by Rich Horton
Me and her, we met not once but twice. The second time was in a hospital, and the EMT that brought me in told me she was still there when I was wheeled in.
“You’re gonna be alright, darlin’,” the EMT said again as they pushed my gurney in through the hospital doors. At least I thought that’s what they were doing, the gauze was so thick over where my eyes used to be; it was difficult to tell.
“What do we have here?” Another voice, walking toward me and the EMTs pushing my gurney, a doctor I thought.
“Twenty-four year-old male, severe trauma to both eyes. Sheriff called it in, found him lying by the house, no one else there, so it’s possible he was passed out, but when we got there, he was awake.”
“You found him at the house. Just like that girl?” the doc and my EMT were both saying it not like a place, the house, but like a dark rumor, a monster to be feared, a story outlined in just two words: The House.
“What about the girl?” I asked. There was a pause full of silence as if they had forgotten that my ears were still working just fine.
“She’s still here, darlin’, getting better. Same as you will.” Bless that EMT’s heart. I can only imagine the piercing stare that little piece of information earned her from the doc, either for telling me about another patient or for suggesting I would heal and be the way I had been. I am not as I had been before, not by a long shot.
But back to Labyrinth. Labyrinth and I first met in a field of red poppies, so wide it nipped at the horizon, so red it looked like a giant had been slain there and bled for every drop. I say a field of poppies, but it wasn’t really a real place like Grand Central Station or the big old oak in my daddy’s front yard. The field of poppies was a scene in a dream we dreamed together, Labyrinth and I, and who knows who else.
Before the dream and the poppies and the dark in the hospital, there was a letter. For me, it all started with a letter. And it wasn’t even meant for me.
• • •
There is a lone girl outside your door, it is Inanna, your sister-self. She has waited so long to meet you. She has been with you forever.
Labyrinth woke up, but it was the waking up out of a late afternoon nap in summer. Instead of feeling refreshed, she just felt groggy, drained. Of course it wasn’t summer, and of course this was not afternoon. It was morning, a sunny one actually, and the grogginess was just what the house always did to Labyrinth, weighing her down with all its age and its dust, mocking her with secrets and unknowable things and hidden things; Labyrinth hated the house.
Labyrinth was in her teens and so she felt that it was probably alright to say that she hated everything and everyone, especially the house. That’s just the way it is with a teenage tongue, it doesn’t even know the lies it speaks itself.
Floorboards were squeaking, outside her door; the stairs, Labyrinth thought, squealing like pigs smelling slaughter. The sound jerked her wide awake, but she still took a look around her room to make sure this was not a dream, the cool lavender and blue wallpaper meeting the dark wainscoting, the cold wooden floor, the pale lilac curtains that hung in front of the windows like icicles. Even the bed felt more like a glacier grown around her, no matter that it might keep her body warm; she was the girl caught in ice, the frozen girl.
Labyrinth hugged herself, tried to hide under the cold covers, hoping that the footsteps wouldn’t reach her.
But they did grow louder, came closer, stopped in front of her door like they always did—not hesitant, just to turn the knob.
“Good morning, Sleepy. You up?”
When she had first come here, come home as it was, she was told that Simon was her older brother. She hadn’t known she had one, her mother had never told Labyrinth, had always insisted that they live in the here and now. Don’t think about the past, little bird, her mother would say, would say it till the end, prayer-like.
Labyrinth remembered sometimes how she thought Simon was a weird boy, not mean or inconsiderate, just weird, the way his blue eyes would keep looking at her, never look away, even if she caught him looking. He was a good talker, too, able to make her laugh, able to keep her interested with his stories of a part of her own family she had never known before. Labyrinth wasn’t quite sure how it happened, that first month or so after her mom’s death. It might have been a warm summer afternoon and she might have fallen asleep on her bed, the warmth forcing her lids closed and slowing her breath. Did I wake you? he had said, or had that been a dream?
Don’t think about the past.
Funny enough, she never thought of Simon as being even the least bit cold when he was with her, not then, not ever. That first time, she cried, but somehow it was like they both cried together, and the house around them was like a desert, sucking up all sound as if it were water spilled on the sand.
• • •
I like to think of Labyrinth as part minotaur. Naturally, she isn’t, there are no such creatures as minotaurs or griffins or monsters living under your bed. When I mentioned before that I was in a hospital just like her, don’t think it was the kind of hospital where fairy tales live in people’s heads and where pills are handed out like candy. I was just there for, well, I like to think of it as a negligible flesh wound, really quite manageable.
Labyrinth, though. Back in the field of poppies where I first met her, I saw her back, she was looking away from me, just standing there, and it was like there were the shadows of antlers on the sides of her head, not even the horns of a bull, antlers like a deer, wide and majestic. When she turned, they were gone. But the picture I have of her deep inside of me on the mantelpiece of my heart is a picture of her with antlers and her head held high and straight as if all the bone weighed nothing, not a thing.
“I don’t think you should be here,” she said with a tingling dream voice. I remember it clearly, unlike one remembers dreams.
“No. But I am here because I want to be, and why shouldn’t I?”
“Because you,” she said, stabbing her right index finger at the dream air between her and me, “are the Hermit, and the Hermit doesn’t come here.”
You know, I was about to say something back to her, but she wouldn’t let me finish. She flicked her wrist, and sure as sunrise, I was kicked out of the dream and woke up again, breath still in me and sand clinging to my eyes.
When I lay there on crisp white sheets, after the poppy field dream, I thought how funny it was that I had fallen asleep some time back in the college library, too. The book I had been using as my pillow was a big heavy thing, old looking, and you know how it is sleeping on books, they sometimes do get stuck to your face a little, just enough to lift the cover up a tiny bit and expose their innermost.
And yeah, that is how and where I found the letter, and how that whole story-thing got started.
• • •
The first gate demands this price. You must pay, Inanna, to keep your voice in the Underworld.
Labyrinth could never shake the feeling of being orphaned in the sense of being all alone in the world. She did know that she had a father with hair white as winter, and a brother with hair like a boundless field of ripe grain, but some truths are unknowable to the heart, and some truths the heart knows are inexplicable to the brain.
You must call me ‘father,’ the dark, wintry haired man had insisted. And still, their father was too absent to earn that title, either buried for hours on end in his own private library, which was not the Big Library that was open to everyone, but a forbidden place that not even the staff were allowed to venture into, not even for cleaning or airing. And when their father wasn’t in with his books, he was out in the world, ‘traveling on business,’ whatever that business might be.
And so it was that Labyrinth and the house became friends, with time. It was not a warm friendship, the house was unwarm, that was just part of its character, but it was a friendship of two beings who were alike, cool and dark and with places unvisited by others. They both knew what it was like to have ravens living within them, and it c
onnected them, unbreakably.
It began with the sound of wood, Labyrinth’s knuckle bones striking the ebony banister, and the house echoing back, softly.
“Huh?” said the lone girl that first time, unsure of what she had heard coming from the wood. And the house echoed back.
Eventually, they developed a sort of Morse code, an intimate thing just between the two of them . . . not to tell the white man. the house would warn Labyrinth.
“How would I tell him? Even if and when he deigns to sit down for dinner with us, he barely speaks. He never listens, that’s for sure.”
The house responded with a kind of comforting chirp, a soft warmth spreading through the floorboard Labyrinth’s hand rested on.
• • •
Alone under her blanket, Simon’s sweaty arm lying on her belly, Labyrinth found she envied the house. It was not the kind of envy that blossoms into hate and hurtful actions, but “you can keep your cold all to yourself,” she would tell the house. “I sometimes feel like I’m stranded in his arms, you know, a beached ice whale. His heart is so much like a furnace.”
The house, in a complicated response, rattled window glass and made its wooden parts churn. How it understood the girl. There was a bliss in cool solitude, but the house had her. The house had her now.
“Right,” Labyrinth said and brushed her forehead against the banister. “We share our cold with each other, and we don’t take any from the other.”
The house agreed that this was well-put and indeed true.
Labyrinth wondered silently where her brother got all his warmth. And why she had none.
• • •
I wish I still had the letter, the one I found in the book in the library. If I did, I would read it to you—but I couldn’t, could I, without eyes to see the words on paper, and . . . well, truth be told, I’m not sure what reading it would do in any case. It’s a sad little letter, but that comes as no surprise. It’s addressed to a big old mountain of timber and stone, but you get the feeling she’s really writing to somebody else. It was like a whistle that letter, loud, demanding immediate attention, because who would write a letter to a house?
When I first read it, it was strange, it was like I wasn’t reading it at all, but like the letter was taking me away, back home, back to the old oak in my daddy’s front yard, sitting on the swing he’d hanged for me from the strongest branch. It was sturdy rope, you see, and I was back on the hanged swing, my hands holding the rope and the rope clinging to me, holding on to my skin, my flesh, my bones. I could feel the rope. My skin knew the texture, knew the bite of it, even though part of me had forgotten all about that rope.
Her signature at the bottom was so fine, a thing of beauty like a deer’s footprints left in fresh snow.
I wasn’t quite sure where to find the house, but that night, I started looking. And I could not sleep without wanting to find that place, because . . . well, there was something about her words that clung to me like the the scent of a warm summer’s eve, long gone and made sweeter because you can never have it back, except in memory. There was something primal in my longing, too, something that I have no words to describe, something I just wanted.
• • •
Inanna, you may push against and howl at the second gate, all the gates, but to pass through them, you must pay the toll as is customary in the Underworld. Inanna, you must pay the toll, or the second gate will never open for you.
The house had always considered itself as being supremely self-sufficient. It needed no one and nothing, it just was. It fancied itself a place made with seven secret gates that had to be passed through in just the right order before one might know its innermost.
When Labyrinth and the house befriended one another, it showed her one gate after the next, and passing through each, she left something of herself by each of them. Such little things they were: the memory of what a raven’s cawing sounds like, the ability to taste salt, the true shape of her shadow.
“I remember the sound of ravens’ wings, though,” Labyrinth would say, and, “who needs salt in their food anyways,” and, “I didn’t know my shadow had a true shape. I’ll be just fine with it taking any shape.”
The house responded with its version of a smile and a shrug each time. It was proud to have someone living inside of itself that cared about its gates more than about what one would leave by them.
And yet, in each friendship there are mechanics, and mechanics follow laws like an obedient horse will follow the pull from its bridle. When two objects meet, the forces which they exert upon one another must always always always balance out the scales.
After the first winter she had spent in the house, the wintry haired man started to look at Labyrinth differently. It was not a reaction to the way Simon had come to behave around Labyrinth, since Simon, it must be said, had a penchant for subtlety when he felt it to be required. No, these looks were of someone who owned knowledge and feared that the sharpness of another’s mind might rob him of it the way a simple blade may take a king’s life straight to the Underworld.
“He never smiles,” said Labyrinth to Simon.
“He smiles like skulls smile, I suppose. Nothing he can change about those grim looks.” Simon said.
“And his eyes are like wells that want to drown me,” Labyrinth said.
“And maybe he would, well-eyes baiting you to fall with the scythe-moon reflected in them,” Simon said, radiating his warmth and making Labyrinth turn her face away from his.
Labyrinth realized too late that the weight with which the house pulled on her was so plainly visible if you knew. And her father knew.
• • •
I could never forget about the oak tree, the one with the rope. Many other things are gone, and it is good that they are gone, but not that tree. I sometimes imagined myself having a conversation with Labyrinth and asking her about the tree, and she would tell me all that I wanted to know, and she would tell me what it all meant, the tree, the rope, the way my skin never forgot about any of it.
Then I remembered that it had been only a dream of poppies and an antler-headed woman, and that I might be going crazy, finally. My grades were slipping even before, and that time when I had the dream (when I took a lot of sleeping pills and my roommate found me just in time) was pretty much the drop that snapped the demon’s neck.
The worst part was that I wanted it to just be a dream and craziness and the suppressed memories of my past finally catching up with me, but I knew that it was all real, all of it. The house was real and so was Labyrinth and the memory of that rope. I just had to go look.
• • •
And to pass through the gates, through all the gates, Inanna made herself bare.
When she passed through another gate, Labyrinth gave away the sight in one of her eyes. She still had the eye, and it still did what eyes are supposed to do, but the things she now saw with it were less normal yet more real. She saw the truer shades of colors, saw the truer way Simon smiled when he stole up the stairs under squealing wood and into her room.
“You are so greedy, Simon,” she told him on the last day of spring. Night had fallen hours ago, and Labyrinth had been curled up in a chair by the window, reading two versions of a book with her two beautifully different eyes.
Simon closed the door to her room behind him and smiled a smile that Labyrinth now saw was quite sharp, edged even.
“I have years and years to make up for in loving you, don’t you think?” and it ended like it always did, his breath too warm on her skin, his skin too warm on her skin, and later everything everything drifting into a deep black night that was also too warm, much too warm.
Their father meanwhile was spending more and more time in his private library. He felt the house, his house, change. It was like the dust had taken on a different smell, like the timber creaked differently, like the shadows gave the whole place a different light.
The wintry haired man with the grim face knew that change can be like an ocea
n in a storm, wild and unrulable, and he—even as he was sitting alone in his library, fingers stroking the books’ spines—felt like he was swimming in that tempest trembling sea.
• • •
In the end I just decided I had to be serious about looking. I quit school and packed up everything I owned into one single bag. North was good I decided, so that is where I went first. I spent a couple months just looking, turning stones. I slept on the road or under bridges. I always thought of that oak tree and the way the rope would swing from that branch, skin and rope, rope and bark, skin and blood.
The details of that search are not very important, of course, you just need to know that I gave myself completely over to finding the house. There were clues, too; old stories of stones moving themselves, a parcel of land that still kept ice and snow to itself while the grass all around was turning green, strange animal behavior. It was all clear enough if you could look past the crazy alien stories that also popped up sometimes.
What does the search really matter, though, for in the end, when I had walked my path all the way, I found the house as I knew I would.
• • •
Inanna, past the seventh gate, you will be bare, and bare you will find judgment. Inanna, the throne of the Underworld, the rule over hooks and shadows and remembered lives cannot be yours without a sacrifice. Sacrifice, Inanna, and the seventh gate is yours.
The fifth gate was not something for those faint of heart.
“Can I ask why you never showed Simon all these things? Why did you not give him the choice of the gates?” Labyrinth asked the house one day when the leaves outside were falling.
The house just shrugged as if a draft were going right through it. That fiery boy that burned and blazed like spring and summer would never have understood, of course. Some people were just made like that, to walk through the world without a care, no need to feel worry, just want and take in their minds. The house had so little interest in that. And told Labyrinth as much. It said
the fifth gate.