The long walls curved and curled deep and purple, folding secrets into shadows.

The midnight tunnels were palely lit by little stars, pricks of spitting phosphorescence floating in the deep of the walls.

Violet’s job was to keep these tiny lamps fizzing with life. She had been a beauty in her time. You could tell from the way she held herself, back straight, head high. But it was long ago when her beauty had been inescapable. Now you had to discern it.

She thought she could remember being told that her eyes assaulted admirers. Now they squinted as she moved from shadow to flame. And she kept moving along these crouching corridors all day, pausing only to touch her taper to a wick, or, very occasionally indeed, to allow someone to pass.

She thought she could remember letting someone pass and, having lost them to the shadows, finding a note left for her. She proved to herself that she remembered this, because she had kept the note. Violet ink for Violet. They loved her, and now that she was free of the youthful beauty of daylight, their time was coming.

Each day, she held the translucent paper close to a twitching flame to taste the delicious promise. But now she knew the words too well. She could slowly sigh them to herself, echoingly, but she could not read them any more. Her eyes were too familiar with them and the irresistible tides of repetition had smoothed and dulled them so they sank beneath time and meaning.

Violet breathed a syllable or two and stopped to reignite a sputtering flame. Did she hear the echo of a footstep?

Her constant condition was listening out for footsteps, so what she heard had become indistinguishable from what she didn’t.

She knew she heard nothing, and there it was again, growing.

One person’s footstep can be different from another’s, and a footstep that you long for is the most tentative, urgent, uncertain and menacing sound you will ever hear.

She felt its stab.

And she knew she saw her distant lover and smelled them as they approached, still hidden in the long folds of the labyrinth. Every soul’s footstep is its own. Each clicks out its own tune.

Violet had been free from the prison of her sunlit beauty for more than fifty years now, and had grown as accustomed to midnight freedom as anyone ever could.

But she recognised their music.