The Dark Labyrinth (24 page)

Suddenly Fearmax thought of “French Marie”. He thought of her with a sudden pang of anguish, and halted in his tracks. Could it be that the footsteps he had seen near where he lay …? Or was he losing his mind—that it should entertain so fantastic an idea. Yet try as he might he could not rid himself of its seduction. Perhaps among these corridors he would come upon the real “French Marie”, the partner and wife he had been searching for for so long. He was sitting upon a stone idly watching the smoke from his cigar trail off down the corridor. A sudden idea struck him?
Where was the smoke going?
Surely it must be naturally drawn off down a current of air? And a current of air pointed the direction of an issue? He laughed hoarsely. Was the smoke leading him, then, to the surface; or perhaps somewhere ahead “French Marie” was waiting for him, waiting to be sought out and recognized.

Fearmax started off once more, following the smoke from his long cigar, pausing every few paces to blow another puff into the sterile air of the tunnel; it moved sluggishly but perceptibly away, leading along tunnels which seemed to descend, across galleries of rock with vaulted arches, for all the world as if they had been designed by human architects. Fearmax followed, one half of his mind still grappling with the problems of composition. “Their work constitutes, therefore, as does that of the medium, deliberate evidence of states of being
not communicable
in linguistic terms.”

Could she really be there, waiting for him? The idea both delighted and terrified him. What would they speak of when they met? The smoke led remorselessly onward; once it led him through a cavern where stalactites dribbled noisily, and he thought he had found the river. But he was disappointed again. Had it been the river, he thought, he might have floated down it to the sea, and yet it would be horrible to be lodged in some cranny too small to admit the passage of his body—lodged like a tea-leaf in a tooth and suffocated. He tried to reconstruct a long quotation from Mysers with which he had intended to end his book. It was about materializations; it reminded him suddenly of the bubbles of paraffin drying—inside them the invisible plump and shapely hands of “French Marie”. Why had she suddenly deserted him? And why had he come all the way to Crete to get lost in this hideous labyrinth? Was there a pattern, a design about it all?

Hogarth would have first asked him to question himself as to the dramatic justification for such a situation. He remembered him saying: “We act our inner symbolism outward into the world. In a very real sense we do create to the world around us since we get it to reflect back our inner symbolism at us. Every man carries a little myth-making machine inside him which operates often without him knowing it. Thus you might say that we live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic—since we get exactly what we ask for, no more and no less.”

Fearmax wondered now whether he had “asked for” this damp gloom, these caves with their melancholy sound of water falling, and the blank bottomless silence which drank it all up at last—to the very dregs?

Before he had time to answer it he heard it—that shapeless echoing roar which memory made familiar to him as the voice of the minotaur. He stopped irresolutely. It seemed to come from some distance away. His torch which had been so bright had become all of a sudden very dim—perhaps the damp had affected the cells of the battery. He took a corridor indicated by the slowly-travelling smoke and hurried on a dozen paces. What kind of animal could make a sound like that?

The corridors sloped gently down to a sort of natural
rond point
from which other corridors jutted, scattering through all the points of the compass. Here the air still vibrated with the passage of the monster's roaring.

“What is reality?” said Fearmax aloud, and recognized it as one of those questions whose import had troubled him for as long as he could remember. His feet—the same feet that had walked backwards and forwards across the damp pavements of Exeter—what were they doing here? Or was this whole place merely a mad exteriorization of his inner confusion; his feet walking slowly down metaphoric corridors of his own subconscious—in which only the roar of the sleeping monster gave him a clue to his primal guilt? It was a pretty fancy. If he ever got out he would have the pleasure of sharing it with Hogarth. The work of Rank on the symbolic significance of labyrinths, and their connexion with divination by entrails. Olaf's observations upon the corridors of the Great Pyramid; was it possible that the place he was traversing had been hollowed by the hands of men to suit some occult purpose? That in coming here he had been sent with a purpose: to make his own observations and deductions upon cults and sciences long since dead—or else only preserved in the esoteric forms of alchemy, or the Tarot pack of cards? It was a proposition. His feet had begun to hurt. Fearmax began to talk to himself aloud with complete freedom; it was as if the last barrier between himself as an individual and himself as a personality had been dissolved. He could hear his muffled tones glancing from the archways around him. He blew out a long tape of smoke and watched it slowly quest, like a pointer, until it at last found the right corridor and vanished down it. He followed slowly, cautiously, talking aloud.

“Suppose, then, that all this were simply an apprenticeship.”

“Towards what possible end?”

“A novitiate towards a new degree of self-knowledge.”

“My poor man, you are raving.”

The roar of the minotaur sounded again. “No,” he cried suddenly, apprehensively. His torch had dimmed down to a dim circle of yellow light, incapable of piercing the farther end of the corridor. Fearmax sat on a stone and took another puff at his cigar; of the two corridors facing him one was dearly indicated. The smoke quickened as it was sucked noiselessly into it. Somewhere, vaguely, it was as if he could smell something, something like scent. And yet it was not really a smell, for when he concentrated he could smell nothing beyond the dampness and the smoke of his cigar. Somewhere beyond the shadows, perhaps “French Marie” was waiting. He got up and advanced upon the two corridors that faced him; his smoke dawdled slowly ahead of him. Yet it was from the second, the one down which the smoke had not gone, that he heard the steely vibrations of the minotaur's voice—a dull jangling like strings out of tune, like dusts being washed backwards and forwards in a confined space.

It was not a question of conscious choice, it was rather as if all activity save this devouring and overmastering curiosity in his mind had been suspended. He turned aside from the smoke and entered the other corridor; it was now that a curious thing happened. He began to feel that it was all a dream—as if he were lost in one of those dreams which confuse our childhood. He felt fear, yes, but at one remove: as if through the clouds of a morphia injection. He was supported now by the vertical clear flame of this overmastering curiosity to know what exactly the minotaur could be. Perhaps it was only one of “French Marie's” disguises, one of her voices or aspects?

A faint odour seemed to have grown up in the corridor he was traversing; it was somehow unpleasant and yet familiar. His feet began to scrape against objects on the hard stone floor; he picked them up and examined them in the last wavering flicker of his torch before it gave out completely. They were twigs of wood. They broke dryly between ringer and thumb. Was he then moving towards the lair of some animal which carried twigs down into the underworld to line its nest?

He halted for a second to get his breath, wondering whether he should not turn round and retrace his steps; it was however in the same direction that he found himself moving, his feet scraping against twigs and branches, his nostrils full of an odour he had already begun to recognize as that of putrefaction. What was it? He drew several deep breaths of the foul air and suddenly his memory provided him with a clue. Once as a boy he had found a heron's nest as he was walking across the marshes. The bird was sitting upon a structure of filthy twigs, surrounded by the half-chewed and decomposing remains of its feasts—fragments of fish and gobbets of field-mice. Now it was the same odour of decomposition that he smelt, only greatly magnified. What kind of animal would have so deep a burrow, and live upon carrion? His imagination simply could not supply an answer.

He sat down upon the stone floor and rested his face in his hands, thinking furiously. Somewhere an obstinate thought seemed to divine the presence of “French Marie” behind it all; a nerve of misery and disquiet in himself which could not be quietened without the promise of her. And yet this terrifying odour of rotten flesh filled the close air of the corridor, and he trembled so violently now that it was as much as he could do to control his limbs. His fear seemed to stretch away on either side of him, filling the hollow sinuses of rock, overbrimming them. His breathing had become harsh now and stertorous. Was he about to enter the trance-condition so long denied him? Was he about to hear that window open abruptly in the air above him, and the voice which so long had tantalized him by a half-uttered word,
speak?

Even as he was thinking this thought he heard, at the farther end of the corridor, a faint noise—like the dim and paralytic shuffling of some very aged person. He was reminded of the harmless shuffle of carpet slippers across the wooden floors of the museum library. Presently there came a gust of tepid air—as if the displacement of some large body farther down the tunnel had driven it towards him. He called out, and as he did so tasted the impure, fetid breath of the Thing. It moved slowly in his direction—so slowly that the anguish was unbearable. It moved towards him at the speed of ice-crystals forming upon the stalactites, of the ash growing upon his cigar, of the nails growing upon his ten fingers. As yet he could see nothing, but the vague swollen promise of the darkness ahead. His torch lay expiring on the floor beside him.

Then, at last, the immensity of darkness seemed to thicken, to ripen, to swell out towards him and he saw what appeared to him to be a pair of small bloodshot eyes moving towards him. Fearmax put his hands over his face and mentally surrendered himself to it. His lips moved but no sound came from them. He felt himself picked up at last in a soft wet mouth of enormous dimensions and carried, half-senseless, down the long damp corridors of the labyrinth.

At the Monastery

I
t was still high afternoon when Baird awoke and washed his face in the cold spring-water from the enamel jug. The Abbot was tending his vines. “Bravo,” he cried, “I'm glad you're in time to bathe.” Together they walked across the woodland paths to the little spit of shale which formed the promontory's butt. With them went the faithful Mark, carrying the towels and a basket of fruit to refresh them. The sea was an ineffable blue; as if, thought Baird, our bodies would turn Tyrian blue from dipping into it. A dolphin leaped for the sun about four cables' length out, hitting the water with the smack of a football squarely kicked. Baird took off his clothes as one might take off the soiled and ragged clouts of this world and lay down upon the hot pebbles. “Come,” he said, “I know you Greeks never find the water warm enough till August. Make an exception.” The Abbot pleaded old age and all its infirmities, and carefully tested the temperature with his finger. “It's terribly cold,” he said, turning pale. “I could never bathe in that.” But under the lash of Baird's teasing he finally slipped off his robes and hob-nailed boots, and did up his back-hair into a tidy bun. Brother Mark reverently took the stove-pipe hat and sat on a point to observe. The old man entered the water uttering groans of rage. His large flabby body was like oak. Baird saw the bullet-marks in his shoulder and thigh—purple scars that looked like knots in old wood. “Here I come,” he said, and they swam slowly out into the icy blueness.

“Mark. Wash the grapes,” called the Abbot, and the little monk obeyed. “Mark's contributions to our researches into theology and morals are wonderful,” said the old man, doing his jerky dog-paddle out to sea. “He moves from prejudice to prejudice like a logician from premises to conclusion.” Baird turned on his back and saw the little monk washing the grapes tenderly and drying them on his master's towel.

They walked back, all three arm in arm, to the monastery garden, where Baird and the Abbot, reclining in deck-chairs, the sea at their feet, spent the rest of the afternoon in idle innocence, eating and talking bad philosophy. Brother Mark sat discreetly in earshot, drinking it all in. “Mark,” said the Abbot suddenly, “what is goodness?” He nudged Baird and invited his amusement at poor Mark's answers by wrinkling up his nose. Brother Mark shook his evil-looking forelock in their direction and raised the hand from which an exploding depth-charge ill-fused had removed two fingers. “Goodness”, he said, “is doing right. Doing what the book says.”

“Which book?” said the Abbot.

“The good book,” said Mark darkly. He knew he was being made fun of; he moved his jaws with a queer chewing motion.

“And if you cannot read?” persisted the Abbot.

“The Abbot John is my eyes,” replied the monk with the air of having scored heavily. The Abbot roared with laughter and slapped his knee. “Was ever a man so focused on goodness?” he asked. “He would disembowel his mother if I told him to. I don't think he's a real Greek—he is not argumentative in a sunny obstreperous Greek fashion; but in a gloomy way, like an Englishman or someone suffering from interior stresses.” Baird closed his eyes and stretched out his legs towards the sea. In the gutter two scorpions copulated like watch springs. Bees droned in among their conversations, and almost palpable waves of heat came off the stone wall of the terrace. The Abbot caught sight of Brother Mark, sitting unhappily on the edge of the parapet, looking at his own fingers; he recollected that it is bad manners to make fun of a countryman before strangers. “Go to Brother Mark,” he said. “You are a holy man who would delight the heart of John the Baptist if he were here.” The little man looked up gratefully. His smile was like that of a small girl—a transfiguration.