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.