When Gelsey woke up, later than usual, she found, strangely, that she no longer felt the fear. And yet, as far as she knew, nothing had changed:
Dr. Z was dead, both the police and Diana were after her and she was still a prisoner of the mirrors.
But something was different. And if, she reasoned, the difference did not lie in the objective facts of her situation, then it must lie within, in her feelings.
Yes, that was it. Because she felt good. She felt almost… ebullient.
She got out of bed, yawned, stretched, then strode into the work space of the loft. Surrounded at once by all her drawings and studies, she was suddenly struck by the notion that with her latest painting in the series, the one she had turned over to Erica, she had finally finished with Leering Man and was ready to take on something new. She didn't know yet what her new subject would be, only that she would discover it when she set to work.
A new beginning, she thought. Perhaps today is the day.
The sun, higher now, was lifting mist off the swamps. Janek, raising his eyes from the road, watched an American Airlines jet, most likely a red-eye from the Coast, fall softly toward Newark Airport. Plumes of smoke, burn-offs from the petroleum-tank farms, marked the windless sky like hieroglyphics. Or perhaps, he thought, like letters written in mirror-reverse.
He knew where he was going. He had gone there with his father many times, His last visit had taken place thirty years before, but he hadn't forgotten the sounds, smells, revelry, crowds. Unshelled peanuts in a paper bag. Cotton candy wound around a cone. Shooting gallery with Kewpie doll prizes. Merry-go-rounds, Dodgem, roller coaster, Ferris wheel.
There were dark attractions, too-the tunnel of love, with its gloomy, watery aroma of cheap perfume and teenage sex; and the fun house (the "crazy house," his father had called it), with its cackling automatons, freaks, slanted moving floors, sudden startling blasts of wind and maze of distorting mirrors. had told "Her folks were carny people," Erica Hawkins h him. "She lives out by a deserted amusement park near Newark."
Janek remembered the place well, and also his father's friend out there, an old organ grinder named Walter Mele", with sad eyes and a drooping, yellowing mustache. His father had kept the old man's hurdy-gurdy going for years.
"Wait will never be able to buy a new one," he'd said.
His father had never charged Meles for repairs; in return, every summer the old man had sent him a pair of one-day passes. And so, each August, on a very hot Sunday afternoon, Janek and his father would go to the Port Authority Bus Terminal and board a bus for Richmond Park. Once there they would ride the rides and say hello to Wait. Janek had always dreaded that part of it-not the saying hello, but the shaking of the hand. Not Walter Meles's hand, either; it was the hand of Walt's old monkey, Suzy, tethered to the hurdy-gurdy, that he would dread.
"Now say hello to Suzy," Walt would intone. The monkey would cackle, stick out its paw and Janek would have to touch it. When one time he complained, his father told him there were things in this world you have to do whether you liked to or not. "Suzy is all that old guy has," his father explained. But still, any fun Janek might anticipate on their annual foray was sabotaged by his knowledge that i he would have to shake the animal's scabrous little paw.
Gelsey had always held to a superstition: that her pencils, crayons and brushes knew what they wanted to depict, and that if she could only get into sync with them, they would take her hand and show her what to draw.
Now she stood before a large sheet of paper tacked onto a sheet of plywood nailed to her studio wall, waiting for her hand to move. The ceiling fan cut at the morning light utions that. streamed in through the skylight, its rapid revol inspiring notions of circles, balls, spheres, globes.
Yes, a head A portrait.
She swirled the black crayon through the air and then touched it lightly to the paper. And then slowly she followed it as it seemed to find a groove. And then it was as the crayon had a will of its own, scribing with such authority that her hand seemed barely more than a support.
Still thinking of his father, Janek stopped the car before the entrance to Richmond Park. The wrought-iron gate, rusted now, was closed and hooped with padlocked chains. Richmond had been shut down ten years ago, closed by the state after its roller coaster crashed. The crash had been a major tragedy-seven children killed, forty-six seriously injured.
Richmond had never reopened, yet no one had bothered to tear it down.
And so it stood, rotting slowly, almost, Janek thought, magnificent in its decay, surrounded by an automobile junkyard, a warehouse especially constructed for storage of industrial wastes and a single street of decrepit blue-collar homes.
A pack of wild dogs, it was rumored, roamed its grounds. A dismembered human female body had been discovered there a couple of summers before.
The killing, Janek recalled, had not taken place at the park; the body parts had just been dumped there. But that was enough to create an aura of menace and fear. Now Richmond was the sort of place one kid might dare another to enter on Halloween.
Thinking sadly of his father, Janek drove on.
Gelsey had no idea what she was drawing until, after fifteen minutes of work, she let her hand drop and stepped back from the wall to look.
And then, when she saw the form, she felt despair. She had drawn the head of a monster, the Minotaur.
I am still a prisoner of the maze.
She was about to rip the paper off the board when she heard a sound and turned. A car had driven up outside and stopped. She went to the window to look out.
When Janek found the building, he couldn't believe he had the right address. A flat-topped, windowless concrete structure with an industrial steel door, it looked more like a garage than someone's home.
He sat in Aaron's car studying the place. The number matched the one on the piece of paper in his hand. He got out, walked across the street, peered in through the eastern perimeter fence of the amusement park. He could make out some of the wreckage of the crashed roller coaster through the weeds. Then, when he turned back, he was surprised. A wooden structure with a pitched corrugated metal roof was perched on top of the concrete building, set too far back to be seen from the street.
He walked along the side, found an exterior wooden staircase leading up to the house.
Sure, she must live up there.
He began to ascend when a young woman appeared at the top of the stairs.
He couldn't make her out. The sun was behind her; she was just a silhouette. But he was certain she was his quarry.
Gelsey stared at the man below her, standing on the bottom step. She recognized him at once-the detective she'd seen on TV, the middle-aged man with the searching eyes. Her hunter. Her enemy.
"Who the hell are you?"
"Name's Janek," he said. "I'd like to talk to you."
I bet you would! "What about?"
"You're Beth Gelsey, right?"
She didn't respond.
"Look, I know-":'Who told you I was here?"
"Efica Hawkins."
Erica-shit! But he must be pretty good if he found his way to her.
Gelsey didn't say anything for a couple of seconds. She knew she had to stall him until she figured out what to do. Escape was impossible.
She supposed she could invite him in, offer him coffee or a Coke. But even if she put him to sleep and ran, she had no place to go.
Then an idea came to her, a way to weaken him, get the upper hand.
"What do you want?" she demanded.
He pulled out his shield, displayed it.
She placed her hands on her hips. "So, you found me.
Big deal."
"Can I come up?"
"No." Her answer was sharp. "Go around to the front. I'll let you in."
Janek stood before the steel door for several minutes. Funny how they all talk so tough. Finally the door creaked opened. Ahead was blackness.
He hesitated.
"Where are you
?" he asked. "Behind the door?"
No answer. He advanced. He felt like he was entering a cave. Then, suddenly, several things happened at once the door closed behind him, the place went pitch-black, then bright lights came on, and then everywhere he turned he saw himself.
He was surrounded by mirrors.
So, she likes to play games. This one seems harmless enough.
As he moved forward he quickly discovered that he was in a mirrored corridor with a mirrored ceiling. And then he had to smile, for the deeper he penetrated, the more distorted his reflections became. He found himself fattened, thinned, twisted, dwarfed, stretched, bent, split in two, hourglassed. In one mirror the lower half of his body was miniaturized while his head suddenly quadrupled in size. Concave, convex and irregularly bent mirrors deconstructed his bodily integrity.
The effects were funny. The only i trouble was that he was alone; there was no one with h m to point and hoot.
Gelsey, standing on the catwalk beside the switchboard that controlled the door and lights, watched silently from above.
Gotta gii, e hi),n credit, she thought. He doesn't hesitate; he moves straight in.
Now that she had him in the maze, she would run him through her hoops.
She had changed from her working garb of shirt and jeans into something a little more… seductive. Wandering below, he was an unwary traveler; in the endless mirrored galleries, she was queen. She stepped softly to the thick white rope, then silently lowered herself to the floor. She moved into the blue chamber, then seated herself on the stool to wait.
Janek turned a corner and found himself amid a sequence of mirrors set at angles to the perpendicular, some bending toward him and some away.
At first the effect made him dizzy, but then he began to enjoy it. Feels like I'm inside one of those 1920s German films.
He could not move quickly-the corridor was narrow and because there were so many mirrors he wasn't always able to distinguish between open space and mirror space. Also, the corridor was sharply angled, full of diabolic turns. After negotiating a few of these he had the feeling he had doubled back on his route, possibly twice.
He passed beneath an arch. On it the words CHAMBER OF UNSUSTAINABLE ECSTASY were written in archaic Old English script. He remembered the archway at the police headquarters in Havana, the word HOMICIDIO elegantly inscribed above.
The corridor widened, and then he was surprised again. He saw Gelsey, in a slinky black cocktail dress, smiling at him, sitting on a high stool against a brilliant neon-blue background. She seemed to be just a few feet ahead, but when he moved toward her he realized he was looking at a reflection. He turned around to look for her but she wasn't behind him either.
He turned back, moved closer to the mirror. Maybe it's a reflection.
Maybe I'm looking at her through a pane He couldn't be sure. She seemed to be sitting in limbo. The bare blue chamber offered no points of reference.
Chamber of Unobtainable Ecstasy: Was she, then, the unobtainable object?
Evidently she thinks so. She's positioned herself like a lure. She was, he recognized, most certainly that, although perhaps not the sexual lure she seemed to think. He saw a very attractive young woman with dark hair, dark eyebrows and very pale skin, whose beautiful eyes spoke to him of hurt and loss.
Thinking that sooner or later he would find his way to where she sat, he decided to move on. There were no trick mirrors in this portion; the angles were regular, the mirrors carefully and uniformly arranged. There were perfect equilateral triangles grooved into the floor, suggesting that the mirrors were set at precisely 60 degrees. But then he discovered several irregularities in this pattern, which puzzled him, as did the fact that the passage had become so wide he could not touch both sides of it at once. Every so often he would see Gelsey again. She didn't move much and her slightly mocking smile didn't change. What was most strange was the way she (or her reflection) seemed to jump around the labyrinth, reflected ill some mirrors and not in others. He couldn't figure out how the trick was done, but he was intrigued by it, and impressed. She was, he reminded himself, a professional seductress. Such a woman would be possessed by a need to be in control,.
To conceal herself in the labyrinth was her way to defy him. But what a labyrinth it was! He had never seen one like it, nor imagined that such an elaborate assemblage of mirrors could even exist. He decided that if he could see her, then she, in turn, must be able to see him.
So, when he came to a panel he was certain was transparent, he stood before her and stared. Slowly her smile seemed to widen. Then suddenly, magically, she disappeared.
Gelsey studied him. I've got him! He looks for me but can't find me.
Finally he sees me… then suddenly I'm gone!
Even though he seemed to be staring at her, she knew he could not see her. Examining him now at her leisure, she decided he did not look much like a mark. Where was the fear she liked to see? The terror?
The acknowledgment in his eyes that the predicament he was in had been brought about by his own stupid lust? That it was his weakness that had brought him to this point of danger? That he had been jerk, a fool, a buffoon?
In fact, as she examined Janek, she saw a man who did not appear to acknowledge anything of the kind. Rather, he seemed to be searching out her weakness, regarding her as if she were a creature in a cage.
Janek thought: To her I'm just a rat in the maze. But even though she was gone, he sensed that she still was there, watching him. So he addressed her missing image:
"Okay, that's pretty good, but now I've had enough. Time to come out where I can see you."
"You've only seen the half of it." Her voice, disembodied, came to him from above.
"Where are you?"
"In mirror world." She intoned the word mysteriously. Her words, he realized, were being broadcast to him through speakers in the mirrored ceiling.
"I'm going back."
"You won't find your way," she taunted.
Don't think so? I can play tough, too.
"if I get lost I'll just break a few mirrors."
When she suddenly reappeared on the other side of the glass, she did not appear amused.
"What do you want?" she demanded.
He stared into her eyes, noting the same vulnerability he'd observed in the police sketches.
"Come out," he said. "I'm not going to talk to you through glass."
"It's about Dietz, isn't it?"
He nodded. "And other things."
She studied him, then seemed to make a decision. "Make two rights, then a left. I'll meet you at the exit."
Again she disappeared.
Ten minutes later they stood facing each other in her loft in the building above. They had barely exchanged a word. She had simply met him, guided him outside, then led him up the exterior stairs, making sure he saw a considerable amount of leg and butt in the process. Now, inside her house above the mirror-maze structure, she watched him as he peered around.
If the building below, with its rigorously arranged mirror maze, had surprised Janek, the wooden house above-filled with art, art supplies, tools, a workbench, mirrored panels and jagged pieces of broken mirrors-was a revelation. It spoke of eccentricity, talent and, most of all, obsession. It had been one thing to see the Leering Man in Erica Hawkins's gallery. Now he stared at twenty drafts and versions of the same subject, in various styles and formats, hanging on or leaning against the walls.
He turned to her. "I never imagined you in a place like this. "
"What did you imagine?" She snickered. "A gaffet?"
"Lived here long, Beth?"
She looked away. "Do me a favor, don't call me that."
"What should I call you?"
"Gelsey'll do."
He nodded, peered around again. A ceiling fan whipped the air. His eyes fell on a table covered with coins, Cuff links, money clips and assorted men's jewelry.
"How long have you lived here?"
"All my life."
"Me and my folks. This was our house." She addressed him as if he were a moron or a child. "And the maze?"
"My father built it."
"Lots of mirrors down there."
"I like mirrors." His eyes fell on a rack filled with huge mirrored panels. "What do you like about them?"
"The way they Make things look." She studied him. "People think when they look into a mirror what they see is what they get. They're wrong.
In a mirror everything's reversed." She paused. "How'd you find Erica?"
"Just followed the mirrors," he said.
She slumped into a chair. "I knew you'd turn up. I suppose I ought to feel relieved."
He took a chair across from her. "Just be damn grateful it was me."
She stared at him with disgust. It was easy to read her face: She loathed him and wanted him to know it.
Way to handle this one, he thought, is to refuse to take til@v other shit.
Still, for all her surliness, he was struck by her beauty, and the depths he saw reflected in her eyes.
"Yeah? Why should I be damn grateful?" She stuck out her legs, just the way Roger Carlson had described. Then she stared at him with curiosity.
He remembered Carlson's words: ".. – looking at me like I was some kind of pinneddown bug."
"There's a nasty man looking for you, Gelsey. You know why Dietz was killed?"
She shook her head, then arched her back, a sexy move on account of the way it thrust her breasts against the fabric of the dress. He thought:
She thinks seducing me is going to be her way out of this, "You took something off of him." "Did I?" She smiled scornfully.
"Don't play games," he snapped. "I'm not in the mood."
She tried to outstare him, snickered again, then gestured toward the table. "Lots of loot over there, Detective. Check it out. Take your pick."
He made up his mind then that if they were going to play, the game would be hardball and he would win.
"You never tried to sell any of the stuff you took?"
She shrugged.
"What about the money?"
She casually gestured toward an old wooden desk. "Bottom right-hand drawer. It's all there, every cent."
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