Monk's Maze

Chapter 3-2

“Why suns and planets? Why na just lumps on stone?” For that was all they looked to be.

But he didn’t appear to hear her. Perhaps she hadn’t spoken. It was hard to tell in the shattered air whirling slowly about the malevolent stone.

He tore at his jacket. With a soft, ripping sound, an opening appeared and he reached within. Yet the fabric didn’t appear to be damaged. He pulled forth a single piece of paper and with a slap of his hand, the opening was gone, leaving only a thin glistening line.

She’d inspected the garment carefully while he’d slept. And found nothing, except for the handlight, which she could feel but couldn’t figure out how to remove. What other magic did he carry with him? Could he reach into some magic storehouse and pull forth a cannon or a magic wand?

His paper rattled and flapped in the wind as he compared some drawing to the cross. He circled about the base twice more before coming to a halt and gazing raptly upward at the central symbol.

Watching his face, her desire to run returned.

He was a fanatic at the heart of his desire. He was the unthinking worshipper before a temple best forgotten and buried. A temple f*******n by every law of humankind for the last two centuries.

He embodied the evil that had destroyed the world. No matter what he claimed, it seemed that technology had died at their whim, and now, after all the suffering was done, they would as whimsically return it.

While they were gone into the sky, a new knowledge had come. First brought by Meyer Miller, but now a part of daily life. With the death of organized religion, a new practice had risen. One of peaceful contemplation. Cooperation. The world was better for it.

She should kill Colin now.

As she should have done when they first met.

And again on Eilean nam Ban.

Leave this island’s secrets unplumbed. Undiscovered. Let them die for another age.

But she couldn’t lift her hand.

Couldn’t move her feet.

The fiery heat of the cross could not be gainsaid.

“The last to do this before us was Robert Brude, the founder of our order. And as far as we know, the last before him was St. Columba himself nearly two thousand years ago.” He patted the stone once more.

“I need to borrow your staff.” Colin plucked it from her nerveless fingers and the cross’ mighty breath didn’t touch him.

He swung the end of the staff high over his head and struck the central boss.

“Air!” he shouted.

“Do na waken the beast!” She grabbed at his arm and missed.

“Fire!” he whacked it again. A mist enfolded her and she could no longer see the abbey. Just his arm swinging back and the staff moving like a great ironmaker’s hammer against an anvil.

“Water!” Over the sound of oak smacking immovable stone, a great ringing sound shook her body. As if the entire world had become a bell and Iona was the striker. The waves of the world were shaken to their very core.

“Earth!”

After the last stroke he took a step back and watched the cross expectantly.

Nothing happened.

What had he hoped for? The second coming of one of his gods?

The pressure didn’t abate, or attack. Instead it waited like a breath held. An explosive, all powerful breath. Perhaps his god did indeed await him. But what awaited her?

He checked his paper. Tapped it a few times. She could almost swear that the picture changed with each touch of his finger. Then he created another pocket from a different bright line of his coat and jammed the paper in as if not caring the value of the precious stuff.

“How could I forget?” Chuckling, he raised the staff in both his hands.

“And the force that binds us all.”

He swung one last time at the central boss just as she reached out to stop him.

“Spirit!”

The earth shattered in that instant and they were cast into the pit.

The world was gone.

No cross.

No Iona.

Nothing.

She blinked.

No change.

No sound.

She was dead. She’d followed a monk of the Order of Iona and he had killed her and cast her into the ultimate pit. Never again would she feel the winds of Iona tugging at her hair. Never again walk the botanical gardens of Edinburgh. Never again hold Toby close as he fell asleep against her breast.

Death was so dark.

So silent.

Only the beating of her heart.

Then a sneeze rang out.

A sneeze?

Not hers.

But then maybe she wasn’t dead.

A dim light slowly grew about them.

Colin was rubbing his nose.

“I think I caught a cold.”

Did you get colds in the afterlife? It didn’t seem likely. Meyer Miller hadn’t mentioned it in any of his teachings.

He handed back her staff which felt real enough and pulled out his paper again.

If she was dead, she didn’t want to be sharing the afterlife with a monk. Of that much she was certain. This must be something else.

They stood in a chamber. A stone room. A stone room lit by some light without source. As if the air itself glowed. The only sound other than the pounding of her heart was the rattle of Colin’s magic paper as he inspected it. Nothing had changed for him. This was all normal. For him.

The floor was a polished black. Darker than newly-turned earth. Darker than the darkest ink. Darker than midnight.

The walls were a mottled gray, like the winter sky over Iona. She could reach out and touch one, as smooth as the finest glass. The three walls joined seamlessly with each other and the floor as if it had all been hollowed from a single stone that happened to have a black floor.

The ceiling was lost in darkness. The air’s light didn’t touch there and it might be two meters above their heads, it might be two hundred. And she suspected that neither guess was near the truth, a strangeness she perhaps did not want answered.

Then she turned to the room.

There was no fourth wall.

She could see the light in the air.

Could follow the floor into the distance. The side walls went on…forever.

But the far wall wasn’t there. Different than the ceiling. The ceiling hung somewhere above, but the fourth wall was simply not there. There was no distance in that direction. Perhaps not even time. It just was. Before time. The primeval darkness. That from which all came and to which all would return in some impossibly distant future.

Yet it was here. Waiting beneath the soil of Iona. Patient with the patience of infinite age.

And now it had them.

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know.” His voice was loud, nearly a shout compared to her whisper though she suspected he’d spoken in a normal voice.

“Ye’ve brought us here to this place and ye dinna know?”

“I was just following instructions. I’ve never seen anything like that wall, or not wall, or whatever that is. The training simulators showed no such thing. I thought it was just not lit very well. Brother David told me he’d found no way to recreate it in the programs and I would just have to follow the directions.” He waved the piece of paper in his hand.

He glanced at the paper and then about the room.

“Okay. We’re in a chamber. Near the middle of the first wall, I guess. I should be able to step forward three paces here.” And he did so without looking up.

Meghan moved to follow, but her feet were anchored in place. Anchored. Not as if a boot were mired in mud, or even cast in some quick-drying mortar. It was as if her very bones were just an extension of the rock. There was no give. She was simply there. Rooted to the Earth.

“Colin?”

He had turned left. “One, two, three, four steps.”

He stopped and stood on his left foot for the count of six, about a hundred of her heartbeats.

“Colin?”

“Shh. I’m counting.”

A misty wall formed behind him as he turned right, then right again. At first it looked as if the mist falling on the grasses of Iona had followed them into the bowels of the earth.

Then it thickened until he looked out of focus. Each passageway formed as he walked through it.

“Colin.” The light was changing by her feet, the boundaries of Meghan and floor were becoming blurred. The pounding in her head was so loud she began to doubt if her ears were even working any more.

A maze of walls followed Colin. Straight. Curved. Jagged. Smooth.

Where he’d been rather than where he was going.

No turns lay before him. Yet he followed them blindly from his map. A map of a maze that wasn’t there.

He faded into the distance though he couldn’t be more than a dozen paces away. Occasionally he would look up from his page, but it never seemed to affect his turnings and twistings about the chamber.

Struggling against her trapped feet didn’t hurt. There was no give. No movement. Her breath was ragged with effort. Her throat closing as the terror descended with its crushing weight upon her. Miller. Meyer Miller. When desperate, he said, focus on the power of joy and the wonder of love. Her love had spent a year sleeping alone in Edinburgh because of her exile. She certainly would not call this joyful and it was the definition of powerless, rooted to the stone in the heart of the world. None would ever know where she was or how she had died with a stupid b****y monk inside an island.

Colin halted, turning his chart one way and another. Poking at it and looking up and then away.

Starting off again, he was knocked back by a wall where he clearly didn’t expect it. The long, low ringing of a gong filled the room.

It was hard to tell, but it appeared that he reached out a shadowy arm. First ahead.

Then to either side.

Finally behind.

Even though he was dim, barely visible, the maze was formed clear about him. A tight box two paces square.

He threw himself at his cage to no avail.

What a way to die. One trapped in a box and the other rooted to the very stone deep inside the cold heart of the earth.

“No!” Her shout faded into the walls and was absorbed as if she’d never spoken. It didn’t even reach her ears.

She swung her staff at the nearest wall that had formed after Colin’s passage. And she would have lost her balance had she not been rooted to the earth. The staff passed through the maze wall as if it wasn’t even there.

“Colin!” She yelled as loudly as she could.

He ceased his struggles. “Why are you shouting?” His voice was as faded as his person.

“Try this!” She knew she was yelling again, but couldn’t help herself. He looked so far away. Sounded so far away.

She lofted the staff to him. It passed through every wall as if it didn’t exist and they were playing a game of catch upon some impossible meadow.

He caught it awkwardly and rubbed where it had rapped his knuckles. Reaching out a tip he proved that it was not stopped by any of the walls. But when his hand around the oak reached a wall, there was no further passage.

That was it.

It was over.

She was going to die here and Colin of the Order of Iona had killed her. Killed her as assuredly as if he’d run a gilded crucifix through her heart.

Of course, he’d rot in his little box as well, so it wasn’t all bad news.

In a gesture of supreme impatience, he dropped the butt of the staff to the floor.

A flash of fire roared outward from the butt.

Not a stream of flame l*****g outward.

Rather a great circular blast of heat and light covering the floor in all directions. It splashed against her.

A blast of pain.

It climbed from the floor up her bones.

The burning light, the last you’d ever see.

Looking into the eye of the everafter.

The heat, a searing agony.