The Mask of Atreus (27 page)

She picked up her pace. She had thought he was scary in the bike helmet, as if not being able to see his eyes made him less human and therefore more dangerous. But now she had seen his eyes, and they gave her no comfort at all. They seemed full of a blind and stupid malice that was far worse than the automaton he had been before. And the tattoos . . . Something about the tattoos seemed familiar. Something about the mask, she thought, but that made no sense. She knew what the image of the mask was and had been staring at various representations of it constantly for several days. Of course it was familiar. Still, there was something else . . . Deborah took another half-dozen strides and then allowed herself to admit the nagging doubt which had started to nose into her consciousness. None of this stretch of the walls looked familiar. She had seen the postern this morning from above, but she hadn't been this far back in the ruins. 224

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"No," she muttered, aloud. "No. Please God, no."

But the truth was getting less avoidable with each step. She had misjudged her position. The postern gate was closer to the western end of the acropolis than she had thought, closer to him. She could keep running along the walls, but there was no way out, and she was just taking herself farther and farther away from whatever people might still be down at the entrance. She counted five more strides and decided to go no farther.

She glanced back. The wall had a slight curve, and he was temporarily out of sight.

As good a time as any
.

She reached up the stone of the acropolis mount and clawed her way up back onto the top platform. This might be just what she needed. If he didn't see her climb out, he might go right by her, and she could double back, run across the top of the citadel and down through the lion gate to safety. Desperately she scrambled, tearing her fingertips against the rock, till she could throw her shoulder over the top and heave herself up onto the platform. She looked down onto the ramparts and breathed. He wasn't there yet. She had made it. It was only as she started to get up that she saw him standing on the platform, closer now, watching her. He had done the same thing moments earlier, perhaps intending to drop on her from the platform. In any case, she had lost crucial yards, he was now between her and both gates, and there was nowhere to go.

CHAPTER 48

Nowhere to go but down. In the far western corner of the remains she saw a triangular portal in the rock, its top arching to a point like the quasi-Gothic windows of the Ohabei Shalom Temple back in Brookline where she had attended Sabbath and festival services until she was thirteen: it was the passageway to the secret water cistern she had read about, the one with the plunging drop. She hesitated for only a second.
Nowhere else to go . . .

She ran toward it and down into the hollow. The entrance was perhaps a meter across, three or four meters high. The stones of the floor looked burnished with centuries of use. The passage seemed dark and cool, but ominous, and to go inside committed her to . . .
something
. She wasn't sure what, but an idea was forming in her head: a dim, dreadful idea. She ducked inside, pausing to peer back. If he had missed her coming this way, she might get past him yet. But there was no real chance of that. He had been too close. Now she saw him coming toward her, closer than ever, close enough for her to read the word tattooed across the mask and the eagle: Atreus. For a moment she just stood and looked at him, her mouth open, though the word itself was no great surprise. It was just the sheer unavoidable and terrible reality of the thing that gave her pause. He kept coming, grinning unpleasantly, and she had no choice but to turn back into the subterranean depths and improvise.

The first few steps didn't seem so bad, but with one sharp turn virtually all light was gone. The walls were surprisingly smooth, as if plastered, but there was no rail or rope to guide 226

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her hand, and she was soon slowing down, feeling with her feet for the edges of the uneven steps. Another turn, and she was in complete darkness. She took two more steps and stumbled, her unsteady ankle giving way as she missed her place with the other foot. She crumpled but was able to stop herself falling down more than a couple of stairs, stopping her momentum with her hands so that her injured wrist flashed pain into her head like migraine, then dulled to a slow smolder. She righted herself and took two more ragged steps. She needed light.

She could hear him coming behind her, his footfalls echoing in the tunnel. He had slowed too, but then there was no great reason for him to rush. He had her, she supposed, exactly where he wanted her. There was nowhere to hide, no alcove into which she could flatten herself as he passed. There was only the sudden end of the passage and, as the guidebook had said, a seventy-meter plunge through blackness to the cold, fathomless water below.

She unhitched her backpack and tugged at one of its side pouches. Inside was the cell phone she hadn't used since arriving in Greece. She knew she could get no service outside the States, and she wouldn't get a signal down here anyway, but it might have enough power to give her . . .
Light!

As soon as she flipped it open, the phone's tiny digital display glowed firefly green. It wasn't much, but in the lightless cavern, it was immeasurably better than nothing. She held it out in front of her, keeping it low to the ground, and she saw the stairway swim into soft, phosphorescent focus, as if the floor was lined with those microscopic plants which make the waves of tropical oceans glow in the dark. Cautiously, she picked up the pace.

She had quickly lost track of how many stairs she had come down, but she guessed it was at least fifty, and the passage had curved sharply several times, corkscrewing through the stony ground like some hellish rabbit hole. 227

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And I'm Alice,
she thought.
But the White Rabbit is chas-
ing me, not the other way round, and he has a knife instead of
a pocket watch
.

She moved farther forward, farther down, one arm spread out to feel the chill wall, the other stretched forward holding the phone and its soft life-giving glow, and she tried to remember what she had read in the
Rough Guide
. The passage was long and difficult, it had said, and it twisted as it went, but if it had said how far it went, she couldn't remember. How many steps had she taken now? Sixty? Eighty? Something like that, perhaps, but neither number helped her recall anything from the book except the way that it ended: in a sudden, sheer drop through nothingness to deep water and death. In the book that had sounded inconvenient and tricky, but down here in the tomb cold and coffin dark, it was terrifying. Even with the phone's dim light, she might not spot the edge in time, and there would be no rescue party on hand to get her out.

The fall would kill you anyway,
said a voice in her head.
Even if you hit nothing but water. Seventy meters? That's
--

what?
--
a hundred and twenty feet. It would be like landing
on concrete
.

"Shut up," she said aloud. "Just, shut up."

She counted her next ten steps, just to distract herself, and a new thought started to shape itself.

Surely there would be a rope across the passage where it emptied into the cistern? There must be. If she was fast--

especially since she was moving faster with her limited light than he was doing with none--she could unhook the rope from one side, get a grip on it, and lower herself over the edge into the darkness of the cistern. He wouldn't see the edge, he would take one last step and find there was nothing beneath him, and he would fall past her, down, screaming, into the black waters so far below.

God,
she thought, as the horror of the idea insisted itself into her mind, the feel of his fingers scrabbling for purchase 228

A. J. Hartley

against the rock, even against the fabric of her clothes as he tumbled over her and into the black void . . .
God
. Could she do it, even if there was such a convenient length of rope securely fastened into the wall? Could she get it unfastened in time? Could she hang there in the blackness, waiting for the sound of his approach, the emptiness of the vast, deadly cistern all around her, hoping that he would make the mistake she hadn't? And what if he realized what she had done and just sat chuckling to himself as she hung there (
seventy meters . . .
), her arms burning with the effort of holding on till exhaustion--with his help--turned her off, kicked her free, and she fell . . .

We'll burn that bridge when we come to it,
she thought. One of Richard's favorite hybrid phrases.

"Deborah," called a voice from back up the tunnel. It was lilting, singsong, a kind of taunt.
"Deb-rah."

Him.

Deborah hesitated, then started off again, her heart beating faster than ever and something like nausea growing in her stomach.

Don't say anything. Just keep going
.

"Gonna get you, Deborah," he sang.

Not Greek, that was for sure. American. Southern?

Maybe.

"How does it feel?" he called.
"About to die and no idea
why."

He giggled to himself at his rhyme, but Deborah was not listening. Refusing to.

The passage turned sharply again, and then once more, and then it stopped.

For a moment she moved the phone's glow over the rock on all sides, but there was no getting away from the awful truth.

There was no rope across the drop. There was no drop at all. They hadn't roped off the cistern. They had filled it in. The guidebook was out of date, and she was trapped. CHAPTER 49

Her last burst of speed had put some distance between herself and her pursuer, and it was several seconds before she could hear him, seconds in which she clung to the hope that he had changed his mind and decided to go back. Having him wait for her outside would be better than being caught here, cornered in the dark like a rat. The image revived her defiance.

I'm not the rat,
she thought.
He is. Smug, murderous little
weasel . . .

He was getting close now, and through the scrape of his feet she could hear something else, something barely louder than his heavy breathing.

He's whistling
.

It was a flat, tuneless sound, the notes shrill and undifferentiated, like he was blowing the air through his teeth, his lips pulled back like a jackal or--the image came back--a hyena. The casualness with which he was going to kill her, the sheer mindless flippancy of the thing, made her suddenly furious. She set the glowing phone down on the step at the last turn in the passage and stepped back into the end of the tunnel. He was almost on her now. Without the greenish light to guide her senses, she would have sworn he was close enough to touch. She braced herself against the walls of the dammedup cistern where so many idiot tourists had doubtless fallen to their deaths over the years, and her muscles flexed from calf to shoulder like a spider in one of those funnel-shaped webs, tense and ready to spring. She would have only the briefest moment of advantage. No time for half measures. 230

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Her eyes didn't catch the outline of his shape till the whistling stopped, but he loomed into view as he stooped to the glow of the cell phone, his face suddenly clear and ghoulish in its green light.
The White Rabbit . . .

She saw his eyes tighten, briefly overloaded by the glow after so much blackness, and she flung herself forward, kicking hard at his face with her good foot. She connected, and he rocked backward.

"Surprise," she said, and struck him hard on the cheek with the heel of her palm.

He rolled backward, sprawling and jarring his back against the steps so that he gasped as if winded, but the action took him out of the phone's glow, and she lost him. She kicked out again, but made no contact and almost lost her footing in the process. She took a step closer, realizing too late that she was probably silhouetted in the green glow which came from a foot or two behind her. His knife caught her across the shoulder and the side of her neck. Wincing, she fell back, clutching at the wound, first instinctively, then feeling for spurting. How she knew to do this, she didn't know, but she did it, probing with her fingers, testing for severe arterial damage. There was none that she could feel, and she didn't waste any more time in the examination. She kicked the phone away, flung herself to her right side--away from his weapon hand--and came at him again, head lowered like a charging bull.

Someone of her size might have had an advantage fighting from the steps where he was, but he was shorter than her by several inches, and he seemed completely unprepared for her fury. Her shoulder made contact with something (his arm?

his face?) and flung him hard against the wall. There was a dull thud--his head against the rock--and the clear, metallic ping of the knife hitting the floor. She didn't look for it, or wait to see if he was conscious. She elbowed past his slumping body and began running back up the stairs. 231

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She slipped twice on the treacherous steps (the only thing the guidebook had gotten right), but she could feel the air warming as she climbed. It was still utterly dark, but ahead was light and warmth and life. She ran on, leaping blindly, bashing heavily into the wall where the passage twisted, but never stopping. Then the blackness was brown, and some of the rock floor had contours and depth. Around the next turn the pallor was clearer, and she sucked in the light like oxygen. Five more steps and another wrenching twist of the tunnel, and she was out, half blinded by the glare, and suddenly feeling a rush of sweat and nerves and pain from the stinging gash across her shoulder, none of which stopped her from running back to the palace ruins and down past the grave circle to the lion gate and out. Remembering the myth of Orpheus trying to save his wife from the underworld, she did not look back.