“One vote in favor of me leaving here, but staying on Thera,” I said brightly. “Jim? But I know what you think. You want me to go far, far away. Sir Christopher wants me to go too. Kore?”
“Stay,” said Kore, in a stifled voice. “You cannot go now. You cannot.”
“Three to one,” I said. “Mr. Keller?”
Keller didn’t answer. He was still staring at Jim. His eyes had a vacant glitter.
“I see now,” he said, as if to himself. “I see the meaning. Yes, it was meant; or why should you come, with his face, as I remember it? You are the one I have waited for, so that I could tell you.”
He advanced on Jim, who stood his ground. The rest of them moved as one man-or one person, including Kore. She made a dash at Keller and put her arms around him. Sir Christopher stepped in front of Jim. Frederick stood up.
“Wait,” he said. “Hold on-”
Somehow, I don’t know how, Kore got Keller turned around, and out of the room. He calmed down as soon as Jim was out of his sight and went with her like a big puzzled child. When the door had closed behind them, Jim let out a long whistle of relief.
“I’d better get out of here,” he said.
“You seem to affect the fellow adversely,” Sir Christopher agreed, studying his assistant curiously. “I would not have expected the resemblance to disturb Keller so much.”
“His conscience is disturbing him,” Jim said.
“No doubt. Well, my boy, I agree that we had better go. Frederick?”
“Not without Sandy,” said dear old Daddy, settling himself in his chair.
“Then I stay too,” said Sir Christopher grimly. “I’ll not have you harassing this girl, Frederick.”
“Whose girl is she?” demanded Frederick.
“Not yours,” I said. “ Frederick, whenever you suggest something, it makes me want to do the exact opposite. Leave. I may come tomorrow-if you get off my back. I certainly don’t intend to come now.”
“Oh, very well,” Frederick grumbled.
I went with them to the door. The maid seemed to have vanished.
Jim hung back. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
“I would also like to talk to you,” I said.
“Can you sneak out of here?”
“Sneak? I’ll meet you tomorrow morning. Outside, if that’s what you want.”
“Make it one o’clock.”
Sir Christopher turned. I didn’t think he could overhear, but I was taking no chances. I nodded at Jim.
I stood in the doorway watching them as they walked away. Frederick was several paces ahead of the other two. It was getting dark; the soft grayish-blue air closed around the three forms, blurring their outlines. They might have been three young men walking in a Cretan evening in a far-gone year. If Kore’s crazy ideas had any foundation, the young man whose life had ended prematurely could find no more suitable place for rebirth than the body of his sister’s son.
Who are we, anyway? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random from some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply? Spiritual scrap bags-bits and pieces of everyone we have ever been, from the shambling apelike creatures of the Ice Age to the present?
The tiled floor under my feet swayed just a little. Nothing was stable, not even the solid ground. I closed the door and went back into the darkening room.
Dinner that night was an experience. I can’t remember what we ate, I was so interested in watching my host and hostess. To a casual observer they might have seemed normal enough, although Keller’s black tie and Kore’s glitter of jewels were a little overdone. I decided they must dress for dinner the way the Victorian empire builders did in remote outposts, to keep up their morale. They both talked fluently, but every now and then a silence would fall, and one of them would steal a sidelong glance at the other, as if searching for something he was hoping not to see.
The atmosphere was not lightened by the occasional quiver of the earth. You couldn’t even call them minor quakes, they were just enough to make the chandelier sway. Midway through the meal the movements stopped, and we finished dessert and coffee without further disturbances. Kore insisted on putting me to bed immediately afterward. I went without argument. I was tired. It was not so much physical fatigue as mental strain. I thought Kore felt it too. She looked old that night. She didn’t fuss over me the way she had before, and when I refused a sleeping pill, she merely shrugged.
“I put it here,” she said, and placed the tray, which also held a glass of water, on the table by the bed. “If you need…”
“I won’t. I’m tired.”
She left a light burning, as usual, when she went out.
I didn’t take the pill, but I drank the water. The sticky sweet wine had produced a thirst that was still with me. Though I was tired, I was not really sleepy, so I read for a while. The book was dull enough to put anybody to sleep; Keller’s English library consisted mostly of books on archaeology and related fields. This was a sober text on Stone Age religion; I remembered having heard Frederick mention it. There was a footnote on practically every word. I read on, my eyelids getting heavier and heavier, till I came across my own name.
The more I discovered about the origins of that name, the less I liked it. Ariadne was not only the daughter of Minos the sea king, she was also a goddess, a vegetation deity who died in the fall and was reborn in spring… There it was again, that reference to resurrection and reincarnation that was beginning to haunt me. Ariadne was a girl too; she was mentioned by Homer, when he spoke of “the dancing ground which Daedalus wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne.” No one had ever really figured out what the dancing ground was, or why the master craftsman of ancient Crete should have directed the construction of a simple dance floor. The author of the book I was reading suggested that the dancing ground was a maze, like the Cretan Labyrinth, and the dance was a twisting, circling survival of an old fertility ritual. The tributary youths and maidens of Athens performed the dance, under pressure, and met the bull-masked killer who was priest of the goddess. “Only Theseus penetrated to the center, to discover Ariadne…with the help of her own clue.”
The words blurred. I dropped the book and let my head fall back on the pillow. The night light was a dim golden haze somewhere off in the distance.
I had never read this book before. It wasn’t exactly my type of literature. How, then, had my subconscious mind come up with the idea that Ariadne herself waited in the center of the maze, the prize of the hero who killed the Minotaur? The dancing place… An innocuous term, suggesting harmless pleasures. How had I known that Ariadne’s dancing place was a labyrinthine web of stone, and that the function of the dance was to deliver a victim to sacrifice?
I fell asleep and dreamed.
There was a period of confused and fragmentary impressions-lights flickering, dank, cool air against my face, voices murmuring words I could not understand. Then the mists cleared. I awoke to darkness, but it was not the foul black of the Labyrinth. Stars blazed down out of a high night sky, and the air smelled of wild herbs and of the sea. A hard, gritty substance stung my bare feet as they moved, stumbling at first and then more surely, in a measured rhythm. The music was a thin, high piping. It was the strangest music, without a recognizable tune. Even the scale was unfamiliar. The notes had no ending, no resolution, they repeated endlessly, and my feet moved with them, moving faster as the beat picked up. I was spinning, moving in a narrow circle, with my arms outflung to keep my balance, and the stars were spinning too, so fast that they looked like coiling, luminous snakes. My moving feet made a pattern, a complex network of force like an invisible cat’s-cradle. When the pattern was complete, something would take shape. I could feel it hovering, waiting with a terrible eagerness, like a creature crouching behind a barrier waiting to spring out. The barrier was crumbling, inch by inch…