When he’s here, in the Labyrinth, he tries not to think of them at all, because he believes that thinking here has power. Even now, as he hears them behind him, he tries to think only of putting the next foot in front of him, then the next. Of going faster, not of why. Even when they sound like they are right behind him, just around the next turn, not even that far. That if he turned his head, he would see them, see them at last as they are and not as he imagines. Even then, he keeps his eyes forward, keeps his thoughts only on McCabe, McCabe, McCabe.
And then he turns a corner and he’s somewhere he’s never been before. Normally, in the Labyrinth, he can’t say that, not with certainty. Most of it looks the same, excepting the occasional landmarks. But this is something else entirely. More than a landmark. This is the landmark. He knows it without even having to look around, knows even before his mind has processed what he’s seen, knows with the faultless logic that is sometimes the province of the dreamlands, that this is the center of the Labyrinth.
The things behind him are forgotten and, as if they are driven back by some invisible barrier, or as if it really has been his attention, however indirect, that held them here, the sounds of their pursuit cease. Or was it ever really pursuit? Were they herding him here?
What would he call the structure that he sees before him, this extruded building of green stone, with its soaring towers and many gaping windows, if he saw it in the waking world? A castle, a tower, a house?
There have been countless attempts to map the Labyrinth and even more to explain it. Is it the first step of an afterlife, a tiny taste of death that we get each night when we close our eyes? Is it a representation of something from the collective unconscious, an enormous symbol housed in all our psyches? Is it literally just the maze of our own neurons? These were things Kendrick never thought about, not outside the Labyrinth and certainly not within it, but he thinks about them now.
What does it mean, this structure? No map of the Labyrinth has ever found its center. No rider, no dream hound has ever come this far and returned, at least, not that he’s ever heard of. In the mind of every sleeping man and woman, a maze, and in the centre of the maze, this place. And inside this building, he knows with that same faultless logic, McCabe.
Without hesitating any further, he goes through the front door.
Inside, the house is like a castle, though strangely sparse and unfurnished. There are no guttering torches in sconces on the wall, but it isn’t dark, either. The green stone seems to provide its own illumination.
When he passes windows and looks outside, what he sees isn’t the Labyrinth and that doesn’t surprise him. Out one window, massive storm clouds gather into an anvil-shaped thunderhead, crackling with multihued lightning. Out another, he looks down upon a misty valley, where golden statues nestled in peaks watch some kind of gladiatorial game on the distant floor below.
He walks here as he walked in the Labyrinth, one foot in front of the other, keeping his mind focused always on McCabe. This house isn’t separate from the Labyrinth, he knows. It’s part of it, maybe the greatest part, and here, more than ever, he must be very careful.
He tries to clear his mind of expectations, and so, he is surprised when he suddenly stops walking. He’s standing in the doorway to a room. At first glance, it’s not different than any of the other rooms he’s passed, but then it is. It’s furnished, with a fireplace and a single, high-backed chair, and the window in the far wall is covered with a thick, velvet curtain. Kendrick stands in the doorway for a long moment, holding his breath, and then he steps inside.
“McCabe,” he says, because he knows that McCabe is sitting in the chair, turned away from him, facing the window. He knows in the same way he’s known all along which way to turn his feet to find this place.
There’s no answer, not right away. Instead, the figure in the chair stands slowly and turns to face him.
In the waking world, Kendrick isn’t a handsome man. He was, once, when he was young, but a poorly-healed job of plastic surgery done to repair a face mangled by a broken bottle left him much the worse for wear. In the dreamland, though, he has greater control over his features and he always looks as he did when he was a young man, the way he still sometimes sees himself in his own dreams.
Kendrick has never seen McCabe in the Labyrinth, before, and he had never thought to ask what the other man looked like here. He’s surprised to see his friend looking old, worn, tired beyond his years. His hair, which is still black in the waking world, is grey, here, and wrinkles of worry mar his eyes. He looks, Kendrick thinks without being able to stop himself, like a man who might welcome death.
“I had hoped they wouldn’t send you,” McCabe finally says, when they’re facing each other across the suddenly-small room. “Though I knew they would. And, to be honest, once I failed the job, myself, I needed them to, because I knew there was no one else I could trust.”
Kendrick hasn’t rehearsed the lines he’ll say now. He’s kept them out of his mind, just as he keeps everything out when he’s inside the Labyrinth, everything except the thought of his quarry. “Why?” he asks and he’s surprised, himself, by the notes he hears in his voice, the betrayal, the hurt.
“I’m sorry,” McCabe says. He doesn’t step forward; he stays standing by the chair and Kendrick can see the effort it takes him not to turn his eyes back toward the curtains. “I suppose I should have come to you, first, but I wanted to spare you. I see now that I couldn’t, that, no matter what I did, you’d have found your way here, sooner or later. I wish I could have, though, that there’d been a way. Now, more than ever. Now that I know what you would do for me, how far you’d go.”
Kendrick feels like he should be confused by what McCabe is saying, but it makes a strange kind of sense. McCabe learned something. Of course he did. Something that he wanted to keep secret. But men like he and Kendrick were in the business of finding secrets, of running them to the ground, even in places like this, places made of secrets. So, he tried to hide in the one place he knew that no one, not even dreamhounds, could track him: death.
“You should have told me,” Kendrick says, taking a step forward. “I could have helped. I could’ve protected you.”
McCabe shakes his head, takes a step back to match the one that Kendrick has taken forward, which makes him freeze. He’s made a mistake, he realises. He’s misunderstood something.
“I’m not protecting the secret, Kendrick,” McCabe says sadly and Kendrick can see that there are tears in his eyes, this man whom he’s seen shot, who he’s seen kill, and never seen shed a tear. “I was protecting you. But I can’t, not anymore. You’re here, now, and even if I could make you leave without explaining, without showing you, you’d come back. Again and again, until you found out. Wouldn’t you? Even if I asked you to leave it alone? Even if I asked you to walk away?”
“I’d try,” Kendrick says, softly.
“But you’d fail, yes?”
A nod.
“I know. I would, too, if our places were reversed. I’d come here, eventually, to see what it was that had taken you from me. So, I’ll show you, I will, but you have to promise me something first.”
Kendrick nods again, knowing already that he’s lost, somehow. Lost a friend and more than that. “Anything,” Kendrick says, and McCabe tells him the secret, and then he pulls down the curtains and shows him.
The men guarding the two bodies are bored. It’s been three hours since Kendrick plugged into the machine and dropped away from the waking world, and since then, they’ve had nothing to do but stand and wait. There’s nothing here to guard, not really, but their jobs depend on them staying, so they stay. The technician who monitors the readouts on the dozens of screens connected to McCabe and Kendrick is asleep in a chair. One of the guards stares out the big picture window; the other plays solitaire on his phone. Neither is prepared when Kendrick suddenly wakes up.