first I found myself squinting; the ceiling was especially bright, giving me reason to believe that it was the light source, though I could not determine a specific location that might be giving off the light. The whole thing was glowing.
Still numb from shock and slightly bewildered, I turned around to exit back into the church. A blank wall stared back at me. It mocked me; “What were you expecting?” it seemed to say.
I felt my shock swelling into something much larger, much scarier. Before I could control myself, I felt my fists pounding on the wall, heard my voice crying out again and again until it became hoarse and my throat and hands began to pain. What was going on? Where was the door?
“You won’t be able to get out that way.” The voice behind me was marred by a slurred accent.
I spun around, something snapping inside me. The man in front of me was short and bent, clad in austere attire and barefoot. His face was middle-aged, coated with half-shaven stubbles; his hair dripped in greasy streaks onto his forehead; beneath them, dark eyes stared at me in perfunctory observation. His shoulders were folded forward and his back was hunched, giving me the impression that he was extremely tired. Eyelids creased, he regarded me.
“Where did the door go?” I said numbly.
“That’s a very good question,” he replied. I waited for a moment for him to say more, but was met with only silence from the man with the dark eyes and the thin lips. Our eyes met, mine wide with despair, his falling slowly into indifference. I opened my mouth.
“Is this part of the church?” I asked.
“Church?” he said. His brow furrowed, and his dark eyes fogged. “There is no church.”
“But there is – I came – here – through a…a door…”
“There is no church, just as there is no door.” The finality in his voice startled me. He turned his crooked back on me and began hobbling down the corridor. He passed three doorways before turning to the fourth one on his right and jerking it open; he considered me for a moment, then disappeared. The door closed behind him.
There was no church? What was he talking about? Hadn’t he experienced the same thing as I, been lured into the same trap? Anger at the church surged up in me, the kind of anger one might feel toward a friend who’d betrayed them. I had been drawn to the church, and it had taken me here, taken me to this place with strange men and bright ceilings.
I walked slowly down the corridor. Each door I passed looked exactly alike, just as impassive and metallic as the last. At last my footfalls came to a stop in front of one; it was the fourth door on the right. I grasped the doorknob, noticing that it was cold; how different it was from the door I had entered at the church, with the smooth handle and mysterious disposition. Somehow it did not seem mysterious anymore, because the enigma that lay behind it, the labyrinth I was inside, was so much larger and more immediate.
I pulled the door open and stepped inside. I was in a corridor, with a ceiling of light, pallid walls, and metal doors. Indeed, it was exactly like the one I had just come out of. Hopelessness began to settle in upon me.
But there must be a way out. One of these doors, one of these silver doors – one of them must lead back to the church. It must.
I was deceiving myself. I had looked into the abyss of the bent man’s eyes, and had uncovered there an absolute certainty, a binding resignation, that there was no way out, that both he and I were trapped.
Was there no hope?
I wondered vaguely what my grandparents would think if I never came back. No doubt that I had committed suicide (and I’ll admit that the thought had occurred to me more than once after my father’s death). How badly Grandfather would feel; he thought that my going to the church would help me, rejuvenate me. Now I might never come back.
The door closing behind me startled me out of my thoughts. The doors close on their own, I realized stupidly. Of course they do; what is the point of a labyrinth (I found myself beginning to attribute this word to the place I was in, for if not a labyrinth, what was it?) if one could see into all the possible passageways? If one could retrace one’s steps through the means of opened doors? This latter thought, I realized, might have seemed to me brilliant earlier, but I knew now that it was impossible.
A man was sitting against the wall opposite me. He had drunken, half-closed eyes, eyes cradled by a network of sagging wrinkles and a pair of overgrown eyebrows. The lower part of his face was obscured by silvery hair, which erupted like ash over his lips and chin and atop his ancient scalp; his head rested upon the wall, and his countenance was framed regally by the placid light of the ceiling. Red satin robes cloaked his body.
“Hello?” I said cautiously. The man did not stir. “Hello?” I tried again. Still the man did not reply, and his eyes, though only half-closed, did not suggest consciousness. Deciding that he was asleep and not wanting to wake him, I turned and began walking down the corridor. I don’t know why I walked; one door was just as good as another, as far as I knew. Still, it was a bit of a ways before I came to the door I decided to enter. The moment my hand touched its handle, a voice sounded behind me.
“Come.”
I froze.
“Please, mon ami. Come.”
Slowly, I retreated from the door. The man was now awake – though if he had ever been asleep, I don’t know – and was beckoning me with weary, withered hands. A corner of his mouth hung open, as if he didn’t have the strength to close it. I listened to the mechanical sound of my footfalls as they neared the man in robes and came to a rest in front of him. The man examined me with his tired, half-closed eyes, before sighing and leaning his head once more against the wall. “You just come,” he concluded.
I nodded.
“Well,” he began again, shifting his weight and looking up at me with renewed vigor, “now you come, what are you going to do?”
I considered this. “I’m going,” I said, aware that this man, like the last, might consider me foolish, “I’m going to try to find my way out of this place.”
The man laughed. He laughed long and thick and rough, and his eyes closed, and the wrinkled pockets and swells on his antiquated face danced in his amusement, and his chest ballooned, and the folds on the sides of his smiling mouth rose and sagged. Eventually he was attacked by a fit of coughing; he chuckled anticlimactically for a few seconds before his merriment subsided and his eyes were again fixed on mine. “That what they all say, that what everyone say.” He coughed some more; I waited. “That what I say, too, when I first come. ‘Je vais quitter,’ that what I say. ‘One of these doors, one of them has to go out,’ I say.” He paused his speech in silent contemplation.
“Do you find me foolish?” I asked. A stupid question, of course, but one I desperately wanted answered.
“Foolish?” he replied. He considered the question. “No,” he decided after a while, “no, not foolish. Hope is good thing. You need hope.” A pause. “What is your name?”
“Mason.”
“Last name?”
“Er, Venti.”
“Do you have any skills, Mason Venti?”
“Skills?”
He nodded.
“Well, I’m good at rowing, I guess.”
“Rowing!” the man exclaimed from behind his beard. He seemed to find this very interesting. “Why, rowing valued skill here.”
“Why?”
“At least, used to be.” He seemed to become sad. His lips drooped morosely.
“Yes, but why?”
The old man didn’t answer. Instead he closed his eyes and slouched back onto the the wall. He sat like this for a few minutes at least, and I began to consider leaving him there, when his eyelids suddenly popped open and his head rose. “Are you lonely?” he asked.
His sudden reawakening had startled me, and it thus took me a few seconds to digest the question. Nevertheless, when it came I considered it. “I don’t think so,” I told him.
“We not alone,” he said, ignoring my answer. “There are many more, like us.”
I thought of the man I had encountered earlier. I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet the people the old man was speaking of. Despite this, I gave the man the question he wanted. “Where are they?” I said.
“Easy to find.” There was a rag lying on the floor down the hall; he pointed to it. “Follow their signs.” With this the old man closed his eyes once more and promptly fell asleep. The murky silence echoed through the corridor.
Follow their signs. I walked over to the rag, standing over it. Did I really want to meet others here? What would they be like? An image of the man with the crooked back waded into my mind. No; that man had acted as if all hope was lost, and simply the fact that these other people had banded together was clearly a sign of determination. More likely than anything, these were people like me, people lost, people fixated on finding their way out. Surely these would be the kind of people I would find.
With this new goal in mind, I opened the door that the rag lay in front of. If the old man was right, there would be another rag - or, if not a rag, some other sign - showing which door to take. And there it was, the rag, a beacon against the white floor, not ten doors down the new hallway. I smiled to myself.
Eventually, following the rags, I arrived at a hallway that was different from the others: it was wider, longer. It did not end with a dead end or a turn, as every other hallway I’d been in had, but seemed to stretch onward in both directions as far as I could see. A rag lay splayed about on the floor in front of a door next to the one opposite me. I had an odd feeling that this would be it, that only a rag and a door lay now between me and my destination. Oddly, I did not feel nervous; instead, I was occupied only by a faint curiosity. I took a step forward. I would be welcome, wouldn’t I? Did I not already decide that the refugees behind this door would be like me, that they would be friendly, purposeful?
I reached the door, careful not to tread on the rag. There was nothing to hold me back now. I reached down, found the doorknob, and pulled the door open.
Please please PLEASE keep this up!! I want to read more!!
