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 toward 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 toward 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.