by J. A. Rock
“I dislike having gates shut behind me,” she said, ushering me through.
The ease with which she’d killed the bird called to mind Alle and the weasel. It surprised me, how easily I sometimes forgot to be wary around Asteria.
“The beast,” I said, watching her carefully. “Was she ordinary, do you think? Until she became a monster? Or was she always damaged?”
“She must always have been troubled, I suppose.”
“But she was human, once. How did she justify killing so many people?”
Asteria walked ahead of me. I noticed then, that part of the bird’s wing was stuck to the bottom of her foot—a bruise-colored mat of feathers. “Is it so hard to see?” She put a hand on my shoulder, urged me to walk beside her. “Violence starts as a discovery—of power, of ambition. Of a force that rests with its head against your heart. It is always there—a shadow, featureless. Until you turn a certain way, and the silhouette resolves itself. You see the nose, the lips, the curve of the shoulder. You see what you are capable of. You feel both the danger and the ordinariness of it. Because in the end, the blood comes out of each of us the same way. And one dead human, weighed against the world and the galaxy and everything beyond, means very little.” She paused. “Every act of violence is a disappointment before it even begins.”
I thought about fights I’d started over the years. The satisfaction of striking out was indeed short-lived. But connect enough of those brief moments of power, and couldn’t you braid something out of it? A fearsome legacy? An enviable façade? I wasn’t sure whether I hated the beast or hated that she and I dreamed together.
She guided me in a strange dance that took us through trees and over odd bulges in the grass, until we were walking along a low stone wall covered in vines. Time seemed to fall away, and I wondered if there was such a thing as spirits, as a web of life as old as the world, and if we had known each other, Asteria and I, when the earth’s greatest battles were between fire and earth, mountain and ocean. When there were no bodies like ours, no words, and no grief.
I realized we had stopped. She was looking at me with that strange almost-smile that suddenly unnerved me. “You’ll reach the center tonight.”
It was as if my heart became liquid for an instant, and spilled through my ribs. “I will?”
“I will meet you outside her chamber. I will create whatever diversion you need. The ivy that grows along this wall? Follow it. Do not stray. You’ll be where you need to be in a few hours’ time—a room of stone with paintings on the walls. If you follow the ivy, it will lead you directly there.”
I gazed at her. You would not betray me?
A fool’s question. She would. Anyone would.
There is no good or bad. Only survival.
My armor seemed to tighten around my bones. Why did I obey her? Why was it always, Follow the silver lamps or follow the ivy or I must return to her now, but don’t be afraid; she does not know you’re here.
The beast knew I was here. She had given me that storm by the ocean. She had taken Kenna from me. She had breathed with me in the dark halls. We’re taught that a predator is an obvious thing, stalking and fanged and hungry. But the best are the riddlers and illusionists, the ones that hide their teeth.
I broke our stare, turning toward the ivy wall. “All right,” I said. “I will see you there.”
I did not obey. I followed the ivy-covered wall until doors began to appear, and then I walked through the first one that drew me. I found myself in sunlight, standing on warm, prickly grass. The sun shone over a green plain. The sky was almost comically blue, and no matter how I looked, I couldn’t see glass above me. I thought for a moment that I had escaped. That I was no longer in the maze at all.
I saw figures—silhouettes at first, resolving themselves into people. Lounging in the grass, picking flowers or watching birds through binoculars. I would have thought it all false, some painted idea of happiness. Except I felt the warmth of this place immediately. I knew Asteria had told me to find the room with the fireplace and paintings on the walls. I vaguely remembered her telling me how to reach it. But all I could do was walk across this plain toward the figures, who looked up as I approached.
I knew by now not to trust anything in the labyrinth. Knew I ought to be more afraid of this idyllic scene than I had been of the room with the toy shelves. But the warning was all in my head and not at all in my gut. The warmth here was unlike anything I’d known before. Different from being pressed against Alle on a narrow cot, different from the ferocious heat of Asteria’s body. I continued toward a shady tree, where a woman was lying. She had red hair that fanned and shone on the grass. She opened her eyes as I drew near, and she smiled.
I am not sure whether she spoke. It was like a dream where you know you are welcome or know you are in danger without anyone having to say a word. I understood her, and when she rose and walked toward a long, low wooden building with rows of windows, I followed. Without any verbal instruction, I began to work with the other people.
Our only job, it seemed, was to sort through maps and place them where they could be seen. We plastered them to tabletops and tacked them to trees. We papered walls with them. We stepped into gardens and used rolled maps to stake tomato plants.
The maps were not of any world I knew. Continents spread over blue backgrounds. There were deserts and rivers I’d never heard of, mountain ranges and bridges the names of which I had no desire to memorize. I was happy. At night, I curled up in that low wooden building, in the nearest available bed, with whomever happened to be in it.
Every now and then I would be out in the field, taping pieces of map to the backs of leaves or creating a map tent to shelter stones, and I would spot a shadow in a window of the wooden building. I would frown, trying very hard to remember whom I had left behind and where I had once lived. And then I would feel the worry leave me like released air, and I would go back to work.
In truth, I am not sure how long I spent in that paradise. But I passed that time in a glorious haze. I frequently stood still and daydreamed. I was in no more of a rush than the sun. But I was troubled occasionally by shadows in the windows. I began to feel there were eyes in the trees, watching me, and I carried out my work with a wariness that made it less joyful. If the others noticed, they said nothing. I began to spend all my nights outside, rather than in a bed. I watched the stars draw into themselves until they were nothing but freckles, then watched them expand again.
One morning, a baby was crying somewhere in the garden. I mostly ignored it, or loathed it. But sometimes I wandered through rows of vegetables and sunflowers, looking for the source of the sound. I encountered the red-haired woman and asked her about the baby. She frowned, a slight furrow appearing between her eyes.
Nobody else I spoke to heard the crying either.
It became more difficult to do my work. My maps rolled back up whenever I tried to spread them out, and I couldn’t find any uncovered trees or rocks or walls. I wasn’t sure if I imagined it, but the sky seemed darker too.
I wandered around the wooden bunkhouse. The crying sounded closer when I was there. But no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find the child. And every time I thought I’d gotten closer to it, a moment later, the sound was far away again.
I began to sob. I, who hated crying, walked across meadows and around map-covered trees, weeping for an invisible child. The others tried briefly to comfort me, but they soon went back to work, and eventually their diligence was an inspiration. I returned to my duties too, but I was a quieter, colder worker. I tuned out the infant’s crying and manufactured a silence that shrouded me well.
Until the day I woke beside a woman with dusty hair, and the sun was shining, and I realized that we all heal. Every one of us. Easily and in our sleep. I truly could not hear the baby’s wails anymore. I went outside and I dozed in the sunlight. I found a bare tree and tacked a map to it. This map featured a long, thin, mountainous continent. A purple ocean with a hundred pin-dot
islands. To my right, far off, the sky was hazy and gray, and I thought how glad I was that sort of sky would never touch me again.
As I was admiring my work, a woman staggered across the meadow. I didn’t like her. She was hunched, sickly looking, and she wore rags. I looked down and realized I wore nothing at all. Around me, people were either naked or in sensible, untattered clothes. I thought this woman should make a choice.
She came right up to me, repeating a word I didn’t recognize. When I started to turn from her, she took my wrist. I felt a heat—not the quiet warmth I was used to experiencing here but a tearing jolt, a sensation I might expect to be caused by a bullet. “Thera.” Her gaze was angry, her nails sharp. “Thera, you’re not supposed to be here.”
I jerked my arm away. “I most certainly am. I live here. And I don’t know what you are calling me, but it is not appropriate.”
“Thera, listen to me.” Her eyes were wide, frantic, the lashes strangely splayed and wet looking. She seemed almost familiar, but I didn’t think she belonged here. I looked around for the woman with red hair, but I saw no one else on the plain. It was just me and the woman in rags, and that clot of dark sky drifting steadily closer. “You must leave.”
“I like it here.”
“You made a promise.”
I stared at her. Opened my mouth to tell her the words meant nothing. But there was something in my skin like a splinter, the smallest of terrors. “Please,” I begged the woman. “Please, I am happy here. Finally. I’ve never been happy before—not like this, not so easily.”
“You promised.” The woman crossed her arms and shivered. A wind whipped her hair, and clouds rolled in. “You promised you would slay the beast.”
“I . . .” I did not remember my promises. Another gust of wind carried the faint sound of the infant crying. “No!” I clapped my hands over my ears. “No!”
The woman stared at me.
“She always cries,” I explained. “That damn baby always cries. I just want to be away from her.”
I saw a ball of thread go by in the wind.
I gazed into the woman’s eyes. They seemed oddly blank to me. I didn’t trust them, but I wanted whatever information she had. More clouds piled above us, and the woman before me seemed to swell too. The sky flickered.
I heard an enormous boom, and then the ground began to shake. I was off-balance, upset. It seemed unfair for the ground to be shaking just when I had grown used to feeling stable. I looked down and saw water bubbling up around my feet. The earth became spongy, fetid. My wrist. Something was supposed to be tied to my wrist, but my wrist was bare. I was seized by fear then.
“Thera.” The woman in rags was beckoning me. “Come on!”
I began to run. And as I ran, my terror grew. My feet drew spouts of water from the land. The clouds were slashed open by a sideways streak of lightning, and water poured from them in sheets. There was too much water for me to see where I was going. It knocked my legs from under me and sent me sliding toward the building.
Before I could race inside and take shelter, the building came loose from its foundation with a crack. The wind whisked it away as though it were no more than wadded paper. Trees were wrenched from the ground and swept off over the horizon; maps flew through the air. The mud I struggled in seemed to anchor me to the earth. A moment later, the very sky and plains were blown away, and I found myself in a dark wooden hallway with a single dull lamp on the wall. The woman was nowhere in sight.
Asteria. The woman was Asteria. The fog seemed to have been shaken from my mind, and I knew where I was. And I was supposed to meet Asteria in the beast’s lair.
I started to walk. I needed to find the wall covered in ivy.
There was a burbling sound behind me. Looking down at the floor, I saw, through the shadows, water seeping into the corridor.
I ran until I turned a corner and found myself in a hall of ice. Thick spikes of it hung from the ceiling and rose out of the floor. I began to shiver. I imagined I saw flashes of red in the ice around me. I heard a sound, a hushed, feminine moan, growing louder and louder still. It sounded like the sighs you’d make in the bedroom: “Huh-huh-huh-huh-huhhhh . . .” The last was drawn out, and then the panting began again. “Huh-huh-huh . . .” But this time more voices joined it, and the harmony was stunning. A choir singing, “Huh-huh-huh-huuuhhhhh,” in ecstasy.
And I did see red in the ice—blushing skin, a swirl of copper hair, crimson nails. The chorus continued. I slipped on the ice in my struggle to escape the water, which flooded the crystal hall and slapped up the walls, and then . . . froze. In the most lovely glass waves, sharp and giving an illusion of motion, like a carved horse’s mane. At last the ice ended, and I was in a wooden corridor again. Water was trickling behind me again, snakes of it. I opened the first door I saw and shut it behind me.
Glasses clinked, and there was a doomed sort of music, a last-waltz type of thing. I was in a beautiful room—all white tablecloths and gleaming silverware. Napkin rings shaped like ivy leaves. Thick, rose-colored drapes, and huge portraits on the walls of men with hunting dogs. People milled about and chatted—men in suits and women in gowns.
“Thera, there you are.” My father clapped me on the shoulder. “We thought you weren’t going to show.”
I was too shocked to answer—shocked by the weight and solidity of his hand. He shouldn’t have been here. But he was, and it was wonderful. He looked a little gray at the temples, but not too old. “I didn’t know you wanted me.”
“Yes, yes. It wouldn’t be a party without you.”
There was something odd about his mouth. A lizard. Every man in the room had a tiny lizard on his mouth. My father’s was green and bitter looking. It snatched crumbs from his lips and spoke for him in a tiny, buzzy voice.
“A girl is a girl is a girl,” my father was saying through his lizard, while a tall bald man nodded. My father took a sip of amber liquid, and the lizard flicked its tongue in too.
I looked around for my mother.
“We endure through mediocrity,” my father went on. “One grand act and we’re fine fodder for tales, but who in this world has a more unshakable sense of importance than those who do a passable job day after day? Whose output is functional and ungenius?”
The water found its way under the door, ruining men’s shoes while they glanced down and lifted their feet, in a splashy, unison stamping.
I thought of a party aboard a sinking ship. But here it was the men who sank. The water rose and they tumbled into it, flailing and shouting. A waiter went down and a whole tray’s worth of glasses soared into the air, forming a temporary constellation before they plunged into the flood.
I spied a door in the back of the room and slogged toward it, the cuffs of my trousers heavy with water. I struggled and finally pulled it open and slipped into the next room. The water didn’t follow. When the door closed behind me, there was something final about the sound. Phantoms. I tried not to think about my father drowning in that room. Phantoms. She has seen your dreams. She built him from that.
I was in a narrow hallway. The only light came from around a corner—a dancing flame, casting shadows on the wall and illuminating ivy-leaf designs in the stone. I could hear faint music—the carnival song. And I walked carefully forward on a strip of red carpet until I turned another corner and found myself in a high-ceilinged room.
The center was open, and three flat, wide stone steps led up to a raised floor on which stood a huge white wooden bull. Large enough that I could have sheltered under its body. It stared at me with dark, painted eyes. It was indeed intricate—scars on its hide, one leg mangled, its tail wrapped around one flank. There was a softness to its muzzle, and a greenish patina like moss over its horns.
A fire burned in a large fireplace, and there were framed photographs of carousel animals on the walls. Beyond the table, on the raised part of the floor, stood a four-poster bed hung with thick green curtains. And spilling from the bed, leaking from between t
he curtains and surrounding the wooden posts, were jewels and gold coins, goblets and pearls.
I was in the Minotaur’s lair. I wandered around, looking at the paintings, straining to hear music over the crackle of the fire. But I didn’t go toward the bed. I understood that the treasure was a trap. That I must wait for the beast. I was still breathing hard, too wired to really be frightened. I knew I ought to look around for the blade, but I didn’t wish to. I had things I wanted to say to the beast. Things I didn’t intend to say with a sword in my hand.
I wished now more than ever that I held the end of the thread.
Eventually a shadow appeared on the wall, and I turned. Asteria stood in the entrance to the room, skin red-gold with firelight. Her rags had pieced themselves together into a white gown with bell sleeves; I could no longer see her breast, or the streaks of dirt. Her black hair fell in waves between her shoulders, and she stood straighter than she had before.
I knew then, and I suppose, had known all along.
I had already faced the beast many times. And this would be the last.
Miss Ridges used to go into quite a bit of detail about how people felt in the Dark Tales. If someone fell in love, there was always a lot of thinking and wishing and doubting involved. If someone was revealed to be wearing a second skin, the surprise was always palpable, the betrayal raw. I liked the Dark Tales because they were so much more complex than fairy tales—more truthful, I thought.
But there is some truth too in fairy tales where men turn to frogs or beetles and princes are blinded by thorns and women make deals with witches, and nothing more is said about it than that the prince was blinded or the deal was made. Sometimes the things that ought to shock us seem, under the circumstances, quite predictable.
“You?” I said softly.
She too seemed unwilling to indulge in a theatrical scene. “Thera.” She walked along the wall and into the chamber. “I see you’ve found where you are meant to be.”