NOAH SPEAKS

He took me by the hand and led me up those damned stairs into the loft of the building.

Once we attained the top landing, we stood before a plain wooden door.

Weyland glanced at me with amused eyes, knowing full well my lack of enthusiasm, then he opened the door and, still holding my hand, pulled me inside.

The door closed softly behind us. For a moment there was blackness, and it disturbed me so much that I actually moved closer to Weyland, needing the reassurance of his warmth and presence.

“Light,” he said, very low, and within a heartbeat soft lights glowed in a score of places.

They did not flare suddenly into life, but gently pervaded the dark, as dawn lightens the land towards the end of night.

My first impression as the lights slowly intensified was one of space. We stood in a great sandstone-columned vestibule, with fan vaulting, and with a flooring of vivid blue, gold and scarlet tessellated tiles. The vestibule’s outer walls were pierced with graceful, arched open doorways leading to balconies, walkways, bridges and long elegant arcades and cloisters. Beyond the doorways and balconies I could just make out a jungle of domed and spired buildings, their gilded tiles glinting under some enchanted sun.

It was a city in this tiny upstairs chamber of Weyland’s house in Idol Lane, and the vestibule its central hub.

My eyes were, I think, impossibly wide. I looked to Weyland, and he smiled very gently at the expression on my face.

“What did you expect? A stinking, dismal cave, full of the musk of Minotaur?”

My face flamed. It was precisely what I had expected.

He laughed, and squeezed my hand before letting it go and walking further into the vestibule.

“I call this,” he said, swinging back to look at me, “my Idyll. It is my retreat from everything that people expect of me, or fear from me, or consider me.”

What people feared of him, or considered him? For that, surely, he had no one to blame but himself. I stared at him, and he made a face.

“You think all of this is a trap, don’t you?”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know,” he replied.

No other answer could have unsettled me more.

I distracted myself by paying more attention to my surroundings. The air was strange—warm, slightly humid, and sweetly spiced.

It was not English air.

“Where is this?” I asked.

“The tiny chamber above the kitchen in—”

I made a noise of exasperation, and he smiled. “It is an amalgamation of the best of all that I have seen over the past three thousand years. I have taken the best and most beautiful from cities in Egypt and Persia and faraway China.”

“This is the heart of the labyrinth,” I said, indicating the central hub in which we stood (I experienced a moment of renewed unease as I said this, for as I turned about I could not see which door it was that led back into the house below). “You have merely recreated your own home, your original home, Weyland, if perhaps slightly more salubrious.”

“Ah, Noah,” he said, walking close now. “You are perceptive, are you not? Aye, this echoes the heart of the labyrinth, but with one crucial difference.”

“Yes?”

“I know the way out. And you don’t.” Paradoxically, at last I felt on firmer ground. This was the Minotaur I understood.