The Henchman

I land hard on cold cement and something in me cracks. A rib, I think.

Shit. That clown is not far behind. He crashes through the ceiling and I roll away before he crushes me. Pain shoots from my chest, around my shoulders and up my neck. Yup, it’s a broken rib, maybe a couple. 

The clown staggers to his feet. He lets out a howl, and falls to his knees - probably broke his ankle. He’s dressed head-to-toe in blue leather, like Batman, if Batman was a deluded asshole. Calls himself the Bookworm, and he’s got an orange grub etched into his helmet.

What a clown.

“Let me out of here,” he says.

How cute. I ignore him and look for my way out. We’re in a square white room, bout twenty by twenty feet. The ceiling is divided into tiles, eight by eight. You wouldn’t know we came barrelling through there a second ago. That means one of those tiles opens up.

Bookworm peers at something on the wall - letters scrawled in red, like you’d see scratched by fingernails in an asylum.

When life gets tough, you can always count on me - he reads aloud.

“It’s a puzzle,” he says. “Look, there's two holes here. Oh…you can always count on your fingers.” He jams a finger into a hole.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I say. I’ve seen what fun little puzzles the Mazemaster can cook up. He usually throws corrupt cops or rivals into these places. Everyone swears there’s a way out, but no one ever makes it. And he loves watching them try. It’s like one of those escape rooms, built by a sadistic psychopath.

The Mazemaster ain’t watching now though. This punk's boss, another clown called Excalibur, stormed our hideout this morning. Me and Bookworm triggered the trap door down here in a scuffle. There’s still a fight above our heads, so no-one’s coming for us. Or maybe they’re all dead, and we’re the unlucky ones.

Bookworm stretches out and sticks a pointer into the other hole. 

Click.

A ceiling tile opens, and a black bag drops down.

Bookworm looks at me with a shit-eating grin. I rush him and yank his right hand free, but his left index finger comes out as a surgically cut stump. Blood spurts and he shrieks.

“Tourniquet that.” I say. 

My only way out is up, and the ceiling’s eight feet high. He won’t be useful if he bleeds out.

Bookworm’s blue glove is glossy and purple from the blood. “How?” he says. He looks desperate.

He doesn’t have a scrap of cloth on him. I take off my tie and wrap him up.

“Your boss is pure evil, you know,” he says, as I finish up.

“Uh huh.”

“Are you?”

I yank on the knot tied around his finger. “You looking to find out?”

If this little shit is trying to get under my skin, it’s working. The Mazemaster ain’t my boss. My boss’s name is Mike. His boss is Francisca, her boss is El Chino and that asshole’s boss is the guy who built this place. The freak they call the Mazemaster. In ten years working for the org, I’ve met him once. Maybe he’s evil, but all I know is the work ain't so bad and the paycheck is good.

“Surely you could do something more noble with your life.”

I smack his stump and he screams. 

 “Look you asshole. I got a dead wife and a sick kid and you don’t know a damn thing about my life.” 

“You're a madman! Like him!”

I want to strangle this clown, but I leave him to cry and I go to the bag. Inside there’s a key and a note. 

Bookworm is crumpled in the corner, sulking and scowling at me. 

“Alright, kid. We’re gonna have to work together to get out of here. That tile…” I point up to the steel plate that opened up for the bag. “... that one opens. If we unlock it, we get back up.”

I throw him the note. “You know what this means?” 

I am the beginning of sorrow and the end of sickness - Bookworm reads aloud.

You can find me in the sun, but I’m doubly in the darkness

His face lights up and he goes to the wall. 

“Wait, before you do anything. We need a plan.”

Bookworm hobbles to me and takes the key. “It’s the letter S. Look, I can see where the paint is over the keyhole. Right here under the first S, ‘when life getS’.”

He turns to me. “But there’s going to be some trick right?”

I nod. “Put the key in, run to me, and hoist me up, I’ll do the rest.”

“You put the key in,” he says.

I take off my belt. “I need to pry open the tile. That requires both hands.”

He squints his eyes and shakes his head.

“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. Unlock it.”

He hovers the key over the lock. Can’t blame him for being shy, losing a finger can’t be fun. “Open the fucking lock,” I say.

He sticks in the key, gives a turn, and runs to me. 

I put my foot on his knee and lift up. 

Click. A tile opens. 

“Wrong one!” Bookworm shouts. He lunges to the last row - forgetting that I was on him. I crash to the ground and the sharp pain in my ribs explodes into vicious waves through my body. The tile above my head opens. 

Snakes! How the hell did the Mazemaster get black mambas in Jersey?

“Snakes!” Bookworm shouts.

I hate snakes, like really fucking hate snakes. Paralyzed with pain or fear or both, I see black eyes and white fangs coming for my face. I scream, like a little girl, I wail for my mommy or god or whoever to save me.

Bookworm saves me. He grabs the snake by the tail and bashes it against the wall until its head caves in. He does the same with the dozen more that came raining down on us - while I curl in a fetal ball and wait for it to be over. 

“You okay?” Bookworm says. He’s covered in gore. 

“I hate snakes,” I say. I take a deep breath to calm down.

“So do I.” He nods to the wall. There’s an open doorway there now, into a dark room. “Do we go?”

“It’ll only get worse from here,” I say.

“Then we'll pry one of these tiles open.” He takes off his belt and flashes his buckle - a replica of the sword-in-the-stone.

Idiot. We burnt our chance and now we’re dead men. 

“You smoke?” I hold out my pack. The cigs are crushed, but I can still light one.

Bookworm looks up to the ceiling. “Nah.”

“You know,” I say “There’s something I don’t get about you and your fancy little team. You got Excalibur, the Green Knight, the Golden Grail, all these King Arthur things, and then you, Bookworm?”

“Are you going to help me?”

“It’s a steel plate kid, you’re not getting it open.”

“Then what? We just sit here and wait to die?”

I take a drag and shrug.

Bookworm leans against the wall, and we sit in silence for a while. 

“When I joined I was supposed to be Merlin.” Bookworm finally says. “Because I was the youngest, I needed to capture the five-to-fourteen demographic, but my engagement levels were slumping. Kids have no clue who Merlin is, so the Avalon group decided on a rebrand. Since then, my engagement levels are up fourteen percent.”

“Congratulations. Your pops must be proud.”

“He’s a lot prouder than your father could ever be. Or what, you gonna tell me he’s dead too, boo…fucking…hoo.”

I laugh. I’m warming up to this kid. “Yeah, you’re right about that.”

“I’m not waiting here to die.” He limps to the door. “I’ll shout if I find a way out.” 

Bookworm passes through the door. It slams shut behind him.

“Hey!” he shouts.

A tile from the second row opens and a bag lands at my feet.

Bookworm pounds the wall. “Hey, can you open it from your side? … what’s that noise?… shit.”

In the bag is a note, a flashlight, and a Ruger pistol - with one bullet in the chamber. 

“DO WHAT YOU MUST” - the note reads

What does that mean? Did the Mazemaster survive, and this some test of my loyalty? If it is, and I kill the kid, do I get out of here? 

Bookworm pounds harder. “Hey can you hear me. Something’s in here. I can’t see anything!”

I’ve never killed anyone… that I know of. Beaten the pulp outta lots of corner thugs, and maybe they died in the hospital, but I’ve never intentionally killed a soul. I’ve made it forty-two years in this business without a murder, and I don’t want to start now. But Shit. If we’re both to die anyway, then why not one of us live?

I tuck the gun behind my back and push on the key. The door swings open and Bookworm staggers forward.

“It’s pitch black, and there’s something else in there,” he says. 

“This came down.” I flick on the flashlight and point it in the darkness. “Go on ahead,” I say. “I got your back.”

***

A trembling Bookworm limps ahead of me. I point the flashlight at him and my left hand goes on the Ruger.

“Jesus Christ!” Bookworm shouts. In the flashlight's beam I see him kicking at the ground, and I catch the gray fur of a rat.

I laugh. “Not a fan?” 

“No, look…” he points to the corner.

I gag. It’s a half eaten human head with a switch sewn into his forehead. 

Bookworm crouches, pokes the head, and sighs. “It’s not real,” he says.

“That rat got in here somehow.” I shine the flashlight at the ceiling - same as the other room, eight by eight tiles. Maybe we still have a chance. 

“I’m going to flip it,” Bookworm says. His fingers are on the switch. “You ready?”

“Go on.” The worst thing that could happen is we die.

Click.

Everything glows blue. The room is an octagon with radiant white images painted on each wall face. They’re all gruesome: One is a woman impaled by a spear, another a tree with eyes stuck on each branch. The wall beside me shows an anguished man with his skin half peeled off. Directly across from the door is the image of the Mazemaster himself, dressed in his white cloak, with a silver amulet and large rings on each finger. There are words under his black-lit portrait:

I am free, but you are bound to me. 

You can't own me, but you can use me. 

You can't keep me, but you can spend me.

“What is it?” I say.

Bookworm’s gaze is fixed on the mannequin head.

“Hey!”

He jumps. “Huh? What?”

“What do you think it is?” I point the flashlight to the puzzle.

He mouths the words and shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe air?”

I walk to the Mazemaster’s portrait. Every hair on my neck stands up. It feels demonic.

“No…wait,” Bookworm says. “It’s time. The answer is time.”

Smart kid. On the Mazemaster’s middle-finger ring, there's a small clock face. I get close and see a tiny needle raised above the fluorescent paint. It’s set at one minute to midnight.  

“Get ready,” I say.

“For what?”

“No idea.” 

I push the needle to twelve. 

Click.

The walls drop with a thud, and the black light is swapped with blinding white. Each painting is replaced by a lifelike depiction of the same scene behind glass walls - like a museum for the mind of a sick fuck. The floor is ballistic glass and underneath our feet is a wooden maze that stretches wall-to-wall.

Tick Tock. Tick Tock. 

The sound comes from a statue of the Mazemaster. A stopwatch hangs around his neck, and it’s counting down from sixty seconds. 

“Look,” Bookworm says. He points to a glass panel where dozens of rats writhe on the ground behind it.

Shit. 

At the far corner of the maze, there’s a canister with the words Bye Bye etched into the tin. The nozzle is wrapped with string and tied to a snap trap near it.

“Shit!” I say aloud.

Bookworm taps the glass and reads the words on the floor beneath the rats. 

I can end a book without finishing a sentence

Tick Tock. Forty-nine seconds.

“A bookmark,” he says. “Look for a bookmark.”

My head spins and I look at all the macabre displays behind the glass walls. The impaled woman has a pained and lifelike look, and I can see the flayed man’s anguish. In the cell beside him, there's a mannequin of a child behind iron bars. She has bruises and scrapes all over her body. I feel sick. Bookworm is right, the Mazemaster is evil.

Tick Tock. Thirty-two seconds.

“I don’t see no bookmark.” I say. “Are you sure that’s it?”

“I don’t know.” Bookworm says. He pounds on the glass containing the rats. 

I can’t look away from the child. Was she real? Will I be another of his displays?

What a wasted life this was. Flashes of my past invade my thoughts. I see my asshole Dad, beating my mother, and I see her track marks and smell the alcohol swabs and the rot. 

Tick Tock. Twenty-five seconds.

No, I will not die here. I take out the Ruger. What do I need to shoot? The rat cage? The floor? Bookworm? Shit, shit, shit. 

Melanie comes to my thoughts. My sweet Melli, oh God why did you take her from me? I was in prison; I didn’t even get to see her…oh.

“A prisoner!” I yell. 

“What?” Bookworm’s hammering the glass like a madman.

“A prisoner can finish a book before he’s done his sentence. It’s something in here.”

Bookworm hobbles over. “On her sleeve, her number is twenty-three.”

Ten seconds

“Twenty-three, twenty-three what? What does it mean?”

Bookworm points up. 

The twenty-third tile.

“Which side do we count from?” he says. 

I look at that evil son of a bitch at the far end of the room. 

When life gets tough, you can always count on me.

I take out the Ruger and point it three rows down from the Mazemaster. 

Two..one…

Click.

The rats flood underneath our feet and head straight for the canister.

Boom! I shoot the tile. It shatters and a rope ladder spills out.

“You first, go!” I say. 

Bookworm shimmies up right as the first rat has its neck broken in the snap trap. A thick white gas seeps through tiny holes in the ground. 

I get on the rope and every inch up is excruciating, but we both get upstairs.

It’s silent carnage. Dead bodies are everywhere and in the middle of it all, Excalibur and the Mazemaster are clutched in a forever embrace.

Bookworm falls on his knees and cries. “I thought our time was up.” 

I light a smoke and take a deep haul. “Nah kid. It looks like we have all the time in the world.”