by Shae Hutto
“The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll finish,” said Amanda optimistically.
“You want the good news or the bad news?” asked Nick enigmatically as he dug in his backpack for something.
“Spit it out, half-pint,” said Amanda warily.
“The good news is I mapped this maze once before.”
“Sweet,” replied Amanda happily. Her smile froze and turned down at the corners, slightly. “What’s the bad news?”
“I think the maze might shift about,” said Nick as he unfolded an old, crumpled piece of notebook paper with some writing on it. “And it took me two days to map last time.”
“Two days?” she asked incredulously. “I thought time was different in here,” she added. “How did you know it was two days?”
“Watches won’t give you any idea of what time it is outside,” he explained as he turned the paper this way and that, trying to orient himself. “But they can still measure time as it passes in here.” As if to prove it, he set the stop watch function on his battered Amazing Spiderman wrist watch. It had come with a clock and had been a birthday present from years ago, or a couple of months depending on how you looked at it. “Put out that flashlight,” he told Amanda after the watch started dutifully measuring the seconds. “Might as well save it for when we need it and let our eyes adapt to this gloom.” Amanda shrugged and put the extinguished flashlight back in her bag.
Weenie sniffed about in the maze, confused by a variety of scents, one not very promising. One thing he did catch a whiff of that made him happy was Nick. It was old, months old maybe, but it was definitely Nick. He had no way to tell them so, but Weenie felt he could probably follow the old trail through the maze. Little did he know that would do him no good at all.
“How did you map it last time?” asked Amanda curiously.
“I used the same trick I did in the corridors,” he answered with a grin. “I had some crayons with me, so I just drew a line on the wall with my left hand as I walked.”
“Did that work?”
“Sort of. I ended up going down a lot of blind alleys. When I came to spots that I had already been, I crossed off the turn with a black crayon. Later, I went back to the beginning and wrote down all the turns as I went.”
“Cool,” said Amanda happily. “Now we don’t have to walk the whole thing. We’ll just follow your directions.”
“I would feel a whole lot better about that plan except for one thing,” said Nick as he stared off into the dark maze with squinted eyes.
“What’s that?”
“My crayon mark is gone.”
Amanda was not going to let that phase her. She just held out her hand.
“Gimme the crayon,” she said with confidence. “I’ll draw our line and you read the map. If your map is out of date, we’ll follow the line back to here and do it the hard way.” She took the red crayon and wrote in big bubble letters on the stone wall: START. It looked entirely too cheerful and feminine to Nick’s male eyes.
Nick thought Amanda’s idea was actually a pretty decent plan. With his eyes finally adapted to the dark, he could just make out his marks on the paper with the available star light. Feeling much better about the whole situation, he led them confidently to the first turn in the maze and consulted his notebook paper. The first mark on his sheet was a smudged and faded L. He looked at his choices in the maze and peeked his head around the corner to the left. More maze stretched interminably into the darkness. When he turned and looked to the right, he saw much the same thing except he could make out the vague outlines of another corner before the inky black completely blocked his vision.
“Look familiar?” asked Amanda from just behind him. She startled him and just for a second, he felt himself begin to dematerialize and burst into a cloud of shadows. This new ability worried him on a level of consciousness that was probably deeper than it should have been. Some part of Nick recognized this fact but he was having a hard time manifesting enough will to care about that particular concern. He was smart enough to know it was linked to the dagger and that it couldn’t continue indefinitely, but it wasn’t something that had to be dealt with right now. It was actually kind of cool and with that realization he slipped a hair’s breadth closer to acceptance of the new norm. He felt a little more comfortable with it because he was learning to control it somewhat better. When he felt himself start to go, he fought it; forcing his body to stay corporeal. For a split second, he felt his toes and his earlobes slip into a realm of existence that felt both alien and like home simultaneously. As he exerted his will and the crux of control slipped into the past, a civil battle waged and won, his disparate parts regained their solidity. His shoes once again contained ten toes and his ears kept their dangly bits. He hoped Amanda didn’t notice his wavering control over his own body. It was vaguely humiliating, like catching a whiff of your own body odor in public.
“No,” he said and realized how stupid that was. “I mean, yes.” That wasn’t any better. “It looks like any other part of the maze,” he expanded reasonably. “But there isn’t anything to set this section apart.”
“Yeah,” replied Amanda. “I got that from ‘No.’”
Weenie nosed around the area, trying to sift through the smells on the ground and on the walls. There were so many, yet so few that were recent. Faint traces of travelers remained that might have been there for hundreds of years. Weenie thought in his dog way that there was probably no rain or wind or any other weather in this maze to eradicate scent trails. According to the olfactory record, Nick had been turned left here more than once, but he had also been to the right. He must have wondered in this maze for a while. But to the left there was also a faint whiff of something else; something alive and feral that pulsed through the still air like a heartbeat. It was faint but radiated power and left an oh so delicate itch in the Dalmatian’s sensitive nose. Weenie felt his hackles rise. He woofed softly.
“What’s your paper say?” asked Amanda as she watched both the boy and the dog trying to decide which way to go. They both seemed to be leaning toward left.
“Left,” replied Nick and seemed to gain a little more confidence in himself.
“Looks like Weenie agrees with you,” said Amanda and nodded at the black and white dog who was already several feet down the passage to the left, nose to the ground and snuffling and snorting with a purpose.
“Left it is, then,” said Nick and followed the dog. Amanda trailed after both of them, elegant silk dress rustling softly against the ancient stone.
The repetition was hypnotic. Nothing ever seemed to change, except they occasionally came across rooms shaped as various regular polygons with multiple doors in them. When this happened they took the door indicated by the paper and marked it with a check. Their minds went numb as they continued on. They walked between stone walls that could have been copied and pasted from the last section. Their existence narrowed to ten or so feet of dry, powdery soil and gravel that lay in front of them the same distance it hung behind them, capped on both ends by velvety nothing. All of this was softly illuminated by starlight alone. They would come to an intersection or a T and have to make a choice which way to go and Nick would consult his paper. They would look to Weenie for confirmation and then they would proceed, Amanda always bringing up the rear as she dragged an ever-shrinking crayon against the uncaring stone walls, slightly diminishing their anonymity. They were on their third crayon; the others smeared over miles of wall in a thin, unbroken line on the left hand. As far as she could tell, they were making progress. They had yet to double back on themselves or come to a dead end. She started to make a little sense of the changes in direction as the constellations above them whirled about as they turned this way and that. She started to notice something that dragged her out of her stupor of boredom. It was a familiar psychic pressure.
“Something scaly this way comes,” she croaked and realized she hadn’t spoken in hours. Her throat was dry and dusty and her voice cracked. She noti
ced Nick almost flew to pieces again and little shadows flitted away from him in all directions before he seemed to call himself back from the brink of disintegration.
“Connix?” he asked, already knowing the answer. Amanda nodded her head.
“How far do we have to go?” she asked, hoping for a miracle to blossom in the darkness like a flower in the desert.
“Two more turns,” said Nick, which was miracle enough for Amanda. “Let’s run,” he added and took off at a jog. This time Amanda didn’t even hesitate before hiking up her skirts and sprinting after him. Weenie caught the sense of urgency and ran with them, hardly bothering to sort the trails because the other smell was so strong now that he could hardly miss it. It was so pervasive that he thought even the nearly nose-blind humans must smell it by now. Besides, running with his people was fun.
They came around the last corner at a sprint, the echo from Connix’s first verbalization fading behind them. Amanda almost stopped running despite impending fiery death from above. She didn’t actually know what she expected to find at the center of the maze, or was it the other side? Whatever she thought they might find, this wasn’t it. She wouldn’t have been all that surprised to find marble statues, stone altars, topiary beasts and fountains covered in verdigris. Instead, there were cocktail tables, bathed in buttery light from a sea of candles. Where an altar might have been expected, stood a stage with one occupant. That sole performer was just about the only thing that made sense because it was very recognizable as a Minotaur: hugely muscled body of a man with a massive bull’s head atop its shoulders. It wasn’t doing what one would expect a Minotaur to do, though. Instead of swinging an axe, clad in a loincloth and attempting violent murder, it was standing on the stage in an exquisitely tailored double-breasted suit and wayfarer sunglasses, playing a tenor saxophone with extreme skill. The sax looked like it was made of solid gold and it glowed softly with power. The valves were of polished silver and the keys were inlaid bone, polished to a luminous smoothness by countless years of the Minotaur’s fingers.
Abruptly, Amanda did stop, as did her two companions. It wasn’t from surprise, though there was plenty of that, but a combination of there being nowhere to go, and the music seeming to command that they stop and pay attention. Amanda wasn’t familiar with saxophone music, never having been exposed to jazz or the type of rock to feature a sax, so she had no idea what the music actually was. She did know, however, that it sent trills up and down her spine and the notes, when long, teased and picked at her soul and, when short, dictated the very beat of her heart. It crashed upon her ears like waves from a hurricane driven sea and threatened to drown her in its rhythm. She was certain that the music could make her do whatever it wanted. It wasn’t absurd that music would want her to do something because this music was undoubtedly a living thing. In fact, it seemed more alive than anything else around. The dragon forgotten, they stopped and stared at their captor, the very picture of rapt appreciation. Both Nick and Amanda stood, relaxed, as they seemed to sway with the music when it was sweet and subtly jerk in time with it when it was emphatic. Weenie sat on his haunches, his head cocked to one side, much like the dog in His Master’s Voice.
Abruptly, the music stopped, the last brassy note nothing but a fading ache in the air. The trio blinked rapidly, regaining their full senses like someone who has just come out of a coma, or a hypnotic trance. On the stage, the Minotaur stood in dramatic profile. His sax had intensified its dim golden glow and actual smoke rose from its mouth in slow, lazy tendrils. Amanda realized that the Minotaur’s horn was not a horn from his head, at all. They had come for that instrument. She was pretty sure it would have been a simpler task to get one of the two sprouting from his skull.
“Thank you!” growled the Minotaur in a deeply mellow voice of velvet foggy rasp. He sounded like the essence of cool. He stepped off the stage, his mirror-polished shoes catching the candle light and clicking when they hit the parquet floor. His walk toward the trio was more of a triumphal march of a victorious conqueror than what one would expect from a lounge performer with the head of a ruminant. “Take a load off,” he said indicating some chairs around the nearest cocktail table. Three glasses full of some icy beverage sat upon it, condensation sparkling on their sides invitingly. “You, too,” he said, pointing up and behind them. Amanda turned to look at what he was pointing and nearly fell over the chair the Minotaur had just graciously pulled out for her. He was pointing at Connix who was perched on top of the wall and looked just as dazed as she felt. Well, she didn’t feel like she had a lazy trickle of mephitic smoke languidly curling from one nostril like the dragon did, but other than that, she imagined she and Connix were sharing similar experiences. She sat in the chair with a thump.
“Nothing like a captive audience, I always say,” crooned the sax-playing Minotaur and chuckled.
Amanda could feel her muscles start to become more responsive as the influence of that devil’s horn started to fade. She could see Nick’s face start to become more like a human and less like an adolescent sized demon-possessed manikin. Odds were that it wouldn’t be long before Nick exploded into fragmented shadowy violence and the Minotaur ended up with a black dagger sticking through his sunglasses. Apparently, he was of the same line of thought because he put his sax back in his bull’s mouth and started a melody that, if it hadn’t reminded Amanda of Kenny G music in an elevator, would have been eerily haunting. Despite her vaguely disparaging opinion of the musical selection, she felt her body respond instantly. Her muscles sagged, allowing her frame to sink into the chair. She saw Nick’s face go slack again. Connix gave a frustrated hiss and almost fell off his perch.
The dragon’s body was so relaxed that it issued a thunderous fart that drowned out the horn. The Minotaur stopped playing in his frustration at being interrupted. Although she couldn’t laugh, Amanda could feel tears in her eyes, either from the hysterical laughter on the inside that struggled to escape, or from the frustration of being held captive in such a manner. It also could have been from the horrid swamp gas stench of Connix’s flatulence.
“How rude,” the Minotaur said indignantly. Amanda found the situation so funny that she would have been howling with laughter if her body would have responded properly. When Nick and Weenie also farted, her inner hilarity leaked through a bit and she felt the corners of her mouth twitch and curl upwards. The strong emotions eroded the lingering effect of the trance and it seemed to make the Minotaur angry. It stopped being amusing when she suddenly felt gas burbling out of her own nether regions and was mortified with the sound of her own gargantuan fart was quite a bit louder and longer than Nick’s, but mercifully less than the dragon’s. Nick giggled. Connix let out a leathery guffaw of reptilian amusement. Mortification helped her regain more control and she felt like she might have enough authority over her own muscles to reach for her blaster pistol in her bag but her hand didn’t even make it halfway.
“Let’s dance, shall we?” said the Minotaur angrily and more quickly than should have been possible, he was playing a ragtime tune that set her feet to tapping and completely obliterated her will. Amanda didn’t know how to dance. Neither did Nick. Surely, Connix and Weenie had no notion of dancing. Despite this, they all danced. Amanda and Nick began what could only be described as swing dancing meets acrobatics. Sweat poured out of them and they both knew that if they lived to see tomorrow they would be so very sore. Weenie stood on his hind legs and with a pathetic expression of embarrassment and horror, began a frightening canine version of a jitterbug. It looked like Connix was attempting to do the dragon version of the Charleston on the top of the wall and was perilously close to falling off and crushing them all to death. The Minotaur seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. As soon as he came to the end of one song, he took a sip of a drink and launched into another, giving them no time to recuperate. After the fifth song, they were lurching with fatigue and heaving with exhaustion. Despite muscle cramps and quivering calves they danced on, entranced by the e
vil sax. She felt like crying when she saw the Minotaur use a quick break in the music to drag her blaster pistol out of her bag and put it in his waistband. She was far too tired to try and stop him.
When they could barely move and Nick and Amanda were dying of thirst, the Minotaur let them rest. Seemingly indefatigable, the Minotaur leaned against a table and sipped a drink.
“Y’all take a little break,” he said smugly with a mocking grin. “We’ll pick up the next set in a few.”
Weenie and Connix collapsed where they stood. Amanda and Nick managed to drag themselves to the table and drank their now warm drinks in big gulps. Amanda reached for her bag.
“Watch it, little girl,” said the Minotaur.
“Just looking for my lipstick,” she said. “I look a mess.”
The Minotaur hesitated, then gestured for her to continue. She reached into her purse and pulled out her lipstick. The Minotaur relaxed. As she applied it, she thought that maybe if she could get him to talk it might delay the next onset of Soul Train From Hell.
“How long do we dance?” she asked him. “I mean the music is great and all, but we’re seriously tired.”
“Not much longer,” he responded. “Five or six more hours and you’ll be as tender as a new born babe.” He licked his lips in the universal gesture of ‘yummy.’
“Tender?” she asked, horrified.
“Certainly,” he said. “I find that dancing until the muscle fibers begin to break down is the best form of tenderization. Brings out the flavor, too.”
“You’re going to eat us?”
“Well, duh,” he said. “That’s what Minotaurs do, hotlips.”
“Wait, I don’t get it,” she complained. “Why would they build a maze to keep us from getting to you if you’re just going to eat us?
“The maze is to keep the Minotaur in,” chimed in Nick wearily. “Don’t you know your Greek mythology?”
“Then what’s with the light path and all that crap?”
