Gordon Knot hadn’t set foot in his home for quite some time. Instead, he had taken root inside the stark embrace of a closed, recursive loop.
For ten years, he had been the architect and the prisoner of a geography made entirely of his own refusal. The walls were high, constructed of paper but painted to look like iron. The floor was cold stone, slick with the humidity of his own doubt. Above him, a sachrine sky made of matte blue latex. Light that couldn’t possibly have come from a star, moon, or cloud stared down, all the same, with the unflinching intimacy of an interrogation lamp.
Gordon was a busy man. He had pockets full of heavy things he collected along the way. Things he refused to part with because he kept telling himself they were there to keep him from floating away into that terrible, synthetic sky.
“There must be some kind of logic to this,” the mouth inside of his head insisted, its words like a pistol, cocked and ready to fire. In spite of this: it somehow felt swollen and heavy in his skull, like a swallowed tongue during a violent seizure.
No matter his condition, he never relented. He walked the perimeter. He counted the corners. He gripped firmly to the red string, clung to it like it was his only lifeline, or perhaps his destiny. The thread had wound itself through the labyrinth just as effectively as Gordon had. He tugged at it, hoping it led to an exit, but it only tightened.
The air grew thick with static. And string.
It started out looking identical to your average, garden-variety fog. Then, it shifted into what could only be descibed as a rendering error in his carefully constructed (and re-constructed) reality. The edges of the paper walls were blurry and trembling. The sound came soon after. Low at first, vibrating in the marrow of his left femur, then rising to a shriek that rattled all ten of his metatarsals.
The Wind Wolves.
It sounded like they were hunting. He thought maybe they were hunting him, but their teeth never found the nape of his neck. It was silence they were after. They sought to kill and consume it and replace it with entropy.
They were hunting the silence Gordon had fought so hard to maintain.
They howled against the paper walls. The static screamed. The dust from ever neglected corner left uncounted kicked up, stung his eyes, tasting of chemical ash and wasted time.
Gordon remained still.
It was the most violent thing he had ever done.
Slowly and ever so carefully, he reached into his pocket, past the heavy things that weighed him down, but never actually grounded him. As if the product of some kind of wish fulfillment, his fingers brushed against cold steel.
A knife.
A blade he didn’t know he had, sheathed in the blindness of his own denial. It was a knife made of the silence he had forged for himself before and had simply forgotten. Because it was a silence that wasn’t necessarily always happy. Because it was the silence of ending.
He looked at the red string; his holy tether. The whole reason for the maze to exist in the first place.
He stopped following the string because he realized there was nothing to follow. It was an intricately chaotic knot of his own making.
For once he stopped pulling and tugging. He didn’t even try to untie the knot at all. It was no longer his purpose to try to understand the geometry.
So, he made his first and only cut.
*snap*
The sound was small, like a dry twig breaking in winter. But the consequence was total.
The tension holding the walls together evaporated. The paper buckled. The fake blue sky ripped open like cheap canvas and blew away with the very real wind.
Gordon squeezed his eyes shut as the world collapsed. He waited for the void. He waited for the Wolves. He waited for death.
The maze didn’t explode, like he had feared. Instead, it collapsed like a house of cards, sliding into a heap of two-dimensional debris. The walls had finally failed to contain him.
Instead of the tinnitus-like hum of the void, he heard something else hum, instead.
*brrrrrrrrrr-put-put-put-ROAR*
A lawnmower with an under-maintanenced two-stroke engine struggling against the damp grass of a Saturday morning.
Gordon opened one eye. Then the other.
The wolves were gone. The stone floor and paper walls were gone, too. He was standing in his own backyard, ankle-deep in the overgrown flora and fauna of a neglected lawn. The air smelled of gasoline, cut grass, and the faint, sweet scent of decay that belongs to the living earth, not the stagnance of a tomb.
He looked down at his clothes. They were ragged, stained with the white dust of his labor, but they were real. He looked at his hand. The blade was still there, now a simple kitchen knife, looking absurdly small against the vastness of the morning.
“Fuck,” Gordon said.
The word fell out of him like a stone, landing in the grass. It sounded like a curse, but it was truly a resignation; a eulogy for the decade he had spent solving a puzzle that didn’t actually exist.
He took a step. His heel sank into the dirt. A real, linear first step forward.
Above him, the sky was a terrifying, infinite depth of royal blue. A raven drifted across it, indifferent and black like a sunflower seed. In its beak, it carried a long, trailing piece of red string. It was flying toward the oak tree near the rear of his property, looking for a place to nest.
Gordon watched ten years float away and become the lining for a bird’s new home. He almost laughed. The sound got lost somewhere in the dry rasp of his withered throat. It had grown unaccustomed to joy.
A movement caught his eye near the fence. A calmly blinking black cat watched him from the top rail. It didn’t care where he had been. It didn’t care about the maze. It just wanted to know if it was going to get a treat or a pat on the head.
Gordon looked at his right palm. It throbbed.
There, etched into the skin in white scar tissue, was a shape. Not a wound, but a diagram. A Compass Rose. The knife and the static had burned a direction into his flesh.
He turned his hand. The scar aligned with the world. He felt a pull, magnetic and undeniable, in the center of his chest.
He didn’t look back at the house, or the collapsed illusion of the maze, or his neighbor Steve, who was aggressively edging his lawn at 8:00 AM.
Gordon Knot turned North, instead.
He put the knife in his pocket, next to the items he hadn’t yet discarded, and began to walk. He didn’t know where North lead, but for the first time in his life, he knew exactly how to get there.
And it finally felt true.