by J. A. Rock
The vines on the fountain were fat and brown and slimy. They seemed to pulse as I approached.
“Fill it,” I snarled. “You ass. There’s a fountain right there.”
The man’s thin white beard reminded me of cobwebs. He shook his head, and I winced again as his wounds snapped their scabs and began to bleed afresh. He staggered to the fountain and dipped the jug in. I watched him pull it from the water, full and dripping. A moment later, the water faded and was gone. He turned to me, shaking the jug as if to say See? See? Then he set it aside and dipped his hands in the fountain. Once again, they emerged dripping. But when he went to splash his face, his hands slapped dryly against his cheeks.
He stuck his whole head in the fountain, then pulled it out, sucking at the water’s surface. A second later, his hair and beard were dry, and he was rubbing his throat. The water was disappearing from the basin before he could swallow it.
He looked at me. “Please,” he rasped. “Please.”
I went to the fountain and dipped my hands in. The water was cool and clear and stayed in my cupped palms. I held my hands up to him, and he leaned down and drank. He looked up at me gratefully, his beard dripping. I got him another scoop, and he drank it too.
“More?” I asked.
All at once, there was a crack, as though from an invisible whip, and the skin over the man’s shoulder split open, dropping a gush of blood so suddenly I gasped and stepped back. Flecks of warm liquid hit my skin through the holes in my shoes. The man moaned in agony, his body convulsing. The invisible whip cracked again, and he went to his knees, blood fanning down his back like gory wings.
He looked up as the ground began to tremble. I looked up too. There was nothing above us but dark sky and our blurred reflections in the glass. Then all at once, a wide, luminous stone pillar descended toward us. The clock tower. It crashed against the ceiling, shaking the whole labyrinth, sending bits of stone into the fountain. But the glass didn’t so much as crack. The clock’s massive face stared down at us, bright white as a moon except for the heart at the center. The vein snaked out and began to pull color from the number twelve, turning from blue to red. The heart seemed to pulse against the glass.
I looked at the man, who was standing with his head tilted and his mouth slightly open. “It’s fallen!” I said. “The clock tower’s fallen.” I had no idea what that meant—if the labyrinth was coming down around us, if the beast was trying to escape.
The man nodded, raising his gaze, and I looked up and saw the tower moving upward again, slowly disappearing from sight.
“Why did it do that?” I demanded. But he had his fingers in the fountain and was flicking the water halfheartedly. He looked less substantial somehow—his brown skin thinner, the veins beneath it more visible. I scooped more water into my hands—there was much less in the fountain now, even though I’d taken no more than a few handfuls. I offered it to him. “Tell me where I’ll find the beast. Tell me where they might have taken my friend.”
He drank with a gentle slurping sound. Droplets of water rolled down his forehead, spreading over his eyelids and lashes. The droplets seemed to take bits of his skin with them, leaving raw pink trails in their wake. He raised an arm and pointed down a narrow hall to my right. As I looked, a series of chandeliers came to life in the hall—small, simple, but nonetheless welcome, as I had no wish to go farther in the dark. The man was dissolving into droplets, his skull visible in one patch of his forehead, skin sliding in strips from his arms. A few soggy wisps of his beard caught between my fingers like cotton, then blew away.
He collapsed onto his side, and the grass drank him slowly, skin-first.
I turned and ran toward the hall, shaken. There was no reason to trust the man, but I didn’t know where else to go, and at least this hallway had light. The walls here were not stone; the bottom halves were wood paneled, and the upper portions papered in faded pink. Several times I had to slow and wait for Alle to unravel more thread. There were doors to my right, but I had no idea which one to open.
Finally I saw a door narrower than all the others, with a brass knob shaped like a cat’s head. It was holding what looked like a real mouse by the tail. I placed my hand on the knob, breathing hard, and yanked it. The mouse in the cat’s jaws began to struggle, and I gasped and jerked my hand away. The brass cat’s mouth opened, and the mouse fell at my feet and darted down the hall. I stood there for several seconds, my heart pounding.
I walked into a room that was mostly in shadow, except for a few yellow splotches of light coming from long-necked lamps on the shelves. Oh, the shelves. They covered three walls, all the way up to the ceiling. And on each one were toys. Mostly dolls, lying limp or else propped with their legs dangling. They were wooden or plastic. One looked expensive and pale—china, I supposed.
I left footprints in the dust. I turned in a circle, trying to see all the toys. There was a wooden train engine. Marbles in a glass jar. A plastic clown in blue and green polka dots bending close to a little plastic dog, a hand cupped over his ear as if the dog were telling him a secret.
I heard a sound like water dripping steadily from a faucet. I looked around, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Then a skittering in one corner. I walked forward and my foot slipped. Looking down, I saw the weak lamplight was catching the edge of a puddle. A rustling came from one of the shelves. I turned, intending to run from the room.
But then I saw her.
The doll had a heart-shaped face and black, shoulder-length hair. She was stuffed into a frilly, peach-colored dress with a lacy collar. Her eyes darted back and forth in the shadow, and she had a tight, tiny, bow-shaped smile painted on. Her lips, though—her lips underneath the paint were sewn shut with spider-leg stitches, and she was moving them, trying to get them open. Each time she did, the stitches strained, and she whimpered.
Her arms had a slight sheen, like plastic, but they looked . . . warm. They looked alive. I gazed at the doll’s face again, irked by her strange familiarity. I reached out and tipped one of the lamps toward her.
Kenna. The doll was Kenna.
Kenna, with her lips sewn shut, that awful, painted smile on her face. She sniffed, and a drop of clear liquid fell from her nose into the small puddle.
“Kenna!” I reached out to touch her, but she wobbled and fell. I caught her and tried to right her. She pulled away from me, stood on her small, hinged legs, and leaped from the shelf. She collapsed to her knees upon landing, but immediately scrambled up and ran behind one set of shelves, her nose still dripping.
“Kenna, come back! I’ll help you,” I promised desperately. But she had vanished. I shined the light on some of the other toys, and noticed new horrors. Some of the dolls still had human skin—moles and downy hair and the shadows of veins. Some moved. Others were inanimate except for their blinking eyes. The wooden train engine was actually made of a tiny, folded leg, a pink shoe forming the smoke stack. The marbles in the jar held miniature body parts. One was a pair of lips encased in glass. Two were eyes, the glass distorting them, making the blood vessels swell and the irises blur. I saw fingertips, locks of hair, yellowed teeth with bits of gum clinging to their roots. My stomach churned, and I had to turn away for a moment until the nausea passed.
A movement in the corner caught my eye. Kenna, looking shy and so small—she only came up to my knee. I dropped the lamp and raced to her. She froze, as though I might not spot her if she didn’t move. Her nose was dripping faster, and as I approached, a tear slid down her cheek, and she began to gush water from both nostrils, like a faucet. She let out a cry through her stitched lips and started to run, splashing through the trail she left.
Calling her name, I chased her from the room and out into the hall, where the chandeliers flickered out one by one until I was in darkness, listening to Kenna’s fading whimpers echoing off the stone.
I don’t know how long I walked, feeling my way along one papered wall, my breath coming in shallower and shallower gasps. I st
opped several times to listen for Kenna, but I heard nothing. Every once in a while I slipped on a wet stone, or imagined I heard water dripping. I kept going, determined that Kenna could be found, could be fixed. That I would not be responsible for the loss of another friend.
I paused once, thinking I heard someone else breathing. But each time I stopped, I was met with a silence that seemed to have weight, temperature—a thick, cold haze. At last, I saw a faint light at the end of the corridor. I ran toward it, and I burst out of the shadows and into another wide space beneath the ceiling of glass. This time I was in an artificial jungle. Enormous leaves arched up around me and vines unspooled from crevices in the walls as I ran. I collided with a solid figure, and gasped and staggered back, my body throbbing with pain.
A woman stood before me, hunched and staring. She was middle-aged, with long black hair in careless curls down her back, wide eyes caught in nets of wrinkles, and thick, fanning black lashes. Her lips were rough and chewed looking, her face slightly lighter in complexion than mine. She held up her hands as if to ward me off. Her nails were almost perfectly square. She wore rags.
I’d seen women artfully, tastefully clothed in rags in illustrations. But this woman . . . Her filthy right breast was exposed, the shreds of a once-white linen dress were streaked with dirt and hanging from her. It was hard to tell which marks on her face might be bruises and which were dirt. And still there was something lovely about her, a beauty that bruises couldn’t touch.
“Go away!” I shouted at her. “Go away, right now!”
Her head bobbed forward as she walked, like a bird’s. “Shh, shh. What are you crying about? Shh, now, no. Shh, no, don’t. Do you want the beast to hear you? Hmm. Do you want it wide-awake? Do you have a plan for when it comes; are you in here all alone?” She extended an arm toward me. “Shh, don’t cry, my baby, don’t shake.”
I tried to calm my gulping breaths, thoroughly ashamed to find that I was very nearly crying. “I’m not afraid! Only I—I’m lost.”
She took my arm and pulled me closer. I resisted, but she was surprisingly strong, sweeping me into the curve of her arm. “Well, you’re going to get killed; you’re going to get us seen. This place is full of madness and wonder and the worst kind of dreams.” Her voice was singsong, her words seeming to tangle and collide in strange rhymes.
“Who are you?” I pulled away from her, my mind filled with visions of dolls and of men who couldn’t drink. Of the clock tower falling and that great heart throbbing against the glass. I needed a weapon. That was what I needed—something in this damned place that I could use to defend myself. “Don’t come any closer.”
She tipped her filthy chin up disdainfully.
“I mean it,” I snapped.
“Oh, dear, dear.” The leaves rustled as she walked around me, her stride steady and graceful, her head still bobbing slightly. She had grime-smeared welts on her calves. I had a sudden memory of rubbing mud into my sister’s hair while she winced and asked if I was sure this would make it grow longer.
“Don’t!” I turned with the woman, glowering, ready to attack.
“How long have you been here? Pretty little girl; pity, little thing . . .” She lunged at me suddenly, and I shoved her away. Her body felt heavy; her dirty rags swung out, then fell against her skin.
“I have no business with you.”
“No business, no business . . .” She chanted as she circled me. I refused to let her out of my sight.
“Have you seen a doll?” I demanded. “A doll that looks like a little girl with short black hair?”
“No, dear. No doll. Have you lost your dolly?”
“Get out of my way if you haven’t!” I shouted.
She stopped moving and lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “Be silent! You’ll bring the beast right to you.” She stepped forward again. “What are you? A prisoner? A debtor? An unwanted girl?”
“No,” I said, surprised by the sting of the lie. “I am here of my own will.”
The woman put a hand to her throat. “Not a tribute, then?” Her eyes were a murky riverbed brown. The pupils contracted and dilated to a rhythm like a heartbeat. Her lips parted, and a soft light seemed to slide from her temples down her cheeks. “Are you . . . here to fight?”
I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me, but never in my life had I so wished to be a warrior. Why should warriors be a thing of the past? Why couldn’t I be one now? One who was always ready to fight, who looked on death and remained unshaken. Who had mastered both stillness and violence and whose life was comprised of quests with clear beginnings and ends. I thought of the horrors I had seen so far, and I found myself saying, without really meaning to: “I’m here to kill the beast.”
A silent moment. Her mouth twitched up every few seconds. A small choking sound came from deep in her throat. Her eyes lost their hardness, and she gripped my hand. “Oh. Tell me it’s true. Tell me it’s true.”
“Who are you?” I repeated. “Tell me now.”
“My name is Asteria.” She shuddered, as though her own name was repugnant to her. “I don’t know how long I’ve been inside the labyrinth. I serve the beast.” She glanced over her shoulder.
“What?” I jerked back.
“No! I do not serve her willingly.”
“Explain yourself.”
She glanced around again, then smiled, two tears leaking from her left eye and leaving pale tracks on her dirty cheek. “I was captured soon after I entered the maze. I thought the beast meant to kill me, but—”
“You’ve seen her?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “She said I might be u-useful.”
“Useful how?”
“I’m supposed to be a spy. I tell her who enters the labyrinth. I tell her where I saw them last—the boys, the girls, the heroes, the men, the mice. And then she hunts them.”
For just a moment, fear pulled me into a too-tight embrace. A fern brushed my leg, and I shivered. “Does she know about me?”
Asteria clasped my hand tighter. Her palm was rough, callused. “That is the beautiful thing. She knows that tributes were brought here. Two men. But you . . . she has said nothing of you. But . . .” She let out a soft, slow breath. “Are there others with you?”
“Only one. My friend Kenna.” Something stopped me from saying anything about Alle. Alle, to whom I thought I’d given the least dangerous role, and whom I had intended to protect. I should have known better. Putting a queen behind a line of pawns only makes her look more of a prize. “I found her in a room back there.” I gestured down the hall. “It was full of—of toys—but they were—she was—”
“Yes.” Asteria nodded frantically. “Yes, yes. I know the place.”
“Does the beast know, then? Did she turn Kenna into a doll?”
Her throat worked as though she were trying to swallow. “There is a chance she does not know. For all her magic, she has grown old. She is not as perceptive as she once was. And there are enchantments here that would make a victim of anyone. Most likely your Kenna did not encounter the beast directly, but simply wandered into the spell.”
Asteria kept looking at me with such hope—yet all I wanted now was to find Kenna, follow the thread back to Alle, and leave this place. “There was a man,” I said suddenly. “When we first entered. He knows we’re here. He had a dog, and he separated Kenna and me.”
“He is not real.” She tugged me closer. “The beast creates phantoms. Sometimes out of tributes’ bodies, sometimes from her own mind.”
I thought of the man who could not drink, who had dissolved when I’d helped him. “Then how do I know you are real?” I asked.
She surprised me by placing my hand on her chest and splaying it over the rips in her garment. The tip of my first finger nestled in the hollow at the base of her throat, where I felt a slow, steady pulse. She looked at me, all anger and slyness and grubby beauty. “Do you believe I’m a phantom?” Her breast swelled just beneath the heel of my hand and her heart s
eemed like a trapped bird, beating its wings beneath her skin.
“No,” I replied honestly.
“Good.” Her whisper made me shudder. “I can take you to her. I can tell you when she is weakest. Tell me what you need from me, and I will aid you however I can.”
I did not know what I needed. “How long will it take to get to her?”
She studied me with a thoroughness that made me uncomfortable. “Two days, perhaps.”
“And what about finding Kenna?”
“If you can slay the beast, Kenna will be freed from her spell. The tributes who remain alive—the ones who are so lost even the beast cannot find them—they will be free too.”
“How do you know this?”
Her expression softened. “I know only what she has told me. She is afraid of death, and has often confided what she fears will happen when she dies.”
“It’s a gamble, then.” I struggled to keep my voice steady. “If I don’t go after Kenna now, she may be lost. And even if the beast is slain, Kenna may remain trapped in that spell forever, if the beast has lied to you.”
“But if you find her now, what will you do? The spell must be reversed by destroying its source.”
I didn’t know whether to believe her, but I felt I had little choice. And had I not come here with a mission that was secret from everyone but Alle?
“All right, then,” I said. “Take me to her.”
Asteria led me across the jungle and into a black marble corridor. We passed through many halls—some wood, some stone. Through a cold blue cave where gems gleamed, half buried in the rock like glittering parasites. Through a narrow corridor with cracked walls and a floor that slanted. There were tables along the walls, small round tables of varying heights, some with vases of wilted flowers.