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granted.
We realized that we were sinking into a kind of comfortable madness, a
bearable madness, that, like animals in a cage, we were consciously being
trapped by it.
There is no world but the Garden, whose boundaries are the Wall. There is no
other world, no other reality. There is only Her and Me. I found myself
repeating that every time I thought of something beyond the here and now, and
I
really didn't want to stop it, not consciously. I we both of us had
consciously surrendered. Only the dreams remained.
He was there at the stream, and at the trees, and along the pathways, always
there in my dreams, with trenchcoat, slouch fedora, and dangling cigarette.
"Listen, sweetheart, you can't give in to this thing or they win, see? You're
a man, a private dick, not no jungle savage. You can't sit around doin'
nothin' or you may as well be dead."
"Listen, Spade, don't you lecture me!"
"Hey! I made all the mistakes, didn't I? Even fell in love with the dame that
iced my partner, and that's worse than anything you got to show. Now, your old
lady, she loves ya and depends on ya. You gonna let her go down like this? She
saved your neck a couple times, and she still feels all this guilt stuff about
all this bein' her fault. It's your turn now, hot shot."
I turned to get away from him, but other figures stepped out of the woods and
stared me down. I knew them all. Marlowe, Archer, the Continental Op, Nick
Charles. .. . Everywhere I turned there was another, and they were all saying,
"Your turn now, hot shot. You're the big brain, Sam, you're the top gun, Sam,
you figure it out."
"What the hell can I do? I don't even know where I am or who sent me here or
how! You didn't break out of jail, any of you, you were all bailed out!"
"There's always something, Sam, if you look hard enough," Spade responded.
"You keep 'it up and something always turns up."
"Sam? Sam!"
"Uh, wha ? Leave me atone, all of you!"
"Sam wake up!"
I opened my eyes groggily. It was still pitch-dark. "Huh?"
"Listen! Wake up and listen!"
I tried to clear out the cobwebs and listen as she Said, and I heard
something, something odd, off in the distance. A sound, like a cross between a
hum and a crackling noise. I was suddenly awake. "The meadow! It's coming from
the meadow!" I was on my feet in a moment and she followed. I looked around,
unable to see a thing. "We ought to get over there if we can find it in this
darkness."
"I can," she responded, and took my hand.
It was about half a mile through the woods, but she led me like she had the
eyes of a cat. It was no big deal in the daytime to follow a trail that was
worn and blazed by you in the first place, but I hadn't realized how little
she'd been depending on her eyes and how much on other things. She felt that
path, and she was unerring and confident.
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We reached the edge of the trees and I stopped her, and we both crouched down.
There, up on the rise, was a pattern I had seen only once before and never
expected to see again, outlined clearly against the darkness. Rotating,
folding, revolving panels of blue light surrounding a mirrored darkness,
moving around and around, folding this way and that.
"Think somebody's coming for us, after all this time?" she asked me.
"I don't know, but maybe we shouldn't wait to find out."
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"Huh? What do you mean?"
"If they can come out of that thing, we can go in it."
"Yeah but we don't know where we'd come out."
"Yes we do. Someplace other than here. Come on!"
We ran for it, not caring about the exposure or thinking about anything else.
Someone had opened the cage door, and might discover that and close it at any
moment. It didn't occur to me to wait to see who might emerge; the fact was,
there was no certainty that anybody would emerge. It might be intended for us
to enter, if we had the nerve, or it might even be that somebody else had to
use this siding to get someplace else entirely and it might vanish for an
eternity at any minute. I had to use their tracks, but by damn it was my
train!
"Which way do we go once we're in?" Brandy called as I pulled her along.
"We went left to get here, so we'll go right," I told her. "Just hold tight.
The odds are we're gonna get sidetracked again, but maybe this time somebody
will remember us!"
Okay, Spade, you just keep that sucker there another twenty seconds and I'll
take the leap!
We reached the edge, and it was still folding and unfolding into those
impossible patterns with increasing speed. There was no hesitation; I went
right in and grabbed Brandy's hand, tight.
We were once again standing in something that seemed to be a revolving door;
but this time I wasn't scared and confused, I was desperate. Once again,
scenes of landscapes seemed to flash by as various panels approached, but if
you kept moving, kept walking through them, you didn't exit but continued on
through that maze. All of the scenes seemed to be totally different than any I
remembered, but it had been so long ago and a life away and I neither could be
sure nor cared.
We were suddenly not alone in the maze of panels. She was tall, real
tall seven feet, maybe and incredibly thin, and her face was white, not like
I was white but like those Japanese dancers only this looked like her natural
color. Her lips, nostrils, and eyes were all jet black, and she was wearing
some kind of long satin dress down to the ground, all a brilliant purple. She
spotted us and started for a moment, then just nodded and went on past into
the direction from which we'd just come. There was nothing else to do but nod
back and give a casual wave with my free hand.
Rather than upset or unnerve me, our encounter with the strange-looking woman
reinforced my feeling that this thing wasn't operating for us. I didn't know
much about her, and wasn't sure I wanted to, but we owed that tall woman for
this chance.
Suddenly we spotted another woman behind a panel, but this one was different.
She was small, slight, wearing a uniform that looked like a cross between Star
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