by Rona Jaffe
Back to the caverns, his own adventureland of endless possibility. Jay Jay hummed happily as he began to investigate the first three chambers, dropping his croutons, arranging little piles of stones to give himself added clues to direction. He was aware how dangerous these mazes were, and he had no intention of ending his life. He felt a little frightened, which pleased him, and also very elated. At nine o’clock, ravenously hungry, he sat down with his back against a large rock and ate his sandwiches and drank his sodas, which were still cool. White paint, he thought, would be good for a secret message, or perhaps even luminous silver paint if he could find it. He knew there wasn’t anything he couldn’t find if he wanted to. He would invent ancient runes—aha!
Feeling very tired and cozy after his supper and his athletic and intellectual efforts, he lay down, pulling the hood of his coat over his head to act as a sort of pillow. It wouldn’t do to go back to the dorm tonight, then nobody would worry about him. He would go back tomorrow. And meanwhile, somehow it seemed as if sleeping here gave him proprietorship, making the caverns his own. He slept, and dreamed of the game, dreamed that they all loved him. A whole tribe of Sprites was sitting on little stone mushrooms, all applauding for him. You are the cleverest of all, O Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir! they cried admiringly in their tiny voices. They were wearing silken robes in pale, iridescent colors, and every one of them looked just like him.
The next morning was cold and clear. Jay Jay rode back to the dorm in triumph, his motorbike a charger; feeling that he had indeed discovered a treasure. He was gratified to see that the others were very upset over his disappearance, particularly Kate.
“Where did you go?” she demanded. “I was scared to death.”
“I’ll tell you when I’m ready,” he said smugly.
“I fed Merlin and put the cover on his cage,” she said reproachfully. “That was a terrible note to leave. I didn’t know what you were going to do. If that was another one of your stupid jokes it wasn’t funny.”
“I’ll tell you tonight if you’re free,” he said.
“We’re playing the game tonight,” she said. “Aren’t we?”
“I’ll tell you before the game,” Jay Jay said. “When we’re all together.”
Sitting in Daniel’s room, in their circle, Jay Jay told them his plan. They looked at him and then at each other, confused, each waiting for someone else to tell them what to do. He could tell that they were both horrified and intrigued.
“It’s awfully dangerous,” Daniel said.
“That’s the point,” said Jay Jay.
“You spent the night there?” Kate said. “All by yourself?”
“Yup.”
“Did you see bones?”
Jay Jay smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Bones … of course, he would have to get some bones too. “However, if you’re too afraid to try my idea …”
“There’s a difference between being brave and being reckless,” Kate said.
“We’re still playing this game,” Daniel said. He sounded hurt.
Jay Jay shrugged. “Think about it. We have plenty of time.”
Robbie hadn’t said a word. “What do you think, Robbie?” Kate asked.
“I’ll do whatever everybody else decides,” Robbie said.
“Don’t you have your own opinion?” Jay Jay asked acidly. It annoyed him the way Robbie always deferred to Kate. Just like a henpecked husband.
“I think it would be kind of exciting,” Robbie said.
“You see?” Jay Jay said. “He’s the only one with imagination.”
“Let’s just play my game till we finish it,” Daniel said. “I worked like hell on this game.”
Jay Jay smiled his guileless little smile. “There’s plenty of time,” he said. “I’ll bring this up again.”
Kate glanced at Daniel as if to say, He’ll forget it. It’s just another of his crazy ideas.
But Jay Jay knew he would never forget it, and he wouldn’t give up. He had never been so excited by anything in his whole life.
CHAPTER 10
Robbie was not allowed to sleep in Kate’s room every night; she said the bed was too small and he disturbed her. He understood. It was difficult to pay attention in classes, do homework, and keep alert in the game when you hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep. For him it was even more difficult than for her, because he had to keep up his stamina in swimming practice. Her practicality was mature and sensible, and he agreed with her plan that they only sleep together overnight on weekends, but still he couldn’t help feeling a little rejected. If she really loved him she would find a way … He drove into town and went to the thrift shop and bought a double mattress which looked quite clean, and dragged it up the dormitory stairs and into his room. He bought a set of sheets and a blanket in the shopping mall, made their bed, and brought Kate into his room triumphantly to show her his surprise.
“Now we can live together,” he told her.
A flicker of fear came into her eyes and her face was grave. “It’s too soon,” she said.
“What’s too soon?” Her rejection hit him like a physical pain. He could actually feel it, a tightening in his chest. “We’re together all the time anyway.”
“Robbie, I never lived with anybody before. I’m not ready. I love you, but sometimes I like to be all alone.”
“Why would anybody want to be all alone?”
“It’s too soon,” she said again, sadly. “I’ve got all these pressures of school … us being together is the best thing in my life, but please don’t try to change it yet.”
“I’m never going to leave you,” he said, “if that’s what you’re worried about.” Over her shoulder he could look out the window at his ugly view of the parking lot. He wondered if she thought his room wasn’t good enough, not romantic enough. “We can put the bed in your room if you’d rather.”
“It’s not whose room we live in,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Robbie, it’s really sweet that you bought the bed. We can use it weekends. It’ll be a lot more comfortable.” She took his hand and smiled at him. “Trust me.”
He locked the door quickly and drew her down on their new bed, to use it and thus make it real. She didn’t protest. But he could feel something in her drawing away from him, and it maddened him and made him feel afraid. For the first time his lovemaking was wild, possessive; not tender, not sweet. She had always been the strong one, she made the decisions, she was the leader, but not this time, not now. He became so frenzied that he didn’t even care whether she liked it or not. He tried to make up for all the times he’d never been able to understand her as well as he wanted to, to obliterate that stubborn core that resisted all the love and need he wanted to lavish on it. He wanted—for once, at last—to win.
It was the best sex he’d ever had, and as soon as he was finished he felt guilty, because he’d liked not caring what she wanted. He looked at her nervously, wondering if she knew what he was thinking.
“Wow,” she said. Her tone was totally noncommittal. He didn’t know if he’d won or lost, and he certainly didn’t dare ask her.
It occurred to him, in the days that followed, that he had expected love to make his life complete, and had never expected that a relationship might be two difficult people trying to become one. He couldn’t imagine how he could have been so stupid not to have known it after the example he had right under his nose at home with his battling parents. But they were from another era, nearly dinosaurs, and he had planned to be different. He had planned for everything to be perfect. He’d thought he really had everything figured out, but now he looked at his life and realized he’d been asleep. His schoolwork was piling up on him. It seemed as if there were never enough hours in the day, and he wondered if he could get a leave of absence from the swimming team, tell the coach he was worried about exams. Other people did that, or else they got thrown off the team for not keeping up. He knew he’d been wasting a lot of time having fu
n, going to movies with Kate, just being with her, playing the game with his friends, daydreaming. It was as if there were certain gaps in his memory: time vanished.
But he did nothing about it. He kept on with swimming practice, he kept spending evenings with Kate when he knew he needed to study more than she because she was so quick, and he kept playing the game. The game was a great emotional release for him because it kept him from worrying about everything else, for a while anyway.
At night he began to dream again about his brother. Sometimes Hall was sixteen, looking the way he had when he ran away five years ago, and sometimes he was an adult Robbie hardly knew. If Hall was alive he would be taller, filled out, perhaps he’d have a mustache or even a beard. He’d be different. Maybe he was a junkie; skinny, sick. Or maybe he’d been dead for years and these were only wishes that would never come true.
The dreams were more complicated now. No longer did Hall come to sit on his bed in the moonlight and talk to him. Now Robbie found himself in a maze, with walls and floor of graph paper, filled with a strange bluish light, and he was running down these frustrating corridors after his brother. It was so neat, like a hospital, or a sketch made by a player. Maybe the dream symbolized that Hall was in a hospital somewhere, perhaps with amnesia. Robbie was always running, out of breath, trying to call out and finding that he had no voice. He could never run fast enough; his legs would ache and he would sink to the floor, drawn inexorably down like someone with a wasting disease. How his legs cramped and pained him! How futilely he tried to shout to tell Hall he was here, to stop and wait for him … He would wake up drenched with sweat, crying. His tears felt scaldingly hot, the tears of frustration. They almost burned his cheeks. He would lie in bed for at least twenty minutes, trying to collect himself, to get out of the dream into the real world again. It was just as well he didn’t spend every night with Kate. He never wanted her to see him like this.
But then, inevitably, she did. She held him tenderly, rocking him like a baby. “It’s your brother, isn’t it,” she said.
He nodded. “I couldn’t get to him.”
“Was he in trouble?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s not your fault,” Kate said. “It’s not your fault.”
But of course it was.
Now the brother who had never been close to him—who had, in the two years preceeding his disappearance, undergone a personality change, becoming inaccessible—became kind and close to Robbie in his dreams. This was the Hall he remembered when he was very young, the brother who had patiently played catch with him in the backyard, who had told Robbie grown-up jokes he was not to repeat to his parents but could to his friends, even though Robbie only pretended to understand them. Robbie waited for his dreams with fear and anticipation. Fear, because of that paralyzing feeling of frustration; anticipation, because each time he felt he was coming a little closer to finding out how he could help Hall. He was sure that no one could dream so vividly, and so often, unless the dreams were trying to say something to him.
And then one night in a dream the most extraordinary thing happened. He was following Hall, and suddenly he was not Robbie at all—he was Pardieu the Holy Man. Looking down he saw his brown robes, the sandals on his feet, and around his waist the rope holding the little leather bag of potions and miracles. Wait! Pardieu cried, running. I am Pardieu! I will help you! But Hall was gone.
Pardieu looked in his bag of magic spells. There was the coin of wishes, to undo what had been done. There was the incandescent liquid, which gave the ability to see into the mind of any being who was possessed of intelligence. His fingers closed around the last, most prized spell of all: The graven jade Eye of Timor. It was a mystery how it had gotten into his pouch, for he had never before been clever or worthy enough to win it. The Eye of Timor could be used by only the highest level of Holy Men, for it gave the user the greatest power of all—the power to raise the dead.
When he awoke from that dream in the morning, for the first time Robbie did not cry. He lay in his bed thinking, feeling at peace. It was as if he were surrounded by soft feathers. He did not understand why, but for the first time instead of dread and frustration he felt a gentle, blissful hope.
CHAPTER 11
Christmas vacation was coming soon, and people were already planning their escape. Kate, Jay Jay, Daniel, and Robbie had decided to have a last great game session before they departed for home, the game to be preceded by a private party with an exchange of gifts. The life of the dorm and the people in it swirled around them as lightly and unheeded as winter snowflakes. Some students had put up a tree downstairs in the common room, and decorated it, and decorations and wishes for Happy Holidays appeared on the bulletin board, along with an address where you could send Christmas cards to the hostages in Iran. A serious editorial in The Grant Gazette warned that potential accidents to our nuclear power plants might make this one the last Christmas ever. The immediate concern in Hollis East, however, was finding a free ride home to save train or plane fare.
Although Jay Jay had no shortage of money, Robbie was going to take him and Merlin, since he could drive through New York on his way to Greenwich; Daniel planned to take the train to Cambridge; and Kate’s mother had sent her a round-trip plane ticket to San Francisco.
“Are you going to miss me?” Robbie asked Kate.
“Of course. Are you going to miss me?”
“Like crazy.”
Kate went with Jay Jay to buy food for their party, which they decided would be held in his room. Parties were always held in Jay Jay’s room. They went to the gourmet section of the supermarket in the shopping mall, and in five minutes Jay Jay had already exceeded their budget. He even insisted on buying champagne.
“You and I should do stuff like this more often,” he said.
“I know. We should.”
“It’s not my fault.”
“It’s mine,” Kate said. “Next time Robbie and I go to the movies, you come too.”
“Okay.”
They were filled with warm Christmas spirit, and sang carols all the way home to the dorm in her car, the backseat piled high with bags of extravagant delicacies: huge, out of season pears and grapes, imported cheeses, pâté, English biscuits, a fruitcake which Jay Jay planned to soak in brandy.
They began the party at five o’clock, toasting each other with champagne. Jay Jay had arranged the food very nicely on top of his desk, and had taught Merlin to sing the first line of “Jingle Bells,” which they all cheered wildly. They had locked the door so no one would crash their party. Then they handed out the presents. Kate and Robbie exchanged thin gold chains to wear around their necks, and she gave Daniel a pair of very sexy-looking sunglasses she knew he’d been thinking of buying for himself, and Jay Jay a real find from the thrift shop: a top hat just like the ones in the old Fred Astaire movies. He put it on immediately. She gave Merlin a swing for his cage, with red and green ribbons on it. She and Jay Jay were the only ones who remembered to give Merlin anything. Daniel gave everybody records, and Robbie, who had conferred with Daniel on this decision, did the same for him and Jay Jay. Jay Jay gave each of them a beautifully lacquered little box, in which he had placed four perfectly rolled joints.
Then they tore into the food as if they were ravenous. It was not really because they were so hungry, but because they wanted to get to the best part of the evening: the game.
They were only dimly aware of how much the game had taken over their lives already. All they knew was that nothing else, not even this special party with its atmosphere of affection and luxury and celebration, was as real to them as the game. And each of them felt, in some secret, guilty way, that they wanted to get the party over with so they could go into Daniel’s room and enter their world.
“You have found the talking sword of Lothia,” Daniel said. He held the dice in his hand and looked at the three eager faces of Glacia, Freelik, and Pardieu. The dice he held were both chance and power. As he surveyed the und
erground perils he had laid out so carefully, he wondered whether all of these adventurers would still be alive at the end of this night. He didn’t want them to die. He was as excited as they were as they fought their way deeper and deeper into the maze, winning battles with strength and wits, amassing plunder. He knew he had to be objective in order to be an effective M.C., but he wanted them to find the treasure. It didn’t belong to him—it belonged to the evil King of the Jinnorak, who was very much alive; horrible, smoke-breathing, covered with scales, feasting off human flesh when he could find it, and the flesh of his part-human slaves when he couldn’t. If Glacia, Freelik, and Pardieu could survive until they came to the throne room of the King, and could kill him, it would be as if they had conquered all the evil in the world.
Glacia grasped the talking sword of Lothia and gazed into its polished surface. The light of her lantern glanced off it, gold and silver, and her heart turned over with fear. But this was her sword, no one else’s, and it would obey her commands. It would kill her enemies and it would speak to her of secrets none of them yet knew. “What lies beyond that door?” she demanded.
“I can only answer yes or no,” the sword answered.
“Is it treasure?” Glacia said.
Soft click of the dice. “No.”
“Is it danger, then?”
“No.”
“Then it’s neutral?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Glacia said. She turned to the others. “Shall we advance or go the other way?”
“Wait,” Pardieu said. “Talking swords have been known to tell lies. How do we know this is a truthful sword? We must test it.”
He was right, of course. Glacia was disappointed; first because she had been so pleased to have the aid of the sword, and second because she had never thought to test its loyalty. She of all people should have known better. Nothing was to be trusted at first sight.
“Do you cut stone?” she asked the sword.
“No.”
“Can you kill people?”
