As long as she lived, would she ever again be able to go through a doorway without flinching?
From a drawer where earlier Chyna had seen a set of cutlery, she extracted a butcher knife with a well-worn walnut handle. She put it on the counter near the sink. She got a drinking glass from another cabinet, filled it from the cold-water tap, and drank the entire glassful in long swallows before lowering it from her lips. Nothing she had ever drunk had been half as delicious as those eight ounces.
In the refrigerator, she found an unopened coffeecake with white icing, cinnamon, walnuts. She ripped open the wrapper and tore off a chunk of the cake. She stood over the sink, eating voraciously, stuffing her mouth until her cheeks bulged, greedily licking icing from her lips, crumbs and chunks of walnuts dropping into the sink.
She was in an uncommon state of mind as she ate: now moaning with delight, now half choking with laughter, now gagging and on the verge of tears, now laughing again. In a storm of emotions. But that was okay. Storms always passed sooner or later, and they were cleansing.
She had come so far. Yet she had so far to go. That was the nature of the journey.
From the spice rack she removed the bottle of aspirin. She shook two tablets into the palm of her hand, but she didn’t chew them. She drew another glass of water and took the aspirin, then took two more.
She sang, “I did it my way,” from Sinatra’s standard, and then added, “took the fucking aspirin my way.” She laughed and ate more coffeecake, and for a moment she felt crazy with accomplishment.
Dogs out there in the night, she reminded herself, Dobermans in the darkness, rotten bastard Nazi dogs with big teeth and eyes black like sharks’ eyes.
At a key organizer next to the spice rack, the keys to the motor home hung from one of the four pegs; the other pegs were empty. Vess would be careful with the keys to the soundproofed cell and would no doubt keep them on him at all times.
She picked up the butcher knife and the half-eaten coffee cake and went to the cellar, turning off the kitchen lights behind her.
*
Pintle and gudgeon.
Chyna knew these two exotic words, as she knew so many others, because, as a girl, she had encountered them in books written by C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle and Robert Louis Stevenson and Kenneth Grahame. And every time that she’d come across a word she had not known, she’d looked it up in a tattered paperback dictionary, a prized possession that she took with her wherever her restless mother chose to drag her, year after year, until it was held together with so much age-brittled Scotch tape that she could barely read some of the definitions through the strips of yellowing cellophane.
Pintle. That was the name of the pin in a hinge, which pivoted when a door opened or closed.
Gudgeon. That was the sleeve—or barrel—in which the pintle moved.
The thick inner door of the soundproofed vestibule was equipped with three hinges. The pintle in each hinge had a slightly rounded head that overhung the gudgeon by about a sixteenth of an inch all the way around.
From the tools in the wheeled cabinet, Chyna selected a hammer and a screwdriver.
With the workbench stool and a scrap of wood for a wedge, she propped open the outer padded door of the vestibule. Then she placed the butcher knife on the rubber mat on the vestibule floor, within easy reach.
She slid aside the cover on the view port in the inner door and saw the gathering of dolls in pinkish lamplight. Some had eyes as radiant as the eyes of lizards, and some had eyes as dark as those of certain Dobermans.
In the enormous armchair, Ariel sat with her legs drawn up on the seat cushion, head tipped forward, face obscured by a fall of hair. She might have been asleep—except that her hands were balled tightly in her lap. If her eyes were open, she would be staring at her fists.