‘Then perhaps we should …’ Peter started to suggest, but he stopped mid-sentence when something in the distance caught his eye. It was already twilight, but the streetlamps gave off enough light for Peter to see a shadowy figure standing just beyond the Hooglandse Kerk, looking at them.
He appeared to raise his hand, as if he was beckoning them over. He wasn’t wearing a coat and his clothing flapped around him as though his shirt and trousers were far too big. When he noticed that Peter had seen him, he abruptly turned around.
‘Hey!’ Peter shouted. ‘Hey! You! Wait!’
Janna and Daniël looked to see who he was shouting at, but the man had already disappeared around the corner into the cobbled alley of the Beschuitsteeg.
Peter ran after him. ‘Stay here!’ he heard Janna shout angrily, but he kept running. He saw the man turn left and run along the Nieuwe Rijn canal. Peter ran past the American Pilgrim Museum. He saw the man cross the canal via the narrow Boterbrug and then turn left again, running towards Van der Werfpark. There was too much distance between them now for Peter to be able to catch up with him, and to make things worse, his knees had started to hurt. He decided to gamble on the man having gone to the park; he’d be able to hide himself easily there at this time of day.
Peter wheezed as he ran along the Mosterdsteeg. Sweat dripped from his brow. I’m going on a diet on Monday, he promised himself.
After crossing the Breestraat, he turned right at De Kler’s bookshop and ran into the Boomgaardsteeg. It brought him out onto the Steenschuur, with the park shrouded in dusky shadows on the other side of the canal. He thought he saw someone go into the park via the left entrance. They were casually sauntering, as though they were enjoying an evening stroll. Was he imagining it? Peter slowed his own pace and stayed close to the Lorentzgebouw, trying not to cause suspicion by looking behind him. He went over the Steegbrug.
The shadowy figure walked behind the statue of Burgemeester Van der Werff and sat down on a bench. He still looked relaxed, almost as though he might produce a sandwich from a bag and enjoy a leisurely lunch, as office workers often did in the park. But instead, he looked straight ahead.
Peter approached the man, being careful not to be seen. Just as he was getting ready to sprint after him again, he turned to look at him.
‘Ah, there you are,’ he said calmly, as though they had agreed to meet at exactly this time.
Peter stared at him in bewilderment. ‘What do you mean, “there you are”?’ He moved closer, so that he was just a couple of steps away from him. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
It was difficult to make out the man’s face in the dark, but he could see that he was young, slim, clean-shaven, with medium-length dark blond hair and a plain-looking face. His clothes were so ill-fitting that they appeared to belong to someone else.
‘But you’re …’ Peter said in amazement. ‘You’re the one who was lying in that tunnel this afternoon.’
The young man ignored Peter’s words. ‘I have a message for you,’ he said.
‘What were you doing there? How did you get there?’
‘That’s not relevant right now.’
‘Not relevant? My colleague disappeared in that tunnel.’
The man looked at him in surprise, but seemed to be sincere. ‘Disappeared?’
Deep furrows appeared on his brow. ‘Even so,’ he continued, ‘I have a message for you.’
Peter opened his mouth to say something, but the man cut him off before he had a chance.
‘You’ve been chosen,’ the young man said abruptly, as though he was keen to avoid any discussion.
‘Chosen?’
‘Yes, chosen. A great honour.’
‘Now listen,’ Peter said with irritation, ‘I don’t have time for this now. My colleague has just disappeared and I—’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about your colleague.’
There was a short, awkward pause.
‘I’ve been … chosen?’ Peter asked, confused by the direction the conversation had taken.
‘Yes, that’s right.’ The young man sat up straight. ‘Have you seen The Matrix?’
Peter nodded impatiently.
‘With the red and blue pill …’ the man continued. ‘Neo is given a choice: if he takes the red pill, he’ll wake up and experience the world as it really is. If he takes the blue pill, nothing changes and he carries on as before …’
‘And that would make you Morpheus, I suppose?’
The man scoffed. ‘Peter …’
Peter was unpleasantly surprised that the young man knew his name.
‘Listen,’ the man said, getting up from the bench. They were standing no more than a metre apart now. When he spoke again, his voice was very calm. ‘Just like the prisoner who escapes Plato’s cave and discovers the truth, you can … be set free, disconnected … like in The Matrix.’
‘So I need to choose the red pill?’
‘You don’t need to understand everything now. You will, eventually. “The hour has come.” That’s the message.’
‘The hour has come?’
‘Hora est.’
‘Hora est. This is …’ Peter let his arms fall to his sides, nonplussed. ‘How do you know who I am? And who are you? Do you have a name?’
‘You can call me Raven.’
Peter had run out of patience. He was exhausted from the chase, from the adventure in the tunnel, from worrying about what might have happened to Arnold. ‘You know what, I’m done here—’
‘Look out! Behind you!’ the man said suddenly.
Peter turned around. As soon as he did, Raven pushed him backwards and he fell to the ground, hitting his head hard on the edge of the bench. He felt his skull explode with pain.
The oldest trick in the book.
The man sprinted off but then he stopped a few metres away and shouted: ‘Salvation is at hand!’
7
Friday 20 March, 7:30pm
Peter rubbed the painful spot on his head. What sort of idiot was he to fall for that? ‘Look out! Behind you?’ That was what children shouted to distract their friends in playfights.
He walked in the same direction that Raven had run, out of the park, over the Steenschuur canal. He crossed the Breestraat and went along ‘t Gangetje onto the Nieuwe Rijn. The street was quiet and empty. The light from the streetlamps sparkled in the canal.
What should they do? The police had clearly given Van Tiegem’s umpteenth vanishing act a low priority, but everything was different this time. Perhaps one of them should go to the main police station on the Langegracht canal to explain the situation properly. The story about him suddenly going missing while exploring a secret tunnel must have sounded quite absurd.
As soon as he got back to the pit, he would talk to Janna and Daniël about what to do next, he decided.
But when he turned into the Beschuitsteeg, he saw blue lights flashing on the walls of the Hooglandse Kerk ahead of him.
He took a few careful steps forward, staying close to the houses on the left-hand side of the alley. Now he could hear the crackle of radios too. So the police had come after all. How was he going to explain his sudden disappearance? The way he’d run off earlier would make him an obvious suspect in Arnold’s case. And what could he say? That he’d had a discussion in the park with a man calling himself Raven who wanted him to choose between a red pill and a blue pill? Oh yes, and that the same man had said that the hour had come and salvation was at hand?
They’d arrest him there and then and detain him until they knew what had happened to Arnold.
Peter stopped next to the last house on the street and peered around the corner. There were two police cars, and some police officers were standing around the hole with Daniël and Janna. They appeared to be discussing something urgently while one of the officers spoke into a radio. When one of the policemen looked in his direction, Peter ducked back around the corner and decided to walk the other way. I need to find out what’s going on here fi
rst, he thought. I want to investigate. Need to investigate. Who knows how much precious time will be lost if they arrest me?
He retraced the route he’d taken earlier that afternoon.
The faculty was deserted by the time he got there. He opened the door with his key card and walked down the hall to his office.
Once he was in his room, he took off his dusty clothes and put his wallet and the two mobile phones on his desk. He took a clean shirt, trousers and socks from the cupboard. As he got dressed, he wolfed down two of the cereal bars he kept in his desk drawer as afternoon snacks.
He went to the toilets and craned his head under the tap as best he could. The water that streamed into the sink was grey. He dabbed his face dry with paper towels, studying himself in the small, round mirror. He looked tired. The whites of his eyes were shot with red, and there was a scratch on his nose. He ran his hands roughly through his hair, releasing a dusty shower of grit that made him look like he had a severe case of dandruff.
And there was a clearly visible piece of lettuce stuck between his teeth. He dug it out and rinsed out his mouth.
Now that he had calmed down, he could see that walking away had been a bad idea. He’d been so taken aback by the strange encounter with Raven, the messages, and Arnold’s disappearance that he’d wanted to go off and investigate on his own. But where would he start?
He went back to his office and took the folder from that afternoon’s lecture out of his bag. The students were required to turn up for least eighty percent of their lectures and he was required to keep accurate records of their attendance. Reading out a roll and ticking off every name individually took much too long, so he usually passed the register around the class. Of course, this sometimes meant that there were more people present on paper than were actually in the lecture hall. He usually brushed it off with a joke. (‘Once again, it appears that, just like a Russian election, we have more votes than voters.’)
He ran his finger down the list of names, trying to remember their faces. He only succeeded in one or two cases. He soon realised that this was utterly useless. What had he hoped to find? A student called Raven Ravensbergen? Or a red arrow pointing to a name and the words ‘hora est’?
He grumpily folded the list up again. As he slotted it back into the folder, his eye fell on the little book that he had been using on the course. More of a thick pamphlet than a book, its cover was printed on the same paper as the contents. Written on the front were the words: GEDEMPTEGRACHTENWANDELING or A WALKING TOUR OF INVISIBLE CANALS, published by the Leiden Canal Society and the Old Leiden Historical Society. It was a route around all the canals in Leiden that had been covered over or filled in.
He picked it up distractedly. How was it possible that the tunnel had never been discovered before?
He spread it open and began to read random pages, looking for answers.
Leiden has always been a city rich with water. Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the Italian-Flemish merchant Guicciardini described the city as a true archipelago. He counted thirty-one islands, connected by a hundred and forty-five bridges. At that time, the city was still medieval in scale.
He read on.
And even now, one is struck by the abundance of water in Leiden. Over the years, however, many of the canals have been infilled or overvaulted. This walking tour hopes to give an impression of these changes. The route covers more than thirty sites where the city’s canals have been removed over the centuries, showing how the water gradually disappeared from Leiden.
How the water gradually disappeared from Leiden …
In the medieval city, the streets of Leiden became densely populated and, over the course of the seventeenth century, the city was expanded three times. The increased density of the buildings resulted in an increase in traffic on the streets. This was not only accommodated by the infilling of some canals, but primarily by means of moving them underground to large brickwork drainage channels, or by roofing the canals over.
The tunnel they had discovered that afternoon was so far underground that it even ran below the canals that had existed in the Middle Ages. Peter leafed through the pamphlet looking for the illustration that showed all the city’s former canals.
A few years ago, the invisible canals tour had been complemented by the addition of an urban legends walking tour that Peter and Judith had once taken. The tour guide had told them a story about each location they’d stopped at and asked the participants to guess whether or not it was true. There was a tale about the well in the Burcht that the guide had told them was false. In the seventieth century, it was believed that a tunnel started at the bottom of this well and led all the way to the ‘Roman arcenal near Cat-wijck’, as the contemporary sources put it. The tunnel was thought to have been built during the Spanish siege of the city in 1573–1574. According to the legend, a live herring was found in the well which was supposed to prove that it was connected to the coast. That fishy tale could obviously be disregarded as belonging to the realm of fables, but persistent rumours about the tunnels were widely accepted to be true.
Then there was Annie’s Verjaardag, the café in the old city vaults which everyone ‘knew’ were part of an underground network of tunnels that led to the Burcht. The city had developed so densely around these areas that there had never been a serious attempt to find out how much truth there really was in the old stories.
Although Peter knew a great deal about the history of Leiden, he hadn’t managed to make a correct guess about even half of the stories on the tour. The lesson he had taken away from the experience was: if a story sounded too unlikely to be true, then it probably was true.
He ran his finger over the Nieuwstraat, another ‘invisible’ canal. He squinted at the page until the fine outlines of the buildings faded away and all he could see were the red and blue delineations that formed an alternative map of the city.
He tapped his finger on the picture.
If there had been a tunnel present ab urbe condita, he thought, then perhaps there wouldn’t have been much digging needed to connect it to the roofed-over canals … What if it wasn’t just one tunnel, but a whole labyrinth of tunnels beneath the city? My god, this could be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the century …
He put the book down and picked up the new mobile phone again. The only apps on it were the pre-installed programs it would have been sold with, and Wickr. Tomorrow he would go to a phone store and ask if they could find out who it was registered to.
Peter jumped when his own phone rang. He involuntarily synchronised his breathing with the ringtone, breathing in when the tune played, and out when it paused.
An 0900 number. That could be the police.
Just as he was about to answer it, the ringing stopped.
Then it immediately rang again. He answered it this time.
‘Is this Mr De Haan?’ The voice sounded formal but friendly.
‘Yes.’
‘This is the Leiden constabulary of the Hollands Midden regional police. We’ve been looking for you, Mr De Haan.’
‘So I, er … so I understand. I …’ Peter felt his face redden. He would make a useless criminal, he thought. He would fall to pieces the minute he was interrogated.
‘Where are you at the moment? We can come and pick you up, if that’s easier for you.’
‘This is about Arnold van Tiegem, isn’t it? Is there any news?’
‘This will be easier if we discuss it face to face. I can send a car for you. That would be the quickest way, I think. Where are you now?’
‘I’m … I’ll come myself. I can walk.’
‘Sir, will you please—’
Peter hung up. He put the telephones inside his jacket and stuffed his wallet into his trouser pocket.
On his way outside he realised that his phone made him easy to trace. If he changed his mind and didn’t go to the police station after all, they would have no trouble finding him. He stopped at the faculty’s pigeonholes and slip
ped his own phone into the box that had his name above it. It was an intuitive decision that instantly felt right.
He decided to visit Judith first. She was the only person he could talk to in confidence about this absurd situation, and her house was close to his route to the police station on the Langegracht.
Less than ten minutes later, he arrived at the Sionshofje on a side street off the Haarlemmerstraat. He pushed open the heavy, green outer door and walked into the large inner courtyard, which was bordered by a brick pathway. There were no lights on in Mark’s house. He was away travelling of course, but Judith’s house was dark too. Surely it was too early for her to go to bed? Had she gone out?
He looked through the window, but the living room looked deserted. He knew that Judith kept a key under a flower pot near the front door. He removed it, carefully opened the door and turned on the light.
As he stepped through the door, a new message arrived.
He opened it nervously.
‘Prophet!’ said I, ‘thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that heaven that bends above us – by that God we both adore –
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore –
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore?’
Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’
He wasn’t much of a poetry connoisseur, but even he immediately recognised it as a verse from Edgar Allen Poe’s famous poem The Raven, about a mysterious raven’s midnight visit to a man mourning the death of his lover.
Nevermore … The poem’s distraught protagonist is denied the hope of ever being reunited with his deceased love. Peter had barely finished reading the poem when the message disappeared. Nevermore …
Peter called out Judith’s name, but no answer broke the silence. He climbed the narrow staircase to the first floor, but it was dark there too. He hurried back downstairs.
Now he regretted leaving his own phone behind. Like many other people, he hardly knew any phone numbers by heart now that he had a smartphone.
St Paul's Labyrinth Page 6
