Hellbound Hearts

by Paul Kane

  When Marcus’s screams came, they were just as he remembered them.

  All he could do was run.

  And all at once, the labyrinth changed. Hedges vanished, to be replaced by sheer fences made of curved, intertwined twigs. The ground was overlaid with thicker branches, and here and there soil protruded through, wet and coiled. He could still see the sky if he looked up, but it was hazy now, and drifting skeins of mist gave the impression of uneasy movement.

  “Where is the end?” he whispered. His voice carried hardly at all, and there was no echo. “Where is the middle?” He was slowly solving this labyrinth, he was sure, because those bad memories were marking the way to damnation. He did not deny their truths, but neither did he have any wish to live through them again. The memories were bad enough when he slept, or when his mind wandered . . . being shown them, hearing, smelling, that was all too much. Though he still clasped the paper map in its clear wrapper, he now followed the map of his mind.

  The stick fences rattled as he passed by, his movement setting them shivering. He slowed to a fast walk, and at every junction he let instinct guide him on. Left, right, straight ahead, but he never once turned back. That would be too much like admitting fear, and that was one thing he could never do. He had never been afraid.

  At the next junction, he sees his daughter Jenny sitting in her bedroom, playing with a collection of farm animals and dinosaurs as if they can live together. In her mind they can . . . she is a sweet young girl, innocent, beautiful, and given the right chances she could grow into someone wonderful. But the door opens, and he enters, readying to take those chances away.

  “No,” he said in the labyrinth, but his feet would not move him away.

  “Daddy!” she says. Her eyes go wide—she has not seen him for some time—as he enters the room. Michelle is downstairs crying, because she knows what is to come. Her hopes that he had come back to stay were just that: hopes. He is far too selfish. This is all too . . . normal for him.

  “Jenny,” he says, “got something to tell you.” Her little face drops, because she’s not so innocent after all. In her world of cows and sheep and T. rex, good things can happen because she wishes them so. In this harsher, more grown-up world, reality bites.

  He does not care. His eyes are far away, his attention directed somewhere distant and much darker than here. As he tells her he is going away forever, and that she will never see him again, and that her mother will raise her and tell her what happened when the time comes, he does not once look at the crying little girl.

  “She won’t have to tell me!” Jenny says, sweeping her hand through the rank of plastic animals. “I know it all myself. You don’t love me, that’s it, and you’re just what she says . . . a cow . . . a cowwood!”

  He shows the first sign of emotion then when he looks at her.

  And in the labyrinth, he backed away at last, but the great twig fences had closed in around him. There was only one way to go, and he ran, leaving the terrible memory of the next few moments behind. He knew that fleeing would mean he heard nothing, because there had been nothing to hear. Jenny had not screamed when he hit her then, but she had spent the rest of her life screaming. A shattered prospect. The ruin of a girl.

  He ran on, surprised at the moisture on his cheeks. He glanced up but it was not yet snowing. The sky was dark now, and peering between clouds, long-dead stars observed his fate.

  “Come and take me now!” he shouted. “I know what I’ve done! I don’t need reminding! They told me you were hungry, so come and feast.” He had discovered the map in a junk shop in Tintern. Overshadowed by the ancient remains of the ruined abbey, More Things had opened its doors to him as he walked by, and inside, an old man had been running a razor blade gently across his right eyeball. He’d smiled and said, “All the better to see you with.”

  And then the map had been in his hands, and as he’d turned to leave, the old man had laughed behind him, and several voices had emerged at once from the shell of a dead grandfather clock. Its hands must not have moved for many years, because they were dusted into place. That frozen time had spoken of tortures and delights that he could barely imagine; voices intermingled, a woman, man, and child, and others, all speaking the same words and combining to make the same steady, ecstatic voice. Spilled out onto the street, the shop’s facade now changed to a boarded-up ice cream parlor, he had sat and cried until he realized he still held the map.

  “They told me you were hungry!” he shouted again. The memory of those voices had always haunted him, because they had been ghosts.

  But his exhortations brought no success. He went on, passing through more sections of the labyrinth, trusting instinct to guide him deeper. True night came, and in the darkness he was shown times in his past when the worst of him came to the fore. Each was an illustration of why he was here, he knew, and why he would find the center. But he found their replays . . . repellent. He had no wish to see the time he had beaten Michelle around the face with a knotted rope. He had no desire to hear his own gargled cries as he let three strange women tie him and pour containers of stinging wood ants across his naked body. The nightclub dancer he had assaulted . . . the weak man called Duke who had let him inject him with a drug cocktail of his own making . . . the tattoo artist, drunk and scared, trying to tattoo the exposed bone in his sliced thigh—all things he had no need or means to deny, but events he felt compelled to turn away from. Hadn’t living them been enough? They were guiding him in, after all, and the faster he reached the center, the faster this last part of the beginning of his life would be over.

  So he ran quicker, and every time he turned a corner and saw a fresh tableau laid out before him, he turned away, avoiding the route that memory marked.

  Eventually, just as dawn came and sunlight began bathing the labyrinth afresh, he reached the center.

  But this was not the center he sought.

  The thing standing in the middle was connected to everything. He knew it was one of them, but at the same time he felt a terrible, creeping dread. Something’s wrong! he thought.

  “Yes,” the creature said, “something is.”

  “Who are you?” He had fallen to his knees at the edge of the clearing, the map still clasped in his right hand.

  “The Gardener. I . . . tend.” And even as it spoke, the thing was tending. Its arms were raised, rose branches and other plants stretching from the tips of its fingers to the surrounding hedges. It flexed those fingers, and the hedges blossomed. Its head was a knotted sculpture of wood, skin harsh and leathery, and one eye was covered with the remains of a black eyepatch. Its feet were rooted to the ground.

  “I’ve found you,” the man said, because it was what he thought he was supposed to say. Even as the words left his mouth, he knew he was wrong. He had found this thing, this Gardener, but what he had been searching for was still very far away.

  The Gardener was naked, skin slashed and shredded where the shoots of new things nosed out from inside. He noticed that nuggets of dried flesh clung to the many long stems stretching across the clearing, and on their thorns the blood was fresher.

  The realization hit him then: This thing was not simply at the center of the labyrinth; it was the labyrinth.

  “You have indeed,” the Gardener said.

  “But . . . but . . . won’t you show me?”

  The Gardener laughed. It was a horrible sound, because it came from a throat that still thought itself human.

  “Show me . . .” he said again, pleading this time. “I found my way through the labyrinth, looking for you, just like the map said.”

  “Did the map say to follow your desires?”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  “Then why did you avoid them?”

  “I . . .” the man began, but he looked away from the Gardener then, glancing past at where other routes opened up in the clearing’s edges. Through there, he thought. Maybe through there. All I have to do is get past, a final test.

  “You saw every mome
nt that should have given you to them, and you closed your eyes to them all.”

  He ran. Denying the truth of what the Gardener said, denying the fact that he hated the things he had done, and did not adore them as he had first thought, and yet craving still that ultimate sensation and experience, because there was really nothing of him left. Not after so long, after so much. This was his whole reason, and he had come so far.

  “I belong here!” he shouted.

  He made it halfway across the clearing before rose stems whipped around him, holding him fast. Inch-long thorns penetrated his throat, chest, scrotum, neck, eyes. He cried out, laughing because he thought this was it.

  The Gardener stroked one gentle tendril down his cheek. He became aroused. And then it plucked the map from his hand and whispered into his face, “Until you learn to relish the pain of every bad thing you have ever done, you belong . . . nowhere.”

  Pain ended.

  Noise began.

  He shouted in surprise, because he was trapped. He saw where he was, but he had no control. He was all inside, the shout silent and agonizing, and loaded with such a sense of loss and failure that he was sure he must go mad. But he was also sure, as understanding dawned, that madness would be far too easy.

  And it would never be allowed.

  “Gonna get me another drink?” Michelle slurred into his mouth. Lights flashed, music blared. She was young and pretty, this first time he had met her. But she’d already had far too much.

  The Collector

  Kelley Armstrong

  The wooden puzzle box floated on my computer screen, a 3-D model perfectly rendered, the liquid display bubbling under my fingertips as I traced the series of twists and turns that would unlock its mysteries. There, and there and . . . yes, there. I smiled.

  I couldn’t resist mousing over to it and clicking, just in case it proved interactive. It wasn’t, of course. Simply an amazing piece of art, the splash screen gateway to the website of a small publisher of puzzle books.

  I clicked the enter here entreaty, feeling a frisson of grief as that perfect puzzle evaporated, replaced by a perfectly boring website. Now I imagined the solution to another challenge—how, as a web designer, I could make this site so much better. From the looks of it, though, my services would be more than they could afford, so I directed my gaze to the upper right-hand corner, where, as I’d been told, there was a second entreaty—this one to try an online puzzle and win a prize.

  So I clicked and read, checking it out so carefully you’d think they were asking me to donate a kidney, not enter a free contest. But you can’t be too careful on the web. Ninety-nine percent of freebies are bullshit. Fortunately, most of those are obvious—badly worded and misspelled missives that never quite explain how a Nigerian prince got the e-mail address of Mrs. Joe Smith in Nowhere, Idaho.

  There is, however, that other 1 percent—legitimate giveaways for promotional exposure—and this seemed to be one of them. Solve a puzzle; win a prize; progress to the next level for a bigger prize. The entry-level contest would win you a downloadable sixteen-page puzzle book. A reasonable reward for a reasonably simple puzzle, one I solved absently, as most of my brain was still occupied reading the page’s fine print.

  I entered the solution for the anagram and was redirected to a page with my prize available for immediate download. I scanned the file for viruses, of course, but it was clean. And that was it. They didn’t even request an e-mail address to be signed up for “exciting promotional offers.” The page simply gave me a code that would allow me to progress to the next level . . . after a twenty-four-hour waiting period.

  I jotted down the code, bookmarked the site, and flipped back to my work.

  Over the next week, I proceeded through four more levels, solving a Sudoku, a tangram, a Tower of Hanoi, and a Takegaki, and winning a sample book, a three-volume collection, a limited-edition omnibus, and a brass-plated n-puzzle with the company logo on the tile’s squares. I needed to provide a mailing address for those, which was fine. I gave my name—common enough—and a post office box. I wouldn’t be rushing to collect them, though. My reward came in knowing I’d already gotten further than anyone in the puzzle enthusiast e-mail loop that had first announced the contest.

  By day eight, I was sitting at my computer, one eye on the clock, waiting for my next twenty-four-hour hiatus to be up.

  My cell phone chirped. When I saw the number, I smiled and picked up.

  “Hey, there. Conference end early?”

  Daniel sighed. “I wish. I just called to say hi, see whether you’d be free for dinner Friday when I get in.”

  “You aren’t tired of eating out yet?”

  “As long as they don’t serve conference luncheon rubber chicken, I’m good.”

  A message box popped up on my screen, telling me it was time, and I missed what he said next. I um-hmm’d appropriately, but my mind was already on the next puzzle. It was a variation on the classic zebra puzzle, otherwise known as Einstein’s Riddle. Now this was something worth solving.

  “And then I rode a camel through Pittsburgh . . .”

  “What?”

  “Ah, you are listening. Working?”

  “Caught me.”

  “On a puzzle?”

  I swore, and apologized. He only laughed, then let me go after we set a date for Friday. Even as I hung up, I was pulling over a sheet of paper and drawing my grid for the puzzle.

  I solved it, of course. I shouldn’t say that so nonchalantly. It was hard. Damn hard. Logic puzzles aren’t my forte. By the time I figured it out, I’d passed my twenty-four-hour waiting limit. Even when I submitted the answer, I wasn’t certain I had it right, and the site didn’t tell me, just said the answer needed to be manually processed and asked for my e-mail address, with a promise to provide a response within twelve hours. I gave them my throwaway Hotmail one.

  Dramatically, at the top of the eleventh hour, the e-mail arrived. My prize? An invitation to try for the grand prize: five thousand dollars. The catch? I had to go to the publisher’s office and solve the same wooden puzzle that was rotating on their splash page.

  Now, as a small business owner, I could see the point in this. If you’re going to give away real money, you want to get your promotional mileage out of it. Have the prospective winner come down, solve the puzzle, and film the big event for your website. Travel could be a problem for some respondents, but according to the address given, it was just over an hour away. Asking me to drive there was perfectly reasonable for a five-grand payoff.

  And yet . . .

  I didn’t buy my house until I could afford a 50 percent down payment. I’d been dating Daniel for four years, yet had dodged the marriage question, waiting to be sure we’d make it to five. I vetted every client before accepting them. I checked the weather forecast before going out. I had never jaywalked in my life.

  I don’t take chances. Not even when it comes to my beloved puzzles.

  So I researched the puzzle publisher. I verified that the address given was correct, as was the phone number. Then I called using a blocked number.

  A woman answered the phone. Elderly, by the creaks and warbles in her voice. Her son owned the business and she was his office assistant. She explained the deal exactly as outlined in the e-mail—come to the office, solve the wooden puzzle, win the prize. Of course, if I won, I had to agree to allow my name and photo to be displayed on their site, et cetera, et cetera.

  I was given an appointment time. There was street parking, but the municipality towed after an hour and was usually waiting to jump, so she advised me to park a block away at a strip mall.

  After the call, I reloaded the company’s splash page and started mentally working through the puzzle again.

  The office was what I expected—a few rooms in a small building. As I’d been warned, there was a tiny lot for the building’s other tenants—a nightclub and an after-hours clinic—but it had been split in half, one side for each business, with signs warning th
at anyone else would be towed, which seemed highly unfair to the publishing company, given that it was open when the others weren’t.

  With everything else closed, the building was quiet, my footsteps echoing through the hall, the silence ominous in that horror movie “walking down a dark alley” kind of way that made me check over my shoulder every few steps.

  When I reached the publisher’s office, though, I relaxed. The cheery yellow walls and comfy furniture helped, but it was the rest of the decor that put me at ease. Puzzles. The room was filled with them, from wooden ones on the coffee table to visual ones on the wall to special pieces on pedestals.

  As the publisher’s mother put my coat away, I walked over to a very old Moku-Zougan Japanese puzzle box and brushed my fingertips over the worn finish, shivering.

  “You’re a collector, Mrs. Collins?” I asked as she returned.

  “My son is. Call me Nell.”

  Nell wasn’t as old as I would have guessed over the phone. Maybe sixty, but careworn, her face lined, hair white, a slight stoop in her shoulders.

  She looked around absently, as if for a moment forgetting what she was there for, then said, “Let me get the puzzle.”

  She bustled off. I heard her speaking in the inner office, her voice too low to make out the words. She returned with the puzzle box, held at arm’s length like an offering.

  “My son’s getting the video camera for us. He’s so much better at that sort of thing.”

  I balled my hands to keep myself from snatching the puzzle box from her. It was even more exquisite than it had looked on the screen, each piece worn smooth from countless hands trying to unlock its mysteries.

  “It’s not easy, I’m afraid,” she said as she handed it to me.

  I smiled. “If it was, you wouldn’t be giving away such a prize. Have there been others?”