Without any hope at all he checked the lock, and everything changed. It was locked sure enough, but only into one of the pair of shackles, one in each door, through which it was meant to run. Somebody must have deliberately left it like that, closing the door either from inside or outside in such a way that it looked from any distance as if it were properly fastened. For instance, they might have lost the key inside the mine. Or they might be inside now. Someone had been here not long ago. Those mule droppings . . .
And the lock looked fairly new. Nothing like as old as the rails.
It didn’t make any difference. He was still going to do what he’d come for. With a thumping heart he eased the door open, first just a crack, and then far enough for him to slip through.
Darkness. Silence, apart from the drumming of his own blood. No. From somewhere ahead the rustle of moving water. He waited, listening, before closing the door and taking his hand torch out of his satchel. Shading the light with his left hand, he switched it on. Cautiously he allowed a crack of light to seep between his fingers.
The rails stretched away into the dimness along a tunnel whose walls were partly natural, partly shaped with tools. Only a few paces along, low in the right-hand wall, he made out what he was looking for, a vertical crack in the rock, as wide as his clenched fist at the bottom and tapering to a point at about knee height. Having checked, and found it was deep enough, he laid the collar and pipes ready, collected some fragments of rock to seal them in with, knelt beside the crack, and picked up the collar, and straightened.
No need to shout. If Ridiki could hear him, it would not be with earthly ears, and suppose whoever had left the door unlocked was somewhere ahead down there, he would be nearer the source of the water-noises, which should be enough to mask a quiet call from the distance.
“Good-bye, Eurydice. Good-bye, Ridiki. Be happy where you are.”
He was answered twice, first by the echo and then, drowning that out, by the bark of a dog, a sharp, triple yelp, a pause, and then the same again. And again. The alert call that every Deniakis dog was trained to give to attract its master’s attention to something he might need to be aware of. It could have been Ridiki. (No, for course it couldn’t. She was dead.) Out on the open hillside he would have known her voice from that of any other dog in Greece, but the echoing distances of the place muffled and changed it.
The call died away into uncertainty, as if the dog wasn’t sure it was doing the right thing. Steff found he had sprung to his feet, tense with mixed terror and excitement. The pipes were still on the floor where he had left them. He stuffed the collar in his pocket and picked them up, but continued to stand there, strangely dazed. Whatever the risk, it was impossible to turn away. To do so would haunt him for the rest of his days. He had to be sure. Shielding the torch so that it lit only the patch of floor immediately in front of his feet, he stole on. The daze continued. He felt as if he carried some kind of shadow of himself inside himself, its hand inside the hands that held the pipes and torch, its heart beating to the beat of his heart, its feet walking with shadow feet inside his feet of flesh and bone but making a separate soft footfall.
And everything around him shared the same doubleness. In the world of flesh and bone this was simply an empty, worked-out silver mine that before that had been a deep cave. But, mine or cave, in the shadow world it was and always had been an entrance to the underworld. Along it, and all around him, invisible, imperceptible, flooded the souls of the freshly dead. And ahead of him there was a dog of flesh and bone who was also, somehow, the dog Cerberus, the dreadful three-headed guardian of that realm. And a nameless stream the shadow of whose waters was the River Styx. And, waiting for him on its further shore, Eurydice. Ridiki.
The daze faded abruptly. He was aware of some other change, but couldn’t locate it. He stopped and stood listening. No, not a sound, a light, a faint orange glow from around a so-far unperceived bend in the tunnel. He moved on, step by cautious step. Even more slowly he edged round the bend. The water sounds became noticeably louder, telling him that they were made by something more than a trickle, more than a small stream. The source of light appeared, an ordinary oil lantern standing on a ledge carved into the opposite wall. Just beyond it, the dog.
A dog of the Deniakis breed, all right, though larger than most, almost twice the size of Ridiki, but very much her colouring. Its collar was fastened by a light chain to a shackle in the wall, and it was lying across the near side of the tunnel, with its head turned away from him, ears half pricked, motionless. He knew that pose only too well. It was waiting for the return of its master.
What now? In the world of flesh and bone the only sane thing would be to turn back. It was the pipes that made up his mind. Unconsciously while he hesitated he had been weighing them in his hand, but now he found himself gazing dreamily down at them. His shadow self returned, allowing him to look at them through shadow eyes, to see them for what they were in that dim light. In the world of fresh and blood he had brought them here as a tangible offering to make as part of his farewell to Ridiki, a way of telling himself that now, truly, finally, he was letting her go. But, like one of the echoes in this place of echoes, that purpose now reverberated back to him from the shadow world all changed, telling him that if he used them the pipes were a passport, a charm with which he might persuade the powers of the underworld to let him through.
Suppose it was all nonsense. Suppose the dog’s only response was to set up a clamour of barking and bring its master running. The man must be a little way off, beyond the dog’s awareness, to judge by its anxious, waiting pose. He’d have a good start. Once through the door he could run the collar through the lock-shackles and fasten it tight. It would take the man some while to force his way past that, and by then Steff would be out of the cleft and well up the hillside . . .
Before that half of his mind had finished these flesh-and-blood calculations his shadow self had moved him quietly out to the centre of the tunnel and put the pipes to his lips. He drew a calm breath and blew two sharp notes, well apart on the scale, three times repeated. All Deniakis dogs had been trained to the same signals, and since, once trained, they were going to be sold on, Nikos never allowed them to bond to a single man, but got them accustomed to obeying the commands of strangers. This was the Attention call, a musical version of the dog’s Alert. Instantly the dog heaved itself onto its haunches. Its head swung round, ears pricked. Herd dogs have excellent sight, but Steff was some way from the lantern’s dim light and the dog, he now saw, was old. Its movements had been stiff and there was something awkward about its posture, very like Ridiki’s when she was at attention.
Nevertheless it recognised a stranger, and was about to spring up and rush yelling to the reach of its chain when Steff blew a long, fluttering call—Down. Wait. Be Ready.
The dog paused, uncertain. He blew the call again. The dog subsided, though still with obvious doubt, and lay with its muzzle on its outstretched forelegs. Its hackles continued to stir as he walked confidently forward, the pipes ready at his lips, but its training held. As he neared he saw why it had so reminded him of Ridiki. The left forepaw—what would have been the hand on a human arm—was missing as far as the wrist. Once well past the dog, he turned and played the first few notes of a local lullaby. Relax. It obeyed, obviously relieved, looking in fact rather pleased with itself at having performed a known task well. It was a nice old dog, he thought, not at all dreadful. And only one head.