St Paul’s Labyrinth

He sat at the table and let his mind drift back to a time twenty years ago, when he was forty years old. Forty was a good, symbolic age. Forty was a number for tests and trials: the forty years that the Israelites wandered in the desert; the forty days that Moses spent on Mount Sinai before he received the tablets with the Ten Commandments; the forty days and nights that Jesus fasted before he was visited by the devil.

Not long after he had arrived in Leiden as a priest, he had become the head of a group of young, Catholic men who made it their purpose to fight against superstition and idolatry in all their forms. Their enemies were not the Christians who had left the warm bosom of the mother church – to a certain extent, that battle had already been fought – but the psychics, the mediums, the diviners, the tarot readers. They saw it as their duty to fight against these false prophets who led people away from the only path to salvation: Christ. Only he was the Way the Truth and the Life. They used their chicanery to steer their customers, those poor sheep, straight onto the road that eventually led to hell.

The man and his group infiltrated all the paranormal and spiritual fairs that took place in and around Leiden. They went to every big event where the likes of Rasti Rostelli, charlatans in their eyes, came to demonstrate their skills. They sometimes even went to lectures where practices like meditation and yoga were shown in a positive light. They adhered to the Christian laws much more closely than their peers, and they were committed followers of the traditions of their ancestors.

They stood outside venues and handed out leaflets, trying to convince people not to go in. Occasionally there would be a confrontation with the organisers, or with one of the mediums who was performing. Even within his own church, there were many who did not understand why they had taken on this battle and believed that people should be left in peace to make their own choices. He preached sermons that warned that their struggle was not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. That they must therefore put on the armour of God so that they could resist and be prepared to stand firm.

They targeted the Theosophical Society too, the International Study Centre for Independent Search for Truth or ISIS – an acronym that spelled the name of an Egyptian fertility goddess – who held monthly lectures on subjects like reincarnation, homeopathy, and the cosmos. Soon, the ‘Knights of Christ’, as the group had been christened, were guaranteed to turn up at every lecture. Most people tolerated the young men’s presence but chose to ignore them. However, some attendees would engage them in discussion. The priest would clash violently with Ane, the ISIS chairman, who had once had the entire group removed by the police when these discussions became too heated. Two police vans had been needed to transport them to the police station on a charge of disorderly conduct. They had felt like modern-day martyrs in the back of the vans; they were suffering in Jesus’ name, after all. Eventually, the threat of a restraining order convinced them to set their fight against ISIS aside.

He welcomed the opportunity to take a break from their activities. He had been plagued by epileptic fits since his early youth and they could be especially intense whenever he allowed himself to become too agitated. His fellow knights had had to prevent him from swallowing his tongue on numerous occasions when he had fallen to the ground with his mouth foaming and his whole body shaking with violent convulsions. They had panicked at first but after a few episodes they knew what they had to do. His epilepsy had even become a way of measuring the importance of each event: if its theme stirred up so much anger and frustration in the priest that it brought on a fit, then it must be of great consequence.

But now he had found a new target.

9

Friday 20 March, 8:30pm

‘This is very strange,’ Janna said, her austere face looking sterner than ever. She also seemed to be even more stooped than usual, as though she was standing in a room with a low ceiling and was afraid to bump her head. ‘Very strange,’ she said again, more to herself than to Peter.

Twenty minutes had passed since the police had called Peter. The officer who had made the call had contacted the main police station several times, but when it had become clear that Peter hadn’t presented himself there, a warrant had been issued for his arrest.

After the emergency services operator had hung up on Janna the first time, she had called again and been able to convince them of the gravity of the situation. This wasn’t just another Arnold Van Tiegem vanishing act that would resolve itself in a day or two. Eventually Janna and Daniël had been persuaded not to take action themselves, but to wait for the imminent arrival of a police car.

When the police had arrived, Daniël and Janna had given them a brief report of everything that had happened since Peter and Arnold had gone into the tunnel. It would have been impossible to accuse the police of acting in haste; when Janna and Daniël had finished speaking, the officers had tucked away their notebooks and then stood shuffling their feet.

‘What now?’ Daniël had eventually asked.

‘Let’s …’ one of the officers had said uncertainly. ‘Let’s call for backup.’

Not long after he’d made the call, two more officers, an older man and a younger woman, had arrived in another police car. They had taken two lighting units from the back seat, small silver-coloured cases that were protected with an armour of metalwork. They had switched on the lamps and shone two powerful beams into the tunnel.

The two officers who had arrived first had decided to stay above ground. The two new arrivals had gone into the tunnel with Daniël and Janna.

Once they were underground, the improved lighting allowed them to really see how impressive the tunnel’s construction was.

Even the two police officers were impressed. The female officer whistled in amazement. ‘This is quite bizarre, isn’t it, right under the city?’ she asked. Her radio crackled slightly and then grew silent about ten metres into the tunnel.

‘Nothing can happen to us here, right?’ her colleague asked nobody in particular. It wasn’t clear if it was a casual observation or an attempt to quell his own fear.

When they reached the point where the tunnel split, they turned right then quickly hit the dead end and went back the other way.

The officers held the lamps in front of them and swept them from left to right over the ground and above their heads. The tunnel appeared to be solidly built, like a well-maintained wine cellar in a big castle.

‘By the way,’ the older officer said, standing still, ‘the young man who was found in the tunnel this afternoon … he’s escaped.’

‘What?’ Janna exclaimed.

Daniël clenched his fist, like a sports fan watching his team miss a huge opportunity.

‘Yes, escaped,’ the officer said again, as though it was nothing out of the ordinary. ‘He just got up and walked away. The stupid thing is he was so covered in blood that we didn’t get a chance to take any photos of him. His interview was planned for tomorrow, assuming he’d come round by then. But, there you go. Things don’t always go the way you plan them.’

‘The mystery deepens …’ Janna whispered to Daniël.

‘Whereabouts do you reckon we are now?’ the female officer asked. She took out her mobile phone, then immediately put it away again. ‘I thought as much. No coverage down here. I thought we might be able to look at a map …’

‘I think,’ her colleague said, ‘I think that we’re somewhere past the Hooglandse Kerk, under the Hooglandse‌kerkgracht, but …’ He stood still. ‘That’s odd.’

Daniël and Janna stood next to the officers so that they could see what he was looking at.

He took a few steps forward and swung the lamp back and forth. Now they could all see that the tunnel didn’t go any further.

‘But how is that possible?’ Janna said, raising her hands in disbelief like a bad amateur actress.

The younger police officer crouched down to examine the wall more closely. Then she pointed the lamp at the wall as she slowly stood up.

‘I don’t know what you’re searching for, Indiana Jones,’ her colleague said, ‘but I think moving walls and secret passages are more of a Hollywood thing.’

‘This whole tunnel is a Hollywood thing,’ his colleague replied curtly, not taking her eyes off the wall. She studied the point where the wall and the ceiling met, then crouched down to look at the other corner.

‘Nothing unusual here,’ she said, finally.

The older officer turned to Janna and Daniël. ‘Ladies and gentleman, whichever way you look at it, what we have here is a mystery.’

They nodded in agreement.

‘We need more equipment.’

‘A GeoSeeker,’ Daniël said.

The man grunted in a way that was entirely open to interpretation.

‘We’re definitely under the Lutheran church,’ said Daniël.

‘Could I have that lamp for a second?’ Janna asked the female officer, who passed it straight over to her.

Janna moved the lamp back and forth over the ground with a broad, systematic sweeping motion, as though she was clipping a lawn with a strimmer.

‘What are you looking for, Janna?’ Daniël asked.

‘Didn’t Peter say Arnold had wounded his head? So that means there must be blood somewhere, right?’

‘I don’t think it was a gaping wound. He just bumped his head. Most of the blood ended up on Peter’s shirt.’

Janna ignored him and started slowly walking backwards.

The others followed along behind her, scanning the ground inch by inch.

‘Here!’ Janna shouted triumphantly, after she had shuffled another ten or so metres. She put down the lamp with a thud, then got down on her knees and held her nose to the ground.

The others squatted near the area where Janna thought she had seen something.

She circled a spot in the sand with the index finger of her right hand. It was slightly darker than the area around it, like something damp and red had mixed with the sand.

The younger police officer wiped her little finger over the stain and sniffed her fingertip. ‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘that’s blood, without a doubt. That metallic smell …’

‘But it doesn’t look like it’s dripped here,’ her colleague said, ‘otherwise it would look like more like a splashed raindrop. It looks like someone fell here.’

‘Arnold,’ Janna concluded.

‘We can’t say that for certain, although I can see why you think that …’ the older officer said, a little too gravely. ‘But all we can say is that someone was here recently, that they were wounded and very probably fell, but other than that—’

‘We need to go back,’ the other officer said urgently. ‘We can leave one of the lamps here. We need to close this place off for forensics and we need a kit to collect the blood …’

Daniël didn’t move.

‘Are you okay?’ Janna asked him.

‘Not really …’ he replied. ‘This wasn’t what we …’

Janna put a hand on his shoulder. ‘No, this isn’t what we were expecting this afternoon. It was supposed to be a celebration.’

Daniël nodded.

‘Come on, let’s go.’ She gave him a gentle push.

The four of them walked back, leaving a lamp behind them in the middle of the tunnel, like a beacon out at sea.

When they reached the tunnel entrance, the younger officer walked a few metres ahead of them.

‘Does it continue along here?’ she asked, shining the lamp down the passage. But the light fell on a wall about ten metres away. ‘Looks like another dead end.’

‘Peter and I walked a little way down there earlier today,’ Daniël confirmed.

‘Go and have a look,’ the older officer grunted, with a note of cynicism in his voice. ‘Maybe you’ll find another secret passage.’

They helped each other climb back up to the surface. Stones came loose as they went and tumbled to the ground in a scud of gravel.

‘We’ll bring a ladder next time,’ the older officer wheezed.

Only one police officer was waiting for them on the street. The other sat in the front of the police car with his feet hanging out of the door and a radio in his hands.

‘A report’s just come in,’ the officer said, holding out a hand to help them up.

The man in the car barked short sentences into the microphone, but from this distance, all they could hear was beeping and static.

He eventually put the radio back in the cradle and sat for a while, with his hands on his knees and palms facing upwards. Then he stood up and walked towards them. ‘It looks like there won’t be any need to continue the search down there,’ he said hesitantly.

‘Whatdoyoumean?’ Daniël asked, the four words coming out as one.

‘I’ve just been told that they’ve found a body floating in the Nieuw Rijn, under the bridge next to Annie’s Verjaardag.’

Daniël covered his face with his hands.

The officer continued in an official tone: ‘There’s every indication that it’s Mr Van Tiegem.’

10

Friday 20 March, 8:58pm

Peter rushed outside, slamming Judith’s front door behind him. He bounded across the courtyard to Mark’s house and pounded on the windows, shouting his name. He realised immediately that it was useless.

Feeling helpless, he stretched out his hands, then curled his tensed fingers as though he was kneading a stress ball. His lips were tightly pressed together.

He had to go to the police of course, as he had originally intended. He would be able to explain the whole Arnold business, including why he’d foolishly run away earlier in the evening. He would be completely open and honest … up to the point where he’d met Raven in the park.

He pivoted around on one leg, like a soldier at the changing of the guard. At that exact moment, another message arrived.

Do not seek help. The same message as before. But now it was followed by something more sinister. If you ever want to see her alive again.

He looked up in panic. The timing of the messages was worryingly precise, as though someone was aware of every step he took. He searched the sky. Was there a drone up there, with a camera watching him?

Do not seek help …

He opened Google and typed in ‘black raven Leiden’, but it didn’t bring up anything useful. The first hit was a barber in Groningen of all things. So he tried ‘raven Leiden’. A student dorm, entries in a telephone book for people called Raven, a seaside holiday park, the puppet from a children’s TV show … they all led nowhere.

Peter was desperate to do something, but he didn’t know where to focus his energy. He felt like the substitute in a football match who has just spent half an hour warming up on the sidelines before being told he won’t be sent on.

Of course! The phone’s location services. He slapped his forehead, almost as though it would wake up the grey matter inside.

He opened the settings and deactivated them. It was the obvious thing to do, but it still felt devious.

‘Raven, raven …’ he mumbled. Follow the black raven. It had to be symbolic. They couldn’t possibly have meant a real raven. Could they?

He opened Google again and typed in ‘raven symbol’. Less than half a second later the search term had produced tens of thousands of hits. On the first page, there was a reference to the raven that Noah had released, but Peter’s eye was drawn to the words below the blue, underlined title of one of the links. ‘The raven is featured as a messenger in mythological tales from all over the world …’

Peter had a feeling this would lead him to something useful, so he clicked on the link. It was part of a website about mythology through the ages, a subpage with an almost endless list of animals in mythological stories. He clicked on the word ‘raven’ and skimmed through the text.

The story about Noah again, Greek mythology, Egypt, Chinese literature … the raven as harbinger of death … Edgar Allan Poe … And closer to home, the Norse myths and sagas. ‘The god Odin had two ravens,’ he read. ‘Munin and Hugin, who flew around the world during the day, and returned to Odin at night to tell him everything they had seen the people do.’

Just like Raven in the park, Peter thought.

He impatiently clicked everything away, and shoved the phone in his pocket. Then he left the courtyard via the large door. He had no idea where he was going to go; he simply wanted to keep moving so that he would feel like he was doing something. He walked past the Kijkhuis cinema, and the gothic remains of the Vrouwenkerk.

The shops on the Harlemmerstaat had closed an hour ago, but the street still sounded busy. Friday nights in Leiden were as in many Dutch towns for going out.

A group of people walked by, two female students in identical red student association jackets together with two men and two women, all having an animated conversation.

‘After hearing all those stories,’ Peter heard one of the women say, ‘it’s so nice to be able to finally see where you’ve been spending all this time.’

Many student associations held an annual ‘parents’ evening’ and invited parents to come and look around. It went without saying that everything was much quieter than normal on those evenings. There was no rowdiness, no beer was thrown around, and the music was kept at a volume that allowed proper conversation.

When the group passed him, Peter noticed the word DIONYSUS on the backs of their jackets. It was the god of wine, but also a fraternity of the Quintus student association. One of his colleagues had been a member and had told him about it. Peter himself had never joined a fraternity.

A thought began to take shape somewhere in the back of his mind. He stood still, closed his eyes and concentrated. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. Something he had seen.

Peter walked aimlessly on, but he was careful to avoid the Haarlemmerstraat. He crossed the Lange Mare, a street that had been a canal until the early 1950s when it had been filled in. So they were true after all, the stories about the tunnels that ran beneath the city’s many former canals. It was almost impossible to imagine.

He thought back to 1978, the first time he’d gone abroad without his parents. With the ink barely dry on his exam certificates, he’d travelled through Italy, ready to conquer the world.

He’d spent a long time in Rome, staying in a seedy youth hostel where men slept twenty to a room on bunk beds with filthy mattresses. He did everything he could to make his money last as long as possible, not even travelling low budget but no budget.

He had visited the catacombs, the city’s complex system of tunnels and underground burial chambers, some of which had only been discovered in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of the tunnels had been built in secret by the persecuted early Christians. It was easy to carve out tunnels and chambers in the soft, volcanic tufo that formed the bedrock of Rome. After it had been exposed to the air, the rock would eventually harden, and the result was a sturdy structure, a city beneath the city, up to four layers deep. They placed their dead in elongated niches that had been carved into the walls. The graves were sealed with slabs of terracotta or marble, although these were unlikely to have prevented the smell of death and decay from permeating this underworld.

He’d taken hundreds of photographs, carrying the rolls of film around in their little canisters for weeks so that he could have them developed in the Netherlands. When he got home, he had been disappointed to discover that the many photographs he’d taken of the frescoes were washed out because he’d had to use the flash.

But who on earth had built this tunnel in Leiden? And how had it remained undiscovered for centuries? The depth of the tunnel had probably played a role, deep below the canals that had once run above it, or ran above it still.

Could there really be an entire system of tunnels under the city? It was difficult to believe. Rome had tufo, but here in Leiden, there was soft earth, groundwater and subsidence. How had they done it?

Peter slowed his pace. He walked a few metres into the broad alley of the Mirakelsteeg and leaned against a wall.

There was something … something he couldn’t quite remember. What was it?

He pictured in his mind’s eye the one photograph he’d taken of a fresco that had come out well. It had hung on the cork board in his dorm room for years. The flash hadn’t gone off, so the only illumination had come from the faint light of the catacomb’s lamps. Despite being almost two thousand years old, the fresco was amazingly clear and bright. It depicted ravens flying above lily-like flowers, and a reference to the Gospel of Luke. In this well-known scripture, Jesus encourages his followers not to worry about their lives, about what they should eat, about their bodies or what they should wear. ‘Consider the ravens,’ he told them, ‘they do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn, yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds! Consider the lilies. They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these flowers … But seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you also.’

Follow the black raven.

All of a sudden, it came to him. He knew where he had to go.

The students he had seen earlier with their parents. That was it. At the time, he hadn’t been able to make the connection. Like when you know you know the name of an actor in a film, but just can’t quite recall it.

And then, just like that, you remember it again.

Peter retraced his steps.

He needed to go to the student association.

He needed to go to Quintus.

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