Masters of the Maze by Avram Davidson Read Free Book Online Page A

in the chamber just quitted; here, it was icy cold and his breath smoked. How often he had asked Glory Smith (who, with Keren King and Ozzie Heid, constituted the total present year-round staff of Darkglen) to turn on the electric heater here before she left. But the thought of an hour’s worth of electricity heating an empty room was usually too much for Glory’s thrifty soul to accept. And so, having failed again to obey the order, she had primly climbed into the back of Ozzie’s old Chevrolet to be driven off to the not-quite-village of Nokomas, where the two of them lived.
    Lived apart, that is. That is, occupying two separate houses. It was as common as any knowledge could be that twice a week, when Glory’s husband had gone off to the poker game at the firehouse and Ozzie’s daughter had gone either to the movies or to choir practice, Ozzie and Glory met for two hours of meta-connubial bliss. They didn’t care. By not sitting side by side in the car they made their gesture toward the moralities. Everyone was satisfied.
    Joseph Bellamy’s life, freely chosen, after all, ruled out concubinage as much as marriage. There was, he dimly remembered Charles Bellamy telling him, an Oriental Christian church somewhere, whose patriarchate descended in the same family from uncle to nephew. It did not, could not, descend from father to son because the patriarch was allowed no wife. Still, he — the patriarch, whoever he was — had an entire church behind him; his duties could be publicly performed … and publicly supported.
    “You’ve had your college education,” Charles Bellamy said, on the same occasion, “and your year abroad. What do you think of doing next?”
    Joseph knew well that this was no casual question, no casual meeting. Charles had paid for both college and tour as he had paid for prep school before then. As — for that matter — he had paid and was still paying for the total support of his unambitious younger brother and the latter’s wife and son and several daughters. And so the nephew now wondered what the “offer” was going to be — on which ladder was the rung and the chance to work himself up? The woolen mills in Massachusetts, the cotton lands in Arkansas, the smelters in Colorado and Nevada? — and knew that the “offer” was a command, wherever it led.
    He had known almost from the beginning that someday the bill would be presented … and that he would have to honor it. Well, he had enjoyed it all well enough. And his parents, though they might live long, would not live forever. Maud, Mabel, and Meg would eventually find husbands. And by that time, surely, the debt (it was measured in moral obligations, not dollars) would be paid. He would be his own man. Until then —
    “We live,”
said Menander,
“not as we will, but as we may.”
    “What do you think of doing next?” Charles Bellamy repeated. He was a bulky man, with a long, wintery face, and a short grizzled beard.
    “I thought perhaps — ”
    “You thought ‘perhaps’ — then you don’t know for sure what your thought in the matter really is. Well, well. What was the perhaps?”
    Lamely, haltingly, the nephew had stammered something about hoping that perhaps a place might be found for him in one of the Bellamy enterprises. He came, finally, to a halt, confused and embarrassed. Both feelings ebbed away into something like surprise as he saw, he scarcely knew how, but the certainty was there, that Uncle Charles understood him and his thoughts even more clearly than he did himself. And surprise was succeeded by a calm relief. There was no need for pretense any more.
    “Well, Joe …” said Uncle Charles, “I didn’t really think that you were going to tell me that you wanted to go back to Paris and become an artist, or go back to New York and become an actor, or go back to Harvard and become an instructor, or even that you wanted to settle down to Philadelphia and take a job in a bank directed by the fathers of