‘I have no way, and therefore want no eyes; I stumbled when I saw’
(William Shakespeare: King Lear, Act IV scene i)
The night was dark and wide but the spoils of war sparkled in the distance. Over puzzling streams that flowed over and under one another on their way to the sea, sky-piercing erections funded by the fall of Attica threatened to pierce the darkness of night. But even blind ambition was subject to the laws of physics and the buildings composed of countless square floors still struggled to reach the icy clouds that played games with the moonlight. As the girl smelled her way over the ruins on the edge of Attica, she felt her away along with a sense beyond the five, a knowing that sounded deeper than anything known.
Under the night she walked, alone among the skeletons of ships and trucks, cats and the smell of spectral fish whose bones were taken back by the sea and the rats long ago. The light from the Isle of Crete seemed to cast a deeper darkness on the Ghost City of Attica. After months of working through the absurdity of the contrast, Ariadne folded and wove a tale telling of an impenetrable veil that hung over the bay and kept the light out. Only the projection of the Sparkling City of Crete remained, glowing with hubris and reaching for that non-place that caused the tower in Babel to fall. In spite of her reckoning, the shore where she walked was dark and the city over the water was not.
The absence of light created a sense of unease in most creatures, even terror. But most people moved at ease in the dark within the confines of familiar rooms. What fascinated Ariadne were not the places of superficial mystery, but the placeless places that flowed or grew into a tangled construction no amount of light could untangle. Even the smallest thread could never penetrate the secret of such places: forests, caves, foreign languages, cities of old, reefs to fish, unknown places on the countless planets beyond, anthills, the ground just beneath Ariadne’s feet. These labyrinths had no clear creator and, therefore, no guarantee there was a way out. They simply existed.
Daedalus Inc. had untied the knots and straightened the fickle routes of what used to be a rather eccentric port kingdom. But nothing ambitious entered the life of mortals without a curse. Even the ruins of Attica bore the insignia of Daedalus, the tyrant who called himself the savior for solving the riddle of the maze by destroying it. Now, geometric constructions had replaced the fickle ways and Daedalus was deemed the master of dull spaces.
Ariadne knew it was a waste of time to reflect too long. It was as senseless as trying to put Attica back together again with her bare hands. But some mazes were beyond ambition. Blowing it up only turned it into another one more faceless than before. As the girl held fast to the offering in her left hand, she opened the steel door beneath her.
Ariadne’s descent was confined as she found herself shut in by the blind walls of nebulous rock. Using her fingertips to guide herself along the first of three turns at once, she laughed to herself as she thought of Daedalus weeping had he descended into this majesty of complexity. The slightest drop of hard water sounded throughout all the diverting caverns at once. To follow one’s ears was certain death, as certain as taking a breath deep underwater. Just as she did when the multitude of winding ways overwhelmed her, Ariadne sang softly to herself to steady her breath.
(Ariadne Singing)
‘When up is down and right is left,
I’ve got a thread don’t call it theft,
A gift from up is brought back down,
Sing alone and become the clown,
But laughter echoes just so far,
I see no more, not one damn star
But I can feel—‘
What was shut away within, took over the song with grunts and faint pleas for something out of sight. The hybrid beast knew she had entered its maze. Ariadne swallowed the next rhyming couplet and considered the song finished. The chorus of one pointed to a secret law, a law that dwelt somewhere in the subterranean cavern where entrances were exits to nowhere and every opening divided and subdivided into countless ramifications. All but one of the ways was bound for nowhere but confusion.
For a moment, Ariadne imagined the millions of gallons of seawater above her. If the cavern gave way, the labyrinth would remain, wet but just as tangled. Her offering weighed heavy in her left hand as her right continued to trace a thread along the wall. When her breath found a hard terminus, she paused. The baritone pleas of the Other came from all the openings at once like a distant Gargantua with a thousand mouths. Ariadne flipped a coin in her mind and walked towards tails. The tail became five of them and she followed her instincts to choose one. When instinct was exhausted after seven hundred and fifty-three steps, she took her chances with the soles of her feet. Heart, mind, nose, ears, that hairy ball with teeth in her belly and something throughout and without her, led Ariadne on. Just as the science of the metaphysical had run its course, she felt the unmistakable sensation of walking on steel.
For trials on end, Ariadne had lost her way through the labyrinth and turned back. Sometimes it took her hours to find her way back, others days. But she had never made it this far. Despite the fathoms deep she was beneath the sea and the earth, the air was almost fresh in this newfound world. In the infinity of the limited multiverse, she had discovered the One.
“Hello!” She yelled. After it echoed back, she called again, “Many are the ways but the way is One, there’s more than one way to find—“
“C’mere!” A voice interrupted like an early echo.
Stifled by the answer but refreshed by the air and her success, Ariadne walked between the coterminous strips of steel as they led the way like permanent arrows. She traced the wall out of habit and delighted in the repetition of the rectangular tiles and smattering of hexagons. She tried to imagine their colors, find the shapes of the irregular pieces composing a mosaic far too tall and broad for her to fathom with her fingers in the dark. When she drifted to her left, a ledge almost as tall as she could reach ran along the dry channel she was walking along.
Just as Ariadne was deciding whether the last mosaic was a man or a bull, something squeaked just ahead. If the labyrinth was capable of anything, a heightened sense of hearing was one of them. This was no rat or rodent of any other color. When it squeaked again, Ariadne held up the offering and knelt in the grime between the subway tracks.
“It’s about time,” an old woman said from her wheelchair. “But at least you made it without crying or any of that other bullshit from last time.”
“I bring this offering to you, grey-eyed goddess who—“
“Oh, enough of that. You’re getting too old to play make-believe anymore,” the old woman scoffed, spinning around once in her rusty wheelchair.
“Forgive me, Athena,” Ariadne pleaded, still on her knees with her eyes closed.
“You can open your eyes. Not like it makes a difference. Tell me you brought the 100’s this time.”
“Yes,” Ariadne smiled, opening her eyes. “Bull 100 Menthol Cigarettes for Your Enjoyment. They are the genuine article. I even smelled them after I verified the shape and traced the logo—“
“That ship has sailed, darling. Now, give em’ over to me. Haven’t had a decent smoke since the subway last ran. Well, you find your way through the tunnels, do I have to keep talking for you to feel where I am?”
“No, goddess.”
“I said, no—“
“Here,” Ariadne frowned, standing up.
“Ya’ know, I used to kill anyone who saw me without my permission. Hell of a thing. I don’t give a damn anymore and here you are. Just look at you.”
Ariadne’s face lost its enchantment as she felt her way towards the old woman. When she caught her scent, she walked with confidence and handed the carton of cigarettes to her. She looked beyond the old woman with her own gray eyes and into a darkness of her own. She heard the old woman flick the lighter and smelled the cigarette burn as the smoke rose like incense in the ruins of the subway tunnel.
“The gods be damned!” The old woman exhaled. “That’s so good. You want one?”
“I’m good,” Ariadne half-smiled. “I just like to smell them.”
“Of course, you do,” the old woman wheezed, her laughter that followed, echoing through the tunnel. “Probly’ see the whole world in a sniff. Like a hound or something.”
“Tell me, grey-eyed goddess.”
“Oh, fuck me. Still? Really? At least you’re not pretending to see the City of Light or whatever you call it. There’s nothing left up there. I don’t have to go up and see to know it.”
“Will I be taking the A or the C labyrinth tomorrow?” Ariadne asked, as she kneeled before the wheelchair.
“This is my reward?” The old woman mumbled to herself, looking up. “Well,” she exhaled with a smile. “My dearest child, tomorrow your goddess commands you to take the C train—“
“Train?” Ariadne looked up, confused.
“Shit…C labyrinth. She demands you, as her suppliant, to bring her an offering of Wild Turkey Whiskey. Not any of that swill like before. I’ll tell you what the bottle feels like and the smell of it in the morning. It’s thicker than Jack and longer than Jim, ahahahaha!,” she paused, seeing the disappointment in Ariadne’s face. “Wild Turkey Whiskey is the nectar of the gods and your goddess demands it.”
“Yes, Athena.”
“And while you’re at it, you can bring—-“
∞
Hayden Moore was born in Georgia in 1981. He studied at the University of Tennessee and has lived in New York City for the past fourteen years. In the past two years, he has been published forty-nine times for his short stories. He signed with the publishing house Vraeyda Literary and his debut novel, SKY TRACER, will be available online and in print in January of 2022. SKY TRACER is a work of Epic Fantasy. He lives with his wife, dog/dragon and looming spirit of his cat on the waters of Jamaica Bay in Far Rockaway, NY.
