After Gelsey let him see her cry, she didn't care what else he saw. She thought: In some strange way he owns me now.
And it also felt good to lean against him, feel his warmth and strength.
She had never touched Dr. Z-shrinks, she'd read, weren't supposed to touch patients, although sometimes shrinks transgressed. But this tall man beside her with the searching eyes was no more a shrink than he was a mark. She wasn't sure yet what he was. A detective-what kind of man was that?
'Ever try and imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a drugged drink?' he asked her. 'The terror as you're going down?' 'I know all about terror,' she said. She didn't want to listen to a fucking lecture. She could give him lessons in terror if she wanted to.
'We're not talking about you,' he said. 'We're talking about your victims.' He paused. 'Oh, I get it-you just feel sorry for yourself.'
She peered at him. She knew she should put up a defense. But her heart wasn't in it. He had made her cry… so what was the use?
'Who else is going to feel sorry for me?' she asked.
'Jesus!' He stood, offered her his hand. 'Come with me. '
'Where?'
'Get up! Come on!'
She stood, then allowed him to draw her across the room to the area where a dozen unframed mirror panels were stored in a wooden rack. He led her to within a foot of the first mirror.
'Look at yourself.'
She turned away.
'Go on! Look!' He placed his hand on top of her head, then gently forced her to peer into the glass. 'Instead of playing with mirrors, why don't you use one once in a while? Take a good, hard look.'
She glanced quickly at herself and then at his image in the mirror.
'Not me! You! Why's that so difficult?'
She squeezed her eyes shut.
'Look at who you are, Gelsey. You might see something you don't like.
Then you might want to do something about it. You might want to change.'
She opened her eyes- She felt his eyes on her as she gazed at herself.
Then she mouthed some words.
'Speak up. I can't hear you.'
'I did try to do something about it,' she moaned. She stared at him and wondered: Does he like me? Does he like me even a little bit?
Janek listened as she told him about a psychoanalyst she'd gone to in Manhattan, a wise, sympathetic, elderly man who'd tried his best to help her. For a long time, she d, she didn't tell Dr. Zimmerman about her drug- robbery activities, confessing only that she picked up men in bars and went home with them for sex. When she finally told him the truth, he was shocked, but still willing to help.
'We were going to get to the bottom of it,' she said. 'Then the next time I came in a woman was there. She told me Dr. Z had died of a heart attack. She offered to continue the analysis. I never went back.'
She turned to Janek. 'I worshiped him,' she said. 'I thought he could be … ' She turned away, embarrassed.
'What?' he asked.
She smiled, then shook her head. 'My good father,' she said quietly.
'The one I never had.'
She made coffee for him. Watching her prepare it, he wondered: Will she try to spike it? Then he thought: We're way beyond that now.
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
