The head is too large. I can barely see anything, so it’s as much an impression as it is anything certain, but I am suddenly sure of it. The head is too large and the breathing is strange, animal. Drunk with fear, some primitive, reptilian part of my brain says, Minotaur. The body of a man, the head of a great bull . . .
I don’t believe it, but I freeze. I want to say that I’m sorry, that I will try to remember whatever he wants to know, but the words won’t come. All my senses close in around the few square inches of thigh above the back of my knee, where his knife has come to rest. I think of the muscle and tendon there, the femoral artery. If he cuts that, I bleed to death.
I do not move. I wait, locked in powerless terror.
And then the pressure on my leg is gone. The cold of the blade, the grip around my ankle, the sense of him looming there, deciding what to do, are all gone. Almost immediately the door closes again, thudding shut. I don’t hear footsteps, but I am sure he
It
is gone, and I am alone again. I should feel better, but I don’t because I know he’s coming back. He’ll ask again, and again, and then, when I cannot answer, when I can’t begin to give him whatever it is he wants, he’ll kill me.
I know that as I know the concrete beneath me is hard and cold. It’s a certainty. I don’t understand why I am here or what he wants, but I understand that, and for the first time I know something else with the same hard surety.
I have to get out. Somehow, before he comes back, and regardless of what labyrinth I am trapped inside, I have to get out.
Chapter Fourteen
I rather liked swimming, even if I wasn’t much good at it, but scuba diving was a different thing entirely and it frightened me a little. Once—spring break in Cancun, if you can believe the cliché—I had gone snorkeling with some friends, none of whom I was still in touch with. It had been a disaster. I hated the taste of the mouthpiece, the way I had to bite down on it to keep the water out even as it kept my airway open. It felt weird, and the first time a wave lapped over the top and flooded my throat with salt water, I was done. I faked it, splashing around, even diving beneath the surface holding my breath, and managed to see some fish. That’s the one upside of being a habitual, even pathological, liar: you get good at pretending all kinds of things. An old boyfriend once told me I was the most fun in bed he’d ever had because I made him feel good about himself. There is, after all, more than one kind of performance.
But I wasn’t going to be able to fake scuba diving. Swimming on the surface and pretending you’d just come up when everyone else surfaced was fine when you were all just floating about with snorkels, but twenty, thirty meters down? Not so much.
“You’re gonna love this,” said Simon at the quayside as we boarded the boat at the dive center in Agia Pelagia. We had been driving for over two hours, and I had been getting increasingly restless and apprehensive along the way. We could have just donned our stuff and then waddled out from some beach, puttered around for a few minutes in the shallows, and come in, but Simon was in charge, so naturally there was a boat and state-of-the-art equipment, all hired at considerable expense for a serious expedition. “For those of you who are comfortable underwater and are used to the usual half mask and octopus, there’s these.” He indicated a set of gear, including air tanks, carefully lined up in the well of the boat, a substantial motorized thing maybe twenty feet long, with a little cabin, a wheel, and a burly local captain who kept leaning over the side to spit. “For the others, you get something a bit special.”
He held up the other masks proudly. They were larger, designed to come all the way down over the chin, sealing around the neck, and had an airflow unit built into the faceplate. They looked like the kind of apparatus firefighters wear.
“No mouthpieces to bite down on,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “And you can talk. There’s a radio link to earpieces we can all wear and to Archimedes here on the boat.” The captain gave a mock salute and a little grin. “It’s all perfectly safe. The water is not super deep, so you don’t need to worry about pressure, and you can toggle between your tank and the ambient air when you surface, so you don’t need to take the mask off at all once you have a good seal. We’ll all stay together. If anyone feels light-headed or disoriented, or you otherwise think you aren’t getting enough air, you tell Archimedes and he’ll give you this.” He indicated another, smaller tank. “Three liters pure O2. Emergency use only. OK? Let’s do this.”
The boat’s engine rumbled, blew out a puff of brown smoke, and came to life. Archimedes cast off and we began chugging out of the harbor. I caught Marcus watching me and gave him a brave smile over Simon’s shoulder as he walked me through my equipment and helped fasten the air tank to my back. It felt clumsy, doubly so with the ridiculous fins on my feet, and I felt both absurd and scared. Melissa and Brad were, predictably, as much in their element as Simon, trading stories of wreck dives and shark sightings in Mexico and Costa Rica. Kristen looked wary but game, and Marcus, apart from his concern for me, seemed happy to at least try. The only person who looked as uncomfortable as I felt was Gretchen, and I found myself warming to her a little.
“You OK?” I asked.
“Not much of a swimmer,” she said under her breath, thumbing absently through a homemade picture book of the creatures we might see that Archimedes had given her. “Or sailor,” she added.
“Oh,” I said, making a sympathetic face. We had barely left the dock, and she already looked a little green and was sitting very still, as if refusing to move at all would compensate for the bouncing of the boat’s nose on the water.
“I’ll stay close,” I said.
She managed a smile.
“Thanks,” she said. “Do you do this a lot?”
“First time,” I said, resisting the impulse to lie and then, as her smile stalled, wishing I hadn’t.
“You think it’s safe?” she said. “I’m not sure I should really be trying this in the ocean. Shouldn’t we have training first? In a pool?”
“Simon knows what he’s doing,” I said.
She nodded, watching him, but murmured, half to herself, like it was a mantra, “I’m really not a strong swimmer.”
“It’s just kicking,” I said. “You don’t have to work to keep yourself afloat. The gear gives you a kind of neutral buoyancy, so you just pick the direction and go.”
“I thought you didn’t know anything about this stuff?” she said. Her nervousness gave the remark a sharpness and her eyes were faintly accusatory, as if I had misled her on purpose.
“My sister does it,” I said. “Loves it. She’s always trying to talk me into joining her.”
“Family Thanksgiving under the sea,” said Gretchen mirthlessly.
“Oh, I won’t be seeing her this year,” I said. “She lives in Portland. We don’t connect much.”
“Had a falling out?” said Gretchen, pleased by the idea of something else to talk about. Or by someone else’s unhappiness.
“You could say that.”
“Over what?”
I looked away.
“Go on,” said Gretchen with a pleading smile. “Take my mind off being about to drown.”
I smirked at her, then shrugged.
“Nothing exciting,” I said. “What sisters always fight over, I expect. Our parents. Who loves whom most. Who’s doing the other person’s share of the work, the care, the worry. The usual.”
“What line of work is she in?”
“Software development for movies,” I said. “CGI and such.”