by J. A. Rock
Asteria turned and raised her arms like a dancer. The gesture was graceful, unhurried. Alle stopped. Her eyes went wide, and she extended her trembling arms, the blade now pointed toward her own stomach.
“Alle!” I cried.
Alle plunged the blade in. She shuddered, ribbons of red spilling over her lip and down her chin. She ripped the sword out, then stuck it in again. Blood tumbled from the wound, soaking her shawl, drizzling over the stones.
I didn’t let myself scream. I fought, and the picture frames released me. I ran to Alle, who collapsed in my arms. Her shawl thwacked wetly on the floor. I eased her down and cradled her.
“Stop,” I hissed at Asteria in the same quiet, furious way Miss Tophitt had sometimes scolded us children at Rock Point. I was beyond anger and beyond fear, on a cracked and desolate rock in a vast ocean. My voice was unrecognizable, a locust-plague buzz. “What have you done?”
“She meant to kill me.” Asteria’s face was wretched and red again, the veins in her neck standing out under the skin. I believed, then, that Alle was no phantom. That Asteria truly was furious. “She meant to kill me, and you grieve for her?”
“You are a beast!” I shouted. “You are everything they say you are.”
She flinched. “Why should I be anything else?”
“Because it is wrong.”
She grinned. Her skin had begun to sag, and her teeth looked bluish and bruised. “I taught a lesson to the town that shunned me. I have killed the fools who came here to kill me. I have witnessed the scum of the scum of your land—its murderers and its castoffs—become lost here forever, but I have not killed them. I have not killed anyone who came here unwillingly.”
I was not sure whether to believe her, or whether I cared. My only concern was for Alle. She had gone very still, her eyes closed. I wanted to tell her what I’d always feared to say. That I would have gone with her to the end of anything—the end of a moment, an era, a lifetime. The edge of any cliff or sensation or story. I would have fallen in much more than love. I was alone now, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t beg the aid of my memories. I thought of her hand in mine on the day it snowed. I remembered her face as she studied the drawings in the Minotaur book.
“Please,” I said softly, as Alle’s blood flowed over my arm. “She was only trying to save me. You’re mightier; you’ve proven this.” I looked down at Alle, whose head had fallen to one side, exposing her blood-streaked throat. “Don’t let her die.”
“What will you give me, to save her?”
I looked up again. Asteria appeared half-delighted, half-despairing. She stretched into a swaying, leering thing, like the winding sculpture in a dragon dance. Thunder sounded in the distance.
“Anything.” It was a lazy answer, and Asteria only stared. I swallowed. “I will stay here with you.”
“Done,” she snapped. She thrust her arms forward as though inviting an embrace. I froze, confused, then watched in horror as Alle’s spilled blood gathered, rising off the floor in a dripping sash and spinning its way into a thread made of ugly dark clots. The thread arched through the air and pierced Alle’s skin at the edge of the wound, then stitched her up until across her belly was a black grin held together by a thread of her own blood.
Alle gasped, her eyes still closed. But she was breathing.
I turned to Asteria. Her expression was one of such anguish and fury that I couldn’t speak.
She looked away, trembling. “I don’t want you to stay.”
I eased Alle down and stood, facing her, waiting until she met my gaze again. “What?”
“I thought,” she whispered, “that once you held that blade, you would know what to do. But you are a fool like all the others.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked sharply.
She studied me for a long moment. “You could free me.”
I didn’t understand. I watched her skin grow more flushed and her trembling worsen. I tried to think how I was going to get Alle out of here, but I couldn’t tear my gaze from the convulsive movements of Asteria’s body.
The veins quivered in her throat, then burst through the skin one by one and hung, broken and limp, drizzling blood like kinked hoses. She stared at me—a manic smile wobbling on her lips, her guts churning like slop, so loudly I could hear them. Her eyes went blank, then the irises burst inward, leaving two black holes surrounded by jagged whites.
Her teeth exploded one by one, like they’d been shot out in a carnival game. Then the shards reconvened into long, flat molars. The bottom half of her face stretched down and forward, thin and sagging like putty, then hardened into a gnarled muzzle. She collapsed onto her hands and knees, and her spine broke in an upside down V at the base of the neck, forming a peak that was soon piled with muscle and covered in a dark hide. Her fists rounded—became black and glassy; became hooves. Her hind end hiked into the air and her knees snapped backward into hocks as muscle and fur covered her haunches. Her arms elongated and turned into a pair of front legs, and her head thickened, horns sprouting from the sides.
She towered, beautiful and terrible. Three times larger, at least, than a real bull, with her sleek coat rippling over her muscles and thick cords of drool hanging from her mouth. Her empty eye sockets bubbled like black oil; her tail was the lash of a whip. She tossed her great head and ropes of saliva struck the walls and dripped down the stones.
I staggered backward, positioning myself between the beast and Alle. I stumbled over something and glanced down.
I picked up the blood-soaked yellow shawl. Held it for a moment, feeling the weight of it. The blood was already drying, stiffening the fabric.
I extended my arms slowly and shook the garment out, spreading it between my hands until it was a wide, stained rectangle. Then I waved it at the beast.
Her mouth opened, and I saw broken bits of tooth bobbing on a slick pool of saliva, saw the thick, blue-black mass of her tongue. She lowered her head and pawed the ground. Her long horns pointed at my chest. And she charged.
Her hooves threw sparks as they met stone. A flash of lightning lit the entire ceiling, accompanied by a mighty crack. The rumbling in the floors and walls increased until it might have been a whole herd of beasts thundering toward me. The lightning outlined the Minotaur’s broad black hump and bone-white horns. She caught Alle’s shawl on the tip of one horn and yanked it from my grasp. I was sent spinning to the floor as she galloped past me and then skidded, unable to stop. She struck the wall, her horns lodging in the stone.
Lightning flashed again. Turning, I saw Alle crawling toward the discarded sword. I ran for it too, but Alle reached it first. She grasped the handle.
“Alle!” I called, holding my hand out so she could pass me the weapon. But Alle crawled back toward the white bull.
Asteria was still thrashing. “Alle!” I yelled again.
She ignored me. Reaching the wooden bull, she gripped its leg and pulled herself to her feet. She gasped and swayed, then drew back the sword and stabbed the carved creature through the chest.
Asteria let out a high-pitched, human-sounding scream as the labyrinth began to shake violently. An instant later, the clock tower collapsed onto the ceiling and sent cracks slinking through it. I looked up. The clock face stared down at me, white and luminescent, blood pouring from the clock hand into the web of faults. I reached Alle and dragged her underneath the white bull as the ceiling shattered and the tower plummeted into the chamber.
The clock hit the floor a few feet behind us in a spray of glass and stone. Alle and I were thrown upward against the wooden bull’s belly. I caught a glimpse of Asteria, still trying frantically to dislodge her horns from the wall, and then suddenly the bulk of her vanished. I thought I spied movement on the ground where she had been standing, but I had no more time to think. The walls of the palace came shuddering down, spilling stones that fragmented and rolled across the floor. I shielded Alle with my body as the storm swept in. I heard glass striking the wooden bull’s back, s
aw the shards bursting into salt-sized grains and skittering between the stones.
The wind toppled the white bull and it fell, not in a splintering of wood, but with a heavy, wet slap against the stone floor, as though it were truly made of flesh. I held Alle tighter as bits of glass and rock and ember swirled around us. The storm blew off suddenly, retreating out across the cliffs. I was surprised by how close we were to the precipice—stones from the palace were rolling over the edge, crashing into the sea or cracking against other rocks. The sky was a weak, watery gray, lightening rapidly as the worst of the dark clouds dissolved. It was several long moments before things went quiet but for the rough hush of Alle’s breathing and my own.
A black mouse raced by my feet, climbing over and under rubble, darting onto the grass. It ran toward the cliff’s edge, vanishing from my sight. A moment later, a fist-sized stone struck the grass, sending the mouse somersaulting through the air and over the ledge. Seconds crept by. Is that it, then? All at once, a gull swept up from beyond the cliff, soaring out over the sea until it became a black dot in the brightening sky, and then disappeared.
Alle’s face was buried in my shoulder. Her body shook. The white bull lay beside us, and from the wound in its chest leaked a stream of blood. Yet when I touched the creature’s body, all I felt was painted wood.
Alle inhaled sharply and looked up at me, her dark eyes wary, familiar. Everything softened then—her body and her gaze—and she reached up to touch my cheek. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Thera. I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” I pushed a curl back from her face.
As if love is ever a matter of forgiveness. We disappear in love. We hunger, regret, and resurface. Guilt and shame are how we decorate love when we are afraid to look at it directly. The core is something simpler. Bright, violent, and unadorned. I loved her; I always had. And now I held her, and I meant never to let her go.
It was the twentieth anniversary of the beast’s fall. Twenty years ago today, Alle and I staggered over rocks and splintered boards, over glass and scraps of clock face, looking for other survivors. We found nothing. Not Denson’s brother or Kenna or Rocky Bottom or strange corpses. No sharks or sheepdogs. No jungle vines, no great trees. Only rubble.
We had walked to Rock Hill. It took us hours, and our feet bled so badly that we were taken to the hospital once we arrived in town. We announced to anyone we saw that the beast was dead. Most people flinched from us like they were afraid, but finally a police officer heard us and rounded up a team to go to the promontory and check our claim. They found the ruins of the labyrinth and the body of the white bull. That always surprised me, how readily people accepted the carving as the body of the beast. When in fact it was her gift, her art, her shell, and her burden. They dragged it into town to taxidermy it for the museum, and as far as I know, no one has ever noticed it is made of wood.
They also found Kenna, alive but badly injured, buried under a heap of rubble.
Kenna we see sometimes. She lives in the heart of town, but she is considerably muted. Her left leg and back are no good; she limps and hates limping, so she tries not to move at all. In trying not to move, she has grown flaccid and a bit pathetic looking. She never talks about what happened to her in the labyrinth, but when we are together I sometimes catch her rubbing her nose with a compulsive fervor, or running her fingers over her lips in a zigzag pattern, as though tracing invisible stitches.
Alle and I were invited to a ball tonight, to be held at the grand hall the city built after the collapse of the labyrinth. They didn’t build it on the promontory or anything so symbolic as that. The hall is on a hill overlooking Main Street’s pubs and shops. I have heard it is splendid, but I’ve never been inside.
I had already skipped the afternoon’s celebrations, but I’d been pressured into attending the ball. Alle had opted not to go. Twenty years ago, she arranged it so that, while we were both heralded as the bringers of the beast’s doom, I emerged the hero. Alle told everyone that it was I who made the sacrifice. Who offered myself in exchange for Alle’s life, an act so altruistic that—as the story now goes—the beast could not survive bearing witness to it. And in the Minotaur’s moment of weakness, it is said I stabbed it through the heart.
I am still conflicted about this. I have indeed made a sacrifice, it seems. I sacrificed my chance to be human, complicated, weak and lovely both. I have seen so many people overlook what I was—an orphan, a crook, a tough in love with her own fists—in favor of the image of me as a warrior. The girl who set out to slay the Minotaur and succeeded.
I do not want the truth gone from me. I do not want only stories. What stories do to heroes is edge out the things that make them bravest—their insecurities and wrongdoings, their thrashing-tailed desire for self-preservation. The way they sharpen their love with a quiet, occasional contempt for the object of it. We paint heroes in broad strokes—nameable virtues and forgivable flaws. They brood, yes, but they are never paralyzed by self-loathing. They kill, but only monsters.
When I first read my tale in a book, I marveled at the stranger in those pages, like a starlet seeing a photo of herself with all her pimples painted out.
In twenty years there have been, to my knowledge, no sightings of Asteria. I do not take credit for this, but I do think often of what Asteria said when I asked why she did not kill the beast herself. I am afraid. In my fantasy she could have freed herself at any time, could have gone out into the world and lived a life where she was not hated or feared, if only she had not been so afraid.
If she lives, perhaps she has decided to do no more harm if she can help it.
Or perhaps she is biding her time.
Alle made a deal with me. If I stayed at the ball for one hour and did not enjoy myself, I could go home to her. She is good at gentle, loving decrees, and at being someone I long to come home to.
I am still not sure what we are. We have never untangled or tried to match our ideas about love, fidelity, and gratitude. I don’t know if I am something she treasures or if I am simply a shelf above loneliness, where she sits and looks down at a void that dares her, coaxes her to lean forward. But I know she keeps me from feeling like I am meeting wall after wall. I think she is more beautiful than she has ever been, and that her beauty is featureless, magnificent, something beyond the body. I hope that if I was ever destined for anything, it was to lie beside her.
Rock Point Girls’ Home closed five years ago, and now I am not sure where cast-off girls go. I suppose to other shelters in other towns. Alle and I have talked on occasion about driving to one of those places and adopting a daughter. But the idea frightens more than it pleases me, so I don’t know. Parenthood seems like a journey I can’t come home from, and I am only recently in love with the feeling that my maze has an end—that I have not one final destination, but many rooms and many returns.
I was too ashamed, too guilty, too exhausted to go back to Rock Point right away after the beast’s fall. But I wanted to find Riley Denson. I wanted to apologize. When I finally did call the girls’ home, pretending to be a young wife interested in adoption and asking if Denson was available, Rollins told me, curtly and politely, that Riley Denson had passed away several months prior.
The shock of the words held me motionless. “Passed away how?”
“She was ill.” Rollins sounded hoarse, older. “She died in her sleep. Left everything to her daughter.”
I sat there, frozen on the other end of the line, unable to speak.
“Riley Denson had no daughter,” I said finally.
“No,” Rollins agreed after a while.
It didn’t occur to me to wonder why Rollins shared that last bit of information. But now I think it was because she knew who I was. I’d made no effort to disguise my voice after the initial shock of the news.
I thanked her and hung up.
I traveled to Rock Point two days later. Alle did not come with me. She had been staying at a shelter in town, and in truth I don’t remember if
I was glad or sorry she was not by my side. I asked the driver of the car to wait outside the main entrance, and I paid him from the money I’d been given by the town. A reward, one that would last me for years.
Inside the parlor, I waited for Rollins. I got distracted, remembering the day Alle had arrived at Rock Point, how she’d rested her chin on her folded arms and stared out the window. I tried to imitate the pose and was startled when Rollins said behind me, “Thera.”
I whirled. She did not look much different—perhaps a little more gray in her hornets’ nest of hair. It had been less than a year since I’d last seen her, and yet it felt longer. She took me to her office, to the room where I’d once picked the lock on the file cabinet. We sat at the desk where I’d found the adoption papers, signed by Denson and Rollins and awaiting my signature. It is strange, how there are numbnesses that seem sharper than pain, and when I sat, I had pushed all feeling so far to the side that its absence hurt terribly.
I didn’t know what Rollins would say to me. If she would call me a hero, like everyone else. Part of me wanted to be recognized that way. Wanted Rollins to know that I, the girl everyone had thought so little of, had done something important. But she just chatted about the weather, commented on the new staff, and finally showed me Denson’s will.
Denson had left everything to me. Not a large sum, but enough that, between this and my reward from Rock Hill, I’d be set for a long while. I also had Denson’s cottage if I wanted it.
I waited for something to happen, something that would give me closure. Perhaps I would run into Miss Ridges, and she would say something wise and mysterious to me about what a true hero is. Perhaps I would see a sixteen-year-old girl who looked like me at that age, and whose glowering mistrust would pique my sympathy and nostalgia. Perhaps I would make up with Bessie Holmes. Or apologize to Van Narr for making fun of her lip hair.
“Is Tamna still here?” I asked suddenly. “I’d like to see her again.”