Mazes and Monsters

by Rona Jaffe

  Three weeks after he’d started at college Robbie was enjoying himself more than he’d anticipated, and almost as much as he’d hoped. He still didn’t know what he wanted to major in, or what he wanted to do with his future, so he had registered for the mandatory courses to get them over with and had tried out for and gotten on the swimming team. He’d met quite a few people in his dorm and some in his classes, and gone to bed with a few Freshman girls who seemed overwhelmed with the headiness of living in a coed dorm and didn’t seem to care if they never saw him again. At first he thought it was because he hadn’t done something right, but then he realized they had just been let out of some uptight all-girls school, or some strict home, and were making up for lost time. Some of the guys were the same way. They all seemed to be Freshmen. The upperclassmen had already gotten over the novelty of living in a candy store and were leading normal lives. He had written only one letter to his parents, and it had taken him an hour to think of anything to say. He supposed his mother would be too drunk to read it and his father wouldn’t care what he said as long as he wasn’t in trouble.

  Meals were served in the dorm dining room, which was like an enormous cafeteria. First you went into the kitchen, where you stood on line and served yourself from a bewildering array of food to suit any fad or dietary cult. Most of it turned out to be greasy junk anyway. Then you went into the dining room and sat at a table with people you knew, if you could find them, or else with strangers. You were really aware of how big the dorm was when you saw the crowd at mealtime. Some of the people just propped up books in front of their plates and didn’t talk to anyone at all. Because of swimming practice, Robbie usually arrived at dinner late and had to sit wherever there was still room. It forced him to speak to people he didn’t know, which was scaring him less now that he was beginning to know his way around.

  Tonight, holding his filled tray and trying to maneuver through the narrow spaces between the long tables, he found an empty seat next to a really weird kid. He was wearing a black leather aviator’s cap like Robbie had seen in old war movies on TV, and around his neck was a pair of goggles and a long white silk scarf. He had a little pointy face with a mischievous look on it, and he looked about fourteen.

  “Jay Jay Brockway,” the kid said, holding out his hand.

  “I’m Robbie Wheeling.”

  “I’ve seen you before. Tan Fiat Spider.”

  “Right …”

  “I had one,” Jay Jay said. “Mine was red. The fecalite gave it to me for my birthday, neglecting to notice I was still too young to get my license, and I sold it to bug him and bought my mynah bird and a motorbike. Mynah birds cost a fortune if you want a good one.”

  “The what?” Robbie said.

  “What what?”

  “Who’s, what’s a fecalite?”

  “My father. It’s a petrified dinosaur turd. Sorry, am I ruining your dinner? He’s ruined many of mine.”

  Robbie had never heard anybody talk that way about their parents before, or indeed about anything so bizarre, to a total stranger. He supposed the outfit Jay Jay was wearing had to do with his motorbike, but why hadn’t he taken it off before he came to dinner?

  “Do you like Brigitte Bardot?” Jay Jay continued. He took a long, thin brown cigarette from a pack and lit it, then offered the pack to Robbie.

  “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”

  “Because I’m giving a party tomorrow night for Brigitte Bardot’s birthday, and if you would like to attend it’s any time after eight, second floor, the room with the noise.”

  “Thank you,” Robbie said. Brigitte Bardot was some old movie actress, he remembered now. “Is she here?”

  “Who?”

  “Who you’re giving the party for.”

  “Are you stoned?” Jay Jay asked, peering at him anxiously. He was beginning to look as if he regretted extending the invitation.

  “No.”

  “Of course she’s not here. Why would she come to this dump?”

  “I don’t know,” Robbie said. He thought fast. “Elizabeth Taylor went to Harvard once.”

  “So she did …” Jay Jay said thoughtfully. His face lit up. “Maybe next year I’ll invite B. B.” He pushed back his chair and stood up. He was very short. “See you tomorrow night. Bring booze, and no more than two friends, preferably interesting.”

  Mynah bird? Robbie thought, looking after him. His first party at Grant! He could hardly wait.

  At half past eight, when Robbie went looking for the party, he saw that it was already in full swing. People had spilled out of Jay Jay’s room into the hall, and into other rooms, and music was blasting. If anyone had planned to study tonight it was obviously hopeless, but no one seemed to care. There must have been at least a hundred people milling around, drinking beer or wine, smoking, talking, dancing, and making noise. Carrying a bottle of red wine he’d bought he pushed his way through the crowd to find his host. He finally saw him, almost hidden in the sea of people, wearing a tuxedo and a hard hat, and looking very happy. Next to him was one of the prettiest girls Robbie had ever seen. She had shiny brown hair and huge dark eyes, and her lips turned up at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling. Jay Jay’s stereo was playing Donna Summer singing “MacArthur Park.”

  “Jay Jay!” Robbie shouted, holding up his bottle of wine.

  Jay Jay steered him in like a ship to port. “This is Kate Finch,” he said. “Robbie Wheeling.”

  “Hi,” she said, and smiled, and held out her surprisingly hard little hand for him to shake.

  After all the loves in my life, you’ll still be the one, the record played. Donna singing, the beat of the music rocking through the room. Every time you fall in love you notice what song is playing, and you always remember it. Robbie looked at Kate Finch and knew that she would always be the record of Donna Summer singing “MacArthur Park.” He looked into her eyes and couldn’t think of a thing to say to her.

  “Well, I guess you want a corkscrew,” she said.

  “I guess so.”

  She reached behind her and produced one, and two plastic glasses. He busied himself with opening the bottle so he wouldn’t have to think of something to say. Jay Jay had disappeared into the crowd again. Robbie poured wine into the two glasses, although he really didn’t much like wine, and handed one to her.

  “You live in Hollis?” she asked pleasantly.

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Right down the hall.”

  “Does he really have a mynah bird?”

  “Right over there.”

  A black bird with a yellow beak was looking at him from a large silver cage. “Isn’t it frightened?”

  She shrugged and smiled. “With Jay Jay you get used to anything.”

  He wanted to say something wonderful so she would be impressed, so she would remember him, and he had never felt so stupid in his life. He looked at his still-full glass.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “I wish we could start in the middle. I wish we’d known each other for two weeks and we knew everything about each other, and we liked each other a lot, and I wouldn’t be so nervous.”

  She laughed. Her laugh was just as good as her smile. “Are you scared of me?”

  “I’m not usually like this,” Robbie said.

  “I like it,” she said gently.

  “I’m really interesting when you get to know me,” he blurted.

  She took his hand and led him out of the party and down the hall to her room. She unlocked the door and led him inside, then she closed the door. He was terrified. He didn’t know what she wanted, but since she hadn’t locked the door …

  She sat on top of her desk, hooked her feet over the edge, put her arms around her knees, and looked at him with big eyes filled with amusement and tolerance and genuine friendliness. “Talk,” she said.

  After a while it wasn’t so bad, and soon he began to feel comfortable with her. She actually seemed to care what he had to say, no matter how dumb it was,
like how he didn’t know what he wanted to do after college and how it made his parents concerned, but worried him even more. He didn’t tell her about his brother, but he did tell her anything interesting he could think of about when he was in high school, and the things he’d liked, even about his Senior year, when he’d played Mazes and Monsters so often that between that and the swimming and the yearbook he was lucky he got into any college at all.

  “You play M and M?” Her eyes lit up.

  “Used to.”

  “What level?”

  “I was up to third when everybody left for college.”

  “Wow! So are we. Didn’t you see our notice downstairs on the bulletin board?”

  “I never looked.”

  “Jay Jay and Daniel and I … Come on, you’ll meet Daniel.” She hopped off the desk and grabbed his hand again. Before he knew it she had pushed him out of her room and was dragging him back to the party, where she introduced him to a very good-looking guy who looked disturbingly familiar. “This is Robbie Wheeling. Daniel Goldsmith, our Maze Controller. Robbie might play with us.”

  For a moment Robbie panicked. He was going to do badly in college if he started playing the game; he wasn’t that brilliant to begin with. But he didn’t want to lose this girl, not yet. “How often do you play?” he asked.

  “We haven’t started yet this year,” Daniel said. “We’ve been looking for another player. We only play a couple of times a week. Really. It won’t hurt your grades if that’s what you’re thinking about.”

  “I sort of was.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Kate said. “Because we don’t want a fanatic.”

  “We do want someone who’ll stay with it though,” Daniel said. “Why don’t you give it a try and see how it works out? Nobody’s demanding a contract.”

  “I know.”

  “Try it,” Kate said, and smiled at him. “What the hell?”

  He smiled back and nodded yes.

  CHAPTER 5

  The four of them were sitting in Daniel’s room after supper, beginning to play the new game he had spent the summer contriving. They had already chosen their characters: Kate was Glacia, the Fighter, again, Jay Jay was still Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir, a Sprite, and Robbie was Pardieu, a Holy Man. They sat in a circle on the floor, pencils and graph paper ready to chart their dangerous and difficult course, and Daniel had put up the small screen the Maze Controller used to hide the pages of the scenario he had invented to take them on their imagined trip.

  Beginning players used rule books, and as their skills grew more advanced they progressed to ever more complicated and imaginative books of adventures, departing from them when they wished. Daniel used a combination of advanced books and things he had invented. He had to, because Jay Jay with his photographic memory had memorized nearly every book that could be bought. Daniel didn’t even want to think how much money Jay Jay had spent. But Jay Jay was rich, and those things didn’t mean much to him.

  Holding the dice in his hand, Daniel began to talk. The other three looked at him with rapt attention. He knew they were visualizing everything he told them, and he was aware how real it was, for he had been a player once himself.

  “A half day’s walk from a small town there is a wasteland of gnarled hills, covered with withered trees and dried grass. Beneath these hills is the entrance to the forbidden caves of the Jinnorak. As long as anyone can remember, no one has entered these caves, and it is rumored that within them lives a mutated people, once human, now changed from generations in the foul depths to creatures unrecognizable and vicious. But perhaps that is just a rumor, and perhaps the last of them have died. Still, there are other dangers, but it is also known that there are wondrous things within, for those brave and clever enough to take them. Shall you enter?”

  “Yes,” Kate said, and the other two nodded.

  “The entrance is only five feet high,” Daniel went on. “As you enter, you find you are in a small room, pitch-dark, with the sound of running water.”

  “Give the dimensions of the room,” Jay Jay said, writing.

  “Six paces wide, twelve feet long. On the right there are two doors.”

  “Whose pace?” Jay Jay demanded.

  “A human’s.”

  “Okay, eight feet. I can see in the dark. I see the doors.”

  “Is there writing on them?” Kate asked.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “But it is in an unknown tongue.” He threw the dice. An eight. “Pardieu can understand the message, but it will be garbled.”

  “It says Ladies’ Room and Men’s Room,” Jay Jay said, and rolled on the floor laughing.

  “Come on, Jay Jay,” Daniel said sternly. “Stop fooling around.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What do I see?” asked Robbie.

  “Journey here forever, unless … and the rest is unknown to you.”

  “I think we should feel the doors,” Kate said. “If the running water is behind one of them it might be magic water and we don’t want to let it out.” She threw the dice. A twelve. “What can I do?”

  “You can open one of them,” Daniel said.

  She felt herself entering the landscape of the game now, and her heart began to pound. She had brought some armor, a short sword, food, a lantern, and a few coins in case there was anyone to be bribed. Pardieu had his magic spells, and Freelik had his own powers as well as the ability to deceive. It was dangerous to light her lantern in case there was a monster in the room who would then be able to see them and attack them. But darkness frightened her more. Darkness was one of the most terrible things she knew, with the sound of breathing; the thing that had happened that night … but she wouldn’t think about it now. Now there was only the game, where she would take revenge on creeping, soft-breathing things, where she would flash her sword and kill, and conquer. She lit her lantern. The small room was empty. She could see the writing on the doors and she couldn’t read it at all. It was in the ancient Jinnorak tongue.

  Jay Jay knew why he had been fooling around. The game always frightened him a little at the beginning—having to make that commitment. It was, he knew, something deep and invasive once he got involved in it. It was a fantasy he ate, slept, and dreamed. More than the excitement of the perils, he liked the satisfaction of winning. Freelik really didn’t need the treasure; Sprites could always do for themselves; but treasure was pretty and satisfying to own, and you could give parties with it, have feasts, sing, and tell stories and dance all through the enchanted nights in the moonlight under the trees. It was for this later pleasure he would go into the terrible mazes. And besides, in a way, he liked tempting the unexpected. The human world seemed far away now, pathetic and boring.

  Robbie, safe in the cloak of Pardieu the Holy Man, walked with sure steps over the damp crumbling floor of the maze. Glacia’s lantern swayed in her hand and cast its glow into the dark shadows ahead. A terrible shriek rent the air. Six gigantic Gorvils leaped up from a hidden pit, snarling their rage at having their terrain invaded. Dimly in the distance he could hear the reassuring clack of the dice. His small dagger firmly in his hand, he sprang at the nearest Gorvil, striking it in its center eye. It screamed shrilly and ran away, waving its little webbed arms. Glacia was whacking everywhere, the strongest of the strong. “I will enchant one!” Freelik cried. “It will tell me where the treasure is!”

  How happy Pardieu was to be here on his sacred search, warm in the company of his trusted friends, guiltless and good. It was a fine thing to have a mission.

  Daniel smiled. They were in it now, they really liked his game. Kate’s shoulders were tense, her eyes squinted as if she could actually see into the unknown. Jay Jay was giving forth little squeaks of excitement, telling everyone what to do, as usual. If they had really been in the maze the Sprite would be hopping around. And best of all, Robbie was working out well, taking it all very seriously, planning his moves. He played intelligently and thoughtfully, but not without daring. Daniel didn’t like a safe ga
me. It was hard to be the Maze Controller: you had to be sure the game wasn’t too easy, but you couldn’t let everyone get killed either. He watched carefully as Jay Jay mapped out the maze to scale on his graph paper, making notes, remembering everything. Jay Jay was by far the smartest of any of them, himself included, and it pleased Daniel the most when he could get Jay Jay totally baffled, which unfortunately was never for long. This world he had created, here in his room, with his close friends participating so eagerly, was the best of all possible worlds. It was worth all the trouble he had gone to this summer to create the new adventure. Michelangelo couldn’t have felt any better when he finished painting the Sistine Chapel. A work of art was a work of art, no matter on what level.

  CHAPTER 6

  They had worked out a routine now where they played the game two or three nights a week and both afternoons on weekends. That left weekend nights free for going out, and the other weeknights for studying. Kate was taking two easy English literature courses, a poetry-writing course, and psychology. She had already read most of the required novels before she’d come to college, and the poetry class was a joke because she could dash off a poem in an hour.

  Eng Lit I was held in a huge amphitheater with rows of seats rising so high that the professor looked like a tiny doll standing in front of his lectern, speaking through a microphone. “I am sure many of you have read Huckleberry Finn before,” he said. “I have read it twenty-two times.” The class groaned, a wave of sound. “Every time I read it I see something different,” he went on. “As we grow and mature we understand new meanings in a great novel.”

  Bor-ring, Kate wrote in her notebook, and passed it to Robbie, who was sitting next to her. It had turned out they were both in the same gut course, so now they sat together all the time and saved seats for each other. It was one of the most popular courses in the school, mostly because it was not hard.