“The maze!” said Tom, and every nameless fear boiled up inside him. “Run, you blighters! Run!”
That H.M. himself did run, despite his large corporation and his dislike of any pedestrian exercise, can only be stated as a fact. Lifting his chin so as to cleave the air, he belted along that road as fast as his younger companions.
Some hundred and twenty yards farther on, they saw the dim gleam of a light past an avenue of trees branching to the left. Into this they flew abreast, found themselves in a large open space, and stopped.
For the first time they heard the wheezing, rusty voice of the old guide.
“Now, miss,” he was pleading, “you don’t really want to go into the maze, do you? ’Tisn’t very difficult, not what we like to pretend it is. But that’s in the daytime. You don’t want to go in at night, miss.”
“But I do!” Jenny insisted firmly. “All my life I’ve been reading about the Hampton Court maze, and I’ll die if I don’t explore it. Won’t you lend me your electric torch?”
In the clearing, a hut or small pavilion had been set well back, evidently used as somebody’s living quarters; on a pole against the side of the hut burned a sickly electric bulb.
The famous maze was set well out from the hut. It was roughly oval in shape, a little higher than a man’s head, of green hedge raggedly trimmed. Illumined in bright green and dead shadow by the sickly fight, it loomed up less as a place of comedy than as a secret, malicious trap.
The entrance must be at the far side, because the entire party was assembled there. Slant-eyed Margot was jumping up and down with joy.
“May I go in too, Mama?” she shrilled. “May I go?”
“No, you may not,” said Aunt Hester sharply. “Afterwards, perhaps, if dear Jennifer—”
“Lot of nonsense, I call it,” grumbled Uncle Fred from under his gray military mustache.
“Please may I have the electric torch?” said Jenny in a voice no man could resist.
“Ah, well,” mumbled the guide. “ ’Ere’s the torch. I s’pose I can always climb up on top of the step-ladder by the entrance, and give you directions if you get lost. Be nippy, now.”
“I will! I will!”
“Jenny!” called Tom. “Jenny, wait! I’m going with you!”
His words did not carry to her. Faintly he heard the creak of a small gate, and the brushing of Jenny’s body against the narrow sides of the maze.
Tom sprang forward, Instantly Sir Henry Merrivale locked both his arms from behind, and held him back.
“No, son,” said H.M., in so soft and deadly a voice that Tom was startled. “You’re not goin’ into that maze.”
“Why not?”
“Whose life,” asked H.M., glancing round him, “d’ye think I’ve been worried about, as much or more than the little gal’s herself? Yours.”
“Are you crazy?”
“No. But you’re not goin’ inside that maze.”
Tom, with one sudden heave and jerk, tore loose even from H.M.’s powerful grip.
“I’m sorry, sir. But that’s where I’m going, and neither you nor anybody else is going to stop me.”
He ran across the sanded space, and round the side to the entrance. He saw the startled face of Uncle Fred, who was swinging a heavy yellow cane. He saw Aunt Hester, with rigid mouth. He saw the pretty, mischievous face of Margot, who was slipping away in another direction.
The guide had already shakily mounted to the top of the stepladder beside the entrance. Tom swung open the little gate, twisted sideways as he plunged into the maze, and attempted to run.
It was impossible.
The hedge-walls were so narrow that tendrils stung his face. Though it was not pitch-dark, just enough light filtered down from the dim bulb outside to distort the eyesight and turn dark shapes into illusions. He might run slap into a hedge-wall at any second, and just saved himself from doing so.
Gently, now!
Stopping at a turn, Tom felt down on his left and found the thin wall, of hard and curved wire, built a little below waist height. In this maze, he remembered it had been said, you must always turn to the left. He did so, and presently turned left again.
That was when he saw, deeper inside these thinnish walls, the firefly glimmer of Jenny’s torch. It vanished again — but it was there.
“Jenny!” he called. “Wait for me! It’s Tom!”
“Tom! Darling!” Her voice slipped through the walls rather than above them. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know. Where are you?”
“Very near the center of the maze, I think.”
“Then stop where you are! Wait until I catch up with you!”
“Oh, no!” Jenny retorted demurely. “I’ll get to the center and turn off the torch. Then you can find me and tell me how much you love me.”
“Jenny, wait!”
But the firefly glimmer danced away. He could hear her brushing and hurrying on. In a moment or two there was a cry of pleasure, as evidently she found the center of the maze. The light of her torch went out.
Tom moved forward, more slowly and carefully. The electric bulb at the hut was now so distant and so dim that it gave scarcely any light. Tom didn’t know where he was. Walls loomed up and closed round him. It wasn’t pleasant, being shut into a twisting maze where...
Then he stopped, listening.
Somebody was following him stealthily through the maze.
Somebody, not much lighter than his own weight, was stalking him — with what intent? Tom ran forward and stopped. The footsteps behind him ran forward and stopped. Tom ran again. But he was not left in doubt long.
A closer footfall, a looming of a shape in near-darkness, made him glance over his shoulder. He saw the upsurge of someone’s silhouette. A distant gleam flashed on the blade of the knife as if lifted high — and struck.
All that saved Tom from being stabbed in the back, as Johnson the ventriloquist had been stabbed, was the dim light and the attacker’s mis-judgment. The blade of the knife ripped through the cloth of the coat over Tom’s shoulder. The attacker, plunging forward so hard that he collided with Tom, sent his victim sprawling one way and drove his own head and shoulders, grotesquely, straight into the hedge on the other side.
Somebody screamed one word, nothing more.
With a crackling of branches, the attacker wrenched out his left arm and then withdrew his head. Before he could disengage his knife-hand, Tom landed a vicious right-hander that opened his assailant’s cheekbone and drew first blood.
Then they faced each other, two dim shapes, between the narrow walls.
There were no Queensbury Rules here. Neither man was a boxer. But both were enraged and both meant murder.
The attacker held his knife blade out, to leap forward and rip up. Just as he lunged, Tom kicked him in the groin. The attacker, in intense agony, began to double up; his knife fell and tinkled. Tom hit him again.
The attacker, straightening up, flew in with both fists. Tom hit him twice, left and right, in the belly. Then he put all his strength into a right cross to the man’s jaw — which, if it had landed, would have broken Tom’s hand.
But it did not land on the jaw. Instead it landed, with just as murderous effect, in the soft flesh under the man’s left ear. The attacker, brain paralyzed and legs suddenly gone to water, reeled backwards and fell.
“Now where the devil,” Tom was thinking, “did we get so much space?”
Then he realized they had been fighting very near the entrance to the center of the maze. For the first time he heard voices, and bodies thrashing about in the maze.