It took my pulse rate some time to return to normal. Nausea roiled in my belly.
“I think,” I said, “that my phobias about dogs and snakes have been surpassed by a new one. If I never see another scorpion again, it will be too soon.”
“A sentiment I am sure the demigod Orion would have shared in his dying moments,” said Dr Pentecost, “as the venom of the giant scorpion sent by Artemis to slay him coursed through his veins and stopped his heart. Gentlemen, once again you have acquitted yourself impressively. Pray carry on through the labyrinth. The fourth test awaits.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
MOTIONLESS
“Gracious me, Holmes,” I said as we arrived at the door to the next chamber. “That hand of yours…”
The base of his thumb was twice the size it ought to be, and the distension was of an angry red hue.
“Pay it no heed, Watson. I am paying it none myself.”
“Let me know should you experience any of these symptoms: dizziness, shortness of breath, blurred vision.”
“Do not mollycoddle me. The pain is disagreeable, I cannot deny, but no worse than a severe bee sting. If I do not die from this, then if nothing else I will know that I need not alter my plans to pursue apiary in my retirement.”
It was a feeble quip, we both knew it, yet I chortled as though it were the funniest thing I had heard in a long time. In many ways it was.
“Enter now,” said Dr Pentecost. “You will find this test the most challenging of all and, by the same token, the least.”
“Dr Pentecost,” I said hotly, “when we get out of this, you will pay for what you have put us through. You will pay for the abuses you inflicted upon Hannah. You will pay, above all, for whatever you did to ensure that Sophia Tompkins did not escape the labyrinth alive.”
“Brave talk, Doctor, but you should really concentrate on escaping it yourself. Anything else is otiose.”
The chamber was cylindrical, like a large, squat barrel. Positioned around its circumference at regular intervals were what appeared to be alcoves. The exit door stood ahead, opposite. Holmes and I trod forward, tense and wary, braced for the inevitable hazard to present itself. The very absence of an obvious trap led me to think that it was only a matter of time before we sprang one. What would be the menace this time? A ravenous tiger perhaps? Jets of flame? Some form of poison gas?
In the event, as we gained the centre of the chamber, the floor gave an abrupt lurch beneath us. The unexpected movement caught us off-guard, causing us to stagger.
Then, from all around, came sounds of ratcheting and whirring. As one, the alcoves became apertures. The backs of them opened like curtains parting, and from the holes thus revealed, crossbows emerged. The weapons thrust outward on armatures, the mechanism that caused this also drawing their strings at the same time by means of a complex system of cams and pulleys.
Suddenly Holmes and I were surrounded by a bristling array of steel-tipped crossbow bolts, all trained straight at us and primed to fly.
“Stay perfectly still,” Holmes warned.
“You do not have to tell me twice,” I replied, although my every instinct, my every nerve-ending, was screaming at me to run and take cover.
“The floor is unstable now. Can you feel it? It teeters as though poised atop a fulcrum. Whatever was securing it in place has been detached, and now one can only imagine that the least imbalance, the tiniest deviation of the floor from horizontal, will prompt all the crossbows to unleash their bolts. Not all of them will find their mark, but only one need do so to finish one of us off.”
“How do we beat this?”
“I am thinking.”
We stood still as statues for minute after long minute. When I shifted my weight even fractionally, the entire floor trembled underfoot. A bead of sweat trickled from my hairline, down my brow. I longed to wipe it away but dared not raise a hand. The droplet rolled into my eye, stinging. I was scared to blink, lest so minuscule an action had disproportionately huge consequences. Breathing itself took on momentous significance. Was I inhaling and exhaling too hard? Was my ribcage rising and falling too expansively?
Soon I had begun to feel lightheaded with the effort of remaining motionless. The Tilley lamp was growing heavy in my grasp. I did not know how much longer I could continue. My muscles seemed eager to disobey my wishes, to act of their own accord.
Then Holmes said, “I see.”
“What do you see?”
“This test is, as Dr Pentecost told us, both the most challenging of them all and the least.”
“I have no idea what that means, other than that it is a paradox. How can the test be both?”
“Precisely, Watson. That is the key to the puzzle. You have cracked it.”
“I have?”
“Well, no. Not as such. But you have hit upon the operative word: paradox. One has to remember that everything Buchanan has presented us with so far in the labyrinth has an Hellenic theme. At first I could not for the life of me see how Hellenism applied here. Then I recalled the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea. He it was who devised various thought experiments to challenge the human perception of time, motion and change. They are set out in Aristotle’s Physics, and I studied them briefly while at university in the hope that they might help sharpen my powers of logical analysis. I gave it up quickly, once I realised the thought experiments were designed merely to provoke debate rather than yield solutions through deduction. They were of no use to me.”
“And what is the pertinence of this Zeno fellow to our current situation?”
“You may be unfamiliar with his name but you will surely have heard of at least one of his famous paradoxes. The best known is that of Achilles and the tortoise. The two are in a foot race, and Achilles sportingly gives the tortoise a hundred-yard head start. Who wins?”
“Achilles, obviously. A man is faster than any tortoise.”
“Wrong. Achilles never catches up with his competitor. By the time he has run the one hundred yards to the tortoise’s starting point, the tortoise has itself gone, let us say, ten yards. By the time Achilles has covered those ten, the tortoise has travelled a further one yard. And so on ad infinitum. Achilles can never overtake the tortoise.”
“That does not stand to reason.”
“And yet, paradoxically, it is true,” said Holmes. “Hence my dislike of mental exercises of that ilk. The only answers they provide are equivocal. Whereas I, by every inclination, prefer to deal in empirical absolutes.”
“All of this is very interesting, Holmes, but…”
“There is another paradox of Zeno’s,” said my companion. “It involves an arrow and is sometimes known as the fletcher’s paradox. Zeno claims that for motion to occur, an object must change position.”
“That goes without saying.”
“However, Zeno argues that an arrow in flight, at any given instant, is static. It is moving neither to where it is nor to where it is not. Since time is composed of instants, it may be asserted that for the duration of its flight – which, however brief, is nonetheless a series of instants – the arrow is perpetually motionless.”
“Holmes, I am woozy and on the verge of toppling over. Your filling my brain with mind-boggling conundrums is only making my head spin even more. Come to the point, please.”
“My inference is that this trap is nothing but a glorious bluff. The floor gives the illusion that it is a trigger for the crossbows – and why would we not assume as much, given the nature of the traps we have hitherto encountered? But in actuality, we have nothing to fear. We may cross the rest of the way to the exit with impunity.”
“You are sure of this?”
“Were I not, would I say so?”
He smiled, as aware as I was that the statement was no less of a paradox than anything Zeno might have dreamed up.
“Very well then,” said I, masking my uncertainty.
Holmes set off with a determined stride.
Immediately, from the walls aro
und us, there came the massed twang of a score of taut crossbow strings being released.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
A LABYRINTH OF DEATH
I threw myself headlong at Holmes, bringing both of us crashing to the floor. I arranged it so that I was on top, my body covering his. I did not think about this consciously. It was a deep-seated impulse, that was all. The world needed Sherlock Holmes more than it needed another general practitioner. I envisaged myself quilled with the bolts, like a porcupine. I wondered whether death would be instantaneous or a slow, agonising process, consciousness ebbing as the blood leaked out of me.
“Watson?”
“Yes, Holmes?”
“Would you be so good as to clamber off? There’s a good fellow. Your bulk is uncomfortable and I am finding it hard to breathe.”
I slithered off Holmes, onto all fours. The floor no longer teetered, having become as solid and stable as when we had entered.
I peered around. The Tilley lamp, which I had dropped in my eagerness to be Holmes’s human shield, had by some miracle landed upright and continued to burn. Its light revealed all the crossbow bolts still in place in their flight grooves but now at the front of those channels rather than the rear. The strings likewise had returned to their resting position, slack between the crossbows’ limbs.
Holmes picked himself up and went to inspect one of the weapons. “The bolts are fixed to tracks embedded in the grooves. They are not free agents. The crossbows, in short, are like some conjuror’s stage paraphernalia, rigged to appear dangerous when they are in fact harmless. Here is Zeno’s paradox made flesh: an arrow that flies but does not fly.”
“A cruel jest all the same,” I said, “to have the crossbows seem to fire when they do not.”
“The labyrinth is a test of mettle as much as of brain,” Dr Pentecost chimed in. “Sir Philip believes intellect is nothing if not based on a foundation of courage.”
“Damn you, you madman!” I exclaimed, shaking my fist in the direction of the periscope mirror. “Every time I hear your smug voice, my wish to throttle the life out of you grows ever stronger.”
“Temper, temper, Dr Watson. That is not a very Hippocratic sentiment, is it?”
“Do not forget that I have performed military service as well as medical. The instincts of the one may well yield to the instincts of the other.”
“Inveigh all you like. Your words cannot hurt me.”
The truth of that was inescapable. I was, for the time being, impotent. I could threaten and fulminate, but it altered nothing.
Holmes echoed these thoughts of mine. “Save your energies, Watson, for the task at hand. We shall have plenty of opportunity afterward to deal with Dr Pentecost. Just one last test stands between us and him. Once we have successfully completed it, you may inflict such retribution upon him as you feel he deserves. I would suggest that, when the moment comes, what you will find is a man begging for mercy, and you will no longer deem him worthy of vengeance, only of contempt.”
“Mr Holmes, you wound me,” said the classicist, mock-affronted. “Let me assure you that, in the event you pass the final hurdle, I shall concede defeat gracefully, with dignity.”
“I will believe it when I see it, Doctor.”
As Holmes and I progressed through the labyrinth to the next chamber, I said to him, sotto voce, “Dr Pentecost is exhibiting a remarkable confidence, do you not think? Here we are, four tests under our belts, one more to go. Given such a track record, the odds are strongly in our favour that we shall survive the fifth. Yet he remains imperturbable, phlegmatic. It is almost as if—”
“As if he does not expect us to come through the ordeal alive?” said Holmes in similarly low tones. “As if our deaths have been foreordained from the outset?”
“Well, yes.”
“I agree.”
“You agree?”
“Dr Pentecost would never have sent us into the labyrinth in the first place if he were not sure, beyond doubt, that it would be the end of us.”
“You have known that all along? Then how come you have said nothing? How come you have meekly subjected yourself, and me, to test after test, as though we were just like any pair of Elysians undergoing graduation?”
“An element of pride came into it. As I said earlier, my wits versus Sir Philip’s. But also, what alternative was there? Our antagonist has Hannah as his insurance policy, for one thing. More to the point, while we are in the labyrinth we are alive, and while we are alive there exists the possibility of a favourable outcome, however remote. Not to go through the labyrinth to the bitter end would be not to court that possibility. It would be an abrogation of all hope.”
“But if Dr Pentecost is hell-bent on killing us and has a guaranteed means…”
“Death shall not claim us tonight, Watson. Not if I have any say in the matter.”
The fifth and final chamber loomed. This one had the customary sliding door, but beyond that lay a second door, altogether smaller and sturdier. Rivets studded its edge and also its frame, while a locking wheel occupied its centre. It put me in mind of a bulkhead door on an ironclad ship, one capable of being closed so firmly that it formed a watertight seal.
The locking wheel turned, seemingly of its own accord, and the door swung inward to reveal an oblong space that had the approximate proportions of a train compartment, albeit half as tall again. Walls, ceiling and floor, as we discovered upon ducking through the doorway and stepping inside, were composed entirely of steel plates, the joins between them solidly welded.
Above us there were a half-dozen circular holes some three inches in diameter, arranged in two rows of three. Below, inset into the centre of the floor, was some kind of vent, covered with a mesh grille. Another such vent was situated at the top of the far wall, where it met the ceiling. Each was the size of a chessboard.
Also on the ceiling was a locking wheel identical to that on the door, yet unattached to any door of its own. The short shaft ascending from its hub simply disappeared up into the ceiling.
There was no speaking-tube outlet in this chamber. Dr Pentecost’s voice emanated from the small vestibule outside.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “you have penetrated to the labyrinth’s heart, and come to its most rigorous and definitive test. It is called the Wrath of Poseidon. You will shortly learn why. I have to congratulate you on the adroitness with which you have got yourselves this far. Sir Philip, were he here, would no doubt dearly be wishing he could claim you as his own. You would, if you had submitted to the Elysian regime beforehand, be perfect exemplars of his ideals. However…”
“Somehow I knew there would be a ‘however’,” I murmured.
“You are not Elysians. You are, on the contrary, a threat to this entire enterprise. More to the point you are a threat to me. To that end, you cannot be allowed to live. Consequently, not without regret, but not without relief either, I consign you to this final trap. You will find it ‘final’ in every respect.”
No sooner had he said this than the door began to close. I leapt for it, clamping my hands around its edge in order to arrest its progress. It was being operated by a powerful screw-driven torsion spring, however, the strength of which exceeded mine. The door swung inexorably towards its frame, and try as I might, digging my heels in and heaving backwards, I could not retard it. In the end, with the door a mere inch from shutting, I had to admit defeat and let go. It was that or have my fingers crushed flat.
“Dash it all!” I swore, as a series of clanks from the other side of the door suggested it was being fastened tight. I could see no opening mechanism on this side of it, nor even any handle. We were sealed within that chamber as securely as though within a bank vault.
I looked round at Holmes. “What now? Dr Pentecost seems to think he has doomed us. Tell me he has not.”
My companion’s face was pinched and, I thought, apprehensive.
“Come along,” I cajoled. “All is not lost, surely.”
“Unless I miss my
guess, Watson,” Holmes said, “it was in this very chamber that Sophia Tompkins met her end.”
His words chilled me to my core.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
THE WRATH OF POSEIDON
I felt a sudden shortness of breath. The chamber all at once seemed smaller than I had first reckoned. It was not the size of a train compartment; more the size of a larder. No, still smaller than that. The very walls of it were shrinking, closing in on us. I thought of the engineer Victor Hatherley and the hydraulic press in which he had nearly been squashed to death. Was this chamber something similar? Were Holmes and I to be flattened to a pulp?
“Watson, get a grip on yourself,” Holmes said. “I can see you panicking. This is no time for losing one’s head.”
I gathered my wits. The chamber’s proportions remained as they had been before. It was not, after all, shrinking. That had been my mind playing tricks, making my worst imaginings seem real.
“My apologies, Holmes,” I said. “A touch of claustrophobia.”
“Understood and forgiven. But we do not have the luxury of giving in to fear. At any moment the chamber is going reveal why it is named the Wrath of Poseidon, and we must do all we can beforehand to prepare for that. Firstly, you observe the hook up on the wall there?”
“I had not noticed it until now.”
“If it is not to suspend the Tilley lamp from, then I cannot see what other purpose it might serve. We should use it.”
“But the hook is too high to reach.”
“Make a step of your hands.”
Having passed Holmes the lamp, I interlaced my fingers. He hoisted himself up on me and, at full stretch, was able to hang the lamp from the hook by its wire handle.
“There,” he said. “Now we have both hands free. Next, we must consider the locking wheel overhead. It is the matching counterpart of that on the outside of the door. Therefore one can only conclude that it fulfils the same function.”
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