ADAM MCOMBER / THE MAZE — always crashing

Rome 438 C.E.

1.
Ruined edge of a ruined city.

2.
Here the fallen aqueducts, the shattered tombs. Rose-colored brickwork, all silvered over with lichen.

3.
Horatius is aware of his crime. He offended the senator, Gnaeus Sabinus. Horatius would not be penetrated in the alley behind the Temple of Saturn. The senator grew angry. He called the guards.

4.
Horatius is taken in a wooden cart to the place of punishment. The place of punishment has no name. The gates are covered in Valeria, a gray weed. Two figures greet him. They are taller than most men. They wear masks made to look like the faces of animals. One man is a tiger. The other, a lynx.

5.
Horatius wants to run toward the river. He could jump into the water, swim downstream toward the black mountains. But the masked figures have already opened the gates. They take Horatius by his arms. They drag him into a courtyard.

7.
“Please,” Horatius says. But the men do not respond. They push him down a steep staircase. He lands on his hands and knees. He is cut. Bleeding. Horatius looks back up the staircase. The tall figures close the iron gate. They lock it. When Horatius does not move, the lynx-man says: “There is a door on the other side of the maze. If you make it to the door, you are free.”

8.
Horatius lifts a burning torch from its mount. The tiger-man and the lynx-man talk quietly behind the gate at the top of the stairs. Horatius moves slowly down the narrow stone passage. He worries the corridor will grow narrower still. Soon he will be forced to turn sideways in order to move.

9.
Horatius thinks of his mother. She does not know he has been taken away. She does not know he spends time with the men in the alley behind the Temple of Saturn. She will wonder where he has gone. She will weep for him.

10.
Horatius comes to a fork in the path. He searches for some stone or pebble. He wants to mark the path he chooses. But there is no stone or pebble. The maze is swept clean. Horatius wonders who sweeps the maze clean. Is it the tiger-man and the lynx-man? He realizes the palms of his hands are still bleeding. He presses the palm of his right hand to the wall of the right-branching path. Then he moves down the path. The halls here are all the same. Horatius makes them different. He marks each choice with blood.

11.
Soon, Horatius comes to a corridor that is already marked. There is a handprint. Yet, when he holds his torch close to the handprint, Horatius realizes the blood does not glisten. It is old, dried. Someone else had the same idea as Horatius, it appears. He wonders then if that other person was able to escape the maze.
As if summoned, there is a sound ahead of him, the scrape of a sandal against stone. Horatius freezes. He realizes it is likely a monster that lives in the maze. The monster has smelled his blood. The monster has come to devour him. Horatius does not run. Instead, he extends his torch into the darkness.

12.
A figure appears, partly obscured by shadow. The figure does not look like a monster.
“Hello?” Horatius says.
The figure raises a hand in greeting.
“How did you come to be here?” Horatius asks.
There is a pause. Then, the sound of a young man’s voice: “The same way everyone comes to be here, I suppose.”
“How long has it been?” Horatius says.
“There is no light in the catacomb,” the figure says. “There are no days.”
“Is there food?” Horatius asks. “Water?”
“There is food,” the figure says. “And water.”
“Where?” Horatius says.
The figure steps out of the shadows. He carries no torch. He wears a kind of cape and a mask made of hammered bronze. The mask does not look like an animal’s face. Rather it resembles the face of a human. “You haven’t gone deep enough yet,” the young man says.
“Is there a way out?” Horatius says.
“Follow me,” the young man replies.

13.
As they walk, the young man tells Horatius his story. It sounds much like Horatius’s own. Someone wanted favors. The young man would not provide them. He was sent here. To the place of punishment with the gray walls.

14.
They walk for a long time. Horatius examines the walls. There are no new handprints. Only old handprints. “You made these?” Horatius says, gesturing toward one dried print.
The young man nods.
“You’ve made many,” Horatius says.

15.
They come then to a hall that is not like the other halls. It is a large room full of statuary. The statues are like those in the sacred places of Rome, painted faces, watching.
“Who are they?” Horatius asks.
“I don’t know,” the young man says. “Memories, maybe.”
“Whose memories?”
The young man shakes his head. “I’ve spent a long time looking at them.”

16.
Deeper still. Horatius and the young man come to a kind of subterranean amphitheater. There are rows of benches and a circular stage. Elements of a tragedy remain. Walls have been painted to look as though they are covered in gray valerian weed. Open iron gates stand near the back of the stage. They look much like the gates of the place of punishment.
“The gates are the same as the ones I passed through when I arrived,” Horatius says.
“That’s what I thought too,” the young man says.
“Was there a performance?”
“Once,” the young man says. “But it didn’t make a great deal of sense. Actors went about their daily lives, looking into the fountain, doing laundry in a basin. If anyone spoke, they did not speak loudly enough for the audience to hear.”
“So there was an audience?” Horatius asks. “People came into the maze?”
The young man nods, bronze mask glinting in the torchlight.

17.
Horatius wants to ask the young man to take off his mask. Yet, at the same time, he does not feel it would be right to make such a request. If the young man wears a mask, he must wear it for some reason.

18.
Horatius and the young man walk down the aisle of the amphitheater to the stage. They step through the iron gate. They pass onto a dirt road. There is a nighttime sky painted above.
“Look,” the young man says.
Horatius looks. He sees the river. The black Tiber. But it too is painted.
There is a moon, and there are mountains.

19.
They rest there on the stage by the iron gate. Horatius worries that if he falls asleep, the young man in the bronze mask will leave him. He will run away into the maze. Horatius will be alone again.

20.
Sleep comes. When Horatius awakes, the masked young man is still there, sitting beside the iron gate, watching him. Horatius thinks the young man’s gray eyes look kind. He wishes that the young man would hold him. Sometimes the men behind the Temple of Saturn held him.
“We should keep moving,” the young man says.
“Because we’re trying to find the way out?” Horatius asks.
The young man says nothing.
They stand and make their way from the theater.
In the maze again, they follow dried handprints. Horatius wonders why they always choose paths that are already marked with handprints. He asks the young man.
“Because I am showing you what you need to see,” the young man says.
“But we want to escape, don’t we?” Horatius said. “The jailers, or whatever it is they are, said there is an exit on the other side of the maze.”
“That is my understanding as well,” the young man says. “But there are other places too.” He pauses, then says: “I have a question for you.”
“What is it?” Horatius says.
“You won’t leave me, will you?” the young man asks. “You won’t run away?”
Horatius blushes. He realizes he wants to take care of the young man. He wants them both to get out of the maze together. “No,” he says. “I won’t run away.”
The young man nods. “I was down here alone for so long.”

21.
They come to a massive empty dining hall. There are tables and benches for a hundred men. Horatius feels oddly frightened when he sees the dining hall. He wonders why a place like this has been left abandoned. “Did men once live here?” he asks.
“No,” the young man says. “I don’t think so. But I’m not really sure.”
Horatius looks at his masked companion again. He wonders, for a moment, if the young man might be some kind of spirit, a shadow left down here in the darkness. He wonders if he himself is becoming a spirit too.

22.
At the back of the dining hall, they pause at the threshold of a darkened room.
“What is this place?” Horatius asks.
The young man takes Horatius’s torch. “Just follow me,” he says. “It’s what I want to show you.”
Horatius follows the young man into the darkened room.
The walls, all the way to the ceiling, are lined with masks.
Horatius stares at them.
There are masks of every sort, animal and human, demon and god. The masks are made of bronze and gold and wood.
“What are all these masks for?” Horatius asks.
“They’re not masks,” the young man says.
“What then?” Horatius says.
“Faces,” the young man says.
Horatius feels cold. He doesn’t know why he feels cold.
The young man unfastens the leather straps that hold the bronze mask to his face.

23.
Beneath the mask is another mask. This one is made of silver. It looks something like Horatius’s own face.

24.
Beneath the mask is a city that looks very much like Rome. Seven hills. Streets like canyons. All lit red by an evening sun.

25.
Beneath the mask is Horatius’s mother, weeping.

26.
Beneath the mask is a black river and black mountains.

27.
Beneath the mask is an emptiness. A wind blows. It makes a hollow sound. There are no eyes. There isn’t even a face.

28.
Horatius turns to flee.
“You told me you wouldn’t leave me,” the emptiness says.
It speaks in a young man’s voice. It has a young man’s yearning.
Horatius pauses. He turns back to the figure. He looks into the empty hole where a face should be. He wonders if he sees something deep inside the hole. “Have you been to the alley behind the House of Saturn?” Horatius asks.
“No,” the emptiness says. “Will you tell me about it?”
Horatius nods. “I will. But let’s keep walking too.”

-00-

Adam McOmber is the author of The White Forest: A Novel (Simon and Schuster) as well as two collections of queer speculative stories, My House Gathers Desires and This New & Poisonous Air (BOA). His new novel, Jesus and John, is forthcoming from Lethe Press. His work has appeared recently in Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Diagram.