The Dark Labyrinth

In the Darkness

For a time she sat in the darkness and tried to shake Fearmax awake, but after a while it became clear to her that he must be dead. The dampness of his clothes conveyed the horrible suggestion of blood flowing from serious wounds. His hands were cold and clenched. Miss Dombey had lost her little torch in the confusion, and she groped at his bony face in the darkness, uttering little wails of terror and supplication. “Mr. Fearmax,” she cried. “Mr. Fearmax.” There was no response. She got up at last and walked slowly down the narrow corridor; she was beginning to feel the staleness of the air, to wonder whether they were not bricked into a tunnel from which there was no escape. She was still moaning under her breath. Her hands outstretched like a sleep-walker she proceeded step by step. When she had gone some twenty paces in this manner her fuddled wits came to life and she remembered that there was a box of matches in her coat. With trembling fingers she cast back her tweed overcoat and took the little box out. The first match shone for a second along an empty black passage-way and went out. The second burned a little steadier. The corridor seemed to have become larger, the ceiling higher. Strange reverberations still shuddered through the length and breadth of the stone honeycomb; dust hung in the unbreathed air. The light went out.

Miss Dombey’s mind was filled with a confusion of panic-stricken images in which all continuity was lost; past and present mingled freely. Perhaps this was the Second Coming she had been so assiduously advertising for so long? She saw the Guardian’s face, with its pale attenuated lines, engraved upon the darkness before; saw Mr. Sowerby peering through his steel-rimmed spectacles at the Wigmore Hall. She struck another match in her nerveless fingers, and then another. She had concentrated so completely upon the death of the world and its summary judgment that she was totally unable to decrease the compass of her thoughts enough for the contemplation of her own personal death. Numbly, with chattering teeth, she went forward, without a plan, lighting match after match until the box was empty. Then she sat down in the darkness and began to weep. What would Andrew, her brother, say? She had not seen him for years. He had been in Quetta with the Army.

Growing up in her mind there came a feeling that perhaps some sort of summing-up, some sort of clue to her whole life’s activities, might be disentangled from this terrible accident which had befallen her. Yet what? She saw her life stretching away, incidents appearing and dissolving before her eyes as meaningless as Chinese idiograms. She was back in the mission-house at Hwang-Tu. Her father was talking about the mystery of the Cross to a group of Chinese children. “To settle your differences with your own soul,” he was saying in that rich deep voice. His clothes smelt of cheroots, his silver hair played on his neck. Her fingers closed absently upon the little phial of sleeping-tablets in her pocket and she remembered Dr. Andrews, looking over the top of his glasses at her, warning her not to take more than …

She heard the dull roar of the minotaur sounding in the depths ahead. The noise passed her in the damp heavy air, almost like an object of weight and substance. She opened the bottle and shook out the little tablets into her palm. Something at the farther end of the corridor moved, a vague shape of darkness upon darkness. She shouted “Hullo! Anyone there?” but her empty voice was flung back at her from the stony throat of the tunnel in little flat echoes.

She swallowed them one by one, remembering how adept she had become at swallowing pills without any water. Malaria had taught her that during the last visit to Egypt. It was with something that bore a recognizable resemblance to relief that she lay down on the cold stone of the corridor wrapped in her coat.

Now she was walking once more across the paddy-fields, hand in hand with her father. Small clouds of thistledown floated in the sky above the river. At the door of the temple a little old man was sitting very softly carving upon a peach-stone; the brooch was one that her father had given her. She lost it one day walking across the wet meadows near Horsham. Search as she might, she could never discover where. It was like the severance of a link in time; she had been cut off from her father by that far more completely than by his own death in China years before. Cut off from her own childhood, that term of happiness and tenderness which she was never to know again once the sea was crossed and Dover reached. She remembered the silent reaches of the lock, the convoy of swans sailing upstream, the yellow kingcups standing attentively by while she walked backwards and forwards, searching and weeping.

Miss Dombey sat up for a moment and opened her eyes. She knew now, for the first time, with complete accuracy, that she was going to die. The familiar sluggish throb of her heart, its strange drugged rhythm had conveyed the information to her. In a sense she was no longer afraid of the labyrinth, since it was no longer the labyrinth that was killing her. Ah, but this was not the martyr’s death she had dreamed about; it was something small and irremediable, lacking even the small logic of her faith and beliefs.

She did not wish to think of God, yet she supposed that someone in her position ought to be praying. “Oh God,” she began accordingly, repeating the formulae that stretched away on all sides of her like well-trodden paths, “Why have I never really believed in You?”

Even through her drowsiness she recognized this as a very remarkable beginning to a prayer; yet the sense of something lacking, even in this confession, persisted. Father, Son and Holy Ghost — what did they mean? They rattled about inside her mind like nutmegs in a tin. Yet over and above it all she felt the emanations of her father; her father reading from the big black book; her father preaching; climbing on to his knee to let him cherish her and rub his warm palms upon the back of her small neck. In some vague way the Second Coming had been designed as a plot to bring him back. It was in the shadow of this immense Imago that Miss Dombey fell asleep at last.…

Fearmax, for his part, awoke with a large lump on the top of his head, and the feeling of having been involved in an earthquake. For a long time he lay quite still, moving his arms and feet gently to see if they were intact. Apart from the contusion upon his head, and the feeling of sickness he could trace no other infirmity due to the adventure. He had fallen sideways, so that his body rested upon his mackintosh, in whose pockets he felt the hard edges of the carton containing his lunch. He lay for a long time staring into the blackness, every nerve relaxed, wondering what he should do next. His last coherent memory was of the guide planing through space towards him astride an enormous boulder. What had happened? The debris, perhaps, had pushed him to one side, down this stone chute. Slowly he sat up, groaning more in anticipation of broken limbs than in any real discomfort. His head, however, throbbed from the blow; but did not appear to be bleeding. His feet were chilled to the bone from the large pool of water in which he had been lying. He picked up the sodden mackintosh and groped for the box of matches he knew he had been carrying. In the little yellow spurt of flame his eye caught the glimmer of something on the ground not three paces away. It was his torch, and picking it up with trembling fingers, he pressed the button, relieved to see once more the powerful yellow beam without whose aid he would have been as helpless as a blind man.

He turned it first upon the blocked passage-way behind, examining the great mound of stones and mud which had been forced like a cork into the neck of a bottle; before him, however, the corridor stretched away into infinity. What was he to do? Fearmax felt a strange calm descend upon him, a sense of well-being and relaxation. It was as if there were nothing more to wish for, and nothing to fear — a resolution had been made in terms of destiny. He must walk as fast and as far as he could, in the hope of finding an issue. But first he sat down and ate, balancing his torch on his knee to do so. It was a welcome pause, too, for he had not fully collected his wits. He noticed the wet footmarks leading from the puddle with a sudden start; he had not been alone, then. But who had left him like that, without a word, and walked off down the corridor? The footprint was small enough to be that of a woman.

Fearmax bolted the rest of his food in his excitement and set off down the corridor, stopping at intervals to shout “Hullo!” Hope sprang up in his breast at the thought that he was not alone in the labyrinth. But as the corridors multiplied and ramified, stretching away into infinity, he became despondent. How could one find anyone in this maze? It was possible, too, that he was only going in a circle.

He passed through a cavern into which the blinding blue sky peered and threw up startling images of volcanic rock, blue, gold and green, which covered the walls like dried sealing-wax. Fearmax looked longingly at the sky, raising his thin arms and shouting until the echoes wheeled down over him like a flock of exhausted birds. Ten feet of rope was all he needed to gain his liberty. Yet it would be fatal to linger.

He started off once more at a great pace. At least if he could reach the river they had crossed it would be something, but cavern led to dry cavern, tunnel to tunnel, until he felt completely dazed and bewildered. Several times, too, he stumbled and bruised his ankles, for the going was rough and the surfaces uneven.

Now gradually his pace slackened and he became more composed. He had found a battered cigar in his coat-pocket and the rich smoke soothed his nerves. In his mind he found himself composing sentences which, if he were to escape from the labyrinth, would find a place in the book he planned to write. The theme was a simple one and owed a good deal to Hogarth; he was writing a treatise upon the psychic mind — its predisposition to epilepsy and schizophrenia. It was to be a guide to the mediums of the future. “To deal with evidence that cannot be reconciled to the body and canons of everyday science has been the task of all independent minds since the beginning of history. It is no less the task of the individual in whose experience must inevitably arise emotions or thoughts which are neither rational nor commonplace. The body of work left us by men like Blake or Nostradamus.…” He bumped his head on a ledge and stopped to swear. “Madness, therefore, must be a conditional term in our judgment of them.” His torch picked up arch after arch, corridor after corridor. The labyrinth seemed to have no end.

Suddenly Fearmax thought of “French Marie”. He thought of her with a sudden pang of anguish, and halted in his tracks. Could it be that the footsteps he had seen near where he lay …? Or was he losing his mind — that it should entertain so fantastic an idea. Yet try as he might he could not rid himself of its seduction. Perhaps among these corridors he would come upon the real “French Marie”, the partner and wife he had been searching for for so long. He was sitting upon a stone idly watching the smoke from his cigar trail off down the corridor. A sudden idea struck him? Where was the smoke going? Surely it must be naturally drawn off down a current of air? And a current of air pointed the direction of an issue? He laughed hoarsely. Was the smoke leading him, then, to the surface; or perhaps somewhere ahead “French Marie” was waiting for him, waiting to be sought out and recognized.

Fearmax started off once more, following the smoke from his long cigar, pausing every few paces to blow another puff into the sterile air of the tunnel; it moved sluggishly but perceptibly away, leading along tunnels which seemed to descend, across galleries of rock with vaulted arches, for all the world as if they had been designed by human architects. Fearmax followed, one half of his mind still grappling with the problems of composition. “Their work constitutes, therefore, as does that of the medium, deliberate evidence of states of being not communicable in linguistic terms.”

Could she really be there, waiting for him? The idea both delighted and terrified him. What would they speak of when they met? The smoke led remorselessly onward; once it led him through a cavern where stalactites dribbled noisily, and he thought he had found the river. But he was disappointed again. Had it been the river, he thought, he might have floated down it to the sea, and yet it would be horrible to be lodged in some cranny too small to admit the passage of his body — lodged like a tea-leaf in a tooth and suffocated. He tried to reconstruct a long quotation from Mysers with which he had intended to end his book. It was about materializations; it reminded him suddenly of the bubbles of paraffin drying — inside them the invisible plump and shapely hands of “French Marie”. Why had she suddenly deserted him? And why had he come all the way to Crete to get lost in this hideous labyrinth? Was there a pattern, a design about it all?

Hogarth would have first asked him to question himself as to the dramatic justification for such a situation. He remembered him saying: “We act our inner symbolism outward into the world. In a very real sense we do create to the world around us since we get it to reflect back our inner symbolism at us. Every man carries a little myth-making machine inside him which operates often without him knowing it. Thus you might say that we live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic — since we get exactly what we ask for, no more and no less.”

Fearmax wondered now whether he had “asked for” this damp gloom, these caves with their melancholy sound of water falling, and the blank bottomless silence which drank it all up at last — to the very dregs?

Before he had time to answer it he heard it — that shapeless echoing roar which memory made familiar to him as the voice of the minotaur. He stopped irresolutely. It seemed to come from some distance away. His torch which had been so bright had become all of a sudden very dim — perhaps the damp had affected the cells of the battery. He took a corridor indicated by the slowly-travelling smoke and hurried on a dozen paces. What kind of animal could make a sound like that?

The corridors sloped gently down to a sort of natural rond point from which other corridors jutted, scattering through all the points of the compass. Here the air still vibrated with the passage of the monster’s roaring.

“What is reality?” said Fearmax aloud, and recognized it as one of those questions whose import had troubled him for as long as he could remember. His feet — the same feet that had walked backwards and forwards across the damp pavements of Exeter — what were they doing here? Or was this whole place merely a mad exteriorization of his inner confusion; his feet walking slowly down metaphoric corridors of his own subconscious — in which only the roar of the sleeping monster gave him a clue to his primal guilt? It was a pretty fancy. If he ever got out he would have the pleasure of sharing it with Hogarth. The work of Rank on the symbolic significance of labyrinths, and their connexion with divination by entrails. Olaf’s observations upon the corridors of the Great Pyramid; was it possible that the place he was traversing had been hollowed by the hands of men to suit some occult purpose? That in coming here he had been sent with a purpose: to make his own observations and deductions upon cults and sciences long since dead — or else only preserved in the esoteric forms of alchemy, or the Tarot pack of cards? It was a proposition. His feet had begun to hurt. Fearmax began to talk to himself aloud with complete freedom; it was as if the last barrier between himself as an individual and himself as a personality had been dissolved. He could hear his muffled tones glancing from the archways around him. He blew out a long tape of smoke and watched it slowly quest, like a pointer, until it at last found the right corridor and vanished down it. He followed slowly, cautiously, talking aloud.

“Suppose, then, that all this were simply an apprenticeship.”

“Towards what possible end?”

“A novitiate towards a new degree of self-knowledge.”

“My poor man, you are raving.”

The roar of the minotaur sounded again. “No,” he cried suddenly, apprehensively. His torch had dimmed down to a dim circle of yellow light, incapable of piercing the farther end of the corridor. Fearmax sat on a stone and took another puff at his cigar; of the two corridors facing him one was dearly indicated. The smoke quickened as it was sucked noiselessly into it. Somewhere, vaguely, it was as if he could smell something, something like scent. And yet it was not really a smell, for when he concentrated he could smell nothing beyond the dampness and the smoke of his cigar. Somewhere beyond the shadows, perhaps “French Marie” was waiting. He got up and advanced upon the two corridors that faced him; his smoke dawdled slowly ahead of him. Yet it was from the second, the one down which the smoke had not gone, that he heard the steely vibrations of the minotaur’s voice — a dull jangling like strings out of tune, like dusts being washed backwards and forwards in a confined space.

It was not a question of conscious choice, it was rather as if all activity save this devouring and overmastering curiosity in his mind had been suspended. He turned aside from the smoke and entered the other corridor; it was now that a curious thing happened. He began to feel that it was all a dream — as if he were lost in one of those dreams which confuse our childhood. He felt fear, yes, but at one remove: as if through the clouds of a morphia injection. He was supported now by the vertical clear flame of this overmastering curiosity to know what exactly the minotaur could be. Perhaps it was only one of “French Marie’s” disguises, one of her voices or aspects?

A faint odour seemed to have grown up in the corridor he was traversing; it was somehow unpleasant and yet familiar. His feet began to scrape against objects on the hard stone floor; he picked them up and examined them in the last wavering flicker of his torch before it gave out completely. They were twigs of wood. They broke dryly between ringer and thumb. Was he then moving towards the lair of some animal which carried twigs down into the underworld to line its nest?

He halted for a second to get his breath, wondering whether he should not turn round and retrace his steps; it was however in the same direction that he found himself moving, his feet scraping against twigs and branches, his nostrils full of an odour he had already begun to recognize as that of putrefaction. What was it? He drew several deep breaths of the foul air and suddenly his memory provided him with a clue. Once as a boy he had found a heron’s nest as he was walking across the marshes. The bird was sitting upon a structure of filthy twigs, surrounded by the half-chewed and decomposing remains of its feasts — fragments of fish and gobbets of field-mice. Now it was the same odour of decomposition that he smelt, only greatly magnified. What kind of animal would have so deep a burrow, and live upon carrion? His imagination simply could not supply an answer.

He sat down upon the stone floor and rested his face in his hands, thinking furiously. Somewhere an obstinate thought seemed to divine the presence of “French Marie” behind it all; a nerve of misery and disquiet in himself which could not be quietened without the promise of her. And yet this terrifying odour of rotten flesh filled the close air of the corridor, and he trembled so violently now that it was as much as he could do to control his limbs. His fear seemed to stretch away on either side of him, filling the hollow sinuses of rock, overbrimming them. His breathing had become harsh now and stertorous. Was he about to enter the trance-condition so long denied him? Was he about to hear that window open abruptly in the air above him, and the voice which so long had tantalized him by a half-uttered word, speak?

Even as he was thinking this thought he heard, at the farther end of the corridor, a faint noise — like the dim and paralytic shuffling of some very aged person. He was reminded of the harmless shuffle of carpet slippers across the wooden floors of the museum library. Presently there came a gust of tepid air — as if the displacement of some large body farther down the tunnel had driven it towards him. He called out, and as he did so tasted the impure, fetid breath of the Thing. It moved slowly in his direction — so slowly that the anguish was unbearable. It moved towards him at the speed of ice-crystals forming upon the stalactites, of the ash growing upon his cigar, of the nails growing upon his ten fingers. As yet he could see nothing, but the vague swollen promise of the darkness ahead. His torch lay expiring on the floor beside him.

Then, at last, the immensity of darkness seemed to thicken, to ripen, to swell out towards him and he saw what appeared to him to be a pair of small bloodshot eyes moving towards him. Fearmax put his hands over his face and mentally surrendered himself to it. His lips moved but no sound came from them. He felt himself picked up at last in a soft wet mouth of enormous dimensions and carried, half-senseless, down the long damp corridors of the labyrinth.