Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

Sometimes he varied the route of his early-morning run, several times going out to the forbidden caverns that lay to the east. They didn’t look so ominous from the outside. If it weren’t for the iron chain that had been bolted into the stones outside the main entrance, and the green and white sign that said DANGEROUS CAVERNS KEEP OUT, you would think they were just some picturesque caves under a hill. They looked like a tourist attraction. But he had heard they extended for miles under the ground, and were filled with bottomless lakes and black pools, stalactites and stalagmites, endless turns, and tiny, hidden rooms where a person could be lost forever. Worst of all, they were pitch-dark. Sometimes, running by, Daniel had a little thrill of curiosity; just to see. He supposed everybody had that feeling once in a while. It was probably what had inspired those two students to explore the caves so long ago, the students who had died.

He simply had no concept of death. Sometimes, driving in a car when he knew he’d had too much to drink at a party, he was aware of danger, but it never occurred to him that he might be killed, even though people often were. You got killed in a war. Everybody knew that. Or someday, when you were middle-aged, the pollution of foul chemicals could give you cancer. But not now. Now he felt immortal. All the terrors of disease and unexpected death were for later, for other people.

Feeling very new, young, frightened, and shy, Robbie Wheeling began his first day as an entering Freshman at Grant University. Back home in Greenwich, Connecticut, he’d been a star of sorts: captain of the high school swimming team, managing editor of the yearbook, popular and secure. Now he was a stranger in a strange place. The dorm he’d been assigned to, Hollis East, seemed huge, and his single room was bare and ugly. There was a lumpy single bed, a scratched wooden desk with a matching chair, a lamp that looked like it came from the Salvation Army, and a wooden bookshelf with graffiti on it. One closet. He’d been issued a key to the lock on his door, to guard all these possessions and whatever he’d brought from home. He dropped the last of his things: his duffel bag and the large carton containing his stereo equipment, and went to look out the window. Being a Freshman, the lowliest of the low, he was assigned a room at the rear of the dorm that looked out on a parking lot. There was his little tan Fiat Spider convertible, his graduation present from his parents, parked along with an assortment of cars belonging to the people he hoped he’d eventually meet, one small motorcycle, and a jumble of bicycles, all carefully chained and locked. Behind him, through his partly open door, he could hear girls’ voices and the stamp of feet along the hall. He wondered what it would be like to live in a coed dorm. Was there a lot of sex, or what? The thought of endless adventures cheered him up a little, and he began to unpack.

He was eighteen years old, six feet tall, with the long, smooth muscles of a swimmer, and a face that was so handsome it was almost beautiful. Green eyes with a thick fringe of dark lashes, fair hair, and dimples. He’d never had any problem getting girls, but he thought now, here in this strange place, that he would like to find one person, fall in love, have a real relationship. He’d never had that, and it seemed to be time. Maybe he could make it last for his entire Freshman year, or at least through the winter. He thought of a girl sitting on his bed, studying, snow falling cozily outside the window, and the room didn’t look so grim anymore. Women. He would have to remember to call them women. They were in college now.

Robbie was glad to be away from home at last. There was nothing there at all for him, never had been, particularly ever since that night his brother ran away again and never came back. After that night Robbie could never look up at the stars without wondering where his brother was and if he was looking at them too, and if they looked the same where he was … or if he was still alive.

His parents were victims of history. Strangers when they married each other way back in the Fifties; his mother just out of Vassar, his father all excited about his first job in an architectural firm; his older brother, Hall junior, born just ten months later — they were a whole family before his parents even got to know each other. His mother had told him that story a million times. In those days people didn’t live together before they got married. Other people’s parents who Robbie knew had gotten married the same way, and had kids, and they got along fine. But his parents fought and yelled, when they spoke to each other at all; endlessly recriminating each other about the past, their wasted lives, their unfulfilled dreams. Yet they would never leave each other. Something held them together, some need “to make it work.” Make what work? His mother had been an alcoholic as long as he could remember. In the suburbs alcoholics have one of two choices: drive their kids to the things they have to do and risk getting killed, or become housebound and trapped. When his mother stopped driving him Robbie was relieved.

Now his father was the head of his own architectural firm, with a big office in New York, and his designs were featured in international magazines. As a symbol of his success, his father had had a different Cartier watch for every day of the week, until his mother got mad and smashed them all, the night his brother left. She’d smashed ten thousand dollars worth of watches in one night. That wasn’t the only thing that had been smashed in one night — their lives had, all of their lives … but he wasn’t going to think about that now.

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.