Maze of Death Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Crete, 1925

  Part One

  Chapter One: Arrival

  Chapter Two: Lieutenant Sideras

  Chapter Three: At Knossos

  Chapter Four: Introductions

  Chapter Five: The Island of Candia

  Chapter Six: Wolfe’s Palace

  Chapter Seven: A Strange Welcome

  Chapter Eight: Wake-up Call

  Chapter Nine: Leap of Faith

  Chapter Ten: To Be a King

  Chapter Eleven: Daedalus

  Chapter Twelve: Damocles

  Part Two

  Chapter Thirteen: Icarus

  Chapter Fourteen: To the Death

  Chapter Fifteen: The Challenge

  Chapter Sixteen: Into the Maze

  Chapter Seventeen: Labyrinth

  Chapter Eighteen: Beast

  Chapter Nineteen: Out

  Chapter Twenty: The Last Wave

  Chapter Twenty-One: Aftermath

  Epilogue

  Also by Philip Caveney

  Copyright

  About the Book

  CRETE 1925.

  After the terrors of Egypt and Mexico, a trip to Crete seems to offer Alec, Ethan and Coates a rare chance to relax – but an encounter with mysterious millionaire Tobias Wolfe brings them a tempting invitation to his private island and the chance to see its incredible archaeological treasures.

  But not all the island’s secrets are so inviting . . .

  Upon arrival, the three friends are taken captive and subjected to a series of tests of skill and stamina, all inspired by the myths and legends of Ancient Greece.

  As the games become ever more deadly, a desperate struggle for survival ensues – and deep in the dark heart of the labyrinth, Alec must face the most terrifying challenge of all.

  For Susan,

  who saved me from drowning.

  PROLOGUE

  Crete, 1925

  TRAVIS WAITED IN the small bare room, alone and terrified. He didn’t know how long he had been here, but it seemed an eternity. He’d woken from a deep, dreamless sleep to find himself stretched out on a hard earth floor, with only the meagre light of a hurricane lamp to illuminate his surroundings. The room had four bare plaster walls, in one of which was set a huge pair of metal doors – two heavy slabs of rusting iron.

  He could not recall how he came to be here. The last thing he remembered was being in a taverna, a remote little place somewhere on the road to the south of Heraklion. He had chanced upon it quite by accident. Hearing the sounds of Cretan music issuing from within, he’d ventured inside and found the place packed with friendly locals, who smiled at him and beckoned him to enter and make himself at home. In one corner, a couple of musicians were belting out raucous tunes on a lyre and a Cretan lute. The landlord, a red-faced fellow with a walrus moustache, spoke a few words of English and proudly told Travis to try the raki, which he claimed to have brewed himself in his cellar.

  Travis was in a good mood and though he’d been warned about the powers of the local brew, he threw caution to the wind and tried a glass. He was a young man on his first real trip away from home and had come to Crete to escape the humdrum of his life back in London. His only intention on this holiday was to relax and enjoy himself. So he had swallowed down the fierce liquor and clapped along to the wild music and had even managed to exchange a few halting words with the other customers. But then he drank that second glass of raki and, quite suddenly, the world started spinning crazily. He stumbled towards the door, aware of laughter all around him – people slapping him on the back and saying that the young Englishman couldn’t handle his drink. He’d waved a hand at them, assuring them he’d be back in a few moments. But stepping outside, the night air had hit him like a fist to the head and he plummeted into a deep blackness.

  After that, he knew nothing until he had woken here. But he realized with a terrible certainty that his drink must have been drugged to have caused so violent a reaction. Somebody had done this to him deliberately and brought him to this tiny room. But why? Was he being held hostage? Was somebody going to demand a ransom from his parents back in England?

  When his senses had fully returned to him, he got to his feet and, lifting the lamp, explored every inch of the room. The metal doors were the obvious way out, but none of his pushing and pounding could budge them so much as an inch. He checked the other walls, running his fingertips across the smooth plastered surfaces. In one side he found another, smaller door, set flush with the wall. But it was no more than a narrow outline in the plaster with no sign of a handle or a lock; and when he put his shoulder against it and pushed with all his strength, he couldn’t make any impression on it. Finally, he resorted to shouting out, his voice echoing hollowly in the tiny room, but nobody came to answer his calls. Eventually, it dawned on him that whoever had spiked his drink and was keeping him prisoner here had no intention of coming to see what he was shouting about.

  He returned his attention again to the metal doors at the far end of the room. There was something horribly forbidding about them, as though they were the gateway to another world. He could see that the packed earth at the base of the doors was marked by the passage of many feet, so it was clear that others must have passed this way before him, but how recently it might have been, he could not tell. He was just thinking this when, with a nerve-jangling clang of metal, the doors began to slide slowly apart, and he found himself looking down a long, dark corridor, hewn out of solid rock. He stood for a moment, wondering whether he should venture out, but since the alternative was to stay right where he was, it was an easy decision to make. Perhaps somewhere along the corridor, he might find a way out of this predicament. But the doors seemed to have opened by themselves and when he peered around them, there was nobody lurking in the shadows. He walked forward tentatively and shouted several hellos into the darkness, his voice echoing eerily back at him, but nobody answered his call.

  He lifted the hurricane lamp and stepped gingerly into the corridor. In the bobbing glow of the light he could see that the walls on either side of him and the roof, a short distance above his head, bore the marks of chisels. This passageway had been cut into solid stone and must have taken years to create. He walked for a short distance and came to a junction with another corridor running at right angles to his. He stood for a moment, uncertain which direction to take, but after a few moments, decided to go left. He walked on again, only to find another split in the path; he decided to turn right this time. It soon became clear that he was wandering into a stone maze – a labyrinth. It was not something that nature had devised, but had been made by skilled engineers.

  Travis didn’t know how long he wandered down the endless corridors, and after a while, he began to get the notion that he was coming back to places he had already been; but since every stone wall looked more or less identical, he could not be sure whether this impression was accurate. A strange half-memory stirred in his mind – a story his grandfather used to tell him when he was a boy – of Theseus and the minotaur. Hadn’t Theseus, a Greek hero, had to find his way through a labyrinth? And hadn’t that labyrinth been located on the island of Crete? But of course in that story, the great warrior had been given something to help him find his way . . . a ball of twine that he let out as he walked so he could easily follow it back to his starting place. Travis had been given nothing but the lantern.

  He wandered deeper and deeper into the shadows, twisting and turning this way and that, peering into the glow of light from the lantern, until he no longer had any sense of time or place. And then he began to hear the sounds. They were distant at first, but as he wal
ked on, they seemed to draw nearer – a series of deep, bellowing noises; a cross between the yell of a man and the roar of a beast. Travis couldn’t identify what kind of creature might be making those sounds, but whatever it was, it filled him with terror and he broke out in a thick, cold sweat. He couldn’t stop thinking about the legend of the minotaur – the half-man half-bull that lurked in the labyrinth of the mythical King Minos of Crete, waiting to tear to pieces any living creature that ventured into its path. He told himself not to be ridiculous. That was just an ancient legend, something that had no foundation in fact – and yet the noises he could hear were being made by something all too real.

  As the sounds drew closer, his attempts to find a way out of the maze became ever more frantic. Now he was running along the corridors, turning in whichever direction he sensed would lead him away from the source of those awful noises – but each turn he made only served to bring him closer, until it seemed to his fevered senses that the creature, whatever it was, was now no more than a few feet away from him, perhaps only on the other side of a rock wall.

  And then as he turned a corner he saw movement up ahead of him, something big and bulky came prowling forward out of the shadows. He froze in his tracks and stared open-mouthed. It had the body of a man sure enough, squat and thick set, dressed only in a loincloth, the muscles rippling beneath a sheen of sweat. But where the man’s head should have been there was something entirely inhuman – a great domed skull, much too big for the body that supported it; an elongated snout with widely distended nostrils, and a crude slit of a mouth, crammed with misshapen teeth protruding above and below the lips from which dripped threads of saliva. Most horrible of all, from the top of the skull jutted two curved horns. Travis could not withhold a gasp of sheer disbelief – he was looking at the creature from his grandfather’s old stories: the minotaur.

  The beast instantly became aware of Travis’s presence. Its wide nostrils flared and it came forward, grunting, its deep-set eyes staring at him with a fierce intensity – an unnatural hunger.

  For a moment, fear rooted Travis to the spot. Then the instinct to survive kicked in and he turned and fled back the way he had come, but in his panic his sweating hand lost its grip on the metal handle of the lamp and it fell, smashing against a wall and erupting in an abrupt gout of flame. Instantly, everything was garishly lit up. Travis glanced back to see the beast holding up its arms across its face, as though terrified of the fire. And then, in the brief glare, Travis saw something infinitely worse. Lying against a wall a few feet away from him – the shattered remains of a man’s body, a twisted wreckage of bones and partially eaten flesh. A skeletal arm lay a few feet from the torso as though it had been torn off and flung aside. The dirt floor and the wall behind the corpse were stained black with dried blood. But the oil in the lamp was soon consumed and the fire began to die down, hiding the gruesome sight once again in the shadows. Panic pulsed though Travis and he fled. He turned down the next corridor and ran madly along it, but he had only travelled a short distance when he was suddenly plunged into a darkness so complete that he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face.

  Gasping in terror, he had no option but to press his shoulder against the closest wall, extend a hand and edge his way forward, his fingers exploring the rock. He moved like this for quite a while and began to think that he had left the creature behind, but then he heard grunting and snuffling sounds in the distance, and he could tell it was moving faster than he was, getting closer and closer. He realized with a dull sense of shock that if the beast was used to living down in this terrible place, it must surely be able to see far better in the dark than any human could.

  Travis tried to increase his speed, his shoulder rubbing itself raw on the rough surface of the wall, but then suddenly, his questing fingers found nothing more substantial than air. He stopped in his tracks, groping blindly to left and right. He stood for a moment in a fog of indecision, horribly aware of the creature’s closeness, and now he heard a bellow that seemed to freeze his blood in his veins. It was nearly upon him!

  With an oath, Travis leaped forward, arms extended to prevent him from slamming into another wall; but his hands encountered no resistance, and suddenly, shockingly, he launched into empty air and felt himself tipping forward. He gave one brief cry of terror and then he was falling, falling into a blackness that seemed to have no end . . .

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Arrival

  THE FISHING BOAT puttered slowly into the old Venetian harbour at Heraklion. It was a baking hot afternoon: the sky free of cloud and the waters of the Sea of Crete a deep, shimmering turquoise. Sitting in the prow of the boat, Alec Devlin felt truly relaxed for the first time in months.

  His adventure in Mexico the previous summer now seemed no more than a distant memory, but he had only to slip a hand beneath the loose folds of his khaki shirt, to touch an unwelcome souvenir: a small, crescent-shaped scar on his chest where an arrow had so nearly ended his life. The doctor who had examined him when he finally got back to his father’s hacienda in Veracruz had told him, in no uncertain terms, how lucky he’d been.

  ‘Another half-inch to the left, Master Devlin, and the arrow would have pierced your heart,’ he had said gravely. ‘And we would not be having this conversation.’

  Hardly surprising that since then Alec’s father had watched him like a hawk, or had insisted that Coates, his ever-faithful valet, or Ethan Wade, the American adventurer who had become Alec’s bodyguard, accompanied him everywhere he went. When his father had been transferred to the embassy in Athens earlier this year, Alec had hoped that his iron grip might relax a little. After all, they were back in Europe now – after one summer spent in Egypt and another in the wilds of Mexico, what dangers could possibly lie in wait here in this more civilized part of the world?

  Luckily for Alec, as the year had progressed, his father had accepted that this was a much safer place to live. So much so that when Alec had proposed a summer trip to Crete, he’d put up little resistance, even though his work in Athens meant he would not be able to accompany his son.

  ‘I don’t like the thought of you going off again,’ he’d said. ‘You know you always seem to end up in some kind of trouble.’

  ‘Oh, Father, I’m seventeen now,’ Alec had reminded him. ‘I’ll be off to university in England in September, and this will be my last chance to have a proper look at Knossos.’

  It was still Alec’s intention to study anthropology at Oxford and from there, to forge a career as an archaeologist. He currently knew little about the ancient Minoan civilization of Crete and was keen to see Sir Arthur Evans’s excavation at Knossos, which had been progressing in a stop-start fashion since 1900, and these days was open to public viewing. He knew that the Minoan civilization dated from around 7000 BC and was the oldest in Europe. He was also familiar with the myths and legends of Crete: King Minos and the labyrinth, and the story of Icarus and Daedalus, but beyond that, he really didn’t know very much at all. Here was his chance, he told his father, to study the ruins in detail, to make sketches and write notes, all of which he could take with him when he went up to Oxford. Father had sighed and shaken his head, but in the end Alec had managed to talk him round. Very well, he’d finally agreed, Alec could go to Crete, but for no longer than a week, and he must stay on the island and take both Coates and Ethan Wade with him, to ensure he didn’t get into any scrapes. Coates would handle all expenses for the trip and on no account was Alec to go off by himself, no matter what the reason.

  Alec had agreed to all his father’s demands and a fishing boat was duly chartered for the trip. So, here he was with his official shadow, Coates, who had somehow managed to get his hands on an old copy of The Times and was now filling in the crossword puzzle. In the stern, Ethan Wade was chatting to Christos, the captain. Alec saw that Ethan was pointing at something across the harbour and turned to see that the object of his attention was a magnificent yacht, berthed at a stone je
tty several hundred yards away. Alec noticed that the yacht had eyes painted on its prow, just as their boat had. These ‘evil eyes’ were common in the Mediterranean and Alec knew they were an example of lingering Egyptian influence in this part of the world, functioning as a talisman to protect the boat from evil. Since evil spirits were believed to come from the eyes of enemies, this was a way of fighting fire with fire – using the painted eyes to ‘stare down’ any supernatural threat.

  Alec glanced at Coates and noticed that his valet had lifted his gaze from the newspaper and was staring towards the horizon, where a plume of smoke and ash was rising into the air.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ he muttered, his voice apprehensive.

  ‘That would be the island of Santorini,’ said Alec, trying to sound matter-of-fact. ‘Looks like the volcano is acting up again.’

  ‘The . . .’ Coates narrowed his eyes. ‘You never mentioned anything about a volcano when you suggested this trip to your father.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Alec. ‘You know how he worries.’

  ‘He’s right to worry where you’re concerned,’ said Coates. ‘If he even knew the half of what you get up to . . .’

  ‘Relax,’ Alec urged him. ‘The last major eruption of Santorini was way back in the second millennium BC. The volcano coughs and rumbles from time to time, but it’s really nothing to worry about.’

  Coates looked unconvinced. ‘So what happened last time it erupted?’ he asked nervously.

  ‘Well, it . . . it created a gigantic wave that all but destroyed Crete,’ said Alec. ‘Many scholars believe it was the thing that brought the Minoan civilization to a sudden end.’ He smiled at the look of shock on Coates’s face. ‘Oh, don’t worry. People have been living there for hundreds of years without any trouble. Really, I’m sure it’s perfectly safe.’ He cast around for a way to change the subject and fixed on the beautiful yacht that had caught Ethan’s attention. ‘That’s a fine boat,’ he observed and Coates was obliged to turn his gaze from the horizon in order to see where Alec was pointing.