Did Jeffrey Dahmer have bad breath? she wondered. Was eating people more unclean than eating cows?
That thought ended the whole exercise of keeping the eyes closed and not moving. Anna’s eyes popped open as a jolt of fear electrified her. She was on her back staring up at the all-seeing eye at the top of her world, the clear blue of sky beyond the mouth of her bottle. Absurdly, she wondered if this was the view babies had shortly before they were born. No, they’d see a masked man in scrubs peering back at them. At one time that image would have amused her. Lying naked at the bottom of a dry well, it scared her nearly as much as that of Jeffrey Dahmer picking human flesh from his teeth with his fingernail.
All that kept her from leaping to her feet in terror was the sure knowledge that it would make her arm and head hurt like sons-a-bitches. Carefully, she sat up.
Things had changed.
The night before, when the drug took her, she had been leaning against the side of the jar. She had urinated in the sand where she sat. The canteen was tucked under her arm. Now she was in the center of the arena of sand. The canteen was leaning neatly against the sandstone near the patch of sacred datura, night blooms only now beginning to close with the light. Next to it was a paper sack, the neck rolled down tightly to keep whatever was inside trapped. Around her the sand had been raked into concentric circles as if she sat at the center of a vortex.
Stinging brought her attention back to her body. Her thigh burned. Blood covered the skin, running down and clotting in her pubic hair. Sand stuck between her legs where the blood had pooled and dried.
“Nooooo,” she wailed. The monster had come as she slept and raped her bloody. “No!” she screamed as on elbows and heels she tried to escape the red stain. Movement sent more burning from her thigh to her brain. She began to cry. Tears blurred her vision and ran down the side of her nose.
The bleeding, stopped overnight, began again, seeping from the top of her thigh to run in narrow red rivulets down the crease between her leg and her abdomen. Anna sat still. Gathering her courage, she leaned forward to study the bloodied area. Neither the ooze nor the pain emanated from her vagina, but from the flesh near panty-line, had she had panties to boast of. Scooting backward, she moved to where the canteen rested neatly beside the deadly garden. Having unscrewed the cap, she poured a small stream of water onto the wound. The water ran red; then, slowly, cuts began to show, straight, careful lines incised into a strip of skin about two inches wide: W H O R E.
The monster had come and cut his word into her.
She jerked back as if she could escape the message, but it was carved on her flesh. Ignoring the sudden roar of pain in her shoulder and head, she began scooping up sand, burying the horror that had been made of her.
“No!” she said aloud at the same moment Molly said, “Stop it, Anna.” Opening her hand, she let the sand trickle out between her fingers, watching it rejoin a million other grains that had been worn from the stone over the last millennium, blown and settled in this trap.
He—the monster—had not made a horror of her. He had made a thing of her, an object, a joke, a notepad, a scrap to scribble on, then throw into the trash. He had made her nothing but his butt, a billboard, garbage.
Trembling took her so hard her teeth rattled and her breath came in short shallow gusts. Folding her legs, she began to rock and moan. The moans turned to anguished sobs, and her lips formed a hard open square as ragged screams were forced through. Far away, in the back of her mind, she could hear Molly shouting something, but the words couldn’t penetrate the thick walls of degradation built around her in the night, walls as solid and imprisoning as the stone jar this damaged bit of trash had been dropped into. She rocked and screamed until she didn’t even have the will to do that anymore.
Then she was just sitting cross-legged on the sand staring at the desiccated-looking nightshade garden, the canteen of poisoned water, and the paper bag.
Three doors and behind each the tiger. There was no lady for such as Anna. She knew the datura could kill her, but she didn’t know if she was supposed to eat it or inject it or smoke it or what. The paper bag held an unknown. The easiest seemed to be the canteen. If she drank all of it, maybe it would be enough.
She waited for her sister to order her to “stay alive.”
From a long ways away she could hear her. “So. Fine,” her sister called, barely audible in the distance. “A bit of monster garbage. Poor you. The monster wins.”
That rather pissed Anna off.
No. That really, really pissed Anna off.
“I will fucking show you,” she muttered and thought she heard her sister’s fading voice saying, “That’s my girl.” Fury swept away most of the self-pity. It burned out with the heat and rapidity of a car fire, leaving fatigue, helplessness, and confusion in its wake. How would she fucking show anybody? A hundred and two pounds of naked city girl with a sore shoulder and a broken pate, what could she do? Unless, when the monster showed up with his number twelve X-Acto knife—or whatever it was he’d used to carve his judgment—he was a malnourished pygmy with rickets, she wasn’t likely to overpower him even if she wasn’t drugged out of her mind.
Maybe she’d get lucky, like the girl kept in the stone pit in the basement in Silence of the Lambs, and the bastard would have a yappy little dog she could hold hostage. From what she’d seen, Lake Powell wasn’t a hotbed of yappy little dogs, more the big sorts that can clear a coffee table with one swish of a mighty tail.
Blinking back the last residue of tears with the thought that she needed all her hydration, she looked around her sandbox. Not even any rocks for bashing in the heads of predators. Self-pity was creeping back when the cat saved her. She remembered Sophie, a five-pound cat she had when she moved to New York after college. Sophie was so sweet until someone tried to make her do something she did not wish to do. Then she became a five-pound buzz saw, all fangs and claws and moving at the speed of sound.
Sophie. Gilda Johanson. Gilda was attacked two floors down in the apartment building where Anna and Zach lived. She was in her sixties, had emphysema and high blood pressure. She snarled and snapped at everybody. A burglar had come in and decided to rape Gilda while he was there. Relating how she had driven the man off was one of the few times Anna had heard Gilda laugh—or rather chortle.
“I don’t has many things. This stomme bastaard he want to take what I got. Then he pull out to zijn smerige kleine penis and wave it around,” she said when she met Anna and Zach on the landing as they were carting their laundry upstairs.
“Did you knock some manners into him?” Zach asked.
“What I got to knock with?” she demanded indignantly. “I start to piss and do bowels and I spit and act crazy and throw the piss and bowels at him and scream and the piece of de hond braakt, he can’t get out my house fast enough.”
Cat and gross defenses, Anna had those. Though they were ridiculous—maybe because they were ridiculous—she was comforted by remembering them. Her sense of helplessness eased a little. Not trusting her recently dislocated shoulder to take any weight, she struggled up and walked on her knees to the canteen, the paper sack, and the deadly nightshade. Plopping down beside them, she picked up the canteen first. It was full, topped off during the night. She unrolled the crimped neck of the paper bag. Two squares wrapped in waxed paper. To her, the two squares wrapped in waxed paper and stowed in a sack spoke of food. To the monster, it might mean anything, tarantulas in an odd box, rat guts on toast. Who knew what monsters thought was nourishing.
Along with the paper-wrapped squares were two cups of the kind of pudding that comes in little six-packs. No spoon, no napkins. Laying one of the packages on her thigh so it covered WHORE, she carefully folded back the corners of the waxed paper.