“No kidding,” I said, trying to mute my unease.
“It’s OK,” he said. “There’s some pretty extensive cellarage for a house this size, but the genny is just round this corner.”
He led the way down a dozen steps that turned slowly like a corkscrew into the ground. At the foot of the stairs, before you entered the room proper, was the scuba gear, the air and oxygen tanks carefully stacked, the masks and fins hanging from hooks on the wall.
“Through here,” said Simon.
We emerged in a low-ceilinged chamber piled with old crates, gardening implements, and rusty tools. Coiled around a stand of ancient mattocks and shovels was a bright new garden hose, green and glinting like a python. It was the only thing down there that looked less than half a century old. I played the flashlight around the room, which was maybe fifteen feet square, the walls and floor stone and draped with cobweb. At one end were five or six steps down to a metal-framed door made of heavy wire mesh, like a cage.
“What’s through there?” I asked.
“Unused storage rooms,” said Simon. “Cellars. The place was closer to a castle than a house, once upon a time.”
Something about the antique door sent a cold thrill through my back, so I turned my gaze to the opposite corner. The generator—new, cartoon yellow, and shiny, as if just out of the box—looked like an alien device by comparison.
I didn’t know the model, but I had seen similar units. It was the size of a couple of stacked suitcases and sat in a purpose-built cage with wheels at one end. There were four gas cans next to it: two plastic and two old metal ones mottled with rust that looked vaguely military. As Simon checked the manual, which he removed from a plastic sheath, and examined the exhaust tube that ran up and through a hole in the external wall, I unscrewed the cap from the generator’s gas tank. We filled it, draining two of the four jerry cans, watching the level rise to almost full, then checked the oil.
“The owner said it’s only tied to the kitchen and living room circuits,” said Simon, checking the connections. “So we’ll still have no power upstairs, and I’ll shut it off over night to conserve fuel. There’s candles and some battery lanterns in the kitchen, though. Look right to you?”
“You have to open up the fuel line first,” I said, reaching in. “And disconnect the battery charger. OK. You’re good to go.”
He flicked the red power switch, then pushed the starter. The generator rumbled to life. It was lawnmower loud in the tight basement, and I didn’t hear what Simon said as he plugged in the main cables, but he gave me a thumbs-up and we went back upstairs, closing the doors behind us, and cutting out most of the noise, though you could still sense it buzzing through the stone foundation, part sound, part vibration.
In the little hallway between the cellar and the living quarters, Simon closed the door to the stairs but didn’t bolt it, and he turned to me before he got the other door open.
“Thanks,” he said. “Knew you’d be able to get the job done.”
The remark struck me as odd, and for a second I felt uncomfortable with him so close in the tight, windowless corridor. It felt like the airlock on a submarine. He stood there, as if waiting for something or trying to decide whether to do something or not. I gave a kind of dismissive laugh and reached for the door handle behind him but, for a split second, he didn’t move, and the smile on his face, distorted by the inconstant beam of the flashlight, looked . . .
What? Menacing? No.
Just . . . not like him.
He half opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and grinned amiably.
“Better join the others and see how we did,” he said, as if nothing had happened.
He opened the door and I stepped out quickly, breathing in the air as if we had indeed been trapped in some kind of airlock, leaving him to close the door behind me as I moved swiftly back to the others.
I found the kitchen and living room lit up as if nothing had happened, Melissa bent over the stereo and Gretchen toasting us with her wineglass, looking impressed and happy. The others turned to applaud us, and Simon bowed in the doorway.
“Actually,” he said, “Jan did most of the work. I was ready to blow us all up.”
“Yay, Jan!” said Kristen. Marcus beamed at me and I smiled back bashfully, like an underappreciated schoolgirl singled out for praise by a teacher. Of the strangeness I had seen in Simon, there was absolutely no trace, so a minute or two later I was sure I had imagined the whole thing.
Chapter Seventeen
I try twice more to reach the nail or whatever it was I had touched before, but I can’t find it and the pain in my wrist has become unbearable. I reinspect the sandal and find it as useless as before, the misery of which makes me throw it—stupidly, pointlessly—against the far wall, but the soft flop of its impact on the wall tells me nothing. I try to sit on the ground, but the awkwardness of having to hold up my left arm is too much, so I climb back onto the mattress and sit with my back to the wall and my knees drawn up to my chest, tears running down my face. I am still scared and confused, but now I also feel defeated, and that drains all the energy and will to resist out of me.
As I imagined some sort of sensor pinpointing the nail I couldn’t reach earlier, I now imagine a stopwatch ticking down to the moment the door will open and my captor will return, questions and blade at the ready, snorting from huge bullish nostrils, his great horns spread wide as the door . . .
Stop it.
He’s a man, not a monster.
The two may not be mutually exclusive, I think.
After all, those myths grew out of something ordinary, something human. Maybe the Athenian tribute to the Minoans in Knossos involved some form of gladiatorial combat or bull fighting forced upon slaves or war prisoners. Maybe the root horrors of the labyrinth were military, economic, and political rather than supernatural, but they probably still involved bloodshed and people behaving like beasts, even if they didn’t actually look like the bull-headed Minotaur that Theseus slew. We don’t need to look to mythological creatures to find terror and brutality. People can do that all by themselves.
Stop it, I tell myself again and this time, I do. I have other things to think about.
I can’t unlock the manacle, and I don’t think I can break the cuff itself. The chain feels strong, and the ring in the wall seems both solid and well anchored. That leaves getting my hand out.
The manacle is old. I’m sure of that. That means the mechanism is simple. There’s no adjustable ratchet that clenches the cuff to the wrist so that it fits snugly regardless of who is wearing it. Once, a year or so after Marcus and I had started dating, we were at a party and won a pair of handcuffs as a gag gift. They were real enough and came with a pair of little keys on a ring. One night a week or so later, we decided to take them out for a test run. I can’t say either of us really enjoyed the experience. It was thrilling for a while, but Marcus wasn’t comfortable as either the captor or the captee—if that’s a word—and we both got embarrassed and started giggling.