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.