The Last Labyrinth

Alissa was forty-two years old and she had never once gotten lost in her own marriage until they moved to the village. That sounded dramatic, she knew, but there it was. Back when they lived in Nantes, she and Jacques had a whole other life after dark, a life with leather belts and blindfolds and rules whispered over dinner. Then the ferry mechanic job moved her to a village so small the baker knew her schedule, and somewhere between the paperwork and the rain, the belts went into a box under the bed.

She thought about that box a lot lately.

"You're staring at that map again," she said, leaning over the back of the couch. "Third night in a row."

Jacques was forty-four, built like someone who walked corn fields for a living, and he did not even flinch. "I'm studying it, chérie. There's a difference."

"Studying. Right." She peered over his shoulder. The map of the Saint-Julien harvest maze was spread across his knees, all those dead ends and loops traced in a farmer's careful ink. "It's a corn maze, love. You walk in, you get lost, you buy cider at the exit. I've done it four times."

"Have you ever found the center?"

She laughed. "Has anyone?"

He tapped one spot in the middle of the map with his finger and said nothing, and that silence had a weight to it she hadn't felt in years. She stood there a moment longer, feeling something old and warm stir in her stomach, and then went to chop onions as a sensible woman would.

The festival came on Saturday, the way festivals do, all at once and too loud. The maze parking field was a sea of hatchbacks and tractors, and the damp earth smelled like rain and crushed corn stalks. String lights ran along the rows, leading people in like reluctant fireflies. And in the first clearing, according to every sign and every laughing adult with a cider cup, there was going to be a lost-and-found auction.

"A lost-and-found auction," Alissa said as they wound into the stalks. "In a cornfield. Who thinks of these things?"

"Farmers with too much time in winter, apparently." Jacques held the map, though she noticed he barely glanced at it. "Found property sits in a barn for a year, nobody claims it, they sell it off for the church roof."

"Romantic."

"Very French, anyway."

The auction clearing, when they finally broke into it, was a cleared circle under the string lights, with folding tables and a woman with a clipboard and a crowd of maybe sixty people. Alissa spotted a child's bicycle with one pedal, three umbrellas, a suitcase nobody wanted, a taxidermied pheasant with an alarming expression, and one box of small oddments that the auctioneer kept waving at without much hope.

"Lot forty-one!" the auctioneer called. "One vintage pager, gentlemen, from the good old days! Property of the maze's own owner, Monsieur Bertrand, may he rest in... no wait, he's not dead, he's just difficult! Never mind."

That got a laugh. Alissa looked at the little black box on the felt cloth, rusted at the corners, its clip half broken, and felt a ridiculous pull toward it. She did not say so.

Jacques raised two fingers. Someone else raised three. Jacques raised four, calm as a lake, and the other man folded like laundry. Sold, for the price of a nice dinner, to her husband, who pocketed the thing with a small private smile.

"What," she said, "are you going to do with a pager?"

"Wait and see."

"You're being weird."

"I'm being me. There's a difference."

That night, back at the house, Jacques cleaned the rust off the pager with oil and a toothbrush, the way he cleaned his surveying instruments, patient and thorough. The little screen was cracked but alive. There was one stored message in it, from a number that resolved to nothing.

ENTER THE CENTER.

Alissa read it three times. "That's all it says?"

"That's all it says."

"ENTER THE CENTER. Like a cryptic corn god."

"Or," Jacques said, setting the toothbrush down with the care of a surgeon, "like an invitation. Think about it. Bertrand built this maze, bought this pager, kept it in the found pile on purpose. An old man who built a labyrinth and left a message at its heart? That's a game, chérie. A game for whoever bothers to find it."

"A game for tourists with a pager."

"A game for two people," he said, and looked at her.

The look went through her like warm water. It had been years since he looked at her like that. Since Nantes, since the box under the bed, since the last time he told her what to do and she had loved doing it. Alissa put her wine glass down before her hand could betray her.

"Say what you're thinking," she said.

"I'm thinking we play." He turned his chair to face her. "Tomorrow night, after the festival crowd clears. You go into the maze blindfolded. I lead you. My voice is your only map. If you can find the center, you find the message, and we see what Monsieur Bertrand left behind."

"And if I get lost among the corn?"

"I won't let you get lost. I've walked that map until I could draw it drunk and upside down. You'd be safe before you'd be lost."

She studied his face. Eleven years of that face and it could still make her pulse do embarrassing things. "And what do you get out of it, hmm? What's in it for the man holding the map?"

"Everything," he said simply. "I get you back."

Oh. Well. That landed somewhere soft and old in her chest, and she had to look at her wine for a second.

"Okay," she said, quieter than she meant to. "Okay. I'm in."

* * *

Sunday came with a low grey sky and the smell of wet stalks. Jacques spent the afternoon doing things without explaining them, which used to be their whole language and which she had almost forgotten she loved. He laid a leather belt across the kitchen table at one point, coiled neat as a snake, and Alissa looked at it and felt her mouth go dry in the best way.

"For your wrists," he said, watching her look. "Not tight. Just enough that your hands belong to me. You say the word yellow and I stop everything. You say red and the whole game ends on the spot, no questions."

"Yellow, slow down. Red, stop." The words came back like a dance step. "I remember."

"Do you? Let me hear the rest."

"My safe word is red, and everything else is negotiation." She grinned at him. "I also remember you used to make me say thank you."

"Only when you meant it."

The sky darkened. The festival emptied out in dribs and drabs, car doors thudding in the distance, the string lights along the maze paths left burning, which Jacques confirmed twice with the woman at the ticket barn, who found the whole thing charming and asked no questions that mattered. He packed a small bag: the blindfold, the belt, a lantern, water, a blanket. He did not explain the blanket. Alissa decided not to ask.

At the maze entrance he stopped, took her face in both hands, and kissed her forehead. "Last chance to be a sensible woman."

"Sensible women don't get the good years," she said. "Blindfold me."

He did it standing behind her, silk over her eyes, the world going soft black, and the sudden loudness of her other senses was almost funny. Corn rustling everywhere. Wet earth under her boots. His hand warm at her elbow.

"Wrists," he said, and she held them out behind her back without being told, and heard the belt slide through its loops, cinch once, twice, loose enough to breathe, snug enough to feel everywhere. Her breath came out shaky and pleased.

"There," Jacques murmured close to her ear. "Walk when I say walk. Stop when I say stop. Left, right, and never, ever guess. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Yes, what?"

Oh, it was shameful how fast that came back too. "Yes, sir."

She heard him smile. She was sure of it, blindfolded, forty meters of corn in every direction, and she was sure of it.

"Walk," he said, and she did.

The first stretch was easy, wide paths, his hand steady on her elbow, the crowd noise dying behind them until there was only corn and wind and the small sounds Jacques made when he was pleased with himself. Then the path changed. She felt it before he said anything, the walls of stalks leaning closer, the air going still and damp.

"Stop," he said. She stopped.

He turned her slowly, a full circle, like a compass needle being set. "Do you know where we are?"

"Absolutely not. And I walked this maze four times, so that's embarrassing."

"You walked it with your eyes. Tonight you walk it with your ears and my voice." His hand cupped the back of her neck, and just that, and her knees nearly went. "There's a fork ahead. Two paths. One leads deeper in. One leads to a dead end where you'd stand in the dark listening to corn for an hour."

"And which one is which?"

"Ah. That would be telling." He guided her three steps, four, and stopped her again. "Kneel."

Her breath caught. Eleven years, and one word, and there she was, forty-two years old, kneeling in wet earth in a corn maze in her good coat, and it felt like coming home to a house she'd forgotten she owned. She went down carefully with her hands still bound, and he steadied her shoulder until her balance settled.

"Good," he said, and she glowed like a lamp. "Now. Before we go further, we add one word. Tonight only. Cormoran."

"The crow? The one that sits on the barn roof and judges everyone?"

"The same. If you say Cormoran, I stop, check you over, and we talk like two reasonable married people before anything else happens. It's for the things red is too big for. Do you have it?"

"I have it. Cormoran. The judging crow."

"He judges me more than you, believe me." She heard cloth move, and then something dry whispering against itself. "And I cut this evening. A switch. Fresh stalk, about so long, peeled of its leaves."