Where the Minotaur Hunts

"Never snub the gods," Grandma told me. "True gods always get their due."

If my father had his way, we never would have met my mother's mother. Only there was an inheritance to think about.

"She's a pagan," he said, and he wasn't wrong. As a church-goer who averaged over fifty trips to the house of God's per year, my father divided society into a four-tiered hierarchy: Regular attendees, like himself, were the smallest portion of the pyramid at the top. Then there was the broad category of non-believers underneath them. He couldn't distinguish atheists from agnostics, and he had no desire to change that. Then there were the Easter-and-Christmas-Eve Christians who wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They swelled the number of "Christians"--he always used air-quotes to express how he felt about their faith--so he couldn't claim the minority status he so desired. And finally, at the bottom, there were pagans.

Unlike my father's assessment of Jews, Catholics, and Muslims, when my father called his mother-in-law a pagan, he was actually right.

"When the gods want revenge, it won't just be bad luck," Grandma taught us after swearing us to secrecy. Even our mother's sympathies might not extend far enough to forgive discussions on Zeus and Hera.

Olympians and their spawn were as real to Grandma as Mother Theresa is to a Catholic. She flatly rejected interpreting the gods as symbols or mere myths. They weren't like the Christian messiah: away from the game, but bound to return eventually. They were like the Pope: out of sight, but still very much here.

From her, I learned about Jason and the Argonauts long before I encountered Jason Voorhees, but those stories played the same note deep inside of me: wondrous, terrified fascination. I kept her secrets because I couldn't bear to lose access to her world of wonderful, terrible magic.

"Watch out for the bull," she told me. "Remember that. Whatever else you forget, don't forget the bull."

Here was the story: Poseidon gave a human the gift of a beautiful, glorious bull in order to show his favor. Poseidon expected that human to sacrifice the bull as a sign of his own deference. My father's God expected a tithe, so why not Poseidon? God gave, and God took. Poseidon gave, Poseidon took.

When she told me the story in land-locked Kansas, I smelled the ocean brine. The silhouette of my jacket hanging on the coat-rack could be Poseidon with his trident.

The human refused to sacrifice the beautiful bull, so Poseidon punished him. The human's wife became infatuated with the bull, and she became pregnant with the bull's child. They gods didn't pull punches.

Even as a child, unclear on much of the mechanics of intercourse, the mind-controlled woman and the bull made me ill. It was uniquely terrible because to Grandma it was history, not fantasy. And yet the story was also uniquely wonderful, because Grandma only ever told that story to me.

"And don't go around telling the others," she warned me. "They couldn't handle it, but you can, can't you? I thought so."

For her seventieth birthday she only had one request: she wanted all of her grandchildren to come for one night. There were fourteen of us, but she finagled and annoyed until all of our schedules aligned. If she didn't have a small fortune--a gift from the gods, or so she told me--the event might not have happened.

"Just my kiddies," she said. "I want to see them all together."

There were seven girls and seven boys, and we gathered in Kansas from all corners of the country. Grandma made us pizza and cookies and read one of the gentler stories from her books. She gave us toy swords and we fought a grand battle in the back yard. Even the older children completely lost themselves in the revelry, and in the haze of pretend-violence I could have been on the shores of Troy. The breeze was cool and briny, and superhuman entities watched our battle from all around us. Even the greatest heroes weren't loved by all the Olympiad: Athena loved Odysseus while Poseidon hated him. I wondered which of the gods loved my family, and which lay curses upon us.

Something watched us from the shadow of the woods, but when I stepped closer to the trees, Grandma called us. "Inside now! C'mon, c'mon, the iced tea is melting!"

The briny breeze was gone.

As the sun set, she disappeared into the laundry room and emerged with a basket of sheets and clothes pins. "I want to see what you can make."

She gave us the whole basement. The older children designed and delegated, the littles scrambled to clip and hold things. Grandma asked, "So you're just making a tent?" and the older children looked at each other. They added a tunnel, and a barrier to split the tent into two rooms. The design sprawled out from the center, incorporating all of the basement's furniture. We were all sticky with sweat and giddy with the day's excitement, and every time we thought we were done, Grandma made a mild comment, and the fort grew. I couldn't keep track of it, but I wasn't one of the designers.

When there were no sheets left in the basket, no clothes pins left in the bowl, and no space left in the basement, Grandma said, "It looks as lovely as the Parthenon itself. You all get inside and I'll bring down dessert."

We filed in, but Grandma caught me at the last moment. "Don't forget what I told you," she whispered, then shooed me into the blanket fort.

My cousins weren't waiting just beyond the threshold.

"Where's Hector?" my cousin Helen shouted from somewhere deeper inside.

"Back by the door!"

"The door?"

"The front flap!"

I rushed to try to catch up with them, but the further I delved into the blanket fort, the less I remembered how we had constructed it. "Helen?" I shouted.

"I'm here!" A note of panic marred her voice.

"I'm coming!"

But I couldn't find her. My breathing accelerated. We'd built this fort, and while the basement was big, it wasn't this big.

"Something's wrong..." one of the littles said. "Guys? I'm lost. I want out. I want out!"

Any second now one of the little kids would knock out a key support and the whole fort would tumble, and we'd stand up and laugh because we were never more than a foot or two apart.

"One sec," one of the bigger kids said.

It wasn't possible, but I couldn't find any of the others. We had to just be missing each other, constantly scooting in tight little circles, because otherwise I would have found one of the other thirteen easily. Unless there was something seriously wrong with the basement.

"Hector?" Helen sounded like she was on the brink of panic, and I thought that maybe that would be for the best. Maybe the whole blanket fort should tumble down.

"Grandma!" one of the littles screamed. "Grandma!"

Something made a rumbling noise behind me. At first I thought it was just grandma's old furnace, but it sounded... wetter than that. I spun around and saw something moving, but the light in the blanket fort was too dim. I couldn't take it any longer. I grabbed a handful of the nearest wall and tugged, intending to pull the whole fort down. The blanket didn't budge. And something was still moving in the fort's dim interior.

I screamed and scrambled away.

Remember what I told you, Grandma had said. And from her deeply landlocked state, she told me to watch for Poseidon's bull.

But it wasn't the bull.

A lead weight in my gut that forced me to take quick, shallow breaths. At some point, somewhere, someone else had seen the bull. Because we were in a labyrinth, and the labyrinth wasn't built to contain a mere bull: it was built to contain the bull's child.

"Let go, let go!" one of the littles screamed. "Guys! It's got my foot! It's got my--" And the screaming rose to a fever pitch.

Remember what I told you, Grandma had said, but it was no help. While Theseus had a trick for escaping the labyrinth, killing the monster was just something Theseus could do. No tricks, just might.

It rumbled louder, louder, louder. I turned and saw: a terrible creature with two massive horns. It was a nightmare incarnate. My father would have called it a demon. I wished for his faith, because he would have believed that a cross could protect him from this beast, but I did not.

Nothing would protect me.

Screaming, I scrambled deeper and deeper into the blanket fort, half-running, half-crawling, all the while the terrible footsteps--hoofbeats?--followed me.

Sometimes I heard screams. At one point, after shuffling through a tunnel that I was certain that we didn't build, I listened and heard nothing except my own breaths. It was enough to believe that I'd escaped, slipping off into some nightmarish version of Narnia.

Sure enough, that was when I heard the footsteps and the agonised roar.

It grew louder, and I knew I couldn't run any longer. It would never lose my scent, and I would never escape the blanket fort. Some people thought Theseus killed the monster with his bare hands, but I looked at my spaghetti-noodle arms and I knew that was hopeless. So I waited, listening to its pained shrieks grow louder and louder.

Finally, I heard it crawling through the same tunnel that I had before.

"You..." I said.

And that horrible bull's face turned towards mine.

"You're a monster, because you're two things that aren't supposed to mix."

It crawled closer.

"But... but you're also incredible."

Those nostrils flared. The light was dim, but the creature's face was near enough that I could see it clearly.

"It's incredible to see... to see what this combination looks like. Isn't it? That's why people remember your story. Because of you. Because it's actually cool to see two different things combine."

The creature's shining black eyes stared up at me for a moment, and then something hit the back of my head. The blanket fort had collapsed. I clawed my way out from the blankets, looking for the bulge of the minotaur's body, but it was gone. Around the basement, my thirteen cousins giggled and screamed and cried and laughed as they emerged from the blanket fort's remains, and my grandmother descended the stairs with a tray of cookies in her hands.

"Oh, you silly kiddies. Knocked it over, did you?"

One of the littles was still screaming, and when I caught Helen's gaze she looked a little dumbstruck, but we all played pretend. We were good at playing pretend. We'd just knocked over the blanket fort. That was all. What else could it have been?

I was the last to leave the next day.

"Grandma?" I asked.

"Yes dear?"

As I child, I couldn't name the look that came over her then. I still can't now. There was knowledge, amusement, fear, satisfaction? Maybe all of them, maybe none of them. She'd heard all about our game of pretend, but looking into her eyes I knew that it was more than just pretend, even if it was still less than reality.

It was something she'd wanted all of us to see. It was our inheritance.