Minotaur

Macabre flash fiction

It’s Monday and I have something macabre. This one was first published in Scribe Base magazine.

Minotaur

“So, where do we put ’em?”

“What?”

“Them, the stiffs.” The young man glanced suspiciously up at the monolithic openings in the cliff face with their smooth slabs and plinths carved from a single block of stone. “Don’t tell me we’re supposed to stick ’em up there!”

He jerked his chin in the direction of the dark doors.

“No,” his companion replied.

The oars splashed, rise and dip, rise and dip, the only sound in the silence of the oily sea. The young man peered into the depths of the approaching cypresses for signs of life.

“Not even no birds.”

Rise and dip, rise and dip.

“I said, there ain’t even no birds.”

“I heard.”

“Don’t talk much, do you?”

“No.”

The young man shrugged. The prow nudged the landing place, which wasn’t a jetty, just a gap in a low wall with an iron ring to tie up. He leaned over and passed the rope through the ring. “Right then. What now?”

From the bowels of the mountain, something gazed out upon the vastness of the ocean. Nothing moved beneath the surface, no birds grazed the sky with their wings. The trees grew tall and dark, and not an insect disturbed the smooth skin of their bark. The something saw every movement, caught every breeze, every rustle of grass beneath the dark trees. It was the island, its soul. Monstrous child, abandoned in a mountainy maze, it was the soul of the rock, with a heart of rock. No tenderness had ever stirred in the touch of its coarse fingers; no tender fingers had ever stroked its bestial head.

The beast stood on its man-legs and gazed upon the ocean with red-rimmed eyes full of the madness of a caged bull. The bull-nose quivered and sniffed. Warm. Blood. It shuffled higher, closer to the opening onto the world, the door that led from death to life. And vice versa. It looked down on the sandy landing place at the puny skiff, saw the shadowy boatman, the pale shrouds of the ghosts, dry and dead all three, of no interest, and passed over to the…other. Warm. Blood. It bloated with pleasure, filling the cavern mouth, and it spilled out, groping long dark fingers towards the source.

“Well? What now?” The young man had jumped lightly onto the shore. Pale sand crunched beneath his boots. “Ew! You seen what the sand’s made of?”

The boatman nodded.

“How do they end up crunched to bits like that?” He nudged a pile of sand with the toe of his boot, peering in disgust at the millions of tiny bits of bone. “Tell you what, I’ll take the feet, you take the shoulders and we’ll heave ’em over. Then we can scarper, let the bone cruncher deal with ’em.”

When the corpses were laid on the sand, the boatman spoke.

“Drag them a bit higher. We leave them by the big flat stone.”

Grumbling to himself, the young man bent to his task. He reached the flat stone and wrinkled his nose. The area all about was trampled and churned and strewn with excrement. Piles of excrement. He raised his head, the words of complaint on the tip of his tongue, but there was no one to receive them. He spun around—the skiff was a dot on the horizon. He shielded his eyes with his hand and stared in disbelief. His first thought was to bellow in anger and demand the boatman come back, but the words died before they were born.

Behind him, the sound of something heavy was scraping and scratching its way down the cliff.

Reluctantly he turned, to face the heavy scraping and scratching and lost control over his bowels. Behind him, there was no clump of trees, no more cliff with its sinister openings. There was only darkness and the stench of putrid breath in his face. Only darkness and deadly silence, except for the heaving of bull-breath and the snap of his bones in the grip of monstrous hands. Then there was only darkness.