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I rose cork-like into watchfulness. I could hear the slip-slush-thud of his hooves, of his sliding threshold still gritty with desert sand. He is just behind us, close now, our faithful and patient hunter never daring to disappoint. The Monkey tastes the rain with a long, cicada-seeking tongue.
“It’s coming. It’s here. Did the Door and swifter than I. Are you wakeful? Will you keep running?”
“He. He is coming,” I murmured, swaying slightly.
“He, then. I am sorry for what I have not told you. Hoo, Darlinggreen, I am sorry. Get up, now, my dear, there is further to go. He is coming.” Ezekiel stroked my olive hand and coaxed gently.
“Sooner or later, there must be a Door, there must be a Minotaur, even if there is not. I choose this Door, and no other. So I win. I will lay down at his threshold. What is eaten also eats. If I choose him, I will never be caught. I will win the Game. It will stop.”
The Monkey shook his coppery head. “I will go with you, you know. I will always go with you, at your side, my Darlinggreen. Hoo.” His gaze was loving and soft and forgiving as a glove sewn of feathers.
We sat for a time, listening for his approach and combing each other, my fingers twined in his fur and his rubbing my cypress-skin like oiled cloth.
“I do not know,” he admitted, “what it will lead to. This is our first capture, the gaining of a Third. It is something new, for the first time in alltime, something new. But it is also older than all. It may take us to the Angel and her white lips, but it may not.”
“I know.”
“I am quite sure you do not. Hoo.”
Silence. The sky overhead was a profound blue, blue as once I was, the cobalt flesh of longago, perhaps not so longago, but I could not say. I was melting, and I cannot say anything. I have come to this, I accept.
And then he
comes over the horizon like a black moon, simply, soundlessly, dark as a pupil, gliding gracefully towards our little tableau, knowing that he no longer needs to conceal his movements. It is an elegant entrance, without trumpets or heraldry. The silver Bull’s head knocker, a tarnished and terrible sky-gray, leers, diamonds dripping like saliva from his great teeth. He is so beautiful, coming towards me, coming towards us, slightly ajar as though his mouth were open in anticipation, the eyes of the Minotaur as blank and irisless as mine. My handsome Death, gargantuan, profound, and I am proud of it. I am its green-veiled bride, reclined and waiting.
The Monkey looks at me with warm eyes, squeezing my hand. But I am not afraid. It is leaning over us now, a devouring eclipse, breathing heavily and watching to see if we will run. I laugh softly, a glutted and velveteen chuckle. I am stretched beneath him, body curved into a crescent moon, with the Monkey nestled in the swerve of my waist like a glinting jewel. I can feel the Minotaur’s mouth on me, his muscled arms gathering me towards his inevitable throat/threshold, the beaten earth littered with bones at the Center-which-is-a-lie, the dry fires of his digestion, furnace leaping towards me, to conflagrate and Devour my limbs in a rush of fire and slamming wood. How tender Death and the Monster can be, if you do not fight. I hold open my arms in second position, remembered from some mirrored room impossibly longago, to take him in and tear into his flesh as he tears into mine.
As the great black Door slams shut, he breaths a sigh of relief and release, a hot rush of that fermentfire air as he rasps his words in a rush, orgasmic larynx shredded by my jade nails as we fall, downdowndowndowndown.
“ —hanc quoque Phoebus amat. Carissima! Ederis!”
24
Rain of rice-clouds as we pass through him.
The thick throat full of bats and chewed rope flies by, and it is not so much down as through. Through the twisted body of the Minotaur, skating on bulbous intestines and pancreatic oil-paints, slicing his flesh with katana-limbs as I go, Devouring what flanks and flesh-handfuls I can seize, savoring the smoky meat, full of fennel and scorched crow’s wings, his black blood dripping from my willow-chin as mine did from the Angel’s. I enjoy now the biting and tasting as she did, the cello-bow slide of flesh into my belly. It is Power. With each sink of my teeth into him, his teeth into me, I hear him hiss like a kettle, the low comfort-hoo of the Monkey at my side, and my own triumphant wolf-cub yelps. What a lovely little concerto we make, the three of us in the dark. But as it is begun I can see that I was mistaken.
This is not the important thing, the passingthrough, the Devouring. My white-armed Death is not comprised of this sooty bullbody. There are many Detours. After all, something lies ever on the far side of any Door. And I could see it as soon as
(it snapped at her, did the Door, and she fell in. Downdowndowndowndown—)
we were inside, lying like a hearth and waiting. What lies inside a Door? What do you see in the sky? Only Another and Another and Another, a Door toleading within the Door fromleading. Doorswithindoors unto the end of the world, the disappointing climax of entrance, knowing that there is always one more, always another Wall, another step, another bridge across the doom of ages.
The second Door glows red as from a forge, a dull and angry light illuminating the muscled walls like a manuscript. It beats inevitable like a deer-hide drum in the distance. Thuhthumpthuhthumpthuhthump. We might as well be patient. Thump.
25
Such a simple thing, opening a Door.
And stepping through, such an accustomed sequence of muscles and fingerbowl-joints; habitual, thoughtless, even. As though from a lustral basin, I sprinkle sacred drops of the Minotaur’s spinal fluid on my brow as we exit his Doorbody. (Have I done this before? Am I doing it right?) Anointed one am I. Dark to light we move, from the museum-arches of black bone to a dusty cloud of subtle gold, as though the wind had swallowed the last possible ray of saffron sun from a dying sky and choked on its beams, coughing out a cigar-puff of topaz-kindling into the little room where we stood suddenly, having stepped through a dilapidated closet Door, draped in rags.
The Monkey climbed cheerfully up my treebody and perched like a parrot on my shoulder, looping the long noose of his tail around my neck, a pretty tableau of gold against green. It took some time for our eyes to adjust, like waking up, peering and hazing. If I had had pupils they would have been struggling valiantly for just the right aperture to take in the little hut where we found ourselves safe.
It was her scream that brought me into focus, instantly aware of the new Walls, knotted shelves sagging with thick-bound books, the forked red of the fire in her hearth, flames feasting on the crisp pages of still other volumes, inexplicably interdicted and condemned to the stake. Tall, slender jars like sentinel herons, bundles of dried branches and herbs hanging like a tangle of roots from the ceiling, scenting the room with an unpleasant odor of rotted wood and rosemary. Thick brown pelts covered the floor, and in the corner nearest the fire sat a woman curled into a rough-hewn oak chair far too large for her frail frame, dwarfed by the high warped back, feeding another book to the fire. All this I took in like a breath, lined with the ragged razor of her voice screaming high, tearing, hawk-like.
The scream penetrated my body, coiling like an eel around the Compass within, spinning the needles, a twisting ribbon of tongue roiling through my ravaged flesh. Her so-human voice scored me like a whip, this realwoman, the first I had seen, without wings, without glass skin, just an old woman crumpled into her last chair, wrinkled and dog-eared, her house full of strange beasts.
Of course, it was not the same for her. I was not human any longer, my lithe serpentbody green as grave-grass, long arms like birch saplings, lips like anemones. And my terrible eyes, almond-shaped emptiness, plain green stones set in my chameleon-face. How awful I must have seemed to her, how grotesque, with my smooth-furred macaque brushing his tail over my collarbone. I emerge Monstrous from the Monster, my skin the dragon-flesh of nightmares.
