Nevada Barr - The Rope

Buddy’s sharp claws scratched her chest as, panicked, he tried to fight free of the bikini cup. Her shoulder was failing. She let go of the line and closed the fingers of her left hand around her furry friend. One-handed now: another step, another slide of her fist. Splinters of nylon jabbed into her palm. Never mind. Don’t care.

“Uuhnn” from below and the susurration of feet dragging over sand, then light lancing up between her legs, over her shoulder to stab red from the stone where the ladder curled over into the canted neck of the bottle.

The ladder jerked sideways. Her left foot slid off the rung. The monster jerked it the other way, and her remaining foot fell free. She hung suspended, a spider on a single strand of web, held aloft only by the strength of the fingers of one hand. Below, the monster panted and grunted, a beast grasping at its meal. The head of her ulna twisted and came partially out of the socket. Pain scorched her will to hang on.

Buddy scrabbled, trying to free himself.

“Sorry,” Anna whispered. Pinching one tiny paw tight between thumb and forefinger, she let her injured arm fall to her side, Buddy dangling in space.

In pain and terror Buddy fought back in the only way he knew how. Skunk spray filled the jar. The monster screamed. Anna heard him falling or staggering. The beam of the flashlight stilled into a single line across the floor. He’d dropped it.

In the enclosed space the stench was more than an evil smell; it stung Anna’s eyes and burned the back of her throat. Gagging, the monster rolled in the dirt, oddly dismembered by the line of light across the sand. The little skunk’s aim must have been true and hit him in the face.

She could see her feet and the ladder. Trying not to breathe, she eased one foot back to the tread, then the other. The hand that had taken her full weight when she’d lost her footing did not want to open, then did not want to close. It felt as if muscle had turned to water and no longer had the power to move bone. Her left arm, swinging free, Buddy’s little weight still suspended by her pincer grip on his forepaw, hurt so bad it was all she could do not to let the skunk kit fall, but she couldn’t leave him. If Mr. Monster carved women who’d never done him any harm, what would he do to a baby animal who had effectively Maced him?

Rung by rung, she pushed up, sliding her rope-burned hand along the blue line stringing them together. The thrashing from below stopped—that or she could no longer hear it over the rasping of breath in her throat and the pounding of blood in her ears.

Then a rung was flush against stone, crushing her fingers as she clawed her way around the bulge. Pushing breast and belly over the next rungs in the sloping neck, she dragged herself toward the narrow eye of the world that had watched her for so many days. Afraid to let Buddy go, she pulled him along, her arm, half dislocated, bumping excruciatingly over rungs and rocks. The baby skunk had ceased to struggle, and Anna feared she had squeezed the life out of him or bashed him to death in her scramble to escape.

Head and shoulders cleared the neck of the jar. The world expanded around her, so startling in its immensity that she had the dizzying sensation she was expanding with it, her mind exploding toward the horizon in every direction.

Then she was well and truly out, belly down on the rocky ground, gasping for breath. A tickle at her thigh let her know Buddy was not dead. Relief at finding she had not killed her friend and savior rivaled that at having escaped the monster. “Run, Buddy,” she whispered. “Run.”

A breeze moved across the rocky plateau. After so long in the absolute stillness of her underground prison, wind felt like life itself. The moon had not yet set, and the desert glowed in stark blacks touched by silver, gentle washes of luminescence over smooth bulges of stone. Even the sharp gouge of rocks beneath her body felt good after an eternity of fine sand. To be free was so exquisite Anna was drunk with it.

Spread along the ground under the length of her body, the ladder twitched to life. Instantly sobered, she rolled off of it, onto her injured arm. Pain took her as she either relocated or totally dislocated her shoulder joint. Had she not been down already she would have collapsed.

The ropes between the rungs grew taut, lifting off the stone as the treads were set up on their edges by the tension.

The monster was climbing out.

It was too late to pull the ladder up. He was already on it and climbing fast. She staggered to her feet. If she ran he’d catch her, catch her and throw her back into the hole. She grabbed up a rock the size of a softball and threw it down the neck of the bottle. There was a grunt of surprise, but she didn’t think she’d hit him. Without strength behind it, even if she did, it wouldn’t stop him.

Bigger, she needed something bigger. “No, no, no,” she sobbed, as she looked desperately around. Several feet from the hole was a roundish rock the size of a basketball. Too big; she would never find the strength to shift it.

The largest muscle in the human body is the gluteus maximus: She remembered that from somewhere. Falling more than sitting, she planted hers on the ground. Bracing the soles of her feet against the rock, she shoved with all the power of her thighs and butt. The stone came loose with a sound like ripping paper and rolled within a foot of the entrance to the jar. Scraping skin from her bare legs and elbows, Anna crab-walked after it and again shoved with both heels. The rock rolled to the edge of the hole, teetered, then, eerily silent, rolled out of sight.

A monster roar came from the depths, followed by the crash of rock and man at the bottom of the hole. Unless he’d been knocked senseless, he would be back at the ladder before she could drag it up. The ladder was not one but two boat ladders tied together, with wire wrapping the top rung of one tightly to the bottom rung of the other. The top ladder retained the two U-shaped metal hooks used to secure it the side of a boat. The monster had anchored it by laying a rusted metal fence post behind two boulders the size of Volkswagens, slipping the hooks over the post, and pulling the metal tight against the stones.

Crawling, Anna made it to where the hooks hooked over the post and jerked them free. The instant she did, they leaped like live things and ran scraping across the earth to follow the stone into the gullet of the jar. Silence followed, broken only by the gentle rain of sand trickling through the throat of sandstone that had swallowed so much so quickly.

Shaking and gasping for breath, Anna tried to stand. Her legs would not support her. On her knees, she stared at the black slit, expecting at every breath that it would suddenly spew forth life, that great angry hands and gnashing teeth would emerge to drag her screaming back down into darkness.

The trickle of sand ceased.

Anna’s breathing evened out.

Buddy appeared from wherever he’d run to hide and watched her tentatively, ready to run if she began flailing and throwing things again.

The night grew so still, the moonlight fading, the stars achingly bright overhead, that Anna felt unreal, as if she had dreamed the whole thing, as if she were dreaming still.

Then came a voice into the world, soft and gentle.

“Anna? What have you done?”

Jenny was thinking about snakes. Even as a child, she’d liked them. When other little girls were screaming and running from horrid little snake-wielding boys, Jenny had wanted to see and touch. An early lesson in life had been the gift of a snake-wielding boy—Carl Johnson. Jenny remembered him vividly; he’d been her first-grade crush. Carl had been pursuing her at the school picnic, yelling, “Snake! Snake!” Undoubtedly courtship as understood by six-year-olds. Jenny had run a few yards, then stopped to touch and see.