by Andrew Hart
It makes sense then that I could think of nothing else to say. Marcus had never lied to me before.
I returned to my room to breathe, though I knew the air would be stale and stuffy. I needed a moment alone to process what had just happened. I couldn’t explain how I knew that Marcus had lied, but I knew it in my heart because I knew him. I knew his face. I knew the involuntary tic of his cheek, eye, and lip muscles. He had never lied to me before, not really, but he had tried to conceal a straight flush across the poker table, had pretended not to take notice when I remarked on a particular perfume three weeks before Christmas, and had tactfully buried any sign of disappointment when I made a less than successful meal or—exhausted from getting up before dawn—started to drop off during a date. Those were all long ago, but I remembered them like my arm remembered how to catch a ball, though I hadn’t practiced it for years. Some things didn’t change. The hesitation, the blank look, the slightly evasive gaze, the repetition, the stupid questions (“Manos? Never heard it. Why? What is it?”), these were his tells, and I could read them like headlines.
He was lying.
But why?
I snatched up the phone I hadn’t touched in days and tried to find a signal, moving to the window and waving the thing around. No bars. No Wi-Fi. I opened a search engine and typed in Manos, but when I hit the “Go” button, it just cycled and cycled. I was staring irritably at it when I heard a shrill and distant tinkling.
A telephone.
The telephone. There was only one in the house that worked.
I left the bedroom and moved along the hall to the stairs and was halfway down when I heard someone pick up.
“Hello?”
Kristen. There was a momentary pause, and then all her quiet reserve was replaced with earnestness and concern.
“What? Slow down,” she said. “What happened?”
In the silence that followed I heard other people coming from the living room to listen.
“How?” said Kristen. “And you spoke to the airline?”
Gretchen. It had to be.
“Let me talk to her,” said Melissa in a low voice.
“Hold on,” said Kristen. I wasn’t sure which of them she was talking to. “She took the wrong bag. Those damn purse things you bought. She has your passport, not hers. They won’t let her on the plane.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Brad said. “Have her change the name on the ticket to match Mel’s passport. She can pretend to be you. There’s no finger printing in immigration. She’ll be fine.”
“And what about me?” Melissa whispered back. “How do I get home?”
“On her passport! Easy peasy.”
“That’s massively illegal, Brad,” said Kristen. “Hold on, honey,” she said, brightly to Gretchen, “we’re just kicking some ideas around.”
“No one’s gonna know,” he said. “They even look alike.”
“That’s absurd,” said Melissa.
“You have a better idea?” said Brad. I was still halfway down the stairs, paused now, for fear that if I suddenly appeared, it would look like I was eavesdropping, which, of course, I was.
“Better than illegal immigration?” snapped Melissa. “Er. Yeah. Reschedule the flight.”
“She’d have to wait till tomorrow,” said Kristen. “No more available planes out today.”
“So she waits a day,” said Melissa.
“She doesn’t want to,” said Kristen, quietly now. I suspected she had the mouthpiece of the phone pressed against her.
“Tell her we’ll come pick her up and get her there in plenty of time tomorrow,” said Melissa.
“I think she’s happy to stay in a hotel in Heraklion,” said Kristen.
“It’s no trouble . . . ,” said Melissa.
“I think she’d prefer to stay in a hotel,” Kristen clarified.
“Give me the phone,” said Melissa.
“Mel, she’s upset,” said Kristen.
“Give me the damn phone.”
I heard Kristen sigh. There was a flurry of movement, and I should have known to go back up the stairs. Or down. Anything but stand where I was, where Kristen could see me as she came, her face flushed and annoyed, round the corner and up the stairs. Her eyes met mine, processed my lurking, then she kept coming, up and past me. I heard her footsteps on the landing and then the slam of her bedroom door.
I breathed out, only dimly aware of Melissa’s cooing, sympathetic noises into the phone in the foyer below, then came down the rest of the way to find them all grouped around the telephone table like a collection of statues, straining to hear. Simon was leaning against the tapestry, Marcus against the door to the basement where the generator was. They saw me. Their eyes went back to Melissa and to the phone, as if I had intruded on something private.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
It had taken Melissa twenty minutes to talk Gretchen into coming back. I hadn’t listened so I didn’t know what she’d said. In fact, she had urged everyone away so they could talk “properly,” whatever that meant, and when she returned to the living room, it was with the look of someone who had just finished a long-distance run in a competitive time.
“Not sure you’re the one she wants to see right now,” said Melissa, her smile brittle.
“Perhaps not,” I said. “But I want to see her. Give me a moment to talk to her and she’ll come back a lot happier. She may not even want to leave tomorrow.”
I’m not sure why I added that last part. It was instinct. My gut said that Melissa didn’t want Gretchen to go: that it was important she stayed the whole allotted week. Maybe it was an ego thing. Mel, the perfect host, didn’t want people fleeing her party . . .
“Why?” she said, hawklike again. “What are you going to tell her?”
I swallowed, conscious of everyone listening.
“Why I did what I did,” I said.
It was as if the house itself had sighed, a collective breath, a little release of the pressure that had been building up overnight. Melissa gave me another calculating look, processing what I had said, then threw her arms around me.
“Oh, Jannie,” she said. “It’s OK, sweetheart.”
I shuddered, suddenly overcome with real emotion, and squeezed my eyes shut as I buried my face in her neck. When I opened them again, I expected to see relief, contentment in every face, not just because the crisis was past but because their suspicions had proved correct, and that meant that all was right with the world. But that was not what I saw. Not from all of them, anyway.
Marcus looked as unsure as he had before. Kristen looked flat-out stunned and puzzled. And Brad was staring at me with fierce and terrifying malevolence.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I explore the chamber where the railway line ends, but there’s no way out, just a roughly cut wall of stone behind the buffer. I have to go back, though how far I have to go before I find another route, I have no way of knowing.
For a moment I squat between the steel rails, my back to the buffer, my hands clasped under my chin and my eyes squeezed shut like a child in prayer, which is, I suppose, pretty close to what I am.
I am Daedalus, the great artificer, I think. This is my labyrinth. I will find the way out.
It’s stupid, and desperate, but it holds back the fear like the iron bracing of some great door as the ram batters against it, and from the stillness comes the beginning of a realization.
The curve. I remember the track suddenly curving this way. Perhaps if I got back to that point and go straight, I’ll find that the room I am in now is a kind of siding, a place to store trucks or a small locomotive. Maybe going straight will lead me to a door, to stairs, to safety.
So I get up again and take three cautious steps, arms outstretched, toes feeling for the steel rails set into the stone floor. I can feel the gentle arc of the turn as I walk, but then . . .
What was that?
The tunnel is so silent that every movement I make seems to fill it with s
ound loud as thunder, the fractional skittering of gravel underfoot, the shifting of my dress, the roar of my breathing, my heart. But I am sure there was something else, something sharper that came from . . . where? Farther along the hall but also somehow above me. It echoed, furring the edge of the sound, but I feel certain that it had been short and crisp, like the snap of a door latch.
I listen, and at first there is nothing, so I eventually raise my right foot to take another step; but then it comes again and is followed by the short, staccato sound of shoes on stone steps.
I freeze once more, straining to hear, to pinpoint the source of the noise.
And then I see the flashlight bouncing crazily off the walls that are a mixture of soft-yellow stone and concrete block. The rails gleam where the light hits them some fifteen yards from where I am standing.
Whoever is holding the light hasn’t appeared yet, and I am caught between hope and despair.
I open my mouth to shout.
Help! I was trapped but I got out. Show me the way up!
But I don’t say anything. Instead, instinctively, I take several long, silent strides back along the track, still facing the person with the light. My feet are almost soundless, and I plant them carefully, exaggerating the downward movement so I don’t inadvertently kick something that will make a noise. The buffer hits me in the small of my back. I grasp it with my right hand and hold on as I go round it and drop to my knees. The buffer is braced with diagonal struts, and I almost lose my balance as I get between them and press myself small and close to the gravelly stone floor, breathing fast.
The footsteps have not altered. The flashlight still feels unguided, almost casual. But then, abruptly, everything stops.
He has reached my cell. That was where he was going, and now he can see that the door is open.
Should I have closed it?
It doesn’t matter.
He is perhaps twenty yards away. No more. I hear his uncertainty, his confusion in the uncanny stillness. Then there is movement again, urgent now, panicked, and the light stabs this way and that, so I bury my head in my hands and try to make myself invisible behind the buffer. I hide my hands and face and hope he won’t make sense of what he can still see.
Keep still.
I do, and in my peripheral vision I sense the flashlight raking the tunnel. The passage is narrower than I had imagined and low ceilinged, no larger than the inside of a train car. Behind the buffer it stops, the blocks ending in a wall that looks like solid natural rock. For the merest fraction of a second, the light hits my skin and the hem of my dress. It’s yellow, and I remember it immediately, though it is filthy now. The light moves on, and I can almost smell his furious alarm, his disbelief.
But then he calms, and the flashlight begins to move more carefully. There is almost complete silence again, and I realize slowly that he has seen something, something worthy of close inspection.
When I am sure the light is not turned toward me, I risk a look over the buffer. He has the flashlight aimed at the ground and seems to have dropped to his haunches. I can see the cell door open. It is one of three, though the others are closed. The light fixes on the floor and by the overspill I see, silhouetted and unfocused though it is, the size of him, the bulk of his body and head. All the old terror floods back at the strangeness of the sight as my hindbrain shrieks
Minotaur!
But then he moves, and I realize with another shock that his body above the waist seems so large because he’s wearing something, something that goes with the mask on his face.
An air tank.
He’s not just wearing the scuba mask to hide his face. He’s wearing the complete breathing apparatus.
From my hidden vantage I stare, and that’s when I realize what he’s doing. He’s seen something on the cell floor. I feel the slickness clotting around the thumb of my left hand, and I know what he’s seen.
Blood.
Not a lot, but enough. I’ve left a trail.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was just Simon and me. I had hoped Marcus would come. Or Kristen. But for all Melissa’s words of understanding and forgiveness, they were all still wary of me and I couldn’t blame them. However much they might pity me, who would want to be friends with someone who might break into your room and cut up your underwear? They might tolerate me. They might even accept me, look after me, but you can’t love someone this fucked up.
If Marcus had come, I told myself, I would have found some way to tell him my confession had been false, but that may have done more harm than good. It was probably just as well that we were apart.
So I rode with Simon, back through the mountain villages to the coast road past Rethymno to Heraklion, and it was only in that last stretch that we encountered any real traffic. In the hills there had been rockslides, and trees had come down in the storm. It wouldn’t take much, I thought, to cut us off if the weather worsened.
Simon said little for the first hour. He seemed tense, focused on driving, and when I reached for the radio he said,
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
I snatched my hand back as if burned, but I smiled and said, “Sure, no problem,” because that was what I did, those little lies that grease the wheels and make life bearable.
“Why did you come, Jan?” he asked without preamble.
“What?” I said, still smiling. “I told you. I want to speak to Gretchen . . .”
“No, not now. I mean Crete. The whole trip.”
“What do you mean? You invited me and I thought—”
“Yes, but why did you come? I mean, we cover your costs and all, so it’s a free vacation and you don’t have a lot of spare cash, but . . .”
“Well,” I began, about to counter that last remark and probably spin some stupid falsehood in the process. I didn’t get the chance.
“No, but seriously,” he said. “It’s just us. Just you and me. So what’s it all about? Why are you here?”
I blink, genuinely confused.
“You think this is about me wanting to get back with Marcus,” I say.
“No,” he says. “Maybe. Is it?”
“No.”
“OK, so what is it?”
“I just wanted to see you all, relive our last trip . . .”
“And how are we doing?” he said. His eyes were on the road, riveted to it, but his voice was clipped, the words bitten off like meat.
“I don’t think I understand . . .”
“Which bit of our last visit did you most want to relive, Jan?”
“Just seeing everyone and—”
“OK,” he said, cutting me off.
“I’m not sure I get what you’re . . .”
“I said, ‘OK,’” he said. “Leave it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, confused and uneasy. “Is it something I said?”
He laughed at that, a short, snapping sound without amusement.
I think to ask him about Manos, but I don’t. His mood is too strange and Gretchen’s odd warning is ringing in my head. We barely speak again till we reach the airport, and when I say I’m going to find a bathroom, he just nods.
The bathroom isn’t as easy to find as I thought it would be, and I have to walk a ways. While I’m sitting there in the stall, I fish out my phone and take the opportunity of a signal to scroll through my e-mail. There are a few notifications from work, the announcement of who got the executive lead position—a woman I’d never heard of—and a few other minor bits and pieces. Nothing of significance, and I’m struck by how little time I have actually been away. It feels like weeks, but it’s only been four days, and the rest of the world has proceeded at its tedious and familiar pace.
I open Google and type in Manos. The list of results is unhelpful: a low-budget horror film, a scattering of sites in Greek, some games, some charitable organizations. Nothing obviously significant. I add the term Rethymno to the search and then, on impulse, the date of our visit to the cave five years ago. Now,
most of the results are in Greek, and I have to run each one through Google Translate. Most are newspaper stories. Manos, it seems, is a name. A man’s.
Or a boy’s.
The picture loads slowly, but I know him immediately. I have his face filed away on my laptop back home.
Waiter boy.
The kid who worked at the Taverna Diogenes. The one who had mooned around Melissa in between waiting on us and leading tourists on snorkeling trips around the bay.
Manos.
I remembered now. But we hadn’t seen him that last day. I was almost sure of it. We had gone to the restaurant for our last meal, expecting the sponges he had promised, but he hadn’t been there. It was one of the various little disappointments and frustrations of our last hours, and Melissa had sulked through the meal, then complained of a headache and gone to bed.
I read the page quickly. The translation was wooden, clunky, but its core required no subtlety. On the last day of our trip, Manos Veranikis, son of Maria, proprietor of the Taverna Diogenes, had been killed in a freak diving accident.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I hadn’t realized my hand had bled enough to leave a trail, and I can’t see to know if that trail will lead to my hiding place. I watch unblinkingly as he sweeps the flashlight beam across the ground from the open cell over the threshold to the tunnel, conscious of the way my right hand is quietly exploring the ground for a rock or hunk of discarded machinery that I might use as a weapon if the worst happens.
He hesitates and then slowly, inexorably, he pans the light toward me, creeping foot by foot along the railway line. If there is a speck of drying crimson there, he will spot it long before my useless eyes find it. The light is fifteen feet away. Ten. Five.
It stops and snaps abruptly back. It finds the drop he saw first, then begins to trace the tunnel in the opposite direction, the way I went first before doubling back when I felt the track descending.
My heart leaps. If my hand bled just enough for a few spatters before stopping, it might lead him the wrong way.