The Shaper
by Rick Shelley
Illustration by Janet Aulisio
The world had ceased to exist for James Kaiser Lohman. Deeply morose, his thoughts would not extend beyond the most narrow dimensions of self. He was hardly aware of the city around him. For an hour or more he had been wandering the streets, paying no attention to where he was going, scarcely paying attention to traffic when he crossed a street. Twice he had nearly been hit by cars. Even the swearing of those drivers had not penetrated his awareness.
Being hit by a car would have come almost as deliverance to Jimmy. “I’m dead already,” he had told himself the second time. “Might as well get it over with fast.” That had led to protracted thoughts of suicide… and a sense of relief, a feeling that—just maybe—he still had a little control over his life. Or whatever was left of it.
A car sped past him, the driver holding his horn down for more than a block, a Doppler scream that finally dragged Jimmy’s mind out of his somnambulistic trance. He blinked several times. The honking car was already out of sight. Jimmy thought that it must have been traveling at least sixty miles per hour.
In the middle of the city? Jimmy looked around. Remarkably, there wasn’t another moving vehicle in sight, in either direction. Nor were there any pedestrians visible, as far as he could see. In the middle of a weekday afternoon, the absence of both sorts of traffic was incredible. And the lack of parked cars along the street went beyond incredible. It was impossible, almost a violation of natural law.
“Where am I?” Jimmy asked himself softly. He couldn’t place the anonymous apartment buildings across the street. He turned. On his side of the thoroughfare there appeared to be some sort of park. A twelve-foot high hedge, dense but carefully pruned, bordered the sidewalk.
“I don’t remember ever seeing that,” Jimmy said.
The novelty held his attention. He stared. Then he started walking again, following the hedge, trying to see through it. But there were no gaps. Nothing was visible through the thick tangle of branches and small, shiny leaves. Near the next comer, though, there was an opening in the hedge. A wrought-iron gateway framed the beginning of a gravel path.
Jimmy took his hands out of his pockets for the first time in an hour and turned to the right, through the opening, and kept walking. There was high greenery on both sides of the path, equally tall and impenetrable. It’s a maze, a real honest-to-God maze, Jimmy realized after several minutes. From some chance memory, he decided that the shrubbery had to be yew. He recalled seeing a high yew maze in some old black-and-white movie, though he couldn’t put a name to the film, or associate specific actors with it.
After making several turns—and once retracing his steps after turning down a dead end in the maze—Jimmy stopped walking for a moment and simply looked around at the hedge on either side of him.
“How could I possibly have missed this for years?” he said, not the least abashed to be talking aloud to himself. There was certainly no one around to catch him at it. “I thought I knew all of the parks in town and I never even beard of this one.”
Jimmy inhaled deeply, held the breath for a long moment, then exhaled slowly, savoring the smell of the dense greenery. The scent was of nature, without the normal gagging blanket of urban pollution. There was no diesel smell of buses and trucks, no stench of garbage rotting in the open. Nor were there any of the cloying antiseptic scents of hospital and doctor’s office. Wherever the distraction had come from, it was precisely what Jimmy needed. He shook his head several times in wonder, then resumed his walk.
The lanes between the hedges were so narrow that he lost any awareness of which direction he was heading. He couldn’t make out anything of the sky but a narrow band right overhead, and the day was overcast, just enough that he couldn’t gauge direction by the Sun. Occasionally, even that narrow band of gray light disappeared. At intervals, tall, stately trees rose out of the hedge, their crowns totally blanking out the sky. Jimmy wasn’t certain what the trees were, perhaps oak. But on either side of each tree trunk, the bushes pressed close. He couldn’t see through to the next lane no matter how hard he tried. The hedge was too thick, the branches too stiff, the leaves too dense.
There were frequent turns in the maze. Twice more he had to backtrack after going down blind alleys. After twenty minutes, Jimmy started to marvel at the size of the park. In all of that time he hadn’t come to another exit. He also had not heard a single sound of traffic. For all practical purposes, the city around him might have ceased to exist.
After thirty minutes, Jimmy’s heart was beating more than a little faster than normal. His mind started to conjure atavistic fears from long-sup-pressed memories of childhood fantasies—dragons and ogres and witches, monsters under the bed and behind the closet door, creaking doors and things that went bump in the night. It was difficult enough for him to accept that he had somehow missed the existence of any park with a maze like this in a lifetime spent in the city. It was totally inconceivable that he could have missed a park as large as this one now appeared to be. There was only one park inside the city so large, and it was miles away—and it had never had a large, formal maze anywhere in its limits. The park commissioners and police would never have countenanced such a hazard to public safety.
Jimmy was breathing hard. He was tired—bone tired. That was one of the symptoms that had taken him to the doctor and, after days of examinations and tests, to the deadly diagnosis.
He stood motionless for several minutes, waiting for the return of some energy. He was almost ready to sink to the pea gravel and sit right where he was, maybe even lie down. But he reasoned, “This is a park so there must be benches around here somewhere.”
While he waited for some resurgence of vigor, Jimmy considered giving up and retracing his steps. There was certainly one way out of the hedge, the gap that he had entered through. But that exit was just as certainly a half hour’s walk from where he was, even if he could find his way back without taking too many wrong turns. There had to be another way out closer than that. Maybe as near as the next turn or branching. Finally, he took a deep breath and started walking again, more slowly now.
Ten minutes later the maze finally disgorged Jimmy into a clearing that was a half block in diameter. There were a few small pine trees in the clearing, but the primary feature of the open space was a small cottage that appeared to belong in some Elizabethan village, from its whitewash and exposed beam siding right up to the thickly thatched roof.
Jimmy stopped walking and stared.
“I know this is impossible,” he muttered, shaking his head.
A tiny curl of smoke rose from a wooden chimney at one end of the house. At first, Jimmy didn’t notice the old man sitting on a bench next to the cottage’s only visible door. The man stopped what he had been doing—whittling at a chunk of wood—and lifted his head.
“Hello, young man,” he said, his voice soft but carrying easily. “Come over and have a sit-down. You look exhausted.”
“I am exhausted,” Jimmy said without thinking. He started walking toward the bench but after just three steps he stopped as abruptly as if he had walked into a wall. The old man hadn’t opened his eyes when he “looked” at him, when he spoke.
“Is something wrong?” the old man asked mildly. His eyes still did not open.
“Everything’s wrong.” Jimmy took another cautious step. He paused again, took in a deep breath and let it out, and continued toward the bench. What difference can it make? he asked himself.