The Maze Keeper – Part 1: The Hedge Maze

The maze had been planted two hundred years ago, tall dark yew hedges that rose well above a man's head, and a stone summerhouse at the centre with a slate roof and a single lantern hook. At dusk, when the estate's gardeners had gone home and the last tourists had been waved out through the gate, it belonged to two people and an owl.

Octavia had booked it for the night. She was forty-four, a landscape architect who understood mazes the way other people understood music. Felix was thirty-six, a physiotherapist, warm and capable, who had said to her once, on a long walk, that he always had a secret dream about being lost somewhere and found by someone who knew the way out.

At the gate, in the blue half-light, she took a folded sheet from her pocket. "The terms."

He read them under the lamp. The Keeper's Terms. His limits and hers, in her round handwriting: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, no leaving the grounds, no one else. The word was Exit.

"Say it."

"Exit."

"If you say it, the Keeper puts down her keys. I am Octavia. We walk out together, the short way, and there is wine in the car."

"I understand."

"And at every bell of the stable clock, I will ask if you wish to continue." She buttoned a long green waxed coat over her clothes and took a ring of iron keys from her pocket. In the dusk she seemed taller. When she spoke again, her voice was cool, low and absolutely unhurried. "Visitor. You have no business in my maze after dark."

"I'm sorry, Keeper. I was lost."

"Everyone is lost. That is what it is for." She lit the lantern and held it up. "Walk before me. Do not turn left. Do not turn right. I will tell you when."

He walked. The yew closed round them on both sides, black and fragrant, and her steps followed, slow and measured, a pace behind. Twice he faltered, and her voice came quietly from the dark: Straight. Straight. Stop. At each junction she stood behind him and let him wait, silent, in the lantern light, until he felt the whole of his attention contract to the soft sound of her breathing and the pulse in his ears.

At the heart of the maze, the summerhouse waited, its door open, its steps pale in the gloom. She pointed at the grass in front of it.

"Kneel."

He knelt on the cool turf. She sat above him on the stone steps, the lantern at her feet.

"Are you content, Visitor?"

"Content, Keeper."

"Good. The Keeper has a great deal to say."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Exit.