The Minotauress

The Writer lit another cigarette and made a closer inspection. The unfortunate woman had been hung on the door by means of a sharpened iron spike sunk directly through the hollow of her throat. Much blood was in evidence, naturally, running down her pallid body and cellulite-pocked legs, to pool at the floor. The blood was dry and browning. Her feet and lower legs were a murky blue. "I'd say she's been dead a day or two," the Writer estimated. "The decomposition of the body is not yet acute, and I'd also say... she's not the first to suffer such a fate in this room." Now his flashlight tracked along the floor. More splotches of dried blood existed before each of the six wood-plank doors in the bizarre room.

The Writer opened the door to which the girl had been impaled. There was nothing behind it except for crudely lain bricks.

"The fuck's that all about?" Balls asked. "If Crafter did all this devil's jazz to get a demon here, a hallway to hell's what should be behind that door, not just bricks, right?"

The Writer chuckled. "While the ritual is active, yes, but of course only in Crafter's mind. There are no real doorways to Hell or demons, Mr. Balls."

"Yeah?"

"Let's not get carried away here, gentlemen. Crafter is an occult fanatic. He believes himself to be a retainer for the Devil, by serving him in such ways. But the notion is actually no different from someone rubbing a rabbit's foot for good luck, or avoiding cracks on the sidewalk. It's superstition. Crafter is probably just delusional, and thinks he's summoning demons or whatever, but it's really just hoopla."

Dicky squinted. "Hoopla?"

"You know. Ballyhoo."

"What's ballyhoo?" Balls asked.

The Writer slumped. "It's bullshit, gentlemen! Occult science does not exist. It's not functional. Its supporters merely believe it is."

"Oh." Balls stroked his goatee.

"But if it's all bullshit," Dicky posed, "then you's mean the chick I'se fucked upstairs all painted black who dumped all that slop out her pussy... wasn't a demon?"

"No, Mr. Dicky," the Writer insured. "She was a hallucination. The kariolytic fumes from this corpse made you and Cora see the woman and made me see that growing starfish shape upstairs. Or something along those lines. Let me make myself perfectly clear. Have you guys even heard of Emmanuel Kant?"

"No," Balls and Dicky answered in unison.

Ask a silly question... The Writer thought of a way to dumb things down. "Kant was the greatest philosopher to ever live. He disproved every philosophy and in this disproval he thereby proved something else: that mankind must have been created by a higher being—God, in other words. He proved this with mathematical theorems. It's incontestible. The only entity that can possibly exist beyond man is God. There's no room for anything else, including the Devil, demons, Hell, etc. For God and the Devil to exist simultaneously, then human volition would have to be teleologic—and we know that this cannot be. It's all math."

Balls' eyes seemed mistrustful. "So God ain't nothin' but a bunch'a numbers?"

"In a sense, yes. He exists by means of a never-ending equation that created everything, and God is the beginning of the equation. Understand?"

"No," Balls and Dicky answered in unison.

The Writer sighed smoke. "Listen, just trust me. Crafter didn't bring any demons here—he merely thinks he did."

"Then what's that writin' on that little plate over the door, above the dead chick's head?" Balls pointed.

The Writer squinted. "Oh, I didn't see that." He shined his light right up.

And stared.

A tiny brass plate had been mounted in the keystone, and engraved upon it was were several Greek letters.

The Writer made a rare departure from his avoidance of profanity. "Holy shit... "

"What is it?" Balls urged, impatient.

"It's Greek... "

"You speak Greek?"

The Writer rolled his eyes. "Of course."

"Then what the fuck's it say?"

After a difficult pause, the Writer told him.

"It says ‘Pasiphae.'"

««—»»

The Writer tried to assess every conceivable angle of the situation. Dicky had said this "woman" had called herself Pasiphae. How could he make that up? These two guys are white trash, not scholars of myth. Still, the Writer had to ask.

"Gentlemen, if I may. Are either of you familiar with the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur?"

Balls and Dicky looked at him cockeyed.

"That's what I thought." The Writer sat down at the table full of books and instruments. "I'm trying to reckon a conclusion: how Dicky could have heard the name Pasiphae upstairs earlier, and then we come down here to find the name written in its original Greek on the transom of that door. So when you gentlemen were children, in school, you never learned any Greek mythology?"