Greek theatre is like magic. There are specific rules you must follow, or the spell is broken.
Fresh air lured him from the musty interior of Dr. Sibley’s cabin, and Leonard’s bare feet tested the dry half-circle of dirt outside the porchless doorway. “There’s plumbing and electricity,” Sibley had told him, “but you’ll have to bring your own comforts, I’m afraid.” Leonard interpreted comfort as a coffee maker and a stockpile of vacuum-sealed bricks of caffeine—food supplies and warm clothing were almost an afterthought, so naturally he hadn’t bothered to pack bedroom slippers. If he was lucky, heat from the metal carafe in his hand might eventually work its way down; in the meantime, he curled his toes and favored the outside arch of his feet to minimize contact with cold, hard ground.
This would be an academic’s idea of “roughing it”: no distractions from television or telephone. He brought his laptop, but would do most of his work the old-fashioned way, with notes on index cards, and chapters scratched in longhand on stacks of legal pads. Sibley approved: that was how he’d written his textbook on Greek tragedy. A single book, not one that would merit tenure in the current market, but with good, close readings of Sophocles’ plays. Critics at the time praised Sibley’s depiction of classical performance: outdoor amphitheaters, choric dancers, stone masks over the actors’ faces. Pretty standard historical background, actually, but influential enough in 1956 to establish Sibley’s reputation. Even today, you couldn’t write about the Oedipus trilogy and not cite Bennet Sibley.
Dr. Sibley. Leonard’s department chair at Graysonville University. As a mentor, Sibley couldn’t really provide helpful advice: he was too out-of-touch with recent scholarly trends. But he had the cabin, and generously offered it to Leonard for the full month between semesters. Enough time, Leonard hoped, to kick start ideas for his second book. As a new member to the Graysonville faculty, he needed to make a strong impression.
He sipped his coffee, bracing against the January wind. Caffeine was his muse. He would linger with her a while in the chill outdoors, then retreat to the warm cabin, to his boxes of books and notecards, to pages of half-formed ideas he’d spread last night over a folding card table. Although he briefly considered driving into town for more supplies—surely there was something vital he’d forgotten?—Leonard resisted. He had to focus on his project. That’s why he was here. And that’s why he’d stepped outside without shoes, without his down-filled jacket: so he wouldn’t be tempted to wander away from the cabin on a lengthy mission that was nine parts avoidance to one part exploration.
He didn’t need to explore the area around the cabin. He needed to work.
Look at the text, Sibley had advised. All the answers you need are in the text. Easy for him to say. In 1956, critics didn’t have to worry about new historicism, feminist or queer theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, and all the backlash against (and redefinition of) these same critical approaches.
Unconsciously, either from irritation or to keep warm, Leonard started to pace. He stayed next to the cabin, avoiding the stone-step path to the carport, and the line of grass and rocks and sticks that beckoned to surrounding woods. The cool dirt beneath his feet was packed tight, smooth as asphalt but with occasional bumps of buried stone or tree root. When he stopped pacing, Leonard backed one heel against a broken branch that was thick as a roll of pennies.
He barely brushed over it, expecting to roll the branch with his heel. Instead, he crushed the segment flat.
Startled, Leonard nearly lost his balance. Was it hollow? Rotted through? A sliver of bark stuck to his bare heel; without looking, he scratched it out with his fingernail.
He set his empty carafe on the ground and kneeled to examine the flattened branch. The bark was as thin as paper. The patterns along the segment seemed more fauna than flora. Hard to trace after he’d crushed the hollow cylinder, but it seemed like a repeating geometric design of dark lines and inscribed ovals. Beneath the design were faint ridges, like the whorl of fingerprints.
Probably, this was a segment of snakeskin. How did that work, exactly? The snake wriggled out of the sleeve of its old skin, emerged shiny and fresh—didn’t it? Well, he was no expert on reptiles, wasn’t certain what species were common to this region. Venomous or non-venomous? Either way, he hoped the skin’s former resident had slithered far away by now.
Leonard peeled up the empty skin—brittle, like a piece of overcooked bacon—and brought it inside. He shut the door behind him, checked the seal between the door and the frame. Then he made a nervous sweep of the cabin’s four rooms, looking under furniture, behind appliances, inside closets.
The cabin offered no resources to help alleviate his uneasiness as the day progressed. No Internet access, no phone, and no books on Sibley’s shelf titled Deadly Snakes of Northeast Alabama. As he sat in the main room of the cabin, several times he caught himself peering beneath the table to check his feet—now in socks and shoes, thank you, although he wished his pants were more snug at the cuffs. He considered fastening them closed above his ankles with rubber bands.
Again, the temptation to ride into town. He could stop at the General Store, maybe find some out-of-work locals huddled in a warm booth at the Gas ’n’ Dine. He’d show them his strip of bacon, get advice from old coots who’d survived wars and the depression, had hiked through years of Alabama woods, dodging snakes along dark paths. But, for all Leonard knew, his skin sample really was bacon—and how silly he’d feel, then.
The worst thing for an academic was to look like a fool. He’d take the risk of his silence.
Better to concentrate on his book. He’d chosen a creative deconstructionist approach—a mode of criticism mostly out-of-favor since the early nineties (and thus, Leonard gambled, due for a trendy come-back). At the very least, a deconstructionist approach would help him make original claims about an ancient, over-examined play. The idea was to take Oedipus Rex apart, ask questions that tore at the perfect fabric critics had admired since Aristotle’s day.
Sacrilege! Bennet Sibley exclaimed when Leonard first mentioned the project. You don’t need fancy critical approaches. Sophocles will teach you how to read Sophocles.
Sibley had too much respect for the text. It limited him.
The play was based on a riddle. Why not treat the play itself as if it needed a new solution?
He’d transcribed the famous Riddle of the Sphinx on the first sheet of a fresh legal pad: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening? The equally famous solution is “Man,” since he crawls on all fours as a baby, walks upright as an adult, and needs the assistance of a cane in later years. But Leonard had scribbled notes over the page to ridicule the accepted answer. Two arms aren’t two legs! A cane is not a leg!
Sophocles didn’t invent the riddle, doesn’t quote it within his play. But it’s crucial back-story, the reason Oedipus fills the newly vacant seat as King of Thebes. And yet, why praise a man for solving an unfair riddle? Rather, grieve for the guiltless heroes before him, who stood their turn before a feather-breasted monster, half eagle and half lion, and tried to shape an honest answer to the Sphinx’s trickery. What might these men have guessed, in days when such she-monsters could besiege a town? Did some say “Chimera,” their voices rising in a fearful squeak? Perhaps some others made up an animal, in Seuss- or Swift-like fashion: “A bumble-glumph,” or “Hurgle-whynn.” Others, soiling themselves with fear, could have blurted out a desperate, hopelessly wrong answer: “A frog?” “A donkey?” Or maybe a few of them proposed the only reasonable response: “There’s no creature in this world that fits your description.”
The answers don’t matter. The Sphinx kills them all.
When Oedipus offers his solution, it’s over-elegant: an analogy of life-span to time-of-day, tucked inside other substitutions of crawl for walk, cane for leg. Legend asks us to believe the Sphinx is so upset by Oedipus’s attack on her riddle—her monstrous sense of self so tied to that impossible one-question quiz show—that she immediately commits suicide.
Would that all monsters were this sensitive to criticism.
These were Leonard’s whimsical musings, yet they supported his thesis about the classical unities of time, place, and action. In his argument, these rules actually weakened our ability to appreciate Sophocles’ play. All those important moments from the past, all those bits of violence banished tastefully off-stage and reported by a weeping messenger—if these scenes were represented somehow, in a radical re-staging of Oedipus Rex, the audience would have an entirely new understanding of the central character. The usual interpretation presented Oedipus as an intelligent, well-meaning king (he saved the city from the Sphinx!), undermined by his tragic flaw (pride and impulsiveness . . . and that unfortunate accidentally-killing-his-father-and-sleeping-with-his-mother scandal). In Leonard’s view, Oedipus’s tragic flaw is not an exception to an otherwise noble life. Oedipus is his tragic flaw.
Abandon the classical unities. Imagine a production of Oedipus Rex where the Sphinx towers over the stage of Thebes, appearing in gruesome flashback when summoned by the Chorus. Or, as Oedipus recollects possibly the world’s first instance of “road rage,” show onstage his disproportionate reaction as he beats a man to death at a crossroads, simply because the apparent stranger (his father) refused to grant him right-of-way.
Perhaps such a staging would be impossible: too costly, too violent or inappropriate, a logistical nightmare. But his book could do the same work. A chapter for each of the unrepresented scenes, envisioned in a creative section, followed by serious critical commentary. The book would be controversial and attention-getting. Did it matter if the interpretations were “correct”?
Blasphemy! Sibley would say. Greek theatre is like magic. There are specific rules you must follow, or the spell is broken.
Well, he was planning to break a lot of spells. By the time Leonard was finished, Sibley would likely regret allowing him use of the cabin.
Leonard worked through the day, mostly brainstorming and outlining, and the ideas came almost faster than he could write. The shift to handwriting rather than typing seemed to open new floodgates. He devoted a separate legal pad to each chapter; in different ink colors, he drew arrows from one idea to the next, spread new thoughts into margins or pinched them in tiny print between previously written lines. It was a strange and welcome reverie, his vague fear of snakes easily forgotten.
He nearly forgot lunch, too. At three o’clock he fixed a quick sandwich, smearing peanut butter on bread using a thick handled steak knife he discovered in a kitchen drawer. Then he worked past the winter day’s early sundown, his pen scratches accompanied by the steady rumble of the generator that kept the cabin warm and lighted.
The generator sat in the utility closet on the other side of the small kitchen. Propane-fueled, it produced a noise similar to the rhythmic rattle of an old-fashioned film projector. Leonard fancied himself in a movie: the scholar, hunched over a table, frenzied in the formative stages of his most brilliant work.
Then the film jumped out of the sprockets. At least, that’s what it sounded like: a metallic screech from the generator, like something got jammed in the mechanism. Leonard rushed to the utility closet out of instinct. The generator was his life-line, and if it broke down he’d have to return home—just as he was getting started, after his most-productive day in recent memory.
He threw open the closet door, and the generator rumbled even louder. This close, the sound was overwhelming. The machine shuddered as if trying to shake itself into pieces. Not that he understood the equipment, but Leonard studied the beige and copper engine, and all the screws and bolts and belts seemed in their proper places. The rumble was loud and steady, with no trace of the scrape and screech he’d heard from the main room.
Or, perhaps a slight screech, like an undercurrent. Maybe in the mechanism—maybe more distant, outside the cabin, an animal’s awful cry of pain.
Leonard had slept well the previous night, exhausted after the drive up I-20, then side-turns down country roads into twisting, barely marked, gravel and dirt lanes to Sibley’s cabin. He’d thrown fresh linens over the cot’s thin mattress, fluffed his own pillow over the lumpy one Sibley had left behind, and then dropped into calm slumber.
Tonight was different. The day’s mental activity refused to abate; ideas tumbled through his head in time with the spinning gears and belts of the straining generator. The two bedrooms were each equipped with a working fireplace, but they were too much trouble to get started. He’d pulled the cot into the main room, where he could huddle close to the wall-mounted electric heater. As a result, he literally couldn’t get away from the day’s work: it loomed near his bedside, spread overtop the card table.
Now that the glow of inspiration had faded, Leonard began to worry that his day’s work wasn’t as good as he’d thought. Was he a victim of that dreaded malady Sibley called “Scholar’s Delusion”? Even in Leonard’s young career, he’d seen his share of the afflicted. Most recently, a colleague had grown so wrapped up in study of a minor nineteenth-century poet, that he convinced himself she was the greatest writer who ever lived. Honestly, Don had said to him in all seriousness, I prefer Felicia Hemans’s poetry to Wordsworth’s.
Had Leonard fallen into a similar trap of self-deception? His department chair would probably agree. Bennet Sibley’s skeptical countenance floated before him in the dark, a bearded Tiresias eager to express the most awful prophesy of failure. You’re welcome to use my cabin, but . . . Why would you want to write that kind of criticism? Why would anyone want to read it?
No, no, he had to remind himself. Forget Sibley and his outdated, reverent respect for the text. He wasn’t writing to please Sibley. Indeed, he’d spent too much of his life trying to please people whom he didn’t respect. The same problem plagued his romantic and family entanglements—which largely explained why he was free to spend an entire month alone in a secluded cabin.
Leonard wrote for a more sophisticated audience, one fully aware that drama was a living organism, no longer the author’s property. You can’t appreciate a text by ignoring its flaws. Oedipus’s story relies on ridiculous coincidence: that a man should flee his adopted father, only to cross paths with the father of his blood; that a she-Sphinx kills each challenger, until one man twists out a solution to her torturous riddle; that a land should need a king, and one walks in. The drama finds its convenience in uncanny chance.
These were the kinds of observations liable to give Sibley a heart attack. But that’s what the play was all about, wasn’t it—the younger generation taking the place of the old? Harold Bloom said the same thing about writers in Anxiety of Influence: to make their reputations, authors had to reshape the works of their predecessors—kill the fathers of literary tradition, so to speak. The theory should hold equally true in the cutthroat world of academic tenure and promotion. Someday, stodgy old Sibley would have to retire as Chair of the English Department; in his place, Leonard would encourage the inventive scholarship and teaching Sibley hoped to suppress.
The film projector continued to rattle from the utility closet. Leonard’s thoughts threaded through the sprockets: some projected a grandiose, satisfying future; others cast “Father” Sibley’s vision of doom. He pictured the man’s rich, fuzzy beard, with its neat convex shape—as if half a gray tennis ball were glued over Sibley’s chin. And Leonard knew his thoughts had gone loopy now, from the day’s excitement and subsequent lack of sleep. Sibley typically would rub his bearded chin with one fingertip as he conjured phrases—no insult intended, nothing more than observations, really—but phrases that might undermine a young teacher’s confidence. If the old man had magical powers, they were centered in that weird tuft of beard. Push aside those stiff, overcombed hairs, and from behind would wink his third eye, the source of his prophetic insight.
These were Leonard’s last semi-lucid thoughts before sleep finally overtook him. He was unable to rouse himself from bed in early morning, when faint cries again seemed to rise above steady mechanical thrums. He was on a train that passed between strange villages. The shades were drawn against the sunrise. In the fields, small animals lifted their heads in a shrill chorus, high-pitched yet also guttural, as if they gargled food, or they were being strangled.
Slightly after noon, Leonard staggered outside with his coffee. Thick clouds masked the sun, a diffuse gray light breaking through. Another abandoned fragment of skin lay, hollow and fragile, on the patch of ground fronting the cabin door. It was not a snake skin.
He kneeled on the ground to get a closer look. The same repeating design of lines and ovals around the circumference, the same ridges faint beneath, the texture of fingerprints. He hadn’t crushed this specimen with his heel, so the cylindrical shape was preserved. It swelled thicker on one end, and bent at a right angle directly in the middle of the hollow tube. In size and shape, with a brown-bark dead-leaf color, it looked like a broken cigar.
The smaller opening was frayed in tiny strips; they curled like paper at the end of an exploded firecracker. Leonard brushed the side of his forefinger against the frayed edge, then pulled his hand away in surprise. The tiny strips were sharp, like pincers.
Without thinking, he pressed his finger to his lips, then bit down slightly where he’d been scratched.
Maybe he really should drive into town, find somebody who could tell him what the heck this thing was.
Then that animal cry again, familiar from last night, and from this morning’s hypnogogic daze. He had trouble judging direction, here in new surroundings and with sound waves echoing off the perimeter of trees. But the noise seemed to come from the other side of the cabin.
This morning, his exit from bed had been more leisurely. He’d put on shoes and dressed for the day. The air was brisk, but not as chilly as yesterday. He could walk for a short while. Go exploring.
He didn’t find any strange animals. But he found something equally strange.
Some evergreens grew close to the back of the cabin, giving the building year-long shade on that side. Past the edge of the woods, most of the trees were bare. Leonard found the obvious foot path, and followed it. A few yards in, the path sloped into a steep drop. Through thin, leafless branches, Leonard could easily distinguish a clearing far, far below.
At the center of the clearing sat an impossible, full-scale replica of a Greek amphitheatre.
Hidden out here? In the middle of nowhere?
Leonard had to see it up close. He followed the path, keeping the outdoor theatre in sight. He felt dizzy after a moment, and soon realized the cause. It was a trick of perspective. The clearing wasn’t as far below as it seemed, and the amphitheatre wasn’t a full-sized model.
Once he corrected his erroneous impression, it took little time to reach the small clearing. He stood with his hands on his hips, an unlikely Gulliver. The amphitheatre was made out of stone blocks, as the originals had been, but they were set in a round cement foundation—about the size of a large dinner table. A rectangular stage occupied one ground-level section, with all the appropriate elements: the parados, aisles where choric singers entered from the sides; the flat orchestra area where dancers would perform between scenes; and the skene, the building that formed the backdrop to the stage, with three doors in place for the main actors’ entrances and exits. The theatron itself, where the audience sat, fanned out from the orchestra area in rising cement steps, forming the main bulk of the structure.
Some people might lay down cement to build a barbeque area next to their wooded cabin. But Sibley, he built himself a miniature amphitheatre. From the looks of it, the model was old—showing some chipped decay, to echo the modern-day ruins of the real theatres in Greece. Leonard guessed it dated back to the fifties, from when Sibley was writing his one and only book.
He wondered if Sibley’s wife ever accompanied him to the cabin. She might have sat there and watched him, knitting while her husband envisioned a miniature Oedipus or Creon or Iocaste pacing the puppet-sized stage; or pictured the deus ex machina contraption lowered from the top of the skene replica, like a tiny God from a tiny heaven.
Nothing currently perched on the roof of this skene—no serpent-drawn chariot for Medea to ride, no cut-outs of the sun for Apollo, the lightning bolt for Zeus. But the detail on the small building was remarkable. Faded paint over the rough concrete simulated the brick-pattern of a royal palace. Thin rectangular panels along the top border glowed with faint gold inlays. The three doors along the front of the skene looked like weather-worn wood, rather than concrete. They each had a small hook-latch on the front, as if they were actually functional doors.
Were they? Leonard bent toward the left-most door and tapped it with a knuckle. The answering sound was a wooden thunk.
He tried the latch. The rusty hook was stuck in the eyelet, and needed to be forced before it would lift. The door itself, in contrast, swung outward with little protest. Inside, the model skene was hollow and mostly dark.
Leonard put his mouth near the opening, shouted “Hello” to amuse himself.
No answer, which was just as well. He remembered the shrill cry he’d tried to follow, and cautioned himself not to upset some animal’s nest.
Even the day’s dim light was enough to reveal, luckily, that the inside of this tiny bunker was uninhabited. The building’s floor was a continuation of the cement base, with a faint layer of undisturbed dirt overtop.
Maybe it was okay to try another door. Number two, in the center. He placed one foot inside the model, planting it on the flat circle of the orchestra stage. He rested his elbow on his knee while he reached toward the second hinge. This latch flipped up easily, and he pulled the door open.
A shape of lumped fabric lay inside the middle doorway. A dark-blue, flannel rag. It didn’t seem like an article of clothing—there was no pattern to the cloth, no seams or pockets or buttons. Leonard brought his other leg into the dipped center of the amphitheatre, then lowered his Gulliver-giant rear onto the jagged slope of the theatron seats. Holding his hands to each side for leverage, he eased the tip of his right shoe into the doorway, giving the cloth lump a gentle nudge.
No animal growl or hiss, thank goodness. Only a slight clacking sound. It seemed safe enough to investigate further.
It turned out to be a small cloth sack, cinched at the top with a threaded rope of yellow yarn. In earlier days, the yarn might have appeared golden.
He lifted it from underneath with one hand. The sack rattled, as if it were filled with tiny bones. He tugged at the yarn, and the soft flannel opened at the mouth of the sack. Again, a clacking rattle as the contents shifted over his supporting hand.
Leonard was disappointed by the contents. Empty walnut shells. Roughly two dozen, at first glance.
Then he looked more closely. The split shells had tiny markings on the surface. Colors. Carved furrows. Threads and faded tinsel.
They were masks. Half-masks for the chorus, full-face ovals for the main characters. Leonard picked up one of them: a miniature comic mask, the smile painted in a delicate red curl, pin-hole eyes drilled in careful symmetry above a natural nose-like ridge in the shell. The craftsmanship was amazing.
He lifted another from the sack. This one was clearly a tragic mask, mouth twisted in an agonized black line, a spiked tin-foil crown attached askew atop the head. Wisps of red thread were glued beneath blinded eye sockets, simulating blood. The shell had a thin elastic band looped around the back, as if to hold the mask on a tiny head.
On a whim, Leonard set down the bag and slid the Oedipus mask over his right thumb. He wiggled the thumb, and the small face shook on its new perch; from the motion, red threads waved faintly in the air, fresh blood streaming from the doomed king’s empty eyes.
After the strange discovery, Leonard accomplished little else that day. He’d spent some time admiring the skill that produced those small masks, many with painstaking details that helped him easily identify the characters: Antigone, her expression firm in quiet defiance of the king’s law; Creon, face ablaze with self-righteous anger. Although the masks obviously had been designed to fit dolls or marionettes, Leonard found no such puppets in the hollow skene replica; a cursory search of the cabin also turned up nothing.
As much as he appreciated the meticulous artistry of those masks, the oddness of the project unsettled him. Similarly skilled fingers assembled ridiculous “ship in a bottle” models, popular with old men in a previous generation. Those ship models eventually became so common that they lost much of their charm. Something dusty and pointless, earning a curious glance then low bids (if any) at an estate auction. The people who built these ships were eccentric retired men with too much time on their hands.
Sibley had invented his own peculiar pastime, without the calming association of shared practitioners. A twisted version of an old man’s hobby—but Sibley, obsessed with classical texts, would have been an old soul before his time. This state of mind surely explained his life-long resistance to new ideas.
The man’s headstrong resistance had seemed annoying to Leonard, maybe slightly affected or quaint. But now he wondered if his former teacher hadn’t long ago left quaint behind, and crossed into more disturbing territory. Mrs. Sibley had passed on in the early nineties, yet the doctor still spent summer months in his isolated cabin. Supposedly he was working on his second book, but that was decades overdue; when asked, he declined to state a title or clarify the topic. Looking for the marionettes earlier, Leonard had uncovered no evidence of scholarly work: no textbooks or journals or scribbled notes.
What did he do all summer: act out the plays with his walnut-shell masks, recreating his own festival of Dionysus at his miniature amphitheatre? Leonard considered the building where he’d found the masks, the roof of the skene from which a god could descend to resolve the play. In Herakles, the spirit of madness scratches at the roof, breaks through and forces its way into the hero’s mind. Perhaps something similar had happened to Sibley.
Phrases from Sibley’s book gained new meaning. (But were they from his book? Or simply those expressions he repeated in class, in the faculty room? The sources tended to blur.) Greek theater is like magic. The unities cast a kind of spell.
And all that emphasis on masks. The actors wore masks. They conveyed no emotion through their faces—it was all in the words themselves. Sibley’s face was expressionless whenever he said this.
Leonard tried to push these troubling thoughts away and work on his book, but ended up doing little more than pushing his notepads in new arrangements across the card table. Doubts overshadowed the productivity of his first day at the cabin: doubts about his own project, and doubts about the sanity of Bennet Sibley.
Which affected his sleep again that night. How frustrating to waste the day, then lie awake knowing that, without rest, the next day could follow the same frustrated pattern. A mechanical screech from the generator closet compounded the problem. Leonard was too exhausted to investigate, and the worrisome machine seemed to wail loudest when he teetered on the edge of sleep, startling him awake.
Sometime in the night, he must have gotten up to turn off the generator. The wailing mostly stopped, but the room grew cold. Leonard huddled under borrowed blankets, and another sound circled the dry dirt outside the cabin—a sound the generator’s hum must have obscured the other two nights. It was something like footsteps. Two small feet have a predictable rhythm, he thought. Three is two with an extra sound. Click click thump. Click click thump.
He’d kicked the blankets away during the night, and the sweatshirt and sweatpants weren’t enough to keep him warm. He lay in the fetal position, his arms hugged tight to his chest. Leonard wasn’t sure he’d gotten any sleep. Certainly, he was awake earlier than he should be: only a faint morning light, and his battery clock indicating twenty minutes after six.
And that howl. That howl that was not the generator. A gargling, choking sound, like a human infant needing to vomit, but too young to know how.
Outside the cabin.
Leonard unfolded himself from the bed, stumbled in stocking feet to the door, then opened it in a quick motion to catch whatever was making that awful sound.
When he saw it, Leonard was unable to step closer. He held onto the door frame for support, clenched the wood for a reminder of something solid and familiar.
The creature stood near the far edge of the dirt porch. It was about a foot tall, covered with scales like a lizard, but with a hard insect back. Its head was the size of a walnut; wire-like bristles sprouted out the top, approximating the appearance of human hair. Impossibly, the creature stood upright. A third leg, thicker than the other two, looked as if it had burst through the creature’s neck, distorting its guttural growls. Flaps of skin, like the suckers of a lamprey, twisted and agitated against the throat-end of the leg. The howling sound whistled over these flaps, a wet and frantic wail.
As Leonard watched in horror, the third leg began to swing back and forth. The lamprey-flaps pushed and scraped until the skin of this thick digit began to slough off. The leg bent and wiggled, and the casing of skin slipped to the ground. The creature howled again through the opening in its throat, a faint hiss from its mouth joining the awful cry. As it screamed, the raw limb began to tear itself down the middle. Two newly formed legs stretched in opposite directions, then the creature’s body shifted, and the new legs lowered to the ground. It walked on four legs in the morning.
What was it?
Bumble-glumph, Leonard thought. Hurgle-whynn.
No.
The creature studied him, its eyes black in a pruned and scaled face that expressed a terrible malice.
Leonard backed into the cabin and slammed the door. He flicked the latch to hold it closed, noticing now that it was a similar hook-and-eyelet contraption to the three doors at Sibley’s miniature amphitheatre. Next he heard a gallop of four legs, two of them untested and shuffling in the dirt. A hard crack hit the bottom of the door, as if a golf ball had been rolled into it. The wood shook beneath his hand. He heard a quick chittering sound, then the creature scrambled away.
Thank God. The thing was some weird hybrid, a chimera. Leonard’s late-night musings seemed less preposterous after such evidence. Perhaps Sibley was some kind of magician after all, his studies of ancient texts uncovering dark secrets other scholars overlooked or avoided out of fear. Sibley had summoned this creature somehow—or he’d had some hand in its making, as surely as he’d crafted those bizarre, tiny masks that would fit perfectly over the creature’s head. Leonard imagined this had been Sibley’s real project all these years: not a second book, but a quest for new, literal truth in the Riddle of the Sphinx. A creature that transformed each day, its two front legs withering away to an upright noon, then a new thick leg tearing through the throat as evening fell. At night the throat would swell around a leg that choked each awkward step. By early morning this leg would itch and wriggle itself into agony: Leonard thought of his own hand, if the webbing between the middle and ring fingers were stretched until it split, then the palm ripped raw, the whole arm torn up the middle. And cursed to suffer this same metamorphosis each day? No wonder the creature howled. No wonder it looked so angry.
As if it blamed Leonard for its pain.
He heard the howl again: the throat gurgle and the hiss combined. A similar cry answered from the right side of the cabin. Then two distinct calls from the left.
Leonard slid to a seated position, his back supporting the door. Tiny feet scuffed in the dirt, the leader’s gallop more steady. A patter joined from the sides, like rain, then a series of hail-stone cracks battered against the bottom of the door. Leonard’s lower back jolted with each strike.
He couldn’t hold this door forever. He wondered about other entrances. In the kitchen, the window was up high, over the sink; but in the main room of the cabin, the sill was a scant two feet above the floor. Those legs—the two back legs, constant through all the transformations, their muscles strengthened over time . . . How high might these creatures be able to jump?
A weapon would help ease his mind, and Leonard recalled the steak knife he’d used for yesterday’s meals. He saw the wooden handle along the edge of the kitchen counter, knew he could retrieve the weapon in a few quick seconds. But he was too afraid to leave the front door unguarded.
The chittering noise grew louder, then the scuffle of retreat before a renewed assault. In that instant, Leonard realized he’d neglected the early part of Oedipus’s story. King Laius learns that his son will grow up to murder him. To circumvent the prophesy, he instructs a servant to abandon the infant in an isolated place, where he would surely die.
In this formulation, Sibley hadn’t loaned the cabin to Leonard out of kindness, but to remove a threat from the new generation of scholars. He struggled to remember Sibley’s exact phrasing. You’re welcome to use my cabin. But I’m afraid no one will ever read that book.
More patter of small feet in distant dirt, getting louder.
The words of these plays are like magic. They cast a spell.
Leonard concentrated, even as the feet grew closer, the steps more numerous. A word appeared to him, in Greek letters, but somehow beyond pronunciation. The letters enveloped him, out of focus. If he could grasp the letters, speak the word . . .
The creatures’ heads battered against the lower door. The latch rattled with each hit, and he knew that soon either the wood would splinter, or the hook would jiggle out of the eyelet. To drown out the fearful sound Leonard covered his ears and shouted that strange word.
The spell. The name. The true answer to the riddle.
The door ceased to move against his back. Leonard dropped his hands from his ears, and heard nothing. The creatures were silent. No chittering. No shuffles in the dirt as they moved away.
He stood up, then rushed to retrieve the steak knife from the kitchen counter. Dry clumps of peanut butter stuck to parts of the serrated edge, but the tip was sharp and the heavy wooden handle offered some comfort as Leonard returned to the windowless door. He wasn’t ready to open it, yet he was certain the creatures had disappeared. They were banished once their name was spoken, the Riddle of the Sphinx solved after all these centuries. Leonard had accomplished something where Sibley, where even the mighty Oedipus, had failed.
Beneath that pride, Leonard worried he might have seen too much. The mask of his face must have held its expression, the curious look he’d worn all weekend, brow furrowed in the perpetual pose of a scholar’s inquiry.
A rush of wind blasted through the silence, like the flap of large wings over the cabin. A hideous shriek sent tremors through the walls; the floor shook beneath his feet.
The old story was wrong. She wasn’t suicidal: she was angry.
He clutched the knife’s handle, certain that the Sphinx was ready to pose a new riddle, one he’d never be able to answer. Heavy talons scraped along the roof. Leonard felt the temptation of an itch behind each eye.