The Mask of Zeus

by Desmond Cory

  But it wasn’t Kaya’s Salamis through which he was now walking or even the Salamis of the shady woods and sunny clearings where the picnickers parked their cars and set up their barbecue grills. Dobie, too, had parked his car some little way back where the sand track ended, only to have it vanish from his view before he had taken ten paces down the overgrown footpath that led him in an instant into a tangled wilderness of thorn bushes and spiny burnet, into the garigue that filled the two-mile-wide space between Salamis and the university buildings. Even here, great lumps of roughly dressed stone showed through the twisted branches of the scrub as the pathway he was following twisted this way and that, pursuing the tortuous line of what two thousand years ago might have been a narrow city street. Now the relics of stone foundations and of shattered paving lay under hard-packed sand, mixed in with the humus of centuries and riddled through with tree-roots. The soil was so slippery that Dobie found it difficult to keep his footing and when, some four or five minutes later, he reached what appeared to be the end of the trail he paused for a while and looked about him. He didn’t attempt to get his bearings (since nothing was visible from where he stood except for the encroaching mass of thorny scrub and a pale stretch of evening sky overhead) but waited to give himself time to come to terms with his surroundings and with his own sense of bewilderment. This wasn’t at all what he had expected.

  Apart from anything else, it was stiflingly hot. The density of the thick-leaved vegetation choked off any breath of sea breeze and the stored-up heat of the day seemed to be rising from underfoot, where the splintered building-blocks of a vanished city lay tumbled amongst softer layers of native sandstone, sinking deeper and deeper into the earth. Dobie could see a few traces of a later civilisation, where two or three of these fragmented shards of granite had been pushed together to provide a backing for the ashes of a recent camp-fire and where a couple of used Pepsi cans had been tossed aside into the undergrowth. Otherwise, the site had been left abandoned to the darting sand lizards and the drifting winged insects. Dobie, sweating, wiped his hands carefully with his handkerchief before taking the print-out from his pocket and unfolding it again.

  He could just make out the line of the collapsed pediments that had once supported some kind of aquifer, commencing just to the left of the camp-fire ashes and running southwards to be engulfed almost at once by an advancing wave of spiky-leaved bushes that had smothered the scattered blocks completely before surging over them like a breaking roller. Circumnavigating the bushes clumsily, Dobie found further half-buried traces some thirty paces further on, where the broken stones emerged briefly before sinking irrevocably out of sight into the sand. Crouched down like a playful puppy he edged his way further round the circle, pushing his way at times under the clinging twigs until he had returned to his starting-point. The effort involved cost him a certain amount of muscular strain, some of his convolutions having moved him into positions he had imagined only to be attainable by limbo dancers at the peak of form; he eventually crawled out, perspiring more freely than ever and with his arms and shoulders aching from innumerable nasty prickles. ‘Oh, bother it,’ Dobie said. Or words to that effect. He sat down and lit a cigarette and when he had finished it, he tried again.

  Casting this time a wider circle he did himself more damage with the same result. Wriggling through thickets, he decided, just wasn’t his scene; this was completely different, as was obvious, to a computer search and he wasn’t cut out for it. His body was the wrong shape, for a start. Ideally, to explore this kind of terrain you’d need to be a snake. And there was a self-defeating element inherent in going round in circles, returning each time to the place you’d started from; you began to feel that in pursuing some hypothetical Wizzle you might indeed be chasing yourself, or (worse) that the Wizzle (or possibly Woozle) might not inconceivably be chasing you. Unable to shake off the suspicion that he, the hunter, had somewhere in this twisted wilderness become the hunted, Dobie plodded back to the convenient marker of the camp-fire and surveyed the said wilderness with extreme disfavour. A measuring-tape would have been useful. He didn’t have one. He walked back towards the bushes, counting his paces. Five of them were sufficient to bring him up against a particularly inhospitable patch of needle-pointed briars; a chainsaw, or maybe a flame-thrower, would have been even more useful, but he didn’t have either. Either. The prickly pear or whatever it was at least afforded him shade from the angled sun; Dobie sighed, and sat down heavily on the hard and dusty ground.

  He hadn’t expected what he was looking for to be easy to find – ‘You can’t see the hole for the trees,’ Seymour had warned him, if perhaps inadvertently – but he had certainly expected it to be easier of access. The bloody bushes grew so quickly in this climate. And there again, he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for. A White Rabbit, maybe, with a large watch clasped in one paw. There were rabbits here, certainly; he had encountered evidence of their activities under those bushes and now carried some of that evidence adhering to his trousers. There were birds. You couldn’t see them but you could hear them. There were lizards and my goodness, yes, very probably there were snakes … A nasty thought which fortunately hadn’t occurred to him earlier. And there were flowers, late summer flowers of one kind or another scattered here and there. Carpeted with flowers, Kaya had said, but these were the survivors of the long hot summer. Mostly very small yellow ones. But there were quite large clusters of dark blue ones over where the line of stones sank into the sun and where the lowering sun now cast dark shadows. Snakes and Snarks, Dobie thought tiredly. Maybe the Snark would turn out to be a Boojum after all. Annoying, though, to have got so far and … no further …

  Dark blue flowers with long woody stems and tapering leaves. Dobie stared at them for quite a while. He knew bugger-all about flowers but he could tell a dark blue flower when he saw one. Blue, darkening to black where the shadows touched them. Surely they wouldn’t be …?

  No.

  But they were blue all right.

  He got up and walked over to them. Some were actually growing from crevices in the broken stonework. Some had driven their roots down into the pebble-laden sand. Others had discovered a convenient ditch where the stone foundations of the aqueduct had formed a bulwark against the drifting soil, a ditch some three or four feet deep, matted with decaying humus and with thickly sprouting vegetation, a ditch at one point almost deep and dark enough to be called a crack or anyway a crevice, some kind of natural fault where the night humidity and the spring rains might collect to refresh the deep roots of those dark blue flowers that otherwise had no business to be growing there at all.

  Yes.

  Dobie went back to the car and took the torch from the glove compartment. He no longer needed to ask himself what it was doing there; Derya had clearly been better prepared than Alice when she’d gone down the White Rabbit’s hole. Though in fact, as Dobie discovered when he returned, it wasn’t a hole so much as … a crack, exactly that, a chink in the layer of stonework where the foundation blocks had been pulled a little apart by some earth movement or subsidence, leaving just enough space for him to push inside his head and shoulders. You had to lie down full length in the ditch even to see the crack; entering it was going to be … Dobie sat up again and took off his jacket, rolled it up and thrust it out of sight under the flower stalks. When he switched on the torch, all he could see inside the crack was a mixture of sand and rubble; he guessed that the fault would continue to run along the line of the pediments and so would involve him in a sharp right-hand turn, or more exactly wriggle, but of course he’d have to insert most of his body in order to be sure of that. It wouldn’t be very nice, of course, if the three or four feet of sand above his head then decided to come down on top of him. Another nasty thought. Dobie, by no means an adventurous spirit, vacillated. It was borne in upon him that he was putting himself in very much the kind of situation that Berry Berry had warned him against: alone in the maquis with no chance of summoning help if by any mischa
nce … Better, perhaps, to come back with a spade and open the entrance a little further; a little judicious nibbling at the edges here and there might …

  ‘Come on, Dobie. What are you? A man or a mouse?’

  ‘Eeeek eeeek,’ Dobie said, scrabbling his way forwards into the tunnel. Of course it was easy for Kate to talk. If I were a mouse, he thought, I’d have no trouble at all, I’d be used to this sort of thing. Or even if I were a rabbit. White or otherwise. The crack seemed to get narrower, if anything, as he advanced, leaving him barely elbow-room to move the torch beam round to his right.

  Yes. It was as he’d suspected. Not exactly a tunnel. Just more and deeper darkness. Open space, then. The tricky bit was getting himself round the corner without getting his knees … There. His groping fingers encountered a sudden unexpected coolness, a hard smoothness; not sand underneath them, but stone. A stone slab. Beyond it, emptiness again. But …

  Aha.

  Lower down, another slab, gritty with dust. Dobie pushed himself yet further forwards and, redirecting the torch beam to a steeper angle, found himself peering over the edge of the topmost tread of what appeared to be a flight of stone steps. Turning the torch beam upwards and levering his head back to neck-crick point, he saw stone slabs above him as well with twisted tree-roots thrusting through the interstices. Stairs, then, and some kind of a roof, and the dim shape of a keystone arch. Extraordinary. And also a little reassuring. Not very reassuring. But a little.

  He had room now, it seemed, to shuffle himself forwards on hands and knees. He did so, manoeuvring his long limbs awkwardly down the first few steps and then finding that he could rise comfortably upright … well, upright, anyway, and continue down the steps in a rather more dignified manner. He counted them as he descended. Anyone would have. Eighteen steepish treads, and more of them dimly shown in the torchlight on the far side of the archway. That put him at some fifteen feet underground. Deeper than he liked. He’d do best, perhaps, to stop counting. The co-ordinates given by the print-out indicated an eventual depth of forty feet, something more like a bloody coal mine, at any rate to a man of nervous disposition with a tendency to claustrophobia. Still, the walls to either side of him now felt completely solid – rock solid, in fact, since that was what they were. This passage, or whatever it was, had been dug down into the native island rock, going deeper and deeper into …

  Ugh.

  He continued the descent into Avernus, counting the steps again because he couldn’t help it. Eighteen more, with the passage seeming to turn slightly as he made his way cautiously down it. Why? That wasn’t indicated in the print-out. Probably an illusion, then. You get easily disorientated when you’re deep underground. Easily scared, too. He trailed the palm of his free hand against the left-hand wall as he moved down the final steps, not so much to keep his balance as to gain confidence from that feeling of cool solidity. Not only cool, but moist as well. Wet, in fact. He paused to examine his fingers in the torchlight. They were wet, all right. Water leaking through, then, from the subterranean spring that had to be near at hand, the source that through some primitive but probably effective pumping system had supplied the now bone-dry baths and swimming pools of the Salamis gymnasium. He had reached the foot of the flight of steps anyway. He turned the torch beam this way and that. Not more steps, surely?

  Yes. But much wider ones. Enormous ones, leading to another archway. Incredible. Dobie cast the torch beam, upwards again. The roof seemed to be really high above him now, unless that too was an illusion. Thirty feet or so, at a guess. And he was no longer standing in a passageway but in an open space. Beyond the archway, the floor seemed to be flat and to extend beyond the range of the torch beam.

  He was entering some kind of a room. Or chamber. A burial chamber, maybe? Or a Temple of Doom? Hopelessly miscast as Indiana Jones, Dobie went on swinging the torch beam to and fro. Dithering, as usual.

  ‘For God’s sake, Dobie, don’t just stand there.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Dobie muttered crossly. ‘I know. Pass down the car, please.’ He stumped forwards and on through the archway, still swinging the torch beam about, however, more than was strictly necessary. The walls were a darker colour now, a deeper shade of grey, with an occasional silvery glitter of quartz. And he was no longer moving through a total silence. He could detect a very, very faint trickling sound coming from somewhere. He went through another archway and turned the torch beam downwards and there it was. Right in front of him.

  The Zeus mosaic.

  Blue of the Mediterranean, black of the Cyprian night, other recurrent colours worked into the design, all fresh and glowing brightly in the torchlight. In the centre, the two great naked figures, outstretched, grappling. It wasn’t the sheer size of the thing that Dobie found amazing but the trompe l’oeil effect that, strangely enough, none of the earlier observers had mentioned and which therefore Dobie hadn’t been prepared for: the angling and ingenious perspectiving of the brilliant facets so that what lay, in reality, flat on the floor seemed to be lifted upright like a cinema screen and rendered almost tridimensional while remaining none the less unrealistic, abstract, the mystic figures converted into flesh and blood through a paradox as staggering as Dobie had ever struggled with in the course of his professional career. Those interlocked shapes conveyed a sense of the total intensity of some mental or psychological struggle rather than of physical effort – the struggle perhaps of sanity with lunacy, of the rational human mind with the inconsequence of destiny. That, at least, was how Dobie – an eminently rational being – immediately saw it.

  Though it could, he realised, settling the beam of the torch on the masked face of the uppermost figure, be seen differently. The upshot of this conflict wasn’t after all as obvious as it appeared. The woman, violated, still seemed to be somehow inviolate, as though the mind thus briefly and brutally subjected to the will of a mindless god remained, though totally possessed and willingly surrendered, none the less intact – and even perhaps in some way enhanced by the mutual fury of the embrace. But another person – Seymour, for instance – might have created an alternative picture, have seen the human mind ravished and defeated, dragged down like Persephone deeper and deeper into the Stygian shades. Neither of these images had any special appeal to Dobie, though it seemed obvious to him that only a fool would consider the depiction to be shocking … unless that was the word with which you described the snake-head of the Medusa or the spaces between the whirling galaxies. It was marvellous; for all he could tell, a masterpiece; but it wasn’t what he was really looking for. He moved away with a certain reluctance to run the torch beam again around the grey rock walls. He saw other, narrower archways opening into other and smaller rooms, other chambers. In the second of those chambers, he found them.

  Twenty-six of them, it had to be supposed. Naturally, he didn’t count them. Stone steps are one thing, human bodies are another, especially when in a stage of advanced decomposition. They lay along one bullet-hole-pitted wall in a confused tangle of yellowing bones and dark strips of rotten clothing, more or less (no doubt) as they had fallen. The torch beam began to waver wildly as Dobie swung it to and fro; he felt a taut hot pressure inside his stomach and stepped back to press his forehead for a moment against the rock wall and to close his eyes. ‘It’s all right, Dobie. They’re bones, that’s all. Fossils. Like the ones you see in the museums. There are bones like those in tombs all over Europe. People were living and dying in Salamis for two thousand years. Every step you take, you’re treading on their dust. That’s all they are, Dobie. Dust. It all happened a long, long time ago.’

  ‘I know,’ Dobie said. ‘I know. I know. I know.’

  All very well for a police pathologist. But death, he thought, is like that bloody mosaic. Different people see it in different ways.

  There was another fossil in the next chamber. A mouldering blanket on the floor and the skeleton stretched out upon it, its angled bones resting on scraps of what had once been a red flannel-like fabr
ic – probably a dressing-gown, since the remnants of what had once been its sash seemed to be still identifiable. And so of course was the necklace with the V-shaped pendant that was still looped around what had once, no doubt, been a white and delicate throat. A woman’s leather handbag lay half open by the far wall. It was a minute or two before Dobie felt able to stoop to pick it up: when he did so, his sense of giddiness, of nausea, was even worse than he had expected.

  Something had caught his eye, though, as he had bent over: a small metal object, lying just clear of the disintegrating blanket. A used cartridge case, Dobie thought; there had been dozens of them lying scattered on the floor in the other room. But this one seemed to be longer, much bigger, a different calibre altogether. Instead of stooping to pick it up, he lowered himself carefully down on to his knees, keeping his head stiffly upright. Turning the cartridge case over in his fingers, he saw that it was in fact a lipstick holder, almost emptied. The lipstick that remained inside had turned to a thick black grease, but he could see that it had been used roughly, violently; its tip was flattened out instead of rounded and the thin metal casing itself had buckled to some kind of a jerky pressure. From where he knelt, he had only to raise his eyes a little to see what the lipstick had been used for: uneven streaks, black in the torchlight, ran in a long unbroken line across the far wall just behind the blanket and low down, only some six inches above floor level, a smeared scribbling that was still easily legible although the writer had had to work lying awkwardly on the floor and probably in the dark and quite certainly in frantic haste: