by Andrew Hart
He begins to walk the line, his pace quickening, and I risk another look. In the darkness of the tunnel, with the tank on his back and his slow, careful movement, it’s like we’re underwater, not on the Daedalus reef but in some deeper, lightless place, like a wreck. He takes another step away from me. Apparently he has found the trail he was hunting, and I think wildly of Ariadne’s thread spooling out behind me. But he’s wrong. He’s going the wrong way, and I have to bite down a shout of defiance and triumph. He moves off farther, and I hear the wrenching of another heavy door.
This is not the way he had come in. When he first came down he appeared in the tunnel quite suddenly, not with the long lead-in I would have seen and heard if he had come from all the way down there, and that means that the stairs he used are close to the cell. One of the doors I had taken for another prison. It has to be.
I swallow, fighting my own indecision, knowing he might come back at any moment, knowing that he will soon realize the trail he is following has dried up, knowing that I have to go. Now.
I come up out of my wooden, joint-aching crouch and begin to pad quickly along the track till the curve straightens out, then I set my heels against it and take three long strides toward where I think the wall should be, right hand out in front of me, fingers splayed. When I hit solid stone, I take three strides back to the track, move a few feet farther down, and repeat the process, all the while straining to hear the sound of the man in the mask coming back.
On the third attempt I find the door. Fumblingly, my hand locates the latch and presses it. It gives with barely a sound, and the door pulls open. Beyond it, lit by a soft gray bleed from somewhere above, is a staircase.
It is the closest thing to light I have seen for hours, and it works like a beacon on my mind as I step into the stairwell and start to climb.
I’m getting out. I’m escaping. He’ll realize his mistake and come back, but it will be too late. I’ll be long gone . . .
But where will I be? I had thought I was under the villa where we had been staying, but this tunnel, the railway line doesn’t fit with that. I climb, reaching as I do so in my mind for the last thing I remember before waking up in the cell, and it comes with startling, horrifying clarity.
I see the body on the living room floor, the back of his head bloody, the blood I can still smell on my own ravaged hands.
I can’t remember hitting him. Just looking down at him.
And then I’m in a much older memory of darkness and blood, one touched also with gas and oil and with the scent of hot, friction-burned metal.
Mom? Gabby?
And now I know why I’ve been thinking about my sister so much. After all these years and in this, of all places. It’s not just because Gabby was where my lies began. It’s because I killed her.
Chapter Thirty
I stared at my phone, processing what I was reading. Manos Veranikis—Mel’s waiter boy—had been swimming off the stone outcrop just west of the Minos hotel’s private beach, where he sometimes took snorkelers. He was gathering sponges to sell, diving from the rocks. He was by himself, which he shouldn’t have been, so there was no one to raise the alarm when he apparently hit his head and lost consciousness. He drowned, and his body washed ashore later that evening.
Sponges. Jesus.
I saw again his mother’s face in the restaurant, the recognition of Melissa and the sudden, irrational fury. Maria blamed Melissa for her son’s death, and now I understood why. We had gone to the Diogenes on our last night, but he hadn’t been there. Mel was disappointed because he had promised us sponges. I saw him in my mind’s eye, miming the basketball-size one he had planned to bring her.
Was that how he died, trying to bring a souvenir for a tourist lady he had a crush on? Could it be that simple?
God, I thought. How awful. How utterly, pointlessly wretched.
That poor boy. And his mother. No wonder she hated us. No wonder she had been ready to flay Melissa’s skin from her face with her nails the moment she realized who we were. I felt suddenly stupid and worthless, a tourist who had gathered up those bits of the place and its people that seemed nice and fun and then left, knowing nothing, unaware that one of the people who actually lived there had died trying to make us happy.
I felt sick to my stomach and sat very still for a long minute, trying to decide if I was going to throw up. I replayed it all as best I could, both the recent visit to the Diogenes and the last one five years ago. The boy had been dead by then, but the restaurant was still doing business and we hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
They hadn’t known yet. How long after we left had the police arrived? How long before Maria—our comic, boisterous Greek servant and entertainer—had been made to identify the remains of her child?
God.
But then other thoughts came and I, tourist still, moved on. If this was the key to the mystery word Manos, as seemed likely, why was Gretchen so convinced we were in danger?
You most of all.
It didn’t make sense. Or rather, it made perfect sense up to a point but didn’t explain what had happened to Gretchen or why she had made her odd pronouncements. It explained Maria’s anger when she recognized Melissa, but it had nothing to do with Gretchen’s shredded underwear, and the simplest explanation was that the two things were, therefore, unconnected, that they were separate issues. One was an accident—tragic and perhaps influenced by Melissa’s flirtatious manipulations, but an accident nonetheless, though one that perhaps some local had seen fit to underscore by piling the leaves into the shape of the boy’s name.
It was a poor revenge, I thought, ashamed of myself. We hadn’t even known what the word meant. Maybe that had only been a beginning, and there was more—worse—to come. But if so, if someone blamed us for Manos’s death and meant to do something to us as a result, how did Gretchen know, and why would she think I was the one most in danger?
Thinking of Gretchen brought me back to the other matter. She hadn’t even been with us last time, so ravaging her clothes was either a mistake or was unrelated to the boy’s death. A mistake, though unlikely, wasn’t impossible. I thought of those big windows in the villa. If someone had seen her going to her room, they might have mistaken her for Melissa and targeted her by accident. She did look a lot like her.
But tearing up someone’s underwear to revenge a child’s death? No. It felt petty, wrong. I couldn’t believe it. Either that was an unrelated bit of spite from someone else, or Gretchen had done it herself in a melodramatic—and frankly psychotic—bid for attention.
My gut said that was it, and not just because I couldn’t think of who would hate her enough to do something so mean-spirited and creepy. I had believed her when she told me she knew it wasn’t me who had cut up her clothes. Maybe this was all just willful self-delusion, an extension of the bad dreams she told everyone about in which she had been interrogated by monsters, and that her warning to me about being in danger was just more amateur theatrics. Some people like being at the center of drama, even when it’s the drama of malice and intrigue.
Especially then.
There was no doubt the woman had issues, and I of all people should understand that. She was sad, lonely, overwhelmed by her more sophisticated and glamorous friends—myself, obviously, excluded—and she wanted the limelight. If she had grabbed it in a way that was preposterous and inconvenient for everybody, there was still no more point in attacking her for it than there was in indulging her fantasies. Leaving the bathroom and heading back to the car, I resolved to be Gretchen’s friend until she felt comfortable enough to tell me the truth. After all, if anyone should understand someone lying to make a shitty situation seem better, it should be me.
So I gave her a welcoming smile when Simon led her to the car. He was using his cell phone, talking, I assumed, to Melissa.
“I have her,” he said. “We’re on our way back.”
Gretchen looked wan, her face pale and un-made-up, her eyes sunken and bloodshot. She gave
me a weary hi and the kind of shrug that could have been an apology but could also have just been a comment on her lot in life. I offered her the front seat, but she shook her head. She wanted to be as alone as the car would let her. I couldn’t blame her for that.
His task complete—or half-complete—Simon’s mood improved considerably. And he flicked on the radio. By the time we were back on the coast road and speeding toward Rethymno, he was humming along to Pearl Jam and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Gretchen said nothing, just stared blankly out the window as the dusty scenery slid past. She looked numb and exhausted, and she clearly didn’t want to talk. Perhaps later, I thought, I could get her on her own.
I wanted to talk about Manos, to tell them what had happened to him, if only to explain his mother’s bizarre behavior at the restaurant, but I couldn’t. Partly it was the fear that, after a cursory sympathetic remark, Simon would shrug it off as irrelevant to him, to us, that it would make me like him less. But it was partly something else too, a lingering anxiety that Gretchen hadn’t been lying, that there was still something I didn’t understand that made the situation far worse than I could imagine.
Marcus had reacted to the word Manos. The name. Did he know about the dead boy? If so, why had he pretended not to? Why had he lied to me?
I shifted in my seat. I was missing something important, and though I had no good reason to think so, I couldn’t shake the sense that it was something bad. Something terrible.
The thought took hold, and for all Simon’s chipper observations on the weather and the view, I found myself getting more and more apprehensive with each mile we traveled, as if the villa was a kind of prison where terrible things might still happen. I could have escaped, I thought, I could have left the airport bathroom and tried to book myself on the next flight to anywhere or checked into a local hotel and sat out the trip there. I hadn’t because that would have been crazy, a ridiculous and defeatist overreaction to a little strangeness and tension, but I couldn’t shake the idea completely.
You could have gotten away, I said to myself. But you missed your chance. And now? Well, we’ll see soon enough, won’t we?
We rounded a bend in the road and a pair of large pink-faced vultures looked up at us from the carcass they were picking over. A dog, I thought. They had white furry collars, but their heads were bare. Simon pointed without taking his hands off the wheel.
“Cool,” he said.
I just nodded.
Chapter Thirty-One
I freeze in the stairwell, though I know he may be on his way back up, may only be seconds behind me, laboring along the tunnel in his scuba mask, blade at the ready. My legs just won’t move.
You killed your sister. All those years ago. You killed her and your mom, and you’ve been lying about it and everything else ever since.
No.
Yes. It’s true. You know it now. You remember.
I do. I see it. I have always remembered waking up in the darkness of the flipped car, Gabby still and silent in the seat next to me, my mother crumpled in the driver’s seat. A silence that sucked in the whole world, the darkness of a black hole from which nothing can escape. I remember the hell that was the wait for someone to see, strapped into my seat on my side, my face pressed to the window against the road. The Toyota’s frame had crumpled in the roll and my seat belt was jammed, though that was nothing compared with the damage on the left side, which had taken the full force of the impact. I remember the disorientation, not understanding which way was up, and then the slow, dragging horror as I made sense of it all but could do nothing but weep and wait.
Eventually there were lights and sirens and men with tools who cut the car apart and told me I was a very lucky girl. They gave me candy and hot chocolate and sympathy. Lots of that, though it would never be enough. They gave me what they could, and they asked me what I remembered.
And I lied.
That was when it started. I told them my mother was tuning the radio, got distracted, lost control.
Mommy.
I didn’t say I poked Gabby one too many times, a hard stick in her ribs with the forefinger of my left hand. I didn’t say that she screamed. That my mother turned round to tell us that if we couldn’t behave till we got home . . .
And that was all it took. A momentary glance away from the road, and then a curve she hadn’t seen properly, misjudged in the darkness, over compensated, and then off the road and down the steep embankment, rolling into trees.
That was the truth, and it began with me.
I stand barefoot on the stairs in the gloom, blinking back tears and then, somewhere in the bowels of whatever structure I am in, I hear the slam of another door, and I’m back in the present and moving, refocusing, trying to find what I need to do and hold it in front of me where I can see it.
Get out. Get out. Get out.
I’m up the stairs and faced with another door.
Don’t be locked.
I try it, and it opens, though I have to push through what feels like a heavy swag of carpet to get out. For a moment, I’m disoriented, but I know where I am. I’m in the foyer of the villa. There is a table lamp by the ancient rotary phone, though it’s on my left instead of my right, and I reach for it, snatching the receiver from the cradle.
Silence. No dial tone.
I slam it back down, but by the light of the lamp I see the door to the stairwell I have just climbed, and with a surge of triumphal resolution, I pull the carpet hanging aside and shut it quickly, dragging the heavy bolts into place afterward.
My hand is trembling as I do it, but I do it, and it’s done, and I’m safe.
I sag to the ground, suddenly light-headed, conscious now that I can feel the slight tremor of the generator running when my hands touch the floor. Everything is as it was. It seems impossible, but the generator means everyone is here, doesn’t it? Maybe they don’t even know I was gone.
I get woozily to my feet and walk round to the living room. There are lights on here too, but it is deserted. There is no body on the rug.
You imagined it. Or made it up.
No. I walk over to the spot where I remember standing, looking down, then get on my hands and knees and feel the rug. It’s wet, but with water, not blood.
Cleaned. Hurriedly and probably ineffectively, but cleaned.
I stand up again, conscious that I’m weaving drunkenly in place now and that my head is starting to throb. This doesn’t make sense. The room is beginning to swim. There was something I had to do, but I’m not sure what it was.
I turn back to the foyer.
There is a snake on the tower stairs.
It’s long and green and bright as spring leaves.
Wait.
No. It’s not a snake. It’s a hose. Like you’d use to water the lawn.
I’ve seen it before, but not here. Not in this room. My brain lurches and fumbles. My stomach turns, but now I remember. I saw it in the basement. It was coiled around some tools. It was next to the generator.
And now I understand.
Chapter Thirty-Two
It was late when we got back to the villa. Roadwork in one of the villages outside Rethymno had added almost an hour to the journey. At one point I pulled out my cell phone to see if we still had a signal. We didn’t, but the last thing I had been looking at—the Manos story—was still up on my screen. I whisked it away again as fast as I could, but I couldn’t be sure that Simon, unreadable in his sunglasses, had not seen.
There was a funereal mood back at the house. Everyone lined up to welcome Gretchen with hugs and pats and simpering smiles, as if she had just come home from war. All except Brad, who gave her an arch look and tipped his imaginary hat like a character out of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Gretchen looked hurriedly away and avoided his eyes for the rest of the afternoon.
But then, so did everyone else. At first I thought I was imagining it, but I kept an eye on him as the rest of us talked and ate and (of course) drank, and it was clear that if
the group felt some unease about me and Gretchen, they felt more about Brad, and I found myself wondering what had been said in our absence. For his part, Brad thumbed through magazines, read or played on his tablet, and sat in the corner, moving only to refill his glass—a bottle of red he was not sharing—or go to the bathroom. I don’t think he said a word all afternoon, but at one point he started humming deliberately. It took me a moment to realize he was imitating the keyboard riff from Prince’s “1999.” He caught me looking at him and gave me a bleak, mocking smile.
Are we having fun yet? It seemed to say. Enjoying the millennial reunion? Who wouldn’t want another two thousand days of this?
In spite of her previous pronouncements about me—or even because of them—Gretchen seemed at pains to keep me close, to make a show of how unified we were, though she never said that she no longer held me responsible for what I still thought of, absurdly, as the panty incident. In fact, we didn’t talk about it at all, and I suspected some kind of mutual gag order had been decided upon, as if to spare both our blushes. Or because they suspected someone else had been responsible but didn’t want to open that particular can of worms.
It was a fitting image: slimy, repulsive, and stinking of decay.
That’s maggots.
Same difference, at least in this instance.
When I went into the kitchen to get ice for my drink—I had moved on from wine to vodka and didn’t give a shit who knew it—Gretchen came with me. She eyed the basket of crusty bread on the counter, then opened the fridge and lifted out a cucumber, a fat, ripe tomato, a jar of black olives, and a block of feta cheese. The light from the fridge was cold and blue. It hollowed out her fragile beauty and made her waifish.
“Do we have anything less Greek?” she mused, half to herself. “I mean, it’s good and all, but I could murder a pizza.”