Pale plumes of breath streamed rhythmically from its wet black nostrils.
Without breaking eye contact with the animal, Chyna pressed the insides of her wrists together as best she could with the handcuffs intervening. The steel chains rattled: all the lengths between her and the chair on which she sat, between her and the table, between her and the past.
She remembered her solemn pledge, earlier in the day, to kill herself rather than be a witness to the complete mental destruction of the young girl in the cellar. She had believed that she would be able to find the courage to bite open the veins in her wrists and bleed to death. The pain would be sharp but relatively brief… and then she would fade sleepily from this blackness into another, which would be eternal.
She had stopped crying. Her eyes were dry. Her heartbeat was surprisingly slow, like that of a sleeper in the dreamless rest provided by a powerful sedative.
She raised her hands in front of her face, bending them backward as severely as possible and spreading her fingers wide so she could still gaze into the eyes of the elk.
She brought her mouth to the place on her left wrist where she would have to bite. Her breath was warm on her cool skin.
The light was entirely gone from the day. The mountains and the heavens were like one great black looming swell on a night sea, a drowning weight coming down.
The elk’s heart-shaped face was barely visible from a distance of only eight feet. Its eyes, however, shone.
Chyna put her lips against her left wrist. In the kiss, she felt her dangerously steady pulse.
Through the gloom, she and the sentinel elk watched each other, and she didn’t know whether this creature had mesmerized her or she had mesmerized it.
Then she pressed her lips to her right wrist. The same coolness of skin, the same ponderous pulse.
She parted her lips and used her teeth to pinch a thickness of flesh. There seemed to be enough tissue gathered between her incisors to make a mortal tear. Certainly she would be successful if she bit a second time, a third.
On the brink of the bite, she understood that it required no courage whatsoever. Precisely the opposite was true. Not biting was an act of valor.
But she didn’t care about valor, didn’t give a rat’s ass about courage. Or about anything. All she cared about was putting an end to the loneliness, the pain, the achingly empty sense of futility.
And the girl. Ariel. Down in the hateful silent dark.
For a while she remained poised for the fatal nip. Between its solemn measured beats, her heart was filled with the stillness of deep water.
Then, without being aware of releasing the pinch of flesh from between her teeth, Chyna realized that her lips were pressed to her unbitten wrist again. She could feel her slow pulse in this kiss of life.
The elk was gone.
Gone.
Chyna was surprised to see only darkness where the creature had stood. She didn’t believe that she had closed her eyes or even blinked. Yet she must have been in a blinding trance, because the stately elk had vanished into the night as mysteriously as a stage magician’s assistant dematerializes beneath an artfully draped black shroud.
Suddenly her heart began to pound hard and fast.
“No,” she whispered in the dark kitchen, and the word was both a promise and a prayer.
Her heart like a wheel—spinning, racing—drove her out of that internal grayness in which she had been lost, out of that bleakness into a brighter landscape.
“No.” There was defiance in her voice this time, and she did not whisper. “No.”
She shook her chains as if she were a spirited horse trying to throw off its traces.
“No, no, no. Shit, no.” Her protests were loud enough for her voice to echo off the hard surface of the refrigerator, the glass in the oven door, the ceramic-tile counters.
She tried to pull away from the table to stand up. But a loop of chain secured her chair to the barrel that supported the tabletop, limiting its movement.