Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “With the generator!” I shout. “I already said.”

  “Show me,” says Melissa.

  “What?”

  “Show me.”

  I say nothing.

  “It doesn’t matter right now,” I say. “We need to look after—”

  “You are saying someone tried to poison us but it doesn’t matter?” says Melissa, aghast. “It does to me. You say you were chained up in the basement. I want to see where.”

  I give her a weary look and then something rises in my heart, a mixture of anger and righteous indignation.

  “You want to see?” I say, getting to my feet. “Fine. You’ll see.”

  I turn and stride erratically for the head of the stairs, leaving Gretchen, Kristen, and Brad in their rooms, steadying myself on the rail and picking my way carefully so that I don’t trip on the hose. Melissa is at my shoulder and actually catches hold of my elbow as we walk, like we are on some girls’ night out.

  She guides me, following the bright line of the hose in the gloom, to the half-open door into the cellar, Marcus stumbling at our heels. The stairwell is dark, and I am struck by a sudden dread of going back down there, even with the others. I think of the thick liquid blackness of the cell speckled with my blood, the creeping bull-headed man-monster I locked down there . . .

  My head swims. Something isn’t right, but I can’t focus to see what, and Melissa is already propelling me down the stairs, the battery lamp held over her head, Marcus behind her. I see the stack of tools from which I took the hammer, the bright-yellow generator, nestled there like something toxic poised to strike: a scorpion, perhaps . . .

  “Where?” snaps Melissa.

  “What?” I say again. The thick fog of confusion is filling my head once more. Something is wrong.

  “You were chained up in a cell.”

  “Yes. I broke my hand to escape.”

  “Where?”

  “What?” I say, my head thick, my voice faraway.

  “Where is the cell, Jan?” says Melissa.

  I turn around stupidly, then realize that she is pressing the lantern into my good hand. I take it and hold it up. There is the passage to the stairs we have just come through and the mesh door on the other side of the chamber. I go through it, picking my way between ancient wooden crates and pallets till I come to another heavy door, its timbers barred. I don’t want to open it, but I feel Melissa and Marcus watching me, waiting. I hold the lantern in the fingers of my left hand, not touching it with my shattered thumb, and use my right to press the latch until I feel the door shift. I pull it. It sticks. I yank harder, an unfocused anger building inside me, flowing down my arm and into my hand. The door scrapes open.

  It is a cupboard. There are shelves, mostly empty, some with moldy boxes and folded hessian sacks spotted with mouse droppings. There is no passageway. No door.

  I turn, bewildered. The light from the lamp falls on Marcus’s face, and I see not confusion, but disappointment and a swelling horror.

  “It was here,” I say. “I was chained up down here. I know I was.”

  “No, Jan,” says Melissa. “I’m sorry, but you weren’t. You made it up, didn’t you?”

  And then, as I stare at them both, Marcus speaks.

  “God, Jan,” he says. “What did you do?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “Nothing,” I say. “I didn’t do anything. I escaped from the cell, and I saved your life . . .”

  As soon as the words are out, I know they are the wrong thing to say.

  “Oh,” says Melissa, realization dawning. “That’s what this is.”

  “What?” I say. “No, I mean, I really . . .”

  “Fuck,” says Marcus, turning away, his eyes wide with shock. “You set this up so you could rescue me? What the fuck, Jan? People could have died! They still might.”

  “No!” I say. “It’s true.”

  “It’s not, Jan, is it?” says Melissa. “You want to be the hero, to make everyone like you, so you arranged this. You are lying to us again, aren’t you? I think you even lied to yourself.”

  “Is that right, Jan?” asks Marcus, appalled. “Is this another fib to make your life feel better?”

  No! It isn’t. I haven’t been lying. I didn’t make it up.

  “That’s pathetic,” says Melissa. “I’m sorry, Jan. But it is, and I’m not going to cover for you this time.”

  “No!” I say. “It’s all true. I was chained up. There was a cell . . .”

  “Where, Jan?” says Melissa, and her confusion has gone too. So has her compassion. Now her face and voice are hard, simmering with barely contained anger.

  “Here!” I say. “Or . . . somewhere. There were railway lines and—”

  “Railway lines?” Melissa sneers. “Jan, this time you’ve gone too far.”

  “I’m telling the truth!”

  I didn’t invent it all to make my life feel better, more interesting, to make myself a hero. I didn’t. I swear to God. Not this time.

  Melissa turns to Marcus, taking charge. “We need to call the police and an ambulance,” she says. “I don’t know as much as she does about carbon monoxide poisoning, but we need to get help now.”

  “There were railway lines,” I say, stuck in the mud of my own thoughts. “I came up into the foyer and turned, but the phone table wasn’t there . . .”

  “Be quiet, Jan,” says Melissa. “We’re trying to figure out what to do.”

  “It wasn’t there,” I muse aloud. “I mean, it was there, but it wasn’t where it should be, where I thought it would be.” I stretch out my right hand, as if reaching into my memory to snatch up the dead phone receiver, then retract it and reach with my wounded left. It is almost there in my head now. I just have to push through the fog a little farther. “It was on the other side, because . . . because . . .”

  Push through . . .

  There was something like . . . fabric. Like carpet hanging. And I turned to the left because . . .

  The house is symmetrical. Simon’s voice in my head. It was what he said when we arrived on the first day. The house had been rebuilt over generations, but at its heart, it was balanced, symmetrical. And that meant . . .

  “There’s another cellar,” I say. “There’s another door on the east side of the foyer. Behind the tapestry. You can’t see it, but there’s a door and stairs down to a labyrinth passage. The cells. The railroad tracks.”

  “It’s over, Jan,” says Melissa. “Drop it.”

  “No,” I say, the certainty growing in my mind. “It’s true. There’s another staircase.”

  “Jan,” says Marcus. “There’s no railroad in Crete.”

  “A mine, then,” I answer, shoving past him, making for the door.

  “Marcus,” says Melissa in a low, serious voice, “I don’t think she should be allowed to wander around . . .”

  “No mines either,” says Marcus irritably. He grabs me by my wounded hand so that I cry out, and he looks down. “Jesus, Jan. What the hell?”

  “I told you,” I say. “I had to break my hand to get out.”

  He looks at me then, and I see doubt in his face.

  “There is no cell, Jan,” says Melissa. “No chain, no ring on the wall. You smashed your hand with the hammer on purpose, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “Jan,” says Marcus, and some of the old care is back in his eyes now, the old pity, though I think it might still be directed at the lengths I will go to get him back. I snatch my hand away, furious at his disbelief.

  “He chained me up, Marcus!” I roar at him. “He asked me questions!”

  “Who?” says Melissa, still defiant, disbelieving.

  I stare at her. If I was clearer in my mind, I might not say anything yet, but as it is, the hesitation is only momentary.

  “Simon,” I say.

  Her jaw drops slowly open. She tips her head slightly to one side, as if trying to home in on a distant sound, her eyes turning to slits.

  “You’re i
nsane,” she says, and she actually takes a step back, as if she’s afraid of me.

  “Jan, listen to yourself,” says Marcus. “That can’t be true.”

  “It is,” I say. “I’ll show you.”

  And I’m moving again, faster now, clearer in my mind and full of a desperate determination to show them once and for all. The cell doesn’t matter. The ring in the wall. My hellish captivity. None of it matters. But they will see that I am telling the truth. I will show them that, or I will die in the attempt. It is suddenly and clearly the only thing I want out of what is left of my life.

  I’m beyond Marcus before he thinks to come after me, round the corner, and halfway up the stairs into the foyer. I hear them coming after me, but I ignore them, bursting into the open space of the foyer and crossing to the telephone table and the hanging tapestry beyond it. I drag it aside, and there’s the door, bolted by my own hands.

  I throw one back, but then I’m pulled away. Melissa has hold of my right wrist and she’s staring into my face with an animal ferocity.

  “That’s enough, Jan. We’re going to sit here quietly while we wait for the ambulance, and then we’re going to talk to the police . . .”

  I start to speak, but I see Marcus’s face and stop. He’s confused again, but now he’s staring at the door half-hidden by the tapestry.

  “How wide were the railroad tracks?” he says.

  Melissa gives him a disbelieving look.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” she says.

  “How wide?” he says again, looking directly at me.

  I shake my head and motion with my hands. A foot. A foot and a half. I don’t remember.

  “Too narrow for a train,” says Marcus.

  “See?” says Melissa.

  “But not for a gun carriage,” he says. Melissa sputters wordlessly at him but he adds, “There’s a gun emplacement in the cliffside. I saw it when I went walking but couldn’t find a way up to it. It was probably a German antiaircraft battery. I hadn’t thought about it, but I’ll bet the house was used as a command post. Officers’ HQ, maybe. There’d be a mini garrison quartered here. Bunks. Storage rooms. A place to hold the AA guns out of the weather . . .”

  He says it dreamily, putting each idea together like a child lining up dominos.

  “But . . . ,” he says, turning to Melissa. “What’s going on, Mel?” he says. “Where’s Simon?”

  “Asleep, as we should be,” she shoots back, but there’s something hunted in her face, like a cornered animal.

  “You know Jan,” she says. “This is one of her stories. Her lies. Why would Simon lock her up and ask her questions? It’s crazy.”

  “Gretchen said she had a dream,” says Marcus, still just thinking aloud. “People asking her questions . . .”

  “Coincidence,” says Mel. “Come on, Marcus, you can’t think—”

  “Manos,” I say.

  That stops her. She turns very slowly to me now and her face is white.

  “What did you say?”

  “Manos,” I say again. It sounds soft in my mouth, like a prayer. “The waiter from the Diogenes. The boy who died. That’s what Simon was asking me about. I think he asked Gretchen about it too because you told her once, when you first met. In a bar. He wanted to know if she had told anyone else . . .”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Melissa shoots back, but she’s on the defensive now and I don’t believe her. “Manos? What does that have to do with us?”

  “Simon was angry,” I say, lining up the remaining pieces till the picture comes together. “That day, our last day, five years ago. He was mad. I didn’t know why because I never saw you in the cave with Brad, but he was. He was sick of your flirtations and whatever else they turned into. He was angry, and he took the Jet Ski out. I remember seeing him bouncing along the waves. He was going so fast. And then he went round the cove. Where the boy was diving for sponges.”

  “That’s enough,” says Melissa. “Stop talking now, or I swear to God, Jan . . .”

  I see it all like the picture in Marcus’s slide show, and I remember that last morning, Simon’s grimness when he took the Jet Ski out and his fury when he brought it back, running it up through the shallows and onto the rocky shingle.

  Fury, and deliberation.

  He had wrecked it on purpose, and the only reason to do that was because he was looking to cover up damage the Jet Ski had already sustained . . .

  God.

  The truth hits me cold and clear as the night air from the shattered window upstairs.

  “Simon hit him, didn’t he?” I say. “Ran him over. By accident, perhaps, but . . . well, he didn’t help him. He left Manos there to drown, and then Simon came back to the hotel and ran the Jet Ski aground so that no one would see the damage he’d done to it when he hit the boy.”

  “You’re insane,” she says. “Delusional.”

  “And you thought I’d seen,” I add, realizing. “You thought I knew, that I told someone.”

  Something happens in her face, a narrowing and tightening, as she stills, listening.

  “It wasn’t just the name in the leaves, was it?” I say. “It started before the trip. Someone sent you something.” As soon as I said it I realized the full horror of that truth. “Oh my God. It’s why the trip happened! You probably had no intention of following up on all that 1999 stuff, did you? There wasn’t going to be a real reunion. But then someone wrote to you. Yes? A letter maybe. Or an e-mail from some untraceable account. You wanted us back here to find out who it was, so the 1999 party became a real thing. What did they ask for, money?”

  “You’re making this up,” she says, her voice flat, hollow.

  “You know I’m not.”

  Marcus is watching us, like he is out in the darkened house of a theater, gazing up at the stage.

  “Maybe Simon didn’t tell you right away,” I say. “About Manos. You don’t have to take the blame for any of this or cover for him. He was the one on the Jet Ski, not you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If it had happened I would have known. I would have seen it. I was with him the whole time.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  It is Marcus. We stare at him in stunned silence, and I think again of the theater, as if he is in the audience but has stood up in the middle of a key scene and joined in.

  “What?” says Melissa, thrown, all her righteous fury draining away.

  “I was on the headland,” he says. “Jan and me . . . we weren’t getting along so I went for a walk. Bird watching, if you can believe that. I had binoculars.”

  “No,” says Melissa. “No!”

  “Yes,” he replies. He speaks quietly, simply, like he is explaining something hard to a slow student. “I didn’t see the thing itself, but I saw which way Simon took the Jet Ski. And I thought it was weird later, when he said he’d gone the other way round the bay, and I remembered seeing him fiddling with the nose of the thing before he got in range of the beach, like it was already damaged—before he ran it aground. I didn’t know about the dead boy—Manos, I mean—not till recently. You asked me to put together the slide show of the trip, remember?” he said to Melissa. “And I wanted to add the names of places, little maps and stuff, you know? So I looked up the restaurant online. The Diogenes. Found the story about the waiter, realized he died the same day as when Simon took the Jet Ski out . . .”

  “No,” says Melissa again. “That’s not proof of anything.”

  “And I thought about how he ran the Jet Ski aground and how pissed he had been in the cave, and how that boy waiter had annoyed him, and I wondered . . .”

  “Why didn’t you say?” I demand, almost as horrified by him as I had been of her.

  He sags, and for a second his eyes close, then he shakes his head and shrugs, like he is shifting the weight of the globe itself off his shoulders.

  “I didn’t know anything,” he says. “It just felt . . . weird. Coincidences. But
the police had ruled it an accident, and I didn’t really know so . . . I just wanted to get a reaction, see if there was more to it . . .”

  “It’s not true,” says Melissa.

  I ignore her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I say.

  “We barely talked . . . ,” he begins, then shrugs again, a weary, defeated gesture. “Not about anything serious. Not till this week. Sorry. I should have.”

  “Marcus, did you blackmail him? Marcus, I can’t imagine . . . it’s almost worse!”

  “It wasn’t like that,” he says. “No demands. The e-mails, the letters, they only said one thing, the same thing I wrote in the leaves on the patio. The boy’s name. I wanted to see if they’d react, you know? I had no proof of anything. I didn’t really know anything. But I wondered, and the more I thought about it—about them—the more it seemed plausible. An accident, or worse.”

  “Worse?” I said.

  “If Simon ran him over,” he said, “the question then is whether he did it by mistake, or if he saw him in the water . . . and then . . . Simon had been so angry . . . it felt right. I could almost see it in my head. And I dreamed about it, the black stuff in the water turning pink . . . it made me furious to think that’s how it might have gone down, and they had just walked away from it. I didn’t want them to forget. I didn’t want them to think that everyone else had forgotten. And I thought that if I pushed it a little, maybe something would come out, some bit of real evidence I could take to the police . . .”

  “You should have said.”

  “I know, Jan. But all I had was a hunch. Swear to God. And then I saw them here and they were just, so them, so perfect, so unburdened by anything, and I couldn’t stand it. So I left his name outside, and I made sure we went to the restaurant, and I left the gate open so that they’d feel hunted, exposed—”

  “Shut up!” says Melissa. “Shut up.”

  “And you thought it was me,” I say to her. “Lying Jan, playing head games with her friends. Well, you’d show her, wouldn’t you? Gas her. Chain her up till she talks, and when you’re absolutely sure she hasn’t told anyone else, get rid of her and anyone else who might be a threat. Flood the house with carbon monoxide. A tragic accident from which you walk away untouched, still flawless, still—”