David Wiltse - Into The Fire

Swann liked the analogy; it pleased and comforted him to think of himself as surviving on guile and craft while the slow-witted ones stumbled about, hunting for him in vain.

The price for such elusiveness was constant awareness, and if he lost that, he was lost. He needed a place to hide now, he needed someone to care for him. A doctor, a hospital, was out of the question. He could not afford to be restrained; his safety depended on a mobility — that equated to anonymity. If he was never in the same place twice, he left no impression, there was no one to remember him, no way to connect him to anything, or anyone.

He could not understand how that cracker halfwit had recognized him in the first place. What kind of incalculably bad luck was it to have been shopping in the same place at the same time? The town was twenty miles from the campsite where he had found the girl. What was the man doing there, and how could he have identified Swann? The man could not have gotten more than a glimpse of a shape in the car. It was night, Swann hadn't even been facing the man. Had he? Could he have had that good a look at him? Or was it even bad luck? Had Swann been careless, was his vigilance slipping?

Frightened in a way he had not been since his first few days in prison, frightened for his life, Swann knew he had to find someone to help him until he recovered. There was only one person who could do it and be trusted implicitly.

He forced himself to drive on, struggling for his equilibrium.

Aural had never known a darkness like this, not on the blackest night of her life, not with her eyes closed, never.

Even the blind see more light than this, she thought. This was the darkness of the grave, total and unchanging. It was not a question of her eyes getting used to a lower level of light; there was no light at all, nothing to get used to, no gearing down or gearing up, no widening of the lens would make any difference.

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.