Steph Bennion - Paw-Prints of the Gods

He lifted a cautious finger to the cross and found it was indeed white chalk. With a casual sweep of his jacket sleeve the mark was gone. This was his moment in history and he wanted nothing to suggest otherwise.

“This is my discovery,” he murmured. “Mine!”

“The past belongs to all, I think you said,” a small voice replied.

Cadmus froze. For a moment he thought he saw a small furry shape sitting on the floor ahead, then in a blink of an eye it was gone.

“Hello?” he called, his voice wavering. “Is anyone there?”

Silence greeted him like a heavy shroud.

“Anyone?”

There was no reply. Taking a deep breath, Cadmus swept the beam of his lamp down the empty tunnel before him and behind, then hesitantly walked onwards down the left-hand passage. He tried hard to convince himself that the silence and cloying darkness was playing tricks with his mind. Yet he was sure the voice had not been in his head.

A short while later the passage veered again to the right, after which there was an identical stretch of tunnel that ended in another sharp left and a split into parallel passages, the right-hand one once again sloping down. When he looked for a chalk mark, he found it in the left-hand passage as before, reinforcing the idea he was following in someone else’s footsteps. After hearing the strange voice, it was not a comforting thought.

He was beginning to understand the layout of the star chamber. He knew from aerial scans that the shape buried beneath the desert was a huge six-pointed star. It seemed he was moving clockwise within the outer wall, with every sixty-degree turn to the left followed by a hundred-and-twenty-degree turn to the right. As he followed the left-hand passage onwards, this deduction continued to prove true and two turns later he found himself at a sharp bend where again the passage split. Here he found another white cross, this time in the right-hand passage that descended into a darkness that felt thicker than ever. Pausing only to wipe the mark from the wall, he continued on his way.

Once again a familiar pattern emerged of gentle left turns followed by sharp turns to the right, though the gap between corners was shorter than before. Despite the sloping passages, the ceiling level remained unchanged and was now twice as high as in the earlier tunnels. Every sharp right-hand bend had the same parallel split as before, all marked with ever-familiar chalk marks that he removed as quickly as he found them. With each half-turn around the perimeter, the white crosses directed him to a deeper and more compact level. It dawned upon Cadmus that the labyrinth was a concentric set of star-shaped passages, linked together in a slow spiral to whatever lay deep at its centre.

After the twelfth cross Cadmus felt weary and subdued. The cloying darkness was making him hallucinate and on more than one occasion he was convinced he heard the patter of paws and a distant yet plaintive yowl of a cat. He had been in the chamber for almost three hours and was now so far underground that the light of his lantern no longer reached the ceiling. The narrow passage was nevertheless claustrophobic.

“My dear Professor Cadmus,” came a voice. “I think maybe you’re in too deep.”

Cadmus came to an abrupt stop and fearfully looked around into the darkness.

“Who are you?” he cried through his mask. “Where are you?”

A grey tabby cat ambled from the shadows. The professor stared at the apparition in disbelief, his mind doing somersaults. The cat regarded him solemnly, its yellow eyes glowing in the light of the lantern, then turned away to lick its fur.

“No pets are allowed on site,” Cadmus reassured himself. “Cats do not talk. Therefore, the creature sat in front of me washing itself is clearly a figment of my imagination.”

The cat paused in its ablutions and gave him a hard stare. All of a sudden, the four-legged phantom leapt dreamlike from the floor and promptly metamorphosed into a tall, raven-haired woman, dressed in a floor-length coat of silver and black fur. Cadmus gave a whimper and stepped back, fearful for his sanity. There was a god-like air to her that was both incredibly beautiful and unspeakably cruel, as if she would quite happily stab him to death with a hairbrush. The woman took a step forward, leaned casually against the wall and regarded the professor with a weary gaze. He was not surprised to see that within each yellow iris her pupils were dark vertical slits.

“You have no imagination,” she purred. “You profess to be an academic but you’re nothing more than a feeble-minded bureaucrat, just one more pawn in the great game. Do you really know why you are here, deep down in this forgotten hole in the ground?”

Cadmus took another step back. “Who are you?”

“Some things are best left buried,” she told him. “You don’t have to be one of them.”

“What?”

“Turn around!” she said, sounding impatient. Her accent, together with her olive complexion, made Cadmus wonder if she was Greek. “Go back! You’re almost out of oxygen. Do you really want to die down here?”

Cadmus glanced at the eye-level digital display of his mask. He had used almost three quarters of the contents of the tank.

“The chamber is open to the dome,” he replied, wondering why he was bothering to have a conversation with a mirage, even one remarkably informed. “The life-support plant will eventually fill the whole labyrinth with air.”

“Whatever,” she snapped. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

Abruptly, the figure was gone. Cadmus stared into the darkness, breathing heavily into his mask and wondering if he really had just been talking to a woman who was maybe also a cat. Yet the dust upon the floor was undisturbed and there was no sign that anyone or anything had been in the passage with him. Eventually, his breathing became more regular. He pushed the strange warning into the back of his mind and stepped forward once more.

The distance between corners was now barely a dozen strides. The passage no longer split away to a lower level and his spirits rose with the thought he was near his goal. The third sharp bend on that level was indeed the last, for beyond the final chalk mark the tunnel curved gracefully into a tall archway that opened into the inky void at the heart of the labyrinth. Cadmus slowly turned to the arch, placed a foot upon the final slope and raised his lantern to the mouth of the pitch-black cavern beyond.

“Oh my word,” he breathed. “Incredible!”

The arch opened into a cathedral-like chamber some twenty metres across that rose into a dizzying darkness far above. The star-shaped ground plan remained, for in the light of his lantern he could see five triangular alcoves ascending like huge grooves to the distant ceiling, with the arch opening into the sixth. Yet all of this received a mere glance. Before him lay a tableau that baffled his archaeologist’s eye.

In the centre of the chamber sat a huge egg-shaped cocoon. It was at least three metres tall with dull green skin, an oval aperture that gave a tantalising glimpse into a dark interior and multiple-jointed spindly legs that sprouted from the top and folded to the floor. The cocoon lay partly-submerged in a dark pool of what looked like oil, which in turn was surrounded by a ring of twelve grey rods that rose to waist height. A narrow tongue extruded from beneath the oval opening and formed a bridge to the solid ground beyond the pool. The bizarre, multi-legged monstrosity looked like the work of a crazed taxidermist who had taken pieces of a giant insect statue and reassembled them into a surreal playhouse for the deranged. The mottled pattern upon its skin suggested a biological origin, but if it had ever been a creature of flesh and blood Cadmus was fairly sure it had breathed its last aeons ago. The archaeologist in him knew he had done wrong to expose the chamber to air, for the lack of oxygen would have preserved it well.