The Minotauress

warm light as Dean led Ajax up the wide, curving stairwell.

'Did you catch that?' Ajax whispered.

'Catch what?'

'Shirley winked at me. She thinks I'm hot.'

Dean winced. 'Ajax, she's in her sixties. It would be like fucking your grandmother.'

'If my grandmother had tits like that... I'd fuck her.'

'You've got to be the most perverted person I've ever known,' Dean commented on the second-floor landing.

'Perverted? Me?' Ajax countered.

'You want to fuck an old lady, you want to pee on girls' backs, and the other night you stuck a pair of my wife's panties into your pants.'

Ajax scratched his chin in genuine contemplation. 'Yeah? So what's the perverted part?'

'Here's your room.' Dean showed him in. A four-posted bed, framed oil paintings hundreds of years old, dormer doors which opened to a high veranda.

'Jesus. It's the Lincoln Bedroom. Do I gotta give you campaign funds to sleep here?'

'My room's right next door. Let's get cleaned up for dinner.'

'Great, I'm starving. I could eat a—well, I could eat your housekeeper if you want to know the truth.'

'In that case, I don't want to know the truth.'

'Hey—' Suddenly Ajax looked quizzical as he prepared to pass Dean his suitcase. 'You got cinderblocks in here? This suitcase is heavy as a motherfucker.'

'All I packed was some clothes.' Dean hefted the suitcase with a look of dismay. 'You're right, it is heavy,' he concurred. Then he shook it and heard a heavy clack. 'What the... ' He opened the suitcase on the bed, fished through his clothes, then slowly pulled out—

'What the hell did you bring that for?' Ajax asked.

Dean was holding his old pair of horn-crankers. He looked wide-eyed to Ajax and admitted in a slow drone, 'I honestly don't remember putting them in the suitcase.'

'Terrific,' Ajax complained. 'More memory blackouts. Shit, I thought sure that would all stop once you got back home.'

'But why on earth would I bring my horn-crankers?'

'Something in your subconscious,' Ajax posited. 'Or I should say something in your fucked- up subconscious.'

Dean felt an itch of dread in his gut. This was getting serious. 'Maybe you're right. Maybe I should see a shrink.'

'No maybes about it.'

'Maybe I should call Daphne—'

Ajax's face went creased in a scowl. 'That's the dumbest thing you could do. If she's the catalyst to your fragmenting personality, the only way to know for sure is to avoid contact with her and see what happens.'

'But-but,' Dean stammered. 'She'll be worried about me, she'll be—'

'Forget it,' Ajax said. 'Besides, she's probably at a work meeting right now.'

But before Dean could further object, Shirley's distant voice called out from downstairs: 'Boys! Boys! Come right away! More children have disappeared!'

««—»»

The 54-inch Magnavox television screen filled the darkened parlor with throbs of color. The three of them stood aghast as the local news channel related the latest details of the crisis. '... as another name is added to the otherwise quiet town's staggering body count,' a brunette in a smart burgundy coatdress spoke stoically into a microphone. Behind her, state police investigators milled about in the woods, making way for a pair of EMT's bearing a covered stretcher. 'Veteran DeSmet Police Sergeant A.T. Lass was found dead early this morning in a wooded clearing off Auburn Street and 38th Avenue, the victim of what local medical officials can only describe as a ‘goring' by a wild, horned animal. Thus far, eight men and thirteen children have been found dead by the same brutal means.'

'Jesus,' Ajax muttered.

The brunette newscaster continued, 'But what baffles investigators further is that nearly all of the dead children appear to have been abducted before meeting their death, which seems to connect some manner of human involvement with the animal attacks. And to make matters compoundedly worse, local single mother Mitzy Rundstedt of the Callisto-Brownsroad Trailer Park, hysterically reported to state police that her infant twins, Ryan and Geoff, disappeared from her home earlier this afternoon. The Rundstedt Twins are only ten months old. Tune in at ten o'clock for updates of this terrible tragedy. From DeSmet, South Dakota, this is Laura Von Paulus, KSKY News.'

Shirley gripped Ajax' arm. 'What a horrible thing! Those poor adorable little twins!'

Ajax put a consoling arm around the buxom housemaid. 'We can only hope the police'll find them before —'

'Before it's too late,' Dean finished. He changed channels, searching for more coverage, then found another quick clip on CNN: '—described as the worst tragedy to befall the unassuming town of DeSmet, South Dakota,' a narrator was saying. First came a still photo of the Rundstedt Twins, smiling up toothlessly and wielding rattles from their cribs. Then a clip of the mother, pallid, tears streaming down her thin meth-tramp face: 'My poor little babies! Please, bring back my babies!' and lastly a live cut to the most recent crime scene where the fine and upstanding Sergeant Lass had been found gored and crushed. A white van was parked before the trees, and men roamed about in windbreakers that read STATE POLICE FORENSICS UNIT on their backs. The narrator returned, 'Today, police crime-scene examiners were dispatched to search for clues but, as bad luck would have it, tonight's