Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

FOR ZEKE

In the spring of 1980 a bright, gifted student at Grant University in Pequod, Pennsylvania, mysteriously disappeared. Vanishing students were not unheard of, particularly during the stressful period before final exam time, but it soon became apparent that this case was different. When the police were finally called in, it was revealed that the missing student was one of a group at Grant who were involved in a fantasy role-playing game called Mazes and Monsters.

Played with nothing more than a vivid imagination, dice, pencils, graph paper, and an instruction manual, Mazes and Monsters is a war game with a medieval background, in which each player creates a character who may be a fearless Fighter, a treasure-hunting Sprite, a magic-using Holy Man, or a wily Charlatan. The point of the game is to amass a fortune and keep from getting killed. The characters are plunged into an adventure in a series of mazes, tunnels, and secret rooms run by another player, the Maze Controller, a sort of referee. The mazes are filled with frightful and violent dangers — monsters who can kill, maim, paralyze, and enchant the players. But if the players can kill, maim, trick, or stop their assailants they can take the fabulous treasure that awaits hidden in the maze.

What made the student’s disappearance so ominous was that the police discovered this particular group of players had begun to act out their fantasies in a real environment, taking the game to the underground caverns near the university campus.

The caverns had been banned by the university as off limits in 1947, when two students, amateur spelunkers, were lost there and died. Their bones were found three years later. Now, in 1980, the police cautiously began inspecting the dangerous caverns again, but stated they were quite sure that no one who was lost in there could still be alive.

None of the other students would come forward to say they were part of the group that had played the game with the missing student. As the tension-filled days wore on, the Mazes and Monsters case became both a cause célèbre and an embarrassment around Grant University. Reporters came to interview students and professors, trying to understand what was now revealed as an obsession with a game — an obsession that had turned into something sinister.

“It’s a perfectly harmless game, ” one student protested. “I mean, people who think that stuff is real are just nuts.”

But often a defense seemed eerily ambiguous: “It’s a game that doesn’t require anything more than imagination,” one student said. “It’s inside everybody. You just have to tap it.”

One student wrote a letter to the university newspaper, The Grant Gazette:

I know Mazes and Monsters is a very popular game on this campus. I played it for two years. But last summer I destroyed all my $100 worth of equipment. The game takes control of your life. You change. I strongly warn anybody who is thinking of starting to stop, and anyone who is playing it to quit before it’s too late.

Perhaps what was most disturbing about this case was something that was on every parent’s mind. These players, the ones who had gone too far and the one who had disappeared, could be anybody’s kids; bright young college students sent out to prepare for life, given the American Dream and rejecting it to live in a fantasy world of invented terrors. Why did they do it? What went wrong?

But for the friends of the missing student, the ones who would not come forward to reveal themselves, such a question seemed trivial and meaningless. This was their friend. They knew what had happened. They knew it had, in different ways, happened to each of them. And they knew that no matter what anyone said, what had really happened was much, much worse.

Jay Jay Brockway was the first of his friends to arrive back at college after summer vacation. He was always the first to show up anyplace and the first to leave — a combination of his need to be properly prepared and his fear of being left by someone else. Small and lithe, with a pointed face and a halo of golden curls, a sixteen-year-old Sophomore with an IQ of 190, an undisputed genius, the son of rich, rather famous, successful parents in New York, he knew he was exactly the kind of person the other kids at Grant would think was weird. And so, being not only intelligent but a survivor, he had turned everything that could have been a disadvantage into an advantage. He was different? Good, he would be eccentric. He was too young and too small? Good, he would become adorable. He was out of step with the masses? Perfect, that kind of person is meant to be a leader.

Jay Jay’s ambition was to be a movie or television star, or if that failed, at least an actor. He knew he was meant to do comedy. He had chosen Grant because it had a good acting school, but more importantly to spite his parents. With his marks he could have gone to Harvard or Yale. But he had chosen a relatively unprestigious university which none of his parents’ friends had ever heard of, whose good acting school had not turned out one famous star, and then he had proceeded to major in English. He had picked English even though it was the one thing that pleased his parents — his father, Justin Brockway, was a brilliant young publisher and editor in New York and everyone knew Jay Jay could get a job in publishing after he graduated if he wanted to. Jay Jay thought he’d rather stick his hand over a lit match than ask the fecalite for a job. He had a love-hate relationship with his father: missing him because they’d never had any rapport since the day he was born, and then his parents split up when he was seven and he went to live with his mother; and trying to imitate him in some ways, like copying his father’s preppie way of dressing.

“Justy,” his father, the boy wonder in cashmere crew-neck sweaters and chino pants when all the other executives wore business suits and ties. Jay Jay, the boy wonder son who had an even dozen cashmere crew-neck sweaters to wear with his designer jeans when everyone else in his school wore plaid shirts with holes or T-shirts with slogans on them. Justy, at the top of his profession at thirty-five. Jay Jay, a college Sophomore at sixteen. Justy, funny, brilliant, eccentric, and admired. Jay Jay, ditto. And they had nothing to say to each other. Never had.

His parents had lived together when they were in college, a rather unusual thing to do in the early Sixties, and then his mother had gotten pregnant and they’d gotten married, which was what people did do. They were both nineteen when Jay Jay was born. He didn’t remember much of those early years of his life: an apartment with cracked walls, always filled with people, nobody telling him he had to go to bed, a home where he learned how to make sandwiches and drink wine when he was four, where people treated him as a sort of pet — something cute until it wanted too much attention and then they said, “Sit!” They’d had a real pet too, a large fluffy dog his mother had rescued from the pound, but everyone said the dog was neurotic and his father had finally given it away to one of his authors who lived in the country. After that Jay Jay always had the vague feeling his father might give him away too, because Justy never really seemed to like him any more than he had the dog.

“We were married too young,” his mother said afterward, explaining the divorce, perhaps explaining how they felt about him. “We were nineteen. A very young nineteen. We weren’t ready for any of it.”