Susan looked at Paul, shrugged, and started slowly down the steps. He followed a few paces behind, in case she had to suddenly turn and run, and together they descended, winding round two full revolutions before they got to the bottom.
Ahead of them, a long brickwork tunnel stretched away into the distance, dimly lit at intervals by fluorescent tubes. It looked in cross-section like a sagged circle, with a broadly rounded ceiling which came down on each side to meet the floor in a languid curve. Every twenty yards or so, symmetrical tunnels on opposite sides joined on to it, leading off into the darkness, and there were a few metal locker cabinets along the length of the side, their bases a couple of feet away from the wall and their tops, at the back, scraping it. The tunnel was deserted, and there didn’t appear to be a sound. They looked at each other nervously.
“If we meet anyone,” Susan said quietly, “you know we’re really fucked.”
Paul nodded. The whole construction had evidently been designed for exactly that purpose: to escape, you’d have to race up the spiral staircase as fast as you could, then grapple with the locked door at the top, get over the wooden bridge, and then navigate your way round the maze – by which time, Opocapopopoulos would have had the opportunity to have a platoon of whatever sort of people waiting for you that he wanted you to meet.
She padded over to the nearest smaller tunnel that lead off the one they were in, and peered carefully round it. It wasn’t lit as well as the main tunnel, and she couldn’t see far down it, but from what she could see it wasn’t very long. Its sides were straight rather than curved, and its walls appeared to be lined with row upon row of lockable cupboards, all the same size, and all numbered. She looked at the numbers, which started at 000001 and went – she scanned them, trying to find the highest one she could – up to 000191 or beyond. Glancing down the main tunnel again, she counted the offshoots; there were more than thirty that she could see.
Paul approached her. “What do you think we should do?” he asked in an undertone. “Forwards?”
“I don’t see what else we can do,” Susan said. “If they know they’re being followed and are lying in wait up ahead somewhere, there’s not much we can do about it. If they think they’re not being, then we might still have a chance though. What’s in these lockers?”
She bent down and examined the nearest metal lockers, looking for something – anything – with which they could defend themselves if attacked. Most of them were, predictably, locked, but a few minutes of trying all the doors they could find yielded one that hadn’t been. Inside it was a mouldy sandwich, a pair of scruffy boots and a large torch, the kind that are about eighteen inches long and which you hold near the front in a fist above your head, so you can hit someone with the back end if you need to.
“Eww,” Susan whispered, referring to the sandwich. “This’ll do, though. You have it.”
She passed the torch to Paul, carefully closed the locker door, and they started off down the tunnel. It was disorientating at first, as its features were so regular: it reminded Susan of one of those Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom’s chasing Jerry down a hallway with a door, a small table with a plant pot on it, a broom, and then a door, another small table with a plant pot on it, and another broom. She had to keep looking back at the spiral staircase at the end to remind herself how far they had come, and she noticed, too, how the tunnel wasn’t actually as straight as it had first appeared, but instead curved in a slightly irregular way as if it had been built a long time ago and then subsided. The floor was smooth enough so that if you stood at one end and dropped a large marble on it, it would have rolled in a somewhat drunken way towards the tunnel’s midpoint, stopped, and then lazily drifted to the right, finally settling in a small pile of dust next to another set of lockers.
Paul, a few paces ahead of Susan, was by now wishing he’d never decided to follow the four men, who had become two men, and who were now two men they knew the names of but who seemed to be up to no good. He was also rather unsettled by the way that Thimble and Kel didn’t seem too ruffled by the thought that they could be being followed – they must have seen them pass on the golf buggy, and even if for some reason they hadn’t, surely their suspicions must have been raised by the noises they’d heard in the maze? The whole thing was rather odd. Why, for example, had Thimble not noticed that he’d dropped the piece of paper with the entrance code on it?
His thoughts were running thus, when Susan suddenly grabbed his elbow and pulled him into the nearest alcove. They retreated into the darkness, pressing themselves against the lockers (Susan noted that the numbers here went from about 001540 to 001720) and waited, while the distant high whine of an electric motor became louder as it approached. They stayed absolutely motionless as another electric golf buggy similar to the one they’d borrowed whooshed past, driven by someone dressed in overalls. It had a pickup-truck-style open-topped back, in which were a stacked a number of large cardboard boxes which were all neatly labelled, and as Paul risked a careful peek around the corner to watch the buggy as it carried on away from them, it slowed and turned into one of the corridors leading off the main tunnel. He waited until it was out of sight.
“That might be coming back,” he hissed at Susan. “We’ve got to move.”
She nodded. They ran out of the corridor they’d been hiding in, and keeping as close as they could to the tunnel walls – not that it would help much, as there was no cover they could use apart from the lockers, if they were spotted – they scampered along the tunnel, looking in each smaller corridor as they passed it in case it led anywhere. About twenty yards on, Paul stopped and ducked into one of the alleyways; Susan followed him, and saw that he’d seen a door at the far end. She could hear the whine of the golf buggy as it whirred back towards them, and scrabbled about in her bag for something they could use to try to get the door open with. Paul took a more direct route, and grabbed the door handle. The door was locked, and he cursed under his breath as the golf buggy’s motor noise became louder and louder until it seemed to fill his entire head. Susan found a credit card in her purse, slipped it down the crack between the door and the frame, and somehow managed to wiggle it in just the right way so that the door opened and they tumbled through, slamming it quickly shut behind them, seconds before the golf buggy passed where they had just been standing.
“That was good,” Paul said, surprised. “Where did you learn to pick a lock like that?”
“That subscription you bought me, remember? The one to Total Burglar magazine. I learned a lot, but never thought I’d use it.”
The corridor they were standing in felt a lot damper than the tunnel, and wasn’t lit. Paul produced his phone again and shone a small pool of light from its screen, and they could see bare, exposed brickwork, a small amount of mildew on the upper portions of the walls, and a flagstone floor. It was difficult to tell how long it was; Paul felt as if they were back in the maze again, as the feeble light from his phone seemed to be beaten back by the darkness.
“This looks too old,” Susan frowned. “I thought the house was only built about twenty years ago?”
“It was,” Paul replied. “You’re right, though. This looks Victorian. Well, you should know.”
“Unfortunately my MA doesn’t cover architecture,” Susan said ruefully. “If I’d known we might end up here, I’d have chosen a different subject.”
“Where does this go to?” Paul wondered out loud, walking a few paces into the corridor. “It looks like catacombs or something.”
Susan remembered something she’d stumbled across in her research, which had concerned an eccentric English aristocrat who’d been so shy, or just plain weird, that he’d constructed a series of underground tunnels linking his family home with the local railway station so that when he had to go somewhere he didn’t have to run into any servants. These tunnels obviously hadn’t been built recently, so why were they here, and what were they left over from?
“Hang on,” she said to Paul. “Have you still got that map on your phone?”
Paul pressed a few buttons, brought the map up again and handed it to Susan. “Why?”
“Well, look,” Susan said, moving the image so that the maze was on one side of the screen and east side of the house could just be seen on the other. “We went in here,” she indicated the tiny blob in the middle of the triangle, “and here’s the house. I think that must be the moat, it looks about wide enough. How far down the tunnel do you think we are?”
Paul looked back at the door they’d come in through, as if that would help him calculate. “About fifty yards?” he hazarded. “I think this is the eighth corridor on the left. Why?”
“Well, I’m trying to work out roughly where we’d be if we were above ground,” Susan explained. “I think the distance between the middle of the maze and the house, once you’ve got under the moat, is about two hundred feet, or three chains. Or almost a third of a furlong.”
“Right.”
“So I reckon that since the moat is about twenty-five feet across, that makes it roughly a hundred and seventy-five feet from the pagoda at the centre of the maze to the edge of the moat. We’ve gone about a hundred and fifty feet, so there can’t be much further to go before we start getting underneath the house.”
“And then what?”
“You tell me,” she said, handing back his phone. “It wasn’t my idea to come out here, I’d’ve been just as happy watching the indie bands in the pub.”
Paul let out a frustrated huff. “We’re not prepared for this,” he said, “at all. Is it worth going back while we still can, and coming out again tomorrow?”
“And doing what? Storming the place? We don’t even know what’s going on here.”
“No, but that’s what I want to find out, and I think we should have come better prepared. Maps, you know. Hey,” he suddenly remembered, “did you ever get a call from that Meredith woman?”
“No, I don’t think I did,” Susan said. “I’m in two minds about that, actually.”
“Look,” Paul interrupted, “should we walk and talk?”
They quietly opened the door, checked they weren’t being watched, and slipped out into the tunnel. They had to dodge a couple more golf buggies delivering their unidentified loads into the side tunnels, but within about five minutes they had climbed the spiral staircase again and were standing in the pagoda.
“Right,” said Susan. “Plan of action, then. First, the cabinets. I don’t know if I really want anyone else to get their hands on them, actually. I’m becoming quite attached to them.”
“Fine,” Paul said, as they made their way out of the pagoda and over the bridge. “Where are you going to put them, then?”
As they talked, from an unlit fourth-floor window high above the moat, Filimore Thimble watched them thread their way back through the maze, a brooding look on his face.
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