The Red

by Tiffany Reisz

  told herself, you want him to love you.

  She admitted it, but only to herself.

  The week before Christmas, the gallery phone rang after hours. She picked it up and was pleased to hear Sebastian’s voice on the line.

  "How have you been?” he asked. "Do you have more Degas sketches to show me?”

  "None, I’m afraid,” she said with a laugh. "You’d be my first phone call if I did.”

  "There’s a Degas exhibit this month. Have you seen it?”

  "I haven’t, no. Worth the trip?”

  "How could you ask me such a thing? I’d walk across a desert with no water for a Degas exhibit and this one is only a cab ride uptown. Come with me. I’ll tell you all of the master’s secrets. You can see the final result of that sketch you have. It’s on exhibit. You won’t regret it.”

  "Now where have I heard that before?”

  Oh yes, from Malcolm.

  Hungry for company, Mona agreed to meet him at the exhibit. But only to meet him. She didn’t want him thinking it was a date, even if it sort of was. She was too far gone in whatever this was with Malcolm to get romantically entangled with anyone else. But still, Sebastian was terribly handsome with his curling dark hair, warm brown skin, and vibrant eyes. And he knew everything there was to know about Degas—his art, his life. Sebastian’s enthusiasm was infectious. She would have to see about getting a whole display of Degas sketches at The Red. When it was time to part, she kissed Sebastian on the lips—a quick small kiss, but more than she’d intended. As he put her in a cab to send her home, she realized she’d gone two whole hours without thinking of Malcolm. A small victory, but one she’d desperately needed on a cold gray Saturday in a lonely December.

  As usual, she went to the gallery instead of her apartment. She pretended she was there solely to check Tou-Tou’s food and water, but she knew what she wanted was to work so late she could justify, yet again, sleeping in the brass bed in the back room. When she walked into her office, she found a book and a glass of red wine waiting on her desk.

  Malcolm was back.

  Mona could hardly catch her breath as she walked to her desk and sat down in the ancient swivel chair that needed oiling. She looked at the wine first. A white card sat propped up on the glass stem. On it in bold male handwriting were two words.

  Drink me.

  If he left the wine for her to drink, that meant he intended to have her tonight. She wondered vaguely if he was watching her and knew she’d gone out with Sebastian. Is that why he wanted her tonight? Usually he gave her a day’s warning. If he wanted her to drink it now, though…

  And why the wine? One glass wouldn’t intoxicate her. At most it would relax her. But for what purpose, what plan? He’d beaten her with a riding crop last time without this sort of preparation. She couldn’t begin to guess why he needed her to drink. Carte blanche, she reminded herself. She’d given him carte blanche. If she needed to drink a little before whatever it was he had planned for her, she would do it.

  She sipped at it gingerly. It was unlike any red she’d had, but once she discovered its subtle sweetness, she drank deeper and faster. On her empty stomach, the wine went to her head quickly. However, although red wine had a depressive effect, it did nothing to settle the tempest in her heart or quiet the storm in her blood.

  She turned her attention to the book. A slim volume of blue, with "Picasso” printed on the spine. So tonight was to be surreal in some way? Her vision was already beginning to blur thanks to the potent red wine. Potent and delicious. She couldn’t get enough of it. She drank every drop of the wine before setting the empty glass on the desk and opening the book to the page marked with her red velvet choker.

  Mona blinked when she saw the painting. Then she giggled. Oh, Malcolm. The painting was called Dora and the Minotaur. It was a large, brightly colored work. A naked woman lay on her back as a pale Minotaur—a creature with a bull’s head and a man’s body—mounted her. Dora Maar, according to the book, had been Picasso’s muse and mistress. And he often painted the Minotaur as a symbol of himself. From what she knew of Picasso’s personality and libido, he had chosen his avatar well.

  So it was to be role play again? She imagined Malcolm wearing a leather mask, with horns on his head and a bull’s large sloped eyes. A laughable idea. She wouldn’t put it past him at all. She recalled the satyr’s role he’d played so well, the hairy leggings that had felt so warm and real, the pointed ears. Well, she would play along. Where Malcolm was concerned she was up for anything. She swayed a little on her feet as she rose from her desk. Malcolm was no doubt already waiting for her in their back room.

  As she walked to the door, another memory stirred. Hadn’t Malcolm said something about how she would hate him next time? He had, yes. The night with the riding crop kisses, he’d given her permission to love him since next time they met she would hate him. Now that was laughable, utterly laughable. She couldn’t hate Malcolm. Another mind game. She was growing fond of them.

  Mona slowly opened the back room door. It was dark inside. Completely dark. The sun had set and no light shown through the skylight. No light at all. Strange. There should have been some ambient light in the room from the street lamps and the moon. But no, the room was pitch black. The door shut behind her and she leaned her back against it, afraid of taking another step in the dark lest she trip and fall.

  "Malcolm?”

  He didn’t answer her call.

  Something else was off. Usually the room smelled of nothing but clean dust, the scent of old books, old theaters, old paint. After a night with Malcolm it smelled of cigar smoke and sex. But now it smelled like an animal had been in here. A large animal. Was that the wine’s doing? A breeze blew past her, warm like a sea breeze. Her nose twitched. There was that scent again. A kind of animal musk. The smell troubled her nose. It didn’t belong in here. She fumbled for the doorknob behind her and felt a string tied to it. She followed the string with her fingers and found it extended far into the room. Now she understood the darkness—she was to follow the string where it led. There was an old myth about the labyrinth, a thread to guide a girl… Who was the girl, again? Ariadne? She’d been out of school too long to say for certain. But she knew the string was to guide her through the labyrinth. She took a steadying breath and stepped forward, thread in hand. Malcolm certainly went all out for these assignations. No wonder two months could pass between their liaisons. It would take anyone that long to put these sorts of scenes together. Perhaps he’d majored in theater at university.

  She giggled a little drunkenly at the thought. Oh no, not laughing already. It would likely hurt Malcolm’s feelings if she laughed at this production of his. She must be very solemn. Following the string in her hand, Mona felt herself walking toward the center of the back room. She sensed walls on either side of her. Malcolm had constructed a whole set for tonight. How flattering it was he went to so much trouble when she would have met him in a seedy motel had he asked it of her. Of course he went to all this trouble to please himself, not her, but she couldn’t deny she enjoyed that he took their assignations so seriously.

  Ahead of her she caught a glimpse of light, red and flickering. The thread led her to turn a corner and she saw a fat white candle alight on the floor in the middle of a blank hallway. She picked up the candle in its holder and raised it. The candle illuminated only the few feet around her, and she saw nothing ahead but the white thread she held. The walls on either side of her were narrow. They looked and felt like stone to her. But that was highly unlikely. It wouldn’t take long to build a maze out of large sheets of plywood, but a stone maze would take weeks. He was either a very good set designer or she had been drugged.

  Considering how light she felt, how fluttery and faint, she figured it was the latter. Malcolm had spiked the wine with some drug or other, one that made her very susceptible to the power of suggestion and also made her care not one whit that he’d drugged her.

  Tomorrow, however, she’d be furious at
him.

  For now, she followed the thread. At the end of the hall she met another corridor. The string told her to go right, but she was more curious to see what was left. She turned her head and saw an enormous shadow move at the end of the hall. She jumped back with a gasp, nearly dropping the candle.

  The shadow disappeared into the darkness. It had seemed far too tall, too wide to be human. Was this the Minotaur?

  No. Not possible. Shapes were distorted when thrown into shadow, she reminded herself. The drugs had done this to her mind. Surely it was nothing. Her eyes were playing games with her too.

  Mona glanced behind her and narrowed her eyes. Nothing. She saw nothing. But she heard something.

  A growl.

  A deep, low, animal growl, like a large dog or wolf.

  "Malcolm?” she called out again. It made her feel safer to say his name.

  He made no reply, no answer at all.

  But he wouldn’t, would he? Not until the game was over.

  She chided herself for giving into fear. This was nothing but a Halloween haunted house. That’s all. He’d set up a painted plywood maze in the large back room while she was out at the Degas exhibit. He’d covered the skylight. He’d put a string on the doorknob and when she found her way to the end of it, she would find Malcolm, naked, reclining on the bed and wearing a silly bull’s mask. He’d throw her onto the bed, probably put her on her hands and knees, and then he’d mount her from behind like a bull on a cow. That’s all. No reason for her to feel such fear. She blamed the wine for her overreaction—the wine, and whatever Malcolm had put into it.

  Carefully she started forward again. The candle flame sent dancing shadows everywhere and they did nothing to help steady her head or clear her vision. She focused on the white thread in her hand. This was her life line. It would take her to Malcolm or take her back out again. Nothing bad would happen as long as she had this candle and this silk thread in her hands.

  She came to a corner and turned. At the intersection where one hall met the other, she saw a hooded person, cloaked and wearing a cowl. Mona screamed and threw herself back against the wall. The figure was gone. She hadn’t seen where it had come from or where it had disappeared, but disappeared it had. She thought it had worn red.

  Distant music echoed through the halls.

  It wasn’t like the sprightly flute music of the nymphs and the satyr. She heard low rumbling drums. Chanting. She couldn’t make out any of the words of the chant, but the voices sounded female. She was certain the creature in the red cloak had been male. She’d only seen it for a split second, but its bulk had filled every inch of the corridor. Its shoulders were twice as broad as hers, its height towering. Something told her it hadn’t seen her.

  "It.”

  The Minotaur.

  Calm down, she told herself. The shadowy figure wasn’t an "it.” The "Minotaur” was either Malcolm in a costume or one of his many compatriots. He seemed to have a bevy of play partners for his erotic adventures. Any one of them could have donned a cloak to frighten her, that was all.

  She followed the cord a few more steps and the music grew louder. She was nearing the end. The thread led her through another turn in the maze and there she smelled that animal scent again. It was strong in her nostrils and strangely pleasant. A smell like raw nature, like a horse might smell after a long dusty trail ride.

  For all her foreboding, Mona couldn’t deny she was excited, even a little aroused. Malcolm was somewhere in this maze, and he wanted her to find him. Soon she would be safe in his arms, his cock lodged inside her right where it belonged. Once she found him, she would be fine. It was only a game, after all. Only a game of cat and mouse. She was the mouse, of course. She must be ready for Malcolm’s pounce.

  Step by dreadful step, Mona made her way through the maze. Rationally, she knew she’d only gone about forty feet at most. Yet it felt like a mile for all the twists and turns, all the darkness, and the surreality of it all. The music grew louder still—if it could be called music, this odd atonal chant. Malcolm was using it to scare her. She refused to let it work on her like that. She wasn’t a child to be frightened by costumes and lighting effects.

  A thought occurred to Mona out of nowhere, a thought and a question: Did her mother have this in mind when she’d told Mona to do anything to save the gallery?

  Likely not.

  Mona pressed on. A breeze gusted through the corridor and blew out her candle. She was frightened at first, but she found another source of light at the end of the hall. She set the candle down and continued on, toward the flickering red light dancing on the wall. At the end of that hall she turned right and found herself at the mouth of a cave. Ten paces ahead a small wood fire burned in the center of a ring of stones. She saw more figures in cloaks around the fire and behind them a massive boulder, wide as a car, tall as a man. Mona’s head spun again, her eyes watered. What the hell had Malcolm put in her drink? A hallucinogenic? Dazed by the chanting, by the fire, by the drug in her blood, Mona stepped forward out of the cave mouth. The bowed heads of the cloaked figures raised and she saw they were women with sooty black painted across their eyes and temples like a bandit’s mask. She wanted to scream, but everything went black.

  When she came to, she lay on the ground by the fire. It felt like warm and real earth to her, not the hardwood floor of the back room. The rational part of her brain unaffected by the drug knew she’d been transported somewhere after fainting. She wasn’t in the back room. That had been misdirection. She’d passed out—probably the drug’s doing—and she’d been driven into the woods where the scene would continue in the open. She saw the twinkling of stars overhead. A ring of trees, large and ancient. Oaks, perhaps? And she smelled wild grass, rich dark dirt, fresh air.

  But that made no sense either. She was warm, almost hot. Earlier, she’d had to wear a coat to the exhibit because of the chilly winter weather.

  The coven of cloaked women stirred silently when Mona opened her eyes. They looked at each and nodded. Mona counted six of them, all of indeterminate age behind their sooty masks and hoods. They seemed to be playing the role of ancient Greek priestesses in this pantomime, and they certainly looked the part with their olive-toned complexions and black braids draped over their shoulders. At once, all six of them reached for her on the ground and lifted her bodily into the air, turning her to stand on her feet. They took the pins from her hair and let it fall in red waves around her shoulders. Fingers sought and found the buttons to Mona’s black blouse, the zipper to her red skirt, the hooks to the stockings she’d worn to the Degas exhibit in case she changed her mind about going to bed with Sebastian. It seemed they managed to strip her naked without touching her skin. Mona had anticipated being naked tonight, so she didn’t struggle. When they were done, Mona stood amid the women, her eyes to the ground. It felt so real, looked and smelled so real. She pawed at the dirt with her toe and it moved like soft earth, not dirt sprinkled across a finished floor. They’d taken her somewhere—they’d had to have. Hadn’t they? She heard an owl in the distance. A sound effect, a hallucination…or something else?

  One woman seemed to be the leader, the eldest. By the firelight Mona could see her hands were those of an elderly woman. The high priestess? Whoever she was, she was holding a stone knife. Mona flinched from the sight of it flickering red in the firelight. She pulled back and away from it, but the cloaked women behind her grabbed her and held her in place, trapping her arms behind her back. The woman raised her hands. Her left was empty, but in her right she held aloft the stone knife. Without warning, she pricked at the center of her own left palm with the knife. Blood bubbled up from the wound. The knife disappeared into the folds of the cloak and the high priestess stepped toward Mona. She touched the blood in her palm delicately, brought her red fingers to Mona’s face and dabbed the blood across her eyelids and temples, giving Mona the same markings as the women, only in red, not black.

  Mona fainted again—from the shock of the blood or fro
m the drug, she didn’t know. When she woke again from the brief faint, the women were dragging her toward the boulder. One side of the stone was curved and smooth, as if a thousand years of water had worn off its rough edges. Iron spikes had been driven deep into the sides of the boulder, and from them hung iron chains. The women lifted Mona off her feet. They pressed her back into the stone and held her down by her arms and legs. The high priestess bound her wrists to the boulder with the iron chains and drew another chain across her stomach, leaving only her legs free. The cloaked women released her all at once and formed a straight line facing her. Even without their hands, Mona stayed in place, the chains holding her fast to the boulder. Struggling proved useless and did nothing but abrade her back against the stone. Due to the irregular shape of the boulder, Mona’s body curved in an obscene arch, her breasts lifted high and her hips tilted forward.

  All at once the women moved. The six of them parted down the center, revealing the red-cloaked figure behind them, the figure she’d seen in the maze.

  It towered over the women, dwarfing them by several feet. Mona could not see its face hidden within the folds of the cloak, but she knew it stared at her. She wanted to scream but her voice was gone. She would faint again any moment. This time, she hoped she wouldn’t come to until morning.

  But she didn’t faint. The figure stepped forward and she could hear its animal breathing now. Not a wolf or a bear or a dog, but certainly something large and lethal. She feared it. No amount of telling herself her senses were distorted by a drug in her drink could convince her not to fear this beast, the Minotaur.

  The chanting of the women began again. Not Latin. Greek, perhaps? Some far more ancient language?

  The Minotaur stepped closer. This couldn’t be Malcolm, could it? Malcolm was tall, but not nearly this gargantuan. No human man was this tall, this broad, this massive.

  It stepped closer yet, so close she felt the heat radiating from it. Against the stone she shook and shivered. A hand extended—a human hand, thank God—from within the red cloak. It was huge, this hand, muscular and veined like Malcolm’s, but even larger. The hand touched her face gently, so gently. It stroked her quivering lips and dabbed at the tears on her cheek. The Minotaur seemed to be trying to soothe her and calm her. He—no longer "it,” for there was a man in there, no matter how distorted—caressed her hair, the line of her jaw, her ears. Her heart rate slowed. Her eyes fluttered. What was he doing to her? Hypnotizing her? She felt calmer than she ever had in her life. It was like a trance, like a waking sleep. Her body went slack against the boulder as if it were the softest of beds, not the hardest of stones. The man in the red cloak extended his other hand. He slid it behind her, cradling her head in his massive palm to protect it from the hard unforgiving rock she lay chained against.

  "Malcolm?” she whispered, hoping he would respond in some way, letting her know that somehow this was him even if the drug he’d given her had turned him into this funhouse mirror version of himself, so much larger than any normal man. Though he said nothing and did nothing to reveal himself, she sensed it was Malcolm. Something in the way his fingers touched her face told her it was him. She was not afraid anymore. They were playing at human sacrifice tonight, he the beast and she the offering. He the Minotaur, and she Dora. It was only another game.

  The man stepped so close his cloak brushed her naked skin. She