Myth Management

Sometimes being immortal hurt, especially when self-respecting minotaurs had to cater to tourists instead of heroically goring them.

“Let’s face it,” Asterion thought, “this job is a one-way ticket across the River Styx to the realm of what’s-his-face.” Never mind that neither the river nor Hades had existed in the spiritual universe of self-respecting minotaurs back then. Along came the Martians, buying up the planet for a few billion baubles, and—whaddya know?—the new overlords let Athens sack Minos’s palace and turn an island paradise into a carbon copy of Grease, complete with its theology.

No, Grease isn’t a typo. It’s a pun on the musical, a statement from a twenty-first-century half-bull, half-man from Crete who should know. Once he was the star of this Labyrinth shindig. Now he’s a middle manager. Meet the Master of the Maze.

Asterion inhaled deeply to fuel a monumental sigh.

That was a mistake. The air, thick and stagnant, smelled of damp limestone and mildew flavored with burnt, endlessly reheated coffee, because the office budget was set for waste not, want not.

He glanced around for something—anything—to cheer himself up. He found a glimmer in a whiteboard map of the maze decorating the wall, if you could call it that. No, there was no surcease for this ennui in the green dots marking selfie spots. But the red dots denoting “guests still missing after forty-eight hours” held promise.

At least those visitors might not use the week-long pass they’d bought at a hefty discount and come back to bother him again.

Beside the map hung a motivational plaque signed by the chairman of the board of Martian Maze Investments LLC. It was the only peep Asterion had ever heard from the company’s absentee owners. Talk about silent partners. Anyway, the plaque read: Smile. The customer is always right.

Yeah. Sure.

His phone groaned. The cheerful chime was long gone. But Penelope’s dear face appeared in the cracked screen, and his heart did that quick little song-and-dance it always performed when he saw her.

She was why he did this job. She wasn’t a Hound of Zeus around him or their children. She had a stunning hooked beak where his bullish snout was, and talons that made a terrible racket on the keyboard, but he didn’t mind. She was usually slaving away for freelance-accounting clients to help him pay the bills.

“Darling,” he said, “it’s so good to see your fierce, wild face. To what do I owe this pleasure?” And it was a pleasure. It thrummed through his manly chest and his bullish bollocks.

She hesitated. “It’s Ferdinand.”

“What has he done now?” Asterion rumbled. Good thing the boy couldn’t hear that rumble. He’d have nightmares for a week. But Asterion had pretty much had it for today.

“No,” Penelope said anxiously. “It’s not that. We just got back from the dentist. His horns aren’t coming in straight. He needs braces.”

Asterion roared wordlessly. The Smile plaque on the wall. “Do you know how much orthodontic work costs these days?”

“I do,” Penelope squeaked.

If Asterion hadn’t already been trying to pull himself together, her two words would have done it.

Two words. Two special little words.

And all these years after she’d uttered those words, she was the marvelous mother of his children. First came the little half-Gorgon charmer—well, she used to be a charmer before she hit the teen years—whom they’d adopted. As so often happens, the minute she came home Penelope’s belly began to swell with a minotaur–harpy bundle of joy.

Pashmina’s favorite phrases these days were “I’m mortified” and “Dad’s horns are so-o-o last millennium.”

That he could ignore. Teenagers will be teenagers. But he couldn’t ignore last week’s news that she needed petrification lessons to control her powers, or she’d never be invited to the prom.

The pressure of life swirling down the drain was fierce and growing, but that was no excuse. He’d scared his dear little harpy. Minotaurs could do that when they got stressed or lost their tempers, and he’d done a lot of both lately.

“Don’t worry,” he soothed. “We’ll work it out together. We always do.” He glanced at the wall clock, which he reset every morning to catch up its lost ten minutes. Right now, he had work to do. He had to keep this job. He had a pension as well as a paycheck to think of. “Darling, we’ll talk more about this tonight over a nice hamburger steak. For now, though, I’m afraid I have to go.”

She made shooing noises, then kissy-kiss noises, and the screen went blank.

He mopped his forehead with the handkerchief she’d reminded him to tuck into his pocket that morning. The air conditioning had begun making strange, loud noises lately, and this labyrinth wasn’t buried deeply enough below the palace to help on what was the hottest day since records began. Global warming. When would the beings teeming on this planet learn to take care of it?

A growl in the hall beyond his time-beaten door made him look up and straighten his slouch. It was Panos Piper, the son-of-a-bitch satyr whom the shades (Labyrinth Ambiance) and the harpies (Janitorial) had elected to run the Union of Maze Employees, Local 667.

He didn’t knock on Asterion’s limestone doorframe, not even a single sharp rap.

“Asty, baby, this just plain won’t do,” Pan said without preamble. He threw a thick sheaf of paper onto Asterion’s desk. “We want a ten percent raise, dental benefits for those who have teeth, and air conditioning that works.”

The desk he littered was a hulking relic Asterion relied on to keep obnoxious visitors at bay. It didn’t work with good ol’ Pan, who perched on the corner next to Asterion and jabbed the papers with an insistent forefinger.

“This ‘final contract offer’ is an insult. We’re going on strike at noon.”

“You can’t.”

“Ever heard of a wildcat strike? We ain’t no pussies, and we’re gonna prove it.”

Pan stormed off, his cloven hooves clopping angrily—and arrogantly—on the once-resplendent marble.

Asterion knew these guys. They’d be gone at noon. He’d have to take the Chadwicks from Texas through the labyrinth himself. How had he ended up as a manager with no one to boss except himself?

He didn’t blame Pan or the other employees for their wildcat action. He’d be on the picket line at the maze’s mouth himself if he could do it without getting fired.

His secretary had already claimed she was sick for the last week. He was sure it was Contract Talks Syndrome. A lot of that was going around. The pay here was lousy, the benefits worse, and the job satisfaction nonexistent.

He stood to go meet the Chadwicks—and sat back down suddenly as the ancient air-conditioning unit in the main corridor gave a wrenching shudder and a final metallic scream. Then, silence.

Which was broken by a nasal whine. “Who’s taking us on the Theseus Package? We paid extra, you know.” The Texan drawl identified Mr. Chadwick, a pudgy fellow with a blotchy red face atop a body half Asterion’s size.

“This heat could melt the bronze off Hephaestus’s anvil,” wheezed Mr. Chadwick, his polo shirt already sporting impressive sweat stains. “Where’s the air conditioning? Isn’t air conditioning included in the deluxe package?”

Mrs. Chadwick fanned herself with a brochure, her voice pitched to carry maximum annoyance.

“And where are the spooky ghosts? The website promised authentic supernatural encounters. This is just hot stone and bad lighting. Not even any brimstone. We missed the scheduled goring too,” she added petulantly. “What kind of operation are you running here?”

Their daughter had her nose buried in her phone. Of course she did; she was a teenager and an unadulterated human being.

Their son Brayden, sticky with lollipop residue and apparently immune to heat, zeroed in on Asterion’s nose ring as though the boy had been born with a magnet. He hung his purple candy from the ring.

Asterion shook his bullish head with full bovine power. The lollipop flew off and stuck beneath the word Smile on the motivational plaque. That was all he dared do, for all he wanted to hook a horn, just one, that’s all, through the little menace’s abdomen.

“Asterion,” Mrs. Chadwick whined, “we specifically requested the new locked-room adventure. When are we doing that?”

“The staff is on strike,” Asterion explained, batting away Brayden’s persistent hands with hands that tried to stay gentle. “I’m afraid the locked-room experience requires—”

“Strike?” Mr. Chadwick’s face reddened further. “Well, that’s swell. I thought we might have run down someone important when we came through all those satyrs and harpies milling around out front. That’s good fun in retrospect, but really. We flew all the way from Dallas for this?”

Brayden had given up on the nose ring and was now alternately tugging at Asterion’s sleeve and wiping his nose on it. “Daddy, tell the cow-man to get down. I want to climb on. I want to ride through the maze!”

Asterion’s email notification pinged with the cheerful electronic chirp of incoming doom. The sender was H.Hades@MartianMazeInvestmentsLLC, so he said, “Excuse me. One moment.”

The subject line was “URGENT”. The message was brief, brutal, and all caps: “YOUR LABYRINTH’S YELP RATING IS AT 2.5 STARS. FIX IT, OR I’M TRANSFERRING YOU TO THE AUGEAN STABLES FRANCHISE. —H”

Asterion sagged back in his chair. The Augean Stables. He’d heard horror stories. Oh, how he’d heard horror stories.

The phone rang. He jumped.

“Hello, darling.” It was Penelope, voice tight with stress. “I’m afraid I have more news.”

“Oh, Zeus preserve me,” Asterion muttered. “What now?”

“Pashmina just turned an Amazon delivery driver to stone again. He was the third this month. They’re threatening to add us to their no-delivery list. And they’re suing us.”

“Really,” Mr. Chadwick said. “Personal calls on the job. We didn’t pay extra to be held up by that.”

Something snapped inside Asterion’s chest. He slammed down the phone. He grabbed the key to the locked-room adventure.

“You wanted the Theseus Package? Fine. Follow me.”

He led them through the stifling corridors, the silence broken only by their shuffling feet and Mr. Chadwick’s muttered threats of litigation.

Join the club, Asterion thought.

They reached the final challenge: a heavy wooden door carved with an intricate puzzle of interlocking snakes. Ariadne’s Enigma, the peeling sign read. The Ultimate Mystery Room.

Asterion heaved the door open and ushered them into the small, windowless chamber. In the center stood a pedestal holding a cheap replica of a golden ball of twine. He let the heavy door boom shut behind them. The locking mechanism groaned and clicked with grim finality.

“Okay, what’s the gimmick?” Mr. Chadwick asked, already mopping his brow.

Asterion didn’t answer. He just stood there, sweat beading on his horns.

He checked his pocket for the key.

He found the hole instead. He’d decided to save a few bucks, ask Penelope to repair it instead of the dry cleaner. But she had looked so tired last night.…

“Well?” Mr. Chadwick snapped. “We’re waiting.”

Asterion began to laugh. It started as a low chuckle and grew into a full-throated, unhinged roar that echoed off the stone walls. The Chadwicks shrank back.

“The gimmick?” Asterion bellowed, his voice cracking. “The gimmick is that there is no escape! Not from the Labyrinth, not from the quarterly reports, not from the soul-crushing pointlessness of it all!”

He stalked the room, a caged beast. He pointed a trembling finger at a cheap rubber minotaur mask hanging on the wall—a prop for tourist photos.

“You see that?” he roared at the mask. “That’s me! A terrifying monster of myth, reduced to a mascot! I inspired terror. Now I inspire team-building exercises! I have KPIs to meet—Key Performance Indicators!”

It was a glorious, sweaty, cathartic meltdown. He ranted about the tyranny of Yelp reviews, the absurdity of de-petrification insurance, the existential dread of a monster who had to clip coupons. He wept, he raged, he kicked a prop skeleton to pieces while screaming about budget shortfalls.

Mr. and Mrs. Chadwick huddled in a corner, shielding Brayden, who had finally stopped whining and was staring in silent terror. But their teenage daughter, Aspen, stood perfectly still. Her phone was held aloft, its camera lens a single, unblinking eye. Her own eyes were not filled with fear; they burned with ecstatic, reverent awe.

She whispered into her phone, her voice trembling as it broadcast to thousands of followers: “This is literally the most, like, wow performance art I’ve ever seen. I’m not even kidding. Here’s the artist.”

She turned the phone toward Asterion. “Performance art,” he repeated stupidly.

She ignored him to keep talking to her followers. “Okay, so, like, the heat? It was literally suffocating. I kept thinking, we’re all just trapped, you know? By capitalist pigs and stuff. Wait—is it late-stage capitalism? I heard that somewhere. Whatever. And everybody else is on strike, and there’s no one here to help, just like how everyone ghosts you online these days. It’s so deep, you know?”

That did it. He roared. He pawed the ground. He drew on the adrenaline reserves of the mortally wounded and took aim with his horns at the door that trapped him with the unthinkable.

It splintered. It cracked. It sagged with a shriek of metal on broken hinges. The tampering alarm blared with a deafening clang.

The wildcat strikers came running. Ten of them stopped him from goring his tourists and sat on him until he calmed down. The strikers took selfies, and waiting tourists gathered to take selfies of the selfies.

Within an hour, the video and its spinoffs went viral. #LabyrinthMeltdown #ExistentialDread trended for a week. The Labyrinth was hailed by art critics as a masterpiece of immersive, existential theatre. Bookings skyrocketed.

A new email appeared in Asterion’s office:

SUBJECT: RE: Q3 ENGAGEMENT METRICS

ASTERION, BRILLIANT PIVOT. THE BOARD IS ECSTATIC. YOUR NEW TITLE IS “CURATOR OF AUTHENTICATED SUFFERING.” RAISE AND FULL DENTAL EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY.

Asterion sat in his still-boiling office, reading a glowing review that praised his “brutal, uncompromising vision.”

He was a celebrated artist—and he had never, in his long, immortal life, felt more profoundly, miserably trapped.