“What’s a shop yard?” I asked.
Belinda looked up just long enough to give me a smile. “It’s the county’s equipment maintenance shop and storage yard,” she explained before she returned her gaze to her map in progress. “After the yard, you cross the railroad tracks and then take the first left—that’ll be the cemetery road. It’s not much of a road and it’s not marked too well, but you’ll see the sign for the graveyard. Stay to the left, ’cause the orchard there is private property. Pass the graveyard and stay on the orchard road along the railroad tracks until you get past the end of the orchard boundary. There’s a real small road there on the right—it’s hard to see but look for a pair of lightning-burned trees standing side by side. That’ll be the road. Go up that and follow it around the hook to the old orchard. You’ll have to walk up from the edge of the property. You’ll know you’re there ’cause there’ll be an alley of pear trees and then a lot of old stone lying around. That used to be the house foundation. And then the trees start up all around, like a big circle with a slice out of it, and you’re there.”
Belinda looked up and handed me the map. “Why do you want to go out there, anyway?”
“Uh, ghost hunting.”
She paled. “Ugh. Well, better you than me. Be careful out there. There’s still bits of that maze out there and you can fall into it if you’re not keeping a sharp eye out.”
That was an interesting caution—how could one fall into a maze? We thanked Belinda and Janice for their help and set out to find Rosaceae.
I drove this time, holding the noisy grid voices at bay a little more easily now that I was doing what they wanted.
Quinton was frowning and about the time I turned onto Chumstick Highway I asked him why.
“It’s bugging me: What did Belinda mean about a circle of trees?”
“The other one—Janice—was telling me the orchard around the house is planted in a circle or circular area with the trees arranged in irregular radii, not in regular rows. Apparently, it was hard to harvest unless you worked in a spiral.”
“Ahhh . . . that’s what I was wondering. I’ll bet the center of the spiral coincides with the center of the labyrinth.”
“Why?”
Quinton paused, ordering his thoughts. “This mystery turns on keys, puzzles, and a labyrinth. But really, it’s just the keys and the puzzles because a classical labyrinth is the visual expression of a key as a circle.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“OK, look—turn right.”
“What?”
“This is North Road. Turn right.”
I did and the road began to climb quite steeply. I had to concentrate on the grade. Even as we crossed the railroad tracks, the angle barely eased and the road curved sharply to the right. I made the curve and almost missed the road to the cemetery. The sign marking it was faded and small, but I saw it in time and made a hard left onto the steep path, not much wider than the Rover itself. The truck’s tires were so close to the edge that they pulled on the ruts rather than falling into them, making the ride a thumping, twitching misery until we passed the neat rows of fruit trees on the right and found a grove of old oaks shading a small slope dotted with crumbling headstones and strange monuments enclosed in rusted iron fences.
Although it was quaint from most vantage points, I found the cemetery unsettling and odd. Most of the graves were old enough to lie quiet, but a few were literally giving up the ghost in spires of colored mist and restless shapes. A disproportionate number of the restless forms were tiny: evidence of high infant mortality. There was a strange cluster of shady forms around the trees at the north end of the small graveyard. The voice of the grid urged me to ignore them and I agreed. I kept my eyes to the right where the last row of graves on the orchard side petered out as the road took a sudden dip down. The Rover lurched a bit at the change of grade but had no problem keeping to the hard-packed dirt surface.
I tried to put the conversation back on track so it would be easier to ignore the curious stares the ghosts turned on us as we passed. “So . . . how is a key a labyrinth?”
“Not just any key: a Greek key—a meander.”
Yet another chill of recognition rolled over me. “Maiandros” was also one of the words the Grey chorus had spoken into my dreaming ears. “Wait—what? A meander is a key? I thought it was piece of a river.”
“It is, but it’s also the Greek word for an ancient, endless shape—the Greek key or fret. Mathematically it’s a relatively simple structure of two connecting, single-turn spirals, one coming into the center and the other going back out, kind of like an outline of an ocean wave. But it’s usually shown squared off instead of rounded, so it looks a bit like the wards on an old-fashioned key. You see it all the time on Greek and Aztec art; I think the Hopi and Anasazi used it, too, but that’s off the point. You know the shape I’m talking about, right?”
I could see it in my mind, running down the hems of ancient clothing and along the edges of dishes at the Greek diner in Fremont, bordered in lines so the squared-off wave shape was contained. “Yes, I can see it.”
“All right. If you think of the outer lines of the shape as solid bars and the inner ones as elastic, then you can grab one of the bars and swing it around over the top of the other so the two bars are now resting back to back. The lines of the spiral elastics will describe the path and shape of a classical, round labyrinth with a circular center, just like the famous labyrinth at Knossos where the minotaur lived. So a key and a labyrinth are reflections of each other.”
A sudden flash of vision or memory made me step on the brake and bring the truck to a halt in a small flurry of dust. In front of me, formed in silver mist, I saw an image of my father’s strange key flexing and twisting in and out of the shape of a classical labyrinth. Then it flew apart into glittering shards that re-formed as a smaller version of the puzzle balls that shifted and rolled across an invisible surface, leaving strange trails of color on the mist of the Grey. “That’s a little freaky.”
Quinton couldn’t see it, so he continued on his own conversational course. “Not so much. It’s just math. But here’s an interesting detail most people leave out of the whole labyrinth myth: A Lady presided over the labyrinth at Knossos and she was viewed with such awe that she received the same tribute each year as all the other gods combined. She must have been a pretty powerful woman to be treated that way.”
I shook away the Grey’s persistent show. “Please don’t suggest that Dru Cristoffer might be an ancient goddess. . . .”
“I’m not thinking so, but . . . it’s an interesting idea and maybe that’s part of the reason for this crazy system of puzzles and keys. Maybe she used that model, scaled down.”
“So that makes my dad the minotaur?”
“That makes him the prisoner. The Labyrinth of Knossos was a prison for the Minotaur of Crete.”
“If I remember correctly,” I added, “Theseus slew the minotaur. . . .” Quinton gave me a long, sober look. “You didn’t think everyone was going to get out of this alive, did you?”
I snapped at him, feeling grief-stricken and unreasonably enraged at the thought, “Don’t say that!”
He sighed, closing his eyes a moment before he said anything more. “He’s already dead, and you can’t bring your dad back. He’s a ghost. Do you think he wants to stay? Given what you’ve told me, do you think that’s a good idea? The best thing you can do is let him—and that poor bastard you’ve got tucked into your pocket—go. Maybe that’s all it’ll take, though I doubt it. Between Cristoffer and the vampires, blood’s going to spill. If it comes down to saving a dead man or a live one, pick the one who’s breathing.”