by Heide Goody
Perhaps Theo picked a painting from the galleries above at random. Perhaps he went for one that he thought was inoffensive and harmless. The painting in question looked as if it had once been an altarpiece and featured a pair of winged cherubs gazing down over a garden. The right-hand cherub erupted from the painting, like a bubble bursting from water, and swooped across the ceiling like a seriously oversized moth.
It turned in the corner and briefly regarded the crowd below, who gasped and shouted in shock (although, you know, I think there was still a proportion of the crowd who thought this was all part of the show and was probably achieved with holograms or something). Anyway, you know that fine line between the face of a healthy, plump baby and a fat, grumpy old man? Well, this cherub definitely came down on the side of the fat grumpy old man. It regarded us with its mean piggy eyes and flew down low, skimming the tops of our heads and making several people shriek in panic. When it reached the opposite wall, a sinister grin crossed its face and it reached behind. It pulled out a bow and arrow. I understood what it was.
“It’s Cupid!” I yelled.
“Eros, Lori. It’s Eros. See, Dad?”
“What?” said James, turning.
And then Theo swept out his arm to point. I wasn’t sure whether it was fear or excitement, but he seemed to have forgotten that he still held the pendant in his hand. As the pointing finger moved across the room, tracking the flight path of Eros, he took in any number of paintings both in the lower hall and the gallery level above.
There was no time to register what else might be coming to life, as Eros had nocked an arrow and now seemed to be selecting a target as he dive-bombed the crowd with his loaded bow, grinning malevolently.
Old-Lori was not a connoisseur of art – not the fusty old oils and watercolours this place held – but clean a frame and an information plaque often enough and something is bound to sink in. That’s how I knew that the fine figure dropping out of his painting on winged sandals was Perseus and if he’d stepped out of Burne-Jones’ The Doom Fulfilled then he was the least of our worries. The vast black coils of a monstrous serpent looped down from the painting and dropped to the floor. Nobody had seen the threat as it looked more like some sort of industrial vacuum cleaner pipe until you saw its face. The head reared up and snapped at the crowd like a demon fish with an attitude problem. Any residual belief that all this was a magnificent, hi-tech, post-modern skit to draw kids to this particular uni vanished at the sight of that fishy monster.
People surged for the door. Brochures were tossed aside. Complimentary muffins were discarded and trodden underfoot. Chairs were tripped over and everyone generally got in everyone else’s way. The police weren’t much help but, in their defence, I don’t suppose they had the training for this. Nonetheless, they had kind of forgotten about me and dropped me like so much trash on the floor.
I found my feet and stumbled, handcuffed, into James.
“Come on, we need to get out of here.”
“Serpent…” mumbled James, agog.
“Yes,” I said.
“I told you,” said Theo, wide-eyed at the destruction he had wrought.
More paintings were coming to life. A giant cabbage plopped out of a still life. Any other time, I would have stopped to stare at a cabbage the size of a small car, but I was distracted by the other things that were bursting into life. Across a mass of confusion, I saw Cookie waving at me as she drew my parents up a flight of stairs to safety. I hoped my parents didn’t think this was a regular day in the new life I had forged for myself. I mean, it was kind of par for the course but not exactly regular.
Constable Stokes apparently decided that it would be a good idea to Taser Burne-Jones’ serpent. He was wrong. It was a spectacularly bad idea.
As the Taser crackled, the serpent reared high and dove down, massive coils and all, onto the stage.
“Cetus!” yelled Theo (which I assumed was some sort of slang).
James grabbed Theo and ran one way. I grabbed Theo and ran the other. I don’t know which of us would have won. The stage flew apart. Something – I think it was the podium – smacked me in the face and something else, possibly a serpent tail, whipped my legs from under me. Giddy, I stumbled away and found myself in a corner by the stairs with Theo and the smashed remains of the podium.
“Where’s your dad?” I said.
“Satyrs!” he shouted.
I had no idea what that meant. Then I saw several handsome creatures jumping out of a painting of a forest: from the waist up, they looked like muscular acrobats in Cirque du Soleil but from the waist down they were hairy goats. They swaggered toward us, seemingly not bothered by flying arrows or snapping serpents.
“Oh, Mr Tumble from Narnia,” I said.
“Satyrs. Greek fertility spirits,” said Theo.
The lead goat-man noticed me staring and winked at me. I rolled my eyes.
“Of course they are,” I said.
Some of them turned their lecherous attention on Bernadette – fish-slapped and tossed about, she did look a mess – and seemed very much intent on getting her to dance to their panpipes and drink wine with them. Even I felt sorry for her; no one should ever be forced to hear panpipes. It’s like a basic human right.
“Lori!”
I looked across at James’ shout. He was on the far side of the smashed stage, at the bottom of the stairs to the first floor galleries.
“The Return of Neptune!” he yelled, pointing.
I didn’t understand at first – Neptune might be returning; it was clearly a great big artistic character reunion today – but then I saw. The painting above the main entrance was one of the museum’s big canvas works, probably by some bloke who had a lot to compensate for. It was like a big still from The Little Mermaid but without Flounder and Sebastian and the other cartoon sea creatures. What it did have, apart from Ariel’s, was the sea. A lot of sea.
The canvas bulged.
On the ground floor, scores of people had fought their way to the doors and out into the university grounds, but there were still stragglers: police officers, the incurably stunned, a solid knot of loyal but misguided snowflakes who were still chanting.
I grabbed the microphone from the ruined podium and yelled.
“GET TO HIGHER GROUND!”
And then the canvas burst and Theo and I were running up the stairs. Neptune, riding a shell drawn by weird horses surged forward on a huge torrent of water. Chairs, coppers, students, satyrs and giant vegetables were swept together by the sea.
The foamy waters crashed off the stairs and then began to rise.
“This is going to be hell to clean up,” I said and then, remembering that I’d been fired and it wouldn’t be me doing the cleaning, I cheered up enormously.
“Dad!” Theo shouted.
On the far stairs, across the flooded hall, James was trapped. The hateful Burne-Jones serpent had coiled around his legs in the rising waters.
“Stay here!” I told Theo and ran round the length of the gallery to get to James. On the way, I had to bypass an angry tiger and a band of sword-wangling Arabian warriors. I think the tiger was angry because he’d clearly been painted by someone who’d never seen a tiger before. The tiger and the warriors were keeping each other occupied so all I had to do was run close to the balustrade and I was past them.
James clawed at the stairs and tried to pull himself away from the slippery monster. I came round to the top of the stairs, snatched a sword off a Pre-Raphaelite knight who was looking all moony and lovelorn and inexpertly hacked at the serpent coils. I’m no swordswoman but it was good enough. Hand in hand, we stumbled up the stairs.
I risked one glance back at the serpent to see that it was now distracted by a trio of satyrs arriving on a giant floating cabbage leaf. They were lewdly waggling their man-bits at the beast and would probably soon be regretting that.
From another gallery hall came the sound of explosions. Cannon fire?
“Oh, God. It’s all gone
a bit wrong, hasn’t it?” I said.
“Understatement,” said James. “Where’s Theo?”
“This way,” I said and pulled him along the corridor.
We passed where the tiger and Arabian warriors had been. They had all gone. That wasn’t very comforting. There’s something decidedly unnerving about being where a wild tiger has been, knowing that it was now somewhere else, anywhere else…
Theo was not where I had left him. Oh, hell! The tiger!
“Psst.”
Theo waved at us from a dark side corridor. We hurried over.
“I had to hide,” he explained. “There was this tiger…”
“Yes. Clever lad,” said James.
“No, Dad. When the tiger came, I brought the lions from the arena to life to fight it.”
“Ah.”
“And then after the lions killed the tiger, I had to do something else.”
“You brought another picture to life?”
He nodded. There was distant roar and a flash of light along a far corridor.
“It was only one dragon,” he said.
I clicked my fingers. “Pendant. Now, young man.”
He handed it over gladly. I was still handcuffed so could do little with it except hold it tightly in my two hands.
“Don’t worry, Lori,” said Theo. “I dealt with the dragon.”
“Oh?” said James.
He nodded. “There was this big painting of Nelson’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar.”
Cannons boomed, stone cracked and dust drifted down from the ceiling. A great winged shadow passed overhead.
“It’s in the process of being dealt with. This way,” said Theo and beckoned us along the corridor.
I frowned. “I only left you for two minutes – one minute even. And you did all that?”
“It all escalated kind of quickly,” agreed Theo.
To my relief, the chaotic noises faded away behind us as we walked. We didn’t speak for a while, aware of the silence, which was in stark contrast to the utter bedlam we’d left behind.
We walked for a while down the tunnel and I could see that the white stone passageway branched up ahead.
Stone passageway?
“Er, I don’t recognise this bit of the museum,” said James.
“Nor do I,” I whispered. I wasn’t all that sure why I was whispering. There was something unsettling about this place.
James touched the wall. “It’s damp, like an underground tunnel, but that just isn’t possible.”
I picked up a nub of chalky stone and considered it. Perhaps I was more accustomed to the impossible than he was.
“They remind me of the tunnels in Crete, near Gortyn,” he mused.
“Yeah, about that,” said Theo.
We both looked at him.
“Oh,” said James. He sounded as if he’d had a penny-dropping moment.
“What?”
“We’re in a painting, aren’t we?” said James.
“Yes,” said Theo.
“The labyrinth?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, fair enough,” I said, looking round. “So we’re in a labyrinth.”
“No,” said Theo. “We’re in the labyrinth. The one that comes with a minotaur.”
I knew this. I did. “Minotaur. Part man? Part, um, something –”
“It’s a man with the head of a bull.”
“Marvellous.”
Chapter 41
We trudged through the labyrinth, looking for an exit and hoping to avoid any cow-men who might be in residence.
“How are we going to fix all this?” said James, not for the first time.
“We bring something else to life to take care of Nelson’s fleet and the dragon?” suggested Theo.
“No. No, we’re not going to do that.”
“Well,” I said in maybe a slightly mocking tone, “I remember a certain someone telling me that Greek myths tell us about all human experience or something, lay out the big problems so we can examine them.”
“He might have done,” said James.
“So, what would Greek myths tell us about this situation?”
Theo had a thoughtful face. “If this was a Greek myth things would just get worse and worse and worse and then Zeus would appear and he would fix everything.”
“Ah, yes, the original Deus Ex Machina,” said James.
“Sex makky what?” I said.
“God from the machine,” translated James. “It’s a plot device, which lazy or inept writers use to wrap up a story when they’ve made too much of a mess of it. You see it in all the worst books and movies these days but it was good old Aeschylus, or possibly dear Euripides, who invented it. Zeus appears and magics everything back to normal with his thunderbolt.”
I tutted. “There’s never a Zeus around when you need one.”
“Listen,” said James as we continued down a longish section of tunnel, “I wanted to apologise properly, Lori. Theo’s told me how he came to be in the back of a lorry that drove off, and that it wasn’t your fault. I know that everything you did was trying to help.”
“I do try,” I said.
“I know. Sometimes I don’t understand the things you do. If there’s a mad choice or a normal choice, you always seem to take the mad one, but you always do it for the very best reasons, and I’ve treated you badly. I’m sorry.”
I kissed him quickly on the lips as a thank you.
“Ew, you two,” said Theo, disgusted.
“You’ve seen worse,” said James.
“And read worse in your myth books,” I added. “I still can’t get over that bit about the Minoan queen who had them build her a wooden cow thing so she could have… intimate relations with a bull.”
“Minotaur,” said Theo.
“Oh, I thought she did it with a bull and gave birth to –”
“Minotaur.”
“That’s right. She –”
“Minotaur!”
He was pointing. And he was right. A hairy brute with an ugly misshapen head was coming down the passageway towards us. It was massive, a hulking lump of walking, sweating muscle, approaching with all the menace of a back-alley mugger.
“When you said a man with a bull’s head, you never mentioned that it would be a giant man,” I said to James as we backed away.
“The classical texts are light on specifics,” said James. “Get behind me, Theo.”
The minotaur snorted and lowed menacingly.
“Should we run for it?” said Theo.
“Maybe it’s bad to run away from a minotaur,” I suggested. “Maybe you’re supposed to play dead or try to look menacing instead?”
“Again...” whispered James, hoarse with fear. “Classics. Light on specifics.”
Wet nostrils flared angrily. Fists clenched, ready to pummel and throttle. Was that dried blood on the tips of his horns? Was I going to be killed by a painting? I’m not sure if I was the kind of person who wanted to die for their art.
“The minotaur was born in darkness,” said Theo, in the hollow voice of a boy terrified to his bones. “It’s known nothing but the maze and the blood of its victims.”
I gazed into the beast’s coal-black eyes and wondered what a creature like that wants. And then it hit me.
“Chorley Danglespear!” I shouted.
“Swearing won’t help,” said James.
I turned to the wall and scratched at it with the chalk in my hand. The minotaur was seconds away but a true artist can create with just a few lines. I stepped back and pointed with the hand holding the pendant.
A fistful of wet luscious grass popped into existence and then into my hand. The minotaur was mentally thrown by this magic. It stopped its approach and sniffed the air. It sniffed the air again and realised that a delicious smell was coming from the clump of grass. I held out my hands and closed my eyes. This would, I thought unhelpfully, be the worst way for an artist to lose her hands, bitten off by a mythical monster.
A wet nose tickled my palms. I opened my eyes a peek. The minotaur nibbled tentatively at a few blades of grass.
“Like it, huh?” I said.
Moments later it was chomping happily and making a small crooning sound.
“Cows eat grass,” I told James informatively.
“Yes, they do,” agreed James warily.
James and I glanced warily at each other. It felt as though we could afford to breathe again. The minotaur looked up at us, and his face had softened so that it was almost friendly. It nuzzled my arm, its terrifying horns dangerously close to my face.
“You want some more?”
I drew more grass on the wall. It was just some lines but I knew it was grass – artistically, it was grass – and so it became grass, a big bundle of it.
“Fill your boots, mate,” I said and the minotaur chomped down on it. While the minotaur was eating his fill, I turned to face James and Theo.
“... and breathe! The minotaur is tamed. All we have to do is get out of here now.”
“I bet the minotaur knows the way out,” said Theo.
He had a point. The minotaur scoffed the last of the grass and even licked my hands clean with its sloppy tongue.
“Good boy!” I said. “Clean plate.”
And then I looked at my hands. They were empty. Entirely empty. “Ah.”
“Problem?” said James.
“Don’t know,” I said. “It’s eaten the pendant.”
“Mr Minotaur,” said Theo, “can you show us the way out?”
He didn’t seem to understand. He was from ancient Greece and probably didn’t understand English. Fortunately, I had recently returned from Crete and knew just what to do.
“Mr Mino-taur,” I said in very slow and over-enunciated English and made little finger horns on my head. “Can you.” I pointed at him. “Show us.” I did a little searching and exploring mime. “The way out.” I opened a pretend door. “Por favor s’il vous plait.”
The Reynolds boys stared at me.
“Does that ever work?” said James.
The minotaur snorted and set off down the corridor and then turned to make sure we were following.
It took a little while and there were more twists and turns than I would have imagined possible but we eventually came to a rectangle of daylight and the upper gallery of the museum exhibition hall. Looking at it now, it was very obvious that we’d stepped over a border when we came into the painting and now all we had to do to get out was to step back into the world.