“Make it one o’clock.”

Sir Christopher turned. I didn’t think he could overhear, but I was taking no chances. I nodded at Jim.

I stood in the doorway watching them as they walked away. Frederick was several paces ahead of the other two. It was getting dark; the soft grayish-blue air closed around the three forms, blurring their outlines. They might have been three young men walking in a Cretan evening in a far-gone year. If Kore’s crazy ideas had any foundation, the young man whose life had ended prematurely could find no more suitable place for rebirth than the body of his sister’s son.

Who are we, anyway? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random from some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply? Spiritual scrap bags-bits and pieces of everyone we have ever been, from the shambling apelike creatures of the Ice Age to the present?

The tiled floor under my feet swayed just a little. Nothing was stable, not even the solid ground. I closed the door and went back into the darkening room.

Dinner that night was an experience. I can’t remember what we ate, I was so interested in watching my host and hostess. To a casual observer they might have seemed normal enough, although Keller’s black tie and Kore’s glitter of jewels were a little overdone. I decided they must dress for dinner the way the Victorian empire builders did in remote outposts, to keep up their morale. They both talked fluently, but every now and then a silence would fall, and one of them would steal a sidelong glance at the other, as if searching for something he was hoping not to see.

The atmosphere was not lightened by the occasional quiver of the earth. You couldn’t even call them minor quakes, they were just enough to make the chandelier sway. Midway through the meal the movements stopped, and we finished dessert and coffee without further disturbances. Kore insisted on putting me to bed immediately afterward. I went without argument. I was tired. It was not so much physical fatigue as mental strain. I thought Kore felt it too. She looked old that night. She didn’t fuss over me the way she had before, and when I refused a sleeping pill, she merely shrugged.

“I put it here,” she said, and placed the tray, which also held a glass of water, on the table by the bed. “If you need…”

“I won’t. I’m tired.”

She left a light burning, as usual, when she went out.

I didn’t take the pill, but I drank the water. The sticky sweet wine had produced a thirst that was still with me. Though I was tired, I was not really sleepy, so I read for a while. The book was dull enough to put anybody to sleep; Keller’s English library consisted mostly of books on archaeology and related fields. This was a sober text on Stone Age religion; I remembered having heard Frederick mention it. There was a footnote on practically every word. I read on, my eyelids getting heavier and heavier, till I came across my own name.

The more I discovered about the origins of that name, the less I liked it. Ariadne was not only the daughter of Minos the sea king, she was also a goddess, a vegetation deity who died in the fall and was reborn in spring… There it was again, that reference to resurrection and reincarnation that was beginning to haunt me. Ariadne was a girl too; she was mentioned by Homer, when he spoke of “the dancing ground which Daedalus wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne.” No one had ever really figured out what the dancing ground was, or why the master craftsman of ancient Crete should have directed the construction of a simple dance floor. The author of the book I was reading suggested that the dancing ground was a maze, like the Cretan Labyrinth, and the dance was a twisting, circling survival of an old fertility ritual. The tributary youths and maidens of Athens performed the dance, under pressure, and met the bull-masked killer who was priest of the goddess. “Only Theseus penetrated to the center, to discover Ariadne…with the help of her own clue.”

The words blurred. I dropped the book and let my head fall back on the pillow. The night light was a dim golden haze somewhere off in the distance.

I had never read this book before. It wasn’t exactly my type of literature. How, then, had my subconscious mind come up with the idea that Ariadne herself waited in the center of the maze, the prize of the hero who killed the Minotaur? The dancing place… An innocuous term, suggesting harmless pleasures. How had I known that Ariadne’s dancing place was a labyrinthine web of stone, and that the function of the dance was to deliver a victim to sacrifice?

I fell asleep and dreamed.

There was a period of confused and fragmentary impressions-lights flickering, dank, cool air against my face, voices murmuring words I could not understand. Then the mists cleared. I awoke to darkness, but it was not the foul black of the Labyrinth. Stars blazed down out of a high night sky, and the air smelled of wild herbs and of the sea. A hard, gritty substance stung my bare feet as they moved, stumbling at first and then more surely, in a measured rhythm. The music was a thin, high piping. It was the strangest music, without a recognizable tune. Even the scale was unfamiliar. The notes had no ending, no resolution, they repeated endlessly, and my feet moved with them, moving faster as the beat picked up. I was spinning, moving in a narrow circle, with my arms outflung to keep my balance, and the stars were spinning too, so fast that they looked like coiling, luminous snakes. My moving feet made a pattern, a complex network of force like an invisible cat’s-cradle. When the pattern was complete, something would take shape. I could feel it hovering, waiting with a terrible eagerness, like a creature crouching behind a barrier waiting to spring out. The barrier was crumbling, inch by inch…

Then the night was dissected by a rising bar of fire. The ground shook under my moving feet; they stumbled and missed the beat. I lost my balance and grasped vainly at empty air; but as I fell I saw the thing that waited behind the barrier. It had my face, but the green eyes blazed like emeralds and the mouth was curved in the queer, disquieting smile I had first seen on the archaic statue Frederick had sent me. I toppled, screaming soundlessly, into a bottomless hole of darkness.

I awoke to clear morning light and a cool breeze from the open window. The sheet was twisted around my legs and the memory of the dream was still heavy on my mind. But as I came back to full consciousness, I was infinitely relieved to realize that for once I had had a nightmare whose origins could be explained. It was the book I had been reading that had set me off.

Relaxed, I lay on the soft bed and contemplated the day ahead of me. The meeting with Jim was not an unmixed pleasure to anticipate. I wanted to see him, but I knew he was going to lecture me. I was tired of people telling me what to do, as if I were a little child. I wanted to be left alone.

It was an effort to sit up. I was still tired, and my legs felt stiff; the sheet had been wound so tightly around them that red welts showed. Apparently I had done quite a bit of thrashing around in the throes of the dream. And then, as I bent my knees, preparatory to getting out of bed, I caught a glimpse of my feet.

The soles were spotlessly clean. There wasn’t even a trace of dust. But from heel to toe they were red and scraped, as if I had run, barefoot, across a rough, hard surface.