Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Drink?”

  “God, no. I think I need a break.”

  I nodded, sipping mine absently while she assembled a rickety sandwich, and suddenly the weight of my past lies was too much to bear and I wanted to be done with it all.

  “My sister died a long time ago,” I said without preamble, like I was confessing to a priest in the hope not just of forgiveness but of redemption, the chance to start over.

  She looked up, her eyebrows raised, and started to say something puzzled, but I shook my head.

  “I know,” I said. “I told you she worked in the movie industry doing CGI. I lied. Sorry.”

  She put the knife down and considered me.

  “Why?” she said at last.

  “I honestly couldn’t tell you. It’s something I do. Did. I’m trying to quit.”

  She gave a snuffling laugh. I had meant my confession, but I saw suddenly how it opened a door to ask something in return.

  “Gretchen?” I said.

  “Don’t ask,” she said quickly. “I know I shouldn’t have blamed you, and I’m sorry, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Still don’t.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t letting her completely off the hook.

  “You said we were in danger—”

  “I was being stupid,” she said quickly. “Forget it.”

  “O . . . K . . . ,” I said.

  “Really.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Do I have to?” she said, not so much defiant as whiny, like a kid being sent for a bath.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” I said. “When the rest of us went to the fort and you stayed with Mel.”

  She was immediately on her guard, pushing her hair behind her ears as I’d seen her do sometimes when she wasn’t comfortable.

  “What about it?” she said, slicing the tomato with more care than was strictly necessary.

  “Did you see Brad?”

  She put the knife down again and turned to face me, lips pursed and face red, like she was ready to tell me where to get off, but then she deflated and looked at her hands. For a long moment she said nothing, and when she finally spoke her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “He texted me,” she said. “Offered to buy me a drink at a hotel in the town center.”

  “And you went,” I said.

  She checked that no one could hear from the other room, then nodded quickly.

  “It was just a drink, right?” she said. “Except that it wasn’t. He had a room. He said he and Kristen were on the outs and maybe I’d like to . . . you know.”

  I buried my surprise and just said, “And did you?”

  She shook her head.

  “I went to the room,” she confessed. “But it all felt too weird. I’m not . . . I don’t know. It’s not my style, you know? I like Kristen, and even though he said . . . anyway, no, I didn’t.” I nodded again, thinking that was the end of it, but then she added, “He was actually quite sweet. And sad. Not like he normally is at all. I actually considered . . . but then . . .”

  Her face tightened, all the tenderness that had been there a moment before now turning into something else entirely. Again she checked the doorway and stooped, as if trying to make herself small, before she leaned in and whispered.

  “He called me Melissa. Not once. Four or five times. He said I looked like her and being with me would be like being with her. Freaked me out. I mean, I was insulted, you know, because he obviously wasn’t really interested in me, but it was more than that. It scared me. He’s, like, obsessed with her. Asked me to sit like her. Talk like her. I couldn’t deal, so I took off.”

  “And he was . . .”

  “Not happy,” she said with a bleak smile. “But then you’d already figured that out, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking of the butchered underwear strewn about her bedroom floor. “I think I had.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  I took a health and environmental science class in college. It was mostly pretty dull stuff, but one of the case studies stuck with me. A Minnesota family in the nineties started getting frequent bouts of what they thought was flu: lethargy, occasional nausea, disorientation, an inability to focus, and memory loss. They were treated and released over and over, with doctors considering chronic fatigue syndrome to be the leading possible cause of their symptoms. This went on for three years. In that time the kids’ grades crashed, the father lost his job, and the mother became so depressed with her failure to complete even simple tasks that she became suicidal. The only time they improved was when they went away on vacation, but as soon as they got home, their symptoms would creep back in. Almost five years after the syndrome began, a random home improvement revealed a leak in the exhaust line of their furnace. Prompt blood tests confirmed that the cause of all their sickness was chronic exposure to low levels of carbon monoxide.

  Cases where the dosage was much higher—when people stayed with a running car in the garage, say, or when they used a charcoal stove indoors—had more dramatic and alarming results, frequently leading to unconsciousness within ten or fifteen minutes and death in twice that. The gas is light and odorless. Most people don’t notice it even as they start to succumb to symptoms.

  I stare at the hose on the stairs, and I know why we have been so tired, so woozy, so forgetful. I had thought we were being drugged, but we weren’t. We were being poisoned.

  Marcus is upstairs. So are Gretchen and Kristen and Brad. I have no idea if they are alive.

  I run clumsily to the front door, but it has been locked with a key. I follow the hose down the cellar stairs to the generator, past the scuba gear, not thinking about who might be down here, stumbling and falling on the steps. My skinned knees flare and my shattered left hand shrieks with pain as I land awkwardly on it, but I get up and blunder over to the throbbing yellow generator and shut it off. The exhaust line has been fitted to the hose and fastened in place with pipe grips.

  The gas is light. That means it will rise, and the sealed windows of the villa that make it so stuffy will hold it. The second and third stories are now a gas chamber. I look at the scuba gear, but I don’t have time to mess with regulators. Instead I snatch up the small tank of pure emergency oxygen, then turn to the tools and garden implements. I pick up a picklike mattock, but it’s too heavy to wield one-handed. Among the dust and cobwebs is a ball-peen hammer, the kind with the rounded striking head.

  That will have to do.

  I hit the wall hard with my left shoulder as I navigate the spiral back to the foyer but keep going, breathing as shallowly as I can while I climb. I can’t smell the poison. I can’t taste it. But I know it’s there and that there’s nothing I can do that will keep it out. The air is probably loaded already, which means I have only a few minutes of consciousness. Maybe not even that.

  I round the corner onto the landing of the third floor at a ragged trot and make for Marcus’s door. I weave as I walk, listing like a rowboat taking on water, and fall heavily against the door. It is locked. They all will be, a precaution against whoever broke into Gretchen’s room. I set the oxygen tank down but waste no time knocking. There is a good chance they are already unconscious or worse.

  I swing the hammer wildly at the door handle, hitting, missing, hitting again, using all the strength I still have. The handle buckles but the latch holds, so I try charging with my right shoulder. The first hit is too close to the hinge, but the second, with a blundering run from the top of the stairs, splinters the wood around the faceplate, and the door judders open.

  Marcus is motionless on the bed, wearing the shorts I saw him in the night before, the sheets kicked haphazardly aside, lying on his belly, his face buried in the pillow. He always slept like that. I don’t wait to check his pulse or breathing but stride across the room, hammer raised.

  The energy of my step drives the swing of the hammer, and the window explodes.

  I lean out into the night and suck in the air. It’s cold
as deep water, and it fills my lungs like life. I use the hammerhead to clear as much of the glass from the frame as I can, but as soon as I try to pull Marcus closer, it’s clear that I can’t do it with one hand. I should be distraught, emotionally overwhelmed, but all my remaining mental strength has been honed to a fine point, to completing a single set of things I need to do, and I feel nothing. I take another breath of the air outside, then go back into the hall and down one flight.

  After the impenetrable darkness of the cellars, the dusk up here barely slows me down. I go to Gretchen’s room next, still feeling unsteady, but I crash into the door like a battering ram, turning my shoulder into it at the last second. The latch holds, but the door itself cracks along a seam where I hit it. I use the hammer to clear the wood, then reach in and unlatch the door.

  Gretchen is huddled on the bed under a protective mound of blankets. I practically throw the hammer through her window, take another breath past the shattered remains, and turn around, only then seeing that there is another figure curled up on the floor beside the bed. I bend, trying to get my eyes to focus.

  It’s Kristen.

  Dimly, I think another piece of the puzzle has slotted into place.

  But I can’t abandon Brad, even if Kristen wants nothing more to do with him. I go back out, moving down the hall to the last door. I’m flagging now. I can feel it, and it’s not just tiredness. My movement is sloppy, my balance precarious, and my mind is wandering. It’s the gas. It’s in my lungs, my blood. I hit the door to Brad’s room, but I’ve lost all the punch I had a moment ago, and it holds. I try again to no avail. I’m suddenly impossibly tired. It’s like being carried away on a thick black river and wanting nothing more than to float with the current. I try once more, but my shoulder charge is weak and uneven. I hit my face against the jamb and collapse to my knees.

  I have no choice. I need air. I crawl back the way I came, back into Gretchen’s room, clambering roughly over Kristen’s prone body to lay my head on the windowsill and drink in the night. A shard of the windowpane gouges my cheek, but I stay where I am, breathing deep and full until my head clears, and I remember the O2 tank I left in the hall upstairs. I stagger out, flounder my way up the steps, and pick it up. I fiddle with the regulator, taking a quick hit as I make my way back to Marcus, and the oxygen hits my brain like an adrenaline firework.

  I roll Marcus onto his back and clamp the regulator to his face.

  “Breathe,” I say. “Breathe.”

  And then I’m moving back into the hall and down once more, wondering vaguely if that delay will cost Brad his life or if he’s dead already. I am lining up to charge the door when a firm hand grips my shoulder and spins me round.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  I don’t know what woke me. It wasn’t a sound as such, or not one I consciously recognized when I opened my eyes. For a while I lay in bed, straining my ears to focus, and then there was something: a muffled thud, like someone overturning a soft but heavy chair. It came from below.

  I had my little stub of candle in its holder and had borrowed a box of safety matches from the kitchen, the waxed kind that smelled of paraffin. I struck one and lit the candle, then swung my legs out of bed and planted them firmly on the floor. I don’t recall really deciding to do anything, and I think I might have still been half-asleep, just acting without really thinking.

  I could have wrapped a towel around myself and stuck my head out into the hall, but I didn’t like the feeling of being naked, or nearly naked, after what had happened to Gretchen. So before I opened the door, I dressed: bra, underwear, a sundress, and sandals. It took me barely longer than the towel would, and I felt somehow secure, like a person ready to face the world. Still, it was a strange decision, and I don’t think I was thinking clearly. My head felt thick, fogged by more than sleep, and my feet were unsteady, as if I was drunk.

  I stepped out into the hall and along to the spiral staircase, my candle flame fluttering so the shadows leaped. I thought vaguely of what Marcus had said about Plato’s cave, about taking the shadows for the thing itself, but my brain was too sleepy to do anything with the image. Instead I tiptoed down into the foyer and looked around. The front door looked solidly locked, but it felt strange to be down there alone in the dark, and I couldn’t remember why I had come down.

  A sound, I thought. I had heard a sound.

  Suddenly I wanted to get this over as soon as possible. I might have gone back up the stairs if the candlelight hadn’t caught the odd flash of green on the ground.

  A garden hose, like one I’d seen in the basement. It seemed to be running from the cellar stairs into the living room.

  I wasn’t scared, just curious, as if I were still in a dream where things didn’t really make sense but everyone behaved as if they did.

  I followed the hose into the living room.

  I could tell something was off as soon as I went in. Moonlight came through the great high windows, and I could see something out of place in the middle of the living room carpet—a sprawling, mounded something, like a large dog stretched out and fast asleep. If my eyes had been better I wouldn’t have needed to stoop to see what it was, wouldn’t have had to touch him, to roll him over, feeling the warm wetness on my hands and smelling the sharp, metallic tang of the blood all over him.

  “Brad!” I gasped, kneeling beside him.

  If I’d had my glasses, I wouldn’t have had to kneel, and I might have noticed the figure I had walked past to get to him, might have sensed them moving behind me before the blow fell. The back of my head flared with sudden agony, and the world went first light, and then very, very dark.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The hand on my shoulder belongs to Melissa. She’s holding a battery-powered lantern and is standing at the top of the stairs, looking perplexed and angry.

  “What the hell is going on?” she says. “Did you break something?”

  “The windows,” I said. “We have to get this door open.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just help me with this door.”

  “It’s locked.”

  “Force it!”

  She knocks, and I push her aside and charge the door again. This time it shudders in its frame.

  “Jan! What the hell!” Melissa exclaims.

  I hit the door twice more, my shoulder aching with each lunge, and at last it bursts open. Brad is lying on the bed motionless. It takes me a moment to see the dark stain on the pillow, brownish at the edges but thick and black around his head.

  When Melissa sees the hammer she tries to grab it, shouting something, but I shake her off, and the iron head crashes through the window. The room floods with wholesome air, and I stagger out into the hall and slump to the ground while Melissa bellows her disbelief. I know I should get the oxygen tank and share it with the others, but for a moment I don’t have the strength. I can feel the temperature dropping as the night air rushes into the stuffy house, and I just sit there, my back against the wall, breathing it in. I doubt it will save Brad.

  Time passes. A minute or two, perhaps, but I’m still not thinking clearly and can’t be sure. But then I hear movement, and I look up to see a shadow in the stairwell. It shifts and turns into Marcus, looking dazed and unsteady.

  “Jan?” he says. “What’s going on?”

  “The generator,” I say, my head still foggy. “The exhaust was connected to a hose. We all have carbon monoxide poisoning. Keep breathing from the tank. And share it with the others.”

  “What?” says Marcus. He looks even less focused than me, though whether that is the corrupted air he has been breathing or the high from the shot of pure oxygen I gave him, I can’t say.

  “The tank in your room,” I say. “Get it. Use it.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Melissa. She’s more alert than us, having only just come upstairs. Maybe her side of the house wasn’t affected since the hose ran right up the tower stairs.

  “Help him,” I say. �
��Help them all.”

  “I can’t tell if they’re breathing,” she says. “Brad’s head is all cut. I can’t tell if it’s bad, but there’s a lot of blood.”

  “Give them the oxygen anyway. The ventilation is getting rid of the carbon monoxide from the air, but we have to get it out of their bloodstream.”

  “I don’t understand,” says Marcus. “Why won’t they wake up?”

  “It’s the gas,” I say vaguely.

  “Will they be OK?”

  “I don’t know, Marcus.”

  “I don’t understand,” he says again.

  I just sit and breathe, suddenly too tired to explain.

  “Why would anyone connect a hose to the generator?” says Melissa.

  “To kill us, Mel,” I reply, exasperation breaking through my weary confusion for a second. “First just to confuse us, disorient us—but now, I think, to kill us. They’ve been pumping low amounts in at night, which is why we’ve been so . . . weird and tired. It makes you unfocused, forgetful. But tonight it’s more and—”

  “Why do you know all this?” says Marcus.

  It’s an odd question, but I shrug it off.

  “I studied this stuff,” I say. “It doesn’t matter. Tonight the dose is way higher.”

  “Why?” says Melissa.

  “Because someone wants to murder us all in our beds!”

  “You weren’t in your bed,” she says. Another odd remark. She seems thoughtful rather than alarmed. Cautious.

  “No,” I say. “I was chained in the basement with the generator.”

  “What?” says Melissa, incredulous now.

  “I don’t understand,” says Marcus woozily. He’s still badly out of it.

  “I was chained to a metal ring in the wall of a cell in the basement.”

  It sounds preposterous, even in my ears, and I see bafflement settle into Marcus’s face, like something heavy that makes his whole body droop.

  “This is crazy,” says Melissa. “You were chained up in a cell? Where?”