Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “Shut up!” roars Melissa.

  And now she’s clawing at my face with her nails, and Marcus is on her, trying to hold her back. He’s still unsteady, though, and she elbows him hard in the gut, so he shrinks away, doubling up in pain.

  “You think you are going to mess up our lives like you messed up your own?” she yells at me, a Fury now, her face hard as steel, her eyes like lances. “You? A pathetic, lying, glorified fucking checkout girl? You? You are nothing! Do you know what we are worth?”

  I wince at the truth of her words, and though I try to dodge as she comes for me, I stumble and lose my balance. I brace for the weight of her dropping on me, but by the mad light of the lantern as it rolls away, I see that she is unfastening the bolts to the hidden door. It takes a second for me to realize what is happening, and then the horror of it hits me as the door jolts open, and the Minotaur who has been waiting behind it comes out.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  I know it is Simon under the mask. I knew that the bulk of his body is just the shadow of the air tank on his back in the gloom. I know everything. So I can’t explain the scale of the horror that descends upon me as the door kicks open and he bursts through.

  Melissa steps back, and—too late—I see the little microphone pack tucked into her waistband and remember the wireless link to the scuba suits. There’s no point pretending we don’t know what he did five years ago and what he planned to do with us on this trip. He’s heard it all.

  He has one of the pickaxes from the cellar in his hands, and he comes through swinging, not at me, but at Marcus.

  Eliminate the threat first.

  Marcus is bigger than me, stronger, but he is also still sluggish from the gas. He is also just beginning to wrap his head around what has been happening in the house, and I think, essentially good and civilized as he is, that he doesn’t quite believe that Simon will kill him right there and then.

  I know different.

  As Simon hefts the pick, I lunge at him, catching him side-on in a clumsy bear hug that throws him off balance. His hammer blow at Marcus still connects, but it strikes his shoulder instead of his head. Marcus cries out and falls back, clutching the wound and half crumpling in a heap. Maybe part of the pick caught his head, after all. Or maybe he is unsteady and is trying to lower his center of gravity. Either way he slumps against the wall and slides down onto his butt, legs twisted and splayed. His left hand moves between the shoulder wound I had seen and the cut on his head, which I hadn’t.

  Simon takes a step toward him, trying to shake me loose, but I hang on like a wildcat. I don’t know what else to do. I cling to him, stupidly, desperately, trying to tangle my legs in his, but he jabs the shaft of the pick hard into my belly, and I slide off him, breathless and wheezing. For a second I am bent double, fighting for air in mad and terrified panic, and then he turns and lunges at me again, this time with the steel head of the pick.

  I have enough presence of mind to leap back, realizing too late that I have fallen through the open door. I tumble hard, missing the foyer threshold and dropping down the steps, hitting my head, shoulder, and knees so that my body becomes a siren, my brain so full of its lights and shrieking that I am aware of the door closing after me only when I hear it latch.

  I have landed headfirst against the bend in the stairwell, my feet above me, and as I fight to right myself, my injuries crying out in protest, I think of only one thing.

  No. Please. Not Marcus . . .

  I claw my way back up the stairs, my hot, swollen left hand tight and useless against my breasts, snatching at the door handle and pulling at it with my right. The door shakes in its frame, but it isn’t going to open that way. I slam at it with the heel of my right hand, the echoes drowning out my moaning sobs, drowning out everything but Mel’s sudden shout.

  “No!” she yells. I stop, though I know instinctively that she isn’t talking to me. “Not with that! It has to look like an accident.”

  “It’s too late for that.” Simon’s voice, still distorted into that slow rolling creep-show Darth Vader sound. Before it had frightened me. Now it just makes me angry, outraged.

  “It’s not,” Mel says, calmer now. “We can fix it. Stick to what we said we were going to do. You deal with her, and I’ll get the generator running.”

  “What about him?”

  “Look at him. He’s not going anywhere.”

  So Marcus has been hit harder than I thought. He is unconscious, or close to it, and Melissa is going to finish the job.

  While Simon comes for me.

  I let go of the door handle like it’s hot and turn back down the stairs. It’s pitch black again, but I am almost used to that now, and my feet feel the edges of the stone steps, guiding me as I scamper down.

  You’re leaving Marcus. They are going to kill him, and you are running away.

  I have no choice. I will go back for him. I swear I will. But I have to survive the next few minutes first and find a way to get past Simon. I reach the foot of the stairs and turn, arms spread, fingers splayed, toes feeling. I’m back in the labyrinth, in the darkness of the tunnels, and the Minotaur is coming.

  I move faster than I should for safety, but there is no time to waste. My feet sweep the stone floor for anything I might use as a weapon, but they find only the rails I had thought were train tracks. They orient me, but I hesitate, hating the idea of moving back toward the dank cell that was my prison and that I worked so hard to escape.

  But there is nowhere else to go, and before I have made the decision, I hear the door to the stairwell and know he’s coming.

  I pace the tracks lightly, silently, my mind working twice as fast, trying to think of something, anything that might work to my advantage. His footsteps echo in the stairwell, and as I half turn toward them I see the shifting pale bleed of light from the bottom. He has a lantern. Shadows loom and flicker, showing the rough texture of the walls, and then I’m turning away and almost running to the empty cell where I was chained in the dark.

  I don’t choose it. It chooses me because it is the only place that feels familiar down here in the dark with the monster at my heels, and before I can think through what I am doing, I have ducked inside. Almost immediately I see the arched passageway come to life in the yellow glow of his lantern. Thoughtless, despairing, I move as far away from it as I can, huddling in the far corner, dropping into a childish crouch, left arm hugging my knees, right hand slamming splayed against the floor.

  There’s something under my right heel. Something small and slender. As if in a dream, I grope for it, remembering the sound it made as it rolled away from my grip when I was still chained.

  A nail. Rusty, but solid, long as nails go, maybe five inches, and with a broad striking head. I snatch it up, watching the light brightening through the doorway, listening to Simon’s shuffling steps and labored breathing.

  “You can’t run, little Jannie,” says the singsong monster voice. “There’s nowhere to go.”

  He’s right, but I don’t care. The cell reminds me of what he did, what he’s going to do, and I am suddenly full of a bright and glistening rage, hard and sharp as a sword. I stand up and move soundlessly to the door, squeezing into the shadows beside it, back to the wall, arms raised and ready.

  The lantern is a mistake. It shows me exactly where he is. The scuba mask is another mistake. It kills his peripheral vision, so he has to lean all the way into the cell and turn before he can see me, and by then it’s too late. My left arm goes round the back of his head and locks under his chin. I jerk him back, and my right hand punches the nail through the wet suit over his ear. I push, feeling the tip probe for the space at the center, guiding it with my fingers like a surgeon.

  Simon stills with sudden horror, feeling the nail tip entering his ear. His body goes limp and he stops fighting to get out of my grasp. The lantern is fixed to his belt, and his hands are both holding the pickax out in front of him, but they too have gone still with dread at what I am about to
do.

  “Jan . . . ,” he begins.

  “Don’t speak,” I say. My fingers have pressed the nail tip as far as it will go before drawing blood. If I slam the heel of my hand hard against the nailhead, it will go straight through the eardrum and the temporal bone of the skull into the brain. He may not know that, but his body senses it.

  Death is two inches away.

  His eyes are wide under the diving mask. He does not move. All my fear and horror have become his. His life is in my hands.

  I am Theseus, come to purge the labyrinth.

  I draw back my hand, then smash it against the side of his head with all the force I can manage.

  I don’t hit the nail. I go higher. His unresisting head slams back against the doorjamb, and he slumps to the ground, the pick sliding from his hands to the floor. I doubt that I have long, but I don’t need much time. Not for him. I’ve already seen by the lamplight the dull, ancient brown metal of the key. I snatch it from the ring and pull him roughly to the concrete bed stand.

  The key fits the manacle and pops it open.

  I wrench his right arm around, conscious that he is already coming to, but the cuff fits tight around his wrist, tighter than it did around mine. It snaps closed. He is not going anywhere.

  I take up the pick and the lantern and leave the cell without glancing back. In seconds, amazed at how short the passage actually seems when I can see, albeit in my fuzzy, unspecific way, I am back at the stairs and climbing.

  The door at the top is not fully closed, and I can feel the thrum of the generator again. I push through it in a single motion.

  Marcus is lying on his back on the foyer floor, his right arm flapping vaguely like a wounded bird. He is gurgling horribly. Melissa is squatting on his chest like some malevolent succubus, one hand pinching his nose closed, the other forcing the green hosepipe into his mouth.

  I have reversed my grip on the pick, so I hit her with the handle. She turns into it, expecting Simon, so I see her furious incredulity just before the shaft breaks her nose.

  She rolls sideways, clutching her bloody face, but then she comes up with a kitchen knife. I don’t know where she got it from or when, but she has it now, and she’s struggling to her feet, her eyes locked on me, her mouth spitting curses.

  She steps over Marcus, but as she slashes at me, his eyes open, and he grabs her ankle. She twists away, stumbling, but as her furious gaze goes to him, I swing. The first blow finds her gut and doubles her up, but then I hit her again, in the back of the head. I hit her hard. Hard enough to do real damage, and she collapses instantly.

  She slumps to the floor, and for a moment, after I have tugged the hose from Marcus’s mouth and left him rolling and gagging, I consider forcing it on her. I might thread it between her flawless lips and push, holding her nose as she had done to him. It would be that simple, and no one would say I had not been sufficiently provoked. I would not be convicted for her death, and for a wild and terrifying moment, I don’t really care either way.

  But I don’t do it.

  Clumsily, I lash her hands behind her unconscious body with the hose and coil the length of the thing around her till she looks like the meal for some great python, and then I go down and shut the generator off.

  Marcus is stirring, sitting up, coughing, spitting. It is the sweetest sound I have ever heard, but I don’t tell him that.

  “Marcus?” I say. “Are you OK to drive?”

  After he checks on Gretchen, Kristen, and Brad, after he leaves in the Mercedes in search of a police station or, failing that, a cell phone signal, I sit on the floor in the foyer, staring at Melissa. Her head is bleeding a little, but I don’t tend the wound. I don’t go near her. I watch her sleep, if that’s what it is, and I keep the kitchen knife and the pickax in easy reach.

  When Kristen comes down, babbling, crying, telling me she can’t wake Brad properly, that he comes to, then drifts away again, that she thinks there’s something seriously wrong with him, I speak to her soothingly and tell her help is on its way, but I don’t look at her. I keep my eyes on Melissa.

  It’s dawn before the police arrive, but they make up for the delay with seriousness and professional compassion. It’s hours before anyone asks me what happened, and by then it has already started to feel like something I dreamed.

  Or made up.

  Except that I don’t do that anymore. I know how that sounds, but I’m sure of it. I know it in my bones, as I might know that I would never wear a certain coat again having cast it onto a bonfire and watching it burn. I was done with that. I had cast it off and done more to it than chained it in the basement where I might one day return, the key pressed hotly in my hand, just to see if it was still alive.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The woman was wearing a white bikini. Not especially small, but cut to suggest it was revealing more than it really was. She looked like a Bond girl. She was striding out of the waves and walking toward us. Marcus said nothing, but I could feel him looking, so I put him out of his misery.

  “Check out Venus born upon the foam,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  I nodded toward her. “Like you hadn’t seen,” I say.

  “Oh, her,” he said. “I see what you mean. Kind of obvious, though.”

  He was trying to be loyal. We had quarreled that morning, not for the first time on this trip, and he was trying to avoid another. The thought irritated me.

  “You can admit you find another woman attractive, Marcus,” I said. “I’m not that fragile. Jesus, she looks like a movie star.”

  “You hate it when I look at other women,” he said.

  “When you ogle them, yes. I’m not talking about that. I’m just saying if someone beautiful walks by, you’re allowed to say so. If you don’t, if you pretend not to notice, then you’re lying and that’s insulting.”

  “I don’t ogle women.”

  It was true. He didn’t.

  “What about that waitress last night? The one with the waist-high neckline.”

  “I just . . . God, Jan, it’s like you want to fight. I looked up and smiled. That was all. I don’t see why you have to go out of your way to find some reason to . . .”

  “Hey. You’re American, right?”

  It was the girl in the white bikini. Talking to us.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t spying on you or anything, but I heard you talking before . . .”

  Marcus gaped.

  “Yeah, we’re from the States,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “Hi,” said the girl. “I’m Melissa. My husband is sitting over there behind the white umbrella, trying to look cool in his new shades. Look, this is gonna sound weird, but we’re trying to make a reservation at the restaurant tonight, and they’re saying they only have a table for six. It’s dumb, but everything is booked up and they don’t want to waste seats. There are only four of us. We’re with a couple of people we just met. So we were wondering if you’d like to join us. Seven thirty tonight. Totally fine if you can’t. But we kind of need to know. Dinner is on us, by the way.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Marcus, smiling doubtfully. “We were gonna go into town, and we really couldn’t accept . . .”

  “Food from strangers,” she finished for him. “No worries. Have a good—”

  “Wait,” I said. “We can go into town tomorrow. Might be nice to meet some new people.”

  I gave Marcus a look, my eyes shaded against the sun, and he floundered.

  “We’re in,” I said. “I’m Jan. This is Marcus.”

  “Are you sure that . . . ?” Marcus began.

  “Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly sure that this was what we needed. “We can go into town tomorrow night.”

  We didn’t, of course. We had every meal from that night on with Melissa and Simon, Kristen and Brad, holding on to them so that we spent less time sniping at each other, and they had been a godsend. It struck me as slightly odd that she should invite us like that, that th
ey couldn’t have just slid the concierge a few euros and kept the table to four. And as we got ready to join them that night, I even wondered if the spectacular bikini entrance had been deliberate too. In fact we had been so charmed by them—so dazzled—that we didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth, but later I found myself wondering if we had always been designated as audience to their greatness, as if they’d needed people to perform their perfection to. They’d recruited us as ordinary people, lesser people who would bask in their reflected glories as a way of making them feel better about themselves. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Could it have been that simple?

  Maybe.

  What the hell did I know? And even if I was right, I couldn’t put all the blame on them. We had loved it, Marcus and I, the glamour, the sense of being part of their social circle, like we had been scooped up from our quiet gray lives and raised above the clouds to a place of golden light and the promise of continual happiness. It was the life we had been promised by every magazine I had ever looked through, every TV commercial I’d ever seen. So we embraced it and clung on, even when the cracks started to show, even—God help us—when we secretly knew what they were under the shine.

  I think of Melissa rubbing suntan lotion into Simon’s back on the beach, kneeling astride him, turning to look at me and smiling, aglow with sex and charm and the easy confidence of wealth. I can almost smell the warm coconut oil, hear the music from the hotel’s sound system, feel the glow of my skin under the sun, Marcus lying, eyes closed, beside me. It’s idyllic, glorious, and I want it back so much that it tugs at my gut, my heart, like the most exquisite pain. And then, quite suddenly, the light changes, and now we’re in the dim lobby of the villa, and Mel is straddling not Simon, but Marcus. He’s faceup and she’s shoving a hose into his mouth. She snaps her head round to look at me, and her face is full of malice and rage, her eyes black and toxic. It’s as if she’s trying to eat him, like she’s a vulture on the road, protecting the carcass she’s found from interlopers. Yes. That’s it. She’s a gaunt, ravenous thing, starving to gobble up that crumb of the world that someone tried to take from her.