Kate Mosse - Labyrinth

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.