“Down,” Fiona announced, checking the symbols against the picture of the Phaistos Disc. “This is it.”
She started down the descending staircase.
And vanished.
7
As darkness engulfed her, Fiona felt her stomach rise into her throat. Her first thought was that she was falling, but this was more like being in a fast elevator. Her feet were still on solid ground, but she was definitely descending. A sudden heaviness signaled the end of her downward journey, and then all was still.
“Fiona!”
Pierce’s frantic shout echoed in the air overhead. She looked up, searching for the source. She saw the faint glow of his flashlight, at least fifty feet above her. The light was not nearly bright enough to illuminate her surroundings, but just being able to see it filled her with hope.
“I’m down here!” she called. The iron walls created a weird reverberation effect, like shouting down a metal pipe. “I’m okay.”
“What happened?” The glow intensified into a bright star, shining down into her upraised eyes. “The stairs disappeared.”
“Did they? I can’t see anything.”
She blinked, forcing herself to look away from the pinpoint of light. “Was this a trap?”
“I don’t know.” Pierce’s voice sounded fainter, as if the distance separating them was increasing. She knew it was not; the light above remained unchanged. “Don’t move. I’ll figure something out.”
“I know I picked the right symbol,” she insisted, more for her own sake than for Pierce’s. To reassure herself, she raised her phone again, intending to double-check the symbols. “Oh, duh!”
She thumbed on the phone’s built-in flashlight, and the darkness retreated.
She was standing in a small square room with walls that rose up into the black void overhead. There was no sign of the steps, but the floor beneath her feet was lined with evenly spaced grooves, each as wide as the treads of a stairway.
The stairs had been rigged to collapse downward as soon as anyone stepped onto them. A trap, but not a lethal one. At least, not right away. She and Pierce were separated. He could still get out, maybe bring back some rope…
He’ll have to backtrack through the maze, but I’ve got the pictures of the Disc. Wonderful.
An arched doorway was the only way out of the room. Fiona flashed her light into the opening, but was unable to see much of what lay beyond. There were no Phaistos symbols on the black iron walls to indicate whether going through the door was the right course of action.
“Like I’ve got a choice,” she muttered. Raising her head, she shouted up at Pierce. “There’s a door here. I’m going to go through it.”
“No! Stay right there!”
She ignored his warning and stepped closer to the door, checking the floor for pressure plates and trip wires. There was a wooden table at the edge of her light, holding something on its center. She couldn’t quite make out what the object was, but the overall presentation reminded her of the display cases at the Heraklion Museum.
“I don’t think this is a trap,” she called. She stepped through the arch.
There was a rasping sound behind her. She whirled around and saw that another opening had appeared on the opposite side of the small room. On the wall, just to the right of the new passage, there was another glyph with Phaistos symbols.
“Freaky,” she said. She stuck her head back into the room and looked up. “Uncle George?”
There was no sign of Pierce’s light. Instead, there was now a ceiling, just a few feet above head level, consisting of metal panels each about the same width as the segments on the floor.
“What the hell?”
The hissing noise came again, startling her back a step. The reflex saved her life. A wall of metal descended through the air just beyond the arch, and would have sliced her in half if she had not moved.
Before she could recover her wits, an opening appeared at the top of the arch, growing larger as the wall descended into the floor. When it stopped, the second opening had vanished into the floor, and the room was configured again as it had been at first. There was just one major difference. Standing in the middle of the room was the somewhat bewildered form of Pierce.
“Uncle George!”
He raised a hand. “Don’t move.”
She nodded, signaling that this time, she would do as instructed.
Pierce’s eyes darted around, taking in the changes. He shone the light up, revealing smooth walls with no visible ceiling. “The steps were camouflage. This is some kind of weight-sensitive elevator. Step on it, and it goes down. Step off, and it rises back up. Probably works on magnetic repulsion. It’s a one-way trip though.”
“I think this is where we’re supposed to be.” Fiona turned around and shone her phone’s light at the table. There were several more like it, dotting the floor and lining the walls of a circular chamber, which was at least fifty feet in diameter. Interspersed with the displays were several more arched openings, which presumably led back into the Labyrinth, but Fiona gave these only a cursory glance. Her attention was held by the contents of the room. “Uncle George, you’ve got to see this…but if you step off, we won’t be able to get back.”
Pierce scratched his head, furrowed his brow, pursed his lips and then said, “We’re not supposed to leave the same way we came in. There are two sides to the Disc. Two routes through the maze. One way in, one way out, but it leads here first.”
Pierce stepped through the opening and turned to watch the segmented floor rise, propelled by invisible lines of magnetic force. The passage was momentarily blocked, then opened up to reveal the second configuration.
He joined Fiona at the central table. Resting upon it, spread out to show its extraordinary size, was what appeared at first glance to be a bearskin rug — perhaps from a Kodiak grizzly — head and all. On closer inspection, the tawny gold fur, along with the shaggy mane surrounding the fiercely snarling head, showed it to actually be the pelt of an enormous lion.
Pierce gasp in astonishment. “The Nemean Lion.”
Fiona grinned as Pierce began to recount how Hercules, after strangling the Lion, had used its own claws, which were sharper than any sword, to cut through its skin, since no blade could penetrate it.
She drifted away and began looking at the other display tables. Some contained what might have been trophies from other Herculean conquests — swords, armor, teeth and claws from enormous beasts — while others contained items that were more utilitarian, with no explicit link to the myth. Fiona was drawn to one of the latter: a small chest, about one foot square and six-inches deep. It was covered in a reflective substance that showed no sign of corrosion or oxidation. Although she was no expert, Fiona thought it must be gold. Yet that was not what had drawn her eye. Something had been stamped into the soft metal, creating a raised relief. Fiona reached out a cautious finger and traced the shape.
Letters.
Greek letters.
“Uncle George, this isn’t right.”
Pierce moved to join her, shining his light directly on the small chest. “Heracleia,” he said, translating the ancient Greek script. “It’s in Greek,” he said, proud that she had noticed the aberration. “The Greeks didn’t develop their alphabet until the eighth century BC. The Phaistos Disc was uncovered in the ruins of a palace that was destroyed centuries before the Greeks started using this alphabet.”
He tested the lid, which refused to open, then tilted the chest up to reveal a thin line of some opaque material holding the cover in place. “Beeswax. Whatever’s in here has probably been perfectly preserved for thousands of years.”