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Not a grain, no, tiny channels, carvings into his brown flesh, likeAnd there I stopped breathing for a est what I was seeing and spare the focus required to breathe Not a wooden grain but an endless maze carved into hiestions of leering faces and twisted beasts There was so of demonic frescoes These channels, this maze, it covered every inch of him Within the channels were holes, black and sudden It was not entirely rigid, this maze pattern, not entirely fixed, for there was movement there, doithin those endless lines and curves and those baffling holes

I heard more clearly now the sounds of what seeh I did want to believe it, fingernails scratching as if to escape, or to hold on And the sounds of voices were ever , prayers almost, yes, and cries of despair

Then as the last of the s—living things—crawled in those er than cockroaches, they were nevertheless huered within that endlessup and doith equal ease or equal distress

There were hundreds Thousands, maybe And some fell down the holes or maybe in extremis they jumped, and I knew then that this maze was not h him He was made of some precise ood, his entire body a uess at

And still I had not dared raisenot to aze and now very much convinced, convinced down to the marrow of my bones, that I did not want to look in this monster’s eyes

But curiosity was as always th I followed a particular denizen of that ravity along the line of the creature’s neck I followed that scrabbling man, for man is what it seemed to me to be, as it ascended, and I used that focus asthat twisted wood-hued form

The ainst a barrier, but it was too late now for her I knew myself, that e to know

And so hted eyelids rose and ged teeth, as darkly stained as all the rest of the creature, and now, helpless to stop, I let aze travel up and ever up and then—

“No!” I cried, the word forced fro throat

I turned sharply away but too late, too late by far I had looked into the eyes of the Master of the Gaed upon the insect-like humans

“No, no, no, no, no,” the voice said over and over again My voice, though it was strained and unearthly “No, no, no!”

I knew at that moment that all the pathways, all the tunnels, all the dark holes, the whole of the three-dimensional maze led inexorably to those eyes, to those worms, to that fate

“Messenger,” the Master of the Ga branches twisted to breaking “Who are the players?”

For the first time since the appearance of the maze creature, I remembered the presence of Liam and Emma All of my own horror was there written on their stricken faces I felt obscurely guilty, as though I was so apparition I saw in their eyes my oonder and fascination mixed with revulsion And worse, for they feared that they were to be reduced to lives as pitiable as the damned who lived within the Master of the Ga, helpless creatures trapped in tunnels and holes, lost, ever and ever lost in the maze

And were they wrong? I didn’t know I had no words of coive them I had as yet no words of comfort for myself And as Emma looked to me, she could see my own confusion and dread and this amplified her own