The Maze The Lost Labyrinth

CHAPTER 11



Although I couldn’t be certain that the six hallways didn’t connect at some point, I knew for sure that I wasn’t going to venture any deeper into the one I had hidden inside. That was the direction the beast had gone, and I had no desire for a second encounter.

After some deliberation, I took the path that veered furthest to the left, reasoning that the outermost corridors might lead away from the center of the maze. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The passage made several abrupt ninety-degree turns, and soon, I had lost all sense of direction. For all I knew, I had made enough right angle turns to put me back at square one. Even some of the writing on the walls looked repetitious, like some futuristic graffiti artist had used these walls to practice his craft.

Eventually I reached a hallway that was lit by torches, offsetting the faint blue characters on the wall with a brilliant orange glare. Thankful for the flames, I grabbed one of the torches out of its sconce and ventured on. After walking for what seemed like miles, I reached another fork in the road and decided to turn right this time instead of left, hoping I would happen upon a door that might lead me back to the outside world.

I had no idea how long I’d been wandering around. I was beginning to have some understanding of how the Israelites felt in the wilderness. The atmosphere inside the labyrinth had gone from a damp mossy smell to dry and stale, like air trapped inside a mausoleum for hundreds of years.

As I reached the next ninety-degree turn, I noted the faintest hint of motion and caught a whiff of something that smelled like it had baked on a slab of desert highway for a week or two. I stopped, holding my torch tightly, willing the fire to keep burning. It was the closest thing to a weapon I had.

Listening and peering intently into the darkness, I waited for a couple of seconds, wondering if the motion I had seen was nothing more than shadows dancing on the walls, set into motion by my flame. It was a definite possibility. But what about the smell? Shadows didn’t stink. Or at least they didn’t in the reality I knew and longed for.

I inhaled the stale odor of eons and the pungent stench of musk. I felt like I was trapped in a system of ancient catacombs. I hadn’t run across any decaying corpses or brittle skeletons yet, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that I was walking the halls of the dead.

A sudden buzzing filled the labyrinth, seemingly from all directions, making it impossible to hear anything else. Without warning, a wave of flies filled the corridor, their wings fluttering against my skin, their mirrored eyes observing me with an alien intelligence. I was too busy swatting them away and trying to escape to hear the clop-clop-clop of approaching hooves.

I swung my torch in wide arcs, trying to get the flies off of me. The kamikaze insects were persistent, biting me, lighting on my face, flying in circles around my head. I didn’t know it at the time but they were stalling me, buying time for their master.

My skin was a patchwork of red welts and inflamed bumps once the insects had done their work and moved on. I clawed madly at the bites although I knew that would only make things worse. As it turned out, the itching was the least of my worries. A set of smoldering yellow eyes peered at me from the darkness.

I cried out and backed away, but the behemoth had his sights set on a feast. It emerged from the shadows, towering over me with a set of horns that could have doubled as javelins. Gunpowder clouds of smoky breath rolled from his nostrils, smelling of raw meat and decay. The creature walked upright on hooves as big as cinderblocks, with legs that were sinewy with muscle. Its hands were covered in a thick, coarse brown fur and were as large as dinner plates. Its face was that of an evil cow, leering at me with eyes like black marbles. A halo of flies circled the minotaur’s head, crowning it in perverse glory.

It sniffed the air once and then looked at me. Although I couldn’t be sure of its expression, I thought it was smiling with pleasure. No doubt, it knew the state of my heart and considered it a delicacy.

Fearful that I was about to die, I threw my torch at the beast and ran for my life as the minotaur howled. I was pretty sure the fire had burned it, and I knew that might buy me a few extra seconds. I just hoped that a few extra seconds would be enough time to allow for my escape. I sprinted down the hallways, taking whichever turn seemed right. The minotaur gave chase, roaring and snorting and growling at me. The gunshot report of its hooves on cement sounded like miniature explosions in the tightly-constructed maze.

It hadn’t been that many months since I had been in the habit of jogging two miles every morning before work. Unfortunately, I gradually lost focus and dedication and stopped exercising altogether. I hadn’t regretted that decision until now. My calves burned, my lungs felt like they were on fire and my side ached, throbbing in time with the beat of my racing heart.

And yet no matter how badly I wanted to stop and catch my breath, I knew that to do so would almost assuredly mean instant death. I had seen the way the Spaniards in Pamplona got tossed around year after year during the Running of the Bulls, and I had no doubt that my fate would be worse.

The beast howled with rage, and the entire labyrinth seemed to quake as the beast’s anger spread outward in waves. I made turn after turn, hoping to elude capture, and at long last I saw something that gave me hope. There was a tiny bit of light burning in an opened doorway.

I headed for that light immediately, knowing that I couldn’t run much longer. My side felt like someone had stabbed me with a hot branding iron. I was definitely not in good enough shape to play chase with a minotaur.

I heard the beast behind me, closer now than ever before. I was too afraid to look over my shoulder, but I imagined gusts of hot breath on my neck.

I reached down deep for that one remaining burst of energy like a runner on the verge of winning a race and focused on the opening ahead. The minotaur snorted behind me, increasing his efforts as well.

I screamed and forced my legs to run when all they really wanted to do was lock up and cramp. I saw the opening just in front of me, and heard the monster not far behind. I didn’t think I was going to make it, but somehow I did.

The moment I ran through the doorway, a panel slid shut behind me, effectively sealing me off from the rest of the maze. The minotaur’s cries were suddenly silenced. I heard the creature ram the door with its shoulder, and I was afraid that the barrier wouldn’t hold. But I was too tired to do anything about it.

I placed my hands on my knees and tried to regain my breath. After nearly a minute of panting and wheezing, I looked up to see what kind of place I had entered. Even after careful study, I still wasn’t entirely sure. It was like a cross between a mad scientist’s laboratory and a cabinet of curiosities. Strangely enough, I wasn’t all that curious. All I wanted was to find the exit and return to my humdrum life.

If only it would have been that simple.

I pulled the scrap out paper out of my pocket I had found in the glass bottle at the beginning of the maze. The message written on it was different this time.

“When is a door not a door?”

It was a joke I had heard a thousand times before, and I knew the answer.

“When it’s ajar.”

It was painfully obvious why the brain teaser was applicable to this situation. Glass jars lined shelves that ran the perimeter of the room. They were filled with what looked like organs, floating in formaldehyde. I did a quick mental count and figured that there must have been hundreds of them there, on display for some reason or another.

Placards had been mounted to the shelves to describe the contents of each jar. I stepped up to one and read: “Hardened heart, William James, 1999.” Inside the glass jar was what looked like a heart that had been petrified. Was it possible that a rock had eroded into a heart-like shape? Or was this something some industrious sculptor had fashioned? It wasn’t immediately obvious what was in the jar, but I knew it couldn’t have been human. Hearts, after all, couldn’t turn to stone, could they?

Another jar was labeled “Deceitful tongue, Michael Curtis, 2003,” and featured a gray flap of muscle that looked like it had been torn straight from someone’s mouth. “Lustful eye, Mitchell Black, 2005,” a third read. The eyeball spun lazily in solution, studying the world yet seeing nothing.

“What is this place?”

I browsed through the body parts like a selective shopper. There were jars containing thieving hands, ears attuned to gossip, feet that frequented dens of iniquity, lips that feasted on forbidden fruit, brains that dwelled on carnal knowledge, and a dozen other various appendages that could be used in the pursuit of evil. All of the glass jars were labeled and attributed to specific owners.

Then there were the empty jars.

I couldn’t help wondering if the architect of this labyrinth was responsible for the collection of these organs or if the owners themselves had been expected to make the sacrifice. This seemed like a place of penance, and I didn’t like the implications of that. I wasn’t sure how I would respond if expected to cut some part of myself out.

I read the names on each of the empty jars and stopped at one with my name. I was surprised to look at the next empty jar and see that my name was on that one too. And the next one. And the next one….

“No,” I whispered. But there was no mistaking the engravings laid in front of each empty jar. “James Michael Burroughs.”

The labels read like accusations.

“Malicious tongue.”

“Lustful heart.”

“Judgmental eyes.”

“Hands that work for selfish gain.”

I looked around suspiciously, wondering if someone was waiting in the shadows with a sharp knife or a Stryker saw, prepared to fill those jars. Fortunately, he room was empty except for me

I knew that if I were to give up all the things that the jars demanded, there would be very little left of me. It didn’t speak highly of the person I was. I had been reduced to my flaws, and there were quite a few of them it seemed. I had never realized some of these things about myself before, and it took a dramatic display like this to open my eyes. My sins were engraved and displayed for the world to see, and I couldn’t really argue that any of them weren’t true.

My heart suddenly felt heavy, and my soul felt cold. Was this the kind of man I truly was?

Although I knew it would hurt more than anything else I had ever done before, I fished one of the amber guilt pills out of my pocket and swallowed it. The effect was instantaneous, and the scenes laid out before me like snippets of film brought tears to my eyes.

“You make my life miserable!” I said this to Amy in a memory taken from a recent argument.

Another scene showed me surreptitiously ogling one of the secretaries at the office when I thought no one was looking. She wore a short skirt, and I wore a leering lustful mask.

In a third memory, I watched with disdain and disgust as a homeless man begged for change. I held up my hand to him impatiently and waved him away, wanting nothing to do with him.

The empty jars on the shelf deserved to be filled, but was I willing to make that kind of sacrifice? Was I willing to give up those parts of who I was? I wasn’t given the chance to decide.

Without warning, something large and powerful slammed into the door, knocking some of the jars off of the shelves. Clouds of long-settled dust filled the air, making it hard to see. I didn’t need to open my eyes to recognize the stench that pervaded the room. The minotaur was nearby. I suddenly thought I had a good idea how all those organs found their way into formaldehyde.

Frantic, I searched the room for any alternative method of escape. Of course, none were immediately obvious. There were no weapons either. I had no options, no ways of defending myself, no way of getting out of this room.

Had I simply been condemned to wander the halls of this maze until the minotaur sniffed out my sins and killed me? Was this the only reason I was here? The maze seemed much too elaborate a setup for something as mundane as murder. However, I wasn’t sure if anyone had bothered to tell that to the minotaur.

My options were limited, and my time was short. I consulted the scrap of paper from my pocket again, hoping for revelation. Once again, the message had changed.

“The fastest way to get your life together is by falling apart.”

I wadded the paper up angrily and shoved it into my pocket. I didn’t need any more fortune cookie-styled clues. I needed tangible instructions on what to do and how to get out of this place. I needed to know how to keep the minotaur from killing me in this dreadful maze, and if I didn’t figure that out very, very soon, I was going to die.

The walls trembled as the beast rammed the door again, and motes of dust displaced by the impact swirled around my face. I searched the room frantically, knowing there was something I was missing, some clue that would lead me to safety. So far every problem in this labyrinth had a solution if only you knew where to look. The problem was knowing where to focus.

Cracks appeared in the smooth surface of the door as the minotaur hit it again. It howled at me from the other side in rage and frustration. Quite a few of the glass jars had fallen from their shelves and shattered on the floor. Various body parts lay strewn about in puddles of formaldehyde. I knew if the minotaur gained access to this room, I would become just another pile of human flaws added to the collection.

The cracks in the door spider-webbed with each new blow, spreading outward from the point of impact. It wouldn’t be long before the beast got to me. I picked up a broken jar and planned to use it as a weapon. It wasn’t much but it was all I had. It was the equivalent of staring down a Sherman tank with a BB gun. This wasn’t going to end well.

With my back to the wall that faced the door, I sat there on the cold, hard floor and watched as my hopeless situation grew more and more hopeless. The door was flaking away in bits and pieces. It wasn’t wood or metal, and it didn’t seem to be rock exactly. The composition meant little, however, because soon the beast was going to gain access to this room, and that would be the end for me.

Over and over again, I watched the jars slide off the shelves and listened to the cacophony of shattering glass. How many people had it taken to fill this room? How long had it taken to harvest so much transgression?

I watched as sin rained down all around me, and something happened as I watched. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something irregular. The minotaur still did its best to break down the door, but strangely enough, my attention wasn’t on that anymore. Maybe I had just accepted my fate and wanted to spend my last few minutes of life focused on something other than my impending death. In any case, I saw a jar filled with a strange, blue substance sitting far back on one of the shelves. There were no discernible body parts inside that I could see; there was only the dark blue goo. I couldn’t think of anything in the human anatomy that was such a color, and I got to my feet, intent on seeing what was inside.

The moment I put my hand on the jar and caught a whiff of the heavenly scent of blueberries, I realized what it was. Good ol’ fashioned, homemade jelly. The kind you put on biscuits on Sundays before church (and trust me, I knew about church- Mama had me there every Sunday without fail). In an ordinary setting I would have immediately guessed what was in the jar, but this was far from normal.

The jar of jelly seemed out of place here, but I was thankful I’d found it. I drew a certain comfort from the jar, not because of what was in it, but because of the memories it resurrected. This was jelly just like my mother used to make, and there was safety in the thought of her. My mother was a wonderful woman, the kind of woman who could face down a hopeless situation such as this and find some thread of hope woven into the fabric of despair. I wondered what she would have done upon finding herself in a mess like this one.

I heard another chunk of the door fall to the floor behind me, but I didn’t bother looking. Instead, I twisted open the lid on the jar and took a huge sniff of what was inside. The scent of sweetened berries made everything just a little easier to bear. Mama started making jellies when the cancer came. It was one of the things she had focused on as a way of getting through it all.

The thought gave me pause.

This wasn’t one of Mama’s jars of jelly. It couldn’t be. Then again, stranger things had happened. Maybe this was where my attentions were supposed to be focused. Maybe this was my clue.

I dipped my finger into the gooey mess and tasted it. It was just like Mama made it.

Mama had been faced with her own hopeless situation and persevered. She beat cancer when the doctors said there was no way. She went from a Stage 4, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that was aggressive and rapidly eating her from the inside out to cancer-free in less than six months, but never took credit for the healing. She always said prayer was the best medicine, and she took her medicine faithfully, praying morning, noon, and night.

I wasn’t sure about my own faith at the moment, but I knew that my mother had believed in the power of God with every fiber of her being. Not once during her sickness did I ever see her get down or discouraged. Instead, she had always been positive that she was going to be healed. I regretted not being more like her. Hoping to avoid thinking about the beast just outside the door, I focused on her instead of the problem at hand. I remembered the calm assurance she’d had during her chemotherapy. I remembered her testimony about the healing nature of God. I remembered the absolute lack of fear.

What I needed more than anything else was that same unwavering belief that God could still work miracles. If my mother had been here with me, her faith was so strong she could have prayed a door into existence. I needed a miracle right now.

I focused on that kind of intense belief and tried to imagine what it must feel like to know that all of Heaven was at your disposal if only you knew how to ask. Mama had known, and there was a lot I could have learned from her.

The heady fragrance of blueberries was like an aerosolized insulation, temporarily shielding me from all of the evils that were being perpetrated around me. For the briefest of moments, I felt calm, safe, even reassured. Maybe it was just the thought of my mother that did the trick. Or maybe it was the thought of her faith that gave me strength.

“God, please don‘t let me die in the bowels of this prison,” I sank to my knees. “Deliver me, Lord. Show me the way out.”

I shook and shivered with each word, and it was all I could do to kneel down and stay bowed in supplication. I thought of my mother’s example and forced myself to talk to God. It had been years since I had done such a thing. I wasn’t sure if He would hear me now after ignoring Him for so long.

The minotaur didn’t seem to care about my prayers. He continued attacking the door with a reckless abandon, intent on getting inside. The labyrinth trembled around me as the beast tried to force his way in. Meanwhile, I held fast to the jar of jelly and tried to focus on the memories it represented.

The beast’s growling quickly turned to prolonged shrieks of pain as a second voice howled out its fury for all the world to hear. Although I couldn’t see what was happening on the other side of that wall, it sounded like two tornadoes had collided and were in the process of destroying everything in their path. Evidently the minotaur wasn’t the only inhabitant of the labyrinth. I tried to conjure an image of something equally as horrible, and it was one time I wished my imagination wasn’t quite so vivid.

They continued fighting, roaring with anger, attacking each other. I hoped the minotaur was losing the battle, although that meant there was something even more terrible to face. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

As the battle raged on the other side of the wall, I wondered if my prayer had worked, if God had actually sent one of His angels to rescue me. Whatever was on the other side of the wall didn’t sound like an angel. Then again, I didn’t really know what kinds of sounds angels made.

Knowing it was fruitless to speculate, I kept praying instead, just like my mother would have done. Within a minute the clippety-clop of hooves faded as the minotaur fled. I couldn’t believe my luck. Then I realized luck had nothing to do with it.

My mother would have been proud, and I resolved to give her a call if and when I ever got out of this place.

The fact that the minotaur was gone lifted my spirits, but I was still trapped inside this room of broken glass and spilled sins. Slimy hands, wet eyeballs, salacious tongues, and other severed organs littered the floor. It looked like a dissection lab had blown up, and I had absolutely no idea how to get out. The door was in shambles, but miraculously it still held.

I placed both hands on the broken door and pushed as hard as I could. I was pretty skeptical that my efforts would have any effect since the minotaur hadn’t been able to gain access, but the door miraculously slid back on an unseen track. I braced myself, fully expecting to see something with rippling muscles, blood-tainted fangs, and claws still wet from the recent battle. Nothing growled or leapt out of the darkness.

Relieved, I took a deep breath and was about to enter the hallway again when something moved. I jumped back and immediately prepared myself for a battle. My efforts, however, were wasted.

A black Labrador with golden eyes and a cheerful disposition stared at me curiously. I was sure my mind was playing tricks on me or that this was some sort of illusion manufactured by the labyrinth until then the dog jumped on me and licked me. I had never been much of an animal lover, but I welcomed the touch of this creature. Wherever this dog had come from, it was most certainly real. More importantly, it was friendly.

Was it possible this was the creature responsible for the minotaur’s retreat?

“What’s your name, boy?”

The dog wasn’t wearing a tag of any sort. Because the hallway was dark, I pulled him back into the illuminated room and inspected him, wondering if he‘d been hurt in the fight. Although the dog showed no obvious signs of injury, I noticed that he was covered in blood.

“Did the minotaur hurt you?”

I combed through his black fur with my hands, expecting him to wince and growl at any minute. The dog surprised me; instead of flinching, he kept nuzzling my hand and licking my face. It was the closest thing to comfort I had felt in a very long time.

After giving the dog the once-over and not finding any outward signs of injury, I came to the conclusion the blood belonged to the minotaur. Evidently this dog was a more formidable adversary than he appeared. As a reward for his help, I sat the jar full of jelly down in front of him and watched as he lapped up the sticky treat with his tongue.

The dog didn’t seem in any hurry to leave. Evidently, I had a new friend.

“What should I call you?” I noted that his most striking feature was his black fur. “How about Midnight?”

The dog didn’t argue. Instead, he showed his approval of the name I had given him by licking my hand again.