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.