# Unholy Places If it had not been the wolves, it would have been the cold or the hunger. If it had not been now, it would have been a week or a year later. You have always been at the bottom of these steps, before this cathedral, in these woods on just such a cloudless night with the same moon that has watched you every moment of your existence lighting a soft way to the brass door. Are you now in any pain? When the teeth sheared your ankle, when the horse buckled and collapsed like a bassinet, when the pine needles took passes at your face, your arm, had you quite forgotten what pain was? Stick to the facts. The wind is high and beautiful. You will freeze to death or you will bleed out or the wolves will take you, if you remain. And what frightens you so about the cathedral? It is old. It is falling apart. You held your father to your chest as he died. Rise, girl. There is nowhere but within. > [[Climb the stairs.->UHP 1-Stairs]] > [[Take your chances with the wolves.->UHP 1-Wolves]]But steady. There is no railing to sure your climb, and time and ice have made a mountainside of the steps. Keep your bearing low, your steps slight. Lean into the wind. You have heard it in the alps, outside your uncle's cabin, in every one of your dreams. There is only one wind, one moon, one God. Steady. Is it the wind howling? Steady. You cannot go any faster than you are now. Yes it is the wind in the upper branches of the pine howling, or in the smashed rose window of the cathedral howling, or in your own throat howling. Or it is a wolf. Steady. You can go no faster. Was this place made by giants? You can already see it from halfway up. The door's handle is higher than you can reach. And anyways it is wide as a whole train car: you would not have the strength to move it. Steady. One foot at a time. > [[Keep climbing.->UHP 2-Wolves Appear]] > [[Slide back down.->UHP 2-Death]]It might be in an hour, it might be the next morning. Sooner or later, the wolves get you. It is horrible, of course, but such material facts no longer concern you. {restart link}They have the mare's blood about their snouts. One has your blood about his snout. This would not be worth thinking about, except you can see them moving in the trees. Can their hunger be so great that they have devoured the horse already? Or is this merely a greed for killing, a certain boredom? Certainly, the world is boring except at such moments. One darts into the clearing. You are only halfway up, and that is not yet to safety. You know you must face them. They will charge if you turn your back. And yet, for all the snapping of their jaws, they have not crossed the threshold of the steps. The air is palpably salt and sap. They are waiting for something in this place within the pines. They have formed a crescent with their body. The moon has yet to give the sign. With your back to the cathedral, you are barely at a crawl. Your heart is trying to break its way out of your ribs. Actually, every part of your body is trying to betray you, is looking to take its chances on its own. The moon must have given a wink as the largest has placed his paw on the first step. > [[Keep climbing.->UHP 3-At the top of the steps.]] > [[Stand your ground.->UHP 3-At the top of the steps.]]Now why would you do a thing like that? What outcome were you possibly expecting? Whatever it was, it's the wolves you get. {restart link}In a moment they encircle you. They have certain questions to ask before striking. They want to know if you will dare to strike back. They sense some resistance in you even you are not aware of. Whatever it is, it is a candle's flame in a hurricane. At last, one lashes forward, but is rebuffed by an involuntary twitch of the arm. Where this movement came from, you cannot say: you are a creature entirely of ice. The execution has been decided. They are only arguing over who will get the kill. The largest howls his claim, but perhaps there is justice in giving it to the child. Some part of your brain is splayed out with the scattered remnants of a prayer. The circle tightens, hisses fraying. There is only so much blood in the world. You scream just before they pounce and the wind screams. The great door roars open and the wind lifts the wolves, lifts you, lifts pounds of ice into the air and tosses everything away, back towards the forest. The whole atmosphere penetrates the body as you reach the highest point. And then drops you like laundry into a basket. In the last light the moon permits you, you watch the wolves shake off the fall and return to the trees. > [[You black out.->UHP 4-Inside the cathedral.]]When you wake you have been dragged into the cathedral. This fact registers not immediately but in parts, at first as a vague gray in the darkness, a cold press about the back, the wind echoing. You would hate for this to be heaven and it isn't. Pain woke you and is keeping you from waking, like a muslin cloth about the mouth. It digs its hand into your calf, where the wolf bit, and the hip that hit the ground first. Breathe carefully, January is acid in the mouth. Eventually the world regenerates like a salamander's tail. The windows are as tall as five men but draw only the slightest quantity of light, in which an inconstant line of pews tussle and hump one another. Someone has set out a clay cup of water and a ration of bread and this may suffice to coax your brain back into its pan. You search your coat for the letter and find it. Someone or something has rescued you. This fact finally registers itself. The interior gives no further signs of this savior. Or perhaps it does, for something has surely kept the disarray at bay, some corners given to cobweb and dust while other parts, the apse and the lectern, appear with no more than the ordinary uncleanliness. The crucifix above the altar is missing its Christ. Somehow this above all else disturbs you. > [[Eat the bread.->UHP 5-Bread.]] > [[Rise.->UHP 5-Rise.]]The bread is so stale your jaw hurts chewing it. The water tastes faintly of limestone. You thank whoever left them for you. You say your aunt's grace. Either the moon has found a more favorable angle or your eyes have adjusted to the darkness. Eventually, you are able to stand, though not entirely upright. The cathedral is enormous, so much so that you do not think of it as an interior. Rather, it seems you have stepped into a different woods, with the tall trunks of columns, their votive canopy. Flecks of paint run up their sides like bark; you cannot guess the color. The transept cuts the space oddly close to the grand door, again closed, as if it had been installed on the wrong side of the building. The space gives no clues to its use, to its occupation. You take a few steps until pain pushed you against the wall. Still, a great dread determines you and you walk again. The windows are filled with stained glass that betray no images and where here or there appear spot or a recess where a sculpture had once stood, nothing stands, or only certain fragments. The meaning of the place had been scratched out. > [[Approach the altar.->UHP 6-Conversation]] > [[Stay and freeze to death.->UHP 6-Death]]The cathedral is enormous, so much so that you do not think of it as an interior. Rather, it seems you have stepped into a different woods, with the tall trunks of columns, their votive canopy. Flecks of paint run up their sides like bark; you cannot guess the color. The transept cuts the space oddly close to the grand door, again closed, as if it had been installed on the wrong side of the building. All around you wolves jaws snap, but only at the edges of your sight. Turning towards them reveals only shattered gargoyles, strange snatches of stone and wood. The space gives no clues to its use, to its occupation. You take a few steps until pain pushed you against the wall. Still, a great dread determines you and you walk again. The windows are filled with stained glass that betray no images and where here or there appear spot or a recess where a sculpture had once stood, nothing stands, or only certain fragments. The meaning of the place had been scratched out. > [[Approach the altar.->UHP 6-Conversation]] > [[Stay and freeze to death.->UHP 6-Death]]The figure atop the stone slab is from a distance a saint's reliquary, then a corpse, and finally a sleeping man entirely enshrouded in a wool blanket. You feel a great desire to wake him but a lingering sense of propriety restrains you. The human form seemed out of place in such a place: an ink blot at the bottom of a great page. You turn away. Not that any strong differences can be made between vantages. Here is stone. There is stone. *Child*. He has lifted his blanked but not yet risen. He is a man, middle-aged, slightly bedraggled, like a banker rushed out in the morning before his shave. He smells faintly of rotten ice. *It is good to see you walking*.<br/><br/> *Am I to thank you for saving me?* You ask. He pushes himself awkwardly from his resting place, stoops slightly before facing you squarely. You think, ludicrously enough, that he might be handsome in a different circumstance. *Only God saves. I merely hauled you up some steps.* >[[Ask the man for help.->UHP 7-Explanation]] > [[Attempt to leave.->UHP 6.5-Abortive attempt to leave]] Free will is a miraculous thing. Its operation, not always so. {restart link}*In the morning, I shall be leaving for Vienna. Would you be able to direct me? At least as to the direction.* Really, some part of your soul wants to leave immediately, but you think of the wolves and know you will need daylight. It is difficult to make out his expression in the gloom. Perhaps he is like a child when his favored nanny announces her departure.<br/><br/> *You suffered no incidental injury. I am no apothecarist and this no hospital. Yet time at least shall mend.* He takes your forefinger in his hand and you do not resist this. His hand feels too much like your father's. *Once, this place had a reputation for miracles of healing. Every princeling with so much as a stutter came to be baptized, to be prayed over, to kiss the shriveled foot of some saint or other. One can hope the spiders have captured something of that godliness, certainly all the saints are fled.* He releases and turns to the nave, pauses a moment, and continues over his shoulder. *What brought you to such a remote place? There are good, safe roads.*<br/><br/> *Good, but long. I have a tight deadline. I am needed in Vienna midday tomorrow.* He gives you a look of genuine concern. *Already impossible, I'm afraid. Even if you left this moment. Even if you walked infallibly to your destination. Even should you hire a carriage the moment you leave the woods.* Of course, you knew all of this already but had not permitted yourself to think it. Hearing it aloud, it comes as a relief. And that relief is terrible. *What is the source of your haste?* > [[Answer.->UHP 8-Marriage]]What exactly you hoped to accomplish with this manouver escapes even you. The doors are shut again, too heavy to move. And every chance there is that the path out leaves into the jaws of the wolf. Best to explain yourself to the gentleman, strange though he may be, and find some aid in your quest. > [[Fine.->UHP 7-Explanation]] > [[Fall down and freeze to death.->UHP 6-Death]]You hesitate for a moment. The cold holds its hand around your throat, muffling your speech. Yet what would the harm be in this stranger knowing? *An ultimatum. I have been engaged to a man in Vienna for the past two years. The consummation thereof being postponed for reasons of my father's illness, the gentleman grew impatient. Lately I have received a letter setting forth a date by which I am to make my appearance, otherwise the marriage would be called off. The letter itself had been delayed by two months, leaving scarcely a moment to hang up my mourning clothes before flying to Vienna.*<Br/><br/> *It is a Christian man,* he said bitterly, *who would deal with his wife with such patience. One may assume an attractive fellow as well, who would be permitted such demands.*<br/><br/> You realize you have never spoken even to your dearest friend about your feelings; you do not know quite what you will say. *I could not well say: I have never met the gentleman.* The man looks older when he smiles. *I fear then that I am scarcely closer to my answer. Why the great rush to marry?* > [[Answer.->UHP 9-Marriage again]]*It was my father's ardent desire that I be seen after once he died. He made, to that end, a series of investments into shipments from the Far East that ended quite counterproductively on the ocean floor. As his wealth grew more illusory, he endeavored to find some well-to-do young, or not so young, man who might yet be persuaded to marry into an illusion. I have no talent for marriage or for illusion or for men, yet have always considered myself an entirely obedient creature.*<br/><br/> *The question is really who you obey.* For the first time, you feel the man's curiosity is not entirely disinterested. *I have always thought a command dies with its issuer. Further, since all on earth but Christ are dead in sin, it is only the Lord's orders which we are given to carry out.*<br/><br/> *It is a nice theology,* you reply, *too nice for my learning.* > [[Listen to the man's response.->UHP 10-The labyrinth]]*This cathedral has or rather had two faces. You will soon understand what I mean. It's "secular" face, which is what we see now, and a true face beneath. Those princes and lepers came to the surface seeking the goods of the earth. They were healed and went on some months or years further to the grave, never knowing that beneath their feet lay the true way to salvation.*<br/><br/> You tremble, but it may just be a wind. *In what does this true way consist?*<br/><br/> *A labyrinth. A winding path the Devil wanders. The Devil? Yes, a man may spend his entire life keeping on the straight and narrow path. But if he has never faced temptation or adversity, how shall he be permitted to enter the Kingdom? I tell you, no place on this planet is closer to Hell. Nor to Heaven. What say you?* > [[Refuse.->UHP 10.5-Refusal]] > [[Consider the matter further.->UHP 11-Question]]*My good sir.* You have seen such madness only fleetingly in the faces of beggars who wander the streets and howl at the moon, heard it only in your father's confused murmurings near the end. *I'm afraid I am made of such meager materials as is suited neither for Heaven nor for Hell. I may or may not find my match in Vienna.*<br/><br/> *My daughter, is it not Providence that brought you to this point? How many miles of conifers encircle us, and yet in your confused wanderings you have chanced upon this holy place, which took me many years of dedicated searching to find. No, it has already been decided.*<br/><br/> *Just for once*, you say, *I should like to decide something for myself.* He returns to sitting on the stone bed. *You hear them? The wolves are still out there barking. If you insist on leaving, in the morning I shall walk with you until we find the road.* > [[Reconsider the labyrinth.->UHP 11-Question]] > [[Leave in the morning.->UHP 11-Refusal]]You consider the silence. The man is mad, clearly. If one could really find Paradise here or be healed of sickness, it would never have been permitted to come to ruin. Yet too, had you not always dreamt of such a crucial moment as this. And he is right, at least, about this much: it is not the time to be galivanting off. Not in this body. Not in these woods. *It is not dangerous?*<br/><br/> *Nothing could have more danger.*<br/><br/> You have been sick to your core, you think, every moment of your life. And every moment you have ignored your sickness while the world, your father, your mother---Lord bless them in Paradise---had need of you. Grant it, you want to be well. > [[Attempt the labyrinth.->UHP 12-The climb down]]The morning never arrives for you. The cold and the loss of blood take you when you fall asleep again. {restart link}The matter decided, the man draws you to a small hollow and finds, secreted into the floor, a handle in the middle of a circular mosaic, and pulls away that hidden covering to reveal only a small hole, and in the hole a ladder coming not quite to the lip. He descends first. As you follow, you think of him at the bottom, staring up your dress. An idle thought, given the darkness, yet there was something to recommend the world of trees and wolves over that of men. He grabs your shoulders as you reach the bottom. To steady you, you hope. *Take my hand. There can be no light here. Yet you will not need any, for there is only path in the maze. A winding, treacherous path, to be sure, but stick to it and it will guide you unfailingly to your goal.* > [[Continue.->UHP 13-More explanation]]Never have you felt more like you are dreaming. *If there is no way to get lost, where is the danger?* Even dreaming caries with it a stronger impression of wakefulness. *There are seven trees. You understand, seven trees for seven sins. The Devil will draw you from the path. That's all sin is, in the end, leaving things unfinished.*<br/><br/> You expect your eyes to adjust to the darkness, but it never happens. You can do nothing but allow yourself to be led. If your guide released his grasp, who can say if you would find your way back to the ladder. > [[Continue.->UHP 14-Entrance]]*This is the place.* Perhaps a certain change in the air confirms it. A different kind of shadow among shadows, the kind that masses before a drawbridge. Not a wind, but simply a denser stillness. You feel it is impossible to go on. *This is the place. Continue if you will.* Your fear does not have any earthly character. It is not a fear given to schedules or quantities, but this is the only language you have ever had to express it. *Will I be finished quite by morning?*<br/><br/> *Do not count the hours, you will get them wrong.* The man's grip takes a certain insistence. *Only know that you will be delivered. Every person who has entered the maze has died. Some have come back from death.* > [[Continue.->UHP 15]] It is only the awful unreality of the place that permits you to continue. He releases his grasp as he pulls you forward, checks that you have made contact with the wall. It is knotted, almost bark-like. Spongy here, sheer there. A faint scent of fishy decay strikes the nostril. You have been once to a port. You lost a white cap to the waves. Your mother starved you for a week. He is quite elsewhere, on a different planet perhaps, and there is nowhere to go but forward. You walk a few steps in, pulled more by your fingers exploring the wall than your legs. The path is uneven in its width, just wider than your armspan at its mouth but narrowing quickly to shoulder width. Just as you fear you will have to turn sideways and walk like a crab, it opens again. In its undulations you imagine progressing down a serpent's belly. Some minor bolus it is not even aware of having swallowed. For the first half-minute, the relative smoothness of the surface underscores this impression. There is an oiliness to the wall, the sense of a million fingers having tried the path before. Yet this impression too fades, the wall roughens, you imagine spirits falling back like the white petals of an autumn rose tumbling to the soil. > [[Continue.->UHP 16]]You cannot describe the intervening time even as an experience. You are unequally steeled for this groping in the darkness. All those nights of your childhood sleeping in your grandmother's room, listening to the hints of her own death pulling in the dark. The man's dire pronouncements too tear away: the outer shell of some rotten fruit. It is only stone and shadow and time, the labyrinth. A carnival construction in a dilapidated house, an amusement to frighten children. Can you say that you are even bored by it? She spoke so so often of Hell, your grandmother, conjured it in a thousand frightful visage over a thousand mundanities: an uneaten crust of bread, a rumple in the sheets, a minute's delay leaving the house. It was all you could do to survive, to learn to be bored by damnation, by the prospects of Paradise. The path seems to fall away. It opens into a sudden alcove. The first tree. > [[Continue.->UHP 17]]If you plant one foot against the wall and lean in to the center, you reach its bark just before collapsing. A real tree! It shifts just so when you press against it, even shakes its leaves like a rattle. You approach and grasp it. It is slender, as thick as a man's leg. The bark is grooved, rougher going down than ascending like a shark's back. Its impossibility registers slowly. And when it registers, it is only as some further unreality. The man had called the trees "sins." Which one was this? And why? Its presence is menacing, granted. All improbabilities are menacing. They mock our sense of the world's solidity. And yet within that threat is a different solidity. This, at last, is a real thing. You sit by it. It offers no firm support, but it accommodates you. Comforts you. You feel your eyes close. You begin to dream. > [[Dream.->AWGUWGD 1]] # As We Go Up, We Go Down The man's beauty is a fact greater than the squalor: the half-wall of drained Natty Light, the palimpsest of hockey jerseys claiming the other chair by the ancient fireplace, the stupid existence of red plastic cups. Why can we not speak of beauty as something as obvious and simple as the climate? You are struck dumb, paralyzed by a web of desires his beauty weaves by way of mutual entailments. It may just be a simple want for words. All earthly comparisons---rainbows and butterflies and sculpted Venuses---have a chintzy, secondhand quality. All other beauties have been chewed up and spit out, so much grassy cud. He is single; as far as you know, he has always been so. His beauty, therefore, may be something like a private color, a pitch audible only to certain species of vampire bats. It is a lucky and a lonely thing for you to perceive it. He speaks. > [[Continue.->AWGUWGD 2]] *There's something happening at the police headquarters.* It is an invitation, something thrilling but also dangerous. You had invited him over, for beer, for weed, the usual dissolutions, to assay your desire. This change of scenery could represent an escape procedure; the police headquarters, the inkcloud from a squid's mouth. *Yeah? Shall we drive over?*<br/><br/> *Clogged up, I imagine. I came by bike.* He did not even intend to down his vodka club. You invent an obstacle. *Bum tire on mine. Haven't had a chance.* An embarrassing fabrication: your life is nothing but chances. *Hop on mine*. He finishes the drink in the end, two thrilling gulps, pulls you from the bear trap of a lounge chair, positions you at the rear, to the private torments of discretion. *Keep hold.* > [[Continue.->AWGUWGD 3]]The excitement is tempered somewhat by the nearness of death. Winter has been stamped down into a few icy millimeters. With the extra weight, the bicycle cannot stop itself before the lines. Down one hill, it careens clean into an intersection, is struck by a Tacoma. The bike buckles, suplexes you into the asphalt, rips your jeans, bloodies your knees, your hands, your face. He kicks you on the way down, extracts himself quickly. The driver flicks her hazards, leaps out in a concern that becomes fury when she finds you alive. He rights you, flips her off, shoulders her scorn, drags the half-bent ex-vehicle to the curb. *Perhaps we should walk,* he offers as he chains the remnants to a park fence. The truck drives off. The cold smarts your scrapes, fills you with the distant scent of juniper. He takes your palm in his hands, works the bleeding with the back of his sleeve, attends to your face. You seem to be filled with some kind of jelly, entirely receptive. *Shit, sorry. The city needs to fucking do something about the streets.* You have never been more glad for municipal incompetence. > [[Continue.->AWGUWGD 4]]You see it from blocks out. The headquarters are on fire. You hear the sirens, they seem somehow to be coming from the smoke, thick, black, acrid, tinged with colored lighting and occasionally bursting with what you realize to be fireworks. As he predicted, the streets soon choke with cars, most empty, sprawled on the street as if parking regulations were a matter for some other civilization. There wouldn't even have been space for a bicycle, as at points the cars come four to a breast, claiming both sidewalks. You take his shoulder as the path narrows. He puts one hand around yours. In the two or three blocks before the fire, the cars become platforms for onlookers. Families take position on their own dashboards. Pedestrians hunt for a spot to see the blaze. The barricade of cars has kept the firetrucks from closing in. Police officers man a loudspeaker, call again and again for citizens to return to their cars and to clear a path. Down one street, the city's entire fleet of tow trucks chips away at an improvised wall of sports utility vehicles. Only the path directly before the burning building is free of cars, the great heat buffeting the onlookers back. *Beautiful.* > [[Continue.->AWGUWGD 5]]You hadn't properly noticed him drawing you to him, first one hand then the other forming a half-embrace. He tightens to you as you stop before the last line of cars. His face is that of a Portuguese peasant before a sun stopped dead and black in the sky. There is something sacred to the perimeter only a couple cops dare trod. He nestles you into a muscle car's wing mirror, his eyes pond-like, colored with reflected want. He puts first a hand to your hand, then, his nose to your nose, his lips to yours. The world is falling apart. What of it? When a fawn is born, it is slick and bare and yet walks only with the vague dreaminess of one long slumbering. It knows already which berries are wholesome, which poison. The forest floor is thick with seeds that germinate only in fire. > [[Awaken->UHP II.1]]# Unholy Places After waking into darkness, it takes you several minutes to realize you are awake. It is only the pressure of the trunk on your back that disturbs the perfect blankness of consciousness. The dream fades slowly, the impression of a warm mouth. Back into the darkness of the maze, you push yourself up slowly. There is a great risk, you realize, that you will have turned around in your sleep, that you will exit the way you came. Or would that be such a bad thing? The man had insinuated all sorts of dangers in the labyrinth, in calling it short. Yet the dream fit strangely into the scheme of the place. Lust, if you had to place it, but nothing like your grandmother's stories of the horrors of lust in this life or the next (the face peeling off with syphilis, the womb filling like a sinking dinghy with blood after an abortion, the sodomite gaping about a dragon's talon). What can you do but press onwards? You have always had a talent for feeling nothing. > [[Continue.->UHP II.2]] And so the path goes a while, turning this way and that like a disobedient horse, until after some time (an hour? a day?) it opens again onto another room around a different tree. A short, squat one, the height of a man but too wide to get your arms around. Some sort of palm, judging by its leaves, its fibrous top. You sit, but you resist sleep, even as it tugs upon your eyelids. These visions are surely the point of the construction, some strange effect of its artifice, like the trees perhaps. (Fakes, you decide, well made but of course aided by the darkness. In the light, surely, they must be some strange, false color.) There must be an odd perfume laced into the bark, a soporific, a stimulant of visions. You wait a while, hoping to discover some sign of this, a scent, a texture about the air. There is nothing but moist stone. You fall asleep. > [[Dream->KA I]]# Kentucky Avenue You hadn't thought of suicide until she took away the toaster. There is cause, of course; you did burn a whole loaf's worth the other day, forgot about it slice by slice until the kitchen became nothing but charred crusts. Still, it was the only appliance you were still allowed to operate, together with the coffee machine. And who knows how long you had left with that. The sad thing is, the toaster is the only instrument of suicide you have any confidence in. Plugged in, in the bathtub. You've seen it in a movie. She is unlocking the cabinet of forbidden items, the nurse, fetching the toaster and a butterknife (you couldn't cut anything with that flea market tat if you had your mind set on it), relocking it, plugging the toaster by the radio on the one window speckled with rain, with the broken brown-and-white reflections of the magnolias on Kentucky Avenue. She is sad this morning. > [[Continue.->KA 2]] She scoots you out of the way to fetch a slice from the bread drawer. The whole row house is a window, a table, a few counters, a bed in the second room, boxes in the third. Between your wheelchair, her hips, there isn't space to breathe. When she passes again, you wish you were a pervert. Secret, sick pleasures seem the only ones on offer in the modern world. You are drinking microwaved instant. Perhaps she did lock up Mr. Coffee after all. *Tell me when.* She scans a knife over an opened butter dish. You wait until it reaches the midpoint. *When.* A jazz band is playing at the cafe on the corner. They sound terrible but thankfully muffled. *We have to think of your cholesterol.* Come to think of it, you would still like to live forever, if you could contrive it somehow. *I thought I was choosing for you. For me, scrape all the butter off the knife and just run it along the bread a bit.* She is slowly being swallowed by her own body. *I guess we're surly this morning.* > [[Continue.->KA 3]] *I am only thinking of your future. How else are you to eat me out of house and home?* She becomes a mediocre drama student reciting a monologue from a third-rate play. *Heaven forbid in my bounded existence of cooking and cleaning, of wiping you down, of portioning medicine, of bending to my father's beck and call, of putting on the image of perfect, dutiful daughter----Anything for Reagan? Heaven forbid, you must have heard, Reagan died: and nurse and maid split from her corpse. My word, well there certainly was enough of her for two.---Heaven forbid. Lord forgive me for thinking anything of my ugly self.*<br/><br/> *Did I say any such thing? You are beautiful.* Perhaps you did say such things. You cannot trust your own memory, though you do not always remember this. She hands you a slice of toast, generously buttered. *Would you open the window, please,* you find yourself saying, *I would like to hear the music.* You do not want to hear the music, but you hope she might. *Father, it's awful. You are not deaf.* > [[Continue.->KA 4]]You keep turning over the question of death as if it were a weekend trip to the zoo. You'd heard about the albino crocodile, of course, the caged mandrills, the rhino whose tusk is slowly curling back into his skull. *I'd like to go into town this evening, for an hour or two. Do you feel up to being alone?* It's a matter of practicalities, really, that's what everything comes down to. *Do we have a gun?* She is sniffing at an orchid even though it's plastic. *Of course we don't have a gun.* The coffee is undrinkable. She must give you back the machine at least. *Not even in your purse? It's a rough-and-tumble neighborhood.*<br/><br/> *You've lived here for fifty years. We have never once been robbed. I was raped on the corner of Cedar in a stalled Cadillac, I must have told you, but he moved to San Francisco.* You are sure she never told you, at least not when your memory held. Now perhaps she confesses every little trauma daily, just to see which stick in your head. *I hope they have good mashed potatoes, this place you're going to. Before you leave, can you put on the coffee machine? I can't stand this instant.* She is wearing her mother's bougainvillea dress, the one your wife stained in the back by sitting on a park bench a drunk had puked on. *That is your coffee, dad. Look, it's still warming. You take too long to drink and the hot plate scalds it.* > [[Continue.->KA 5]]That evening, she forgets to lock the cabinet. You fill a bath, plug the toaster in rested on the sink. You don't know if it has to be loaded. You stick two pieces of bread in to be safe. The toaster is slightly warm at the side when you climb in, wearing a dress shirt and cleaned-press trousers. There is dignity to think of. The cord is too short. The toaster disconnects before it hits the water. Perhaps you got a bit of a jolt, but that might have just been the hunk of chrome striking your chest. There's an extension cord somewhere in the third room, but it doesn't seem worth the unboxing. Just change into dry clothes. Ask the neighbors for a length of rope. Keep things simple. > [[Awaken->UHP III.1]]# Unholy Places (again) You start awake. This time in a sweat, despite the cold. It is horrible, being anything other than oneself. Not at the time perhaps, but now, trying to pull back together a sense of a unified personality. You focus on breathing. That at least is safe, within your character, whoever you are. You wonder if already you are supposed to have learned something from these visions. This one in particular seems arbitrary, cruel. You try to pray in the familiar manner, collapsing into your own chest, but keep hitting upon that image of a metal box, some future device for making toast with its arcane relationship with death. Perhaps it is a vision of the future. You think of some remarks your father made on some ideas of Malthus. Perhaps this is how the future will solve the population crisis: stock each household with a thousand instruments of death, let the cautious survive. You press on. If Christ or the Devil have a message for you, they will know where to find you. > [[Continue.->UHP III.2]]This stretch seems longer than the last, though you don't have a sense of how long either is. Strangely, you do not feel hungry or thirsty, even any sense of pain has gone. You shout and listen for how long it takes the echoes to fade. This is a mystic place, the man had been right about that. Though so far it has given only bewilderment. It has time enough, you suppose. On you go to the third room. Larger than the others, huge actually, with roots that come down from the branches like ropes. You do not know exactly how tall the basement is, perhaps it has slanted imperceptibly to make room for this tree. In any case, you are now ready to accept the trees as living organisms, howsoever impossible that seems. This one feels almost bursting with water. There is not a comfortable spot among its roots. But that scarcely matters. You fall immediately into sleep. > [[Dream.->SU 1]]# Surf's Up The morning pulls like a trashfire around the edges of your sunglasses. Some night. Heaven knows how you even dragged yourself the block from your bed to the beach. Or why. With your mind more on the mystical connection between breath and stomach, the political concerns of waste management, you can't quite pin it. Beneath the salt, the hummusy smell of a man's sex. Some night. Gulls take a grater to your ear drums with their cries. Won't someone take pity and shoot the damn things? There are a couple hotel plastics of Fireball in your beach bag. Can't hurt. Your body cannot quite distinguish sand and water. Something about temperature perhaps? Everything moves with a boat-like rocking, the whole Earth a brittle leaf on a koi pond. *Hey! You rose from the dead.* The man from New York. Certain details of last night arrange themselves into the edges of a jigsaw puzzle. *Like a zombie, darling. Like a zombie.* > [[Continue.->SU 2]] He insinuates himself beside you. *I suppose I have you to thank for airlifting me home.* He puts a thumb on your chin. God, you really might hurl. *Don't mention it. The party was a sad affair without you.* The entire planet reappears a meter to the left. *I hope you rewarded yourself.* He drops next to you. Heavenly host, protect you. *Just as I was leaving, we were discussing a very interesting subject.* You have always used insobriety to carefully manage your awareness of physical reality, to see things from their most flattering angle. *Me, I hope.* He kisses your cheek and it is like a length of seaweed washing up onto shore. *In a way.* A boombox dopplers from right to left on the shoulders of a skateboarder, playing Metallica. *Money?* His hand is up your shirt, resting on your nipple. You must have given all the keys to the kingdom. *Money.* > [[Continue.->SU 3]] When he pulls onto you, you are a penguin in the mouth of an elephant seal. The general outline of the scheme arrives in a sudden waft of garbage. *It's a wonderful institution, the lottery. One of the few engines of upwards mobility that still works in this country.* It occurs to you that you could spend the remainder of your life lying in just this position. *Come on, mate. No time like the present.*<br/> You consent to being lifted to your feet. Or rather, your consent is implied by some primordial agreement with the world that will never be renegotiated. It isn't the same world standing as it is lying down. The palm trees are all crooked. You walk like some newborn bird as his hold turns from tenderness to annoyance. *It's just at the end of this street*. > [[Continue.->SU 4]]You scope out all of the trashcans in a hundred meter radius by the convenience store. The man from New York buys twenty scratch-off tickets, places them one by one in your palm. You do not have to fake the tremble. The half-functioning air condition expresses itself in a pebbling of sweat on your upper arms. The world is the sum of a billion years of half-brained ideas. *This one.* Pictures of racecars line the edges of the tickets. You prepare yourself for anger, for the sudden icy movement of disappointment. You start everything from a position of falsehood, that way there's always an escape plan. He scratches off the positions with a pocket knife. You do not know what the numbers mean, but they excite him. *Holy fuck, you were right. That's some Nostradamus shit.* You throw up into a trash chan. *Some Nostradamus shit.* > [[Awaken->UHP IV.1]] # Unholy Places (again) Who is there, speaking in your brain? *Satan,* the voice announces himself. You are back in the darkness of the maze. It has not changed its quality. *Satan?* You want to question him over this strange temptation. But certain notions of your grandmother intercept the interrogation: evil is nothing, you cannot see it. *It is a lonely journey.* Perhaps he is again a serpent among the branches. *A lonely journey,* he insists, *and not half over.*<br/> He is right, of course. You have had no one to accompany you these last years but griefs and visions and animals. It is difficult even to speak in the strange atmosphere of this cellar. *Have you come to tempt me?* There is an ancient sadness to his voice. *Our own minds tempt us. Something in how we're made I've never understood. May I walk with you a ways?* You have never had more than a glass of wine, but you stand with the shadow hangover of the dream. What use will it be either to accept or refuse? > [[Continue.->UHP IV.2]] The Adversary is there in your footsteps. He is in the stretch and warp of your calves, your ankles. He has his fingers in the heaviness of your hair. You were a man in these visions, you decide. Perhaps a bishop could tell you what that means. Perhaps the devil and his presence is just a mad delusion. It would help you to believe that. It would excuse the comfort you feel. *Why so fleetly?* He has been silent for minutes. You do not need to explain yourself. What reason had you to remain. Best to Vienna. You have already been too long delayed. *When does a woman's soul enter her body?* The spirit is indeed a snake pulling about your throat. *First her father holds it, then he sells it off to her husband. Perhaps when he dies, if she has not already promised it to her children. A strange creature to tempt.* > [[Continue->UHP IV.3]]The being that might be the devil is silent for many minutes. This is a long stretch of passage. Longer by far than any that have come before. And you never get less clumsy in the dark, never accustom yourself to it, can only proceed by slowly feeling your palms across the wall. *Do you think I can be happy in Vienna?* Your question goes unanswered until you reach the threshold of the next room. *Have you been happy anywhere?* The tree is rotten through, just the stump of an old oak. *Then what do you think you will find different in Vienna?* Your father, you almost answer, will be properly dead. *A terrible thought. Put it from mind. We will see if there's anything this dream can teach us.* > [[Dream.->OHWIR 1]]The car slips twice off the road during the commute. You are not hurt. You do not hit anything. The vehicle suffers no damage. It is Thursday, February 3rd. You are three years older than you ever thought you would be. The town still thinks it's Christmas. If everyone is very good, perhaps next year there Santa will pony up for some snow plows. The key sticks in the lock when you enter the store. Not even metal likes the cold. Maybe you'll have to call a locksmith. Take the day off. Two more seconds of jiggling and it's unstuck. The door is open. The infrared sensors recognize a body. The lights turn on. > [[Continue.->OHWIR 2]]You check on the walk-in. Everything as it should be. You can't smell the dough anymore. Or you can, but it smells more like normal air than anything else does. The outdoors smells like a rusted tin can to you. You hate your job, the dream job, the job you quit everything else for. It is not worth saying. The dough still needs to be shaped into loaves, placed in neat rows on aluminum trays beneath plastic sheets, proved, scored, baked, rested, sold. The remainder, disposed. What are your hands doing, idle like that? > [[Continue.->OHWIR 3]] The two ovens can support two trays on separate rows. At three deep and five wide that's sixty loaves at once, two batches an hour. Eight hours of baking in a day, that's a thousand loaves. Half a ton of bleached, white flower. Add wheat, for texture. Ten kilos salt. A few more of leaveners, preservative. Two dollars of material per loaf, add rent, electricity, wages, bank loans. Sell them for six dollars and the numbers work. You sold eighty yesterday. That was a good day. > [[Continue.->OHWIR 4]] You keep undoing your progress. That's how you make bread. Let the yeast do its work, then knead the air out of it. Things are changing inside the dough, at a level you can't see. It's premature to preheat the oven, but you start one anyways (you haven't used the second in months), afraid of forgetting again, having nothing to sell. Being your own boss is just being a slave to numbers. You like to watch the snow while you work, can just about see half a window from the kitchen. You'll have to shovel out the sidewalks again, try and clear a parking space or two by the entrance. No point doing it yet, it would just fill in. Still, sometimes you like to play with your scoring razor, cut something obscene deep into the skin and then reseal the surface. > [[Awaken.->UHP V.1]] # Unholy Places You awaken and wait for Satan to speak to you. How quickly you have become dependent on a demon. But who else has shown the slightest consideration? You would like to be terrified, you think. Or anything. If only the visions followed some scheme, organized themselves with some purpose, you could feel at least that there was a point to all of this wandering. *Would you like a preacher?*<br/><br/> All of this sleeping and you are still tired. You do not answer. *It helps, I think, to have someone on hand to assign a clear moral to everything. To tell us what we are meant to think. I can give it a try.* To have your madness interpret itself. *Your madness? I'm quite mad enough myself, thank you very much.* > [[Continue->UHP V.2]]It is unbearable to think of the rest of your life, unspooling this way, a snail winding its way only to come out into the dark slime, the decay of the earth. *Hasn't that been the one constant in your life? A desire to get things over with. To play daughter so perfectly you are nothing but the role, to dash off to play wife.* It strikes you now that there was some method to your grandmother's madness. That it had an intensity and fixity that precluded errancy. *Let's strike a deal. There are three visions left. You can count, I'm sure. Pick one of them. Just one. Perfectly Christian, isn't it? Three-in-one.* This strikes you as a trick, somehow. Yet you have had more than enough of darkness, of perplexity. You want at last to be choosing. *There are three visions. Pick one.* > [[Option 1.->BH 1]] > [[Option 2.->MIWU 1]] > [[Option 3.->TEIN 1]] # Broken Harpoon The town is burning. The French have set fire to the town, shot half the men. You are running along the beach, take a path inland at the distant sight of a ship, come upon a fork in the road. Everything is ash and smoke, a burning in your eyes. > [[Left.->BH 2]] > [[Right.->BH 2]] # Magic I Want U After your aunt's funeral, the estate sale starts. She took all the good jewelry to the grave, but there's still a carat or two on display. You find a scuffed pendant of a silver circus elephant riding a pearl. It's ugly, but give it a clean and it'll be tacky instead. You've never wanted anything more. > [[Buy it.->MIWU 2]] > [[Don't.->MIWU 2]] # The End is Nigh You are perfect just the way you are. > [[Continue.->UHP VI.1]]An old man has hanged himself from a mangrove tree. The branch has sagged under his weight. It is noisy in its complaints. His feet almost reach the sand. Another fork. > [[Left.->BH 3]] > [[Right.->BH 3]] A hog charges into a clearing. Its intestines are three feet behind it. It is horrible in its squealing. You leave it die among the berry bushes. You leave it to die among the hibiscus, the honeysuckle. The road diverges again. > [[Left.->BH 4]] > [[Right.->BH 4]] A woman is offering herself to the air. The cloth around her hair has come undone, the fabric around the rest of her more of a vague memory of clothing. She is praying to a god she cannot even name. She wants off this planet. You know the drill, left or right? > [[Left.->BH 5]] > [[Right.->BH 5]] At the edge of the forest, a captain is wounded. He clutches desperately to an empty musket. He'll bleed out soon, whatever you do. You slit his throat. > [[Awaken->UHP VI.1]] # Unholy Spaces The laurel is silvery. You remember light exists in the world a moment before you register the beams that come down from an opening. The laurel almost embraces a ladder coming through the opening. You don't know how you got here. You climb the ladder. Its rungs are harsh, splinter into the hands. They bend more than you'd like under your weight. The opening at first is a straight wall of light. As you pass through it, the world resolves into the dark gray walls of a tower. The ladder keeps going. There is a further opening maybe twenty meters ahead. You climb slowly. As if you have forgotten every movement that is not crawling in the dark. You do not permit yourself to look back, but simply watch the wall and do not think. Easy does it. One step at a time. > [[Climb->UHP VI.2]]That is, until you see the lamp. The plastic djinni's lamp, not officially a Disney product, the light a frosted red LED on its tip, a discount Robbie Williams trapped in blue along the base. The paint has chipped along the shaft. The switch is stuck permanently on. > [[Buy it.->MIWU 3]] > [[Don't.->MIWU 3]] Hidden among the three separate knife sets: a Himalayan salt mortar and pestle. The kind of thing that gets used once (you can tell from the ugly spots of what might be garlic) and never again. Already there's a fracture in the rod. > [[Buy it.->MIWU 4]] > [[Don't.->MIWU 4]] The estate agents don't know what to do with the books. The kind of magazines that sit in waiting rooms. Three decades of self-help. Cookbooks for every variety of casserole. You would thinks our possessions would say more about our lives. > [[Buy all of them.->MIWU 5]] > [[Just the self-help books.->MIWU 5]]Two oil portraits of her basset hounds that died three decade ago. > [[Awaken->UHP VI.1]] It is a belltower. The man is there. The room smells of sawdust, of mold, of copper. Midday tugs strangely at the glassless windows. He is sitting on a tripod. Through the windows, a simple world of green and blue. The air pulls itself around every part of your body. One day, you will know how to fly. *It is good to see you again.*<br/><br/> You barely move from the opening. You have never wanted anything less than to be here now. You allow him to approach slowly. He ducks below a bell. There are three of them. They do not move. He asks what you saw. You do not say. *I would like to confess something.* > [[Listen.->UHP VI.3]] *Three years ago, I went into business with an older gentleman in Freiburg who dealt in shipments. A charming man, the business went badly, but for the sake of our friendship, I persisted in the deal. As the losses mounted, I began to search for an opportunity to abandon the partnership. The man offered his daughter's hand in marriage and, being unmarried, I agreed.*<br/><br/> *By some strange, sympathetic magic, both him and I become mortally sick, though I disguise this fact from him. In my research to restore myself to health, I discover this place. It heals me. I want to write to tell him, to let the whole world know of this miracle, but a small voice stops me: Not yet.*<br/><br/> *I suppose I hated him as well, feeling tricked. I write a letter aiming to take his daughter from him, to demand she come to me. The next day, filled with regret, I write another canceling this demand. I now know the first was delayed, the second never arrived. Filled with repentance, I return to the cathedral and discover the labyrinth.*<br/><br/> > [[*So you are the man who has caused me such grief.*->UHP VI.4]] *I believe our meeting is providential. That we were meant to find one another, not as man and wife, but as brother and sister before Christ. There is much that is goodly in this place, much to be done to restore it and bring it back into the world.*<br/><br/> *I cannot demand your assistance, but would ask that you remain here a while. To see what I have seen. To come to know this place as perhaps you have already begun to do so.* There is a holy madness to his expression. There is lilac in the air. *I have still some fortune that was not lost in foolish endeavors. By rights, half of it should belong to you. If you choose to leave, I will give you a letter. Take it to my solicitor in Vienna, and it shall be arranged.* > [[Sit and consider a while.->END]] *The Maze* is a game by Damon Stanley written for Shuffle Comp 2024. Inspired by the following songs. 1. [Broken Harpoon - The Jayhawks.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN4-Fd3x8aY) 2. [Kentucky Avenue - Tom Waits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeZ1lrywI9I) 3. [The End is Nigh - Ridiculon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-VFHO2PxA) 4. [As We Go Up, We Go Down - Guided By Voices](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnbneKvdBCM) 5. [Unholy Places - Carboluka](https://on.soundcloud.com/eg9w7) 6. [Magic I Want U - Jane Remover](https://youtu.be/Ew3WUpPw2nA?si=7q0x5hyN9XfK0gKy) 7. [Surf's Up - The Beach Boys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyOYQ8qfFng) 8. [Only Happy When It Rains - Garbage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpBFOJ3R0M4) Thanks for playing.