Intensity

as though she were whispering confidences to someone, but no sound escaped her.

Chyna put her cuffed hands under Ariel's chin and lifted her head. The girl didn't try to pull away, didn't flinch, but was revealed when her veil of hair slid away from her face. Although they were eye-to-eye, Ariel stared through Chyna, as if all in this world were transparent, and in her eyes was a chilling bleakness, as if the landscape of her other world was lifeless, daunting.

'We have to go. Before he comes home.'

Bright-eyed and attentive, perhaps the dolls listened. Ariel apparently did not.

With both hands, Chyna enfolded one of the girl's fists. The bones were sharp and the skin was cold, clenched as fiercely as if she had been suspended from rocks at a precipice.

Chyna tried to pry the fingers apart. The sculpted digits of a marble fist would have been hardly more resistant.

Finally Chyna lifted the hand and kissed it more tenderly than she had ever kissed anyone before, more tenderly than she had ever been kissed, and she said softly, 'I want to help you. I need to help you, honey. If I can't leave here with you, there's no point in my leaving at all.'

Ariel didn't respond.

'Please let me help you.' Softer still: 'Please.'

Chyna kissed the hand once more, and at last she felt the girl's fingers stir. They opened partway, cold and stiff, but would not relax entirely, as hooked and rigid as a skeleton's fingers in which the joints had calcified.

Ariel's desire to reach out for help, tempered by her paralyzing fear of commitment, was achingly familiar to Chyna. It struck in her a chord of sympathy and pity for this girl, for all lost girls, and her throat tightened so severely that for a moment she was unable to swallow or breathe.

Then she slipped one cuffed hand into Ariel's and the other over it, got up from the footstool, and said, 'Come on, child. Come with me. Out of here.'

Though Ariel's face remained as expressionless as an egg, though she continued to look through Chyna with the otherworldly detachment of a novitiate in the thrall of a holy visitation, her head spinning with visions, she got up from the armchair. After taking only two steps toward the door, however, she stopped and would not go farther in spite of Chyna's pleas. The girl might be able to envision an imaginary world in which she could find a fragile peace, a Wild Wood of her own, but perhaps she was no longer able to imagine that this world extended beyond the walls of her cell and, failing to visualize it, could not cross the threshold into it.

Chyna released Ariel's hand. She selected a doll-a bisque charmer with golden ringlets and painted green eyes, wearing a white eyelet pinafore over a blue dress. She pressed it against the girl's breast and encouraged her to embrace it. She wasn't sure why the collection was here, but perhaps Ariel liked the dolls, in which case she might come along more readily if given one for comfort.

Initially, Ariel was unresponsive, standing with one hand still fisted at her side and the other like a half-open crab claw. Then, without shifting her gaze from faraway things, she took the doll in both hands, gripping it by the legs. Like the shadow of a bird in flight, a fierce expression crossed her face and was gone before it could be clearly read. She turned, swung the doll as if it were a sledgehammer, and smashed its head into the top of the dinette table, shattering the unglazed-china face.

Startled, Chyna said, 'Honey, no,' and gripped the girl by the shoulder.

Ariel wrenched away from Chyna and slammed the doll into the table again, harder than before, and Chyna stepped backward, not in fear but in respect of the girl's fury. And fury it was, a righteous anger, not merely an autistic spasm, in spite of the fact that she remained expressionless.

She pounded the doll against the table repeatedly, until its smashed head broke and spun across the room and bounced off a wall, until both its arms cracked and fell away, until it was ruined beyond repair. Then she dropped it and stood trembling, arms hanging at her sides. She was still staring into the Elsewhere and was no more with Chyna than she had ever been.

From the bookcases, from atop the cabinets, from the shadowed corners of the room, the dolls watched intently, as if they were thrilled by her outburst and in some strange way feeding on it as Vess himself would have fed if he'd been there to see.

Chyna wanted to put her arms around the girl, but the handcuffs made it impossible to embrace her. Instead, she touched Ariel's face and kissed her on the forehead. 'Ariel, untouched and alive.'

Rigid, shaking, Ariel neither pulled away from Chyna nor leaned toward her. Gradually the girl's trembling subsided.

'I need your help,' Chyna pleaded. 'I need you.'

This time, as if sleepwalking, Ariel allowed herself to be led from the cell.

They crossed the fallen door through the vestibule. In the cellar, Chyna picked up the drill from the floor, plugged it into the power strip on the wall, and put it on the workbench.

She had no timepiece for reference, but she was sure that nine o'clock had come and gone. In the night were dogs waiting and Edgler Vess somewhere at work, bemused by waking dreams of returning home to his pair of captives.

Trying unsuccessfully to get the girl's eyes to focus on her, Chyna explained what they needed to do. She might be able to drive the motor home while handcuffed, though not without some difficulty, as she would have to let go of the steering wheel to shift gears. Dealing with the dogs while cuffed would be a lot harder. Perhaps impossible. If they were to make the best use of the time remaining before Vess's return, and if they were to have the best chance of getting away, Ariel was going to have to drill out the locks on the manacles.

The girl gave no indication that she heard a word of what Chyna told her. Indeed, before Chyna finished, Ariel's lips were moving again in a silent conversation with some phantom; she didn't 'speak' ceaselessly but paused from time to time as if receiving a response from an imaginary friend.

Nevertheless, Chyna showed her how to hold the drill and press the trigger. The girl didn't blink at the sudden shriek of the motor and the air-cutting whistle of the whirling bit.

'Now you hold it,' Chyna said.

Oblivious, Ariel stood with her arms at her sides, hands half open and fingers hooked as they had been since she had dropped the ruined doll.

'We don't have much time, honey.'

In her clockless Elsewhere, time meant nothing to Ariel. Chyna put the drill on the workbench. She drew the girl in front of the tool and placed her hands on it.

Ariel didn't pull away or let her hands slide off the drill, but she didn't lift it either.

Chyna knew that the girl heard her, understood the situation, and, on some level, yearned to help.

'Our hopes are in your hands, honey. You can do it.'

She retrieved the workbench stool from the outer vestibule door, which it had been propping open, and sat down. She put her hands on the workbench, wrists turned to expose the tiny keyhole on the left manacle.

Staring at the concrete-block wall, through the wall, speaking soundlessly to a psychic friend beyond all walls, Ariel seemed to be unaware of the drill. Or to her it might have been not a drill but another object altogether, one that filled her either with hope or with fear, the thing of which she spoke to her phantom friend.

Even if the girl picked up the drill and focused her eyes on the manacle, the chance that she would be able to perform this task seemed slim. The chance that she would avoid boring through Chyna's palm or wrist seemed slimmer still.

On the other hand, although the likelihood of salvation from any trouble or enemy in this life was always slim, Chyna had survived uncounted nights of blood rage and questing lust. Survival was far different from salvation, of course, but it was a prerequisite.

Anyway, she was ready to do now what she had never been able to do before, not even with Laura Templeton: trust. Trust without reservation. And if this girl tried and failed, let the drill slip and damaged flesh rather than steel, Chyna wasn't going to blame her for the failure. Sometimes, just trying was a triumph.

And she knew Ariel wanted to try.

She knew.

For a minute or so, Chyna encouraged the girl to begin, and when that didn't work, she tried waiting in