Beth lay still, her entire lower body on fire. Her wildest fantasies were coming true today, and she felt her grasp on reality start to slip. Closing her eyes, she enjoyed the afterglow.
Beneath the rocks, Abella grunted.
“Oh shit.” Standing on wobbly legs, Beth found her panties and her pants and slid them back on.
Asterion stood naked next to her until Beth handed him his loincloth.
“Abella? Are you okay?” Beth was worried that the gargoyle had gone silent. She knelt by the gap in the stones.
“Uh…yeah.” Abella’s face appeared in the hole. Her face was darker than normal. “I was, uh, just having trouble with my tail. It got stuck.”
“You have a tail?” Beth asked. “That’s so cool! Shit, I’m sorry, Asterion, could you please help me with these blocks?”
Asterion was now beside her, and he casually lifted the large stone blocks off the pile. His muscles bulged lifting some of the larger pieces, and Beth patted them appreciatively. The small pile seemed to move on its own, and Abella rose, the heavy stones falling around her. She stretched her arms to the sky, her wings unfolding behind her back. Beth saw that the stone webbing had torn in multiple places beneath the rubble, and Abella’s body had dark flaws across it, cracks in the stone that glistened with dark fluids.
“Thank you, Asterion.” Abella bowed her head at the Minotaur, who now contemplated her.
“Are we friends too?” Asterion asked.
“Yes, but not in the same way as you are with Beth. I prefer men who are a bit smoother,” she told him, rubbing her shoulders. Her stone breasts rippled, tiny chunks of debris falling off her. “Thank you for freeing me.”
“You are welcome.” Asterion smiled.
“So we can go now?” Abella asked.
“Hmm.” Asterion frowned.
Beth smiled patiently while Abella rolled her eyes.
Asterion knelt to retrieve his ax, then held it casually over his shoulder. “We must go to see the lady. If you want to leave the Labyrinth, you need her permission.”
Abella swore under her breath, but Beth patted Asterion on the arm. “That sounds like a great plan. Lead the way, friend.”
Asterion beamed at Beth, then led them out of the room of stone columns.
CAUGHT IN THE TRAP
Water flowed through a crack in the wall. Mike could hear the river on the other side. Placing his hands against the hard stone, he could feel the vibrations through it. Cupping his hands, he collected a mouthful of water and drank it. It was cold, with a slight metallic taste, but Cerulea had informed him that it was safe to drink.
“Is it good?” Cerulea asked from her perch on his shoulder.
“It tastes like water,” Mike responded, then sucked down a huge mouthful. Wiping his mouth, he turned away from the wall. Cerulea had led him away from where the fairies had found him, citing safety concerns about the potential arrival of the Minotaur. The river acted as a natural barrier, but the fairy had informed him there was a single bridge that the Minotaur could cross if it needed to.
In the distance, Mike heard the Minotaur cry out. It sounded different from earlier, but Mike was no expert on monster shouts. If he had to venture a guess, it sounded like the Minotaur had found a bag of gold or a shiny new ax.
“Lucky boy,” he muttered to himself, wondering what had made the beast so happy.
“What?” Cerulea asked.
“Oh. Nothing. Thinking out loud.” He contemplated the paths before him. There were three, and each one looked equally suspicious. Cerulea had informed him that they were in the inner circle in relation to the river and that the passageways had been booby-trapped. They had only walked for about ten minutes, and she had pointed out at least three traps that Mike could have triggered that would have killed him.
Mike leaned against a dry section of the wall, closing his eyes and letting the rhythmic vibrations of the river lull him into a meditative state. His clothes, dried with fairy magic, still retained a mystical warmth.
He had asked Cerulea about the traps. The Labyrinth wasn’t just a random maze, he had informed her, and the fact that someone would put in a giant maze with killer traps and a Minotaur meant that it must have a secret or a treasure worth protecting. She had shrugged away his answers, being deliberately evasive. She also wouldn’t speak to the fact that she and the others were trapped, which was also a piece of the puzzle.
Why would a maze be designed to keep people out but then never let them leave? His eyes closed, he sank deeper into a state of relaxation, tiny lights flickering behind his eyelids.
The world of darkness receded, chased away by glowing beams of light streaming through his windows. He walked through his house, humming a song to himself that he didn’t recognize. A large table had been set up in the family room, with an equally large game board.
“Every room has its purpose, every monster has its place,” he sang out loud, but it wasn’t his voice. It was Emily’s, but that wasn’t quite right either. It almost sounded like Emily’s voice mixed with Naia’s. The game board in front of him reminded him of Clue—it was a layout of his house. On the board, several pieces were scattered through the house. He picked up a sultry figurine that was standing in the fountain, immediately identifying Naia. Setting it back down, he then picked up another one on the front porch. This one was Cecilia. Even Lily was there, her figurine currently in the backyard with Naia and Zel.
There were other pieces on the board, pieces he didn’t recognize. When he held them up, they were blurry and he was unable to see any detail. Frowning, he stared at the board. Where was the Labyrinth?
He touched the spare bedroom, tracing his fingers over to the closet. The board shimmered and unfolded another section, revealing the enormous structure somehow in the walls of his house. The pieces were on the board, standing in various locations. He found his own piece, picking it up to inspect it. Setting himself back down, he spotted the Minotaur with a couple of other pieces.
Beth and Abella. Fuck. He set these back down. He saw the other fairies, their figures very tiny, and even Sofia. Her miniature scowled at him somehow. In the center of the Labyrinth was a pair of figurines. One was Tink, but the other one was blurry. Holding the piece in his hands, he tried to identify it by feel.
“Mike!”
His eyes snapped open, and he stood up. Had that been a dream or a vision?
Olivia was hovering in front of him, glitter shedding off her wings.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I found one of your friends. She needs your help.”
“Who did you find?”
“The one with one eye.” Olivia’s face twisted up. “She is really mad.”
“Is she okay?”
“For now.” She turned into a ball of light. “Follow, follow!” She whizzed away, then stopped at the entrance to the corridor on the right. Mike followed close behind, Cerulea sitting on his shoulder. Olivia moved at a pace consistent with a fast walk—she was easy to keep up with but would zip farther ahead if Mike tried to catch up.
Mike was already lost, and Olivia led him through a series of twists and turns that made it so that he knew he wouldn’t be able to find his way back to the river. He looked up, marveling at how his brain couldn’t even identify a landmark in the dark ceiling.
An icy void blossomed in his belly, and he froze, his magic telling him he was in danger but not what from.
“Duck!” Cerulea shrieked in his ear.
Mike threw himself flat, and a large stone on a rope swung where his head had been. He was going to stand up when he heard the creaking of a second rope. Crouching, he moved forward, and the second rock crashed into the first one. His ears rang, and the pile of rubble buried the passageway behind him under a few feet of stone.
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
“You’re telli
ng me.” Cerulea squeezed out from under his collar, where he had crushed her. Her chitinous shell readjusted itself, her wings tucking back beneath it. She smoothed out her antenna and rubbed her left shoulder.
“Sorry.” Mike stood. “I’m glad you saw it in time.”
“Part of that is thanks to you,” she said, her antenna twitching playfully. “My senses haven’t been this sharp in years!”
“Have you guys really been stuck here that long?” Mike asked.
“A woman named Emily banished us to the Labyrinth over a misunderstanding. She thought we did a bad thing and told us we could live here or leave the house.”
“And you chose to live here?” Mike looked around. “Why not go be free?”
“Fairies like us are almost extinct, you know.” Mike had started walking again, and Cerulea spoke softly into his ear from her perch on his shoulder. “The human world isn’t as friendly as it used to be. Our fields and forests got torn up, and fairies learned long ago never to trust humans.”
“You trusted me,” Mike pointed out.
She shrugged. “We had been down here for quite some time and figured if you weren’t the Caretaker, then something had happened to the house. We could smell Naia’s magic coming off you.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “It also didn’t help that we were all so horny.”
“Well, if we get out of here, we can discuss your current living arrangement. I want to hear more about this ‘bad thing’ some time.”
“Step around that,” Cerulea told him, pointing at the floor.
Mike knelt, finally seeing the seam in the stone from up close. He was able to scoot by easily, wondering what sort of trap that would have set off. He continued walking and noticed the trap frequency had increased dramatically. “I have no idea how the others made it through here.”
“They didn’t come this way,” Olivia told him from up ahead. “This is a shortcut, so the number of traps is really high.”
“A shortcut to where?” Neither of the fairies answered.
Their pace slowed dramatically with the appearance of trip wires and pitfalls painted to look just like an ordinary floor. Mike nearly fell in one of these, but a quick-thinking Olivia bounced herself off his chest hard enough that he tipped back onto the path instead of falling. The way forward was perilous, and Mike moved only a few steps at a time at the fairy’s insistence. It had been a long time since the Minotaur had called out, which made him nervous. If he were to come across the beast now, it would become a battle of luck as he ran away.
“Whoa.” They came to a three-way intersection, and Mike stopped to survey the other two paths. Whoever had come through here before him had set off several traps down the other corridors. Spikes from the ground and wall were evident everywhere, and a few piles of rock could be seen in the distance. He followed Olivia, who was moving a bit faster now.
“Most of the traps have been sprung already,” she told him. “Except for a couple of the nastier ones, so watch your step.”
“What could be nastier than spikes?” Mike wondered aloud.
To answer him, Olivia flew ahead and grabbed onto a small wire near the floor, pulling it backward. Jets of fire filled the hallway for several yards. The whole area became hot enough that he broke into a sweat.
“You made your point,” he announced.
Olivia’s twinkling light hovered by his face, doing lazy figure eights.
“The fire jets are the worst,” Cerulea told him. “Even if you trip the trap, you can’t get out of the way. There’s one part of the Labyrinth where there aren’t any traps except for that one. It’s a giant pressure plate that takes up the whole floor for about ten feet, so you can’t avoid it. It scorches everything for a couple hundred feet in either direction.”
“It pisses off the Minotaur when it goes off,” Olivia added with a smile. “It leaves scorch marks that he has to remove, otherwise people will realize that the trap is there.”
“How often do you guys set that one off?” Mike asked.
“About once a year.” Cerulea giggled. “Then we all jump out when he shows and yell, ‘Happy Birthday!’”
Mike laughed. “You three are a riot.”
“It passes the time,” Olivia said. “Especially because she won’t let us leave.”
“She who? Emily?” Again, silence from both of them. “Why won’t you tell me who is running the Labyrinth?”
“Because we can’t,” Cerulea whispered. “It’s part of the Labyrinth’s magic.”
“I don’t understand why it matters who runs the Labyrinth,” Mike said.
“She doesn’t want people to know she is here,” Cerulea said. “She’s protecting something important. It’s why she is down here.”
Mike mulled over the possibilities. “Is the Labyrinth separate from the house or an extension of it?” he asked, thinking about the vision he’d had.
“We don’t know,” Olivia told him.
“We ended up at the house by accident,” Cerulea added. “We don’t know anything about it. Emily let us stay because she liked how we sparkled.”
“But she changed.”
“And it wasn’t a good change.”
“After the thing with Garrett?” Mike asked. “The guy who attacked the house.”
“No.” All the sparkle had gone out of Cerulea’s voice. “She changed way after.”
“What happened?”
The fairies were quiet. Mike was about to ask again, but they turned a corner, entering a chamber full of columns covered in thick, leafy vines. In the middle of the room, something large hung from the ceiling, vines wrapped around a figure that slowly spun in place. The creature rotated slowly until her face came into view. Her eye narrowed when she saw him.
“It’s about fucking time,” Sofia said.
Dana looked at herself in the mirror. She felt the same, or at least she thought she did. Touching the ceramic sink below the mirror, she realized that she couldn’t tell if it was hot or cold. This had been true of everything else she had encountered so far, a strange numbness that only applied to temperature.
Her sense of touch had been muted, but her sense of smell had received a boost. Even now, she could smell the corpse of her landlady in the basement and Daryl’s breath in her bedroom. Daryl the necromancer had let her out of the basement to roam about, announcing that he intended to take a nap. He had warned Dana that any attempt to flee would permanently ruin her chances of returning to the afterlife, and he would do worse things to her if he ever caught her.
His driver stood guard in the driveway. He had motor oil on his jacket from retrieving her broken bike and casually throwing it in the garage.
She didn’t know what to do or think. Her emotions were similar to what she’d felt sitting through Alex’s funeral. She knew they were there, but they were being tossed into the void quicker than she could feel them. Wandering from room to room, she thought about what Daryl had told her.
Mike apparently had something that Daryl wanted. All Dana had to do was go in his house and either get Mike to let Daryl in or figure out what Mike was hiding and bring it to Daryl. She had asked what it was he was looking for, but Daryl informed her that she would know it when she saw it. He had also tasked her with creating a cover story, a reason for showing up unannounced. No matter what else she had asked him, he either shrugged or changed the subject, refusing to offer her any additional help.
“Lazy fucker,” she muttered under her breath. Not only had he killed her, but now she was expected to do all the work. This was just like every group project ever in college.
Wandering through the house, she found herself stopping at the door to look at the back of the driver. He somehow made standing guard look casual, and the few neighbors who passed by didn’t seem to notice.
Dana let herself out, then crossed over to the garage. She stepped int
o her home, wondering if it was the last time she would ever do so. Was it even her home now? After all, she was dead.
She walked to her toolbox and searched for the box cutter she kept there as a memento from a failed job stocking boxes at night. With a little digging, she found it. Moving quickly, she slashed the back of her forearm, digging the blade in deep.
Nothing happened. She didn’t even bleed, and it didn’t hurt. She had wondered if Daryl had simply drugged her, but now she was left with a nasty-looking wound on her left arm and the realization that she really was a zombie.
“Fuck,” she muttered, storming up the stairs to her room. It wasn’t until she was upstairs that she realized that the motorcycle on the garage floor was missing its motor. Leaning over the railing, she surveyed the mess below.
Behind her, the clock chimed. She walked toward where it sat on her bed and looked down at it.
“What?” she spat. “What the fuck do you want?”
The clock was silent. Frustrated, she stood and looked out the window to see if the zombie goon had heard it and was coming inside. Mr. Tall and Stupid remained at his post, surveying the street. When Dana turned back around, the clock was gone. Instead, a large, ornate typewriter had appeared on her desk.
“Yeah, sure, this helps me,” she muttered, standing up and staring at it. “So are you an autobot or a decepticon?”
The typewriter dinged at her, shifting back and forth. A few keys hammered the blank roller, and Dana sighed. She pulled a piece of notebook paper from under her desk and stuck it in the back of the roller. Immediately, the typewriter spooled itself, pulling the paper through.
“You’re a magic clock that can’t even provide its own paper,” Dana muttered. “I don’t suppose you can bring me back to life?”
The paper had finished spooling, and two keys hammered against the paper. She didn’t have to lift it free to read it.
No
“Oh, great. Awesome.”
The typewriter moved again. In the back of her mind, she felt like she should feel surprise or shock seeing such an event, but she just couldn’t be bothered to care. She didn’t know how much of that was being a zombie and how much of it was being denied an eternity with Alex.
Radley's Labyrinth for Horny Monsters Page 24