Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  Stop.

  I can’t think about this. The pain and the fear and the cumulative exhaustion have gotten to my nerves. I’m losing it just when I need to concentrate, to be on my guard. He’s out there, somewhere. The Minotaur, stalking the labyrinth. Hunting for me.

  Focus.

  I’m out of my cell, but I’m still underground and in the dark. I have to find a way out. I can’t see, and I don’t know what’s there, but it feels like passages spreading in all directions, turning in on themselves like a great hard-angled knot, all blind alleys and long, winding false hopes burrowing back into the center. I think of Daedalus, who made the wooden bull for Pasiphaë and built the maze that housed her dreadful offspring, and I remember what James Joyce called him: the “old artificer.”

  Artificer.

  I had puzzled over the word in a corner of the Wilson library one day, when I was in college, thinking of the strange way it evoked different but related things, combining them in a slippery gray fog that I instinctively—if unhealthily—liked:

  Art.

  Artisan.

  Artifice.

  Artificiality.

  I wrote them out just like that, amazed by the neat way the words made a picture, a right-angle triangle like a half Christmas tree. I thought about the slim distinction between the base of the tree and the star on the top, between fiction and lies. It comes back to me now, and I think, wildly, perhaps still delirious from the pain in my hand, “I am the great artificer, Jan, the Cretan liar. I am Daedalus. This is my labyrinth, and I will find the way out.”

  I move blindly along the stone corridor, listening to the echo of my shallow breathing as it bounces off the stone. The air feels the same as the cell. Smells the same. Maybe a little more dank. The stone flags underfoot are irregular, their edges rounded with age, their surfaces coated with dust and grit fine as sand. And then, without warning, there’s something else. I feel it with my foot, a metallic coldness. I drop to my haunches and feel with my good hand, registering the long iron strip set into the ground and feeling over to the right to find the other I know will be there.

  Railroad tracks.

  So I’m in a tunnel?

  This throws me. I’ve seen no sign of a railway system on Crete. In fact, I’d swear there wasn’t one. I run my good hand along the steel. The sides are furred with rust, but the tops are worn by use, though not, I think, recent use.

  A railway.

  My mind tightens around the idea, trying to squeeze the strangeness out of it. Some kind of minor mountain funicular for the tourists and skiers? It doesn’t seem likely.

  Or a mine.

  It could be one of those old underground cart railways that I know only from Wile E. Coyote and Indiana Jones. I guess they are real things, but has there been much mining in Crete? I kick myself for not learning about the place before I came and wish Marcus were here. He would know. Not that he’d want to talk to me.

  I am remembering more and more about the last few days. Awful though my imprisonment has been, it has somehow cleared my head. The longer I am down here—in this mine or whatever it is—the more I feel like myself in ways I haven’t for hours, even if some of the memories that come with that clarity are things I’d rather not recall. I had made up with Marcus, gotten past the whole lying-about-my-sister thing, but then it had all gone wrong again.

  Gretchen’s underwear . . .

  It should be funny, but even down here in the dark, picking my way along some underground railway line and listening for the return of my sadistic captor, it makes me shudder. I wonder if the two people—the one who chained me up and the one who ravaged Gretchen’s clothes—are the same person.

  I pause. I have just noticed that the rails beneath my feet are sloping gradually down. I am sure of it. If this is a mine, I am going deeper, and while that might give me somewhere to hide, it probably won’t get me out. I need to go the other way.

  I turn carefully, using the rails to orient myself in the dark. I am pretty sure my cell opens onto the track at a right angle, that if I follow the lines back the way I came, I might go right past it. I hold on to that idea as if it is a lantern so the prospect of turning back won’t feel quite so much like failure, like a return to the place where I was entombed.

  I pick my way back along the tunnel, my toes half gripping the edges of the deep-set rails so that I don’t lose my way. It seems even darker here than it had in the cell, the kind of darkness where up, down, left, and right mean nothing. If I stumble and fall or spin around, I will have no idea which way I am facing without the railroad tracks to guide me.

  Like waking up in the car, your cheek against a window smeared with torn grass and dirt . . .

  I keep walking, slowly but steadily, deliberately, not knowing whether I am going away from my enemy or toward him, knowing only that I need to keep moving, to feel like I am doing something to get out. He could be back any moment, his bull-headed form looming in the blackness, muzzle wet, nostrils wide and flaring with each breath, horns spread wide as the hallway . . .

  No. The railroad tracks might be my Ariadne’s thread, but my Minotaur is just a man.

  Simon.

  Do I really believe that? It seems impossible, and the evidence is circumstantial at best. A whiff of oil and gasoline? A facility for scuba gear? That’s nothing. It could be any of us, including the women, though that is harder to picture than, say, the idea of Brad as psychological torturer.

  That is much easier.

  But why? Unless this is all just some psychopathic freak-out and my captor has no rational motive, none of this makes sense. I can’t make it look any more rational with Brad’s face under that Minotaur-head scuba mask than I can with Simon’s.

  I think again of Manos. Or did I mean Minos, the king whose Knossos palace was the home of the Minotaur myth? Or Midas, the king whose touch turned everything to gold and whose name Melissa had confused with the name of our hotel so very long ago in some sunny, idyllic land when life had been so good and full of promise . . .

  Manos, Minos, Midas. None of it helps.

  The tracks beneath my bare feet arc sharply to the left. I press on, my right hand out in front of me, from time to time reaching out to the side to see if the tunnel is narrowing, but I can’t reach the wall. My left hand continues to burn and throb with the slightest movement, so I keep it lightly pressed to my sternum and can feel the steady pulsing of my heart.

  The ground underfoot changes. There is suddenly more debris, more fragments of stone, and twice I kick against loose metal objects. I stoop to one and test it with my fingers. It is a long metal bolt, its thread rough with rust. I stand up, take two more steps, and bark my shin against a hard barrier that runs across the track. Another meets my waist. I feel along it and find a pair of bulbous metal buffers directly above the rails that stop me going any further.

  End of the line.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Gretchen’s second phone call was to a taxi company. Simon offered to drive her, but she said that everyone had done enough and that she just needed to go. She thanked them. She took her suitcase, packed for her and brought downstairs by Marcus, and collected her brand-new leather purse from Melissa, and sat silently on the front step till the cab’s headlights lit the driveway.

  It was all weirdly fast. No one talked to me, and Gretchen pointedly left me out of the series of hugs she gave before running down to the taxi, but as she stooped to her case, she shot a look back to me. She held my eyes just long enough to show intent, to remind me what she had said, despite her apparent play acting to the others. Then she was climbing into the back of the car and roaring off into the night.

  Simon closed the front door and it boomed through the foyer. He threw the bolts and turned the key, and then there was, after the flurry of activity that had filled the last couple of hours, a strained and empty silence. I wanted to tell them what Gretchen had said to me, if only the part about her not believing I was the one who had torn up her underwe
ar, but I knew that would just sound like another lie, and anger flickered through my head, adding to all the other questions that centered on Gretchen. Why hadn’t she told them? Why had she so deliberately misled them if she hadn’t thought me guilty? It was OK for her, jetting back to the States, while I toughed out another three days as the pariah, the deranged obsessive out of a fucking Brontë novel. Maybe I should have gone with her.

  For a second I considered the possibility, but paying change fees on three separate flights, assuming I could get them, wouldn’t just stretch my budget to the breaking point, it would do a number on my finances for the next couple of months. It would also—and I couldn’t believe I actually felt this—feel rude, walking out on the others, on Simon and Melissa, who had spent so much time and energy hosting the reunion. And then there was Marcus.

  No. You can’t leave yet. Not with things as they are. Get through this, and everything will get better.

  But even with this half-assed resolve in place, I had caught something of Gretchen’s fear and felt sure that someone in the house knew much more than they were letting on.

  We’re in danger. Not just me. All of us. You, I think, most of all.

  I didn’t know what to do with that. Maybe Gretchen was the deranged obsessive. Maybe she had felt thwarted in her attempt to bag Marcus and had staged the whole absurd pantomime for dramatic effect.

  Maybe. But I didn’t think so. The fear that had been writhing in my belly like a basket of snakes since Gretchen’s strange confession on the stairs now hardened and chilled till it felt like a stone in my gut, weighing me down, a constant, pulling dread.

  “I don’t want to go upstairs,” said Kristen. “Can we sleep down here? All of us?”

  “What about Brad?” said Marcus.

  “What about him?” Kristen replied. “Apparently, he’s fine where he is. I’m not. Not there, I mean. I want to stay here.”

  “OK,” said Simon, carefully, like he was setting down a fragile vase or pitcher. “We can do that. Everyone?”

  Melissa nodded. Marcus shrugged and said, “OK.” Simon turned to me, and everyone turned with him.

  “Jan?” he said.

  “If I’m welcome,” I said.

  If I had expected a chorus of encouragement, I was disappointed. No one spoke. Kristen frowned, uncertain. Marcus tipped his chin up, his face blank. Melissa looked hawkish.

  “Of course you’re welcome,” said Simon.

  I didn’t feel it, but I also didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. There was certainly nothing I could say. So I went up with Kristen and Simon to get my bedding, all three of us going into each bedroom, not talking, and then rolled out my duvet and pillows in front of the hearth in the living room. Brad came down with Kristen, but he didn’t speak, merely throwing himself onto the couch away from her and covering himself with a blanket they had found in a hall closet, rolling to bury his face in the cushions. Kristen watched him, her lips so thin they seemed to vanish, then made herself a bed on the other side of the room. Marcus curled up in an armchair. He had always been able to sleep in almost any position. He did not look at me. I considered marching over to him, yelling at him, slapping him, but I didn’t.

  When you lie all the time, you get used to people losing faith in you, even the ones you want most desperately to believe you, and you know in your heart that it’s your own fault. Not in the present, but in the past, where all those little evasions and misdirections burrowed into the bedrock of your relationship and left it prone to tremor, sinkhole, and collapse. I couldn’t really blame him.

  Except, of course, that I could and I did. I told him I never lied to him anymore, and I meant it. He knew me well enough. He should have trusted me.

  I looked at him now, and he seemed more than sad and confused. He looked distraught. Bereft. Suddenly I wondered if I hadn’t been the only one hoping to rebuild our friendship, our love, and a new impulse to speak to him, to make it all right, ran through me like fire. I was trying to think what I would say when he shifted in his chair, nestling, his face turned away from me, and I knew that the moment had passed.

  Simon didn’t want to run the generator just to keep a nightlight on, so he left the hurricane lamp burning on the stone counter in the adjoining kitchen, making sure there was nothing flammable close by. It lent the room a soft and shaded glow, like firelight, and might, in other circumstances, have been warm and evocative. Even romantic.

  Not now.

  “Should one of us . . . I don’t know, keep watch?” said Marcus, stirring.

  “It’s not the Lord of the fucking Rings, professor,” said Brad.

  Marcus scowled and looked away, then turned quickly back and said to Melissa, “Did Gretchen spend the whole afternoon with you?”

  “What?” said Melissa, who was already lying down.

  “You went shopping together when the rest of us went to the fort. Did she stay with you the whole time?”

  “No,” said Melissa. “Just an hour or so. I felt like doing my own thing so . . .”

  So she dumped her. That sounded like Mel.

  “You know where she went? What she did?”

  “No,” said Melissa. “Why?”

  “No reason,” said Marcus. “Just wondering.”

  “Can we go to sleep, please, Nancy Drew?” said Brad. “Miss Marple, or whoever the fuck you are. Or would you like to arrest the butler?”

  Marcus said nothing and shifted again, closing his eyes. Brad settled down and started snoring softly almost immediately, but I lay awake, eyes open, going over and over what I had heard and seen, listening to the house settling. Simon fell asleep next, I thought, and within another half hour or so, I was fairly sure I was the only one still awake. I kept quite still, watching the black cedars swaying through the tall windows, listening for footsteps upstairs, for the sound of a door opening or closing, for anything—anything—out of place.

  There was nothing.

  As I lay there, I tried to make sense of Gretchen’s words but I couldn’t. People were keeping secrets, I was sure of that, but I couldn’t grasp how we might be in real danger. Even the underwear incident, nasty though it was in every sense, felt more like a mean-spirited and possibly deviant prank than a threat. Melissa had said as much to Gretchen as she tried to talk her into staying. Gretchen had been appalled, said Mel was blowing it off like it was just a kind of bad-taste joke. Melissa had abandoned the argument gracelessly, making it very clear in her slamming and banging around the house as she helped prepare for Gretchen’s departure that she didn’t approve of this running off to the airport. It was, unsurprisingly, Brad who added his own hard and dismissive brand of wit to the matter as he made himself toast the following morning.

  “You know what I always say,” he mused to whoever might be listening. “It’s no good crying over spilled panties.”

  He grinned to himself. Kristen, still in her makeshift bed, sat up and glared at him for a long moment, then lay down again, teeth clenched, eyes fixed on nothing.

  The rest of us got up slowly and quietly, all the energy and fun long gone, the weight of my supposed guilt hanging over the room like a storm cloud. It reminded me of the final day of our last visit, the day after the cave.

  I went to the bathroom upstairs and checked my room, half expecting to find my suitcase ransacked, my clothes torn to shreds and patches, but there was no sign that anyone had been in, and with the window bathing the room in golden morning light, it was hard to believe that we had been too scared to sleep upstairs.

  In fact I had barely slept at all. The floor, in spite of the comforter, had been hard, and with my mind as preoccupied as it was, and with one ear open for the sound of unwelcome movement in the house, I had hardly shut my eyes. Bizarrely, however, I felt less tired than I had the previous morning, and my mind was clear. I confess to hesitating before drawing the shower curtain, but there was no Norman Bates lurking, and I emerged comparatively refreshed and determined to do one thing. />
  I had to bide my time because Marcus was, predictably, avoiding me. This was an old strategy of his when there were problems or the possibility of confrontation. I used to call him Old Ostrich Face, because of his ability to bury his head in the sand when things got rough, but since my coping mechanism involved inventing an entirely fictitious version of the universe, I guess I didn’t really have the high ground. In the end, I snuck up when he was taking his shower and ambushed him as he came out.

  “I didn’t do it, you know,” I said to him.

  “Jan, I don’t know what to think right now,” he said. “So I think it’s best if you just let me be.”

  “I told you I’d never lie to you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You did.”

  It was almost an accusation, and I decided I couldn’t be bothered arguing the point. Instead I got right to what I should have asked him the day before.

  “What does the word Manos mean to you?” I said.

  The question caught him utterly off guard. He blinked and leaned back, as if trying to refocus his gaze on me, then shook his head.

  “Manos?” he said. “Never heard it. Why? What is it?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “Something I read.”

  “No,” he said. “Means nothing to me.”

  You remember your firsts, especially where romance is concerned. First love. First kiss. First true sexual encounter. You remember them usually because you didn’t really know what they were till they happened. They open up a rush of new thoughts and sensations, like you’ve stumbled on a world you hadn’t believed in till you found yourself in it. The feelings that come with that new world may be the beginning of a long sequence that eventually becomes familiar and staid, but they begin as surprise.