It was not entirely silent as she had thought at first, however. For one thing, there were her own noises, her breath, the rasp of her clothing against rock, the sound of swallowing. Every sound was magnified and the louder ones echoed back and lived on for seconds longer. But beyond herself there was the noise of water. Somewhere in the distance a creek ran over rocks, the familiar splash could be heard as if filtered through hundreds of yards of darkness. And closer at hand, if she remained still herself, Aural could hear water dripping, very softly, with long intervals between drips, but steadily, with the regularity of a clock. She tried to count the interval between drips and determined it to be 180 seconds long, assuming that saying one-thousand-one in your mind actually took a second. Three minutes. She had a drip she could cook an egg by.
How many drips had he been gone? How many before he returned? How many before her real ordeal began? she wondered. She didn't know what this guy had in mind for her, but it seemed a pretty good guess that it wasn't to just leave her alone. Beyond that, she didn't allow her mind to speculate. There was no point in getting scared ahead of time. No point in doing his work for him.
What she had to do was prepare herself as best she could for his return.
Since her hands were cuffed in front of her body, getting the knife from her. boot was no problem, but she didn't know what to do with it after that.
Hobbled as she was, she would not be able to maneuver.
She would get one chance at best and even then she didn't know what to do. Say she cut him, so what? She couldn't then run away while he contemplated his wound. All he had to do was step away from her, bind himself up, then attack at his leisure. Or just leave her alone again while he went away to get a weapon. Wounding him, scaring him, would do nothing for her because she couldn't get away. Which meant she had to kill him.
First of all, she told herself, she didn't know if she was up to killing anyone. It was one thing to threaten with a knife, which she had done several times, and the threat had always been sufficient to buy her enough time and space to get away, but to kill with one was something else again. And suppose she did manage to summon the courage to kill him, what then? Unless she knew where she was, or how to get away, she'd not only still be lost, but she'd have a corpse for company. This place seemed enough like a grave already without adding that touch of realism.
One thing she did know was that she couldn't keep the knife in her boot.
Whatever else he had in mind for her, if this guy was like every other man she'd ever known, eventually he was going to want to have her clothes off of her. Which probably included her boots, which meant he'd find the knife unless she already had it in her hand.
On her knees, Aural felt around for a hiding place in the rocks. The rock was moist wherever she touched. And smooth-everywhere she put her fingers it was smoothas if water had been running over these rocks forever.
With her hands stretched out in front of her, Aural stood and inched slowly to one side. At first she counted her steps so she could return to her starting point, but then she realized that there was nothing to distinguish that point from any other. The only place she needed to mark was the spot where she put the knife.
Walking was awkward on the uneven floor and it was difficult to maintain her balance with her legs so closely constrained. She fell once on the slippery floor and landed hard, unable to break her fall. She started to cry from the shock of the fall, but then wept out of self-pity. She wept a long time, giving full vent to her fright and unhappiness, and her cries filled the vaulted room and reverberated back and forth until she seemed to be in the center of a crowd of moaning, wailing women.
At the end, Aural laughed at herself, pouring some of the same hysteric energy into the laughter so that the stones resounded again. This time it sounded as if she were in a crazy house at the fair, one of a nest of cackling lunatics.
That was okay, she said to herself Do it once, get it over with, nobody around to hear you make a baby of yourself, except yourself, and you knew that much already. Just do it when you're alone, if you have to, but don't give it to him. That's a reward you must never give him.
She proceeded, half-crouched, feeling the uneven surface first with her hands before inching forward with her feet. When she paused to listen, the running water sounded closer, though still far away, and the drip of her clock was getting harder to detect.
She found a spot at last, her fingers slipping into a recess in the rock that was large enough to hold the knife.
Feeling it with both hands, she tried to picture the geometry of the rock. Would it be visible when he brought the light back? She checked each angle of vision in turn, straining to imagine how it would look if someone could see. Even a speck of visibility would be too much-the knife might reflect the light more than the,rocks, glint and flash and call out its presence. The hiding place seemed to curl in on itself like the edge of a snail's shell. He would see the opening only if he put his eyes where she had her fingers, which she didn't think was possible, and even then he would see only the hole. The recess itself was behind a curve, the knife completely out of sight.
Aural put the knife in the hiding place, took it out again, worried about it, put it back. It was the best she had found.
It would have to do, at least until she came up with something better.
She practiced getting her hand into the hiding place while standing up, while sitting down, even while lying on her back. The surfaces of the stone became familiar; she memorized the contours until it was no more difficult than finding a water glass in the bathroom in the middle of the night.
The difference was, she could always find the bathroom. She now had to be sure she could find this spot.
Aural removed her boots and placed them so that if she sat with her feet where the boots were, her back would rest in the perfect place to give her immediate access to the knife.
She moved slowly to her right, counting steps, feet and hands feeling ahead of her into the darkness, searching for a different kind of niche in the rock, something big enough to hide herself. After fifty restricted steps she decided to return to her boots and try another direction, but when she came to what should have been the proper spot, her bare feet did not encounter the boots.
An icy panic gripped her. She had lost her way, mis placed her only weapon in a vast cavern of empty darkness. She had given herself over, defenseless, out of her own stupidity. With an involuntary cry of anguish Aural dropped to her knees and groped along the slippery rock with her hands.
Was she too far or too short? Had she already passed the boots in the darkness, slipping past them on her way back? Or had she not yet gone far enough? How far would she have had to be in the pitch black to miss them? An inch? Half an inch? She needed only to have misstepped by the narrowest of margins to have missed them completely, because if she didn't touch them, they were as far away as the moon. How could she have been so stupid?
This wasn't like fumbling around in her room with the lights off; there were no landmarks here, no familiar furniture to bump into, no walls to rebound from.
At first she flailed wildly with her bound hands, patting and pawing in all directions, praying for a touch of leather against her fingertips, but when she started to crawl forward, she stopped abruptly. Think, she adjured herself Think. You can't be that far away now, a few steps in any direction at best, but you must be basically on- line.
But if you start to crawl around, you could end up anywhere, pointed in the wrong direction and lost forever with no hope at all. Anchor yourself here in some way.
You're not really lost right now, you're just not where you want to be quite yet, but you're not lost if you stay anchored. You need the best way to search the most territory without leaving this spot. Don't be a baby, don't be any more of an idiot than you already have. Think. The farthest you can go in any direction and still stay in place is the length of your body. She lay down on the rock, stretched her hands as far as they would go. There was a particular depression at her fingertips, a hollowed dip that felt like a saucer. She ran her fingers around the saucer, then around the rock immediately surrounding it, trying to establish a context. Her toes were pressed against a slight ridge. Like all the other surfaces, it was smooth and rounded, but it rose up from the floor by several inches.
When your toes are there and your fingers are in the saucer, you're back where you started, she said to herself Now slowly, carefully. Keep your feet against the ridge and roll. Moving one careful revolution at a time, Aural began to roll in a circle with her toes at the center. Face down, face up, she counted the turns, praying all the
