The sky is painted grey with clouds.
At first, I'm not certain that I'm outside, but a stale breeze sweeps over my bare feet, carrying dead leaves that scrape the ground noisily. I shiver, rubbing my bare arms with my hands, crossing them tightly across my chest.
I'm wearing a threadbare slip, downy grey and soft as (feathers) against my skin. It falls to just past my knees and the straps are at least a couple of fingers wide over my shoulders, so I am afforded some modesty in this place, but it doesn't offer any buffer against the cold, dusty air.
There's a fog settling in the distance, creeping toward me, and fatigue is sinking heavily into my joints, but I walk forward anyway. The wall in front of me is smooth and unbroken, a solid sheet of white marble, stretching in every dimension as far as I can see.
Which isn't particularly far, and shrinking quickly as the fog extends smoky fingers toward me.
Trailing my fingers along the wall, I start walking, because that's what I've always done when I find myself Underground. It feels familiar, but it's also not anything I've ever seen before. And a desperation is slowly building in me, a primitive instinct about the fog and the creatures it might be disguising.
As if on cue, I hear a faint scrabbling in the distance, what might be claws on stone, and I hold my breath to hear it better. But when the sound of my panting cuts out, I hear unintelligible whispering, and that might be worse.
Now I am afraid.
The ground is unforgiving beneath my feet, and I trip more than once on a loose cobblestone, my arms flying out to try to steady myself, one of them always touching the wall beside me. I don't know where to go, but I can't walk toward the fog, and walking out into the open seems more dangerous than being trapped against the wall. The very thought of being exposed out on the long, unbroken plane of grey stone under grey sky makes my heart skip a beat.
It isn't reasonable or rational, but I am operating under the conviction that every scuff of my feet against the ground is alerting creatures in the mist to my presence. I don't belong here. If I could get to the other side of the wall, I might be safe. It's separating me from something I need. I don't know how I know it, but if I can't cross the barrier, I'll never see whatever it is again.
I'm running now, racing along the ground, fingers skimming cold marble, feet pattering softly on the ground. My head is full of scratching and growling and muttering, but I don't make a sound, not a single sound, barely allow myself to gasp shallowly for air. I'm desperate to find some opening in the wall, some foothold, desperate to cross over to the other side and escape the encroaching fog.
Normally, in dreams, I can't move fast enough, like I'm wading through molasses and can't keep my balance. Here in this grey in-between, I am flying, moving at a breakneck pace that makes me fear for my own well-being, remembering the loose stones beneath my feet, and I look behind me because there is nothing ahead of me except ominous clouds, this one single wall, and the ground, littered with leaves.
With a nasty jolt, I discover that fog is nipping playfully at my heels (a game of cat and mouse and I am the mouse
I am the mouse
I am-)
My heart rockets into my throat, my hands dampen, prickle with painful electricity. Behind me, the opaque mist lunges up and up, a tidal wave of whiteness, beginning to spill over itself in its hurry to catch me. I call on any energy left in reserve to fight the growing heaviness of my body-
and then, rather than the jutting stone I'd imagined would ultimately thwart my escape, I distinctly feel something moist and not entirely substantial wrapping around my ankle and yanking me back, and I fall, skidding across the ground as the mist swallows me up, muting my senses, my elbows bearing the brunt of the fall until my progress is abruptly stopped in a sprawl against the wall.
The muttering builds to a cacophony and I keep my eyes tightly shut, unwilling to confront the source of the breath puffing over my extremities, which all feel as though they've been draped with spiderwebs, sticky and unyielding. But when I finally open my eyes, there is nothing but the sound, no ghosts or ghouls (or goblins) leaning over me and grinning horribly, and that makes it worse.
I brace myself against the ground and against the wall and stand, unable to see more than what I assume is two feet in any direction.
And then I hear it.
Footsteps. Not scratching, not whispering - the voices fade to nothing, not growling or roaring – but footsteps, steadily approaching.
And he emerges from the smoke, inches away from me. It curls around and then away from him, creating a space where the air is clear around us. This new void encapsulating us is perfectly spherical, mimicking the shape of the crystal he holds loosely in one hand.
He is pride incarnate, terrible and beautiful. His skin is nearly as white as the wall that I have pressed my back against, and his eyes burn strangely in his thin, gaunt face.
"So, Sarah," he says, his lips turning meanly upward, baring jagged teeth as he steps forward, bends slightly, puts his lips close to my ear, "How are you enjoying your labyrinth?" The rhythm of his speech is alien but familiar and his breath burns where it touches my skin.
I can't get enough air, even though my hair whips loosely around my shoulders.
the mouse, I am the mouse
"Yes, Sarah," he continues, and his voice is resonant and although it is quiet it makes my bones ache as though he has discovered my frequency and could shatter me with a few choice words. "I've made it for you and with you. You and I have had much work to do since you tore my last labyrinth to pieces. Mending the fabric of space and time is not child's play, but I think you'll agree that you owed the debt to me."
I gasp, my lungs finally inflating, ballooning in my chest. "M-my labyrinth?" I ask dumbly, words tangling on my too-thick tongue. I'm reduced to the child I was ten years ago, unable to think clearly in his presence, afraid and too old to call upon the foolish defiance I once had in spades.
"I've been waiting for you," he says, ignoring my question to trail his gaze indelicately over my slip.
"Well, it's not much of a labyrinth, is it?" I manage to indicate, with trembling fingers, the grey horizon broken by this single wall.
"On the contrary. You've created an uncrackable riddle. You can't get in; you can't get out." His eyes glitter dangerously. "It's very clever. I couldn't have done it without you."
The fog presses like something alive against the unseen barrier. I realize that the nucleus of the sphere we stand in is the crystal in his palm, lit dimly from within.
"I haven't seen you in ten years," I say childishly. "I couldn't possibly have done this. It isn't real!"
"Come now, Sarah, now is hardly the time for petulance."
He is at least as much taller than I am as he ever was, a full head and shoulders above me. A black cloak flutters in tatters from his shoulders, curling around his torso. Grey leather leggings, heeled boots, a flowing white shirt beneath a black vest…
I can barely look at him. He makes my eyes ache.
"What do you want?" I ask. My voice shakes.
"You know very well what I want." The hand holding the crystal moves almost imperceptibly, and like a spooked horse, I bolt.
Or try to, anyway, until I find myself stopped, his gloved hand wrapped around my upper arm. It hurts, the sudden stop via the wrench of my shoulder. Panic rises like a tide in my chest, flight impulse stopped but fight impulse lolling helplessly at the look in his eyes, his fingers like steel bands around me, thwarted adrenaline fuzzing my mind, making me stupid and confused.
"Call me by my name," he says suddenly. The words sound like a thunderclap, and my mouth opens as if compelled to do so-
I am compelled-
Somehow it has not occurred to me that he should have a name, that he would be bound by such a low, common tradition, that the name for him would be something that could be torn from my mortal lips. But of course he has a name. Naming oneself is the very zenith of vanity.
And I do not know his name.
Low wailing emanates from beyond the wall.
"But I don't - I can't remember," I plead, the words a rough whisper of supplication, and his hand tightens, his head tilting, more canine than human.
"Really, Sarah," he says bitterly. "You can do better. How quickly you forget."
If I didn't know better, I would believe that a flicker of hurt passed through his features, if only for an instant. But he is not vulnerable, he is vengeful, and I-
I am the mouse
"I can't!" My voice is rough with fear. "We never had a proper introduction. For all I remember, I never even knew your name."
He pauses, looks thoughtful, loosens his grip slightly. "I was certain my incompetent subjects must have had at least one loose tongue among them, but perhaps the old fool was wiser in this than in other tasks. Sarah, my love, my little plaything," he says, removing his hand from my arm to collapse mockingly into a bow before me. "The pleasure is all yours, I assure you."
As he speaks, I can feel it reaching for me, his name, struggling to break the surface of everything I'd worked so hard to forget, and I know that I've heard it before though I've never spoken it, but my mind is sluggish and uncooperative, and watching his body kneel, contorting with animal grace, makes me certain that I do not want to know it.
The break in eye contact, the role reversal from our last meeting ejects me from my stupor abruptly. Before I understand what I'm doing, I push off the wall to leave the space created by the crystal, sprinting haphazardly, drunkenly into the clouds surrounding us. Repressed memories begin to converge on me in a chaotic din of sound and light so that I cannot hear whether he is in pursuit, and I fight them off, rabidly clinging to ignorance.
If I remember his name, something awful will happen.
I remember words, but they aren't his name. Triumphantly, I call back over my shoulder to him, taunting, confident in victory. Words from a glorified nursery rhyme, from folklore in an old play, from a little battered book bound in red leather.
My kingdom as great.
"You have no power over me."
I scream it, and my throat crackles with the force of it, and darkness drops around me like a curtain. I drop to my knees, press my palms against the ground because it is tilting crazily below me, rendering me unable to reorient myself in the blackness.
"But, you see, Sarah," he says, disembodied voice in my inner ear just before the ground drops away from beneath my hands and knees and I enter free fall,
"I do."
I jolted awake to the sound of Jen slamming the apartment door, heart racing but otherwise intact, sitting safely on the couch.
"Why didn't you turn the lights on?" she asked, and I could hear the frustration of a long, rough day in her voice.
I plastered a smile on my face and felt the horror of the past few minutes start to fall away. "I was looking at the night sky." It was only partly falsehood: I distinctly remembered noticing how huge the moon had looked before I fell sideways into my personal nightmare fantasyland. Turning to look out the bay windows myself, the moon seemed a smile rather than a scythe, and certainly wasn't large enough to give anyone pause.
"Really." Jen crossed the apartment to the window, nearly pressed her nose up against it. "Seems unremarkable to me."
"We are made of starstuff," I said, grandly, invoking Sagan in a bid to convince her of my levity, but my voice sounded artificially hearty even to my own ears.
"Sarah, there are, like, eight stars we can see from here tonight. Have you seriously been staring out the window since you got back from work?"
I looked at the clock above the stove, and it read 10:25pm. I got home from work around 7. Time has telescoped, and I with it.
I have reordered time
"Must've fallen asleep. Anytime can be naptime!" She turned and gave me a look as I said it, skeptical but also a little bit amused despite herself, and then she crossed the room and flipped the lights on.
"What the hell."
"What?" I whirled to see what had not been obvious in the apartment's dusky twilight palette.
Under the artificial lights, the bell-shaped sheaths of the once white and purple flowers from Esther were now coal-black. The entire centerpiece evoked inky silhouettes curling over the lip of the vase.
"You know, I thought when you took the florist job, you'd bring something nice home once in a while," she sighed, "but there's no accounting for taste. Your love for the macabre makes me itch. Do we have to keep those in the living room?"
"No," I said, "Esther is playing a practical joke on me. She gave me those flowers for my birthday, and calla lilies are really popular funeral flowers, so there's this association with death, and since it was my quarter-century celebration, she's riffing on old age and having one foot in the grave." I paused, hating myself for babbling on about it. "Anyway, I don't know how she did it, but I don't want them anymore."
"Elaborate joke," Jen said. "Artists are so morbid."
"Says the photographer."
"Light and color, Sarah. Celebration of life. Not spooky black birthday flowers of death."
I reached down to pick them up and toss the flowers in the bin, and as I did, my hand barely brushed the whorl of one of the flowers. It crumbled into ash, sprinkling into a tiny heap on the table, and as my hands shifted the vase, the rest followed suit, blanketing the table, the carpet, and the formerly pristine white bandage on my right hand in chalky soot.
"That is some party trick," Jen said, now sounding more impressed than anything. A chill ran down my spine as I spotted the remaining half of my peach perched amid the mess. It rocked gently in response to some unfelt groundswell, swollen and sanguine, spattered with inky black. But it was yellow, before.
"I'll get the vacuum," I said, shaken, but as I turned to retrieve it from the front closet, Jen shrieked.
"What the hell, Sarah?"
"What now?" I asked, but she had already come up behind me, holding my arm tightly at the shoulder and the elbow.
"Who did this to you?"
When I looked down, I saw four dark purple bruises spidering their way around my upper arm, freakishly long and slender but unmistakably from the punishingly tight grip of fingers.
My eyes came back up to Jen's face, and I knew they were guilty and scared.
Oh, but you see, Sarah:
I do.
