He set off again, past the cavern where the rock had fallen, to where the tunnel forked. When he reached this point Stephen realized that he had no memory of which branch he had come up, the left one or the right. They looked exactly the same, winzes made in coffin level profile, narrow, with arched roofs and the sweeping marks of picks on their walls. One would lead him back to Apsley Sough and the dangling rope, the other into God knew what depths of Big Allen. And if he took the wrong one, would he realize in time to find his way back again?
At school he remembered being told the story of the labyrinth at Knossos and the Minotaur. Theseus in those passages had brought a ball of string and paid it out behind him. Stephen wished he had had the forethought to do the same, for, although there was no risk of his encountering a monster, half-man, half-bull, he had no idea which tunnel to take in order to find his way back.
Were he to lose himself and be unable to find the place where the rope was, no one would ever look for him here. He hadn’t even left his rucksack by the sough which might have indicated where he was and where it was, but had deliberately hidden it under the George Crane Coe, a good quarter of a mile away. He was happy down here under the ground but he didn’t want to die here. He didn’t want to roam the maze of levels until he grew exhausted, his candles burnt down, his torch battery spent, and lie down here to die in the dark …
Moving the torch beam searchingly over the entrances to the two winzes and the tooling marks on their walls, he deliberated over which one to take, the left or the right. If he had had a coin he would have tossed it. He thought, if the matches are in my right-hand pocket I’ll go to the right. His left hand, the free one, went into the pocket on that side and found there only the candle and the saucer. Stephen hesitated no longer but began to make his way down the tunnel on the right-hand side.
* * *
For a long way there was nothing to show him if he was going in the direction of Apsley Sough. The walls of the winze, because of the way they had been tooled three centuries before, had a corrugated appearance. So had the walls of the tunnel he had come along, so had all the coffin levels. He couldn’t remember if the passage he had come along curved as much as this one seemed to, but that was the point, he couldn’t remember. However, he could go back. Very soon the tunnel, if it was the right tunnel, should enter the wider, though scarcely higher, chamber through which he had come into the mine. And here it was now. Powerful as his torch was, it couldn’t illuminate the passage for very far ahead, but now he could clearly see an ending of the tunnel and at the end a broader darkness.
Stephen had never felt very afraid. With so much means of light at his disposal, with a good sense of direction — though it had seemed to let him down a few moments before — it was absurd really to suppose he could get lost or be trapped in the mine. He came to the end of the tunnel, swung his torch up to eye level for a sight of the suspended rope, and saw that though he had come into a chamber it was the wrong chamber. This wasn’t the cavern at the foot of Apsley Sough.
But it wasn’t only this that fetched from him a gasp of astonishment. He had thought of the mine as bare, empty, unchanged, but this wasn’t so. Someone had been there before him, had made of this smallish, vaulted room in the rock a — what? Bedroom? Hiding place? Sanctuary? Wonderingly he played the torch beam across the walls, the floor, into the room’s furthest recesses. It was quite dry up here, without smell, the air fresh. At the far end of the chamber had been a fall, perhaps blocking exits. Between this and a great spur of limestone that jutted out from the wall, placed on the floor on a groundsheet, was an inflatable mattress, inflated, and on it a dark blue sleeping bag, zipped up and rolled. There were some clothes in a pile, a camouflage-pattern padded jacket, an aran sweater very much like one he had once owned himself, a pair of brown cord trousers and a pair in worn and dirty grey tweed. Set on an upturned wooden box were two candles, one hardly used, one a half-burnt stump, stuck in the necks of milk bottles.
These things were by no means all the chamber contained. Stephen, who had stood for some moments at the end of the passage simply staring in, now stepped across the sacks which provided a rough carpet and lit both the candles. They made an eerie flare, sending up enormous shadows of themselves on to the walls. He looked round him slowly and with wonder. Whoever lived here, camped here, had provided himself with food and drink. In a cardboard box that had once contained two dozen cans of loganberries were a packet of biscuits, two tins of corned beef, a jar of pickled onions and four cans of beer still linked together in their plastic sling. Stephen squatted down to examine it all. In another box he found a small kettle and a can opener, in a plastic carrier dried milk and teabags and pieces of cutlery.
There was one more item of furnishing in the chamber, on the farther side of the spur of rock and half concealed by it. This was another cardboard grocer’s box, its lid of four flaps closed by folding the four separate pieces under and over each other. Stephen wondered if it contained pans for cooking or possibly more clothes. It intrigued him that the top of this box should have been so carefully closed while the others were left open. He lifted it but it felt very light.
There must have been strong currents of air in the chamber, for the candles constantly guttered and flared. Sometimes the light jumped and ran up to the roof. Stephen undid the flaps on the cardboard box. Inside, in a loose nest of pink tissue paper, was a mass of small, essentially feminine objects, a hairslide, an eyebrow pencil, a black and white plastic bracelet, a perfume phial, a crumpled handkerchief initialled A, a tissue with lipstick on it, a tasselled pencil. There came from these things a cashew-like, powdery scent, very strange down here under the earth.
Beneath the objects were more layers of pink paper, and under the paper lay two smooth hanks of shining hair, each a headful of hair cut off close to the scalp. One was a gleaming white-gold, the other of a darker corn colour, and each was carefully coiled in its bed like a sleeping snake.
10
So there was a Minotaur here, after all, a monster, half-man, half-animal, who inhabited this maze. The images of the candle flames and the arcs of light from them shuddered. It was as if someone had come into the chamber to move the air and the shadows. Stephen jumped, his heart racing, but there was no one there, there was nothing but the bed and the tins of food and the things in the box.
He looked at the two coils of hair. Cautiously he put out his hand and lightly touched them. Then he lifted out the paler blonde hair and held it in his hands. Was this Marianne Price’s or Ann Morgan’s? He had no way of knowing, just as he had no way of knowing which items in the pink tissue paper belonged to which girl except for the handkerchief with A on it. When, almost reluctantly, he had put the hair back and had closed the lid of the box again, he looked around the chamber for the knife or scissors which the man must have used, but he found nothing. It was going to be something to tell the police, all this, a gift of evidence as would rarely come their way. Stephen thought of Malm’s face when he coolly informed him of what he had found and of the respect even Troth would have to accord him now.