They sat facing each other, sipping from mugs. Both her parents, she told him, were dead. Her father had been employed at Richmond, where he'd managed and kept up the fun house. Then he'd quarreled with management and quit to go on the road, driving a rig, hauling a fun-house-on wheels to carnivals all over the Northeast. His mobile fun house contained a mirror maze, too, a puny one made of a few Mylar panels.
"He only cared about the maze downstairs," she said. "He spent all his free time working on it. Spent all his money on it, too." "Funny," Janek said, "I used to come out here as a kid, but I never heard anything about it."
"It wasn't open to the public. it was just for us. For him."
A private mirror maze: Janek was astonished. "He built that whole thing just for himself?" "You have no idea how big it is," she said. "You went through less than half of it."
Clearly it had been her father's obsession, just as the image of the Leering Man was hers.
"My mother worked at Richmond, too," she said. "She managed the tunnel of love."
"I used to ride through there."
She nodded. "So did I. With my father… "What was wrong with him?"
She looked away.
"Did he abuse you?"
She nodded again, then gestured toward the floor.
"In the maze?"
She stared past him. "It's an ugly story," she said.
She led him to her sleeping area, rolled up a rug beside her bed, exposed a trapdoor beneath. do "This," she said, raising the door, "is the secret way down."
He nodded casually even as it occurred to him that by offering to show him this secret way, she was inviting him to enter her world.
He followed as she descended a ladder to a series of narrow catwalks.
She told him to stand still while she went to a switchboard to turn on the lights. He stood in darkness, until, suddenly, the entire maze was set ablaze. And then, for the third time that morning, he was astounded.
The mirrored ceilings were transparent. The labyrinth lay bare beneath, all its intricate winding corridors revealed.
Gelsey moved back to his side and began to point things out:
"There's where you came in. You wandered through there, the Corridor.
See! There's the row of trick mirrors that took you apart. And there's the row that put you off balance. Over there's the Chamber.
See the blue room?" Janek nodded. "That's where I was sitting."
"I figured you were hiding in a little room somewhere. But why weren't you reflected in all the mirrors?"
"Ha! You want to know our tricks!"
He shrugged. "If it's a secret..
But she was eager to explain: "First, you probably figured this out, the ceilings are made of one-way glass. When you're down there they look like mirrors. From up here they're transparent-when the lights are on below." He nodded. "Now you want to know why you only saw me in some of the mirrors and yourself alone in others." She smiled. "The maze mirrors, the ones that reflect a visitor, are all set at sixty or one hundred twenty degrees. The ones where you saw me, too-there're fewer of those-are angled to one another at forty-five degrees. So those are the only ones in which you can see a person sitting in the blue room.
One of them, of course, isn't even a mirror-it's a plain sheet of glass.
But down there there's no way to tell."
He thought he understood it. "Did your father figure that out?"
She shook her head. "Dad was smart, but he wasn't an inventor. He played around with other people's ideas. Some nineteenth-century guy came up with the notion of interlocking sets of differently angled mirrors. Dad discovered it when he researched maze patents. Then he built it."
"My father was a builder, too," Janek said. "He could repair anything.
He repaired accordions for a living." She peered at him closely, as if she thought she'd finally found a link.
"So," he asked, "how did you make yourself disappear?"
She giggled. "That's called the Blue Room Effect. If we move over there, I'll show you how it works."
They moved along the catwalks to a spot above the blue chamber. Gelsey pointed out that the little room was actually divided on the diagonal by a large mirror. She explained how, sitting on a stool at one side, she could control the large mirror with an electric switch, making it move back and forth. When the mirror was inside the chamber, it reflected her where she sat, projecting her image throughout the maze into any other mirror angled to it at 45 degrees. But when it was retracted, she would seem to disappear, and the chamber would appear empty.
There was more. She guided him above other sections, first to a winding, tortuous snakelike sequence of mirrors called the Fragmentation Serpent, where, she told him, the visitor, entering the serpent's mouth, faced a parabolic mirror that turned him upside down. Then onto a vast section that took up more than half the building-her father's masterpiece, the Great Hall of Infinite Deceptions.
It was here, she told Janek, that her father had abused her. The Great Hall had been their love nest.
"He would bring me down on rainy afternoons. Richmond was always closed when it rained. Then he'd make love to me. I'd see us reflected everywhere. At first I didn't know how to escape, then I learned to enter mirror world." She looked down, shook her head. "Once inside the glass nothing could touch me," She stared at Janek. "Trouble is, mirror world wasn't as safe as I thought. There was a monster wandering around in there."
What's she talking about?
"I saw it now and then. My father called it the Minotaur. You know, the mythological creature, half-man, half-bull, that supposedly lived in the center of the ancient Minoan maze. Dr. Z was going to help me figure out what the Minotaur was. Then he died." She shrugged sadly.
"Want to go down and walk through the parts you missed?" As he followed her he asked himself why he was feeling so warm toward her. She had done terrible things. She had drugged, robbed and frightened people. Clearly she was dangerous. And he knew that if she didn't get help, she would most likely do such things again. But he couldn't make himself think of her as a twisted, antisocial offender.
Rather he saw her as a deeply troubled person, compelled by an irresistible impulse. He now understood the Leering Man portrait, and all the preliminary sketches and paintings he'd seen up in her loft, as a struggle against the forces that drove her to the bars.
He hesitated when he saw the gym rope. My Tarzan days are over. When she reached the floor, in a kind of backstage area between two segments of the maze, she seemed to sense his reluctance to shin down. She called to him that if he preferred, he could descend by a steel ladder built into the wall.
He took the ladder. When he reached the floor he found himself in an oddly shaped space surrounded by narrow angled black walls. A few moments later, one of the walls folded open. Gelsey appeared in the doorway and reached for his hand.
"Come," she said. "I'll lead you."
Beneath the mirrored ceilings, he could see nothing above except strange, confusing multiple reflections. The clarity he had obtained on the catwalks-the overview that had allowed him to comprehend the maze, follow the paths of its numerous, intricate corridors-was supplanted now by bafflement. He had no idea where they were or where they were heading. And she confused him more when, every so often, she would push at a mirror, cause it to spring open like a door, pull him into another backstage area, then reenter the maze through another door mirrored on its maze-side face.
She seemed to know every corner of the labyrinth, every secret entrance and exit. And although each mirror looked the same to him, to her each was evidently unique.
"I think I liked it better upstairs," he said.
"Relax," she goaded. "You'll have more fun."