The Lost Labyrinth

THIRTY-FOUR
I

Gaille dragged the armchair back against the wall, then pulled the rug aside. And there it was, a wooden trap-door embedded in the cement. The wood had warped and swollen over the years, so that she had to give the rope handle a hard tug to open it on its hinges. It threw up a soft fog of dust and detritus as it came, then released a gentle but reassuringly vinegary aroma.

She rested the trapdoor all the way on its back and looked down the narrow flight of steep bare steps, cobwebs and motes of dust and gloomy shadows at the bottom vanishing into pure darkness. Something scuttled. A rodent in the basement or a bird upon the roof; she knew which she'd prefer. She shook her head at her hesitation. The house had electric lights powered by the solar cells: presumably the basement did too, though she couldn't see any from here. She made her way down, one step at a time, her palms pressed against the cold rough walls on either side. There was a corridor leading to her right at the foot of the stairs, going back along the spine of the house, and there were three doors leading from it, two to Gaille's left, one to her right. She tried the first left-hand one, fumbling in the darkness until her wrist touched a string that she grabbed and pulled. A single dangling bulb came alight, revealing a small room with a plumbed-in sink and wooden tables against two of its walls. An enlarger stood on one of the tables, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of a darkroom: colour-coded developing trays and tanks, an assortment of light filters, chemical containers, tongs, thermometers, a magnifying glass, boxes of photographic paper. Three lengths of washing-line cord were strung from wall to wall, fitted with clips for hanging photographs up to dry, though there weren't any there at the moment.

She went back out and through the second left-hand door, found the light-switch. It was a little larger than the first room, and also fitted with a sink, as well as a worktable and a desk and chair too. Beakers, flasks and test tubes lounged indolently in wooden racks. A kaleidoscope of chemicals in glass jars stood on the shelves. And she noted a gas burner too, an oven and digital scales and filters and what looked to her laywoman's eye like a centrifuge. A home chemistry lab.

Photographs were pinned or taped against the walls, new ones put up wherever there'd been gaps, so that their corners overlapped, enabling Gaille to deduce the order in which they had been put up, like stratification in an archaeological dig. Some had been there years, to judge from their fading homogeneous greys and the crackled yellow of the sticky tape from which all adhesiveness had long-since gone, so that it clung to the wall by mere force of habit.

Each photograph depicted a different plant or fungus, some in the wild, others in Petitier's greenhouse, or harvested and in his kitchen. Many of them had handwritten notes attached with a paperclip, instructions on preparation along with scrawled additional information on dosages, experiences and antidotes.

There was a shelf of books, too. A directory of psychoactive mushrooms; a pamphlet on African ethnobotany. Pagan shamanistic cults. Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. Wasson. Ruck. Other half-familiar names. She pulled out and flipped through a field guide to hallucinogens, stopped at an evocative watercolour of myristica fragrans, then again at a gorgeous picture of galbulimima Belgraveana, a dream-inducing narcotic used by native Papuans.

She went back out and through the facing door into the third room. It was significantly larger, this one, with multiple lights. Most of it was given over to metal shelving on which stood grey archival boxes and racks of folders, dates going back well over a decade written on their outside edges, along with some of Petitier's incomprehensible hieroglyphics. She opened one up at random, found four seal-stone fragments inside, each individually wrapped in tissue paper, each inscribed with Linear A symbols. She returned the box to its place, continued along the shelves, pulling out another every couple of paces: shards of painted pottery decorated with plants and wildlife; a crude earthenware figurine of a heavily pregnant woman; a small but exquisite polychrome vase; fragments of marble and other stoneware; a bronze dagger with designs wrought upon both blade and handle.

She took this last to the work-table, where the light was better. Her hands trembled a little as she turned it around, her thrill at all these treasures spiced with anger that Petitier had kept them to himself. A dozen or so photographs were pinned in a snaking pattern to the wall above the table. Each was taken outdoors, each showed a different slab of rock, and each rock had at least two symbols chiselled into it. She remembered the symbols she'd seen herself, atop the escarpment. She looked for them among the photographs, and there they were. A thought came to her: she hobbled upstairs for the replica Phaistos disc on Petitier's desk, brought it back down. Yes. The symbols on it were similar to those in the photographs, though they formed different clusters. But then she turned it over and felt shivers scurry up her spine.