by J. A. Rock
“Did she make all this?” I asked. “I’ve heard she did her own decorating.”
Asteria walked with such a long stride that it was hard to keep up. “It was a maze. But she has made it a hell.”
“And is there truly a treasure?”
She paused—the slightest break in her easy rhythm. “Indeed, there is a treasure. And many gluttons, many thieves have come looking for it. All dead now.” Her bare feet shuffled over the stones. “You may come here to play hero, you may come to be a slave, but you may not come to take what isn’t yours.” I couldn’t tell if she was warning me or if she meant you in a wider sense.
“She lives in the very center,” Asteria went on. “All routes lead, eventually, to her chamber, no matter where you might stop on the way.”
“I saw the ocean. Through one door, I saw the sea.”
“An illusion.”
But I’d felt the sand and the spray. The water had lifted me. Those moments I had commanded the waves and sky had seemed more real than any in my life. “If I’d tried to swim it?”
She glanced at me. “I imagine you’d have drowned, little girl. Little pretty, hoping thing.”
“I’m not a little girl.”
She stopped walking suddenly. I nearly ran into her. “What’s that on your wrist?”
I started, tucking my arm close to my body. She stared at the thread, and I offered my arm hesitantly to her. “I’ve tied the other end in the entryway. So I’ll be able to find my way back.”
She touched my wrist. “This is clever.” She tugged lightly on the string.
“Don’t.”
“But easily broken.” She met my gaze and said nothing else.
We arrived in open space again, the clear ceiling partly obscured by the branches of two massive gray leafless trees that we passed between. The ground beneath us was uneven—troughs of dark earth and small pools of mud. Rocks staggering up like broken teeth.
“I used to think I was like the beast.” I hopped from one flat stone to another to avoid a pool of mud. I was more confident now—excited, even, about our adventure.
Asteria was a couple of steps ahead of me, and I saw her shoulders rise slightly. “Why?”
“I don’t have any magic—at least, I don’t think so. But certainly enough people have called me a monster.” I hopped onto another stone. I felt tension in the thread, and stopped to pull it carefully over the rocks, then raced to catch up to Asteria.
“I was immensely unpopular.” I halted beside her. She was staring at something beyond the trees. “I went to a very fine school, but I was considered unteachable. My problems arose from my family situation. My mother murdered my father with an ax.”
She walked on. “Oh my. Things are bad, aren’t they? Sometimes, in the world?”
“My mother said it might be best for everyone if I was shut up somewhere.”
Asteria didn’t answer. I wanted more from her. Wanted to know everything she knew about the beast.
“Can’t she leave?” I asked. “If she’s so powerful?”
No response.
“I mean, she terrorized a town. No one could kill her. And now she’s stuck here? Isn’t she magic? Isn’t this ceiling made of glass?”
“I don’t know why.” Asteria’s voice took on that singsong quality again. “Magic is brittle; minds have their own bars. Silence, now—we are coming to dangerous places.”
I got a thrill at that. With Asteria by my side, even if she was strange and cracked and untrustworthy, I grew braver. The ground became very dry. Broken stones and brown grass, shrubs that would have snapped at a touch. A sludgy brook that slunk past us like a snake. “Perhaps it’s all about mothers. Do you think? If mine had lived. If the beast’s had been—”
“Get down!” Asteria pulled me to my knees behind a dry brown hedge. I heard skittering nearby, and then a small, plaintive wail.
“What if it’s Kenna?” I started to stand. “What if she’s looking for me?”
“Hush!” Asteria whispered.
Over the stones came a steady clop, clop, clop.
Hooves.
I shrank closer to Asteria. I saw a shadow on the far wall—hulking, horned. It was there for a second, then gone. My heart pounded. I felt suddenly very small, like I would be useless against that shadow. The danger you can’t see is always more frightening than the danger you can, I reminded myself. When you confront her, no matter how fearsome and horrible she is, it will be easier, because you can see her.
But I wasn’t so sure of that anymore. I might have chosen more hours in dark halls, listening to whimpers and footsteps over the images that now haunted me—Kenna’s stitched lips and the bloody back of the man at the fountain.
I could hear the beast’s harsh breath moving closer. A snuffle, almost a sigh.
Asteria suddenly flicked her wrist. From the marshy area we’d just crossed came a tremendous crack. I peered around the hedge and saw a branch plummet from one of the huge trees, hit the ground, and splinter. A silence followed.
I held my breath as the clop, clop, clop moved slowly in the direction of the disturbance. I heard the suction of mud as the creature retreated the way we’d come, through the muck and between the trees. Then an enormous snort, then a bellow that rattled the walls and made me clap my hands over my ears. I was trembling when it ended, and I looked at Asteria, lowering my hands. “You have magic.”
Asteria closed her eyes briefly. “It’s why she wanted me. She thinks I might help free her.”
“Can’t you use it to fight her, then?” My voice rose with excitement.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “She knows someone is close by. But she’s frustrated, tired.” She stood. “I must get back. She’ll be returning to her chamber soon and will want my news.”
“Wait . . .” I struggled to my feet. It had not occurred to me I would have to be alone in the labyrinth again. “You’re just going to leave me?”
She studied me. “I want you to keep going through this hall.” She motioned at a corridor to our right. “It is a long stretch, and there are few forks. The signs.” She nodded at the wall, where a purple neon sign read: French’s Fish Sticks. “If you come to a divide, follow the signs. Eventually you will reach a cottage. Wait for me there.”
Something jolted in me at the mention of a cottage, but I pushed it aside. “But you’re going to her chamber. And isn’t that precisely where I need to be?”
“I have ways of getting there faster than you ever could. I must go to her now so she sees nothing is amiss.” Asteria leaned close to me. “If she finds out about you—that I am helping you—I will be tortured to death. It is very important that you listen to me.”
I nodded, enlivened by the promise of such high stakes.
“The journey should take you several hours. I will find you at midnight.”
She gave me a quick kiss on the forehead and vanished down a small, hedge-lined path I had not even noticed until that point.
I was alone in the labyrinth once more.
For what seemed like miles, I followed the signs. They were spaced every few yards or so:
Dr. Arnet Lauer, DDS.
Fizzy Pop.
Stage Door.
Skodal Studios.
Hotel.
Some of the signs had arrows, but I never saw anything but the black hall.
I worried sometimes about the thread—that I would run out, that I would be forced to sever my one connection to Alle and venture deeper into the maze with no hope of getting back to my starting point. That Asteria would abandon me, or betray me to the beast, and I would have nothing, no one.
I started to wish I had simply given Asteria a head start and then followed her down the hedge-lined path to the beast’s chamber. If I had done so, perhaps everything would be over now—I would either be dead or triumphant. I closed my eyes and searched for the beast in my thoughts, but even there I found silence. I felt alone in a way I had not since my earliest days at Rock Point. Lon
eliness is like having a wound sewn shut with barbed thread. We close off the parts of ourselves that are open to others and pretend to embrace the privacy of our bodies—and yet we do the closing with something that will hurt every time we move. That will remind us of the secrets we’ve tried to stow away.
I thought of Alle often. The faint smell of sweat on her skin and the whiff of soap in her hair and the weight of her breast in my hand. The promise I’d made that day in the snow. The thoughts became so consuming sometimes that I’d find myself tugging the thread too hard and too often. Each time, she tugged back, and I imagined that she understood. That she had a wealth of compassion, a panoramic wisdom that caused her to look upon me with a warm, amused pity and whisper that I would be all right.
I came upon a hallway lit with gold, glass-walled lamps. The hall was narrow, with blue tiled walls and a high ceiling webbed with stucco. Music filled the corridor—a symphony that alternated between languid and triumphant. There were five dark doorways, two on either wall and one at the corridor’s end, and as I walked by, I peered into each one.
In the first room was some sort of banquet—high tables, silver platters, the clink of glasses. Laughter and happy chatter. And then as I watched, a shadow leaped onto the table—wolf-shaped, long-nosed. It began to devour a woman, pulling her from her chair headfirst. She screamed until there was a crisp crunch, like biting into an apple, and then the screaming stopped. Others were shouting; I heard thumps and crashes. The wolf’s bristling tail flung plates to the floor, and the snap of bones seemed deafening.
I hurried on, my heart striking slow, sharp blows to my ribs. Phantoms. They are phantoms.
In the next room was a symphony—rows upon rows of instruments playing softly and sadly and out of tune. But there were no players. Just instruments and empty chairs. A saxophone dipped slowly. The valves of a trumpet moved up and down. I walked on.
The third room was dark. The fourth door was closed.
In the fifth room, a man sat slumped in a chair, his head on a desk. Pale as a fish’s belly. A single weak bulb in a wire cage cast a whitish light throughout the wooden room. There was something familiar about the man. As I stepped inside, he opened his eyes, and I knew.
His eyes were Denson’s eyes.
I was frozen for a moment, looking into them. His mouth was open, and there was a dark pool of liquid under his chin. When I ran to him, when I asked if he was hurt, if he could move, he moaned and tried to lift his head. The dark pool grew.
A single steel bolt passed through his tongue and chin and into the wood of the desk. He stared at me, eyes wide, body trembling. I hovered with my hand near his mouth. “Oh God,” I whispered.
Asteria. Asteria and her magic. Perhaps she could fix this.
“Hold on,” I told him. “I’ll go for help. There’s someone who can . . .”
He closed his eyes, his breath shallow. Then it slowed and was finally silent.
He vanished slowly. First his legs, then his body, then his arms and his head, then his blood. All that was left in the table was the steel bolt.
Then the light went out, and I ran.
Asteria was waiting by a small cottage in a little square of woods. I ran to her, nearly in tears. “There’s someone—someone being tortured.” I could barely get the words out between gasps. “Bolted to the table. There are—I don’t know if anything’s real! I need your help.”
“Oh,” she murmured. “Pretty little doll, you have not obeyed. Where did you go?”
She wrapped her long, dirt-streaked arms around me, and my head went under her chin. Her hair smelled like earth. Her body was soft, and yet I was certain she could lift me, pin me, do whatever she wished. She guided me down onto the gritty floor, and she held me. I could feel the tension in her at first, as though she wasn’t used to doing this. When I looked up at her, I saw wonder in her gaze. It made me think of Denson, and then everything hurt. She tightened her embrace. I shook, though my eyes remained dry.
The clock tower fell against the glass, setting the palace trembling. I watched the vein latch onto the number twelve. I clutched Asteria harder.
“Does it always do that?” I murmured.
“Every midnight.” She stared up at it. “I used to dream it would break the glass, and that I’d climb up there and fly away.”
The tower lifted off the glass and righted itself. Asteria stroked up and down my back, and for a moment I pressed my forehead to her shoulder. “I should never have come here,” I murmured.
“But you did.” I suspected she took some satisfaction in the words. It was only the ghost of smugness—could easily have been my own paranoia. But I feared, for a moment, that she wanted me to suffer. That I always would. Kenna and Denson’s brother and Alle and Asteria—all of us tortured endlessly until the beast saw fit to end it.
“I said I was ready to come to this place. I thought— I thought I didn’t care if I lived or died, but I do.”
Asteria kissed my forehead. I imagined a mountain of treasure, the slide of gold coins and silver cups down the sides. I pictured the cottage behind us as Denson’s home in Rock Hill. I wished that on the night of Bitsy’s death, we had all stayed in and Miss Ridges had read us a story.
But what I had right now was Asteria. And she was, under the layers of grime, beautiful. Whatever I wanted to believe about the unimportance of beauty, it couldn’t change the fact that she burned with it—her black hair and wide eyes, her firm jaw. I loved the faint vertical lines between her brows and the way her hair clung to the sweat on her neck. I could have wrapped my body around hers and pulled her into me; I could have fucked her until our cries twined and drowned out the music of suffering.
I thought of Alle, and a savage pain cut me at the middle. “Alle,” I whispered, tugging the thread and getting no response. “Alle.” Louder. “What if something happened to her?”
Asteria writhed for a moment, as though my pain hurt her too. Then she went still. “Alle?”
I held up my wrist with the thread on it.
Sometimes it would happen, in a Dark Tale, that a character would do something quite stupid—spill a secret to the wrong person or wander off when she ought to stay with her group. I always loved these girls best when they were doing the stupid things. They weren’t witless; they made good choices along with the bad. It was just that sometimes they fucked up in a single, irreversible instant.
I knew I shouldn’t tell Asteria about Alle. I have nothing to say in my defense, except that you should have seen her—Asteria. Ragged and sure and mysterious. This woman could have sung with no regard for tune, and you’d still have heard a song. I told her the story of my friendship with Alle; it seemed to come out of me unbidden. I admitted I had not gone to a fine school, that my mother had not killed my father with an ax. I told how I had failed Alle, lost her affection. How Alle now held the thread at the labyrinth’s entrance.
When I was done, my breathing had calmed. The image of Denson’s brother bolted to the table seemed like a bad dream. Asteria was rocking me, and I felt light, almost as if I were floating. “It’s strange,” I said. “I know she doesn’t want me anymore. But I’d still do almost anything to protect her.”
“Anything?” Asteria repeated. She had seemed to go into something like a trance when I told her about Alle and the thread.
“Well, almost. I feel I’ve already let her down in so many ways. But I still want to— I want to do good things for her.”
“I may know the feeling.” Asteria was silent for a moment. “My parents put me here.”
“Your parents gave you up as a tribute?” I gazed up at her, stunned.
She sighed, her breath ruffling my hair. “And yet I still sometimes think, if they wanted me back, I’d go. I suppose that’s simply the way love works.”
“I don’t know if I’ve ever really loved anybody,” I admitted.
“Of course you have.” Her voice was so sharp I nearly pulled away. “You have loved. And you know that lov
e is a miracle.”
“I don’t know that,” I said harshly. “It only seems to get in the way.”
“No. No, no, no. It is a brave someone who would fall in love. And a fool who would let it go once she had it.”
Did she mean that as an accusation?
“Have you ever been in love?” I demanded.
“I think perhaps I have.”
I plucked the thread.
“She’s safe enough, if she stays there,” Asteria said finally.
“What?”
“The beast cannot find the labyrinth’s entrance. No matter how hard she tries.”
“Can you find it?” I asked.
She shook her head slowly.
I stared once more at the thread. “Do you want me to take you to it? We could both leave, quickly—”
“It would not work the way we want it to.”
I shrugged out of her embrace. “How do you know?”
“The beast will still be here. The town will still send tributes. Your Kenna would still be trapped. This is my prison, and it is yours now too. And will be as long as she lives.”
We stopped talking then. Asteria went into the cottage and came out with food—tins of meat and canned vegetables. She opened the containers with a casual spell, and we ate in silence. When we were done, we positioned ourselves among some shrubs at the side of the cottage and lay down.
It was cold. And though she held me close to her, I did not grow warmer. I felt restless and helpless, and she seemed as fitful as I. We fell asleep, both of us in our broken prison, rattling like coins in a box.
In the morning, she was no longer holding me. In the instant before I spotted her standing by the cottage, I feared she had been an illusion too, and for some reason this made me furious. “These phantoms,” I snapped at her. “Are they—are they true? What I see, is that really what happened to these people?”
“I don’t know.” She seemed a bit wary of me. The cottage stood behind us like a stage set, empty and pathetic in the gray light coming through the ceiling. The air, though, smelled fresh, earthy.