THE BOATMAN NOTICES MY SILENCE and discomfiture. “How many strawberries,” he probes me, “grow in the sea?”
I ignore him, but Willow comes to my rescue, “As many red herrings as swim in the wood.” Willow returns to staring into the boatman’s flames, her hands on her knees. She hums a tune I don’t recognize.
Lank seaweed dangles from the boatman’s fishing rod as he plucks it from the water, only to stick the pole back in again. There are no other signs of life—no mosquitoes or black flies, no minnows in the deeps, and no waves churning these waters.
The boatman tries again, later. Not a question, this time, but a challenge: “Pretty little goldfish,” he sings at me, “never can talk. All it does is wriggle when it tries to walk.”
When I stay mute, he champs off the end of the grass clutched between his incisors, and the pale stalk falls down to blemish the dark water. I take it as a sign of his frustration and grin to have thwarted him.
Unfortunately, as the far shore finally comes into view, his rhyme proves oddly prophetic—I attempt to stand up on the barge, and then I do, indeed, flop back down to wriggle on the deck. As quickly as it had evaporated, the boatman’s grin returns, and then it splits into pealing laughter.
The far shore is no true shore at all, but a wall rising from the water. I’m hypnotized by its approach, rising like a mountain of grey through the darkness. A dim light partially illuminates the wall, though I cannot find its source. The top of the cliff—if, indeed, there is a top—is lost in the starless gloom overhead.
The boatman steers his vessel straight towards this wall, and I wonder where he plans to make berth, or how one would scale a cliff like that. The cliff is bone dry above where the river knives off its bottom in a horizontal black line. No waves ever crest these waters.
I’m eager to be off this barge and away from this river as soon as possible, even though the boatman is the first human being I’ve seen in days.
If all the maze’s denizens are like him, and the figure lurking beneath the bridge, maybe I’m better off alone.
I become aware of a small light on the wall, as the boatman poles us forward. A single light illuminating a white dock, which looks similar to the one we disembarked from. I stand up again as our boat pulls level with the dock, eager to be rid of the boat and our host, but the boatman stands up with alarming speed to block my path.
The hand that he holds in front of my face is dark and weathered, and lacking its pinky and the adjacent ring finger. The skin around the missing fingers is glossy with old scar tissue, stretched tight where it has grown over and forgotten the missing digits. Why did you let it go? Willow had sung to him on the far dock. Because it bit my finger so.
“Master’s fiddled his river stick, for dame and doodle doo,” he creaks. “Now time to pay their due.”
I notice that Willow still clutches her bouquet of crabgrass, and I half expect this to be some obscure form of currency, but instead she surprises me by lifting her free hand to her face and unhooking the earring from her left ear. As it passes from her hand to the boatman’s, I recognize the jewelry. Jade, like my Grandmother used to wear.
The boatman, all gap-toothed smile, tucks the earring deep into his pocket, while Willow walks past him and onto the dock. I move to disembark once more.
“Tsk, little dickybird.” The boatman looms over me. He’s a monster at eight feet tall. His smile no longer looks friendly, and all of his remaining teeth are bared. “No doors there are to this stronghold, yet thieves break in and steal the gold.” At the word ‘steal,’ the boatman jabs a long finger into my collarbone once again. I recoil back against the bulwark.
“L-little Bo Peep has lost her sheep....” I stammer out, and the boatman’s laugh is cold.
“I think not, lambkin. Perhaps you’ll stay with me? Every denizen of this labyrinth is lonely and I never set foot on the far shore.”
I look pleadingly at Willow, but she sniffs and looks away. My mouth hangs open—abandoned again! Really? Willow doesn’t make a move towards the boat and she doesn’t offer up a rhyme to free me.
I trip backwards, sprawl to the floor of the barge, and as I do my pocket jangles. I’d forgotten entirely about the trinkets I’d found early on. I proffer up the nickels to the boatman and his laughter abruptly ends.
Coins clutched between long fingers, the boatman lids his eyes and smiles down at me. He makes no move to stop me as I leave from his raft this time. Only my shaking legs betray my confident departure, but I still hear him chuckle as I lean down and steady myself against the clammy, white planks.
“What else?” Willow shouts.
“What do you mean ‘what else,’ that’s all I have!” I shout. But when I look up at Willow, she’s gazing over my head, back at the boatman, who is already poling silently away.
He frowns at the demand, but stops his raft all the same. Then he grins and holds up his hand with three fingers. One by one, he folds them.
“For you,” he says to Willow, “Cut thistles in May, they’ll grow in a day. Cut them in July, then they will die.” Willow goes even paler, if that’s possible.
“For the other,” he says and turns to me. “The girl in the lane, that couldn’t speak plain. The man on the hill, that couldn’t stand still.” I shrug.
My reaction doesn’t bother him. His grin widens as he lowers his final finger.
“And for the two of you together: up and down the staircase, as you have done before. Go in and out the window, as you have done before.”
Willow, still gripping my hand, turns her back on the river and leads me away.