Chapter 27: The Luckiest Wall

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which a plan is made calmly, in a quiet room, by competent people, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry down the corridor. What is the one thing six people can carry that none of them could lift alone? The answer is not heavy, and it is not light. It is, however, very easy to drop.

The sound came closer.

It was not a roar. A roar would have been easier. It was the sound of a man in good shoes walking at an even pace through a house he owned, tearing out each room as he passed it and folding the pieces under his arm. A wall cracked. Another fell, softly, like a book closing. Somewhere behind them, a torch went out, and then the next, and then the next, in a line that was getting longer.

"That’s him," said Hadjer.

"That’s him," said Arthur.

Then the voice came down the corridor with the dust, and it was no longer pleasant.

"Olly olly oxen free!"

Nobody moved. It was the call you make at the end of a game of hide-and-seek, to let everyone know they can come out, and it was being sung by a man who clearly did not mean it.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are! I said READY OR NOT!"

A wall behind them, thirty feet away, turned from stone to brick. Painted on the brick, in fading white, was a hopscotch grid.

"He’s pulling his Happy Place in," said Jaquan, faintly. "Oh, that’s very bad. That’s the worst version of that."

"How long?" said Arthur.

Bliss was already on her feet. She had her eyes shut and one hand pressed flat against the wall, and her face had gone white and focused, the way a surgeon’s does.

"I’ll explain," she said, "but we have to move while I do it. It’s how it works. Everybody up."

They ran.

"Rule one," said Bliss, as they ran, a little out of breath. "The rooms move. Every one of them. Walls, floors, corridors. They don’t stay where you left them. Rule two: every move you make triggers it. Every step. Don’t think of it as a maze, it’s a machine, and you’re the button."

The left wall slid sideways as she said it, and a corridor that had been there a second ago folded itself shut like an eyelid.

"Rule three. There’s only one door out. One. It’s always on the outer wall, the edge of the Labyrinth, never in the middle. And it moves too."

"Can you see it?" said Carter, behind her.

"I always know where it is. That’s my passive. I know where north is, and where I started, and exactly where the door is, even when it’s moving." She swallowed. "That’s never been the problem. The problem is that by the time I’ve run to where it was, the Labyrinth has shifted it somewhere else."

"So you chase it," said Jaquan.

"I chase it. For nine hundred attempts. Even when I get close, and I have, I’ve been ten steps away, close enough to see it, there’s always a small chance the door itself slips away from me. A tiny one. Just enough." Her voice shrank. "It’s not a puzzle. It’s a game that’s decided not to let you win. I tried to tell you it was hopeless."

The floor lurched. A section of tile dropped away to their left, and Matt, who had been running with his arms out for balance, shrieked and stepped over it as if the gap had been a puddle.

"That," said Jaquan, running, "is the worst sales pitch I have ever heard for a Happy Place."

"I said it was stupid."

"Quiet," said Arthur.

He had stopped.

Nobody wanted to stop. The floor under them was already rearranging, tile by tile, and somewhere close behind, a wall had given up with a slow, deep groan. But Arthur had stopped, with one hand on the stone, and was listening, with his head slightly on one side and a wrinkle of thought between his eyes. He paid the sound of doom coming after them about the same attention a man pays to the weather in a different city.

"Okay," he said. "I’ve got a plan."

"We’re about to be demolished," said Carter.

"I know. Hear me out." He turned to Bliss. "The door is always on the outer wall. Always on the edge. You said so."

"Yes."

"Then we don’t chase it. We go to the closest limit of the Labyrinth. The nearest edge. You can find that without a problem, can’t you? It’s a straight line."

"Yes," said Bliss, slowly. "I can find the edge. I always know where it is."

"Then take us there. Right to the wall."

"And then what?" said Hadjer.

She had been silent for most of the run, with her gray hands tucked into her sleeves and her shadow, at last, a small, black, ordinary shadow under the torches, stretched ahead of her like a dog. She looked at Arthur, and then at the thick gray stone that rose into the dark above her head.

"We break through?" she said. "That looks thick. And we’re not him."

"Her point stands," said Jaquan. "He’s built like a refrigerator. We’re built like children."

"We’re not breaking anything," said Arthur.

He started to laugh. It was a short, quiet, dangerous laugh, the kind a person gives when he has found a better idea at the bottom of a very bad day. He looked across the corridor and past Jaquan and Carter, to the tall boy in the expensive shoes who was crouched against the wall with his hands over his head.

"We just need to get there," he said, "and leave the rest to luck."

Matt looked up.

He looked left. He looked right. He looked at the empty corridor behind himself, in case somebody else had been the subject of the sentence.

"What?" he said. "Me?"

"You," said Arthur.

"Me?"

"Every move triggers a shift," said Arthur, patiently, "and every shift is a roll of the dice. We don’t need the door to stay where it is. We need the dice to land once. Just once, on the right side of the right wall." He smiled. "And I’ve got a boy who doesn’t lose."

There was a very long pause.

"That is actually a good idea," said Bliss.

"Thank you."

"Worst case," she said, "he hits the wall, and it’s hilarious."

"Worst case?" said Matt.

"I’d pay to see it," said Jaquan.

"I would not," said Hadjer, and then, rather less certainly, "...I might."

Matt stared at them all. Then something crossed his face that was very like the old smirk, only warmer, and a great deal more frightened. He straightened to his full height, shook out the cuffs of a shirt that was no longer clean, and lifted his chin.

"I don’t hit walls," he said. "I am me."

"That’s the spirit," said Arthur.

"We got this," said Bing, all hyped up as well.

"Yes, I got this," said Matt, letting everyone know he was the star of this moment, like all the moments he was part of.

The corridor behind them exploded.

What came out of the dust was not a monster.

It was a man in a gray jacket, with a cap on his head, a smile that had stopped pretending to be a smile, and a hummingbird camera at his shoulder that had been told to keep recording. Behind him the Labyrinth was being eaten from the far end, wall by wall, in a long yellowing line. Where the wall had been stone, it was brick now. Where the floor had been tile, it was asphalt, with hopscotch squares painted across it in faded white. A chain-link fence grew out of a corner and began, politely, to take root.

"Found you," said the collector.

He said it almost gently. He had lost the schedule, and the camera, and the patience, and he was now running on something very much older.

"I will be quite honest with you," he said. "I was prepared for a good many things today. I was prepared for cheating. I was prepared for clever. I was not prepared to have the Stage stolen out of my own yard by a child’s Happy Place I didn’t know existed." He took one step forward. The floor turned to asphalt under his shoe. "I want you to know I don’t take it personally. I take it professionally. Come out, come out."

"Run," said Arthur.

They ran.

Every footstep did something. That was the horror of it. The floor rolled under Carter’s feet like a conveyor, and he threw himself sideways and caught a corner with both hands. A wall came down in front of Jaquan with the speed of a guillotine, and he stopped so abruptly that his scarf kept going. Bliss shouted, "Left! Left! No, right!" and the three of them turned right, and the left side of the corridor slid across the gap where they had been standing, with a dry, enormous, stony sound.

"Do you see what I mean?" she cried. "It listens!"

"Everything listens!" said Jaquan.

Behind them, a section of the Labyrinth went out like a light. The sound of the collector’s shoes came on, steady, clean, unhurried.

"Three," he sang. "Two. One. Who’s gonna run? Who’s gonna hide?"

Hadjer was falling behind.

It was nothing dramatic. She was fast enough, and she had never fallen behind in her life, but the tiles around her had gone sallow and soft where her feet touched them, and they were giving way a half-second too early, as though the Labyrinth had begun to dislike her a little. She stumbled. A wall came across the corridor ahead of her, right where she was going to be.

She looked down. At last, there was a shadow under her, cast by a torch that burned without smoke, sharp and black as ink on the stone.

Shadow Step.

She stepped, and the wall was behind her. She had gone the length of three tiles in less than a breath, and she turned, panting, to find Arthur’s hand already out for her.

"Take it," he said.

"The floor..."

"I’ll take the floor. Take the hand."

She took it. Her grass-gray fingers closed on a hand that did not flinch, and, for the length of three strides, nothing under her seemed to die.

Ahead of them, Carter had set his shoulder against a descending slab and was holding it, for a second, with every bone in his back. "Go!" he said, through his teeth. "Go!" And they went under it, one by one, Jaquan first, then Bliss, then Arthur dragging Hadjer, and then Matt last, with his eyes shut, because he had decided that if he was going to be lucky, he did not want to see how.

The slab came down behind them like a verdict.

"Carter!" said Bliss.

"Here," said Carter, coughing. He had rolled out from under it with a hair’s breadth to spare, and was on one knee, dusty and furious and alive. "I’m here. Keep going."

A team is not a thing that begins at the finish line;

it is the thing that happens in the hallway, in the middle of the grind.

"There," said Bliss.

She had stopped, and so, one by one, had all of them.

The corridor ended. It did not end in a door, or a turning, or a trick. It ended in a wall: tall, smooth, thick as a cathedral’s, the color of a very old bone, with a line of cold torches burning along its foot. There was nothing special about it, and nothing marked it out as different from the other eight million stones. But Bliss had her hand against it and her eyes shut, and her face was perfectly still.

"This is the edge," she said. "This is as far as it goes. The door’s on the other side of this. Or it will be, if it..." She stopped. "If anything."

Behind them, the sound had changed. It was no longer steady footsteps. It was a run.

"Okay," said Arthur. He took a breath. "Everybody line up behind Matt."

They lined up. It was almost comic, how quickly they did it: Carter, bruised and furious, on Matt’s left; Jaquan, scarf crooked, on his right; Bliss at the back, with her palm on the stone; Hadjer, gray to the wrists, at the edge. Arthur took the last place, and the snake coiled tight around his wrist and put its small head above his sleeve to see.

"Okay," said Matt. His voice had gone very small. "So I just..."

"You just run," said Arthur.

"At the wall."

"At the wall."

"With my face."

"With everything," said Jaquan. "Think of it as a team-building exercise."

"I hate all of you," said Matt, and it was the sincerest, warmest thing he had said all day.

The corridor behind them shook. A voice, thin and high and almost cheerful, rolled down the dust: "Olly olly..."

"Go, Matt!" said Bliss.

"You can do it!" said Carter.

"I believe in you," said Jaquan, with only the slightest, most loyal trace of irony.

"Don’t miss," said Hadjer.

"Don’t die," said Arthur.

Matt Oscatt looked at the wall. He took off his jacket, folded it neatly, and handed it to Bliss. He rolled his shoulders. He looked down once at his expensive shoes, and then, in one swift and decisive motion, he kicked them off.

And he ran.

He ran with everything he had, which was a good deal more than any of them had expected. He ran with his head down and his arms pumping and a roar rising out of his chest that did not sound like him at all. He ran for every bench he had slept on, and every game he had never lost, and every person who had only ever wanted him for a name. Behind him, five friends and a snake screamed his name at the top of their lungs. The floor flickered under his bare feet and decided, for once in its life, to hold. The torches along the wall began, one by one, to lean away in alarm.

He did not close his eyes.

The wall came up to meet him, vast and gray and absolutely solid.

"MATT!" they shouted.

TO BE CONTINUED...