By Angus Stewart
All abstract creations, with or without batteries, long to abduct the easily-led. Take for instance this potent example: a book which locked I and others just as pliable in thrall. A work of art which once was analogue but now persists eternal, online. It is still interfering with humanity. Halfway through my life-to-date I encountered it, and lately it has been preying upon my thoughts, calling its name… MAZE.
Or in full, MAZE: Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle. It has never been completely solved. Inside its 90-page labyrinth, each verso bears a hundred or so words, describing a room or passageway illustrated on the recto. Each such place — with one troubling exception — contains doors. Adorning each door is a number from 1 to 45, and by choosing your door you take your next step through the maze.
In the Directions, we are told ‘this is not really a book’ at all. We are challenged to…
- Find a 16-step path from room 1 to room 45 and back again.
- Find the riddle in room 45.
- Find the answer to the riddle of room 45 along the 16-step path.
The 16-step path is MAZE’s simplest problem, resolved by careful mapping. But each step is supposed to be solvable ‘on-page’ too, and there in the interpretation lies the trap – some pointers are detectable, while others remain invisible. We are told anything can be a clue, but that not all clues are trustworthy. This is no lie. Each room is impenetrable on first glance, yet overloaded with signs and signals, and the methods one must adopt to determine the correct door are hardly, if ever, intuitive. For a taste of MAZE-logic, I will describe one conclusively ‘solved’ room, and another whose case — in my view — remains open.
Room 1: A Solved Room — The first challenge. Each of the four doors here has a word carved above: 20 has ‘story’, 26 has ‘fable’, 41 has ‘tale’, and 21 has ‘yarn’. On the verso our narrator (more on him below) remarks that ‘the silences of the Maze are as eloquent as the sounds’, which if picked up provides an indispensable interpretive guideline: throughout MAZE the correct door is often the ‘odd one out’ which no clues point to. The word ‘story’ appears in the accompanying text for this room, in dialogue. Also in the dialogue are ‘nary’ and ‘late’ — anagrams for ‘yarn’ and ‘tale’. That leaves only ‘fable’, and so the correct door that moves us one step closer to room 45 is door 26. Alas, this is one of the easier rooms.
Room 4: A Less-Solved Room — Here we are several steps further along the correct path, in a long corridor with seven numbered doors. On the way to room 45 we must choose door 29. Then on the way back from room 45 to the entrance we arrive here again, and this time must choose door 15. In the verso prose a cat runs out of an unspecified door on the right-hand side of the corridor, then flees. The narrator spots it and is glad that his guests (more on them below) do not. Doors 29 and 15 are both on the same side of the corridor, perhaps indicating some connection with the cat. There are also visual clues that may indicate the ‘twoness’ of the solution (split wood blocks, two nails, two lit torches, and an axe linking doors 29 and 15) — yet I have seen no convincing interpretations that spell out the ‘first 29, then 15’ answer.
There are many rooms like 4, whose ‘solutions’ feel incomplete or maddeningly obtuse. Stare at a room for too long and a sense of despair — or diminishing sanity — may come to augment your frustration. MAZE’s central riddle and its answer have at least been confirmed, but the textual interpretations by which one is supposed to arrive at these border on the ridiculous. Here’s my favourite, quoting a MAZE-puzzler named John Bailey:
The row of wood on the table is a “wood row.” Combined with the “will” from the I AM Shakespeare riddle and the sun = “Woodrow Wilson.” Which leads to the Woodrow Wilson quote “Without God the world would be a maze without a clue”
Some readers have accused MAZE’s architect of poor puzzle design; others insist on his singular vision. I find myself in the latter camp, pulled there more by desire than logic. Such is the danger of obeying instinctual aesthetics — we can’t know where they will take us. We the readers start at the door of a great house, observing a group who will soon attempt to navigate it under the supervision of an unkind narrator:
I met them at the gate though I usually wait inside. Preoccupied with their own thoughts, impatient, like so many children, they didn’t see who I really was. They never noticed my crown, my pain, the fire in my eyes.
Our disdainful Guide, plainly, is MAZE’s fourth riddle; central yet unwritten. His agenda adds a fifth. These mysteries are ‘fair’. Given a little mythological knowledge, you can arrive at the Guide’s most likely identity based on certain remarks he makes in the text. As to his agenda, that is yours to play with as a reader.
The author hiding behind the Guide is one Christopher Manson, easily misreadable as ‘Mason.’ His title page illustration includes a spike, compass, hammer, and square. A glance across his bibliography indicates a sustained interest in worlds of yore: folklore, alchemy, and traditional crafts. On my 2020s return to MAZE, those esoteric inclinations struck a chord. Amid plague, turmoil, and depression I had found my mind venturing down dark alleys. I became interested in gnosticism — a lost hermetic movement underpinned by the idea that our world is an evil prison from which we must escape. As malaise deepens, so the allure of the beyond develops. In time I was to find that others, like me, had returned to Manson’s MAZE.
My copy of MAZE is the UK edition, not the American original. This is significant because US publishers Henry Holt bundled a competition along with their book — answer the three prime riddles by mail within six months post-publication, and win $10,000. The UK edition dangled a piddling £1,000. Nobody in the US provided all three answers in time, so eventually the prize was divided between those who came closest. As for Britain, I simply haven’t a clue.
The Holt edition’s blurb is written in the teasing voice of the Guide. The UK edition employs more conventional copy but rather unearthly cover art, sourced not from Manson but one Peter Goodfellow. His visuals venture fully outside the labyrinth but help place the book as an airy and ethereal item, suspended between postwar genre fiction and the emerging era of screens and the opaque operating systems running silently beneath them. This foretells the nature of MAZE’s 21st century readership, progressing through translation to cyberspace — but before slipping through that door, allow me to digress into questions of style. It’s only appropriate. MAZE is an aesthetic affair, by turns painterly and perverse.
Its depopulated halls are rendered in pencil, all sun and candle light traced to accentuate architectural flourishes and scatterings of strange ephemera ranging from Greco-classic to manufactured (post)modern. In the unchanging passages an eerie calm presides; often there are subtle indications that some other entity has just left the room we have entered. Nominally, MAZE is set inside and sometimes beneath a vast stately home. As the attentive reader meanders, however, they ought to arrive through the gradual accrual of dissonant notes at the persistent intuition that we are somewhere beyond time. There are multiple ominous indications, even in the prologue, that we are already dead.
This reader has probably reached such an intriguing line of literary inquiry precisely because they failed to break the more fundamental problems of the text — the numerical path sequence and the arcane letter puzzles that produce its final answer. The story of MAZE as a cultural artefact is just this: failure to break through, followed by recursive diversions into analysis. The promise of an ultimate solution draws us inside the walls; the cold beauty of its absence holds us within.
Beyond those walls, MAZE has generated digital twins. In 1994 a Mac OS video game version was released, recapitulating the book in tasteful colour and imbuing it with music and narration. (Today, you can watch somebody speedrun it in 25 seconds — how vulgar.) A later, uglier game adaptation was brought to demo stage then canned, but online there is mention of a conversion of that demo to Android, by a lone user. Input from such figures is enmeshed in the story of MAZE’s digital afterlife. From as early as the dialup era, the evolution of MAZE’s hypertext incarnations traces a shift in control from ‘author/publisher’ to ‘user/reader’. One surviving twin, borne from Holt itself, was erected in 1996. The equivalent efforts of ensnared netizens and the discussions they provoked remain scattered across 404 errors, caches, and antediluvian mail groups. The numbered door and the hyperlink are, in a sense, cousins.
By the early 2010s, anyone still troubled by their failure to solve MAZE could find closure, as I did, by Googling the answers. In 2013, a master-analyst under the handle ‘White Raven’ launched intotheabyss.net. Here he curated, collated, and created an impressive array of labyrinth-exploring resources, including a hypertext version constructed with permission from Manson himself. Here, questionable qualities come creeping. White Raven had an ego, and wished to make it clear that he was in a sole and special state of contact with Manson in which deep exchanges would be conducted. Nobody else was to contact the author. All communications were to be permitted only by proxy, through the master-analyst.
White Raven announced that he had solved 44 of the 45 rooms completely. This shifted future analysis fundamentally, moving the target away from perfect solutions to the core mysteries. But rather than disclosing his own conclusions and perhaps ending the game forever, White Raven asked users to submit their claims and workings as comments, which he would then select for ‘approval’. Now the ensnared readers could be gathered to form a cybernetic hivemind capable of computing every possible solution to every possible mystery.
White Raven himself does best when thinking beyond dry riddles and venturing into culture. For example, he argues with close reference to the text that MAZE is a metaphor for the human journey through an unfair and overwhelming world; usually unsuccessful and always terminal. Grim thoughts, but insightful — perhaps arising from the sort of personality that finds solace in assuming control of the conversation, and soliciting admiration. White Raven seems a near opposite of Manson the recluse, but a near match for his haughty narrator.
Beyond personality, White Raven is also, like the Guide, a clever caretaker of his domain. His decision to open the pages of Into the Abyss up for user comments elicited volumes-worth of peer-to-peer exchange. There, one can find a still-expanding library of interpretations, straight from those who love MAZE best — the eternally ensnared. This of course is wonderful and democratic, but it is also here that a familiar strain of online rot sets in. Whether in hope of finding truth or approval, at some point analysis began to turn inward. The internet is often a troubling place when we consider the minds of its users; White Raven’s site exemplifies the pattern. A few choice examples:
Bird, Cloud, Moon, Lightning: BC ML, 1050 BC, the beginning of the Greek Dark Ages … D also equals 4, and 4+11=15 which is the room we’re in so we know we’re on the right track. — user vewatkin, on Room 15
A Keystone species is a species in Ecology where a Community relies on America is the Community and Keystone Species is the Freemasons… New Years the Empire State Building BEARS a ball ON ITS SHOULDERS! — user jason argonauts, on The Solution to the Maze
In reference to the license plate, it also says 20th century fox. Marilyn Monroe did not change her name on 8/28/46 , she indeed signed a contract with 20th century fox on that day. She later changed her name to Marilyn Monroe… — user Kelly, on the Contact page
I am sorry to say that these quotes make little more sense with their context than robbed of it. Spending too long in virtual reality — disembodied, in a state of pure exchange — is simply not advisable. In MAZE, there is a ‘death’ page where the reader is deposited in a room with no exit. It is totally black, save for a congregation of bulging white spheres — these are the eyes of the souls with whom you are trapped, forever.
Forever is not for everyone. 45 months after setting up his honey pot, White Raven stepped away. Commentary continues in his wake — albeit at a smaller pace among a smaller crowd. Of course, Into the Abyss was never the only nexus. Other congregations have existed.
There is one MAZE show: the Mazecast, which ran from 2014 to 2017, then resurfaced to record three more episodes during the pandemic. In stark contrast to Into the Abyss, the show had no domineering figurehead. Speaking plainly and without much polish, the assembled hosts discuss possible solutions to various rooms and aspects of MAZE, and do at times try to establish concrete links to other texts — for example, the writings of Luis Borges. They demonstrate a certain level of critique too, regularly returning to the phrase ‘I don’t buy it’ — expressing their disdain for the assurance with which the MAZE’s would-be gurus stand by their most tortuous assertions. Sadly, the production values are abysmal. Nominally the episodes have themes, but are punctuated more by mic feedback and connection dropouts than sparks in the conversation. I genuinely hope that over their six years of broadcasting and interpretation, this little clan feels they have waded at least a little closer to the truth — or at least to satisfaction.
At each evolutionary stage of the internet, disembodied communities of MAZE-interpreters have coalesced and fragmented. Perhaps inadvertently, White Raven and the users under his wings may have broken the cycle and secured the immortality of the text – or at least massively multiplied the count of words devoted to its mysteries. Books, like the zones of the internet, depend and trade on the attention of flesh-and-blood humans. But if we may turn back a page, I would like to talk about fictional people. Within its covers, MAZE’s pencilled denizens are a scattered and obscure population, absent from most rooms. Every chance encounter with these beings — whether up close or espied from afar — is uncanny. In one crucial chamber, a blind man speaks. In another, a distant figure in an opera cape and top hat spots us and flees. Except in paintings, we never glimpse a female figure — just as we never see the Guide or guests. They’re in the prose — nowhere else.
However, the only guest Manson distinguishes from the others is a woman. She’s more inquisitive and perceptive than her peers, and that makes the Guide nervous. When she asks if some flowers he has picked are for her, the dark-hearted fellow won’t disclose to us his reply. That is as close as MAZE draws to sexuality, though the gothic qualities of its narrator might provoke an excited whisper between certain readers.
MAZE never provoked such stirrings in me, but its quasi-human denizens and secreted compartments do remind me of one specific film: Spirited Away. There is a character called Lin in Spirited Away who looks and acts exactly like a flesh-and-blood person, but — in a vast bathhouse full of absurd, magical entities — she repeatedly derides the main character for being a ‘disgusting human’ or similar. So what is Lin, if not human? On subsequent viewings, she was the character my eye followed, wishing the story would linger upon her, extending upon its edges. Reading MAZE, a similar trace nags at me. I want to know who the denizens of the house are; those who cannot easily be filed as ‘guest’ or ‘Guide’. Are they human, or something other? What lies beyond the limits of the text? MAZE is a book that provokes such longings. Consider another form of heartache, named ‘anemoia’…
…which is nostalgia for a past you never experienced. During the mid-00s, while I was inspecting MAZE in my bedroom, over and over, getting absolutely nowhere, considerable swathes of the primitive internet must have still been alive. I could have sought out and browsed the abandoned html MAZEs of the 1990s. I could have borne witness to their steady departure from the cutting edge of cybernetic consciousness. But the thought never occurred to me. Work overseas and a difficult return home through my late twenties split me away from MAZE. It lived with my mother; I was always inside the wrong house. Then in the 2020s, settling down followed by willing re-entry into this static, monochrome and sometimes troubling world afforded me relief from the sensory overload of my virtual life and the steady decay of material conditions here in the United Kingdom. Retrotemporal, somewhat melancholy dreams of exploring the text in my childhood home, whether on the sofa or Internet Explorer, have reduced my inflammation. Though the most precise and perfect sequence of explanatory words evades me, I will end by confiding that I believe quite strongly in the existence of some relation between questing at an unsolvable mystery, returning to past events in one’s mind, and contemplation of the void that waits for us. It is all, in some sense, a desire to return to the source. To catch a glimpse is to be haunted forever.