The Ariadne Connection

THEY HAD BROUGHT HER food again, thrusting the chipped pottery bowl fearfully, worshipfully through the gap in the curtain made from an old coat.

She stirred in her nest of rags and straw, growling, burrowing back into warmth and darkness. Sleep. She wanted more sleep. Tired. But hunger flared in her belly, and her nostrils twitched. She growled again and pulled herself upright, groping for the bowl. Tilting it to her face, she bolted down the thick porridge and licked the bowl clean. A dented metal coffeepot by the cardboard wall still held water, and she gulped that down, too. She wanted more. More. She raked matted hair from her eyes and crawled around the dim cubicle, circling inside the two walls of soot-blackened crumbling masonry, the one of cardboard, the one of buckled sheet metal. She prowled around again, a heavy coiled presence stirring within her.

The draped coat was pulled aside. Dusty sunlight, and a face thrust through the gap. “Wise-Mother? You will see more now?”

She snarled, and the face hastily retreated. The blackness inside her swelled, squeezing. More. We want more. And a different hunger mounted.

But Ariadne shook her head from side to side, irritable, resisting. Something else, some distant nearly-forgotten voice teased her from outside the stifling den. Light? Pushing through swirls of darkness, she lunged across the dirt and scrambled through the draped opening.

Startled voices. She staggered unbalanced, hands groping as she winced in the sunlight. Blackened brick walls surrounded her, bent pipes protruding, window shapes empty of glass. Inside, piles of broken machine parts, stacked boxes defining cubicles walled with cardboard, metal scraps, stretched blankets or black plastic sheeting. Faces crowded into the open space—frightened, avid, blank-eyed.

Bandages. Draining sores. Crutches. Dull interest quickened inside her.

A woman with an infant wrapped in rags pushed forward. “Wise-Mother, please.” She held out the squalling bundle.

Two men took the woman’s shoulders and pulled her back. A gray-haired woman, layered in clashing skirts and blouses, barked at the crowd, “You all got to wait your turn. Now I want to see those numbers, and if you haven’t paid up with Marcos over there, then you better see to it.” She swung around, eyeing Ariadne and moving warily closer. “Now come on, Mother, back inside, you know they don’t like to see the screaming, just them healed afterwards.” She cautiously grasped Ariadne’s arm.

Ariadne took a step back, shaking her head, confused by the noises, the colors. She didn’t want the woman’s hand on her. She stared down at it, focus narrowed at the end of a dark tunnel, and there was a gasp as the hand jerked away.

More voices clamored around her in an irritating buzz. She lurched away, crashed through a collapsing cardboard barrier, and pushed her way toward a crumbled gap in the masonry walls. More people blocked her way, but the black coils were swelling in her now, screaming, demanding, filling her with the power and the hunger. Mine, they’re mine. The frightened faces shrank back from her.

The blackness wanted them, wanted their sicknesses. More. But there was something else, calling faintly.

She pushed her way through the warrens of makeshift shelters, through the maze of cracked streets, bare foundations, burned-out shells of buildings. Babbling voices surrounded her—shouts, pleas, commands—but no one touched her. She had to find it.

Find what? She shook her head again, the heaviness inside dragging her down. She fell against a broken-off wall, felt the warm sooty bricks against her face, stroked them mindlessly as she groped for what it was she should remember. She scrambled onto the wall, stood swaying as pigeons burst up in a stutter of wings.

Blackened ruins sprawled outward at her feet, a rat’s-nest of squatters’ huts crawling with movement and color. Beyond, gray concrete towers and earthquake rubble. Hazy hills. She turned, arms flinging out for balance, the charred landscape spinning around her, then settling into tile-roofed buildings lapping against a rocky cliff.

She swayed, squinting past fragments of walls, a distant billboard and buildings.

There. Through a gap, she caught a pale shimmer. On top of that high rock outcrop, a clean white geometry of fluted marble columns and sweeping cornices, impossible perfection floating above the squalid Athens streets and smog. Yes. Harmony and balance. She had held them once in her hands, smooth planes and angles of a crystal funneling blended pure light. . . .

But that was gone now. There was only a terrible emptiness. “More!” She cried out, flinging up her hungry hands.

A roar answered, voices calling up to her. She blinked, clawing the twisted ringlets from her face to see the crowd pressing against the wall below her. They held up their hands. Pleading. Demanding. Their roar was the voice of the black serpent, coiling about her in hissing sparks, filling the emptiness as she and the darkness merged. They swelled together into the immensity of power, dwarfing the supplicants at her feet.

Mine. They’re mine.