And the exit was an entrance.
He closed the book. The visions stopped. The labyrinth was gone.
He became obsessed. He stopped teaching. He sold his amp for a tube practice head. He learned “King of Kings”—the arpeggios like crumbling pillars. “While Christmas Dies”—slow, mournful bends that felt like tears on a fretboard. Each song, a turn deeper. Each silence, a step forward. Vinnie Moore The Maze Songbook
He smiled. He had finally found the exit.
The visions grew longer. The stone labyrinth. No sky, just a soft, guitar-amp glow from somewhere above. He heard music there—not his playing, but the potential of it. Melodies that decayed before he could name them. Rhythms that existed in the gaps between heartbeats. And the exit was an entrance
He didn’t play the reprise. He put the guitar down. He picked up a pen. And in the empty staff paper at the back of the songbook, in the space where “The Maze (Reprise)” should have ended, he wrote a single, held whole note. Not a pitch. A duration. A silence of his own making.
“For those who get lost: the notes are the walls. The silence is the path. Play the rests twice as hard as the riffs. – V.M.” The labyrinth was gone
It wasn’t a book. Not really. To Leo, it was a door.