Alec Devlin: Maze of Death

Philip Caveney

Prologue

Travis waited in the small bare room, alone and terrified. He didn’t know how long he had been here, but it seemed an eternity. He’d woken from a deep, dreamless sleep to find himself stretched out on a hard earth floor, with only the meagre light of a hurricane lamp to illuminate his surroundings. The room had four bare plaster walls, in one of which was set a huge pair of metal doors – two heavy slabs of rusting iron.

He could not recall how he came to be here. The last thing he remembered was being in a taverna, a remote little place somewhere on the road to the south of Heraklion. He had chanced upon it, quite by accident. Hearing the sounds of Cretan music issuing from within he’d ventured inside and found the place packed with friendly locals, who smiled at him and beckoned him to enter and make himself at home. In one corner, a couple of musicians were belting out raucous tunes on a lyre and a Cretan lute. The landlord, a red faced fellow with a walrus moustache, spoke a few words of English and proudly told Travis to try the raki, which he claimed to have brewed himself in his cellar.

Travis was in a good mood and though he’d been warned about the powers of the local brew, he threw caution to the wind and tried a glass. He was a young man on his first real trip away from home and had come to Crete to escape the humdrum of his life back in London. His only intention on this holiday was to relax and enjoy himself. So he had swallowed down the fierce liquor and clapped along to the wild music and had even managed to exchange a few halting words with the people around him. But then he drank that second glass of raki and, quite suddenly, the world started spinning crazily around him. He stumbled towards the door, aware of the laughter all around him – people slapping him on the back and saying that the young Englishman couldn’t handle his drink. He’d waved a hand at them, assuring them he’d be back in a few moments. But stepping outside, the night air had hit him like a fist to the head and he plummeted into a deep blackness.

After that, he knew nothing until he had woken here. But he realised with a terrible certainty that his drink must have been drugged to have caused so violent a reaction. Somebody had done this to him deliberately and brought him to this tiny room. But why? Was he being held hostage? Was somebody going to demand a ransom from his parents back in England?

When his senses had fully returned to him, he got to his feet and, lifting the lamp, he explored every inch of the room. The metal doors were the obvious way out but none of his pushing and pounding could budge them so much as an inch. He checked the other walls, running his fingertips across the smooth plastered surfaces. In one side he found another, smaller door, set flush with the wall. But it was no more than a narrow outline in the plaster with no sign of a handle or a lock; and when he put his shoulder against it and pushed with all his strength, he couldn’t make any impression on it. Finally, he resorted to shouting out, his voice echoing hollowly in the tiny room, but nobody came to answer his calls. Eventually, it dawned on him that whoever had spiked his drink and was keeping him prisoner here had no intention of coming to see what he was shouting about.

He returned his attention again to the metal doors at the far end of the room. There was something horribly forbidding about them, as though they were the gateway to another world. He could see that the packed earth at the base of the doors was marked by the passage of many feet, so it was clear that others must have passed this way before him, but how recently it might have been, he could not tell. He was just thinking this when, with a nerve-jangling clang of metal, the doors began to slide slowly apart, and he found himself looking down a long, dark corridor, hewn out of solid rock. He stood for a moment, wondering whether he should venture out, but since the alternative was to stay right where he was, it was an easy decision to make. Perhaps somewhere along the corridor, he might find a way out of this predicament. But the doors seemed to have opened by themselves and when he peeped around them, there was nobody lurking in the shadows. He walked forward and shouted several hellos into the darkness, his voice echoing eerily back at him… but nobody answered his call.

He lifted the hurricane lamp and walked gingerly into the corridor. In the bobbing glow of the light he could see that the walls on either side of him and the roof, a short distance above his head, bore the marks of chisels. This passageway had been cut into solid stone and must have taken years to create. He walked for a short distance and came to a junction with another corridor running at right angles to his. He stood for a moment, uncertain of which direction to take, but after a few moments, decided to go left. He walked on again, only to find that now a third corridor cut away in two directions and this time, he decided to walk to his right. It soon became clear that he was wandering into a stone maze – a labyrinth. It was not something that nature had devised, but had been made by skilled engineers.

Travis didn’t know how long he wandered down the endless corridors, and after a while, he began to get the notion that he was coming back to places he had already been; but since every stone wall looked more or less identical, he could not be sure whether this impression was accurate. A strange half memory stirred in his mind - a story his grandfather used to tell him when he was a boy – of Theseus and the minotaur. Hadn’t Theseus, a Greek hero, had to find his way through a labyrinth? And hadn’t that labyrinth been located on the island of Crete? But of course in that story, the great warrior had been given something to help him find his way . . . a ball of twine which he could let out as he walked and easily follow back to his starting place. Travis had been given nothing but the lantern.

He wandered deeper and deeper into the shadows, twisting and turning this way and that, peering into the glow of light from the lantern, until he no longer had any sense of time or place. And then he began to hear the sounds. They were distant at first but as he walked on, they seemed to draw nearer – a series of deep, bellowing noises; a cross between the yell of a man and the roar of a beast. Travis couldn’t identify what kind of creature might be making those sounds, but whatever it was, it filled him with cold terror and he broke out into a thick, cold sweat. He couldn’t stop thinking about the legend of the minotaur – the half man–half bull that lurked in the labyrinth of the mythical King Minos of Crete, waiting to tear to pieces any living creature that ventured into its path. He told himself not to be ridiculous. That was just an ancient legend, something that had no foundation in fact – and yet the noises he could hear were being made by something all too real.

As the sounds drew closer, his attempts to find a way out of the maze became ever more frantic. Now he was running along the corridors, turning in whichever direction he sensed would lead him away from the source of those awful noises – but each turn he made only served to bring him closer until it seemed to his fevered senses, that the creature, whatever it was, was now no more than a few feet away from him, perhaps only on the other side of a rock wall.

And then as he turned a corner he saw movement up ahead of him, something big and bulky came prowling forward out of the shadows. He froze in his tracks and stared open-mouthed. It had the body of a man sure enough, squat and thick set, dressed only in a loincloth, the muscles rippling beneath a sheen of sweat. But where the man’s head should have been there was something entirely inhuman – a great domed skull, much too big for the body that supported it; an elongated snout with widely distended nostrils, and a crude slit of a mouth, crammed with misshapen teeth protruding above and below the lips from which dripped threads of saliva. Most horrible of all, from the top of the skull jutted two curved horns. Travis could not withhold a gasp of sheer disbelief – he was looking at the creature from his grandfather’s old stories: the minotaur.

The beast instantly became aware of Travis’s presence. Its wide nostrils flared and it came forward, grunting, its deep-set eyes staring at him with a fierce intensity – an unnatural hunger.

For a moment, fear rooted Travis to the spot. Then the instinct to survive kicked in and he turned and fled back the way he had come, but in his panic his sweating hand lost its grip on the metal handle of the lamp and it fell, smashing against a wall and erupting in an abrupt gout of flame. For a moment, everything was garishly lit up. Travis glanced back to see the beast holding up its arms across its face, as though terrified of the fire. And then, in the brief glare, Travis saw something infinitely worse. Lying against a wall a few feet away from him – the shattered remains of a man’s body, a twisted wreckage of bones and partially eaten flesh. A skeletal arm lay a few feet from the torso as though it had been torn off and flung aside. The dirt floor and the wall behind the corpse were stained black with dried blood. But the oil in the lamp was soon consumed and the fire began to die down, hiding the gruesome sight once again in the shadows. Panic pulsed though Travis and he fled. He turned down the next corridor, and ran madly along it… but he had only travelled a short distance whenhe was suddenly plunged into a darkness so complete that he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face.

Gasping in terror, he had no option but to press his shoulder against the closest wall, extend a hand and edge his way forward, his fingers exploring the rock. He moved like this for quite a while and began to think that he had left the creature behind, but then he heard grunting and snuffling sounds in the distance, and he could tell it was moving faster than he was, getting closer and closer. He realised with a dull sense of shock that if the beast was used to living down in this terrible place, it must surely be able to see far better in the dark than any human could.

Travis tried to increase his speed, his shoulder rubbing itself raw on the rough surface of the wall but then suddenly, his questing fingers found nothing more substantial than air. He stopped in his tracks, groping blindly to left and right. He stood for a moment in a fog of indecision, horribly aware of the creature shuffling closer and now he heard a bellow that seemed to freeze his blood in his veins. It was nearly upon him!

With an oath, Travis ran forward, arms extended to prevent him from slamming into another wall; but his hands encountered no resistance and suddenly, shockingly, he stepped onto empty air and felt himself tipping forwards. He gave one brief cry of terror and then he was falling, falling into a blackness that seemed to have no end...