Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

“He would,” Kate said. “What do you mean he abandoned you?”

“He promised me a ride to New York and then I couldn’t find him.”

“Then you abandoned him,” Daniel said lightly.

“Well,” Jay Jay said, “maybe he had something more important to do and he was going to find me later. I’ll put the note back so he remembers.”

But they didn’t see Robbie that night in the dining room, nor the next morning at breakfast. After breakfast the three of them went to Robbie’s room. The bed hadn’t been slept in and Jay Jay’s note was still there. Robbie’s car was still in the parking lot.

“I think maybe we should call his family in Greenwich,” Kate said. “If he was going somewhere, he’d have told them.”

“Where would he go without his car and his clothes?” Daniel asked.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Kate said.

She looked up Robbie’s number in her little address book and dialed it right from his room. Now she was sure something very bad had happened, and she was afraid to even begin to think what it might be.

His mother answered.

“Is Robbie there?” Kate asked pleasantly.

“No.” How nervous the woman sounded! Kate could hear it vibrating down her own body. “Who is this?”

“This is Kate Finch, a friend of his from Grant. Did he go home for vacation?”

“No. Didn’t he tell you his plans?”

“No,” Kate said. “When is he coming back to school, do you know?”

“Don’t you know?” his mother said. Her voice cracked.

“Don’t I know what? ”

“What? What?” Jay Jay hissed, poking her. She glared at him.

“Don’t you know where he is either?” his mother said.

“Don’t you know?” Kate asked.

“He never came home,” his mother said. “Are you a very good friend of his?”

“Yes. But we all thought he was going home.”

“Oh, no …” From the pain in that woman’s voice Kate knew exactly what she was thinking. Robbie’s older brother had run away and now his mother thought Robbie had gone off too.

“I’m sure he’s all right,” Kate lied.

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well …” What was the point in lying when it might hurt Robbie if something awful had really happened to him? “We’ll ask around, okay? I’ll call you if I find out anything.”

Kate hung up and looked at Daniel and Jay Jay. “Robbie’s vanished into thin air,” she said.

Daniel started looking through the papers on Robbie’s desk. Kate and Jay Jay joined him. There was some homework, but mostly maps and mazes; the one they had used for the caverns and one they had never seen before. It was on pale blue paper, intricately worked out, with a tiny red heart in the center of it. Around it was a beautiful drawing of two white towers set in the clouds in a striated pastel sky.

“I didn’t know Robbie could draw,” Kate said. “And look at the gorgeous lettering.”

“ The Two Towers, ” Jay Jay said. “That’s the book by Tolkien.”

“Where’s ‘The Great Hall’?” Daniel asked.

“In some book, I guess,” Jay Jay said. “Or maybe in the game. It looks like he was working on a new one.”

None of it made sense. There were all sorts of books in Robbie’s bookshelf; many of them dealing with the occult and other mystical things. That part made sense, in view of Robbie’s new religious kick, but none of it gave any explanation of where he could have gone or why.

“Maybe he went on a retreat or something,” Jay Jay said hopefully. “You know, with one of those cult groups.”

“He would have told us,” Daniel said. “Those people are always telling you how great it is and how it’s changed their lives. Robbie never proselytized about anything.”

Robbie’s room made them all feel uncomfortable. It was such a normal room: normal furniture, normal possessions, a few maps and things pertaining to a special hobby. Jay Jay picked up the note he had left on Robbie’s bed and started to crumple it up.

“Don’t!” Kate said. “That’s evidence.”

“Yeah,” Jay Jay said worriedly. He smoothed out the note and put it back. Then they trooped despondently into Jay Jay’s room where he opened his closet and brought out a bottle of red wine that was left over from his party, and a box of Oreo cookies.

“Hi, Merlin,” Kate” said. “Say hello.”

“Birds can’t talk,” Merlin said.

They sat down and drank and munched. The sky darkened outside their window as the sun set. Daniel sighed. “Do you think some maniac got him? Like The Freeway Murders in California?”

“Robbie wouldn’t hitchhike,” Jay Jay said. “He had the car.”

“April fool,” Merlin said.

April fool … why was that somehow so important?

“Wait …” Kate said. She started to think out loud. “Those maps Robbie made … The Great Hall … Robbie’s brother’s name was Hall. The one who ran away. It’s not a place, it’s a person.”

“He had a brother who ran away?” Jay Jay said. “He never told anybody.”

“He told me,” Kate said. “And April first, April Fools’ Day, was the night his brother left … at his own birthday party. We all saw Robbie at Jay Jay’s party, and then we never saw him again.”

“You mean he went off to look for his brother?” Daniel said.

“Oh, my God!” Kate said. Now she knew: she was right, she had always been right. She should have listened to her instincts.

“What? What?” Daniel and Jay Jay clamored.

“Robbie’s gone into the game,” she said. “He’s become Pardieu.”

“The caves!” Daniel said.

“We have to go get him,” Jay Jay said. He grabbed all his equipment — the maps, the spray paint, the compass; the safeguards that had lulled them in the real world, the magic that had gone awry in the fantasy one — and they ran down to Kate’s car.

They knew at once she was right.

“It’s my fault,” Jay Jay kept saying all the way to the caverns. “It’s my fault.”

“No,” Daniel said. “It’s mine. Kate suspected it, and I talked her out of it. She saw him becoming Pardieu. Now when I look back it was all so obvious, but I ignored it because it was so unreal. Who could have dreamed of such a thing?”

“It’s not anybody’s fault,” Kate said. “It’s the game’s fault.”

“Oh, who cares anyway who’s to blame?” Jay Jay said finally, as the red Rabbit skidded into the safety of the clump of trees outside the forbidden caverns. “Just let him be all right.”

The dark rooms of their maze looked different now, and the pleasure was gone. A decomposing body could be real. There were no monsters; only the reality of death. They held their lanterns high and searched carefully, calling for Pardieu because they knew Robbie would not answer, and each of them felt an icy terror far beyond anything they had conjured up in their make believe. For the first time they were playing the game as they would have liked to play it — to the limit of danger and fear, and with a true yearning for the reward — but now there was nothing in it at all of fun or adventure. There was no sign anywhere that Robbie had passed by, but if he had believed himself to be Pardieu then he would have gone off with nothing. The dripping of the water on the stone reminded them all that he could have drowned.

Finally they stopped to rest in a small room of the maze. “We can’t do this alone,” Daniel said.

Jay Jay was hunched in the corner looking very small and frightened. “His map was different,” he said softly. “I don’t understand his map.”

“He invented his own caverns,” Kate said. “A Holy Man can see things that aren’t there. Don’t you remember?”