From the bookcases, from atop the cabinets, from the shadowed corners of the room, the dolls watched intently, as if they were thrilled by her outburst and in some strange way feeding on it as Vess himself would have fed if he’d been there to see.
Chyna wanted to put her arms around the girl, but the handcuffs made it impossible to embrace her. Instead, she touched Ariel’s face and kissed her on the forehead. “Ariel, untouched and alive.”
Rigid, shaking, Ariel neither pulled away from Chyna nor leaned toward her. Gradually the girl’s trembling subsided.
“I need your help,” Chyna pleaded. “I need you.”
This time, as if sleepwalking, Ariel allowed herself to be led from the cell.
They crossed the fallen door through the vestibule. In the cellar, Chyna picked up the drill from the floor, plugged it into the power strip on the wall, and put it on the workbench.
She had no timepiece for reference, but she was sure that nine o’clock had come and gone. In the night were dogs waiting and Edgler Vess somewhere at work, bemused by waking dreams of returning home to his pair of captives.
Trying unsuccessfully to get the girl’s eyes to focus on her, Chyna explained what they needed to do. She might be able to drive the motor home while handcuffed, though not without some difficulty, as she would have to let go of the steering wheel to shift gears. Dealing with the dogs while cuffed would be a lot harder. Perhaps impossible. If they were to make the best use of the time remaining before Vess’s return, and if they were to have the best chance of getting away, Ariel was going to have to drill out the locks on the manacles.
The girl gave no indication that she heard a word of what Chyna told her. Indeed, before Chyna finished, Ariel’s lips were moving again in a silent conversation with some phantom; she didn’t “speak” ceaselessly but paused from time to time as if receiving a response from an imaginary friend.
Nevertheless, Chyna showed her how to hold the drill and press the trigger. The girl didn’t blink at the sudden shriek of the motor and the air-cutting whistle of the whirling bit.
“Now you hold it,” Chyna said.
Oblivious, Ariel stood with her arms at her sides, hands half open and fingers hooked as they had been since she had dropped the ruined doll.
“We don’t have much time, honey.”
In her clockless Elsewhere, time meant nothing to Ariel. Chyna put the drill on the workbench. She drew the girl in front of the tool and placed her hands on it.
Ariel didn’t pull away or let her hands slide off the drill, but she didn’t lift it either.
Chyna knew that the girl heard her, understood the situation, and, on some level, yearned to help.
“Our hopes are in your hands, honey. You can do it.”
She retrieved the workbench stool from the outer vestibule door, which it had been propping open, and sat down. She put her hands on the workbench, wrists turned to expose the tiny keyhole on the left manacle.
Staring at the concrete-block wall, through the wall, speaking soundlessly to a psychic friend beyond all walls, Ariel seemed to be unaware of the drill. Or to her it might have been not a drill but another object altogether, one that filled her either with hope or with fear, the thing of which she spoke to her phantom friend.
Even if the girl picked up the drill and focused her eyes on the manacle, the chance that she would be able to perform this task seemed slim. The chance that she would avoid boring through Chyna’s palm or wrist seemed slimmer still.
On the other hand, although the likelihood of salvation from any trouble or enemy in this life was always slim, Chyna had survived uncounted nights of blood rage and questing lust. Survival was far different from salvation, of course, but it was a prerequisite.
Anyway, she was ready to do now what she had never been able to do before, not even with Laura Templeton: trust. Trust without reservation. And if this girl tried and failed, let the drill slip and damaged flesh rather than steel, Chyna wasn’t going to blame her for the failure. Sometimes, just trying was a triumph.