The orange tom leaned against her leg, and she scratched his ears. He looked up with eyes filled with lazy scorn at her insistence on the laws of physics and geometry. She shrugged.
Right again, and right again, and right again, she followed the cats. Maureen gave up on mapping an impossible spiral. The hedge shrank down to just above her head, open now to the sun and the butterflies. She had a sneaking suspicion the walls would be just above anybody's head, even a seven-six NBA center. It would always be high enough so you couldn't see where you were going.
Then she caught up with the cats. They sat in a pool of sunlight, daintily washing their paws, at a blank dead end.
Maureen turned around. Instead of the path she had walked between the hedges, she faced another dead end. Butterflies and bees danced across a solid wall of green dotted with pale pink roses. The hedge had boxed her into a trap.
She squatted, nose to nose with the orange tom. He went back to washing his ears with one paw, a study in calm confidence.
"Okay, fuzz-face, what gives?"
"You wouldn't have gotten this far if the cats thought you were dangerous."
Maureen jerked at the voice, nearly falling backwards into the hedge. A face formed in the leaves, sort of a Cheshire Cat in green, and smiled at her. It could have been Fiona.
"I've always hated answering machines, love," the face said, "so I've decided to make mine more personal. I'm not in, right now, but you can leave a message. What makes my service more personal is this: the message will be you. You can't leave until I release you."
Something furry butted Maureen's hand, and she supplied scratching service automatically. Then she realized she could still see two cats. A third had joined them, a gray tiger-stripe. She couldn't see any gaps in the hedge around her.
"If," the green voice went on, "you're anybody I really want to meet, you'll figure out how to get on to the house and have a cup of tea while you wait. Otherwise, tough shit."
The hedge-face melded back into the wall of green, from the edges inward, leaving a smile. Somebody had been reading too much Alice.
"Oh, by the way," the smile added, as the eyes returned. "I wouldn't recommend touching anything purple, love. I've decided the color doesn't go with my complexion."
The face faded out completely. Maureen shook her head and looked around, at a sunlit box of greenery and three smug cats grooming themselves. Bees hummed from flower to flower and then rose up to float away south, probably to their hive.
Purple? What the hell had she meant, don't touch anything purple? Poison?
The gray tiger-stripe batted at a butterfly, leaping up with paws spread wide. She missed, landed with a flip of her tail that said, "I meant to do that," and cocked her ears at the fluttering cat-toy. The yellow ribbing of the tiger swallowtail turned purple. It wavered its way past Maureen's ear and into the bush, where it perched on a purple rose-blossom, sipping nectar.
All of the blossoms were purple, now. They had been pink a minute ago.
Another purple swallowtail fluttered across Maureen's nose. She brushed it away. Fire flashed up her arm, and she stared at the red blotch left on the back of her hand. It throbbed like a hornet sting.
Hot coals touched her neck and arm, feathery touches that left acid running up her nerves. Butterflies flitted across, an inch from her eyes, brushing her ears, lighting on her knees to fan their wings. She felt the heat of them even through the denim of her jeans.
The hedge inched closer. She could have lain down crosswise in the path, before, and never come near the bushes. Now she could touch the thorns on each side with her outstretched arms. More blossoms spattered the walls with purple. More butterflies filled the air. Maureen huddled in on herself.
The cats ignored it all. She wondered how they judged which visitors were dangerous and which could pass into the maze. Two of them sat in loaves, with tails and paws tucked in, watching her like feline Buddhas. The third, the orange tom, had vanished through a cat-door into a parallel dimension.
Poe, not Lewis Carroll, she thought. Fiona had created her own version of "The Pit and the Pendulum." The problem was, nobody was going to show up to arrest the Inquisition.
Purple, that was the problem. Nothing had happened until the first butterfly turned purple. She glared at the lavender roses. Pink, she screamed in her mind. You were pink!
They stayed purple. She singled out one, ignoring the heat of a score of fiery butterflies perched on her blouse and pants. Something brushed her cheek and left a swelling welt. She squinted against the pain and tears, thinking of nothing but the single blossom. If she couldn't return to the past, maybe she could change the future . . . .
She snarled at the flower. "Okay, dammit, you're yellow. I'll paint all you bastards yellow, like the cards in Alice painting the roses red."
Maureen leaned closer, her eyes crossing as she held the blossom centered in her sight. Her breath rustled the leaves and shivered the fragile petals of the rose.
"Yellow," she whispered. "You are a yellow rose."
Her vision narrowed to a tunnel, and she lost touch with her body. The burning coals died in the darkness. The hornet stings left her flesh. The humming bees and the whisper of wind through the hedge died out of her ears, the warm green smells of grass and tree and earth abandoned her nose. All that remained was rose--the glistening velvet petals of the flower, the golden pollen on the stamens, the soft perfume of the nectar.
Time froze
