The Palace of Madmen

Interestingly enough, I visited the Palace of Madmen once (or the Changing Maze, the Sanctuary of Dreams, the Labyrinth of Many Names, the Heap, or whatever else you care to call it). I stumbled across one of the back doors. There are no front doors. I suppose you could say that I didn't actually go in - I only took one or two steps into the first room, keeping a tight grip on the knob of the door so that it couldn't get away. I'd heard about the place before. It's almost as hard to leave as it is to enter.

The one room I saw was roughly round, like the bottom floor of a tower, with an assortment of spoons and egg whisks branching like trees out of the ceiling. Mice fluttered through them and hung from prehensile tails. The floor was covered with mushrooms in every imaginable color, from amethyst and aquamarine to copper and cinnabar. A family of six-legged toads appeared to be eating spaghetti and jam on a checkered blanket on the largest one. Upon seeing me, they squeaked, turned immediately into bright green spiders, and attempted to hide against the tomato-red cap of their mushroom.

Of course, they were probably really hiding from the hooded burreler who walked into the room a second later, swinging a large pair of hedge shears on the end of his impossibly long tail. The hood on his head flowed seamlessly into a pair of chain-mail overalls festooned with buttons and elaborately braided green onions. Upon entering the room, he proceeded to shave the fluff off of a small mushroom-patterned carpet, the bristles off of a hairbrush growing among the spoons and egg whisks, and the fringe off of a large mushroom shaped like a lampshade. He was quite efficient. It took him roughly five seconds. All the mushrooms promptly crawled into the floor, spider-toads, picnic blankets, and all, shutting the stonework neatly behind them.

The Palace of Madmen takes in all types of lunatics, and - as far as I've heard - makes more sense to them than the outside world. Like most people on Hamjamser, the vast majority of them are friendly and perfectly harmless. Unfortunately, not all of them are. The maze welcomes the dangerous ones just as readily; it simply keeps the rest of its inhabitants safely away from them.

With the mushrooms gone, the burreler turned a pair of wild, sea-green eyes to me, which was when I noticed that he himself had no fur whatsoever, and his typical black-and-white burreler stripes were actually made up of tiny ceramic tiles stuck to his bare skin. He eyed my hair angrily, swinging his shears and muttering something about flagellated herring.

That was when I left. I didn't know whether or not the maze's protection applied to casual observers. I wasn't particularly eager to find out. The door made a faint ringing noise when I closed it hastily, and the knob folded itself into the faded purple wood with a sound like a silver crab retreating into its shell, leaving no trace in the seamless wood of the door.

When I stepped back, the door frame had gone as well. Only a rectangle of faint purple remained, no more than a stain on the plain wooden boards of the wall where it had been. The window next to it looked out onto the fog-draped fields around the little abandoned cabin.

There had been nothing in the sad little one-room building except the purple door, and now there wasn't even that. Wisps of fog drifted in through the window, split by the few remaining shards of glass. The floor and walls held nothing but shadows and a faint rectangle of purple. There was nothing to see. I left.

The Northern wall of the cabin, where the purple door had been, held only the blank, empty window on the outside. I hadn't noticed it on the way in. There was nothing particularly noticeable about it now. The boards were gray and warped in place. They had obviously stood there for decades, never disturbed by even the hint of a door, much less a purple one to a building out of a dream.

The cabin might have only existed to have the door in it, the one that had opened, shut, and vanished completely. I don't know why. Probably, there was no reason. It just was. That's how the maze works.

There was nothing to see, and there were quite a lot of hills between me and the town of Skither, and the thought of spending the night on the fog-smothered grass by (or in) the empty cabin with the door that wasn't was not particularly appealing, so I set out across the bedeweled grass without much hesitation. The cabin was lost in the mist when I looked back.

I've never found it again. And believe me, it hasn't been for lack of looking.

Anyway. This drawing is based on other stories I've heard of the Palace - from scholars who have spent their life writing in great detail about their few, cherished glimpses of it, from travelers like me who have stumbled across a door or two, and - very rarely - from a few of those who have lived there. There are not many of them. There are even fewer who ever leave. Most of them would rather die. Their descriptions are strange and ambiguous; real words, in the real world, are the wrong shape to hold stories of the Sanctuary of Dreams. This is the closest I can come to making sense of the least senseless accounts. I doubt I will ever attempt to draw my own glimpse of the Palace.

This is not a picture of the Labyrinth of Many Names. It is only as close - I hope - as a sane mind can come to it.

(Dedicated to Colin Thompson, Ursula Vernon, Tanith Lee, and James Blaylock.)

(Image copyright Nigel Tangelo / Ross Emery.)