by Ellis Peters
His senses were beginning to wilt in the earthy, smothering air. Twice in the last hour he had found the passage before him partially blocked, and the outer wall of the flue buckled inwards in a jagged heap of brick and soil, but each time there had been space enough for him to crawl through, with some difficulty and a good deal more terror. The tug of shifting earth at his shoulders brought the sweat trickling down over his closed eyelids, but the clogged space opened again, and brought him sprawling down to the brickwork of the floor, with no more damage than the nausea of fear in his mouth.
But the third time he ran his probing hand against a crumbling wall of earth ahead, there was no way through. The brickwork had been pressed down bodily under the weight of soil, and sealed the flue. His straight run home had been too good to be true from the start. There was nothing to be done but work his way painfully backwards, the flue being too narrow to allow him to turn, until he felt the first cross-flue open at his right elbow. If you can’t go through, go round, and get back on course as soon as an open passage offers.
He turned right, and then, with a premonition of worse to come, halted to consider what he was doing. What use was a sense of direction, down here in limbo? His only salvation was the Roman sense of order, that laid out everything at right-angles. Suppose he had to keep going on this new line past several closed flues? Keep count, Hambro, he told himself feverishly. Never mind relying on your memory, for every blind alley you have to pass, pocket a bit of tile—right pocket—every shard means one more you’ve got to make back to the left.
Into his pocket went one fragment of tile fingered out of the dirt. And at the next left turn another one, because here, too, the wall of earth was solid and impassable. And a third, and a fourth. Then it began to dawn on him that he was beneath the open centre of the caldarium, beneath land which had been cleared of its available masonry for local building purposes centuries ago, and for centuries had been under the plough, with a wagon-road obliquely crossing it. Constant use and the passing of laden carts had packed down the soil and settled everything into a safe, solid mass. No choice but to go where he still could, crossing the rectangle towards its right-hand boundary, where he had no wish to go, where there was no way out, and hope to God that somewhere one of these flues would have held up, and let him turn towards the river again.
The first that offered he tried, and it took him a few feet only to close up on him from both sides, and force him back. The second helped him to gain a little more ground before stopping him, and he pushed his luck a shade too hard in his hope and desperation, and brought down a slithering fall of bricks over his left arm. When he had extricated himself, with thundering pulse and shaken courage, and opened his eyes momentarily to blink the dust away, he saw that the luminous second hand in the comforting bright eye of his watch hung still, and the glass was broken. There, at eleven-thirteen in the morning of Sunday, went all sense of time; there was no measure to his ordeal any more.
Sometimes he put his head down in his arms and rested for a little while, where the going was better: but that was dangerous, too, because only too easily he could have fallen asleep, and the urgency of movement hung heavy upon him like the malignant, retarding weight of the darkness. He even kept his eyes open now, to ward off sleep the better. His gloves were in tatters, his fingers abraded and bleeding. And he must have been crazy to bring a damned awkward thing like that helmet with him on this marathon crawl, slung round his neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross, by his tie threaded through its eye-holes; a clumsy lump hampering his movements at every turn, having to be hoisted carefully aside when he lay flat to rest, slowing him up in the bad patches, where it had to be protected from damage even at the cost of knocking a few pieces off his own wincing flesh. Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist. It was one of the finest things he’d ever seen of its kind, even if it had all but killed him, and he’d be damned if he’d leave without it.
‘He wrote it,’ said George Felse, smoothing the crumpled note between his hands, ‘and he didn’t write it under any sort of compulsion, or even stress, as far as I can see. Does that make you feel any better?’
She looked at him intently, the damp wind from the swollen river fluttering the strands of hair on her cheeks, and said firmly: ‘No.’
‘It should. To some extent, at any rate. But you can be extraordinarily convincing, can’t you?’ he said, and smiled at her.
‘Does that mean we wait for word of him, and do nothing?’
‘No, it means I’ve already done what needs to be done. For good reasons we don’t want any public alarm or any visible hunt. But we’ve sent out a general call on his car, and an immediate on any news of it or him. Orders to approach with discretion, if sighted, but once found, not to lose. By evening we may hear something. Meantime, not a word to anyone else.’
The air was giving out, or else it was he who was weakening. His head swam lightly and dizzily, like a cork on storm-water, and sometimes he came round with a jolt out of spells of semi-consciousness, to find himself still doggedly crawling, and was terrified that in that state he had passed some possible channel riverwards, or left some crossing unrecorded. He had crawled his way clean through the knees of his slacks, and ripped the sole of one shoe open. There were moments, indeed when he felt as if his knee-joints were bared not to the skin, but to the bone, and suffered the alarming delusion that he was dragging himself forward on skeletal hands stripped of all their padding of flesh.
His mind remained, at least by fits and starts, as clear as ever, aggravatingly clear. He had a surprisingly sharp conception of where, by this time, he was. He had started out to proceed in orderly fashion down the left-hand limit of the caldarium to the river, and thence to the open section. And here he was, God alone knew how many hours or weeks later, forced farther and farther off-course to the right, until he must be within a few yards of the right-hand margin, and no nearer the river than when he had set out. Somewhere at this corner there had been a limited dig, he remembered, about nineteen months ago, but they’d filled in the excavation with very little gained. A disappointing affair. My God, he thought, staggered by the astringent precision of his own thoughts while his body was one blistering pain from cramp, exertion and strain, I’m going quietly crazy. I could recite the text of that article word for word, and I’d never even seen this damned place when I got the magazine as part of my briefing.
I will not go crazy, though, quietly or noisily, so help me! I’ll crawl out of this Minoan labyrinth on my own hands and knees, or die trying!
It was nearly half past five that Sunday afternoon when a courting couple in a Mini, returning from a spring jaunt and finding themselves with time for an amorous interlude before they need return to the bosoms of their families, drove off the road on the heath side of Silcaster into a certain old quarry they knew of, and parked the car carefully on the level stretch of grass above the abandoned workings. If the boy had not sensibly elected to back into position and drive out again forwards, and his girl friend had not been well-trained in all their mutual manoeuvres, and hopped out without being asked, to make sure how far back the ground was solid after the rain, a very much longer interval might have passed before George Felse got any information in response to his general call.
‘Come on, you’re all right,’ she called, beckoning him gaily back towards the sheer edge of the quarry, still some eight yards or so behind her, and thinly veiled with low bushes here and there. ‘Somebody’s been back here before us, it’s safe enough.’ And she glanced behind her, following the course of the tyre-tracks flattened deep and green into the wet grass, and suddenly flung up a hand in warning and let out a muted shriek: ‘My God, no! Stop! Eh, Jimmy, come and have a look at this! Some poor soul’s gone clean over the edge.’
The tracks ran straight to the rim, and vanished into the void; a little bush of stunted hawthorn, barely a foot high, was scraped clean of all its twigs and leaves on one side, and dangled broken into the grass. In stun
ned silence they crept forward to the rim of the cliff, and looked over into the deep, dark eye of the pool which had long since filled the abandoned crater. Rock-based, with only a few years’ deposit of gravel and fine matter to cloud it, and almost no weed, it retained its relative clarity even after rain, but it was deep enough to cover what it held with successive levels of darkness. Nevertheless, they could distinguish the shape of the car by the still outline of pallor, light bronze forming an oblong shoal with all its sides sloping gradually away into the blue-green of deeper water.
‘Oh, God!’ whispered the girl. ‘It’s true! He went and backed her clean over.’
The boy was sharper-sighted, and bright enough to be sure of what he saw. ‘He never did! That car went in forwards. Look at it! What’s more, look at those tracks!’
By instinct they had walked along the wheel-tracks to the edge of the quarry, the grass being longish and very wet, and the flattened channels the smoothest and driest walking. ‘Look there, between the wheel-marks!’ She looked, and there beyond doubt ran the curious feather-stitch pattern of two human legs wading through grass, midway between the grooves the tyres had laid down. Not merely walking, but thrusting strongly, for the soft turf, though it retained no details, was ground into a hollow at every step. These marks began only about fifteen feet from the edge, and ended in a patch of more trampled grass about six feet from it. Only a few yards of effort. ‘You haven’t set foot in there,’ said the boy, ‘and no more have I. Either I’m crazy, or the bloke that did was shoving that car. Put her in gear and let her run, and even then, with this growth, downhill and all she’d need a hand to send her over.’
‘What, just getting rid of an old crock?’ said the girl, relieved of the vision of two young people like themselves slowly drowning as the car filled. ‘Is that all? Well, I know they go to some funny shifts to get shot of ’em, I suppose that’d be one way.’
‘I don’t know! It doesn’t look like a job I’d throw away,’ he said dubiously, peering down at the pale shape below. ‘Suppose it was some car pinched for a job, and then dumped? And it’s recent—couldn’t be longer ago than last night it was put in there.’ He made up his mind. ‘Come on, we’d better report it. Just in case!’
It was his statement that sent a Silcaster police car out to the quarry less than half an hour later. The colour appeared, the boy had said, to be fawn or light brown. The implications were urgent, with the missing light bronze Aston Martin in mind, and they sent out, after only momentary hesitation, for a skin-diver, to settle the matter as soon as possible, one way or the other. If they were wasting time over an old hulk ditched illegally by its desperate owner, so much the worse. But they couldn’t afford to take chances.
The diving unit brought flood-lights and equipment, never being given to do things by halves. The diver went down before the daylight was quite gone, and brought up a report that set the whole circus in motion well into the night.
The first call was put through to George just before seven. ‘Got some news of the Aston Martin for you,’ said the Silcaster inspector, an old acquaintance. ‘Some bad, some good.’
‘Let’s have the bad first,’ said George.
‘We’ve found the car. Dumped in a pool in a deserted quarry up by the heath. Courting couple found the tracks where it had been driven over, and had the sense to report it. We’ve already had a diver down, and it’s the car you want, all right. We’re setting up the gear to raise it, but our frogman reckons he could see pretty well into the interior, and—’
‘And he isn’t in it,’ said George, drawing the obvious inference with immense relief. ‘That’s the good news?’
‘That’s it. Good as far as it goes, anyhow. No body, no luggage, nothing visible bigger than a rug on the floor. But it leaves you with a problem, all right. Since he isn’t there, where is he? Because whoever put his car out of commission down a hole can’t have been exactly well-disposed to the owner, can he?’
The air was getting fouler, and he was getting weaker, and he was almost as far away as ever from that unattainable corner where the hypocaust opened one vein to the light of day; though whether it was night or day, and what the hour was, he had now no means of knowing. He had given up hope of finding a way through the centre of the maze. Every hopeful passage he had attempted towards the river had only closed up in front of him and driven him still further to the right, and three times now he had had to turn off to the right even from that line for a short distance, so that he had lost some ground gained earlier. He must now be at the very site, he thought, of that last minor dig, and the one hope he had left was that this right-hand boundary wall might have survived in better case than the opposite one. Since the centre was bedded solid, and the obvious way to his objective had failed him, try the long way round, and pray that it might yet turn out to be the shortest way home. The flues at the rim of the hypocaust had the best chance of surviving, since on one side they backed all the way into solid earth, the brickwork unbroken by cross-passages. And this one towards which he was now crawling, on no remaining fuel but his native obstinacy, would certainly have carried less traffic and less weight during the centuries of cultivation, since the vast bases of the forum pillars alongside it had defied removal even by the ingenious village builders, and baulked all attempts at getting this piece of land under plough. It had always, he remembered from old photographs in the museum, been a scrub hedge between the fields, and a strip of waste ground, good only for blackberrying. This side he might have better luck.
The boundary flue had one other great advantage, considering his present condition of exhaustion and light-headedness. When he came to it, it would be a blank T-crossing, with no way ahead, and could not be mistaken. He had been telling himself as much, and promising that it would come soon, for what seemed hours, which only indicated how tenuous his grasp of time had become, and how slow his progress. But at every move he still reached out a hopeful hand to flatten against the facing wall that still wasn’t there—as now.
But this time it was there. His palm encountered the unmistakable rough texture of brickwork, squarely closing the way ahead. He lay still for a few minutes, his head swimming with the weakness of relief, and also with the thick, smothering odour of the air, which had congealed into a peculiar horror of old, cold physical death. He groped out fearfully towards the left, which was now his way, and the flue beside him was open, and clear of rubble as far as he could reach. He fingered the walls, and they were sound; the ceiling above, and it felt firm as rock. He shifted his weight with labour and pain, carefully moving the dangling mask out of harm’s way, and reached out towards the right. If that way, too, the flue seemed whole and sturdy, he would begin to believe that his luck was changing at last, and in time. Because either this air was fouler than any he had encountered yet, or he was losing control of his remaining senses.
The vault to the right held up as strongly as on the other side. He felt his way down from ceiling to floor, and his hand touched something which was not mere dust or the ground fragments of brick, or even thick, foul cobweb, but parted beneath his touch in rotting threads, with the unmistakable texture of cloth.
He couldn’t believe it, and yet it revived him as nothing else could have done. The helmet was no find of his, but if this was cloth, then this was all his own. His questing fingers felt shudderingly over the scrap he had detected, passed over a few inches of flooring, and recaptured the same evident textile quality in several more tindery rags. And they had this up, he thought, and never found anything better than a few animal bones and pottery, when they couldn’t have been more than a few feet away from here. Curiously, though he had no way of verifying his calculations, at this moment he was absolutely sure of them.
And it was at that very moment that his fingers, moving with wincing delicacy where there might be priceless discoveries to be made, encountered what was unquestionably bone, but exceptional in being not fragmentary, but whole, as far as he could reach, without lesion. St
retching, he touched a joint, where the bone homed into the cup of another mass, as naked and as clean. He searched in his blind but acute memory, and brought up vividly the image of a human hip joint, intricate and marvellous.
He was a hundred per cent alive again, and he had to get out of here alive now if it killed him, because he had to know. There was one minor city, not unlike this one in its history, where they found two human skeletons in the hypocaust, some poor souls who had taken refuge in the empty heating system when the place was attacked, and almost certainly suffocated when most of the town was fired over their heads. The same could have happened here. He forgot how nearly dead he was, and how completely and precisely buried, and quickened to sympathy and pity for this poor soul who had died after his burial, so many centuries ago. Very softly he drew his finger-tips down the mass of the femur, stroked over the rounded marble of a knee-joint, and then reached out tentatively where the foot should be. For a leather sandal might have remained embalmed perfectly all this time, as durable almost as the ivory of the wearer’s bones. Quite close to his right knee, under the wall of the flue, his knuckles struck against the erected hardness, and the sound was music to him. A solid, thick sole. He felt from heel to toe, and then round to where the straps should be, and the still-articulated bones of instep and toes within. Gently, not to do damage. Also out of some reverence a great deal older than Christian ethics, the universal tenderness towards the dead.
The leather sole was sewn to a leather upper. Clearly his raw finger-tips relayed to him, with agony, what they found. No straps, no voids between. A very hard, dehydrated shape moulded inwards from the sole, seamed over a smooth vamp, finished at the heel with a hand-stitched band. Above, where the two wings joined over the instep, the small, metallic roundels of eyelets, and the taut cross-threading of laces. The bow he touched parted at the impact, and slid, still formed, after his withdrawing fingers.
