Minotaur

by J. A. Rock

  I wished I could see the white bull.

  “When the middle daughter finished, she loved her creation too much to give it to her mother. And so she crafted another beast for the carousel—this one made of cheap wood, painted dully—and presented it to her mother. But her mother had spies everywhere, and she’d heard about the beautiful white bull her daughter was hiding from her. She demanded the bull, and when her daughter refused to give it, she cursed her daughter to have eyes only for the bull.”

  “Have eyes?”

  Bitsy leaned close and whispered, “Made her want to hmm-hmm the bull.”

  I burst out laughing so hard I choked.

  Bitsy glared at me. “Listen! The daughter planned everything around the bull. She ate next to it, slept sprawled on top of it. And one day she got jabbed by a good-looking young trader, staring up at the bull’s white underbelly and imagining the bull itself was giving it to her. She got pregnant, and her belly swelled much bigger than a pregnant belly ought. She swore she could feel two sharp points digging into the wall of her womb. Horns, she thought.”

  “Why would she think that?”

  “I don’t know.” Bitsy sounded irritated. “She’d been dripping for a bull for months—she had bulls on the brain.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Go on.”

  “At first the daughter was comforted. She believed the bull had indeed been her lover, and that she was going to have a miracle child—half human, half bovine. Several days before the birth, she began to bleed down there. She thought perhaps the baby was hurt, but it came out normal. Black, curly hair. A daughter.”

  “That’s disgusting. The blood and everything.”

  “Shh. This is the best part. She cared for the child as she knew she ought to. But it kept changing. She’d look, and she’d see a baby. She’d look again, and it was a small black bull with red eyes and hooves and twisted horns as yellow as bone. She asked others to examine it, but nobody else saw anything unusual about the child. Afraid, she sought refuge with her carving. Night after night she lay in the woodshed with the bull, while inside the house, the baby wailed with hunger.”

  I began to feel sick, though I wasn’t exactly sure why.

  “Eventually, she came to realize this was part of the bull’s curse. And so one day she bound the baby to the white bull’s body, and she left both on the promontory.”

  Bitsy nudged my knee with her foot. “A man called Darwull found the baby. He was an architect, well loved in town for the beautiful church he’d built. He untied the child from the bull and raised her as his own. But the girl always had problems. She was forever being sent home from school. Her teachers called her a monster. Other children feared her. Darwull tried to love his adopted daughter, but she frightened even him.”

  I felt sicker.

  “When she was fifteen, she tried to murder him with a pair of scissors. He managed to fight her off, but she ran away and was not heard from again until she returned to Rock Hill a full-grown woman. Different, though. A sorceress.” Bitsy whispered the last word. “And a wicked one.”

  I’d always heard that magic existed in Rock Hill. There were rumors of old witches in bent houses, traveling men with potions under their cloaks. But magic was, for the most part, a stale idea. Rarely could those with power use it for anything of consequence. When the beast’s reign of terror began, the town’s police had apparently begged the help of those with “extraordinary” abilities. But no spell could quiet the beast; no potion could protect the people.

  Bitsy reached out and took my hand. I was startled, but said nothing.

  “She had transformed herself into a creature part bull and part woman—”

  “Wouldn’t she be a cow?” I interrupted. “Not a bull?”

  “Thera, I’m going to putt a nut into your box in a minute. She’s a goddamn sorceress; she can be whatever she wants.”

  “Okay. Fine.” I still felt sick, and nagging Bitsy made it a little easier not to think about the abandoned baby, crying in the house day after day and then left to die on the cliff. I squeezed Bitsy’s hand.

  “She transformed herself and began to ravage the town.”

  “Killing indiscriminately,” I supplied.

  “Yes,” Bitsy agreed. “And wrecking homes.”

  “Tearing children from their mothers’ bellies.”

  “Eating the men sent to slay her. Slowly, in front of their wives.”

  “And then eating their wives.”

  Bitsy looked at me and grinned. “Darwull felt so guilty. If he’d never found the baby, the town would have remained safe. And so he agreed to build a prison for his own daughter. High on the promontory, he built the labyrinth. He constructed it around the white wooden bull, which had remained there all those years, unscathed by weather. There’d been a game in town where children dared each other to go to the promontory to touch it. Many reported they could feel a beating heart beneath the wooden chest. Many died—swept off the cliff by a gust of wind. Or, according to some reports, hooked suddenly on the white bull’s horns and tossed over the ledge.”

  “That’s some baloney right there.”

  “Hush up. Darwull lured his daughter to the promontory with a promise—she could take his life, as long as she vowed never to harm another townsperson. She met him on the cliff in her human form. He tried to run. She followed. He was faster, and so she transformed herself into a bull and galloped after him. He ran inside the labyrinth, and she followed. The door swung shut behind them.

  “Nobody knows what happened in there. We can only assume Darwull was the Minotaur’s first tribute. He left a blueprint in Rock Hill showing the labyrinth he’d built, and he’d told of his plan to trap the Minotaur inside. People came to the labyrinth in hopes of hunting the beast and slaying her once and for all.

  “Only one person who ventured into the labyrinth ever returned—a man called Granz. He told of a maze unlike anything from Darwull’s blueprint. A place full of danger, jungles, illusions. A place worse than nightmares. He said he had spoken to the beast herself, who had agreed to release him if he passed along these demands: She was to be provided, regularly, with tributes. At least nine per year, or she would escape her prison and destroy Rock Hill.”

  “And nobody thought she was lying? That she couldn’t have gotten out of the labyrinth if she’d tried? Or that Granz was lying?”

  “I suppose”—Bitsy let go of my hand—“nobody wanted to find out. Rock Hill has sent tributes ever since. And many people continue to volunteer. The tributes of the past often brought gold and jewels, hoping to soften the beast with bribes. It’s said that there’s now a massive room in the labyrinth full of treasure. And that many who vow to slay the beast are really going treasure hunting.”

  I was terribly intrigued by this. “Treasure?”

  She stared at me. “Yes. Why? Do you think you’ll be the one to find it?”

  “Maybe so. Maybe I’ll become the richest person in all of Rock Hill.”

  She snorted. “Good luck with that.”

  But I could not stop thinking, that night or in the days to come, about a room full of treasure. About that palace full of secrets. About the abandoned child and the monster everyone feared.

  Perhaps a beast was what I was meant to be. A cast-off daughter, a dangerous sorceress. I might have done quite well at indiscriminate devouring, at creating a legend much larger than myself, and much more frightening. I wondered if the beast was lonely. If there were tributes she could not find; if she went to bed hungry.

  Bitsy and I became casual bullies. We told the other girls what we wanted—their spare change, sweaters, stuffed animals—and they were usually scared enough of us to give it over without us even needing to make threats. One of the worst things we did was take a rock from Rina. Little Rina wanted to be a biologist. She spent hours making notes on Rock Point’s flora and fauna. She’d collect rocks, eggshells, dead rabbits, anything. This particular rock looked like any other rock to me, but she swore it
held the fossil of some something-or-other. She begged us to let her keep it, but I took it from her hand and tossed it high over the gates and into the prison yard.

  Then one day we made the mistake of telling Kenna Murphy to give over her small beaded purse, which she carried pinched between her fingers like a cigarette.

  Kenna was our age, a spiky girl oafishly angry over everything. She moved like a top, like some invisible hand was spinning her until she wobbled and fell. She wore her hair close-cropped, which emphasized how narrow her skull was, how it didn’t look much wider than her neck. She was always yelling at everyone on the rec field like she was the coach, and she dressed in faded rugby jerseys and pants with elastic in the waistbands.

  She could also pull your goddamn leg like no one else. She’d stare right at you without a trace of a smirk and tell you about the time she was on that cargo ship that sank twenty years ago, even though she was only sixteen and had never been to sea in her life. Or she’d tell you she’d gone to the deserts and the jungles, slain a zebra with a bit of flint. Or that her brother was a contortionist in a circus, until he’d gotten stuck with his legs behind his head and now had to walk on his hands.

  I might have been jealous of her, since my attempts to tell everyone my mother had done my father in with an ax had been met with derision, while Kenna’s tales were taken with good humor and requests for more. I’d avoided challenging her up to that point, but Bitsy and I had grown bold.

  Kenna laughed when I told her to give over the purse.

  “Awf!” Kenna stepped back, baring her teeth like a dog. “D’you know where I got this? Off a rickshaw pedaler in the Far East. We played the shell game for thirty-six hours straight, and I finally won.”

  “You’re fulla shit; now give it over.” I hadn’t been raised to speak like a tough, but I’d hung around enough of them in town that I knew how to mimic their voices, their speech. Usually girls quailed at it, but Kenna just frowned, breathing noisily through her nose.

  When I tried to grab the purse, Kenna threw a punch. I threw one back, and she and I ended up grappling until she had her fingers in my mouth, and I was biting down on them while simultaneously trying to pull her left ear off by the lobe. A crowd of girls had gathered to cheer on the fight, and I was well prepared to do serious damage when somebody yanked me away, slapping my hand so sharply that I released Kenna’s ear with a cry of pain.

  Bessie Holmes.

  Bessie Holmes, with tightly curled hair and her freckled cheeks and forehead. She was something of a joke among us girls, with her mixed-up way of speaking and her tendency to get flitty over nothing. But at this moment, she looked almost intimidating. I was breathing hard and so was Kenna. I wiped my hands on my jeans.

  Bessie Holmes looked from me to Kenna and back. “Apologize.” The word was a furious whisper. “Apologize to each other at once.”

  I stared, still wired from the fight, not at all ready to apologize, but afraid—all at once, terrified—that I might be sent to the labyrinth as punishment.

  “Apologize!” Bessie repeated, and her voice echoed through the hall. She smoothed her skirt. Her jaw was quivering. She leaned close to Kenna and me, as if we were small children. “We are all we have. You hear me? We are all we have ever has, and we are being on the same side.”

  I stuck my hand out to Kenna grudgingly. She took it and nearly crushed my fingers, glaring at me. We shook. And in the days after that, through some odd muddle of necessity and rancorous admiration, we became something like friends.

  I was sure I’d be dragged before Rollins and the psychologist for another disciplinary hearing. When that didn’t happen, I worried that my trip to the labyrinth was a surprise the Rock Point staff intended to spring on me. I lay awake several nights, expecting my door to burst open and a crew of women to grab my limbs, haul me from my bed, and throw me into the back of a truck like the one that had unloaded the prisoners.

  “Do you really provide tributes to the beast?” I asked Denson finally. A week had passed since the fight with Kenna, and still no one had disciplined me. Denson and I were in my room, and what I found to be an irritating gush of white-silver light poured steadily through the window.

  Denson, who had been sorting my afternoon meds, looked up. I only took three pills now: one for nerves, one to help with a series of stomachaches I’d had lately, and one to balance my moods. I still spat them into my dresser.

  I was used to instant, no-cowshit responses from Denson, so it made me suspicious, the way she seemed to consider her words. “Do I personally? I don’t have that kind of time.”

  “Not you. Rock Point.”

  “No. We don’t send any of our girls to that fate.”

  “But some orphanages do.”

  Denson plopped a pink pill into the cup. “Yes, some.”

  I sprawled backward on the bed. I had large breasts, especially compared to the other girls here, and I liked the sideways spill of them when I lay on my back.

  I caught Denson looking. I thought, as I often did now, about what Bitsy had said. “You have to know she’s a BD.”

  Maybe Denson was. I didn’t mind. I liked the idea that Denson had a secret or two. She was old—at the time she seemed unimaginably old, though she was probably only in her midthirties—and the way she looked at me made me feel extraordinarily noticed.

  “So why not do it?” I asked. “It would keep the girls’ home from getting too crowded.”

  “Nonsense.” There was a slight edge to her voice. “Would you do that to children?”

  I shrugged and lolled my head toward her. “I would go into the labyrinth if I was sent there. And I’d club the dumb beast’s head off.”

  Denson stopped moving. I could see her pinching the little pill cup until it looked like it might crack. “It is all right to have an imagination, Thera. But sometimes it’s better not to comment on what you don’t understand.”

  But what I didn’t understand kept me anchored in my body. Otherwise my mind would have woven new truths and soared, unhumbled, through space and stars. It would have backstroked through the mulch of the earth, and I would have been a living doll, my body frozen and my dreams on stilts. As it was, I let the locked-away truth rap me sharply. Until I sat back, shaking my head, and began to circle it again. “Do you think the beast ever gets lonely? She’s got no one but tributes for company, and she eats them.”

  “I really don’t concern myself with that creature.”

  “I’m just saying, after my mother hacked my father’s head off with an ax, she grew so lonely she poisoned herself.”

  When I finally looked at Denson, she said slowly, “Your mother did no such thing.”

  I felt a jab of fury. “How do you know?”

  “Your parents died in an auto crash.”

  I sat up. “Is that what my Auntie Bletch told you?” I kept my voice hard and sly. I saw her waver for just a second.

  “It’s what the records say.”

  “Why would you believe Auntie Bletch and not me?”

  “Be quiet, Thera.”

  “Why would you believe Auntie Bletch and not me?” I shouted again. “Why am I not worth listening to?”

  “You are lying; now stop.”

  “Don’t you like me? Don’t you like me more than all the oth—”

  “Just stop it, you horrid brat!”

  I fell silent. It was the first time Denson had raised her voice to me. She closed her eyes and shook her head, breathing in soft huffs, as though she were crying.

  When she offered me the pill cup, I touched her hand—deliberately, but with such casual clumsiness that she might think it was an accident. Something flared in her eyes, a desolate longing blunted by weariness. Some old demon of hers had been snagged from the sea, cranked up, and dangled before her. Now I credit myself with tidier thoughts than I could possibly have had at sixteen, but I felt I was seeing a dual reaction: Denson’s soft, secret joy at my touch, and her loathing of whatever had been pulled out o
f the water. That blue-lipped, bloated mystery from her past, with its closed eyes and its smug, sleeping smile. She knew it wasn’t dead. Knew it would wake and cough a stream into her face.

  Maybe I realized then that I had ammunition. And perhaps I was ashamed, because I suddenly slapped the pill cup from her hand, and we both stared at the damned little things that skittered into the cracks between floorboards. Things that failed to improve me and turn me forgivable.

  Allendara came to Rock Point on a Saturday, two months after my arrival. She’d been picked up in town by Dr. LiPordo and driven to the girls’ home in the doctor’s white car.

  Allendara—Alle—was tall and as full figured as a grown woman. She had dark-brown skin and black, shiny curls. A wide nose and full lips, and enormous dark eyes that glistened just a bit too brightly, like they were always covered in a layer of tears. She entered Rock Point regally, as though she were being shown a new, grand home she was thinking of buying. Dr. LiPordo ushered her into a seat by the parlor window and left her while she went to find someone to complete the check-in process.

  I watched from the stairs as the new girl folded her arms on the back of the chair and rested her chin on them, staring out the window. In tales, women are often soft, pensive, and trapped. They sit by windows, and where a starved dog in a pen is a sad thing, a maiden silent at a window is supposed to be a thing of beauty.

  I never bought that shit, and I was unimpressed by Alle’s lovely wistfulness. It seemed perverse, if you truly had a secret sadness, to advertise it as boldly as she did. I went upstairs to find Bitsy and complain. Instead, I ran into Denson.

  “Thera,” she said, as I tried to slip past her. I stopped and turned.