The bar was crowded, and he took the last place at a table where three other men sat. Feeling invisible to their eyes, he removed his glove and kept looking at the hair bound to his skin while he sipped his drink. He was trying to decide what his discovery meant, but the degree of cognitive effort required to do so posed a challenge which his mind, in its current state, was incapable of answering. His thoughts behaved like highly volatile liquids.

He was surprised when the man next to him spoke:

“If you don't mind me saying, you look like some kind of mad poet.”

The man's voice was rough and dry; he had a long sharp thorn of a face, half buried in a black muffler. He was drinking whisky.

Gwynn gave him a measured look, then shook his head. “No. I am like you.”

“I figured so,” the man said. “Otherwise there would have been no cause for me to comment on your mien. So what's that…hair?”

“A favour. A present.”

“You get presents often?”

“No.”

“I figured that, too.” The man sounded satisfied. “So it's a lucky day for you.”

“Apparently so.”

“Yeah, well, one day, years ago, I was sitting in a place by the sea, turning a glass around like I'm turning this one,” the man said. “My thoughts were interrupted by a huge shadow passing across the street. I looked up to see what it was. It was a ship, a steamer, the biggest I've ever seen. Built for crossing oceans. At the moment I saw her, my whole life changed. I learned about everything I didn't have, all in one instant. I knew she was there for me. I was supposed to go on board. Don't ask me how I knew. Sometimes you just understand things like that. But I stayed where I was. I was too full of hate at the time, you see? I even hated that ship. So I cursed her, and cursed her shadow and her captain and every soul on board her. Sometimes I feel I'm still there, looking up and seeing that ship, swearing at her like the biggest fool on earth. But if I'd found a red hair like the one you're holding, I think I would have found my way on board. You know why? Her name was the Rosie Hare. I'd have known it for a sign. Sometimes that's all a man needs, just a sign, then he can get his courage up. I reckon I'd be prince of my own country by now, if I'd found that hair you've got on your fingerbone. Yeah,” he nodded, “I'd be a man of no small consequence.”

The man across from him smiled bitterly. He was younger, and was dressed head to toe in black velvet. “Sirs, I'm a musician. Curiously, I once dreamed that I found a red lute string, a filament similar enough to a hair for the purpose of this conversation. I strung it onto my lute, and in my dream I played music unheard before on earth. But when I woke I could not remember it. I can only tell you that it was the music of a life lived valiantly and poignantly and beautifully, music of a soul enchanted. My soul. Ever since, I have struggled to find that music. I have always failed.” He looked at Gwynn. “But now I am coming to think that you are holding the thread of my genius. It can be of no use to you, sir, and therefore I ask that you give it to me. Come, I can see by your fingers that you play an instrument. You must realise what I've suffered.” His chin started to tremble, and he looked on the verge of tears.

Then the third man, who was old and deathly gaunt, spoke up:

“I can tell you all of a minotaur. This monster was born in the old black town of the ivory hunters. It seemed a savage but simple place, in which anyone could fear being murdered for their teeth, which was bad enough; but the town's wickedness was not simple. There were fig and cypress trees whose leaves stirred violently at night when no wind was blowing; and the skulls of apes were found hanging from the branches in the morning. Children disappeared from padlocked rooms with no windows. All families lost one or two out of each generation in this way. As for the survivors, they were all crooked, bad people.

“No one ever spoke to the minotaur, save to mock him. No one touched him, save to beat him with clubs. When he reached the age of ten he ran out of the town. No one had told him that there was anything better out in the wide world, but he had at times smelled strange, wonderful odours on the wind, and he had followed the path of the sun across the sky with his eyes, and desired to follow it beyond the horizon.

“Escape failed to bring about any sweetening of his circumstances. On the contrary, he experienced blight upon blight, suffering pains familiar and new: aching loneliness, illness, deprivation, freak shows, bad fortunes with women, bullfights in poor villages where they couldn't afford a real bull, stretches in prison. His life enraged, horrified and bewildered him. He never received a name. After a long time, he at last found a job as an assistant to a gravedigger, a cruel man who flogged him morning and night. After a few weeks of this treatment the minotaur crushed the gravedigger's skull with a shovel.

“A militia captured him and tried to hang him, but instead of his neck breaking the rope did. Charging with his horns, he managed to escape, and ran alone into some mountains. Finally he had done something that human beings, certain human beings at least, could respect. A gang of bandits accepted him. These men gave him a name at last: ‘Bully’. His human side didn't appeal to them much: they liked the bull.

“He killed many more men. He looted, burned, pillaged and did everything else the bandits did. He learned to walk without stooping, despite his heavy head; he learned to swagger. To gratify his lust, sometimes he chose women, sometimes cows. His desires were confused. He had an instinctive and pure love for certain things – rotten hay, the full moon, guitar music – but those things weren't going to change his fate.

“One year, a war broke out. The minotaur joined the army. Of course his heart wasn't fired with patriotism; he simply thought it would be a fine lark to do what he did every day and be paid a steady wage for it. In this way he came into his own at last. Half-beast as he was, both less and more than a human being, he was a natural soldier. Bullets never touched him; it was as though magic protected him. His fellow soldiers soon came to value him. To them, he meant good luck. They learned his lowing speech and the simple sign language with which he supplemented it. He rose up the ranks like an eagle ascending in the sky. He won victories and medals. He became a hero. Women made themselves available to him, and he forgot about cows. He was made a general. There was even talk of marrying him to a royal princess. A splendid place in the world was prepared for him after all.

“Or so he thought. But most unfortunately, the enemy won. The people were bitter and wanted a scapegoat. The minotaur was thrown into a dungeon. Soldiers of his own army took him to a yard and, using pliers, tore off his epaulets and then his testicles. They blindfolded him, threw him in a cart, drove him to a labyrinth and installed him in it. The frightened buggers encrypted him. They fed him on rotten apples and onions, dropped down long shafts too high for him to climb.

“After that, all his long life was a disastrous repetition of deepening darkness, narrowing walls, desolate loathing of himself and the world, head crashing into walls and hoofed feet slipping on dung. Sometimes the minotaur dreamed of a red thread guiding him to an exit. But even if there had been such a thread, he would not have been able to find it in the dark.”

“But that is only the beginning of the story,” the old man said quickly. “The reason bullets could not hit the minotaur was because he was not real. He was the protagonist of a dream. The dreamer was a man locked up alone in prison. This man did not know what his crime had been, or what his sentence was. He had no trial. The only openings in his cell were one window, too high to see out of, and a drain in the floor.

“After the first month of his imprisonment, when he was sure that he was going mad, a sheaf of paper was poked into his cell with his morning meal tray, along with a pen, nibs and ink. He counted the paper. There were exactly one hundred sheets. For a moment he was less miserable; but the moment only lasted briefly. Then he felt sicker with anxiety than he had felt at any time during his incarceration. He knew that he had to decipher the purpose of the paper. Any sign of lenience in his captors was worth something. And it was impossible not to hope, too, for something else, something crazy: that he had been given an opportunity to save himself, if he wrote the right things. He could write a confession, leaving a space blank for someone to insert the name of his crime; alternatively, he could write a denial, an abject plea, a plausible alibi, or a raging tract that would demonstrate his courage and perhaps therefore his right to live; or he could try to write something so profound or beautiful or witty that his captors would judge him worthy to live in freedom.

“He would have to be very lucky, he thought. He had never been a good gambler. Then it occurred to him that perhaps the paper was meant as an instrument of torture. He could assume that he would be dead or mad the next day and take the opportunity to write furiously on every sheet, immediately, to try for the jackpot of salvation or at least leave something of himself behind that might be filed away and found in the future. On the other hand, he could assume that he was going to be kept locked up alone for years, or decades, in which case he would want to use the paper very sparingly, only a little each day, and meditate at length about what he would write, in order to occupy his mind and thus stave off the advancing baboon of madness. It wasn't inconceivable that if he endured long enough, more paper or some other amusement would be given to him. But he would have to choose what to do, and make the same choice the next day, and the next, and every day after. Each day the matter of deciding what and how much to write would be momentous, a matter of life or death, madness or sanity. True, it wasn't difficult to think of more painful and injurious torments; but he was in no state to be able to count his blessings.

“All that day he lay like a log, unable to pick up the pen or do anything at all. He greeted the night with the whimper of an exhausted child. He tried to tell himself that every mortal creature lives every day under many restrictions, and that in fact he had always been ignorant, confused, distant from his fellow human beings and helpless before the whims of fate, and that therefore his situation was little different from his life before his imprisonment. But his own sophistry did not impress him at all.

“It was during that night that he suffered the long and unpleasant dream about the minotaur, a dream which lasted far longer than the hours of his slumber. He lived the minotaur's life, day by day, for decades, until the light levered his eyes open. ‘O Minotaur!’ he groaned, wiping tears from his face. ‘Your heavy head droops like the narcissus at the brink of the waterfall. The wound between your thighs has gone bad. For a count of years equal to the period of the sixth planet's long circuit around the sun, you have heard nothing but your own lamenting roar. You didn't think of using your horns to open the artery in your thigh and end your life, which proves that you were more beast than man after all. The clearest point of distinction between a sentient being and a brute is that the former is capable of suicide while the latter is not. While I was you, I couldn't think of killing myself, and had to suffer until the light woke me. I suppose my waking killed you. Powers of mercy, I've served a sentence strict enough to compensate for any crime! Since I was in prison for so long, and suffered so much, and went so mad, I should be set free this instant! Indeed, I believe I should be paid some compensation!’ As he moved, during this speech, from the language of dream to the language of the waking world, he spoke all the more indignantly because he knew how ludicrous he sounded. To be dealt with fairly was his earnest wish, but he knew of no reason why he should be singled out among human beings for such treatment.

“The dream of the minotaur haunted him all through the day, following his thoughts like the black hound that follows travellers on lonely roads. He could think of nothing else. At nightfall he sat down on his bed and accused himself of wasting the day in profitless re-viewing of the same images. He imagined darkness waiting impatiently during the cold indigo twilight in the world outside the prison, eager to disgorge the rind of the eaten day. He was full of trepidation about the night.

“But when he closed his eyes he found himself inside a dream as charming as the dream of the minotaur had been wretched. This time he was a green bird who befriended a princess, who fled her castle and took to the seas on a sailing boat, and the green bird sailed with her and shared her adventures. At the end of the dream the princess turned into a red bird, and the red bird and the green bird flew away to the summer stars together. This dream, too, covered a span of many years. It was as though his mind was creating time. Even if he was executed in the morning, he had already lived longer than a human lifespan, albeit half in a hell of body and spirit.

“The answer to the difficult question of what to do with the paper then became clear to him. He vowed to himself: ‘I hold my captors in stern contempt. I have no interest in them or their world. I disown my waking hours in this prison. I claim only my sleep, and only to the events of my sleep will I bear witness. I shall use as much or as little paper as seems right to me. Whatever game my captors are playing, I do not know its rules, therefore I cannot play and will not attempt to.’ He sat down, took a sheet of the paper, and wrote out as much as he could remember of the two long dreams. As he did not wish to stoop to communicating with his captors, even by accident, when he had finished writing he tore up the paper and dropped it down the drain hole. Already he felt brave, as though he had begun working undercover for a vital cause.

“Days went by. He dreamed every night, and his dreams continued to last for years and to be extraordinary. Some of the lives he lived were good, some bad. He played the parts of hero, villain, victim, lover, betrayer and clown. The questions of what his crime might have been, and how he might avoid punishment, ceased to matter to him. They were hypothetical. The prisoner almost ceased to exist as himself. His nightly lives overwhelmed him. He existed only when his eyes were closed. When the paper ran out he was glad, for it belonged to his old, despised life.

“The first night after all the paper was gone, he had a dream of ordinary length. He dreamed he was in his cell, and a jovial man visited him and told him that his whole ordeal had been a test, one to which he had voluntarily submitted and for which he was being paid handsomely.

“When he woke, he felt unwell, and his right hand was sore. He looked and saw that his fingers had been cut off. The hand was neatly bandaged. His meal tray had been delivered, along with a new stack of paper.

“He was faced with the question of whether the removal of his fingers was a terrible punishment or a lenient one. Soon, with shame and disgust, he realised that he was thinking like his old self. By taking away part of his body, his captors had succeeded in getting his attention. He swore that he would continue with his oneiric life. But he was unable to believe himself. He was too badly shaken by the mutilation of his hand, and no matter how he tried he couldn't regain his indifference.

“Each night after that, he dreamed that he was in his cell, alone, exactly as he was during the day, down to the detail of his missing digits. Naturally he went mad. One day, in his madness, he did a grotesque thing. He thrust his left hand down into the drain, for the smell of the filth in it had started to interest him. He found nothing down there but foul moisture. If only he had found a red thread, gentlemen! A long, long red thread with a key tied to the other end, a key that had lain all along in unknown waters, in seas beyond the sewers of the world, only needing to be reeled in and hauled up. He could have slipped the key under the door, and the ones he called his jailers would at last have had the means to let him out!”

His story finished, the old man threw himself forward upon the table and wept. “I have tried!” he sobbed. “I have tried so hard. I have done everything.” He threw a look of towering wrath at Gwynn. “What right do you have, you wretch, to keep that divine filament?”

“He's right,” said the man in the muffler, speaking to Gwynn. “I think that hair might be worth something. More to us than it is to you.”

“We should play for it,” stated the young man in velvet. He slapped his hand on the table. “What's your game, sir? Poker, dice?”

Gwynn stood up. He felt his curiosity was more than satisfied. As time could ripen, so it visibly could rot, and a prolonged moment deteriorate badly.

From a pouch on his gunbelt, he freed one of the spare loaded cylinders he customarily kept handy. He slipped three bullets out and placed them on the table.

“If your burdens are too heavy, there is the solution,” he said. “Were we in a less public place, I could do more to help you. As it is,” he shrugged, “that is the most charity I can spare.”

“You are of low character,” the man in velvet said coldly. “Clearly, you must have cheated. Everything you win, you will lose.”

The man in the muffler snorted. “Big deal, kid. That happens to everyone some day.”

“I can do better!” cried the old man, a wild, sick look in his eyes. “In my youth I was a puppeteer; I had one daughter, a little girl like an angel, but she died of the shaking fever, for she was a golden child and too good for this world. To console myself, I made an exquisite marionette, a child of porcelain and carved wood and stuffed silk. That was the body I made; it only awaited a soul. With the many threads I tied to her joints, I could make her imitate life. But if I had found a red thread, if the gods had given me a red thread to go into the place set aside for her heart –”

Gwynn walked outside, hearing the old man's voice retreat into the general hubbub of the crowd.

“Time, gentlemen,” he murmured.