The Secret Book of Paradys (96 page)

He could burn his uncle’s letter – even burn down the mansion, if necessary. Or he could merely leave at once and never come back.

But he was sane, surely, that was the whole trouble, and his sanity insisted he investigate the maze. Smara would not need to begin to kill again for some days. Even if it took him a week to return … And then again, would he not anyway reemerge into Paradise at the hour, minute, or moment he had left it? Pieces of the complex wandering letter had seemed to tell him this.

Felion walked across the floor, toward the white wall. It came nearer and nearer. And then he was against it. He touched the surface with his finger, and it was
cold
.

Holding the torch high, the knife in his right hand – he had been left-handed but trained himself otherwise – he entered the arched opening.

At once, everything was altered. Became absolute. Although he could still see the entry point behind him, the wall of ice towered up and up and disappeared into an indescribable nothingness above that was not mist or space – or anything.

The labyrinth was freezing, like a winter, described to Felion in bits of rotten books. The ice breathed out a faint vapor that swirled around the nasturtium tatter of the torch.

There was a smell he recognized, if only from a laboratory. Not chemical. What had it been called?

The ground was like muddied glass. (He was reminded of the shattered bottle.)

Sounds came, rushes, like seas, like … blood moving in the ear. And he felt a slight vertigo. But then that would be proper, if the balance of matter had been disturbed.

He moved forward, following the left-hand turnings of the wall.

He believed in the labyrinth now, as he had not done when outside. He believed that it was real, and apt, and led to somewhere. His thoughts of Smara dwindled. The archway had vanished out of sight.

The first specter – hallucination, vision, element of elsewhere – spun suddenly at him, it seemed from the wall. He had not anticipated this, and despite his uncle’s warning (
The labyrinth may open randomly to show you one other place or time
) had not understood what the notation might mean.

It was like a surge of the fog that clung about Paradise, but in this fog were lights, shapes, voices. Felion heard a frightful shriek, but he had grown used to shrieking. Then the sight of women was before him, ugly women and one very beautiful in a dark fur cap, or else her hair was fur. Another of the women had been struck down. She lay full-length, and the beautiful one bent abruptly to her, touching gently – and then the mirage was gone.

Felion had stopped. He shouted, “Ah! Uncle!” And then, softly, “O my prophetic soul!” And then he grinned. And saw his grinning shadow reflected from the torch into the ice wall.

Stupid to hesitate. He had had the warning and not heeded it. But the
thing
had done him no harm. No, this was not the Minotaur of the labyrinth.

Felion strode on. He whistled a tune of the bars and dives of Paradise. The walls obligingly caught it up hollowly and it echoed back to him.

The second vision came quite mildly. It was like an aperture, filling the
area between the walls, the ice-rink floor, and the illimitable ceiling. He saw a dry, tawny lawn, grass, without mist, rising up to a weird house of glass. And in the glass an enormous vine was growing with bursting black fruit.

He moved toward it, and wondered for an instant, if this was the exact exit point, but certainly he had not come far enough.

And the picture smeared, crumpled, and gave way. And there the labyrinth of ice went on.

“Smara,” Felion said.

He looked back. Could he
turn
back now?

Then he cursed his uncle, an awkward obscenity, for Paradise no longer had a God, a religion, or any regularized views of sexuality, to form the substance of oaths.

Felion walked on. He did not whistle.

He came around a turn, and a silver insectile web hung across the labyrinth. In the web a woman sat, her tongue protruding, and snakes for hair.

She was gone in three seconds.

And instead, he found he had reached the heart of the maze.

The heart was empty.

An oval region, with one way in from the convolutions of the ice, and a second way out.

In the floor was a stealthy mark, but it only looked as if something had scratched the surface, without intent. It was not a rune, a message, a cipher.

Felion raised the torch high again.

He recalled the woman who painted and would drink herself to death. He did not think she was one of those he had glimpsed in the hallucinatory visions. But now, standing in the womb of the ice, he credited that other world beyond, which his uncle had named, as if jestingly,
Paradis
.

Felion spent a few minutes at the core of the maze (the empty heart), and then he went on through the outleading arch, and continued, keeping to the left-hand wall.

Felion was primed now for further demons, but nothing occurred.

Nothing occurred until he came around one of the twines of ice and saw in front of him an arch of purest nothing.

It was not like the etheric tapering-off of the ceiling. It was a sort of omission from sight. He did not like to look at it. He looked away.

Here was the end. The
egress
.

Perhaps it was all a joke. A hoax.

Perhaps the labyrinth opened into hell, whatever hell was. Or heaven. Or into colossal snows. Or the sea.

The exit could not be relied on. His will might not be able to control it.

Felion’s will was strong. He and Smara had wills of iron and flame.

He glared again at the vacant arch and said aloud, “Her house. The painter who inherited from my uncle.
There
.”

And as he said it he thought,
Maybe, in this other world, there are no houses. Maybe they drift in the air
–

But the archway convulsed. It filled.

He saw a room, in shadow.

And with a howl, Felion ran between the walls, and out into that room. While as he did so, the torch puffed into darkness.

The house of the artist.

He had made it be, at the tunnel’s end.

Everything about the room (he deduced it was a room) was totally uncanny to him. It was not that the furnishings and accoutrements were so alien. But no mist hung over it, and above a skylight showed rich, black night.

An easel of metal stood in the room. And elsewhere were stacked canvases, and there, a long table littered with paints, and all an artist’s accessories.

He had accomplished his objective.

Felion kept still, and felt after the psyche of the house. The house of the woman who painted and drank. Who was the heir to his uncle’s fortune in this other world.

And the house was like a casket, chock-full of nothing. Empty, like the labyrinth’s heart.

Felion looked up.

And in the black pane of glass, he could see –
stars
.

Stars.

Felion kneeled on the floor of the studio in the parallel world of Paradis. He prayed to something that had no name.

Later, he investigated the room, but only superficially. He did not move anything from its appointed place.

When he eventually looked around for the way back into the labyrinth – this first time he was quickly satisfied, entirely overwhelmed – he could not see it.

But when he beat his head against the wall, crying, “Smara – Smara –” the wall gave way, and there it was.

As he stepped through, shuddering and hot with fear, the great cold came, and the dead torch – which all this time he had kept in one hand, the knife in the other – mysteriously revived.

He ran through the labyrinth, then. He ran through the heart of it, up against the right-hand wall.

And when he sprang out again into the cavern under the mansion of his uncle, he screamed.

Every stone reiterated his cry. He lay on the ground beside the track, hearing it, and the torch guttered out once more.

The initial killing had been a little like this. But then he had had no additional puzzlement. He had gone to Smara with a severed hand, and shown her, and they had marveled together over the whorls of its fingertips. But now, how, how to tell Smara of
this
?

Leocadia remained calm.

Like any sentence of death, she did not believe it.

Even after she had taken up her new life, her food and music and drink supplied, books delivered, as she wished, paints and canvas, drawing materials, notebooks, clothes, powder, everything, even then in the hermetic environ of her prison she did not believe in it. Not wholly. Not with her mind.

Was that, after all, a form of madness, then?

Even after she had sorted the pieces, grasped the plot. Accepted that her very calm itself must come from minuscule tasteless particles in her food, and in the air itself, which did not restrain her creative flair or her energy, or ability to concentrate, but which must be controlling her. Not even then.

And as she went to and fro from her room in the daylight summer hours, having found she might, and met in the corridor and garden other inmates of the Residence, who were genteel and well-mannered, sometimes bemused, excitable, but never abusive, loud, or agonized, not then either.

Until in the end even her mind knew, and it was too late, she had accepted it.

For, though powerless, she should have resisted. In some fashion, however oblique or useless.

Her asides to the doctors –
I’m anxious to leave, I’ll tell visitors how you torture me
– were not protests or shields, let alone missiles. It was almost a repulsive flirtation, her acid quips, their smirking refutations.

And how did her life differ? She did much as she had always done. She spent a vast amount of time alone. She painted. True, the elegant dinners were gone, but had she ever really enjoyed them? True, she had no lovers, but surely it might be possible, if she were desperate, to seduce some person or other, their bizarre quality or nasty appearance offending her not at all in the
onslaught of needy lust. And then again, if she could not be bothered with such unappetizing creatures, this must mean her sexuality burned low, she had had enough.

She missed walking in the City. But then, too, months had sometimes passed without her venturing more than two streets from her house.

Now she did not explore the asylum grounds. A low fence lay across the grass and trees the far side of the gravel walk, beyond the broken hothouse. It was easy to climb the fence, and now and then some inmate might scramblingly do so. But they returned from wandering among the old buildings of the madhouse disconsolate, once or twice crying.

It occurred to Leocadia that she kept the blocks of the madhouse in reserve, making of them something mystical and bad, against the ultimate rainy day of terrifying ennui.

“Oh dear, you’re too late, I must go down now,” Mademoiselle Varc had said to Leocadia when Leocadia first left her room and found the white woman in the corridor. “If only you had come sooner.” And then she scurried to the elevator.

Leocadia then did not see Mademoiselle Varc for several weeks.

Instead she confronted Thomas the Warrior, who might once have been a wealthy old soldier, that in his youth had conceivably seen action in some small foreign war, tanks and carrier planes, and the threat of worse. Now he puffed about a flowerbed he was in charge of, below the summerhouse. It was a wonder of blooms and stone slabs, on top of one of which stood a stone head of Medusa poking out her tongue.

Thomas was elderly, thin and stooped. He paid Leocadia no attention, only speaking to his flowers. Doctor Saume had informed her of his name.

Three or four more went about the garden regularly, and some of the other older ones would bask nervously in the summerhouse. Males and females, they were sad and frequently decrepit, moaning with stiffness that even contemporary medication had not been able to alleviate.

The most immature of those she saw was a young man, possibly twenty-five years old, who crouched along like a dismembered spider. He frowned at unseen things, but meeting humans he usually brightened for a moment, telling them how well and lovely they looked. But of Leocadia he seemed afraid, and ran away and hid behind objects as she approached, even behind Thomas the Warrior and his Medusa, if nothing else were available.

Only Mademoiselle Varc actually greeted Leocadia, now thinking her her maid, her niece, her nurse, and once or twice some kind of empress or queen that she had perhaps been introduced to long ago. On these latter occasions Mademoiselle Varc curtsied, and Leocadia had felt a sudden compulsion, in
case Mademoiselle Varc fell over. This was the first compassion Leocadia had ever experienced for a being other than an animal. And so Mademoiselle Varc amused Leocadia, and Leocadia was careful, in her contrary way, always to attempt to be the one she was mistaken for.