Lies That Bind Us

“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—”

Stop.

I can’t think about this. The pain and the fear and the cumulative exhaustion have gotten to my nerves. I’m losing it just when I need to concentrate, to be on my guard. He’s out there, somewhere. The Minotaur, stalking the labyrinth. Hunting for me.

Focus.

I’m out of my cell, but I’m still underground and in the dark. I have to find a way out. I can’t see, and I don’t know what’s there, but it feels like passages spreading in all directions, turning in on themselves like a great hard-angled knot, all blind alleys and long, winding false hopes burrowing back into the center. I think of Daedalus, who made the wooden bull for Pasipha? and built the maze that housed her dreadful offspring, and I remember what James Joyce called him: the “old artificer.”

Artificer.

I had puzzled over the word in a corner of the Wilson library one day, when I was in college, thinking of the strange way it evoked different but related things, combining them in a slippery gray fog that I instinctively—if unhealthily—liked: Art.

Artisan.

Artifice.

Artificiality.

I wrote them out just like that, amazed by the neat way the words made a picture, a right-angle triangle like a half Christmas tree. I thought about the slim distinction between the base of the tree and the star on the top, between fiction and lies. It comes back to me now, and I think, wildly, perhaps still delirious from the pain in my hand, “I am the great artificer, Jan, the Cretan liar. I am Daedalus. This is my labyrinth, and I will find the way out.”

I move blindly along the stone corridor, listening to the echo of my shallow breathing as it bounces off the stone. The air feels the same as the cell. Smells the same. Maybe a little more dank. The stone flags underfoot are irregular, their edges rounded with age, their surfaces coated with dust and grit fine as sand. And then, without warning, there’s something else. I feel it with my foot, a metallic coldness. I drop to my haunches and feel with my good hand, registering the long iron strip set into the ground and feeling over to the right to find the other I know will be there.

Railroad tracks.

So I’m in a tunnel?

This throws me. I’ve seen no sign of a railway system on Crete. In fact, I’d swear there wasn’t one. I run my good hand along the steel. The sides are furred with rust, but the tops are worn by use, though not, I think, recent use.

A railway.

My mind tightens around the idea, trying to squeeze the strangeness out of it. Some kind of minor mountain funicular for the tourists and skiers? It doesn’t seem likely.

Or a mine.

It could be one of those old underground cart railways that I know only from Wile E. Coyote and Indiana Jones. I guess they are real things, but has there been much mining in Crete? I kick myself for not learning about the place before I came and wish Marcus were here. He would know. Not that he’d want to talk to me.

I am remembering more and more about the last few days. Awful though my imprisonment has been, it has somehow cleared my head. The longer I am down here—in this mine or whatever it is—the more I feel like myself in ways I haven’t for hours, even if some of the memories that come with that clarity are things I’d rather not recall. I had made up with Marcus, gotten past the whole lying-about-my-sister thing, but then it had all gone wrong again.

Gretchen’s underwear . . .

It should be funny, but even down here in the dark, picking my way along some underground railway line and listening for the return of my sadistic captor, it makes me shudder. I wonder if the two people—the one who chained me up and the one who ravaged Gretchen’s clothes—are the same person.

I pause. I have just noticed that the rails beneath my feet are sloping gradually down. I am sure of it. If this is a mine, I am going deeper, and while that might give me somewhere to hide, it probably won’t get me out. I need to go the other way.

I turn carefully, using the rails to orient myself in the dark. I am pretty sure my cell opens onto the track at a right angle, that if I follow the lines back the way I came, I might go right past it. I hold on to that idea as if it is a lantern so the prospect of turning back won’t feel quite so much like failure, like a return to the place where I was entombed.

I pick my way back along the tunnel, my toes half gripping the edges of the deep-set rails so that I don’t lose my way. It seems even darker here than it had in the cell, the kind of darkness where up, down, left, and right mean nothing. If I stumble and fall or spin around, I will have no idea which way I am facing without the railroad tracks to guide me.

Like waking up in the car, your cheek against a window smeared with torn grass and dirt . . .

I keep walking, slowly but steadily, deliberately, not knowing whether I am going away from my enemy or toward him, knowing only that I need to keep moving, to feel like I am doing something to get out. He could be back any moment, his bull-headed form looming in the blackness, muzzle wet, nostrils wide and flaring with each breath, horns spread wide as the hallway . . .

No. The railroad tracks might be my Ariadne’s thread, but my Minotaur is just a man.

Simon.

Do I really believe that? It seems impossible, and the evidence is circumstantial at best. A whiff of oil and gasoline? A facility for scuba gear? That’s nothing. It could be any of us, including the women, though that is harder to picture than, say, the idea of Brad as psychological torturer.

That is much easier.

But why? Unless this is all just some psychopathic freak-out and my captor has no rational motive, none of this makes sense. I can’t make it look any more rational with Brad’s face under that Minotaur-head scuba mask than I can with Simon’s.

I think again of Manos. Or did I mean Minos, the king whose Knossos palace was the home of the Minotaur myth? Or Midas, the king whose touch turned everything to gold and whose name Melissa had confused with the name of our hotel so very long ago in some sunny, idyllic land when life had been so good and full of promise . . .

Manos, Minos, Midas. None of it helps.

The tracks beneath my bare feet arc sharply to the left. I press on, my right hand out in front of me, from time to time reaching out to the side to see if the tunnel is narrowing, but I can’t reach the wall. My left hand continues to burn and throb with the slightest movement, so I keep it lightly pressed to my sternum and can feel the steady pulsing of my heart.

The ground underfoot changes. There is suddenly more debris, more fragments of stone, and twice I kick against loose metal objects. I stoop to one and test it with my fingers. It is a long metal bolt, its thread rough with rust. I stand up, take two more steps, and bark my shin against a hard barrier that runs across the track. Another meets my waist. I feel along it and find a pair of bulbous metal buffers directly above the rails that stop me going any further.

End of the line.



Chapter Twenty-Six

Gretchen’s second phone call was to a taxi company. Simon offered to drive her, but she said that everyone had done enough and that she just needed to go. She thanked them. She took her suitcase, packed for her and brought downstairs by Marcus, and collected her brand-new leather purse from Melissa, and sat silently on the front step till the cab’s headlights lit the driveway.

It was all weirdly fast. No one talked to me, and Gretchen pointedly left me out of the series of hugs she gave before running down to the taxi, but as she stooped to her case, she shot a look back to me. She held my eyes just long enough to show intent, to remind me what she had said, despite her apparent play acting to the others. Then she was climbing into the back of the car and roaring off into the night.