Hotter Than Hell by Kim Harrison, Martin H. Greenberg

Thirty minutes later the lights switch off. I know this routine, though I have never seen it. Every night, as soon as I leave the café, munching on some snack I am allowed to take free from the pastry display, I meander down the broad marble stairs, flowing with the public. One more stranger, a slip of a girl, moving neither fast nor slow, sometimes with a book in my free hand. Going places.
    People leave me. We part ways as I descend deep into the catacombs. Sometimes a crowd, then nothing at all. It is, I often think, like walking through a door no one else can see—a slipstream gate, from one world to the next—into a forest of stone and tile, where branches are straight as shelves, holding books and yellow brittle newspapers, aisles riding like paths into shadows, the illusion of endlessness, the maze, the winding circle.
    Occasionally I find another reader in the labyrinth, but no one lingers. There is a cold air, a sense of oppression. Eyes in the dark. It bothered me once, long ago, but I did not run. I read out loud instead, in a whisper to the darkness, until the cold air turned warm and those eyes lost their power to scare. So that now I pretend I have a friend, one friend, someone who welcomes me home.
    I hide my sleeping bag and backpack in the gap behind a row of crusty encyclopedias. The lights do not function in that particular aisle. I move by instinct and memory as I find my belongings and jiggle them free. There is a bathroom nearby. Ancient, also unlit, no door. The toilet works, as does the faucet. I keep a battery-operated lantern just inside, on the floor.
    I undress, folding my clothes, putting them aside. I toss my underwear in the sink, and then, cold and naked and barefoot on the ancient tile, I clean up. Wash my short hair under the faucet with cheap shampoo, savoring the chemical scent of lavender and jasmine. Run wet hands over the rest of my body, soaping up, rinsing as best I can. A puddle spreads around me.
    When I am done, I drape my wet body in a big floppy t-shirt. I wash and wring out my underwear. Hang the pair on the rim of a toilet stall, then take down another that has been drying there all day, and slip them on. It is an easy routine.
    On the night I dream of the Minotaur, I turn off the bathroom lantern and in pure darkness walk back to my sleeping bag. Air dries my body. I lie down, cradle my head on my arm, and close my eyes.
    I dream. I dream of a place I have never been, though in the way of dreams, it is familiar. There is sand underfoot and the air is warm and wet. I look up, searching for stars, but all I find is stone. Stone all around. I am in a box, and there is only one way out.
    So I take it. I walk across the sand to a door made of bone, smooth and pale and grinning with skulls; a warning, a promise, an invitation. One touch and my hand burns. I flinch, but do not turn away.
    I enter an oubliette. A place of forgetting, of never turning back. I know what that is. I know what it is to be forgotten.
    I stand just within the doorway of the void, and for the first time in my dream, feel fear. A terrible urgent despair, the kind that begs sound—a wail or cry or quick breath—because sound is life, sound means presence, and I could forget myself in this place. I think I already have.
    But just as I am about to retreat through the door of watching bones, I glimpse something in the void—a solid curving plane of gray. The round edge of a shoulder, perhaps, holding very still.
    “Hello?” My voice is soft. There is no answer, but in the silence I sense another kind of weight, a longing, familiar as the unseen eyes that watch me nightly from the shadows of the basement labyrinth. I cannot turn from that presence; as though a hand wraps around my body, I am drawn across the sand.
    I walk into darkness, blind. The shoulder I saw before disappears, but I continue on, helpless.
Just a dream
, I tell myself.
Only a dream
.
    Except, I can feel the grains of sand digging between