Hotter Than Hell(17)

So I take it. I walk across the sand to a door made of bone, smooth and pale and grinning with skulls; a warning, a promise, an invitation. One touch and my hand burns. I flinch, but do not turn away.



I enter an oubliette. A place of forgetting, of never turning back. I know what that is. I know what it is to be forgotten.



I stand just within the doorway of the void, and for the first time in my dream, feel fear. A terrible urgent despair, the kind that begs sound—a wail or cry or quick breath—because sound is life, sound means presence, and I could forget myself in this place. I think I already have.



But just as I am about to retreat through the door of watching bones, I glimpse something in the void—a solid curving plane of gray. The round edge of a shoulder, perhaps, holding very still.



“Hello?” My voice is soft. There is no answer, but in the silence I sense another kind of weight, a longing, familiar as the unseen eyes that watch me nightly from the shadows of the basement labyrinth. I cannot turn from that presence; as though a hand wraps around my body, I am drawn across the sand.



I walk into darkness, blind. The shoulder I saw before disappears, but I continue on, helpless. Just a dream, I tell myself. Only a dream.



Except, I can feel the grains of sand digging between my toes, and the air in my lungs is heavy and hot. I feel very much awake, very much alive.



And suddenly I can see again. Not much, just that same sliver of gray; a shoulder, attached to a long muscular arm; higher still, the faint outline of a broad chest, a strong throat. All at a height much grander than my own. I am looking at a giant. A giant made of stone.



I stand very still, staring; then slowly, carefully, reach out. I cannot explain my action. I must touch and be touched, though it is only rock beneath my hands. But I hesitate, at the last moment. I fear, irrationally, that I might be burned—and indeed I flinch as though harmed, because what my fingers find is not cold or stone, but flesh and warm.



I stagger, falling. A hand catches my waist, then my arm; in that grip, profound strength. Terror flutters my heart, freezing my voice. I think, dream, but I cannot wake no matter how loud I scream inside my mind.



A rumble fills the darkness. I reach out. My palms press against yet more skin, a body trembling with sound. Like a thundercloud, sighing in the night. I try to see, but cannot. Try to free myself, and am held closer.



“Let go,” I breathe, struggling.



“No time,” whispers a low voice, rough and masculine. “Listen to me. Listen.”



But he says nothing else and I gaze up and up, staring at shadows gathered around a curving line, hard and tipped and ridged. A horn. I can see nothing else. In the oubliette, where I should find only darkness, gasps of light are playing tricks.



Something grazes my cheek; fingers, perhaps.



“Tell me,” says the voice, quiet. “Tell me what you hear.”



“You,” I whisper, my voice shaking on the word. “Only you.”



I hear a sigh, another rumble that pushes through my body, settling around my heart. A sad sound, old and tired. Again, my cheek is touched. Fingers slide into my hair, warm and gentle. For a moment my breathing steadies and I can think again.



A dream, I tell myself. Then, softly, “You are a dream.”



“A dream,” murmurs the creature. “A dream, if I could so be. Your dream, better.”



“My dream,” I say. “But you are.”



“No,” breathes that low voice. “I am the Minotaur. And this is no dream.”



The hand holding my arm slips away; the body beneath my palms follows. I am left standing alone in the darkness. I feel bereft, lost without that touch which so frightened me. I cannot explain it. I do not want to.



“Soon,” rumbles the voice. “Soon, again.”



“Wait,” I say, but the world falls away, the oubliette spinning fast into a jolt, a gasp—



I wake up.





A week passes before the Minotaur returns to me. I think of him often. Dream or not, I cannot help myself. I feel his fingers on my cheek as I pour coffee. I feel his body beneath my hands as I wrap scones in wax paper. I hear his voice inside my body as I count change for an old man in a suit. Everywhere, the Minotaur.



And when I close my eyes for just one moment, I return to the oubliette, to the darkness filled with thunder, and feel him with me like a shadow pressed against my back, watching and waiting. The longer I wait, the more I want to be with him again. The more I want to understand.



Some dream. I wonder if that is all it is. If there is more, and whether, like Ariadne with her ball of golden thread, I will be able to find my way home again the next time the Minotaur comes for me. And I know he will. I feel it, fear it—am even eager for it—though it sows discontent, unease. For the first time in a long while, I think about my life. Not about the things I do not have, but the people who are gone. Parents. Friends. I had them once, I think, but at some distant time so far past, such people seem more dream than the Minotaur.