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 . . .”