by Glenn Roug
foot, it was still a good fifteen minutes before we got there. "Did you buy this truck?" I asked Doc Minus Two as we were struggling to find our footing in the dark.
"A local contact lent it to me. The same contact who owns the shed. If there's any damage to either it's your responsibility. You already owe them for the bike you stole you know."
The local police knew where the entrance to the cave was, which was fortunate as it was just a hole in the rocky ground and easy to miss. They did not use flashlights but one of them had infrared goggles on. A few feet down the hole there was a rusty metal gate that blocked the entrance. Three of the bars were bent down forward, however, so that visitors could squeeze inside through the gap. We went through easily, except for Doc Minus Two, who had to wriggle back and forth to get in. Once inside, he handed us hard hats with flashlights on them.
"I don't have the map on me," I remembered.
"I do," Doc Minus Two said. He took out his tablet and turned it on. The scanned map glowed in the dark.
A narrow white tunnel led inside. There were many inscriptions on its soft, lime sandstone walls. Most were from the twentieth century. Brick-sized stones were strewn over the floor. The tunnel passed underneath a blocked, second entrance and opened up into a medium-sized room. The room was also white, as were most rooms and corridors in the labyrinth. Most of the area of the floor was covered by piles of stone. The ceiling was a composite of several large flat sections that seemed as if they were about to come loose at any moment and drop down on our heads.
The next room, though originally also white, appeared darker, made so by black residue. In addition to stones, the floor was covered by old artillery shells that the German army had left from the time they used the cave as an ammunition dump. "Why hasn't anyone removed these?" I asked one of the local cops. "Suppose one of them goes off?"
He answered in Greek and Rodriguez translated for me. "They're safe here so long as people obey the law and don't enter the cave to play with them."
The next room also had a pile of ammunition on the floor. The exit from that room split in two, giving us, for the first time, a taste of the labyrinth. Doc Minus Two looked at the map and directed us towards the right exit, which was a short, curved corridor. After this, the rooms were pretty much the same. They were of medium to large size, high enough to allow us to stand upright in comfort, and had lots of old artillery shells on the floor. The rooms seemed a combination of natural spaces and some human digging. They started out as large sections of the cave that humans carved into square shapes and even added columns to support the ceiling where they thought it was necessary. Some of the rooms had a single exit, while others gave you two choices. When the number of choices began to add up, I became worried that we would not find our way back and regretted not bringing a ball of thread with us like Theseus had. The further in we went, the fewer inscriptions we saw, or other evidence of human visitors, which I took as a bad sign.
After a while, the cave became more primitive, less touched by man. Someone had still tried to give the walls and the ceiling a flat, carved shape, but huge piles of rock dominated the floor and lined up the walls. It was now more difficult to stand upright without touching the ceiling. "Looks like there were several cave-ins here," I said.
"Yes," the local police explained through Rodriquez. "Mostly because of explosions, but there were many natural cave-ins over the centuries even before that. There are lots of cracks in the walls and the ceiling and you got to watch out because from time to time chunks of rock will fall right on your head. They claimed too many lives already. That's why there's a ban on entering this cave."
Now we arrived at a long, narrow curve with piles of stone on both sides of it. I knew we were very close to the point the a-corridor started from. Doc Minus Two recognized it, too, as he was looking at the map more frequently. We continued into a section of the cave that seemed to have gone through an earthquake. Large slabs of rock looked as if they had come off the ceiling recently. Some were hanging down, partially touching the ground, and some were already in pieces, adding more obstacles to the already uneven, treacherous floor. The local cops looked concerned.
And then we were there. Doc Minus Two stopped and looked at the map and handed it to me. I agreed. That was the spot of the offshoot. It looked only a little better than the section we had just come out of, with overhanging slabs and fissures in the ceiling. But along the right wall, where the a-corridor was supposed to begin, there was a crude stone wall. It looked like those the Germans had built as generator rooms and for other enclosures, but it was too new and complete to have been constructed seven decades ago. If this wall was truly from the war period it would have shown damage and wear like other such walls in the cave we came across. "It's behind this wall," I said confidently.
"I agree," Doc Minus Two said.
Rodriquez shook his head. "But it's blocked. I wish we'd brought a sledge hammer with us."
"I doubt whoever built this sealed it permanently," I said. "Someone must be going in and out all the time. No, there must be a way in."
Doc Minus Two turned to me. "Archeologist, do your trick. Maybe you'll win someone's respect for once."
I approached the wall and started pushing the stones and banging against them with my hands. It was clear that the wall was not thick — one or two layers of stones at the most. It was no more than twenty feet long and seven high and was held together with a minimal amount of cement. An average contractor would have taken only a day or two to build something like this. The left side of the wall seemed especially thin and had almost no cement between the stones — just enough so they did not fall off at the touch. I began to push hard on some of the stones in that section. After testing a few, my hand brushed over something soft. I banged on it lightly and the surface went in pliably and bounced back. This was white cardboard that someone had sprayed with texture paint to give it the appearance of stone. I stuck a finger between it and the stone immediately next to it and peeled the cardboard away, revealing a small cavity in the wall. Inside was a metal handle. I reached a hand to grab it.
"Don't pull that handle!" Doc Minus Two yelled. It was the first time I ever heard him yell. It sounded unnatural to me.
I froze in my place. "But isn't this the reason why we're here?"
"Touch that and you'll look like a tongue that someone slammed a door on." He approached with a piece of rope and tied it to the handle carefully and then motioned us to get away and the five of us went fifty yards back inside the curved tunnel we had come from. He made sure we were all there and then gave the rope a forceful tug. There was a soft bang and then a loud thud of rock hitting against rock. He led us back to the stone wall, cautiously eying the ceiling through the clouds of white dust that now filled the room. We stopped ten yards away from it. A gigantic slab that had been part of the ceiling a moment ago was now lying on the ground in pieces just in front of the stone wall where I had stood. One such piece had knocked over much of the flimsy stone structure. Doc Minus Two observed the ceiling carefully to make sure no other sections were threatening to come down, and then motioned me to come with him. We went behind the remains of the stone wall through the hole the slab had opened in it. It was a disappointment. There was nothing on the other side of it except an ordinary cave wall. Someone had simply sealed off a few square feet of space.
I tapped on the newly exposed cave wall. "That's solid rock. How can the a-corridor start here?"
"It doesn't," Doc Minus Two said.
"Where is it then?"
"It isn't anywhere, don't you get it? It never was part of the cave."
I felt a sharp stab of disappointment going through my body. "Are you saying the map is a fake?"
"That's right. But don't look crestfallen. It gets interesting."
"Why fake the map?"
"To kill you."
"You mean to kill whoever pulled the handle?"
"No, to kill you. Someone's picked a good spot in this cave where
there was a ceiling that was near collapse and hid small explosive charges inside the fissures. Next, they built a stone wall right underneath with a handle that would set off the charges. Then they altered the original map to make it look like there was a mysterious extension, knowing that you would not resist the temptation to go and investigate."
"That's ridiculous. Why go through all this trouble just to kill me? Why not put a bullet through my head like they did to the others?"
"The point of this entire operation was for you to die right here. Not anywhere else."
I sat down on a rock and buried my head in my hands. "Why? Why here of all places?"
"Your death right here in this cave would have removed the last obstacle preventing the perps from reaching their ultimate goal."
"What goal?"
Rodriquez stepped forward now. "Doc, if what you said before is true — and I now believe that it is — then we better reposition. We don't have much time."
"Reposition for what?" I asked.
"For the truly interesting part of the evening," Doc Minus Two replied. "That handle did two things — set off the charges and let them know it has done its job. They'll be here shortly to confirm that you died and to retrieve this suspicious device that they planted here in the wall." He began to untie the rope from the handle and rolled it