THE TUNNEL TRACED a slight upward curve that drove into the centre of the structure and narrowed as Hendaya left the entrance behind him. The walls were lined with book spines from top to bottom. A coffered ceiling sealed the passage, made out of old leather book covers on which one could still read titles in dozens of different languages. After a while he reached an octagonal hallway with a table in its centre. The table was packed with open books, lecterns, and a lamp shedding a soft golden light. A web of corridors spread in multiple directions, some descending, others climbing upwards.
Hendaya stopped to listen to the sound of the labyrinth, a sort of murmur, as if of old wood and paper in constant movement, barely perceptible. He’d decided to take one of the descending corridors, assuming that Alicia would try to find another way out, hoping that he would get lost inside and give her time to escape. That’s what he would have done in her place. A second before entering the passage, however, he noticed it. A book hung from one of the shelves, as if someone had started to pull it out but left it dangling, about to fall. Hendaya drew closer and read the title:
ALICE THROUGH
THE LOOKING GLASS
LEWIS CARROLL
“So we’re in the mood for games?” he asked out loud, his voice echoing through the tangle of tunnels and halls. There was no answer. Hendaya pushed the book back against the wall and continued along the passage, which soon started to go uphill, becoming ever steeper, eventually forming steps under his feet at short distances. The farther he penetrated into the labyrinth, the more he felt that he was moving through the bowels of a legendary creature, a leviathan of words that was perfectly aware of his presence and of every step he took. He raised the lamp as far as the corridor’s vaulted ceiling allowed him and kept walking. Some ten metres farther on, he stopped dead in his tracks. In front of him loomed the figure of an angel with wolfish eyes. A fraction of a second before firing, he realized that the figure was made of wax. Its hands, which were large and looked like tongs, held a book he’d never heard of before:
PARADISE LOST
JOHN MILTON
The angel guarded another oval hall, twice the size of the previous one. The room was flanked by glass cabinets, curved shelves, and niches laid out like a burial chamber for books.
Hendaya sighed. “Alicia? Stop fooling around and show your face. I only want to talk to you. As one professional to another.”
Walking across the room to the point from which new corridors set out, he listened carefully. Here again, next to the curve where the gloom darkened, a book peeped out from a shelf in one of the passageways. Hendaya clenched his teeth. If Leandro’s whore wanted to go on playing cat and mouse, she was going to get the surprise of her life.
He didn’t bother to see what new book Alicia had chosen in her trajectory towards the heart of the labyrinth. “Up to you,” he said, taking that corridor, which rose very steeply.
For almost twenty minutes Hendaya climbed what appeared to be a colossal piece of stage machinery. On his way he crossed large halls and walked over balustrades suspended between arches and walkways from which he was able to see that he’d climbed far more than he’d estimated. The figure of Isaac, handcuffed to the water pipe below, now seemed minute. He looked up toward the dome, sprawling and swirling into increasingly elaborate configurations above him. Every time he thought he’d lost the trail, he found the spine of a book peeping out at the entrance to a new tunnel, leading to yet another hall from which the path forked into endless twists and spirals.
The labyrinth went on mutating as he ascended towards its zenith, its intricate design using arches and ventilation shafts to allow the entrance of vaporous beams. Mirrors set at different angles spread the eerie, floating light. Every new room he found was increasingly populated by paintings and contraptions that he could barely make out. Some figures looked like unfinished automatons; paper or plaster sculptures hung from the ceiling or were encased in the walls, like creatures hidden in coffins made of books. An indefinable sense of vertigo and unease took hold of him, and soon he found his gun slipping between his sweaty fingers.
“Alicia, if you don’t come out, I’m going to set fire to this pile of shit and watch you burn alive. Is that what you want?”
At a noise behind him, he turned. A round object the size of a fist, which at first he thought was a ball or a globe, was rolling down a set of stairs from one of the tunnels. He knelt down to pick it up. It was the head of a doll with a disquieting smile and glass eyes. A second later the air was filled with the tinkle of a metallic melody. It sounded like a lullaby.
“You bitch,” he muttered.
He raced up the stairs, his temples throbbing. The strains of music led him to a circular room that opened onto a balustrade flooded by a dense, almost liquid shaft of light. Seeing the glass dome on the other side, he realized that he’d reached the summit. The music came from the back of the room. On either side of the doorway stood pale figures encased between books, like mummified bodies abandoned to their fate. The floor was covered with open volumes, which Hendaya trampled on as he made his way across the room to a small built-in cupboard that looked like a reliquary. He could hear the music playing inside it.
Hendaya opened the small door carefully.
A music box made with mirrors tinkled on the cupboard floor. Inside the box, an angel with open wings turned slowly in a hypnotic trance. The sound gradually petered out as the mechanism unwound and the angel was left suspended in mid-flight. It was then he noticed a reflection on one of the mirrors in the music box. One of the figures he had taken for plaster corpses when he came in had shifted.
Hendaya felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He spun around and fired his gun three times at the figure silhouetted against the bright light. The layers of paper and plaster that made up the effigy were ripped apart, leaving a cloud of dust floating in the air. The policeman lowered the weapon slightly and strained his eyes. Only then did he notice a gentle movement in the air next to him. He turned, and when he tightened the revolver’s hammer again, he recognized the dark glow of two penetrating eyes emerging from the shadows.
The nib of the pen perforated Hendaya’s cornea and cut through into his brain, so deep it scratched the bone at the back of his skull. He collapsed instantly, like a puppet whose strings had been severed, his trembling body stretched out over the books.
Alicia knelt, snatched the weapon he still held in his hand, and, using her feet, pushed the body towards the balustrade. Then she kicked it over the edge and watched it fall into the abyss, still alive, and smash against the stone floor with a dead, humid echo.