Page 56 of The Hymn to Dionysus

I was just falling asleep when the triplets did something they never had before. One of them banged on the door. I jolted awake and pulled it open, feeling hard done by. I hadn’t slept for years; all I’d ever wanted in life was my own tent and someone cleverer than me to tell me what to do, and this was what had come of it.

“What? What stunningly sinister thing have you come up with now, you creepy little doll-people?”

All three of them were outside. They all pointed to the door down into the maze. It was down a flight of steps from the kitchen.

“Something’s down there,” one of them said. “It’s . . .” He looked at his brothers for a word.

“It’s banging,” one of the others said.

“It screamed,” the third said.

They all looked up at me with huge eyes and I realized that they meant it. They were frightened.

“Something?” I asked. I had to rely on them for sounds around the house: by myself, I wouldn’t know if a thief was making himself dinner in the kitchen. “What do you think it is, a wolf, or . . .”

“It’s not a wolf,” the first brother said softly.

Maybe it was the mystery thing that had been leaving dead animals in the olive grove.

Suddenly the boys looked very fragile.

“Right,” I said, quietly, in case it could hear us too. “You all come in here. There’s a lock.” I’d put on a lock, so that I knew they couldn’t come in at night and hide under the bed. “I’ll go down and see what it is. Stay here until I come back. If anything happens, if I don’t come back—run to Dionysus next door and tell him. You know, the tall man, the witch?” The furious celestial thing that will burn me soon—no. No. Shut up.

They all nodded.

“Good. Lock this after me. I’ll see you soon.” They only looked more afraid than ever. There was nothing reassuring I could say. I had no idea what was in the maze. “And don’t do anything unnatural to my gear. I don’t want any dolls with pins in or little cursed bundles of sticks or whatever it is you’re planning to use this time for.” I signed watching them.

Owl stares, but one of them might have smiled: the experimental smile of someone who was just starting to wonder if maybe I was joking.

I smiled back and pressed the door closed.

We never went far into the maze. We kept apples and cheese down there when we had those things, or olives from the grove if the trees grew any edible ones, but we left them just inside the door. It was cold no matter the heat above. The dark was deep, the passages were narrow, and unless you enjoyed being lost and upsetting a lot of bats, there was no reason to bother. I went with my sword in one hand and a lamp in the other, listening. Now I was down here, I could hear whatever it was in the echoes—rasping, breathing. It was loud, but that didn’t mean anything. The maze moved sound so strangely it must have been designed to do that.

I clocked the hilt of my sword to the wall to see if I could make whatever it was come to me. It did pause, like it was listening, but then nothing.

“Come on. Come out, come and be murdered like a good mystery thing so I can go back to bed,” I said into the echoes.

“Back to bed,” said the echoes, “back to bed?”

I tried not to be unnerved by the way they changed my intonation.

“Back to bed,” they crooned. “Be murdered.”

I decided not to do any more talking.

Painted onto the walls, which were bare, hacked-out bedrock, were pictures so ancient I wasn’t sure people had made them. They showed the old goddesses, all wings and teeth. The Furies still sleep under the earth somewhere. I tried not to look. I didn’t want to think about whether they were why this maze was here.

“Come out,” the echoes whispered, and perhaps because I wasn’t hearing well enough or because the twisting ways had changed the sound, it didn’t sound like my voice any more.

I hit a dead end and had to double back. The echoes were stealing the sound of my steps too, at a lag, so that it sounded like there were three or four people walking. I had to keep stopping, to check.

The fifth time I stopped, the echo-steps didn’t stop. Someone else, something else, was walking close to me. I swung my lamp back. No one behind me, no one ahead, but they must have been only a few bends in the path away from me. I moved faster, and started to concentrate on keeping silent. Still, though, there were steps. Through the echoes, I couldn’t tell if the thing was moving on four legs or two.

Something tapped my shoulder.

I spun around sword first, but no one was there. Or no one I could see.

Tap, same shoulder.