Labyrinth

CHAPTER 11

Pic de Soularac

Sabarthes Mountains

Southwest France

MONDAY, 4 JULY 2005

“Alice! Alice, can you hear me?”

Her eyes flickered and opened.

The air was chill and damp, like an unheated church. Not floating, but lying on the hard, cold ground.

Where the hell am I? She could feel the dank earth rough and uneven beneath her arms and legs. Alice shifted position. Sharp stones and grit rubbed abrasively against her skin.

No, not a church. A glimmer of memory came back. Walking down a long, dark tunnel into a cave, a stone chamber. Then what? Everything was blurred, frayed around the edges. Alice tried to raise her head. A mistake. Pain exploded at the base of her skull. Nausea sloshed in her stomach, like bilge water at the bottom of a rotting boat.

“Alice? Can you hear me?”

Someone was talking to her. Worried, anxious, a voice she knew.

“Alice? Wake up.” She tried to lift her head. This time, the pain wasn’t so bad. Slowly, carefully, she raised herself a little.

“Christ,” muttered Shelagh, sounding relieved.

She was aware of hands beneath her arms helping her into a sitting position. Everything was gloomy and dark, except for the darting circles of light from the torches. Two torches. Alice narrowed her eyes and recognized Stephen, one of the older members of the team, hovering behind Shelagh, his wire-framed glasses catching in the light.

“Alice, talk to me. Can you hear me?” said Shelagh.

I’m not sure. Maybe.

Alice tried to speak, but her mouth was crooked and no words came out. She tried to nod. The exertion made her head spin. She dropped her head between her knees to stop herself passing out.

With Shelagh on one side and Stephen on the other, she edged herself back until she was sitting on the top of the stone steps, hands on her knees. Everything seemed to be shifting backward and forward, in and out, like a film out of focus.

Shelagh crouched down in front of her, talking, but Alice couldn’t make out what she was saying. The sound was distorted, like a record played at the wrong speed. Another wave of nausea hit her as more disconnected memories came flooding back: the noise of the skull as it fell away into the dark; her hand reaching out for the ring; the knowledge that she had disturbed something that slumbered in the deepest recesses of the mountain, something malevolent.

Then nothing.

She was so cold. She could feel goosebumps on her bare arms and legs. Alice knew she couldn’t have been unconscious for very long, no more than a few minutes at most. Such an inconsequential measure of time. But it had seemed long enough for her to slip from one world into another.

Alice shivered. Then another memory. Of dreaming the same, familiar dream. First, the sensation of peace and lightness, everything white and clear. Then plummeting down and down through the empty sky and the ground rushing up to meet her. There was no collision, no impact, only the dark green columns of trees looming over her. Then the fire, the roaring wall of red and gold and yellow flames.

She wrapped her bare arms tight around herself. Why had the dream come back? Throughout her childhood, the same dream had haunted her, always the same, never leading anywhere. While her parents slept unawares in their bedroom across the landing, Alice had spent night after night awake in the dark, hands gripping the covers tightly, determined to conquer her demons alone.

But not for years now. It had left her alone for years.

“How about we try to get you on your feet?” Shelagh was saying.

It doesn’t mean anything. Once doesn’t mean it’s going to start all over again.

“Alice,” said Shelagh, her voice a little sharper. Impatient. “Do you think you can manage to stand? We need to get you back to camp. Have someone take a look at you.”

“I think so,” she said at last. Her voice didn’t sound like her at all. “My head’s not so good.”

“You can do it, Alice. Come on, try now.”

Alice looked down at her red, swollen wrist. Shit. She couldn’t quite remember, didn’t want to remember. “I’m not sure what happened. This-” She held up her hand. “This happened outside.”

Shelagh put her arms around Alice to take her weight. “Okay?”

Alice braced herself and allowed Shelagh to lever her to her feet. Stephen took the other arm. She swayed a little from side to side, trying to get her balance, but after a couple of seconds, the giddiness passed and feeling started to come back to her numb limbs. Carefully Alice started to flex and unflex her fingers, feeling the pull of the raw skin over her knuckles.

“I’m all right. Just give me a minute.”

“What possessed you to come in here on your own anyway?”

“I was…” Alice broke off, not knowing what to say. It was typical of her to break the rules and end up in trouble. “There’s something you need to see. Down there. On the lower level.”

Shelagh followed the line of Alice’s gaze with her torch. Shadows scuttled up the walls and over the roof of the cave.

“No, not here,” said Alice. “Down there.”

Shelagh lowered the beam.

“In front of the altar.”

“Altar?”

The strong white light cut through the inky blackness of the chamber like a searchlight. For a fraction of a second, the shadow of the altar was silhouetted on the rock wall behind, like the Greek letter pi superimposed on the carved labyrinth. Then Shelagh moved her hand, the image vanished and the torch found the grave. The pale bones leaped out at them from the dark.

Straight away, the atmosphere changed. Shelagh gave a sharp intake of breath. Like an automaton, she walked down one, then two, then three steps. She seemed to have forgotten Alice was there.

Stephen made a move to follow.

“No,” she snapped. “Stay there.”

“I was only-”

“In fact, go find Dr. Brayling. Tell him what we’ve found. Now,” she shouted, when he didn’t move. Stephen thrust his torch into Alice’s hand and disappeared into the tunnel without a word. She could hear the scrunch of his boots on the gravel, getting fainter and fainter until the sound was eaten up by the darkness.

“You didn’t have to shout at him,” Alice started to say. Shelagh cut across her.

“Did you touch anything?”

“Not exactly, though-”

“Though what?” Again, the same aggression.

“There were a few things in the grave,” Alice added. “I can show you.”

“No,” Shelagh shouted. “No,” a little calmer. “We don’t want people tramping around down there.”

Alice was about to point out it was too late for that, then stopped. She’d no desire to get close to the skeletons again. The blind sockets, the collapsed bones were imprinted too clearly on her mind.

Shelagh stood over the shallow grave. There was something challenging in the way she swept the beam of light over the bodies, up and down as if she was examining them. It was disrespectful almost. The light caught the dull blade of the knife as Shelagh squatted down beside the skeletons, her back to Alice.

“You say you touched nothing?” she said abruptly, turning to glare over her shoulder. “So how come your tweezers are here?”

Alice flushed. “You interrupted me before I’d had the chance to finish. What I was about to say was I picked up a ring-with the tweezers, before you ask-which I dropped when I heard you guys in the tunnel.”

“A ring?” Shelagh repeated.

“Maybe it’s rolled under something else?”

“Well, I can’t see it,” she said, suddenly standing up. She strode back to Alice. “Let’s get out of here. Your injuries need seeing to.”

Alice looked at her in astonishment. The face of a stranger, not a good friend, was looking back at her. Angry, hard, judgmental.

“But don’t you want-”

“Jesus, Alice,” she said, grabbing her arm. “Haven’t you done enough? We’ve got to go!”

It was very bright after the velvet dark of the cave as they emerged from the shadow of the rock. The sun seemed to explode in Alice’s face like a firework in a black November sky.

She shielded her eyes with her hands. She felt utterly disorientated, unable to fix herself in time or space. It was as if the world had stopped while she’d been in the chamber. It was the same familiar landscape, yet it had transformed into something different.

Or am I just seeing it through different eyes?

The shimmering peaks of the Pyrenees in the distance had lost their definition. The trees, the sky, even the mountain itself, were less substantial, less real. Alice felt that if she touched anything it would fall down, like scenery on a film set, revealing the true world concealed behind.

Shelagh said nothing. She was already striding down the mountain, mobile phone clamped to her ear, without bothering to check if Alice was managing all right. Alice hurried to catch her up.

“Shelagh, hang on a minute. Wait.” She touched Shelagh’s arm. “Look, I’m really sorry. I know I shouldn’t have gone in there on my own. I wasn’t thinking.”

Shelagh didn’t acknowledge she was speaking. She didn’t even look round, although she snapped her phone shut.

“Slow down. I can’t keep up.”

“Okay,” Shelagh said, spinning round to face her. “I’ve stopped.”

“What’s going on here?”

“You tell me. I mean, what precisely do you want me to say? That it’s okay? You want me to make you feel better that you fucked up?”

“No, I-”

“Because, you know what, actually it’s not okay. It was totally and unbelievably fucking stupid to go in there alone. You’ve contaminated the site and Jesus knows what else. What the fuck were you playing at?”

Alice held up her hands. “Okay, okay, I know. And I really am sorry,” she repeated, aware of how inadequate it sounded.

“Do you have any idea of the position you’ve put me in? I vouched for you. I persuaded Brayling to let you come. Thanks to you playing Indiana Jones, the police will probably suspend the entire excavation. Brayling will blame me. Everything I’ve done to get here, to get a place on this dig. The time I’ve spent…” Shelagh broke off and ran her fingers through her cropped, bleached hair.

This isn’t fair.

“Look, hang on a minute.” Even though she knew Shelagh was well within her rights to be angry, she was way over the top. “You’re being unfair. I accept it was stupid to go in-I didn’t think it through, and I admit that-but don’t you think you’re overreacting? Shit, I didn’t do it on purpose. Brayling’s hardly going to call the police. I didn’t really touch anything. No one’s hurt.”

Shelagh twisted her arm out of Alice’s grasp with such force she nearly lost her footing.

“Brayling will call the authorities,” Shelagh seethed, “because-as you would know if you bothered to listen to a fucking word I said-permission for the excavation was granted, against the advice of the police, on the understanding that any discovery of human remains would be immediately reported to the Police Judiciaire.”

Alice’s stomach hit the floor. “I thought it was just red tape. Nobody seemed to take it seriously. Everyone was always joking about it.”

“Clearly you didn’t take it seriously,” Shelagh shouted. “The rest of us did, being professionals and having some respect for what we do!”

This makes no sense.

“But why would the police be interested in an archeological dig?”

Shelagh blew up. “Jesus, Alice, you still don’t get it, do you? Even now. It doesn’t fucking matter why. It’s just how it is. It’s not up to you to decide which rules matter and which you’re going to ignore.”

“I never said-”

“Why do you always have to challenge everything? You always think you know better, always want to break the rules, be different.”

Alice was shouting now too. “That’s completely unfair. I’m not like that and you know it. I just didn’t think-”

“That’s the point. You never do think, except about yourself. And getting what you want.”

“This is crazy, Shelagh. Why would I deliberately try to make things hard for you? Just listen to yourself.” Alice took a deep breath, trying to get her temper under control. “Look, I’ll own up to Brayling it was my fault but, well it’s just that… you know I wouldn’t go charging in there, on my own, in normal circumstances, except…”

She paused again.

“Except what?”

“This is going to sound stupid, but it sort of drew me in. I knew the chamber was there. I can’t explain it, I just knew. A feeling. Deja vu. Like I’d been there before.”

“You think this makes it better?” Shelagh said sarcastically. “Jesus, give me a break. You had a feeling. That’s pathetic.”

Alice shook her head. “It was more than that-”

“In any case, what the hell were you doing digging up there in the first place? And on your own? That’s just it. Break the rules just for the hell of it.”

“No,” she said. “It wasn’t like that. My partner’s not here. I saw something underneath the boulder and, since it’s my last day, I just thought I’d do a little more.” Her voice tailed off. “I only wanted to find out if it was worth investigating,” she said, realizing her mistake too late. “I wasn’t intending-”

“You are telling me, on top of everything else, that you actually found something? You fucking found something and didn’t bother to share this information with anyone else?”

“I-”

Shelagh held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

Alice held her gaze for a moment, then fished in the pocket of her denim cut-offs, pulled out the handkerchief and handed it over. She didn’t trust herself to speak.

She watched as Shelagh folded back the white folds of cotton to reveal the brooch inside. Alice couldn’t help herself reaching out.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it? The way the copper round the edges, here and here, catches the light.” She hesitated. “I think it might belong to one of the people inside the cave.”

Shelagh looked up. Her mood had undergone another transformation. The anger had gone out of her.

“You have no idea what you have done, Alice. No idea at all.” She folded the handkerchief. “I’ll take this down.”

“I’ll-”

“Leave it, Alice. I don’t want to talk to you right now. Everything you say just makes it worse.”

What the hell was that all about?

Alice stood bewildered as Shelagh walked away. The row had come out of nowhere, extreme even for Shelagh, who was capable of blowing up over the smallest things, then had blown out just as quickly.

Alice lowered herself down on to the nearest rock and rested her throbbing wrist on her knee. Everything ached and she felt utterly drained, but also sick at heart. She knew the excavation was funded privately-rather than attached to a university or institution-so was not subject to the restrictive regulations that hampered many expeditions. As a result, competition to get on the team had been fierce. Shelagh had been working at Mas d’Azil, a few kilometers northwest of Foix when she’d first heard about the excavation in the Sabarthes Mountains. The way she told it, she’d bombarded the director, Dr. Brayling, with letters, e-mails and testimonials until finally, eighteen months ago, she’d worn him down. Even then, Alice had wondered why Shelagh was so obsessed.

Alice looked down the mountain. Shelagh was so far ahead now that she was almost out of sight, her long, lean figure shielded by the scrub and broom on the lower slopes. There was no hope of catching her up even if she wanted to.

Alice sighed. She was running on empty. Like always. Doing it alone. It’s better that way. She was fiercely self-sufficient, preferring not to rely on anybody else. But right now, she wasn’t sure she had enough energy left to make it back to camp. The sun was too fierce and her legs too weak. She looked down at the cut on her arm. It had started to bleed again, worse than ever.

Alice looked out over the scorched summer landscape of the Sabarthes Mountains, still in their timeless peace. For a moment, she felt fine. Then all at once she was aware of another sensation, a pricking at the base of her spine. Anticipation, a sense of expectation. Recognition.

It all ends here.

Alice caught her breath. Her heart started to beat faster.

It ends here where it started.

Her head was suddenly filled with whispering, disjointed sounds, like echoes in time. Now the words carved in the stone at the top of the steps came back to her. Pas a pas. They went round and round in her head, like a half-remembered nursery rhyme.

That’s impossible. You’re being stupid.

Shaken, Alice put her hands on her knees and forced herself to stand up. She had to get back to the camp. Heatstroke, dehydration, she had to get out of the sun, get some water inside her.

Taking it slowly, she started to descend, feeling every bump and jolt of the mountain in her legs. She had to get away from the echoing stone, from the spirits that lived there. She didn’t know what was happening to her, only that she had to escape.

She walked faster, faster, until she was almost running, stumbling on the stones and jagged flints that stuck up out of the dry earth. But the words were rooted in her mind, repeating loud and clear, like a mantra.

Step by step we make our way. Step by step.