For a moment I squat between the steel rails, my back to the buffer, my hands clasped under my chin and my eyes squeezed shut like a child in prayer, which is, I suppose, pretty close to what I am.
I am Daedalus, the great artificer, I think. This is my labyrinth. I will find the way out.
It’s stupid, and desperate, but it holds back the fear like the iron bracing of some great door as the ram batters against it, and from the stillness comes the beginning of a realization.
The curve. I remember the track suddenly curving this way. Perhaps if I got back to that point and go straight, I’ll find that the room I am in now is a kind of siding, a place to store trucks or a small locomotive. Maybe going straight will lead me to a door, to stairs, to safety.
So I get up again and take three cautious steps, arms outstretched, toes feeling for the steel rails set into the stone floor. I can feel the gentle arc of the turn as I walk, but then . . .
What was that?
The tunnel is so silent that every movement I make seems to fill it with sound loud as thunder, the fractional skittering of gravel underfoot, the shifting of my dress, the roar of my breathing, my heart. But I am sure there was something else, something sharper that came from . . . where? Farther along the hall but also somehow above me. It echoed, furring the edge of the sound, but I feel certain that it had been short and crisp, like the snap of a door latch.
I listen, and at first there is nothing, so I eventually raise my right foot to take another step; but then it comes again and is followed by the short, staccato sound of shoes on stone steps.
I freeze once more, straining to hear, to pinpoint the source of the noise.
And then I see the flashlight bouncing crazily off the walls that are a mixture of soft-yellow stone and concrete block. The rails gleam where the light hits them some fifteen yards from where I am standing.
Whoever is holding the light hasn’t appeared yet, and I am caught between hope and despair.
I open my mouth to shout.
Help! I was trapped but I got out. Show me the way up!
But I don’t say anything. Instead, instinctively, I take several long, silent strides back along the track, still facing the person with the light. My feet are almost soundless, and I plant them carefully, exaggerating the downward movement so I don’t inadvertently kick something that will make a noise. The buffer hits me in the small of my back. I grasp it with my right hand and hold on as I go round it and drop to my knees. The buffer is braced with diagonal struts, and I almost lose my balance as I get between them and press myself small and close to the gravelly stone floor, breathing fast.
The footsteps have not altered. The flashlight still feels unguided, almost casual. But then, abruptly, everything stops.
He has reached my cell. That was where he was going, and now he can see that the door is open.
Should I have closed it?
It doesn’t matter.
He is perhaps twenty yards away. No more. I hear his uncertainty, his confusion in the uncanny stillness. Then there is movement again, urgent now, panicked, and the light stabs this way and that, so I bury my head in my hands and try to make myself invisible behind the buffer. I hide my hands and face and hope he won’t make sense of what he can still see.
Keep still.
I do, and in my peripheral vision I sense the flashlight raking the tunnel. The passage is narrower than I had imagined and low ceilinged, no larger than the inside of a train car. Behind the buffer it stops, the blocks ending in a wall that looks like solid natural rock. For the merest fraction of a second, the light hits my skin and the hem of my dress. It’s yellow, and I remember it immediately, though it is filthy now. The light moves on, and I can almost smell his furious alarm, his disbelief.
But then he calms, and the flashlight begins to move more carefully. There is almost complete silence again, and I realize slowly that he has seen something, something worthy of close inspection.
When I am sure the light is not turned toward me, I risk a look over the buffer. He has the flashlight aimed at the ground and seems to have dropped to his haunches. I can see the cell door open. It is one of three, though the others are closed. The light fixes on the floor and by the overspill I see, silhouetted and unfocused though it is, the size of him, the bulk of his body and head. All the old terror floods back at the strangeness of the sight as my hindbrain shrieks
Minotaur!
But then he moves, and I realize with another shock that his body above the waist seems so large because he’s wearing something, something that goes with the mask on his face.
An air tank.
He’s not just wearing the scuba mask to hide his face. He’s wearing the complete breathing apparatus.
From my hidden vantage I stare, and that’s when I realize what he’s doing. He’s seen something on the cell floor. I feel the slickness clotting around the thumb of my left hand, and I know what he’s seen.
Blood.
Not a lot, but enough. I’ve left a trail.
Chapter Twenty-Eight It was just Simon and me. I had hoped Marcus would come. Or Kristen. But for all Melissa’s words of understanding and forgiveness, they were all still wary of me and I couldn’t blame them. However much they might pity me, who would want to be friends with someone who might break into your room and cut up your underwear? They might tolerate me. They might even accept me, look after me, but you can’t love someone this fucked up.
If Marcus had come, I told myself, I would have found some way to tell him my confession had been false, but that may have done more harm than good. It was probably just as well that we were apart.
So I rode with Simon, back through the mountain villages to the coast road past Rethymno to Heraklion, and it was only in that last stretch that we encountered any real traffic. In the hills there had been rockslides, and trees had come down in the storm. It wouldn’t take much, I thought, to cut us off if the weather worsened.
Simon said little for the first hour. He seemed tense, focused on driving, and when I reached for the radio he said, “I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
I snatched my hand back as if burned, but I smiled and said, “Sure, no problem,” because that was what I did, those little lies that grease the wheels and make life bearable.
“Why did you come, Jan?” he asked without preamble.
“What?” I said, still smiling. “I told you. I want to speak to Gretchen . . .”
“No, not now. I mean Crete. The whole trip.”
“What do you mean? You invited me and I thought—”
“Yes, but why did you come? I mean, we cover your costs and all, so it’s a free vacation and you don’t have a lot of spare cash, but . . .”
“Well,” I began, about to counter that last remark and probably spin some stupid falsehood in the process. I didn’t get the chance.
“No, but seriously,” he said. “It’s just us. Just you and me. So what’s it all about? Why are you here?”
I blink, genuinely confused.
“You think this is about me wanting to get back with Marcus,” I say.
“No,” he says. “Maybe. Is it?”
“No.”
“OK, so what is it?”
“I just wanted to see you all, relive our last trip . . .”
“And how are we doing?” he said. His eyes were on the road, riveted to it, but his voice was clipped, the words bitten off like meat.
“I don’t think I understand . . .”
“Which bit of our last visit did you most want to relive, Jan?”
“Just seeing everyone and—”
“OK,” he said, cutting me off.
“I’m not sure I get what you’re . . .”
“I said, ‘OK,’” he said. “Leave it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, confused and uneasy. “Is it something I said?”
He laughed at that, a short, snapping sound without amusement.