Lies That Bind Us(29)

“I don’t,” I say. “What do you think I did? Perhaps if you explain . . .”

“What did you do? What did you see?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about! How can I answer you if I don’t understand what—”

The light goes red and then goes out. I hear movement, and my eyes detect the vaguest shift in the shadows. He’s standing now.

“I’m sorry,” I gasp. “I’ll tell you anything. I just don’t know what you mean—”

There’s a metallic snap, loud as a gunshot in the dark, then a juddering creak, and I can see a graying of the darkness. He has opened the door.

Oh thank God, I think. He’s going to let me go.

I sit very still and then I feel a hand on my bare ankle. I bite down the shriek of horror and surprise, pulling my foot away, but the grip tightens, and then I feel something cold and flat against the flesh of my calf.

Metal. I can’t feel the shape of it properly, but I think it is a blade.

Again I try to pull away, kicking with the other leg, but then the knife—if that is what it is—pivots, and I feel not the flat, but the edge, sharp and biting, inching up the back of my leg.

It presses but does not slice, and I take it as a warning rather than the beginning of something more awful that may or may not follow, so I go still. In the same instant, I get a sense of his

His?

presence, his body close to mine, and I realize with a start that something is wrong.

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.”