There was reason, then, for him to believe the interloper had not survived her abduction. If they’d caught up with her, los niños might have toyed with her for awhile, but they were stupid things, and their attention spans were short. It would not take them long to decide that there’d be more sport in hurting the woman than in teasing her, and once her blood began to run they’d become frenzied, and fall upon her, taking her limb from limb.
That was his fear.
The source of his hope? That he had not heard any death-cries in the canyon since she’d been gone. It was a tiny reason to believe that something good might come of the woman’s arrival here, but he had to have some little measure of hope, or there was nothing. So in the absence of hearing the woman’s screams, he allowed himself to believe that there was one in the Canyon who would might the undoing of Katya Lupi.
TWO
Tammy was indeed alive. She knew she was alive because she was hungry. It was the only thing about her present condition which she really recognized; the rest was a kind of fever-dream, filled with blurred horrors; remote pieces of what might be real and what she hoped to God were not.
She had been carried by her abductors to the far end of the Canyon where there was no sign of any habitation. The area was pretty much jungle: dense thickets of barbed shrubs, overshadowed by stands of immense, shaggy palms. There was no way to climb up any of these trees, to escape those who’d brought her here (though even if she’d been able to do so, she was certain they would sniff her out); nor was there any way to move more than a few steps through the thicket. So she was left with only one option: she had to confront her abductors.
It was her mother’s gift to her, this evenheadedness. In circumstances that would have brought lesser minds to the point of collapse, Edith Huxley Lauper (Ma Edie to everyone who’d ever knew her for more than a day), had been uncannily calm. And the more panicky people around her had become, the calmer she’d get. It made her an ideal nurse, which was the work she’d done all her life. She soothed the hurt, she soothed the dying, she soothed the bereft. Everything’s fine, she would say in that soft voice of hers (another of her gifts to Tammy); and by some miracle everyone would believe her. Very often, because people believed her, the panic ceased and everything was fine. It was a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
So now, sitting in the thicket, in the midst of this fever dream, with its voices and its faces and its stink, she repeated Ma Edie’s mantra to herself, over and over: Everything’s fine, everything’s fine, everything’s fine, waiting for it to turn out true.
Her head still throbbed from the white light that had wiped out the world before her abduction; and her stomach was certainly in need of filling, but she still had all her limbs, for which she was grateful, and a voice in her throat. So, once she’d calmed herself down, she started to talk to whatever it was that had come after her, (and was still there, in the vicinity) her volume quiet, but her tone insistent enough that she would not be mistaken for somebody who was afraid.
“I’d like to get back to the house now,” she said to them, “so will one of you please escort me?” She scanned the bushes. They were watching her. She could see the glitter of their eyes, the gleam of their teeth. What were they? They didn’t seem quite substantial; she had the feeling that their flesh was not as solid as hers, as real perhaps; yet they’d possessed enough strength to remove her from the vicinity of Zeffer’s cage to this corner of nowhere, so they weren’t to be disrespected.
“Do you understand me?” she’d said, keeping her tone even. “I need to go back to the house.”
Off to her left she saw a motion in the thicket, and one of the creatures approached her, coming close enough that for the first time she’d had a proper view of one of the abductors. It was a female, no doubt of that, and vaguely related to a human being. The creature’s naked body was scrawny, her ribs showing through flesh that seemed to be covered with light gray-silver hair. The front limbs were extremely delicate, and she surely had hands and fingers not pads and claws. But the back legs were as crooked as a dog’s, and rather too large for the rest of her anatomy, so that squatting her proportions were almost frog-like.