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 But when it was retracted, she would seem to disappear, and the chamber would appear empty.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.'
He tried, but he didn't experience the maze as fun. He found it painful.
But then, of course, he realized, bafflement was not his favorite state-of-being.
'I'm a detective,' he told her. 'I like to know where I am, see where I'm going.'
'Life isn't like that,' she responded. 'Life's more like this, confused.'
Perhaps she was right. But that didn't make him like the maze better.
If her father's labyrinth was a metaphor for life, he preferred to stand up on the catwalks, where the pattern could be seen and understood.
'A person could go crazy down here.'
'A person did!' she said.
He supposed she thought she was that person. But why had her father taken her here to abuse her' One would think that a man, performing an act as forbidden as father daughter incest, would commit it in a private place-an attic or a cellar. But her father had chosen to commit it in this brilliantly lit multimirrored space, a space where the taboo nature of his deed would be replicated by reflections to infinity.
Standing in the center of the Great Hall, he thought: Now I understand what it feels like to go mad.
'How can you stand this?'
'I had no choice,' she said. 'Now I'm used to it. When you're brought up living above a crazy house, it doesn't seem all that crazy.
It just seems like… home.' He asked her how her parents had died.
'Accident.'
'The roller coaster-?'
She shook her head. 'Car crash. Dad was on the road and Mom was with him. I was in art school in Providence at the time. It was night.
They'd been out to dinner. Dad was driving his rig without the trailer.
They collided headon with an eighteen-wheeler on the truck route between Hagerstown and Baltimore.' She paused. 'Sometimes I wonder if he did it on purpose, decided the time had come to pack it in.' She said that with such nonchalance, he could barely believe she was serious. But when he glanced at the mirrors and saw her expression reflected everywhere, he understood she had been masking her feelings.
He also understood that it was important to her that he stand with her now at this scene of the crime. Was she merely trying to evoke his sympathy, or was there some other reason?
'Oh, sure, you're right, a person could go crazy here,' she said. 'Mom used to send me down here when I was bad.'
'That seems pretty cruel.'
She nodded. 'I'd cry and beat on the mirrors, trying to break them. Of course I couldn't. They're three quarters of an inch thick.'
'Why'd she do such a thing?'
'They were carny folk-big, slick smiles on their faces, hard and bitter beneath. Think about it. The amusement park game is a hoax. All those rides-the point of them is to make you scream. A fun house isn't fun at all, it's more like torture. A tunnel of love isn't about love or romance, it's just a dark wet place where kids can feel each other up.
The whole thing's a snake-oil show. Even the stuff they sell to eat is bad for you. It's ' their money and smile,', them think they're having fun.' But have you noticed how sad such places are?
That's why they close up when it rains. In the rain you can see them for what they really are-empty, flat and mean.'
It felt strange to stand with her in the center of the Great Hall, looking straight at her but aware that their encounter was reproduced on every surface, repeated down endless illusory corridors. They were alone, except for their clones. How many were there? At least a million, he thought.
Gelsey understood that he was about to tell her something important. She waited for him to speak.
'You have to face the fact you've hurt a lot of people.'
Yeah, well, I already know that.
'The victimizer can be as damaged as the victim. In some cases more.'
Interesting. She felt at once that that was true.
'When you commit a crime you have to pay for it, and not just as an example to others, to repay society, for re habilitation. You've heard all that too many times.' She nodded. 'Is there another reason?'
'Yes. To make you feel better-because you've paid a price. ' 'Ah, punishment,' she said.
'Yes, punishment.'
'Do you believe in it?' 'Do you?' he asked.
She thought a moment before she answered. 'I think I crave it,' she finally said.
