Feedback is always appreciated. Let me know what you think.
---
The Labyrinth
At first, she couldn't move. Or maybe she wasn't brave enough to. When at last her lungs started to work again and her head stopped spinning, she realized that nothing, absolutely nothing, was as it should be. The light playing over her face was orange and flickering - torchlight. She could smell the burning wood and oil, and wondered where in the world she could be. The last few minutes were a blur, and all she could think about was the cheesecake lady and how mad she would be at the delay in getting a supervisor that didn't exist.The floor under her back was stone, cold and mostly flat, though she could feel the joints between the tiles. And the air smelled like dust and sand and stone. Nothing like the stale bread smell of the back room at the mall. And she didn't hear Greg, either. Shouldn't he be worried about her? But... the mall didn't have torches.
Carol slowly sat up, putting a hand to her temple. She felt like she'd been put through one of those old-fashioned wringer dryers, squeezed from all sides until there was nothing left inside but apple sauce. Her head was still muddled, but at least the spinning had stopped. She was sitting in a passage built entire of blocks of stone, square and unyielding. The floor, the walls, even the ceiling was made of the same stuff, though the upper third of the walls had been carved with a skillful hand, like the walls in the Egyptian tombs she'd seen on TV. There were figures of people, and of animals, and lines of script that were completely foreign to her. Not runic, like the Norse letters she knew some of, and not any of the Slavik characters her grandmother had tried to teach her. The weirdest thing was that the letters seemed to glow, somehow.
Shaking her head the woman decided this, like some of the other things she was seeing, must be a hallucination, or maybe a trick of the light. Nothing was making sense just now, but she had a mounting suspicion that the "Labyrinth" the Sphinx had talked about was, unlike his riddles, very literal. What about Jake? Would he end up here, too, after he failed to answer the riddles? Had she doomed him to share her fate? No. He was better with those out of the box riddles than she was. He would be fine.
But where does that leave me?
From her right, there came a rumbling noise. Not like thunder or like the rolling of stones (she was reminded powerfully of those archeologist-turned-adventurer movies that Jake liked so much) but like someone with a really deep voice talking. There was no reply to the deep voice, and it seemed consistent, so she wasn't sure what it could be if it wasn't that. Carol turned her head and cautiously moved to the right, toward the sound. There were right-angle corners in both directions, about twelve feet either way, and no door or anything to indicate a way out. She peeked around the corner to the right, careful to keep most of her body out of sight, in case this was the sort of place she wasn't supposed to be.
Almost as soon as she'd looked, she wished she hadn't. There was a Minotaur walking toward her, apparently humming to himself. He was a huge figure, at least ten feet tall, broad-shouldered and muscular under the thick pelt of coarse brown hair that covered him from crown to heel. There was a battle axe strapped to his back, winking with the light of polished steel over his shoulder, and his only clothing appeared to be a black leather loincloth about his waist. His hands were big, with horny, black-nailed fingers (only three of them, apparently) and his feet were the hooves of a bull, cloven, black, and sharp.
The Minotaur's moist black nose wrinkled, nostrils flaring, then the humming stopped.
"I smell a human," he rumbled, and even at the distance of several yards, Carol could see the beast's eyes light up, as though with excitement. That didn't seem like a good sign. When he started to lumber forward at a swifter pace, Carol turned on her heel and ran. She sprinted, as fast as she could, to the opposite corner of the stretch where she'd woken up, dazzled by the torches flashing past her.
Skidding around the corner, already panting and wishing she'd taken Jake up on his offer of a workout buddy system thing, Carol found herself looking down another long, empty stone corridor. She ran, taking the first turn she found, then another, and a third. She only realized after the fourth turn that this was a maze, and she was getting herself lost. She paused, gasping, and looked over her shoulder, trying to listen over the pounding of her heart. What she heard was not at all reassuring.
The click of heavy, cloven hooves.
With a thrill of fear, Carol took off again. Lost was better than trampled, or chopped into little bits like kindling for the winter fire. She didn't want to die! She needed to stay alive and get good at this so that she could help Jake when he showed up - assuming he showed up at all.
The woman was still lost in thought about whether or not Jake was going to come as she rounded another corner and ran smack into something very big and very... muscly. Carol fell over, the wind knocked clean out of her by the impact with the big, solid thing. When she could gulp a lungful of air, Carol lifted her head and looked at the thing, and immediately wished she hadn't, as if by not looking she could have made it not exist. The thing she'd run into was the hindquarters of a large beast, crouching in the corridor. It turned, lumbering about in a circle to turn on her. The back half was covered in tawny fur, making her think at first of the Sphinx, but then she saw the tail, which was a segmented scorpion's tail, barbed point curled tightly off to the side. The forequarters were those of a lion, and on closer inspection the hind legs, though tawny, were shaped like those of a cow or maybe a goat, sort of boxy and bony.
Manticore.
With a growl, it swiped at her with one huge paw, and she felt the claws catch on her skin as they tore through the side of her shirt. Letting out a shriek of fear and pain, Carol rolled to her feet, staggered, and took off at a run, nearly smacking face-first into the Minotaur as she tried to backtrack. The bull-man grunted in surprise and lumbered to a halt, looking back at her as she slid past him and bolted.
Then the Manticore roared and the Minotaur bellowed back, and Carol heard the clatter of claws against steel, and she assumed the two beasts were fighting. What more could she do, but run? Trying to take different turns than she had before, the woman sprinted until she was light-headed and gasping, then finally staggered to a halt. Warm blood tickled her side as it trickled across her sweaty skin, and when she touched the bleeding area she found they were scratches only. Deep scratches, but at least they weren't gashes, or anything worse. Clutching the stitch in her side, the woman sank down to crouch against the wall, breathing hard, wishing there was something else she could do that would make more sense than just running.
"Lost, are we?" The voice was soft, almost pleasant, but too dry to be human. Much too dry.
Carol straightened a little, still breathing hard, squinting around at the seemingly empty corridor for the source of the voice. "Who's there?" Her own voice sounded sort of raspy, probably because of all that running. Somewhere nearby, she heard a dry chuckle.
"A shame, I think. A waste of effort, leaving a poor human here all on her own. Don't you agree? Some sort of hint or direction would be fair, since you were dragged across the Border."
The voice was definitely close, but she couldn't figure out where it was coming from. Then, with a thrill of terror, Carol remembered all those movies where she groaned and rolled her eyes and said "they never think to look up!" It only took a moment to brace herself, then she looked up at the ceiling.
There it was. It looked like a spider with a fat, shiny black body and a human face. It clung to the ceiling, looking down at her with a smile that showed protruding fangs, glistening with what she could only assume was venom.
It was all she could do not to scream. The spider thing reached down to her with one long, shiny leg, and she scrambled away, out of reach.
"Oh, come now. It would be an awful shame to put all that lovely flesh to waste," said the spider, still smiling, as though that was the only expression it could make. "Come here, human. I'll be sure it's quick." The spider thing was creeping down from the ceiling. It didn't seem to be very fast. Adrenaline pounding through her veins, Carol leapt to her feet and ran for her life. Again. This time, she stopped when she found an empty place far enough away from the spider thing to be relatively safe.
"I'm gonna die," she murmured to herself, covering her face with both hands, but keeping her ears alert for the sound of anything approaching. At least so far, things had been decent enough to warn her before attacking. What would happen when she found one that wasn't? What would happen if she fell down a hole and got stuck, or got eaten, or... or anything else horrible that might happen in here?
"You know, for a human, you're pretty fast." The voice was so deep it made her bones rattle. Carol tried to get to her feet again so she could run away, but her legs refused to obey. They were shaking so hard that she couldn't even brace herself against the wall, let alone stand. Fear made her throat tight and hot as she looked up and saw the Minotaur standing over her, his bloody ax gripped between both big hands.
"I don't want to die," she whimpered, wishing she could look away, but not daring to.
"No one does," the Minotaur agreed. "But I'm not here to kill you. I'm here to give you directions. And you should be grateful it's been so slow around here, otherwise I might not have bothered chasing you this far."
No comments:
Post a Comment