St Paul's Labyrinth

by Jeroen Windmeijer

  Daniël checked the window frame for shards of plastic. When Freylink removed his jacket, Peter was taken aback again by his bloody face and the way his hair was pasted to his clammy forehead. As soon as the mayor poked his head outside, the crowd began to applaud with relief.

  He climbed onto the steering wheel and stood up a little straighter. Peter and Daniël grabbed him by his armpits and gently pulled him upwards. His trousers snagged on a hook, ripping a long tear in them as they dragged him out.

  When the mayor finally emerged from the pit, there was more applause. He smiled weakly and waved. Daniël and Peter took him to the waiting ambulance. The crew started to unload the stretcher, but the mayor motioned it away and got into the ambulance himself to allow the paramedics to see to him.

  The second excavator arrived, led by a group of men carrying thick cables. Daniël stuck his head inside the ambulance door. The blood had been wiped from the mayor’s face already and he sat holding a handkerchief to his nose while a paramedic wound a bandage around his head. He reminded Daniël of a footballer with a head wound, being patched up before returning to the pitch.

  ‘I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am, sir,’ Daniël began.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault … I don’t know what went wrong. I must have pressed the wrong button … It felt like there was some resistance and then I broke through something.’

  ‘We’re going to investigate, Mr Mayor. And again, please accept my sincere apologies.’

  The paramedic finished dressing Freylink’s head wound and told him he would like to take him to the hospital for further assessment, to which the mayor agreed. Before he got into the ambulance, he gave another jovial wave to the people who stood watching from a distance. The ambulance doors were closed and it quietly drove away, without lights or sirens.

  The cables had been attached to the excavator, and now the other digger reversed, growling and puffing smoke while four men stood around the pit to supervise it all. The trapped machine soon began to move and, after twenty minutes, it was back on the surface.

  Daniël stood waiting impatiently with a rope ladder in his hands.

  ‘Do you want to go down?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Yes, of course! I want to see what the hell went wrong. We didn’t find anything unusual when we were digging. I inspected everything myself just an hour ago.’

  They both stared down into the pit. It looked like part of the bottom of it had subsided. When the all-clear was given, Daniël carefully lowered the rope ladder. He made sure that it was securely anchored into the ground with two pegs before he put his foot on the first rung. He switched on the lamp on his helmet and began to climb down.

  ‘And?’ Peter called after him.

  ‘It smells different … like the air is damper, heavier. And …’ He had reached the bottom now. ‘There’s been a partial collapse at the bottom!’ he shouted. ‘It looks like there’s a space underneath it.’

  ‘Is there room for one more?’ Peter shouted. He wanted to take a look too, hoping it would take his mind off the strange text messages.

  ‘I knew you were going to ask that! Come on!’

  Peter descended cautiously, as Janna watched, looking worried and indignantly shaking her head.

  Daniël took off his hardhat and pointed the headlamp at the ground below him. ‘This is really bizarre. Look.’

  Now Peter could see it too. It was obvious. The walls of the pit were clearly made of bricks and mortar. What on earth was this? A stone floor? Three metres underground?

  Peter knelt down and leaned forward to see how far down the hole at the bottom of the pit went. He took Peter’s helmet and pointed its headlamp downwards.

  Suddenly he heard a groan. A soft, but unmistakable groan.

  He jerked his head backwards with a sharp cry. The helmet fell into the hole.

  ‘Have you seen a ghost?’ Daniël asked, laughing nervously.

  ‘I … I think there’s someone …’ Peter stammered.

  The groan came again, harder now. He hadn’t imagined it. Daniël had heard it too.

  Peter took a deep breath. He stuck his head back into the hole, searching for the source of the groaning. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.

  Two bare legs poked out from underneath a pile of bricks. At the other end of the pile lay the naked torso of a young man.

  The headlamp only barely lit the scene in front of him, but as soon as his eyes grew used to the darkness, he gasped as though he had been punched in the stomach. What appeared before him could have been a medieval painting of the torments of hell.

  The man was covered from head to toe in blood.

  4

  Friday 20 March, 5:10pm

  Anja Vermeulen’s shift was almost over, less than two hours to go. The kitchen staff were serving meals ahead of the start of visiting hours.

  She set out the patients’ medication on her trolley. The general ward at Leiden University Medical Centre was known for being fairly quiet. Most of the patients were here to recover from minor surgeries like appendectomies, or to be helped with the transition back to their homes after a longer stay.

  Ordinarily, nothing particularly interesting ever happened here. But today had been extraordinary. That afternoon, a young man had been brought in, a mysterious case. He had been discovered when a digger fell into a pit during excavation works in the town centre. The man, who was in his mid-twenties, was covered in blood. He’d been found lying in a cavity below the hole that had been dug for an underground waste container. Except for a loincloth, he had been completely naked. Nobody knew how he had ended up under the ground. Anja had heard the news about the accident on the local radio. It said that Mayor Freylink had been injured, but they hadn’t mentioned this nameless casualty.

  After he was admitted to the hospital, unconscious but in a stable condition, the young man was washed from head to toe. Not a single wound was found on his body, and miraculously, none of his bones were broken. The blood that covered his body must have come from someone else. A sample had been collected and was being tested in the hope that it would reveal clues, a disease or some other condition. The police had said they would come the next day to take photographs of the young man and question him, if he had regained consciousness.

  The anonymous patient was dressed in a clean hospital gown and taken to an empty room.

  At about quarter past five, Anja looked in on ‘Anonymous’, as the name card next to his door said. She opened the door and saw that all was as it should be. The young man, well-built, clearly the sporty type, was breathing calmly. Everything appeared to be under control.

  Clothes from the depot had been left on a chair, ready for him to wear when he was discharged from the hospital.

  She stood next to his bed for a while, wondering what could have happened to him. As she turned to leave, she saw his eyelids flutter, a sign that he was regaining consciousness. She turned up the dimmed light on his bedside cabinet to make sure. Now the patient was clearly blinking his eyes. Instinctively, she blinked back.

  When his eyes were completely open, he only stared at the ceiling at first, disoriented. Anja took hold of his hand. He slowly turned his head to look at her, furrowed his brow, and then closed his eyes again.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ she asked softly.

  He nodded weakly.

  ‘Do you know where you are?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘You’re in hospital. The LUMC. You were brought in this afternoon.’

  He frowned again.

  ‘Do you know what happened?’

  The young man pressed his lips together, as though he wanted to speak but was being silenced by something stronger than himself. He tried to lift his head.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Anja said comfortingly. ‘Whatever happened to you, it’s over now. You’re safe. Nothing can hurt you here.’

  Her words were apparently what he needed to hear. The frown vanished from his forehead, his mouth relaxed and
he let his head fall back onto the pillow.

  ‘I have to leave you for a few minutes, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. I won’t be long.’

  Anja hurried back to the ward reception desk to report the patient’s progress to the doctor on call. He put her mind at rest and said that he would look in on him later. Since there didn’t appear to be anything medically wrong with him, no immediate action was necessary.

  She made a note in the records, along with a short summary of their conversation.

  Just as she was about to go back to the young man’s room, the ward telephone rang. She answered it, but kept an eye on the corridor.

  ‘Hi, it’s Patrick.’

  Anja and Patrick talked almost exclusively by phone, almost never in person. He worked in the hospital’s lab and often called to pass on test results.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at home?’ she asked. ‘The lab’s closed, isn’t it?’

  ‘Normally I would be home by now, and we are actually closed for the day, but I’m calling about the man who came in this afternoon. You know, the one who was found after that accident with the mayor.’

  ‘Yes, he’s here. He woke up a few minutes ago, although he’s not said anything yet. I’ve just told the doctor.’

  ‘Good, listen … The bloodwork was scheduled for tomorrow but his case was so interesting that I went ahead and made a start already.’

  ‘Right. And?’

  ‘It’s not his blood,’ he said, sounding slightly hesitant.

  ‘No,’ Anja said, ‘but they were fairly sure of that already anyway, weren’t they? I mean, he didn’t have any wounds, right?’

  ‘No, he didn’t but …’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Patrick fell silent.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Anja repeated the question, with an increasing mix of worry and curiosity.

  ‘Listen, it’s—’

  ‘Hang on a second,’ Anja said.

  She was sure she had just caught a glimpse of someone leaving the anonymous man’s room.

  ‘I think something’s not right here,’ she said to her colleague. ‘I’m just going to put the phone down for a second.’

  ‘But—’

  Anja threw the receiver down on the desk and ran down the hall to Anonymous’ room. The light, downy hairs on both her arms stood on end, like marram grass on a bare dune. Before she even got into the room, she could see that the pile of clothes was gone from the chair.

  The bed was empty.

  Anja ran back to her desk to call security.

  The phone’s receiver was still on the desk. When she picked it up, she heard her colleague’s voice again.

  ‘Oh, there you are. Listen—’

  ‘Sorry, I have to hang up. That man is gone.’

  ‘What? But … Wait, wait, this is important.’

  Her finger hovered over the button to hang up, but Patrick spoke so urgently that she hesitated for a second.

  ‘You know I said the blood wasn’t his?’

  ‘Yes. So?’

  ‘It’s not human blood.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s from an animal.’

  5

  Friday 20 March, 5:55pm

  There were no more text messages. After the bizarre events of the afternoon, Peter’s unease about them faded into the background.

  The moment he had realised that someone was buried under the rubble, he and Daniël had crawled through the hole in the bottom of the pit. They had found a young man whose lower body was pinned to the ground. He was unconscious, but his breathing seemed normal. Working in the scant light provided by the helmet, they’d removed the bricks to free him.

  A putrid stench had emanated from the man and he was sticky with the congealed blood that covered him. Peter and Daniël had retched more than once.

  Getting him out of the hole had been no easy task. Another ambulance had been called for and arrived soon afterwards. After a stretcher had been lowered into the pit, two sturdy-looking paramedics had taken over. After briefly assessing him, they had put him inside a cover that looked like a body bag, then fastened him onto the stretcher and eventually lifted him up to the surface.

  Peter and Daniël had taken the opportunity to investigate further. With everyone else gone, a great silence had fallen over the site. They appeared to be in a tunnel, around two metres high and perhaps a metre and a half wide. The floor was made of stone, the walls and the vaulted ceiling that arched over their heads were constructed from red bricks.

  The tunnel ran in the direction of the Burcht one way and looked like it went towards the Hooglandse Kerk in the other.

  Peter had heard about the tunnels that were rumoured to run below Leiden’s streets, stories that did the rounds in many Dutch cities. Supposedly, some of them had been part of the original designs when the Pieterskerk, the Hooglandse Kerk and other churches were built. Others were thought to have been created to move supplies into the town during the Siege of Leiden, when it was twice besieged by the Spanish. It was said that secret tunnels led from the Burcht and the town hall to places that had once been outside the city walls.

  ‘This is just bizarre,’ Daniël had said.

  ‘How was this not discovered at the planning stage, before digging started?’

  ‘We relied on the Land Registry for information about pipes and cables. And of course, we have a good idea of where the former canals are. But maybe if you go down another layer, there are things that have never been mapped. They didn’t find anything when they were drilling either.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem possible.’ Peter still hadn’t been able to shake off his disbelief. ‘Surely this would have been discovered years ago?’

  ‘Apparently not,’ Daniël had replied testily. ‘Otherwise we wouldn’t be standing here.’

  ‘We need to hire one of those gadgets, a …’

  ‘A GeoSeeker? Yes, exactly, that’s what I was thinking.’

  Peter had worked with a GeoSeeker before, a device that detected cavities below ground. They were very expensive pieces of kit.

  ‘We’ll have to put in a request for one first. I don’t think we’ll be able to get it until Monday.’

  Daniël and Peter had walked just a few metres into the tunnel before turning around and going back to where they started.

  ‘It’s not safe to go any further,’ Daniël had said. ‘We’ll need to set it up properly with a team, decent lights …’

  They had climbed back up to the street, where the noise and activity had calmed down by now. Most of the spectators had gone home after the young man had been taken to hospital. The drinks reception had been cancelled, the tables had been collected by the catering company, and the drinks and food had been cleared away. A truck full of building materials had driven off as they emerged from the pit. When they were back on the surface, the police had placed two safety barriers over the hole and cordoned it off with red and white tape.

  Daniël and Janna had stayed behind, as had the unavoidable Arnold van Tiegem, who had been to fetch a Belgian beer from the De Twee Spieghels jazz bar.

  Peter had promised Daniël that he would wait for him so that they could walk part of the way back together.

  Now, just before six, he was sitting in a shop doorway.

  He had washed his hands in the toilets of a nearby pub, but no matter how much he’d scrubbed, he hadn’t been able to get rid of the blood that had found its way under his fingernails. His shirt and jacket were covered in dust.

  He sat in a daze, holding the phone that had been left in the lecture theatre, half-expecting a new message to arrive. But it stayed silent.

  He opened Google. He noticed that the internet connection was fast now. He typed in ‘Wickr’ as a search term and learned that it was a mobile phone app similar to Snapchat. Wickr encrypted text messages and then deleted them when they had been read. The sender could decide how long messages would be stored for before they disappeared. The site security.nl said:


  Wickr is based on 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 4096 encryption, and our proprietary algorithm. ‘It is the first end-to-end encryption that does not require a PGP key,’ according to professor and co-founder Robert Statica. According to Statica, Wickr’s servers do not see user accounts. Nothing is stored except the cryptographic version of the Wickr ID and the user’s hardware ID.

  Peter read the text without understanding much of it, but it told him that the person who was sending him the messages wanted to remain anonymous.

  He took a silver case from his other inside pocket and flipped it open. Inside was a single cigarillo, held in place with a small clip. Every Sunday, he refilled the case with exactly five little cigars. In the old days, he’d smoked in his room at the faculty, but the university’s smoking ban had put an end to that. Sometimes he wistfully remembered the days when he could just light a cigar and watch the smoke curl upwards as he collected his thoughts.

  He lit his last cigarillo of the week, took his earphones from his pocket and put them in his ears. Then, on his own phone, he opened a Spotify playlist that he had filled with the works of Bach. He’d become something of an expert on Bach’s cantatas over the years. They had a meditative effect on him. He had once spent some time looking into the numerological symbolism in Bach’s compositions, but had soon found himself out of his depth.

  ‘Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen, entweichet, ihr Schmerzen,’ the singer lilted softly, ‘es lebet der Heiland und herrschet in euch.’ Listening to Bach was good for his German too. Rejoice, O hearts, begone O agonies, the saviour lives and reigns in you.

  After he lit his cigar, he tried to keep the spindly cedarwood spill burning for as long as he could. When the flame licked at the top of his index finger, he quickly dropped it on the ground.

  From where he sat, it looked like Janna, Daniël and Arnold were having a heated discussion about something. At one point, Arnold turned angrily away from the others and disappeared into the bar. Peter assumed he had gone to get another drink.

  But he came back outside not long afterwards, clumsily fastening his belt as he headed straight for Peter, with Daniël and Janna behind him.