by Nevada Barr
Having achieved a modest level of alertness, she set about erasing all traces of herself from the bottom of the jar. The belt went into the loops to hold up her shorts. She would need both arms free. The fanny pack she wrapped around her waist, snapping the plastic buckle in place. The scraps of paper from her and the skunk’s repast she shoved into the pockets of her shorts, then clipped the plastic water bottle to the strap of the fanny pack with the carabiner.
If the monster came, he must come down the throat of her jar. The angle dictated that, if he used a rope and didn’t simply crawl down the sides like a blowfly, he would enter her world slightly off center. Beneath the angle where the throat widened into the body of the jar, and the stone overhung the farthest, was the least visible part of the bottom.
As the last of the light was going, she dug out a shallow trough six feet long and two feet wide in the exposed area where she could see the throat and the eye of sky. Sitting in it, legs straight, toes pointing toward where a rope thrown down the jar’s gullet had to land, she buried the canvas-covered canteen next to her right knee and laid the strap along her thigh. That done, she swept sand over her feet and legs. When she was certain nothing of her extremities was visible, she lay down and, grateful that Kay had been so well endowed, arranged one triangle of the bra over her eyes and the other over her nose and mouth. Doing the best she could by feel, she buried her chest, neck, and head, leaving only a slit between the fabric of the bra and the bridge of her nose so she could see out. Moving as little as possible, lest she disturb her sandy shroud, she burrowed her right hand and arm under the sand till she felt the canteen strap and closed her fingers around it.
Buddy had watched her doings with interest and even found the courage to pounce on her foot when she moved it beneath the sand, much as a kitten might. It made Anna wonder if skunks hunted and, if so, what? Even through the sand banked around her head she thought she could hear him nosing around and several times felt him walking across parts of her anatomy.
Then he, too, was still. Night had come. The slit between bra and nose showed only black regardless of whether her eyes were shut or not.
Tonight it would be decided if she were to be, or not to be. A melancholic since Zach’s abandonment, Anna knew the narcotic comfort in contemplating suicide. Molly would be amused that when the choice had been taken from her, and someone else could choose her “not to be,” Death ceased to be a suitor and became the enemy. Sheer contrariness was an excellent motivator.
Anna opened her mind to the sand. For so long she had cursed its incursions into her crevices, its dust in her nose and eyes and ears, its grit between her teeth. Lying as one with it, she embraced the camouflage it afforded and tried to rethink herself as a trapdoor spider, hiding in her own controlled vortex of sand, waiting for her prey to come too near. She pictured the darkness overlaying the sand overlaying her, providing another layer of protection. Almost, she felt herself slipping into the stone surrounding her and wondered if it were the dregs of the drugged water, self-hypnosis, or incipient insanity. Regardless of the cause, for a moment she felt as at home as she did backstage in the dark; she knew where she was and was doing exactly what she should be.
She was waiting for the villain of the piece to enter.
EIGHTEEN
Time passed. Or not. Anna wanted to look at Kay’s Timex but didn’t dare move. Her carapace of sand was fragile. Itches she dared not scratch, thirst she dared not quench, cramping muscles she dared not stretch, chipped away at her sense of being at one with the jar. Thoughts of the kind embrace of the earth shifted to thoughts of hot baths, food, and clean sheets.
Mostly, though, she thought of the monster, willed him to come. It was opening night; the curtain was up, the audience waiting. That he hadn’t come the previous night did not concern her overmuch. Even monsters, she supposed, had obligations they could not get out of. If he didn’t come tonight, though, she would probably die in the bottom of this solution hole. If he didn’t come tonight, maybe he was merely a murderer and not an even lower form of beast. Maybe he simply needed her dead because she’d seen Kay struck down. A plain old murderer would turn his back and walk away, satisfied she was no longer a problem.
She clung to the facts of the drugged water, the sandwiches, the cuts in her thigh. Those had “monster” written all over them. A true monster would come back for her. A monster couldn’t stay away two nights running, not with a captive so very captive and helpless as naked, incapacitated Anna Pigeon.
So she waited and her mind drifted. She did not give in to sleep. Instead she rehearsed: envisioning how her half-baked plan would be enacted, going over every move in her mind, cataloging her props and working out how best they could be used. In the impossible darkness, she toyed with dialogue. As a down-on-her-luck genie in a bottle, she had a right to the role of Scheherazade. Several scenes of charming the monster with words filtered through her mind as she lay in wait. Finally she decided a drugging, carving, murderous monster probably wouldn’t be all that much into oral tradition. Besides, Anna had progressed beyond words. She wanted a pound of flesh.
She revisited the idea that more than one monster was involved. Should all three come together, or even two, she would not stand a chance. She put that thought aside.
Twenty minutes after her interment she was fighting sleep and losing. Then she heard someone walking overhead. Fatigue flared out in a gust of adrenaline.
Footsteps, louder, louder, were coming toward the opening of her jar. Breathe two three, hold two three, out on a five count: She calmed her twitchy muscles.
The footsteps stopped.
Anna forced herself to keep breathing, to listen past the rush of blood in her ears and the sigh of air from her nose. The exterior silence was solid as ice. Had she dreamed the footsteps? Imagined them?
Then they began again. This time they were walking away. Panic rose up from the adrenaline bath in which she lay. Someone had come, they’d come to look, maybe a lost tourist or a ranger on a camping trip, or Molly or Jenny or somebody looking for her, and they’d come and she hadn’t called out, hadn’t let them know she was alive and in this hole, and now they were walking away, leaving her.
Just when she couldn’t bear it another second and was about to leap up shrieking, “It’s me! It’s me! I’m down here!” the sound of the feet hitting the gravel stopped. Whispers and thumps followed as if the walker were dragging something out of a sack or a hiding place.
Almost weak with relief that she hadn’t destroyed her one chance before she’d had it, Anna gathered her scattered emotions and packed them back into her bones. One set of footsteps equaled one monster: so far, so good. Her wait had not been overly long. She was not too stiff. Legs and arms hadn’t gone to sleep on her. Breath was coming too fast and too shallow. That, she adjusted.
The beam of a flashlight skittered across the throat of the jar. Slow erratic forays down into the throat. Anna imagined the monster holding it clamped between his arm and his rib cage as he arranged whatever it was he used to descend into, and ascend out of, the solution hole. With light she saw that the edge of the bikini bra over the bridge of her nose had settled, narrowing her viewing slot to a scant quarter of an inch. There was nothing she could do about that. After what seemed a long time—and to have elapsed in less time than it took to blink—came a loud scattering of pebbles followed by a slithering sound. The monster had thrown a rope down the throat of the jar; it snaked down the neck to the edge of the main body of the hole, then fell in a hiss.
From her right came a tiny squeak. Anna hoped Buddy was hiding, invisible in the patch of tattered nightshade.
A grunt from above; the monster was lowering his body down the angled neck of the jar. Dust motes writhed in the flashlight’s beam. From the angle and the jerky movement, Anna guessed he had shoved the flashlight into his belt to free up his hands for the climb.
A rain of pebbles pattered on the sand as a form wriggled feet first over the lip of sandstone
. The light played havoc with her limited vision, sending shadows running and striking snatches of color as it glanced across the ropes. Ropes plural. After thirty faithless years, Anna believed in Santa Claus again.
What the anti-Santa was using to climb down the chimney was a ladder of bright blue nylon rope with plastic rungs, a style she’d seen on several houseboats. The ladder could easily be pulled from the water and stowed.
The monster got his feet on the second rung down and righted himself from the belly-crawl required to descend the throat. A beam of light shot up from his belt as he pulled the flashlight free. Anna’s vision blurred with the intensity of her need to see: hiking boots covered in scratches and dust; socks, once white, now tiger-striped where dirt settled in the creases; one calf, muscular, no hair. Either he wore shorts or hiked naked.
Forcing discipline, she closed her eyes before the light could slip down the sides of the jar lest they shine, flash color, or catch the light. Red drowned her lids, strobing with black; the light passing over her face, flickering through the thin layer of fabric and sand.
A sharp intake of monster breath.
Nobody in the jar. Anna hoped that was what he thought.
A whirring sound. A thud.
He had slid down the ladder and landed on the floor. Again Anna was one with the sand and stone; she felt the boots strike, breathed the dust when they hit, cast back the light of the flashlight, felt the intrusion of his mass into her space.
Anna had buried herself not under the greater curve, where her shallow grave would be invisible from the throat of the jar, but on the exposed side. Years in the theater taught her the audience is less interested in the seen than in the unseen, in open doors than in those partly ajar. When the curtain rose on an empty stage, all eyes turned toward the entrance most likely to spew forth the expected players.
Watching those who watched also taught her that the mind fools the eye. The mind is too impatient to wait for a full report and makes snap decisions on what the eye has beheld. The curtain rises. No actors are standing onstage. The mind decrees it empty and orders the eyes to move on. Piles of silk begin to move; the audience gasps as thirty dancers flow up from the floor.
In choosing her burial spot, she had banked on the fact that what held true for New York theatergoers would also hold true for desert monsters; the man on the ladder would quickly scan the exposed area. No naked drugged woman. Ergo empty. His interest would then shift to beneath the overhang, to the unseen, his back to her, his light raking the alcove behind the ladder.
She waited, without thinking, for any sound of surprise or dismay. Thinking would destroy her nerve. A miserable, aching, eternal second ground by.
“Whuff?”
The grunt of a cartoon bear was her cue. Anna surged up from the sand, to one knee, to her feet, sand cascading from her body. Mouth wide, she roared, and in her mind the sound was a tide of fear and hope and determination and bloodred murder. From her dry lips and leathery tongue the sound was like that of an ancient coffin lid pried open with a crowbar.
Light hit her with the force of a fist, found her eyes, and blinded her. With strength born of desperation, she swung the half-filled metal canteen on its strap. Light leaped crazily around the circular walls. The canteen struck something solid, then banged back on its tether and cracked her shins. Pain opened her clenched fingers; strap and canteen fell away. Light steadied, drawing a perfect circle of bronze from the curving sandstone. The crests of the waves of sand streaked gold across the floor. By this faint illumination Anna stumbled for the ladder.
A black shape tottered from the deadly nightshade. Buddy. She couldn’t leave Buddy. Snatching him up before he could startle and run, she slipped him into the hammock of a bra cup, then grasped the ladder. It moved like a living thing, the bottom step dancing away from her foot each time she tried to step on it, disappearing into the dark, then catching a scrap of light and reappearing.
“No, no, no,” she murmured, her voice as high and frightened as a child’s.
The monster groaned. He was coming to, waking up, hungry like an ogre is hungry. Fee fie fo fum, Anna heard from some long-ago fairy tale trapped in her mind. I smell the blood—
Her right foot was on the tread. The ladder steadied with her weight. Her left foot found the next tread up, and she came free of the sand. The ladder began to sway. She cried out but did not let go. Afraid to loose and regrasp the blue line lest it get away from her, she slid her closed fist up until it cracked against a higher tread. Gripping there, she lifted her right foot to meet with her left, then fumbled her left one rung higher. She was doing it. She was on the ladder. The prisoner was escaping.
Buddy’s sharp claws scratched her chest as, panicked, he tried to fight free of the bikini cup. Her shoulder was failing. She let go of the line and closed the fingers of her left hand around her furry friend. One-handed now: another step, another slide of her fist. Splinters of nylon jabbed into her palm. Never mind. Don’t care.
“Uuhnn” from below and the susurration of feet dragging over sand, then light lancing up between her legs, over her shoulder to stab red from the stone where the ladder curled over into the canted neck of the bottle.
The ladder jerked sideways. Her left foot slid off the rung. The monster jerked it the other way, and her remaining foot fell free. She hung suspended, a spider on a single strand of web, held aloft only by the strength of the fingers of one hand. Below, the monster panted and grunted, a beast grasping at its meal. The head of her ulna twisted and came partially out of the socket. Pain scorched her will to hang on.
Buddy scrabbled, trying to free himself.
“Sorry,” Anna whispered. Pinching one tiny paw tight between thumb and forefinger, she let her injured arm fall to her side, Buddy dangling in space.
In pain and terror Buddy fought back in the only way he knew how. Skunk spray filled the jar. The monster screamed. Anna heard him falling or staggering. The beam of the flashlight stilled into a single line across the floor. He’d dropped it.
In the enclosed space the stench was more than an evil smell; it stung Anna’s eyes and burned the back of her throat. Gagging, the monster rolled in the dirt, oddly dismembered by the line of light across the sand. The little skunk’s aim must have been true and hit him in the face.
She could see her feet and the ladder. Trying not to breathe, she eased one foot back to the tread, then the other. The hand that had taken her full weight when she’d lost her footing did not want to open, then did not want to close. It felt as if muscle had turned to water and no longer had the power to move bone. Her left arm, swinging free, Buddy’s little weight still suspended by her pincer grip on his forepaw, hurt so bad it was all she could do not to let the skunk kit fall, but she couldn’t leave him. If Mr. Monster carved women who’d never done him any harm, what would he do to a baby animal who had effectively Maced him?
Rung by rung, she pushed up, sliding her rope-burned hand along the blue line stringing them together. The thrashing from below stopped—that or she could no longer hear it over the rasping of breath in her throat and the pounding of blood in her ears.
Then a rung was flush against stone, crushing her fingers as she clawed her way around the bulge. Pushing breast and belly over the next rungs in the sloping neck, she dragged herself toward the narrow eye of the world that had watched her for so many days. Afraid to let Buddy go, she pulled him along, her arm, half dislocated, bumping excruciatingly over rungs and rocks. The baby skunk had ceased to struggle, and Anna feared she had squeezed the life out of him or bashed him to death in her scramble to escape.
Head and shoulders cleared the neck of the jar. The world expanded around her, so startling in its immensity that she had the dizzying sensation she was expanding with it, her mind exploding toward the horizon in every direction.
Then she was well and truly out, belly down on the rocky ground, gasping for breath. A tickle at her thigh let her know Buddy was not dead. Relief at finding she had
not killed her friend and savior rivaled that at having escaped the monster. “Run, Buddy,” she whispered. “Run.”
A breeze moved across the rocky plateau. After so long in the absolute stillness of her underground prison, wind felt like life itself. The moon had not yet set, and the desert glowed in stark blacks touched by silver, gentle washes of luminescence over smooth bulges of stone. Even the sharp gouge of rocks beneath her body felt good after an eternity of fine sand. To be free was so exquisite Anna was drunk with it.
Spread along the ground under the length of her body, the ladder twitched to life. Instantly sobered, she rolled off of it, onto her injured arm. Pain took her as she either relocated or totally dislocated her shoulder joint. Had she not been down already she would have collapsed.
The ropes between the rungs grew taut, lifting off the stone as the treads were set up on their edges by the tension.
The monster was climbing out.
It was too late to pull the ladder up. He was already on it and climbing fast. She staggered to her feet. If she ran he’d catch her, catch her and throw her back into the hole. She grabbed up a rock the size of a softball and threw it down the neck of the bottle. There was a grunt of surprise, but she didn’t think she’d hit him. Without strength behind it, even if she did, it wouldn’t stop him.
Bigger, she needed something bigger. “No, no, no,” she sobbed, as she looked desperately around. Several feet from the hole was a roundish rock the size of a basketball. Too big; she would never find the strength to shift it.
The largest muscle in the human body is the gluteus maximus: She remembered that from somewhere. Falling more than sitting, she planted hers on the ground. Bracing the soles of her feet against the rock, she shoved with all the power of her thighs and butt. The stone came loose with a sound like ripping paper and rolled within a foot of the entrance to the jar. Scraping skin from her bare legs and elbows, Anna crab-walked after it and again shoved with both heels. The rock rolled to the edge of the hole, teetered, then, eerily silent, rolled out of sight.
