CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Let me tell you what you need to know if you want to survive a fight with a ghost.

Mike and I fight with ghosts all of the damned time. We love it. Love. It. Ghosts are the ultimate sparring partners when you want to test lethal techniques you absolutely cannot use on anything with a pulse. [23]

However, most of the ghosts I know aren’t good fighters. The Founding Fathers, bless their undead hearts, are strong believers in punching as hard as they can. That’s the beginning and the end of their combat skill set. Dodging? Nope. Kicking? Please. They learned this particular thonk-bonk style of fighting when they were alive, and if they’re solid enough to participate in a physical fight, then that’s how their physical bodies will fight. None of that misting back-and-forth between solid and vapor like you see in the movies, because who the hell has that much concentration?

This is important: ghosts are only solid when they want to be, but when they’re solid, they remember what it’s like to be solid. Sensations. Pleasure. Pain.

Hence, if Bully McGillicutty was real enough to swing an axe, he was real enough to get the shit kicked out of him.

Not that that was our Plan A, because the only way to truly win a fight with a ghost is to avoid that fight altogether.

Ghosts might feel pain, but if we lopped the Minotaur’s head off à la Darling’s corpse, that wouldn’t kill it. At best (for us), the Minotaur would experience a major earth-shaking revelation of shock and awe that would require quite a bit of recovery time.

At worst (same)? One spectacularly sore and pissed-off Minotaur that never forgets how it’s already dead.

So, if you want to survive a fight to the death with a ghost?

You run.

Mike and I scattered. He dove to the side while I charged the Minotaur with a battle cry.

It roared and swung its axe.

The Minotaur missed me by a mile, mainly because I had turned my charge into a diving roll and had zipped through its legs before running as fast as I could in the opposite direction.

For the record, I will have you note that I did not hit the Minotaur in his jimmies. It would have been easy—they were right there in all of their barely-covered-by-a-loincloth dangly blueness. But there was a chance that we could still reason with him, and once you punch someone in the junk, Minotaur or not, that chance goes away.

I actually yelled this at the Minotaur as I scampered down the tunnel. I don’t know if he understood English—“Hey, I coulda nut-punted you but I didn’t, okay? Bye!”—but I figured that maybe the thought counted.

There was a bellow behind me, and the ground started to shake with the Thump!Thump!Thump! of pounding feet. I turned a sharp corner and started running straight-out, the light from my flashlight illuminating a tunnel with none of the usual chunky pointy bits one would expect in a natural cave, with another well-defined intersection up ahead.

Oh goodie. The Labyrinth had levels.

I ran straight at the wall in front of me. The plan was to do one of those Parkour-style flips over the Minotaur, and then run back the way I came. Fortunately, I remembered at what might have been my very last second that Minotaurs are taller than most of the dudes I practice freerunning with, plus a bonus set of pointy horns, and changed that flip from overhead (*clonk*squish*gore*) to sideways (*whee!*woosh*zoom*).

The Minotaur bellowed again as I dodged around him, and it swung that wicked labrys at me. I grabbed the labrys’ shaft and used it to whip my body forward.

On my way up and over, I had a clear view of the Minotaur’s left arm. It had a scar running from its shoulder to its elbow, ending in a nasty curve that reminded me of a fishhook.

I suddenly regretted not having paid more attention to the Minotaur’s dangly bits while I was down there.

The momentum from the labrys put another few long lengths between me and the Minotaur. I shot up the same tunnel I had just run down, and when I reached the end, I tossed my flashlight over the edge of the chasm. I screamed, too, and tried to taper my voice like I was falling. Then, for good measure, I chucked a few decent-sized rocks after my flashlight.

Then I tucked myself into a tiny ball behind another large rock, pulled Darling’s handy camouflage cloak around me, and waited.

The Thump!Thump!Thump! slowed, then stopped. From beneath the edge of the hood, I saw a pair of blue bare feet walk up and down the edge of the chasm, right at the spot where I had pretended to fall to my death.

After a moment, the feet vanished.

I don’t mean the Minotaur walked on—I mean that it vanished.

I waited a few more long moments for a labrys to split my head open, and when that didn’t happen, I started creeping towards the treasure room.

Keep in mind I had no idea if this would work. The Minotaur and the Labyrinth? Pretty much synonymous. I figured that the Minotaur had some sense of where trespassers were located when they were in its domain: that’s why it had appeared when Speedy had cleared the threshold of the treasure room. But was this an all-encompassing sense? Did it know exactly where I was, right this moment?

I was betting no.

Ghosts are only human, after all.

And this particular dead human most likely had experience with a particular kind of living human, which is to say that its only social contact for however long it had been lurking in this hole tended to be brief and bloody.

Unless, of course, the Minotaur was just an ordinary bored dead dude who enjoyed moonlighting as a monster. If this was the case, I was screwed. But I could see this ghost—out of all of the ghosts in Greece, this one was strong enough to cross whatever socio-cultural boundaries that had prevented me from seeing the others. As I slunk down the tunnel in the dark, finding my way back to the treasure room by feel alone, I knew that any ghost strong enough to manifest as the Minotaur would not stay in this dusty horror hole unless it thought it absolutely had to.

After an eternity of groping around in the dark, the reflected glow from the gold in the treasure room began to light the tunnel. I kept low and quiet, and made my way to the room as quickly as I dared.

As I reached the opening to the treasure room, I heard Speedy’s voice: “Come on in.”

“You sure?” I whispered back.

“Just get in here.”

I scooted inside, pausing at the invisible threshold which functioned as a doorbell for a legendary monster. “You better be right about this,” I muttered as I crossed it.

Speedy, sitting amongst a pile of gems the size of his nose, said nothing for about five seconds. Then: “Okay, good. Wasn’t sure that would work.”

“You bastard.”

“Hey,” Speedy said, as he lifted his forepaws so I could pick him up. “We’re learning as we go.”

I let him climb up to my shoulders as I gazed around the room. “You guys have been in here the entire time?”

“Yeah. Thanks for leading it away. What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. It was getting hard to think: there was so much I wanted to see and touch and explore…

“Focus,” Speedy said, whipping a paw across my head. “That thing could show up at any moment. Tell me what happened, and what you think it is. Your gut instincts are usually spot on when it comes to ghosts.”

So I told him about the brief chase down the tunnels, and how I had tricked the Minotaur into thinking I had fallen off of the ledge. He was especially interested in the scar—“Are you sure it was the same one you saw in your dreams?”—and kept looking around the room as if taking inventory.

I couldn’t blame him. It was hard to concentrate while standing in a dragon’s hoard.

Sorry. Minotaur’s hoard.

It wasn’t the gold and gems that had grabbed me; it was all of the things. They were all ancient, and so many of them chimed at me with the same pushing, pulling sensation that I was learning to associate with objects with deep histories. As I walked around the room, vertigo rose up, and my knees began to give way…

I touched the three beads around my neck, and the feeling of falling into the abyss disappeared.

“Fuck yeah,” I whispered to myself. “I’m already Helen’s bitch, y’all.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I told Speedy, as we paused by an overly ornate shield the size of a smallish car. It was covered in raised reliefs that were too detailed and complex to make out without dropping everything for serious study, but I managed to spot the sun and the moon at its center, with the constellations spaced out around them.

“Think Sparky could lift that?” I asked the koala.

“Easily.”

I grinned. “Nice.”

“Hope,” Mike whispered from across the room. “Come and see this.”

He had a naked sword in his hands. It was a claymore, that enormous metal weapon of William Wallace/Mel Gibson fame.

It fit him.

“Damn,” I said. “That looks good on you.”

Speedy whopped me across the head again. “Do the math.”

I had no idea what he meant until I did, and then I needed to sit down on the floor for a moment to recover.

Claymore.

Scottish claymore.

Scottish claymore from the 16^th century.

“Oh hell,” I said. “We’re not the first to discover the Labyrinth.”

“Probably the first to have lived this long, though,” Mike said, as he carefully repositioned the claymore on one of the weapons racks. “There’s a pocket watch on a table by the east wall. That’s the most modern item I’ve found.”

I shuddered at the idea of cell phones lost within this golden mess. It’s all well and good to think that a Minotaur’s been murdering explorers for millennia, but it gets a little more real when those explorers are part of your millennium. I wondered if the more modern items had belonged to psychics who had gotten past Helen’s defenses, or if the queen had the occasional off day.

Or maybe we weren’t the first she had sent down into the Labyrinth…

I was suddenly very doubtful of Speedy’s version of events, how Helen had seen my future and was trying to help me. Speedy is usually right, but when he’s wrong, he’s dead wrong.

“All right,” I said. “What’s the game plan? Try and sneak back up to the surface, or keep going down?”

“What’s further down?” Mike asked, as he tested the balance of a gladius.

“The Labyrinth keeps going,” I replied. “That claymore was more your style.”

“The blade’s too long for fighting in close quarters,” he said with a sigh. “Did you see any of the layout?”

“No,” I said. “I was in and gone as fast as I could. The lower tunnels look identical to the upper tunnels, though.”

I heard a rushing clatter of coins as Speedy shoved the contents of a nearby table onto the floor.

“Speedy!” I whispered, horrified.

“Time’s more important than trying to be sneaky,” the koala said. He had taken another Sharpie from Mike’s pack, and was sketching out a grid in broad black lines on the two-thousand-year-old table. “You were right: the Minotaur’s sense of this place isn’t absolute. If it were, it wouldn’t be searching for your body. I’m guessing it has a limited awareness of certain locations. This room is one of those; it knows that someone never left it. That’s why it didn’t pop in when you crossed the threshold; since Mike and I stayed put, that awareness was already active. It’ll swing back and check on us when it can’t find you.”

“Hope, come and pick your poison,” Mike said in his normal tone.

I left Speedy to turn a priceless artifact into so much graffiti, and joined Mike by the weapon racks.

It was…

Okay.

Take a moment and pretend you’ve trained in the martial arts from when you were a little kid. It might not be your entire life, but it’s a huge part of it—you’ve spent the better part of your existence accumulating factoids about fighters and fighting.

Then, without any warning, you’re deep in a hole with the weapons of generations of warriors. You recognize all of them, fresh and shiny in their ghost-preserved stasis.

Which one do you choose?

Most of them were Greek. Obviously. Mike and I would have both gravitated right to the Japanese weapons, if there had been any. We had both trained on those, and when you’re going into battle against a ginormous predeceased monster, familiarity is a big plus. But no, it seemed as if no one from Japan had ever stumbled into the Labyrinth, or, if they had, they hadn’t been packing.

I walked past a king’s ransom in weapons, trailing my fingertips across them as if waiting for one to speak to me.

Some of them did.

My hand closed on a xiphos, the short sword that defined one-on-one combat for the Spartans.

I tested its weight. It felt good and right and—

I shook myself as I replaced it on the rack.

“No,” I said. “My fight. Not yours.”

“You okay?” Mike asked me.

“Nope,” I said, as I moved down the row. “I think Helen wants to ride me into battle.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.”

Mike went to gather up the sheath to his gladius. “Why would she do that?”

“Because the Minotaur is Theseus,” Speedy said from atop his gigantic sketch pad. “Or what’s left of him. Get over here.”

I grabbed something off of the rack at random, more to have the weight of a weapon in my hands than any rational selection. Then, I joined the boys at Speedy’s table.

He had been drawing the Labyrinth.

Speedy’s an excellent draftsman; he had used solid and dotted lines to break up the sketch, and I could tell at a glance that the solid lines showed the path we had taken to reach the treasure room.

He was reading my face, and nodded. “I guessed at the rest,” he said, tapping a claw on a dotted line. “Patterns repeat.”

“You think it’s this big?” Mike asked. The map spread across the entire table. If Speedy had drawn it to scale, the treasure room was a shoe closet dangling on the edge of a mansion.

“Yup,” the koala said. “I need to take a few turns through the lower section before I can get a feel for the layout, but if the same architect designed it, I’ll be able to take us straight to the center.”

“The center?” I asked. “What’s there?”

“Something more important than this,” Speedy said, waving at the mountains of gold around us. “Something so important that its creators set this room out as bait.”

“Okay, okay, I gotcha,” I said. “Anyone looking for treasure would have come straight into this room if they made it this far—you can’t miss it—and bam! Minotaur murder spree.”

“Exactly.”

“What did you mean about Theseus and the Minotaur?” Mike asked.

“It’s a ghost, right? Has to be a person in there somewhere,” Speedy said, and then netted the claws on his front paws together. “Name another person in the mythology as closely linked to the Minotaur as Theseus.”

“But Theseus killed the Minotaur,” I said.

Ever received a look of pure scorn from a marsupial? It withers the soul.

“Or,” I amended, “Theseus didn’t, because there’s no such thing as a real Minotaur.”

“Bingo,” Speedy said, as he added a few flourishes to the map. “But say you’re an ancient Greek king, and you’ve done some really shitty things during your life. Say you’re part of a culture which believes that your Afterlife will include punishments and eternal torment befitting the crimes you committed in life. To top it off, you don’t die in battle, which might have redeemed you. Instead, you walk into the throne room of the queen you blamed for your misfortune, and you lay a death curse on her and her kingdom.”

“Oh, shit,” I said. “Maybe… Maybe since you’re the ghost of a king who’s still celebrated in Western culture, you’ve got the power to stick around for millennia. But you’re popular not because you made treaties or peace or whatever, but because your name is synonymous with a monster’s. So you… What? Theseus got his mental wires crossed along the way and became that monster?”

“Just a guess,” Speedy said, as he finished his sketch. “But that scar means it’s a good one.”

“Remind me to never go looking for the ghost of Saint George,” Mike said.

I cringed at the idea of a firebreathing saint.

“Why would a ghost keep a scar?” Mike asked.

I knew the answer to that one. “It’s part of his identity,” I replied. “Helen hurt him—she changed how Theseus thought of himself.”

“And if your dreams are her memories,” Speedy said, “then we know he’s sticking around to hurt her, and she’s sticking around to keep him in checkmate. If he can’t find the mental wherewithal to get rid of that scar, he can’t shake the idea that he’s cursed.”

Mike leaned against the cave wall, and I felt a wave of sadness flow from him. “That poor soul.”

“You mean that rapist fuckhead who kidnapped little girls?” I asked.

“I mean the human soul that’s trapped itself down here for thousands of years,” he replied. “Whatever his crimes were in life, he’s paid for them.”

Mike couldn’t hear the women’s screams still running around in my memory, so I didn’t say anything.

“So,” Speedy said. He pointed at his map, towards the space at its center that was defined in broken lines. “Do we go up or down?”

Mike and I came over to lean against the table. “What happens if we go up?” I asked.

“The Minotaur feels all of us cross the threshold, and it appears.”

“And if we go down?”

“Same damned thing.”

“And if we stay here,” I said, looking around the room. “It appears.”

“Eventually,” Speedy said. “It’s a ghost, so time’s practically meaningless to it.”

“Except whoever’s inside that monster is really messed up,” I said. “It thinks it’s got a job to do. Can we even leave the mountain without fighting it?”

“Maybe if we hadn’t gone inside the treasure room. After this, I doubt it.”

“Well, then,” Mike said, as he moved to unbuckle his new sword from his waist. “We don’t fight him—we help him.”

Which might have been a stunning idea, except the Minotaur chose that moment to appear behind him.