Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  I have no idea where I am.

  I move forward, right hand out in front of me, bare feet sliding along the floor, feeling as they go. It feels like stone flags, old and a little uneven, gritty and unswept underfoot.

  The villa’s cellar.

  That still makes sense. I try to orient myself but have no idea which way I’m facing. I take a step, then another, and my outstretched hand runs into something cold and solid.

  Another stone wall.

  For a second I feel panic and despair rising. My cell was inside another small locked room? But then I move to my right, my left shoulder brushing the wall, my wounded hand pressed softly to my chest, and there is space.

  Not a room, then. A corridor or passage.

  That’s better, at least until the word passage settles in my head, combines with the darkness and sense of being underground and emerges, less comfortably, as labyrinth.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded like it was right outside my door, the sound a high and rising wail that chilled my blood. It was wordless, an abstract keening, and as I blundered out of bed and pulled a robe around me, I tried to decide if the root of the sound was fear or pain.

  I had the door unlocked and was through it and into the night-black hallway before I stopped to think of my own safety. The power was still out, and I had come upstairs by the light of a stuttering candle that I had blown out as soon as I got into bed. It sat, cold and forgotten, on my nightstand now as my fingers flicked stupidly at the light switches and got nothing. The cry came again, but it wasn’t right outside my door. It was one flight down.

  I stumbled down the tower staircase, hand on the bannister for guidance in the gloom, and rounded the corner. The screamer was on the landing, a pearly ghost in the dark, shrieking like a banshee.

  Gretchen.

  Almost immediately another door kicked open, and someone came out with a flashlight, its beam flitting around and making the darkness wherever it wasn’t seem all the deeper.

  “What the fuck?” said someone. Brad, I think. The person with the flashlight.

  “Gretchen?” said Kristen’s voice, soothing and calm. “What’s wrong, honey? You have a bad dream?”

  She might have been talking to a three-year-old. In the leaping and uneven flashlight, I could just make out Gretchen, her hair down and ragged around her shoulders, clad in a faintly Victorian nightdress, staggering away from her open door and throwing herself against the opposite wall, as if trying to get as far from her room as possible.

  Marcus appeared on the stairs behind me, an old-fashioned hurricane lamp held above his head, its amber glow lighting the hall. He was wearing only boxer shorts and glasses but looked wide awake.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Gretchen!” said Brad sharply. Gretchen’s wail had dwindled into a feverish sob, but she was still saying nothing. “What happened?”

  In answer, like some Gothic specter crouched in the angle of wall and floor, she stabbed a finger in the direction of her bedroom, pointing wordlessly. Marcus strode in, radiating irritation, as Kristen dropped to her and put an arm around her shoulders. The sound of Marcus’s commanding footsteps falling suddenly silent was unnerving, like a thunderclap. For a second there was a loaded stillness, and then, his voice low, he said, “Who did this?”

  “Did what?” said Brad, pointing the flashlight and moving into the doorway to see. There was another momentary pause, and then he whispered, “Jesus.”

  “What?” said Kristen, vague anxiety turning quickly to panic. “Brad, what is it?”

  Brad said nothing, but I heard him moving around, and then he was back in the doorway, the flashlight splashing the hallway, and in his hands were pieces of colored fabric, mostly very pale—cream and ivory and satiny silver—and other bits of navy and pink and black, some trimmed with lace, some no more than thongs . . .

  It was underwear. Gretchen’s, presumably. I frowned, baffled, and then I saw. Brad held a sample out in one hand and fixed them in the beam of the flashlight in his other hand so that everything else seemed to dissolve into blackness and there were only Gretchen’s ravaged panties, every pair cut to ribbons.

  “We have to search the house,” said Marcus.

  We were all downstairs now. Brad had roused Melissa and Simon from the master suite on the other side of the house, and they had joined us, bleary eyed, caught between bafflement, irritation, and alarm. The last of those quickly won out. Simon put the generator back on, and the rest of us buzzed around Gretchen like bees jarred from their hive and unable to settle.

  “The doors are all locked,” said Simon. “I checked.”

  “So he’s still inside,” said Marcus, as if that proved his point.

  Simon looked away. He glanced at Melissa and something passed between them. I caught her puzzled frown and the minute shake of her head.

  “What?” Marcus demanded. He was as close to losing it as I had ever seen him.

  “No one could get in,” Simon muttered, shaking his head and still not meeting his eyes, as if he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Meaning what?” said Marcus.

  “Nothing,” said Simon, his voice low, his gaze wandering to Gretchen.

  “You think she did it herself?” said Marcus, incredulous.

  “That, or one of us did it,” said Brad, as close to nonchalant as he could get. Kristen had gathered Gretchen onto the couch, and Brad had flopped heavily into an armchair, his watchful face unreadable. The rest of us were still standing awkwardly, not knowing what to do or say.

  “Is that what you think?” asked Marcus, fixing Simon with a defiant stare. “That it was one of us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, Marcus,” Simon shot back, his voice rising. “I don’t know. You have a problem with that?”

  “You two want to save the pissing contest for another time?” said Melissa.

  “All I’m saying is that we should look around,” said Marcus, “rather than, you know, assuming one of us is a colossal asshole.”

  “Or a liar,” said Brad.

  I stared at him. His gaze was on Gretchen, but it was impossible not to feel like he was talking about me.

  “Gretchen, hon,” said Kristen, and it struck me that Marcus was right. Her British accent vanished when she wasn’t thinking about it. “Tell us exactly what happened.”

  Gretchen groaned and turned her face into Kristen’s shoulder like a weary toddler.

  “Come on,” Kristen coaxed. “It will help to get it all out, and then we can get it all sorted.”

  Gretchen gazed at her, her watery eyes huge, then moistened her lips.

  “I took a shower before bed,” she said. “You all crashed, but I was still awake, so I took a shower. Then I thought I would choose my clothes for tomorrow, you know? Lay them out. Something cute, and . . . anyway, I opened my suitcase. And there it was.”

  She dissolved into tears.

  So I hadn’t been asleep, or not for long, when it happened. I frowned, trying to get my head round it. I felt dazed, half-asleep, and almost as taken aback by the idea of someone laying out her clothes for the morning as I was by what had been done to those clothes.

  “So it happened while she was in the shower?” said Marcus. “Gretchen, when did you last look in your case? When was the last time you saw that everything was . . . OK?”

  Gretchen shrugged and shook her head wearily.

  “This morning, I guess,” she said. “When I got up.”

  “So it could have happened anytime today,” Marcus concluded.

  “Why would anyone do this?” she said. “What did I do to them?”

  As she said it, her gaze strobed across the room, found me, and lingered. I stared at her. For a second I tried to ignore it, but as she continued to stare, the silence became awkward, accusatory.

  “Wait,” I said. “You think that I . . . ?”
/>   “Did you?” she said, and suddenly she was quite together, quite calm, and both her wet eyes and her cracked voice had a touch of steel.

  “No!” I said. “Why the hell would I do that?”

  “I think you know why,” said Gretchen.

  Everyone was looking at me. What had been a dull, smoldering anxiety in my head had suddenly roared into bright, hot flame.

  This can’t be happening.

  “What?” I said. “You can’t be serious!”

  “You’re jealous of Marcus and me,” she said.

  I was so stunned that for a second I just gaped at her. No one else spoke.

  “What?” I demanded.

  “You know,” she said, snakeskin quiet.

  “Marcus,” I said. “Tell her!”

  “Tell her what?” he said. He was quiet and still. Wary. His manner gave nothing away, and his uncertainty turned my smoldering anxiety to anger. It flared white hot in my chest.

  “Tell her I wouldn’t do that!” I shouted. “You know I wouldn’t. Marcus, you can’t think . . . I didn’t. I wouldn’t! Why would I . . . ?”

  “You didn’t like me near him,” said Gretchen. “I could tell. Everyone could tell.”

  I felt the sudden embarrassment in the room and knew she was right, they had all thought it, discussed it . . .

  “No,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

  “Jan,” said Melissa. “I get it, but this is really not the way . . .”

  “Shut up!” I shouted. “All of you. I said I didn’t do it, OK?”

  “Now, Jan.” Simon this time, also still and quiet but deliberate, like some guy in a movie defusing a bomb. “This isn’t the time for one of your stories.”

  I stare at him, breathless, tears starting in my eyes, and then I look to Marcus, who had said they didn’t know about me, not really. He looks down, ashamed, though whether that’s about me or him, I can’t tell.

  “I didn’t,” I manage, crying openly now. “I would never . . .”

  And I mean it. I didn’t do it. I swear to God, I didn’t.

  “We can fix this,” said Melissa, turning between Gretchen and me and smiling. “Tomorrow we can head into town, buy you some new things, Gretchen, and then we’ll have a little chat, just us girls, maybe a few drinks, and then—”

  “No,” said Gretchen. “I need to call the airline. I’m leaving.”

  Melissa protested, of course, said it would all be better in the morning, but Gretchen stuck to her guns, watching me from under her bangs as if I might attack at any moment, and at last the call was made on the ancient rotary phone in the foyer. Kristen sat with her on the tower stairs as Gretchen talked, but she met my eyes and shrugged with noncommittal exhaustion.

  So the jury is still out on me.

  Simon and Melissa huddled in the stairwell to their room, then went through the motions of searching the house for intruders while I stood at the bottom and stared, unseeing, at the large tapestry that hung in the foyer, all faded birds in threadbare green and gold. Having found nothing, Brad, who had gone with them, armed with a knife from the kitchen, went back to bed—something of a relief to Kristen, I think, since his patience was already worn thin—and Marcus drifted apart like a satellite in high orbit, just barely connected to what was going on. Once I caught his eye and took a step toward him, but he shook his head minutely and I stopped, trying to decide if he wanted to keep whatever conversation we might have for a more private moment, or if he was just done talking to me.

  It was impossible not to feel betrayed by the world and him most of all, and the look I gave him was less imploring than it had been and more accusatory.

  You’d think that tales about boys crying wolf would make me immune to this sort of thing, but it didn’t. It was an obvious downside of being a known embroiderer of the truth, a distorter, a misleader, that even when you were being absolutely honest, the best you could hope for was a kind of wary détente, a truce between battles while everyone waited for independent confirmation that you weren’t, in fact, lying your ass off. So I should have known better than to be hurt by Marcus’s careful distance and by the way no one had really come to my defense. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that my word counted, apparently, for nothing, but it still hurt.

  It hurt like ice pressed deep into my heart. Like fire. Like rejection.

  As to the offense itself, anyone could have done it. We had all had the opportunity to slip into Gretchen’s room—she apparently didn’t keep it locked—at any number of times after we got home from Rethymno or even before we left this morning. If someone had broken in, it could have been done while we were out, but no one seemed to be taking that possibility too seriously. Nothing was missing, and the attack—if that was what it was—felt specific. Personal. There was nothing I could say. The more earnest I was in my denials, the more I looked like a stone-cold lying bitch. After a while, I just stopped talking.

  I sat on the stone steps to the tower, caught between wanting to flee to my room and wanting to be supportive of the woman who had blamed me, as if that would help. I knew I couldn’t sleep, though I was weary to the point of exhaustion, and I was, ironically, more afraid than the others. They all thought they knew who had gone into Gretchen’s room and cut up her clothes, an act that was more than malicious. It was voyeuristic. Pornographic. It was frightening, particularly for me, the only person in the house who didn’t think they knew who had done it, the only one who knew for a fact that it wasn’t me.

  Because it wasn’t. I had never even been in her room before. I certainly hadn’t rooted through her things, cut them up, an act at once petty and deeply, troublingly sadistic.

  I watched the others coming and going, avoiding my eyes. An hour passed. Maybe more. I spoke to no one, staying where I was, gazing into the foyer as the others murmured in the living room. I was still sitting there when Gretchen walked in, making for the phone. She had already changed her flight, so I hadn’t expected to see her here, and I think she thought I’d gone to bed. She froze in the act of picking up the receiver, staring at me, though I couldn’t see the expression on her face at this distance.

  “I know you think it was me, Gretchen,” I said. “And I know you think I’m jealous of the way you are with Marcus . . .”

  “You are,” she said, not moving.

  I hung my head, not wanting to say this, not wanting to say anything, but then looked up and nodded.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am. But I didn’t go in your room. I didn’t cut up your . . .”

  She started walking over to me, a sudden, brisk stride that got me to my feet in case she was going to take a swing at me. I braced myself, but instead of hitting me, she got hold of me by the shoulders and pulled me close.

  “I know,” she whispered.

  I was dumbfounded.

  “But you said . . . ?”

  “Yes,” she said, checking over her shoulder to make sure no one else was in earshot. “I’m sorry. I had to.”

  “You did it yourself?” I said.

  “No!”

  “But you know who did?”

  She shook her head, but it was less a denial than it was a pushing away of the question.

  “I have to get out of this house,” she said.

  “What?” I said. I couldn’t get my head around how radically the conversation had shifted. “Why?”

  “I can’t be here anymore,” she said. She was still quiet but was, if anything, even more hysterical than when she had first found her shredded underwear. She was trembling, her grip on my shoulders tight, each finger digging into my flesh like a clamp. “You don’t understand, but I can’t be here. It’s not safe.”

  “Not safe?” I said. “What do you mean?”

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

  PART 3

  TARTARUS

  Theseus and his companion ventured into that point of the underworld known as Tartarus through a secret way and came to the palace of
Hades, who ruled that fearful place. They made their request to take Persephone back to the world of the living and Hades seemed to consider their request, but then the king of the dead suggested they sit down to rest themselves and they realized—too late—that the seats were the Chairs of Forgetfulness. Their skin immediately bonded to the chairs so completely that they could not get up again without tearing their flesh away. Snakes surrounded them and, with Hades looking on, Theseus was lashed by the Furies and mauled by the great three-headed dog, Cerberus, so that it seemed they would be trapped there in deepest pain and misery for ever.

  —Preston Oldcorn

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “Where were you when your mother and sister died in the car wreck?” says Chad.

  Not this again. We don’t have time for this.

  “I told you. I was at school.”

  “Liar,” says the Chad in my head. “You were in the car. Weren’t you, Jan? You were in the car.”

  I start to deny it, then stop, suddenly unsure.

  I keep very still, eyes shut, feeling for the truth like it is an old dog that cannot be relied upon not to bite. And then I see it, remember it, the darkness, the smell of oil and gasoline, electricity and blood. It all comes back and, for a moment, I’m stunned by the fact of it, as if I hadn’t known till now, even though I had, however many fathoms deep I had buried it.

  “Yes,” I say to myself. “I was in the car.”

  “But you survived.”

  “Yes.”

  “Barely a scratch on you,” says my imaginary Chad. “Your mom was driving. You were in the back with your sister. You were both buckled in, but when the car came off the road, when it rolled down the ditch and into the tree, the left side took the brunt of the damage.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were sitting on the right.”

  “Yes.”

  “Barely a scratch on you.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing,” says imaginary Chad. “I’m just wondering if what you say you told your first lie about . . . the reason you lied about having a sister—a living sister, that is—was because you felt guilty. She died. You walked away. Motherless. That can’t feel right to a child. Kids. They always feel responsible for what happens in the world. Step on a crack, break your mother’s—”