Jaspar stands across from me, overdressed for a school carnival, but on point as a player in a steampunk creep show. The rose-gold pinstripes in his emerald green suit and cape of copper-colored silk match the impervious lenses in his round-framed goggles. His fitted paisley pant legs are tucked into knee-high utilitarian boots with grommet buckles that jingle as he taps his left toe, as if impatient. The cape unfurls at his waist with the movement, baring a dagger with a spiraled handle that blinks through a glowing rainbow of colors. Steam puffs out from three miniature black tubes threaded through the back of his shirt and stretching to the tip of his top hat. They remind me of the smokestacks I’ve seen on factories in Astoria.
Somewhere underneath my awe of the kaleidoscopic view, there’s a niggle—an inkling of déjà vu—where I sense I should fear the shift from a hollow-skulled creature to an unsettlingly pretty guy. Yet I don’t. It feels … expected. Like I knew all along he wears more than one face. Yet how could I know something I’ve never witnessed?
“The famed Phoenix.” His whispery husk of a voice breaks the silence between us. “Such lengths, getting you here. Getting you to come out at all. Never seen anyone so afraid of a holiday. Especially one with traditions so quaint and charming as All Hallows’ Eve. Corpses walking on their own … pumpkins casting flames from empty sockets. To think, of all the monsters we could’ve chosen to smoke you out, it was a baby doll that forced you from your hidey-hole.”
His taunts drizzle over me like a sleet storm, chilling and intrusive. I have to fight the urge to shiver. “You … you were in my house?”
“Oh, not exactly me. I had help—a concerted effort, really. We’ve been making arrangements for this visit for some time.”
That’s all it takes to slam me back into the moment and why I’m in this maze to begin with.
“We, who?” I ask. “You and our supplier? The owner of the orchard?”
Jaspar chuckles. “Technically, yes. Exclusively, no.”
I clench my teeth, annoyed with his evasive-speak. “What’s this all about?” I aim my most intense glare at him. “What have you done with my uncle?” I try to stand, but my legs seem to be rooted to the chair. I hold my ground—figuratively—determined to at least appear brave. “Just tell me where he is,” I hiss.
“Where, indeed?” Jaspar shoves his hat so it hangs off the back of his head, propped up by the smokestack tubing. He rakes long fingernails—silver and coiled like springs—through his hair, getting several stuck before wrestling them free, illustrating why he always looks so disheveled. “That’s yet to be seen, isn’t it? It all depends on you.”
“What are you talking about?”
He removes his goggles so they dangle from a leather band around his neck, then locks me in that beetle-sheen gaze. “Well, you’re the artist. The builder of worlds. Why not simply draw your uncle where you’d like him to be?”
I look down at the sketches on the desk. Is he serious? “How could you know that about me? And how did you reenact this memory?” I glance at the diorama setting still in place around me. This has to be some sort of virtual simulation, but where did our deliveryman get his details? It’s impossible that Uncle ever shared anything about me with this creep, considering how protective he is when Jaspar’s around.
“Ah, memories.” The deliveryman taps a spiraled fingernail against his forehead. “They’re the building blocks of your kind. Thus, the stage is set each time you look in a mirror. And, as an artist, your creations are extensions of those past experiences, as well.”
Your kind?
He steps closer and his grim sneer widens to show his teeth. In that moment, I’m seeing all his features come into focus for the first time. His teeth are metallic at their pointed tips; and as for his roach-black irises, there’s a flicker there I’ve never noticed. It’s as if a curtain drops, revealing two tiny red pupils in each eye, as small as pinholes. When he blinks, white sparks fountain up between the twin dots, like a short circuit passing between electrical wires.
An uneasy twinge unfurls in my belly as I remember a profile for a character in Mystiquiel that I started a while back but haven’t finished yet. It’s a changeling-like fey called a doppleganglia, with the same dual-pupil peculiarity. The doppleganglia can mimic other characters by adjusting its own inner circuitry, forming a glamour of sorts. Actually, more like a hologram. I planned to incorporate it into my novels, but each time I started adding it in, other than the eyes, I couldn’t make out the face clearly. So I scrapped the idea. Now that character sits languishing in a spiral at home. Or does it?
Is my doppleganglia imitating our deliveryman?
My throat catches at the absurdity of the thought. No. The right question is: How can I be buying into any of this? My drawings, my world … they’re all imaginary.
They can’t be here.
My earlier attempt at bravery drains away, leaving my blood cold. I clench my hands around the chair’s arms, feeling the weight of makeup, piercings, and zippers across my face as I struggle not to show the horror and incredulity in my expression. “Are—are you saying I somehow brought my memory to life in the mirror? That my imagination created this whole maze without me even knowing it? How can that be?”
“Ah. That’s the rub of being an artist, isn’t it?” He pauses, clacking his metallic teeth together so they underline his question with a high, musical ping. “Imagination is like a garden. You must water only the plants you want, and rip out the sneaky weeds winding their way in. If you’re not mindful of the gaps between the good seedlings, that’s where the wicked offshoots will crop up. It’s your job as the creator to lop off their heads. Otherwise, they could lop off yours—or those of the ones you love.”
My heart sinks. If such nonsense were true, it would be more guilt heaved on top of what I already carry. “So you’re saying I caused my uncle’s disappearance? This is my doing?”
Wearing an annoyed scowl, Jaspar polishes his hat’s copper-wire band with a thumb, triggering a few more hazy puffs from the tubes on his back. “Oh, stop being so dramatic. You’re not all-powerful. Nor are you powerless. You have the means to get in and bend things to your will. Your uncle’s already there, waiting for you to find him. Simply watch for clues that will lead you to him. Just don’t be afraid to take off those mitts and get your hands dirty. Understand?”
Speechless, I look down at my gloves, more confused than ever.
Jaspar slides the goggles into place over his electrified eyes. “I suppose you’ll figure it out once you get inside.” He prods his hat back onto his head. “But I suggest you don’t tarry too long here. The clock has just begun to tick, and time passes on a knife’s blade in this maze. When you find the key, don’t hesitate to use it.”
I flinch as Jaspar drags his prismatic dagger from its sheath and jabs the razor-edge into the skin beneath his jawbones. He begins to saw, cutting his face away as easily as slicing a ham. Bile rises in my throat and I gulp as the flayed edges curl and gape. Even while dreading the blood and gore, I can’t stop looking. I’ve seen enough of Clarey’s SFX creations that I’ve developed a stomach for the more gruesome aspects, and I try to convince myself that’s what this is. A costume … a performance.
However, instead of a mix of corn syrup, nondairy creamer, and red food coloring drizzling out from a severed prosthetic, there’s a white glittery shimmer, like light hitting a thousand facets in crackling increments.
In a blink, the effect spreads to his skin and clothes, as well as the bunk beds, floor, and wall—transforming the diorama to diamonds.
Yet it’s not diamonds … it’s an infinite number of tiny mirrors.
Within moments the sunbeams from the window burnish to dazzling hues and catch fire to Jaspar and the room. There’s no heat radiating from the reflections. Instead, they give off a frosty chill.
My mind spins in disbelief and confusion; Jaspar or someone working with him was in my house this morning after Uncle left, putting everything in place to chase me out. How did they get in without me seeing them? How did they know what buttons to push?
Maybe the same way they knew intimate details of my private memory …
I don’t have time to speculate on any optical illusions or the things Jaspar said. The mirrored chair I’m seated in begins to crack—the snap of a lake freezing over. I leap off just before it shatters into pieces along with the diamond desk and its pencils and papers, each one casting off blinding chinks of light. If my drawings were the key to anything, they’re gone now. I wince, and using my gloves for shade, back away.
A masculine wail sounds in the distance. A dog’s frightened bark joins in. It’s Clarey, shouting for help. Either he found Uncle and he’s hurt, or Clarey himself is in trouble.
Determined to find them, I wield my arm across my eyes to ward off the brightness and start forward. The ground quakes beneath me. Stumbling, I grab blindly and catch a railing. A loud clang rattles my bones as the metal frame of earlier drops back into place, caging me again.
The whoosh of pistons and motors muffles Clarey’s screams, but I still can’t see over the mirrored prisms of sunshine. Only the harbor of my arm salvages my sight.
I’m at the mercy of the platform, the motor thrumming beneath my feet. It carries me away, leaving the spectacular inferno behind, and shadows rise around me again. Soon a grouping of lights appears in the air just inches away—flickering bluish Edison bulbs, a soothing balm after the blinding light I just left. The bulbs float freely in a cluster, as if they were glassy balloons with copper ribbon tails. I shove a hand outside the bars, catch the ribbons, then wind them around the framework to keep the gentle glow close so I won’t be left in the dark again. There’s not a mirror in sight now, only other metal walkways as far as I can see within the circle of light.
I yelp when the gear shuttling me slams into something solid. The cage lifts, breaking the bulb-bouquet’s tails. The lights hover out of reach, yet oddly, still follow close behind, like they’re tied to me with invisible strings. There’s a crunch of steel on steel beneath my feet, interlocking gears that propel me forward. The progression is swift, and with no railings on either side, I have to keep up the pace or I’ll tip off the edge and into the snarling, pounding machinery below.
My entire body lurches when the conveyer-style walkway comes to a jolting stop, as if someone put the brakes on; I manage to stay balanced by lunging and landing on my good knee.
An excited woof makes me look up. Flannie leaps down from a sinking ride that could double as a Ferris-wheel’s bucket seat. The soft light tints her fur to cornflower and powder blue. I call her name, my throat swelling with relief. She licks my chin and I nuzzle her fuzzy head. Clarey drops down, just a few steps behind.
My happiness to see him shrinks to worry when I realize he’s lost the duffel bag, and is wearing his mask again. Something bad had to have happened for him to seek his hiding place. Did Jaspar or something from my imagination attack him?
The irrational thought would make me laugh aloud if I hadn’t seen for myself that my characters … my world … appear to be making live appearances somehow.
I shoot to my feet and rush over. Clarey wraps his arms around me—holding on so tight I feel every tensed muscle.
For one elated minute, I bury my nose against him, inhaling flowers, chemicals, and his own delicate brand of sweat. Then I notice his erratically beating heart and how the brittle tension stretches from his muscles to his trembling bones. I’ve never seen him have a panic attack, but I’m guessing this could be the start of one. Or the end …
I stretch him to arm’s length to study his eyes inside the triangular holes. I can’t even appreciate the ability to see their color again; they’re watery and racked with fear or dread. Maybe both.
“You saw Uncle, didn’t you? He’s hurt. Is that how you lost my duffel, trying to help him?”
Clarey shakes his head and clears his throat behind the mask’s bulging lips, as if searching for the strength to answer. “I—I didn’t see him. My BAHA … it broke.” He says this as if in a trance. So he’s not in shock over something he saw? He’s just worried about the expense Juniper will have to shoulder for replacing his BAHA?
But I don’t get the chance to clarify. A loud clank shakes our platform, and a rusted chain-link fence, at least ten feet tall, rises from the edges and snaps into place, penning us from all sides in a space no bigger than a walk-in closet. Though I’m relieved our trio managed to stay together this time, Uncle Thatch is still alone somewhere, possibly at the end of one of the walkways now out of our reach.
As if to compound my unspoken fear, the gears and cogs making up the maze—all the winding bridges and paths—start to shift, taking vertical, parallel positions. Clarey and I watch helplessly as, with a loud grinding creak, they whir outward, locking into notches on the walls like tiles, leaving our domed space suspended alone in the dark void. The gears spin in aimless loops on the distant walls, jagged wheels going nowhere, and leaving me no pathway to Uncle Thatch.
Biting back a sob, I look down. There’s nothing below—only deep unseeable depths where the blue glow won’t reach.
“How high are we?” I shout over the chugging gears surrounding us. “Are we just drifting here, or is this a pedestal?”
No sooner have I said this than I think of the odd quote on the front of the fun house, the same one that I saw transform from my sketches in the memory trap.
“A pedestal … is a plinth,” I mumble.
Clarey’s eyes brighten with something akin to understanding, but a shuddering gong, like the voice of a giant clock, sounds off three times and interrupts his response. Before my skeleton has even stopped vibrating, Clarey grips my biceps and drags me into a crouch as a huge shadow swings across us from the emptiness above. A rush of wind follows in its wake. Flannie yelps and cowers between us. The giant form swoops back in the opposite direction, and the bluish light flashes across a gargantuan silver blade—shaped like a hatchet—strung by thick ropes from the upmost center of the endless, obscured ceiling.
“A—A clock’s pendulum,” I stammer. This must be what Jaspar meant, about time passing on a blade.
A scraping, metallic screech prefaces a shower of sparks, the blade eating through the top of our fence like a knife cutting butter while leaving behind the stench of burnt sulfur. The deadly pendulum drops closer and closer to our heads with each sway, slicing through the chain links—inch by inch. Clarey and I drop to hands and knees.
My pulse ratchets up, and I curl wool-tipped fingers against the metal floor. What was it the verse said? I try to concentrate in spite of Clarey’s ragged breaths inside his mask, still wondering in the back of my mind what happened to him while we were apart.
“Look,” Clarey says, surprising me with the steadiness of his hand as he points down where another pendulum appears from out of nowhere, moving perpendicular to the first. This one must be suspended from the ceiling off-center, because the ropes glide by without touching our fence, and the sequence of its swaying is timed perfectly with the pendulum above, so they pass like deadly cradles swinging from tree branches in the night.
On each undulation, the lower pendulum’s top surface skims by a few inches below our pedestal; it’s flat and looks as wide and long as the storeroom’s floor at the bakery. Unlike the first one, this pendulum continues without descending in elevation, back and forth, holding its bearings. It’s close … close enough we could touch it if we could somehow get out of our chain-link prison.
And then it hits me: “ ‘Tame the pendulum. Breach the plinth.’ The quote on the fun house’s facade?”
Clarey’s eyes widen to the size of the mask’s holes. “Right … tame the pendulum. You tame a horse by—”
“Riding it,” we say simultaneously.
Clarey and I initiate army-crawling, scooting with our elbows and dragging our torsos and legs, trying to stay as low as possible to avoid getting caught by the blade, which has already eaten through half of the fence’s height. We choose opposing sides and search for some weakness in the metal links, or a gate that’s camouflaged somehow.
No luck. The fence is solid.
Another squealing, jolting swoop slices by, ripping through metal and missing us by a mere two feet or so. “Lay, Flannie!” Clarey yells, and drags her close as he and I sprawl on our bellies. Our gazes meet and I feel the terror reflected in his eyes burrowing inside my own gut. Just a few more strokes and we’ll all be left in shreds.
As if triggered by the press of his clothes against the platform, Clarey digs in his front pocket and draws out Lark’s wire cutters. Somehow, we both forgot about them.
“Do it!” I shout.
Clarey springs into action, using the tool to bite through the steel wires. The diagonal jaws cut at an angle, leaving flat tips behind. Clarey’s propped on his elbows, cutting the last link to open a big enough hole to squeeze through, when I shove him flat to the floor just as the pendulum gores into the tip of the pumpkin stem on his headpiece. The latex topper sticks to the blade and lifts away, taking his Velcro skullcap with it. His black curls spring free, then his white streak follows suit. Only his mask remains, leaving him oddly half-formed … part jack-o’-lantern, part Clarey, but at least he still has his head intact.
Although my tackle caused him to lose the wire cutters, he nods in gratitude. As the pendulum sways away, dropping the stem and cap into the darkness below, Clarey shoves the outline he carved in the chain links free. It falls without a sound, causing me to question if there’s a bottom to this place at all.
Since my hands are gloved, I bend as many sharp edges outward as possible so we can ease through without catching clothes or fur, or gouging skin.
Once we’ve belly crawled enough to clear the fence, we pause at the edge. Clarey grips Flannie’s vest harness to keep her close as the lower pendulum moves toward us, slowly aligning beneath our pedestal.
The moment it’s centered, I take a breath, and holding Clarey’s free hand, I nudge the three of us to leap. We land, grunting and rolling along the moving expanse. I snatch the rope rooted at the axis. Clarey grips my hand tight while he helps Flannie climb closer to the middle. As soon as we’re balanced, we wrap the rope around our arms with Flannie sandwiched between us and sit up to catch our breaths, grateful to be out of the hatchet blade’s range.
We swing, gusts of hot, fumy air raking over us with each fluctuation. A wailing screech sounds above as the blade finishes off the remaining chain links and grinds them to dust. The gears that formed our pedestal split apart, allowing the dangerous pendulum to continue its downward course while altering trajectory just enough to slant toward our pendulum’s rope.
“It’s going to cut us loose!” I scream.
Clarey and I both look downward into the darkness. Just then, my flickering Edison bulb bouquet drops lower, its light illuminating a stage some two stories below. The same key-shaped tree that I saw on the fun house’s facade, heavy with fruits, is painted in its middle, although this time I can make out all the colors.
The key …
Jaspar said not to hesitate to use it.
I nudge Clarey and nod toward it. “That’s our way out.”
“How do you figure?” he asks. “All I see is a painting.”
“There’s got to be some way to go through the stage; maybe a trapdoor. Why else would it be a key?”
He looks above us at the oncoming hatchet, then mimes concern about how we’ll get close enough to jump safely onto a platform so far down.
It’s then I notice Flannie digging at a small metal box that protrudes from the surface where we sit, right next to the suspension’s core. One hand anchored to the rope, I prod her muzzle aside and lift the lid. A red tab rests in the middle, with a space above and below, suggesting it’s a switch that controls our rope’s length by either taking up slack or loosening it. That’s only a guess … because there are no instructions.
“Should I try it?” I ask Clarey.
“Worst case,” he mumbles behind his mask, “it’ll blow us to kingdom come. Pretty sure that beats being sliced in half by a giant ax aimed at your back.”
It would lift my spirits to hear the sarcasm beneath the huskiness of his voice—if there wasn’t the possibility he’s right.
I’m still debating when Flannie shoves my hand aside and nudges the button with her nose. It flicks upward, and Clarey and I tense, waiting.
A sudden jerk of our rope stops us midswing. We’re dangling in place like toys on a clothesline—a rag doll and a pumpkin puppet hung out to dry—when a loud creak, followed by a pounding snap, erupts overhead. We have little time to react as the pendulum above us releases from its rope and plummets our direction.
Not even thinking, I slap the switch downward, and at the last second, our pendulum reactivates and we swing out of the way, barely missing the giant hatchet rushing by at breakneck speed. With a gut-clenching crack of splintering boards, it severs the wooden stage below wide open.
The sound of an ocean and the scent of brine burst upward at the breach. Our pendulum sways, lifting us high to the right, and then dipping toward the center. We’re no lower than before, but there’s an opening now that we can jump through, should we dare.
Clarey cups where his left ear hides in his mask, obviously worried about water damage. I don’t have a chance to convince him or myself before a giant crest of white swells up from the darkness and snatches the three of us off our perch.
The last thing I can think to do is catch my breath and hold, as the wave curls its fist around us and plunges us into the roaring ocean below.
Through the crystal ball—our eye in the sky—we observe her fall into the sea. We can’t react. We won’t remit. Even as the crown and throne begin to crumble, our heart persists on its assigned algorithm. Though the beats skip and groan to the demands of synthesis and assimilation, though we strain for the actuality of individuality—to taste, to touch, an eager and angry lust—our work is yet unfinished. She will not deter us. She’ll not lose us what we crave. We have earned this destruction. Yes. We have earned the end to everything.