Chapter 7 #3
Pan stared at him, aghast. “You talk nonsense like village idiot.” He said something else, but I didn’t hear it because my mind was trying to put the puzzle pieces together.
Ilias despised me as much as Pan in the beginning, but I don’t know if he had ever gotten rid of that feeling even if it seemed that way after the drinking party.
What if Troy was right and this was Rayk?
What if he had only pretended to be in love with me to lull me and the others into a false sense of security?
What if he was simply thinking of a way to betray us to Isaac a second time?
But then it would have been Ilias on the Agamemnon who had thrown me overboard, not Pan.
And during the confusion on the ship after Isaac’s arrival, he must have jumped overboard as Pan.
That sounded logical. Far too plausible since I already suspected Ilias, alias Rayk.
I swallowed and looked at the others. Nathan had bent down in a flash and grabbed a carpenter’s hammer, which he held in front of him like a sword.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know one thing for certain.
..” His voice sounded strained. “...you, whoever you are, leave this island immediately and never set foot on it again. If I run into you in the next few weeks, I swear, you better hope God has mercy on you.”
“Nathan,” Pan whispered, shock in every syllable. “I Kjertan, please. I never do Willa anything bad. I had opportunity, but never do nothing.”
“Get out of here!” Nathan’s voice filled the darkness.
“You ask me what only I know! You…”
“Go! I don’t care who you are. Leave! Now!”
As if he were breaking into a hundred pieces, Pan stood rooted in place. His eyes filled with tears and he held out his arms as if wanting to embrace me or Nathan like a rejected child. “I no harm Willa,” he said, choked up. “I love Willa. Traitor among you. I warn you, Nathan. Trust no one.”
Nathan gripped the hammer tightly as if he wanted to break the handle. “Go! Go before I do something I’ll regret!”
I held my breath. For a moment, I feared Nathan would rush Pan, but Pan turned and walked toward the dock with his head hanging.
“Take the boat,” Nathan shouted after him. “Use the compass and row north. And don’t come back! Never! Do you hear? Do you hear that, Johannsson?”
My stomach clenched in misery. Pan’s grief, or rather Ilias, seemed real, not feigned. But the ointment was here on the island, so someone had to have brought it here.
We watched Pan row away through the fog and darkness that quickly swallowed him up so that we could only hear the paddles plunging into the water. I had a bad feeling that kept buzzing in my veins. I carefully peeked at Nathan, who was still clutching the hammer as if he was about to fight.
“Good thing you sent him away!” Troy said at some point, ruffling his frayed hair, an expression of relief on his face.
“Too bad we only have one boat now,” Icarus remarked dryly.
Nathan stared into the wall of fog above the water with his lips pressed together. His emotions were as opaque as the swamp.
“Will Pan find his way back?” I asked, unable to stop thinking about his despondent expression.
Troy snorted. “First, it was probably Rayk, not Kjertan, second, he can use the old compass, the miserable ass, and third, you of all people shouldn’t care at all!”
For a while, we all stood there transfixed as if trapped in a bad dream.
We seemed to be thinking the same thing.
Pan, of all people—or his twin! Suddenly, I felt deeply unsettled.
Six of us had set foot on this island weeks ago, now there were only four left.
I was scared. Every time I felt safe, something happened that threw me back into a state of complete helplessness.
“Could Pan lead Isaac here?” I asked Nathan because, at one point, I couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
Nathan took a deep breath. “He won’t. He’ll find his way back because he’ll head north and the mainland begins somewhere there, but he won’t find Lost Memories again.
This is a labyrinth and he would need the exact coordinates for that.
” He energetically shoved the hammer under his belt and pulled out his cell phone.
He tapped the screen several times, then frowned and looked at me.
“I need to talk to you! Alone.” He pointed to Troy and Icarus.
“You two go back to the hut and keep an eye on the shore.” His gaze fell on the tools on the ground and he picked up the file.
“Arm yourselves in case he does come back.”
Nathan placed the file next to the hammer, took my hand, and pulled me along the path.
I knew what he wanted to talk to me about.
If only I hadn’t found his cell phone, I would never have run back that way and bumped into Pan.
Everything would be as it was before. It was strange how much you sometimes wish you could turn back time even though what you learned was necessary, even vital.
The truth hurt. However, if Pan’s betrayal was painful for me, how was it for Nathan?
“I’m sorry,” I said after we had walked side by side in silence for a few minutes. The night was fresh, but not cold even though the fog made the air damp and my clothes sticky.
Nathan gave me a sideways glance. “What are you sorry about: that Kjertan is the traitor or that you are also a traitor?”
“Both,” I said quietly.
“It doesn’t feel good to be betrayed twice in one day, I can tell you that.” Nathan looked me over, but he didn’t seem nearly as angry as I expected. The Pan thing was obviously bothering him so much that everything else had become irrelevant.
“I didn’t mean to…” A branch cracked in the distance.
Nathan shook his head and looked around warily, which increased the uneasy feeling inside me.
“We’ll talk in a minute.” He quickened his pace until we were almost running, and only when the hut appeared in the fog in front of us did he slow down.
It was the hut where we had made love less than two hours ago today, but it felt like it had been years ago.
From the inside, Nathan locked the door with a hook from days gone by that certainly couldn’t withstand a punch from Pan.
I walked to the middle of the room. “Why are you locking us in?” I whispered automatically because he had never done that before even when we had been intimate.
Nathan peered out the window intently as if he was looking for someone before turning to me. “You have to tell me the truth now, okay?”
He sounded so tense that I nodded mechanically.
He approached me seriously and put his hands on my shoulders. They were strong and warm and I instantly felt protected. “My cell phone. You used it.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “But I only dialed the New York area code. Nothing else…”
Even in the darkness of the tiny wooden hut, I could see that he raised his eyebrows. “You didn’t do anything else?”
“No. I don’t even know if I would have dialed our number because Troy caught me…”
“So Noah caught you dialing?”
“Yes.”
His gray eyes widened. “You didn’t delete the call history?”
“No…why?”
Nathan let go of me and peered out the window again. “Oh, damn it!”
“What is it?” His behavior made me uneasy again.
For a few seconds, he seemed to be trying to sort out his thoughts. “Kjertan…Pan…he’s not the traitor.”
“Excuse me?” Now I didn’t understand anything at all.
“Any of the four here could have lost the ointment. At any time, couldn’t they?”
“Basically, yes.”
“It could have been lying in the grass for a long time without you or me noticing.”
“Yes, but…”
“Do you remember that Noah used to walk to the huts alone for a while because he wanted to look for usable stuff?”
“He was searching for tools and stuff, yes. He gave me the ring that he found once.” And that I had taken off at some point even though it was pretty. A dark suspicion rose in me.
“It could be that he lost the ointment right at the beginning when we were searching everything for clothes and canned goods. And after that, he just kept going out because he wanted to find the ointment. He rarely came back with anything useful.”
“Troy?” I suddenly felt ice cold. “That can’t be.” That couldn’t be true, just like with Pan.
Nathan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, pressed a button, and held it in front of my nose. He looked at me intently. “If you didn’t delete the call history, he must have because it’s empty. It’s as if I haven’t made a single call.”