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.
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.
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
