It got very dark very quickly, to the point that the phones’ screens became almost unbearably bright, and they couldn’t look directly at them because it ruined their night vision for a few minutes afterwards. This brightness, however, was only an illusion, as the phones didn’t manage to penetrate more than a few feet into the gloom, and so it was virtually impossible for them to plan where they were going, or remember where they’d been. They kept close together, creeping guardedly along, round corners and along hedgerows that seemed to get narrower and narrower. Finally, they rounded a corner and were confronted with a dead end.
“Back we go,” muttered Paul. “What do you reckon, shall we go straight ahead this time?”
They’d taken a left at the last junction, which had been a three-way split: paths led off it left, right and straight ahead, and then curved gently around to the left. Or at least, they’d assumed the other two had curved round in the same way the left fork had done.
“Hmm,” Susan mused. “Think about it logically. This one seemed to be bearing left all the time, and the curve got tighter and tighter. Therefore, I think we’re in the middle of a big spiral. If we go out of here and head straight on instead, that way could also go into the spiral, or it could lead into the path that went right. I think we should go further back and find one of the other junctions we went past.”
They were keeping their voices low as they retraced their steps back to the crossroads. Suddenly, Paul held up his hand, and they both listened.
From somewhere over to their left came the muffled sounds of an argument, conducted at a level which suggested the arguers didn’t think they could be overhead. They were moving in roughly the same direction as Susan and Paul.
“This ‘ole fackin’ operation was a bodge from the start, Thimble, and you know it.”
“Fuck off, Kel. I’ve done my bit, I ain’t buggered up nuffin.”
“I knew you was the wrong choice. Too bloody loyal, that’s your problem. If we’d’ve known he was gonna end up dead –“
“I din’t kill ‘im!” spluttered Thimble. “We both know ‘oo did.”
“Ain’t sayin’ yer did kill ‘im,” Kel replied gruffly, “but you could’ve stopped it, if you‘d stood up for yerself a bit more. Anyway, what’s done is done.”
“I ain’t ‘appy,” Thimble said bitterly, “but what can we do about it.”
“All I’m sayin’,” said Kel in a deliberate tone, “is that I fought you knew the way through this bloody maze.”
“An’ I do,” Thimble retorted. “I must’ve bin from one end to the uvver an ‘undred times. But just not in the dark. I’ll get us there, it’ll just take a bit longer’n usual, is all.”
“You din’t even bring a torch.”
“Din’t fink I’d need one, did I? Din’t fink you’d’ve bin bovvered abaht the woman findin’ the wine cellar. Which is all it is, like I said,” he added, “a wine cellar. We wouldn’t even ‘ave to be ‘ere now, if you weren’t so bloody paranoid abaht it.”
The other man snorted derisively. “Don’t pretend like there’s no time limit,” he shot back, “and there ‘as bin, now, for weeks. If ‘e ‘adn’t’ve died, we could’ve carried on like there was no problem. But now, ‘s only a matter of time before the ‘ole place gets divided up an’ sold off. So I ain’t bein’ paranoid, ‘specially not now they’ve found one bit of the cellar. That ain’t gonna stop ‘em ‘til they’ve blown the lid off the ‘ole thing, an’ then we won’t even be able to get in this way.”
They continued in silence. Three hedgerows away, Paul and Susan turned a corner and found themselves back where they’d started, next to the entrance.
“Shit,” Susan cursed, and then had an idea. “Have you got internet access on your phone?”
“Yes, why?”
“This maze is probably big enough to show up on Google Maps, isn’t it? We could see what it looks like from space, and then follow the path round like that.”
A big grin spread across Paul’s face. “Now that is what the internet was made for,” he said, and fiddled about with his phone for a few minutes until a small aerial photograph of the gardens appeared on the screen. He zoomed in on the maze, and they could see that it was roughly triangular, with an entrance at one corner and an oval space in the middle with some kind of building in it.
“Come on,” Paul said, “let’s do it on the hoof.”
They jogged along a long path that ran round the edge of the maze, ending suddenly and presenting the mazee with two choices: hairpin back, or take a left. Paul scrutinised the map on his phone for a moment or two, and decided on the hairpin, and they were off again. The voices of Kel and Thimble had faded away now and become indistinct, and Susan felt they must have found the right way and be heading towards the centre. She tried to run as quietly as she could, though, in case the other two were still blundering around: it wouldn’t be a good thing at this stage if they ran into them.
All of a sudden, Paul slowed down and held out his hand for Susan to stop. He indicated on the screen where they were, somewhere about halfway in between the entrance and the middle. Susan listened, straining to hear whatever she could, and then heard the crack of a twig.
All was still, deadly silent. The crack sounded like it had come from the next pathway, just over the hedge on their right. She couldn’t hear the two men talking any more, and they seemed to be holding their breath too, possibly aware that they were being followed. Paul put his finger to his lips, and pointed through the hedge; Susan nodded. Instinctively, they both crept back into the murkier pools of darkness next to the hedge on the other side of their pathway, trying to make as little noise as possible, and waited.
There were the muffled sounds of movement from the other side of the hedge. It was clear to them both now that whatever Thimble and Kel had felt before about not being followed, they were now suspicious, guarded. Nothing happened for a full minute, and then they heard the sound of footsteps creeping off to their right, going away from them.
Susan carefully let out her breath, in a controlled way so as not to make any noise.
“That was close,” she breathed into Paul’s ear. He nodded. He’d pressed the phone to his chest when they were trying to avoid being heard, to mask the small amount of light that spilled out from it, but now he pressed a button on it to make the screen come on again. He formed a shade with his cupped hand over the top of the screen to try to limit any light getting anywhere it shouldn’t, and showed it to Susan.
“I think they were there,” he breathed, so quietly that she had to strain to hear him, and indicated the next row along. “They’re heading straight for that blobby thing in the middle, looks like a building. So are we.”
She nodded.
“I think we’ve got two options,” he continued. “We either follow them at a distance, maybe five minutes behind, and count on the building not being locked when we get there – I’m assuming it’s connected to a tunnel or something. Or, we catch them up, and try to overpower them.”
Susan looked at him, bathed in the cold glow of his phone screen. “You’re not a hard-boiled private eye,” she whispered, “and I’m not much of a femme fatale. So I think we should go with the first option.”
He nodded, and they padded towards the end of the hedgerow where it made a hairpin turn into the row where Thimble and Kel had stood a few minutes before. Peering cautiously round it to check the coast was clear, which it was, he motioned for Susan to follow him. He checked the map on the phone: they were about three rows out from the building in the middle, but tracing the line of the path round it seemed that the path they were taking would lead away from the centre before it lead back towards it. He suddenly noticed something he hadn’t seen before, and tried to zoom in for a closer look, but the map was already zoomed in as far as it would go.
“Look at that,” he whispered, passing the phone to Susan. “What do you think it is?”
She stared at it for a moment or two. “It looks like a bridge.”
“I think so too,” Paul said quietly. “We’d better be careful.”
They carried on, past a couple of blind turns and navigating three or four more crossroads and T-junctions, until Paul judged that they must be coming up to the straight section of path over which the bridge crossed. It appeared, from the fuzzy image on his phone screen, that the bridge was their final obstacle, leading straight to the building in the middle, which would explain why at first glance it had looked oddly asymmetric. Now he looked at it more closely, he could see it appeared to be two structures: the bridge, and a round building in the middle of the oval clearing at the centre. With a jolt, he suddenly realised that the maze was built to look like a gigantic All-Seeing Eye, the triangular symbol on a dollar bill with an eye in the middle of it.
They moved stealthily around the corner and saw the bridge, straddling the path, and suddenly noticed two shadowy figures crossing it. They instantly retreated back around the corner, slightly shocked.
“Do you think they saw us?” Susan breathed.
“I hope not,” Paul whispered. “Although there’s not a lot we can do if they did.”
He peeked around the corner, saw the second of the two figures move down the steps leading from the bridge into the central oval area, and tiptoed forward. The moon was directly in front of them, fully illuminating the pathway over which the bridge crossed and leaving no hiding spaces: if either of the men decided to walk back up the steps onto the bridge while they were in the corridor below it, they’d be seen. Running, however, probably wasn’t a good idea, because of the crackly leaves and twigs underfoot, so they walked as briskly but quietly as they could towards the bridge and the kink at the end of the corridor.
Paul kept his head down, studying what he could see of the terrain ahead to avoid stepping on anything noisy, but Susan, a couple of paces behind him, was paying more attention to the bridge. There was a creak, and she tapped him on the shoulder; he popped his phone into his pocket and looked up at the bridge, but saw nothing. Another creaking noise, the kind made by a foot on a wooden step.
“Fuck it,” muttered Paul, and the two of them broke into a run, hurtling towards the bridge as fast as they could. They reached it just as one of the men came into view, looking up and down the corridor suspiciously.
“See anyfink?” growled the other, from the central area. It sounded like Kel.
“Nah,” said Thimble. “Must’ve been a fox, or summink.”
From where they cowered under the bridge, Susan thought: What’s he talking about – he must have seen us –
Thimble looked up and down the corridor, but saw nothing. He turned to Kel. “Plenty o’ wildlife round ‘ere, y’know.”
Kel looked at him suspiciously, but said nothing.
“Go an’ ‘ave a look yerself, if yer don’t believe me,” Thimble offered.
“Nah, yer all right,” grunted the other. “If there’s anyone followin’ us, we’ll know as soon as they get in anyway. We got more important fings to do that worry abaht that.”
He turned to the pagoda, a hexagonal structure about twelve feet across with a door in it. “Got the code?”
“Yeah,” Thimble said, fishing a scrap of paper out of his pocket. “’Ere, I wrote it dahn.”
He crossed to the door, next to which was a numeric keypad, and keyed in the code from the slip of paper. There was a click, and he pushed the door open.
“After you,” he said, letting Kel through first. “I gotta check it’s shut prop’ly, see –“
The door clicked shut. All was silent for a few minutes, and then Susan and Paul creaked up the steps, across the bridge and down the other side into the oval, still moving cautiously in case there was anyone around. When it was clear that there wasn’t, Paul pulled out his phone again.
“I reckon –“ Susan began, but Paul had noticed something. Bending down, he picked up a scrap of paper from where it had fallen next to the door, and shone the phone’s weak light on it. The numbers 102929 showed up clearly.
“I don’t like this,” Susan whispered. “Something’s not right about this at all, it feels like we’re walking into a trap.”
“Then we go carefully,” Paul murmured in reply, and went to the door. He punched in the code, and there was a click as it unlocked.
They looked at each other.
“Normally I’d say ladies first,” Paul said, “but I suppose I got us into this mess, so –“
The two of them entered the pagoda, and the door swung shut behind them with a soft, menacing click.
No comments:
Post a Comment