Murk once again requested my presence, so I went to the mansion before he decided to send someone to retrieve me. After parking my purple Hyundai Accent in the drive, I followed his directions to a part of his estate I had never seen before. I found Dr. Murk wandering the vast grounds. He carried a croquet mallet in his hand. There were no balls or wickets apparent, nothing to indicate a game was underway. I approached warily, as is my usual practice when the doctor is armed.
“Hello, Piper,” said Murk. “Glad you could make it. I’m just tending to a small problem my gardener, Arturo, has made me aware of. It appears I have a small gopher infestation. Simply won’t do to have them burrowing about. So when they pop up, I smack them down again. With this.” He playfully spun the mallet in his hands.
“Don’t they make poison for that?” I asked, appalled.
“Mmm. Quite,” said Dr. Murk. “Anyway, I asked you here because I want you to do something. See this hedge maze?” Dr. Murk gestured to what I assumed, until then, was merely a large, well-maintained shrubbery. An opening between the hedges was barely visible. “You must enter it and meet me in the middle. There we will hold palaver.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“We will talk, you imbecile.”
“Can’t we talk here?” I asked, apprehensive.
“No. It’s very important that we talk in there. Besides, there’s a surprise waiting for you at the center of the maze: one of my wife’s apple pies. All for you.” Murk smiled at me.
I thought of the pie: golden, flaky perfection, paradise in pastry form. A delight for all the senses (except hearing, as pies are silent). Always Murk would torment me with his wife’s apple pie, eating it in front of me and refusing to offer me a slice, while he moaned orgasmically with every bite. I longed for the pie. Dr. Murk knew this, and thus played me like an emotional xylophone.
“Fine,” I said. “See you in the middle.” I started towards the entrance.
“Wait,” said Murk. “There is an entrance on the other side. You must use that one. This one is for me.”
I sighed in exasperation, but thoughts of the pie soon had me circling the hedge maze seeking the second entrance. I found it right away. A sign in the shape of an arrow pointed to a break in the shrubbery. “Enter here, asshole!” was painted on the sign. So I did.
It was much darker within the close confines of the hedge maze than I first expected. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I berated myself for blindly following Murk’s directions. Although I knew that no possible good could come out of entering a maze at Dr. Murk’s house, I wanted the pie so much that I was willing to risk my sanity and my very life to get it. I knew there was a trick to finding one’s way through any maze, but I could not remember what it was. Try as I might, thoughts of the pie pushed all other thoughts from my mind.
I came out of my ruminations to find I was hopelessly lost amidst the dark passages and switchbacks of the maze. I took a deep breath, fighting panic, as that would do me no good at all. Suddenly, the tinny sound of Dr. Murk’s voice sounded over a loudspeaker, concealed somewhere in the shrubbery around me. “Hey, Piper, did I tell you about my trip last year? Wifey and I went to Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya for our seventh honeymoon.”
Great, I thought, wondering where this was going.
“Well, I don’t need to tell you the wife is quite the animal lover, and wouldn’t you know it, she fell in love with the wild mountain baboons there! Vicious, ill-tempered things, known to pack-attack (and eat) humans, but hey—the wife loves ‘em. So I arranged for us to smuggle a dozen or so home with us. The wife was away for a while, and, well…I’ve just been so busy, I forgot to feed the little devils. Now, I don’t want to alarm you Piper, but I suppose I should tell you I just accidentally released them into the maze with you. You’ll probably hear them soon, so you might want to hurry.”
I felt my veins fill with ice. All thoughts of the pie vanished and I began to panic, blindly running in a random direction. I plunged ahead, following twists and turns as my heart pounded fit to burst and my breath came in ragged gasps. I could hear the sounds of the starved baboons somewhere in the maze. By now they had my scent and were on the hunt. I ran around the corner and skidded into a large white crate on the ground. Instantly, the air was filled with angry buzzing. A beehive!
I slapped frantically at the insects as they swarmed in the air around me, stinging my exposed flesh. “Oh, I forgot to tell you about the bees,” said Murk’s tinny voice. “also from Africa. If you see a hive, don’t get too close; they’re quite aggressive. Just turn around and don’t make any sudden moves. They should leave you alone if you stay calm.”
I screamed and fled in the opposite direction, a black cloud of killer bees trailing in my wake. I tore through the maze, heedless of direction, certain at any moment to dive headfirst into another beehive or plunge into a pack of savage, starving baboons; where I would be dismembered and eaten to the accompaniment of Dr. Murk’s gleeful laughter. I rounded yet another bend and smacked into a hedge wall. Someone had affixed to it a poster of a kitten hanging from a clothesline, struggling vainly to get up. “Hang In There!” read the ridiculously trite caption. In vain I tore at the hedgerow itself, hoping to burrow my way through to the center of the maze, but with no luck. The foliage was too dense, and all I succeeded in doing was bloodying my hands. Desperate, I whirled and fled deeper into the maze.
“Want to hear something funny, Piper?” Dr. Murk’s voice came once again from the loudspeaker. “The wife tells me she’s been dressing up like you and poking those baboons with pointy sticks for months. Usually she waits until they’re asleep, then wakes them up with a sharp jab in the face. Wow, do they get cranky!”
I ran on, heedless of Murk’s taunts, intent only on surviving this murderous game. I stumbled and fell, crying out in pain and fear. My ankle was twisted; it was only a matter of time before the baboons or the bees or both caught up with me. I lay down, prepared to die. And that’s when I noticed a passage to my right, all but hidden in the darkness. I crawled on my strength of will alone to the passage, and fell through into a clearing in the center of the maze, bleeding from dozens of cuts, scratches and beestings. A metal gate slammed shut behind me, sealing the maze off from the clearing.
“Ah, Piper,” said Murk. “So glad you could join us.” The Doctor had changed into a deck shirt, Bermuda shorts and Birkenstock sandals. He smiled at me from a lawn chair beneath a sun umbrella, lazily fanning himself with a large hand fan while sipping an immense tropical drink. Behind me came the enraged howls of the baboon pack as they came face to face with the metal gate.
“P…P…Pie…” I gasped between deep breaths.
“Oh, right, the pie. There never was any pie, Piper. I just wanted to see if you’d run the maze.”
“You freakin’ psycho!!” I screamed. “I’m not a goddamn lab rat!”
“And yet here you are, at the center of what is undeniably a maze, which you just ran in the hopes of a reward. Sounds somewhat rattish to me.” Murk slurped his drink.
“You’re insane! I had killer bees up my kilt, for Christ’s sake!”
“You’re not allergic, are you? At any rate, it’s likely the most swelling you’ve experienced down there in a long time.” Dr. Murk laughed. His Asian wife laughed too, and it was then I realized the doctor and I were not alone.
Mrs. Dr. Murk stood in the midst of a fountain in the center of the clearing. Cascading water caressed her sleek skin, sending silver streams meandering down the graceful lines of her back and over her briefly flaring hips, to continue down her rock-hard buttocks (the buttocks of an assassin, I reminded myself) and bare legs into the pool of ankle-deep water at her feet. Her long black hair reached the center of her back and clung, matted, to her sun-bronzed flesh. Breasts the size of canned hams strained against the fabric and threatened to burst from her ridiculously skimpy bathing suit. Idly, she ran her hands through her hair, scattering droplets of water in a prismatic spray. She looked at me through eyes that promised miracles and ran her tongue over her pursed lips in a gesture that could only mean—
“Cease eye-humping my wife, Piper,” said Dr. Murk. “It angers me. Say hello to our guest, my dear.”
Languidly, Mrs. Dr. Murk extended a glistening arm in my direction and very casually flipped me the bird.
“What the hell was this really all about, Murk?” I snapped.
“Well, it seems it’s been a long time indeed since you have written a book review. I suppose this is my way of encouraging you to get back on the stick, you skirt-wearing homo.” Murk finished his drink and began noisily munching the cherry garnish.
“You asshole!” I screamed. “You could have just asked!”
“This was much more effective, wouldn’t you say?”
“For your information, a new review has been up already for a whole day! You didn’t even bother to check!”
“Interesting. Oh well, disregard this whole thing, then.”
“What?!!”
“You probably won’t want to go back the way you came,” said Murk, ignoring my apoplexy and gesturing towards the slavering baboons beyond the gate. “Take the path I took to get here. It’s a completely separate maze, with no bees and no baboons. You have my word.”
Angrily, I limped out of the clearing, taking the exit Murk indicated. It was a completely straight path, at the end of which I could see the familiar purple paint job of my Hyundai.
Son-of-a-bitch.
