The Rope

NINE

Mad as Lady Macbeth, Anna scrubbed her hands together lest any of the long and human hairs buried in the sand should cling to them. Retreating to the far side of the jar, she felt her panic worsening. There was nowhere to be, nowhere to run but in circles like a crazed hamster. Slumping down, she leaned back against the sandstone, hands held before her, too unclean to touch any other part of her body, and stared at the mess of delicate brown strands near her cat hole. “My life is a Stephen King novel,” she whispered. “Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can’t get any worse, everybody dies.”

Everybody dies.

Had she been thrown into a charnel pit?

The monster might have been using this hole for years. Dropping his human garbage into it, playing his games with drugs and cutting and chocolate pudding; watching his victims, sans clothes, sans dignity, sans freedom until, finally, he got tired of them or broke them.

Sans life.

How many women were buried in her sandbox? Into her mind’s eye came rotting arms, skeletal fingers, reaching up through the dirt to drag her down.

“Still breathing here,” Anna said loudly. “Breathing in. Breathing out.”

Bit by bit, a determination that could be mistaken for courage returned.

Gingerly, she made her way across to the tangled strands, aware that she might be treading on the corpses of hastily buried women. A book she’d read came unbidden into her mind, Chiefs. The killer had a long and successful career, sowing his land with dozens of his victims before he was caught. Halfway across her prison floor a noise from the other world stopped her.

Something was coming, an engine, tiny and distant. Humming down through the bottle’s neck was a comforting burr of sound, a small-engine aircraft, one of the little ones that took sightseers on flights over the lake. The sound grew louder. The little plane was close to the ground, close to Anna. Tilting her head back, she squinted at the impossibly blue eye above. The neck of her jar was canted like the slightly twisted dual necks on the old vinegar-and-oil carafe her mother kept on the kitchen counter. The carafe was for show. The only salad dressing they ate was homemade Thousand Island: ketchup, mayonnaise, and sweet pickle relish.

“Down here!” she yelled. “Help me! I’m down here!”

They were looking for her. They had to be. Over her lieu days Jenny probably thought she’d hitched a ride on a boat headed for Wahweap to spend time in town. By now her lieu days must be over. She’d been in the pit at least a night and a day and a night, thirty-six hours. If her weekend wasn’t over now, it would be tomorrow. Without a watch, without knowing how long she had slept or what day it was, time got tricky. Knowing the time kept people from going adrift.

When she didn’t show up for work—whenever that was, today, tomorrow—when she didn’t show up on her “Monday,” Jenny would raise the alarm and the Park Service would come find her. Search and rescue. The rangers were big on that. Visitors, fools like her, were always getting lost, falling into holes, being eaten by wolves, that sort of thing.

Rangers and EMTs. Law enforcement rangers had to be EMTs; she remembered that from the information the NPS sent after she’d gotten the job. They had to take courses every year. Search-and-rescue rangers would search for her and rescue her; EMT rangers would give her aspirin for her head, maybe Valium for her shoulder.

The airplane, it was them.

“Down here!” she yelled again. “Help me!” The plane droned louder. “Down here, goddammit! Help, help!” The engine whined overhead. “Down here, you stupid fucks!” she screamed, leaping to her feet. The plane murmured away. Anna fell to her knees.

The bottom of the jar, down here where the bodies were buried, wasn’t visible from airplanes. Nobody would be peeking into the hundreds of holes. First, they’d think of the water. Lake Powell was so deep, in the main channel there was no dragging the bottom. Deep meant cold and dark. Bodies didn’t always float up. In the cold and dark, they sank. The rescuers and EMTs, did they think she had gone down to the world of the dead, joined the army of the drowned? Had they stopped looking? Or never started?

She wished she’d told somebody where she was going. Jenny might remember their conversation about the trail out of Dangling Rope.

Not bloody likely. Jenny was all about the fecal materials.

God damn stupid fucking green-and-gray Smokey Bears. Rangers. Telling John Q. Public not to litter and to be sure and hold hands with your buddy on the scary paths.

“Fuck!” she yelled. What she wouldn’t give to have the NYPD looking for her, real cops with guns, batons, Mace, handcuffs, bad attitudes, and ambulances that whisked the injured to big shiny hospitals where doctors—“Doctors who’ve actually gone to medical school,” she ranted at the eye—fixed injured arms and broken heads.

Shouting at the fragment of empty sky, Anna realized the jar wasn’t as deep as she’d first believed. The way the neck curved and narrowed created a false perspective. The opening wasn’t more than twenty feet from where she stood, smooth vertical walls rising for fifteen feet or so, then a steep slope from that to the eye.

Twenty or two hundred, there was no way to climb out.

“I screwed up,” Anna croaked, her throat raw and dry from shouting. Her head was aching again and her arm throbbing. “I hoped.”

Getting into the solution hole would be easy. A strong person could easily climb down a twenty-foot rope. All he’d have to do was tie it to a big rock and drop it into the throat of the jar. When he left, he could just pull it up after him, no muss no fuss. Unless he drove or walked in from the miles of bleak and rocky desert she’d seen to the north, he’d have to climb up from the lake. That would be hard, harder than the short hop out of this hole. The monster had to be strong.

Strong enough to carry her down into the hole? Maybe not. Her shoulder and head suggested he’d just tossed her over the lip to survive the fall or not.

That was annoying. He wasn’t even sure she was a high enough grade of garbage to be monster meat.

“Bite me, you prick!” she yelled at the eye. “I hope you choke to death on my bones.”

He would be strong. Strong and young. Movies insisted serial killers were twenty to thirty years old. Anna hoped they were right and he was young; it limited the number of dead people with whom she might be sharing space.

Though the lake was only a small part of Glen Canyon Recreation Area, nobody much hiked. There were a couple of trails used by backpackers, one down from the Navajo Reservation to Rainbow Bridge and another somewhere uplake. A trail led into Bullfrog, but it was long and came from nowhere to dead-end at the lake’s edge.

People didn’t hike along the shoreline. Lake Powell didn’t have shores, not like a real lake. Powell lived in canyon bottoms, cliffs rising vertically two hundred, six hundred, as much as a thousand feet in some places. From what she’d seen of the plateau, there weren’t any roads.

Other than on the water, or the few small beaches carved out from the sandstone, there wasn’t anywhere to be. Anything farther from the lake than a man could throw a beer can was dry rock and hot dirt, wilderness.

Half a mile as the crow flies from this burial pit, boaters were catching fish, children were splashing in the shallows, and girls in bikinis were flirting with boys in cutoffs. A half mile and a half million light-years.

At least that’s what it felt like to anybody but lunatics and coyotes, Anna thought sourly. She would not screw up again. Like praying to a nonexistent god, it was demoralizing to hope for help when none was coming.

No, Anna wouldn’t hope.

Turning, she studied her jar looking for anything new, anything she hadn’t noticed before—besides the nest of human hair under the sand. Silent walls swirled upward; smooth, beautiful in their way—a perfect palette for an artist.

A perfect lair for a monster; utter privacy within commuting distance of home.

Where was a monster when he was at home?

Houseboats, even those moored in the marinas year-round, were allowed only two weeks on the water. It kept homesteaders from living on the lake full-time. Was the monster a boater who used his two weeks a year to pursue his hobby?

That would work, Anna thought. That would be ideal. Spend two weeks on a houseboat—time enough for a bit of sport—kick sand over the remains, then go home to Oregon or New Hampshire or North Dakota, tanned and rested, plenty of holiday memories to enjoy over the winter, show one’s pals slides of the vacation.

Anna swayed, her mind wanting to shut her down in a faint. The possibility that a picture of her misery might live on after she had been murdered to pleasure her killer over and over again was unbearable, worse somehow than death, torture, or rape. To be used after one was dead shouldn’t matter. Dead was dead, gone, beyond all pain.

Except it wasn’t, not when one was alive to think about it.

“No pictures,” Anna shouted. “No fucking pictures!”

For a heartbeat she felt the earth around her as a comfort, clean and honest, a cloak against eyes and lenses. Shaking her head, intentionally eking out the remaining pain from her injury, Anna pushed photographs of her degradation from her reality.

The monster.

Anna had to understand the monster so, like Scheherazade, she could continue to live for a thousand and one nights. Better yet, so she could find his Achilles’ heel and escape. Did he brown-bag it, bring his own prey? No. Bringing victims from his habitat would raise too many questions. He took what was offered on the lake, she decided. Safer to have no connection with his victims, and, with a nice boat, it would be easy enough to pick up a party girl—or a seasonal ranger—whom nobody would miss for a while.

If he hunted on the water, why had he found her? Unless she had forgotten climbing down off the Colorado Plateau, she was on the north rim of Glen Canyon, above Dangling Rope, hours from anywhere. Only a crazy person would travel across a zillion miles of desert from Piddlesquat, Utah, on the off chance a woman would be wandering around alone and unprotected. Had it been mere chance? Monster Man is out poaching lizards or snakes or stealing artifacts or engaging in an unrelated monstrous activity and gets lucky? Had she been stumbled upon by a psychopath?

Anna had turned in a full circle. She had searched the smooth circumference of her bottle without seeing anything new or different, anything that could alter her circumstances. Stopping, she lowered her gaze from that single blue glimpse of sky to the hair straggling over the sand.

There was no reason to bother the nest of hairs. A few swipes with the side of her foot and things would be as they were before—nearly unendurable. Digging up whatever it was she’d be digging up might render them completely unendurable. Knowing what was buried beneath her might make her insane. Of course, not knowing would do it quicker. Nothing drove Pigeons crazier than not knowing that which could be known.

That’s why Molly went into psychiatry; she wanted to know how people’s brains worked. Anna went into theater; she wanted to know how people’s hearts worked. Neither she nor her sister was one to let sleeping dogs—or dead girls—lie. Anna assumed it was a girl because of the length and fineness of the hair, and because it was possible she wasn’t the first specimen to be bottled up and played with until it wasn’t any fun anymore.

Back at the datura, Anna drew a circle in the sand, the strands of hair at the center, and then began gingerly sweeping sand away with the tips of her fingers. The hairs were long, not as long as Anna’s, but they would fall to bra-strap level on a woman of average height. As best she could, she combed the hairs from the sand carefully, laying them out to minimize snarling. Partly she did it to show reverence for the dead, and partly because, should she join this woman, she hoped similar respect would be shown her, and partly to put off the moment she would have to look on a lifeless face.

Clearing away the dirt, she watched a well-shaped ear emerge from the earth, two small silver hoops in the pierced lobe. With the ear came the faint odor of decay. Though she hadn’t thought it consciously, Anna had been expecting a skeleton: dry, brittle, desiccated scraps of skin peeling away from bone, the way old leather peeled from the bindings of ancient books.

The ear was lifelike, plump and pink, yet there wasn’t as much stench as a day-old rat in a subway station. The woman hadn’t been in this hole much longer than Anna.

Memory slammed into the back of her eyes, rocking her onto her heels. The scream had come through the tortured piñon trees; hoping for water, she began to run. The clarity was more than remembering, it was reliving. She saw her abandoned pack, the sun appliqué smiling up from the hard ground as she passed the patch of shade where she’d been sitting; she felt the wadded-up map, crunched in her fingers.

Running was hard, as it often is in dreams. Her thighs ached and her feet struck the ground heavily. A stitch was sewing her ribs to her liver. She slowed to a jog, clutching her side and panting. More screams drew her on. Anna became afraid the woman was in deeper trouble than she could handle.

Self-preservation, learned from a lifetime in the city, stopped her headlong dash. Anna remembered trying to suck hot dry air through a throat closed from lack of moisture. She could see herself, dark clothes, pale with dust, hands on knees, gasping and thinking maybe this wasn’t something she should get involved with.

Had she not wanted a drink of water so desperately, she might have lost her courage. She straightened up and, still breathing hard, pushed up a small rise of stone. The rise gave way to a round depression half the size of a tennis court.

There were four people in it. A tall boy had a girl with long brown hair, wearing cutoff jeans and a bikini top, in a hammerlock, pressing down on her neck. Her arms were flailing. “Stop it,” he was yelling and laughing. “We don’t want to have to hurt you.” A second boy had his back to Anna. She remembered how his muscles rippled as the sun hit the sweat. His shorts were halfway down his butt as if he’d undone the fly to take them off. He was hopping on one foot, laughing like a hyena, trying to pull off his shorts. He staggered and fell. Drunk, she thought. The fall only made him laugh harder. The third boy, not laughing, not undressing, was a plain-looking kid with ragged brown hair and a fury of pimples across a high forehead. He saw Anna and yelled, “Holy shit!”

The man wrestling with the girl glanced up, locking eyes with Anna. The girl must have hit or clawed him. Letting go of her, he shouted, “Fucking bitch!”

Staggering, the girl fell on her hands and knees. He kicked her. Fighting to get to her feet, she grabbed at his shorts, her fist closing on the front of them. He bent double. For a heartbeat Anna thought he was going to help her to stand. Instead he grabbed up a fist-sized rock and slammed it into her temple.

Anna turned and ran.

The earth lurched and folded beneath her feet, scrub and rock jerking in her peripheral vision. Heat burned up through the soles of her sneakers. A steady strong thud, thud, thud of boots pounded behind her.

Then nothing, then this hole, the dislocated shoulder and a knot the size of a tennis ball behind her right ear.

She hadn’t gotten blind drunk and passed out. Bad men had clubbed her from behind. Honor intact, skull not so much. The blow accounted for the patchy memory. “Yay, me,” Anna said.

“Blunt trauma to the head is the only cause of amnesia I know of outside paperback novels,” Molly once said.

Long brown hair.

The girl Anna was disinterring must have been the focus of Buttboy’s attentions. She dug faster. Grit packed the girl’s nostrils. Her lips were parted and sand had been shoved into her mouth; that or she’d tried to breathe after she’d been buried. Her eyes were open, scabbed with grains of sand.

“Damn, damn, damn.” Curse became mantra and finally made its way from Anna’s mouth to her ears. She stopped her frenzied scooping. Clearing the dirt from the girl’s nose and mouth was not going to save her.

“Sorry,” Anna said to the corpse. Using the end of her long braid as a whisk broom, she gently swept at the dirt sticking to the eyes and teeth. “Were you alive when they buried you?”

Ray Milland, Vincent Price, Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum; this girl in the pit—had she awakened to find herself facedown, breathing hard grains of rock into her lungs, sand sandpapering the delicate sclera when she opened her eyes?

Anna had to look away. Her gaze came to rest on the deflated, wrinkled white blossom of the deadly nightshade.

“They hit you in the head,” she murmured, unsure whether she spoke to the girl’s shade or just to keep herself company. “Then they came after me and threw us both down the garbage disposal.” From the wilted flower, her eyes drifted to the walls. With their spin of muted colors spiraling up, she half expected to hear a switch being flipped, a grind begin, and the spiral to move as she and the corpse were ground to mincemeat and sucked into the sewers of hell.

“Young and pretty,” she thought half aloud. “It wouldn’t matter. Young and pretty or old and scrawny, monsters will be monsters. You were dead when they threw you in, weren’t you?” she asked the ghost of the girl. “Otherwise it would be you digging up my grave.”

Buttboy with his pants half down, staggering drunk. Hyena Boy, laughing. Gang rape. Anna shows up, hoping for a refreshing beverage, and they kill the girl instead.

The cuts on Anna’s thigh stung with sweat and sand. Roughly brushing the grit away, she ran a dirty fingernail along the marks, tracing WHORE in dried blood. There’d been three would-be rapists. There were three. One little, two little, three little monster boys.

Her tongue was dry, big, and thick; her lips stuck to her teeth. The drugged canteen beckoned from the other side of the nightshade. Anna crawled to it, fumbled the cap off, and, in thirst and despair, drank too much, drugging herself more than she had to. Water ran from the corners of her mouth and made mud on her breasts. Instantly, she felt the drug flow into her body, felt her muscles loosening. Her head swam, thoughts sloshing like water in a washtub, slamming against the sides of skull bone and bouncing back on one another.

It came to her then that she had to get the girl out, had to.

Having plowed back though the battered weeds, the pain from her injured shoulder driving her as a whip drives a horse, she clawed wildly at the sand. Scratching and scraping like a maniacal cat in a litter box of burning coals.

The dead woman’s head was freed from the dirt.

Sore tendons shoving daggers into her, vision tunneled, Anna scooped and scraped, bulldozed with knees and forearms, kicked and dug with her heels. Sweat poured into her eyes and ran in rivulets between her breasts, leaving trails in the dust and grime. Sand stuck to her skin. Grunts and cries bubbled up the neck of her jar. She scarcely knew if she was standing, kneeling, or lying in the grave with the dead girl. Finally, hips braced against the sandstone, one foot planted on the prone woman’s thigh, the other on her shoulder, Anna rolled the body from its grave with an ungentle shove.

Gasping and sweating, she withdrew her toes from the lifeless flesh and surveyed what she had wrought.

A girl—the girl the boys were attacking—lay facing the scrap of sky eyes open and sand-crusted. Denim shorts were twisted around her scissored legs. A pink and yellow Hawaiian print bikini bra had been hiked up over her left breast, showing a white triangle where she wasn’t tan and a dark brown nipple. Her right sandal had come un-Velcroed during the one-sided struggle and was smashed beneath her knee. Around one ankle was a thin gold chain, K and A and Y in glittery stones dangling from it, the K wedged between chain and skin.

“Kay,” Anna whispered. “Welcome to my world.”