Lost Cargo (24 page)

The stone walls of Buchanan House appeared. Ian tried to hurry, stumbled, and fell flat in the dirt, shocked by the fall. He landed jaw down and banged his teeth, forcing his breath out in a solid
whumph
. His cell phone slid out of his coat, flipped across the weeds and sailed into the gorge. After a few seconds of silence, it hit the rocks with a sharp crack.

“No!” he shouted in disbelief. He crawled to his knees and peered down, but the phone was gone, lost in a jumble of boulders and darkness. It was a new phone, too, a nice phone with a lot of features. The wrong people could gleefully rack up hundreds of dollars in calls.

“Damn it,” he swore.

His words rolled into the night. Before his voice died out, one of the boulders in the gorge moved and stood up.

Ian’s skin prickled. In the dim light he’d mistaken an enormous woman for a boulder. She’d dressed herself in the same gray shade as the rocks. He blinked, amazed. His eyes had read the folds in her cape for stony fissures and cracks and the mottled light on her broad back for spots of pale green lichen. Her shoulders looked like wide slabs of heavy stone and her small head like a rock. For a horrifying moment she didn’t seem to have a head, as though her skull had melted into her neck and was growing back on the spot. Then he realized her chin must have been resting on her huge bosom, a mountain of a bosom. She’d just seemed headless until she looked up, a crazy illusion.

What was she doing in the gorge?

Something warm trickled down his chin. Ian wiped his face, surprised at the smear of blood on his hand. He’d cut his lip and chin when he fell and now the blood and its salty metallic taste was in his mouth.

Well, he’d take care of it when he got home, but the woman in the gorge was blocking the path. He couldn’t take his eyes off her misshapen body. Her head didn’t seem to go with the shoulders at all, too small, a mere stump, as if a mad scientist had snatched her up and mismatched the body parts in a basement laboratory before turning her out the door.

She stared at him. A normal person would have shuffled off, embarrassed if you caught them napping in the woods, but her cold eyes never left his face.

Ian rubbed more blood from his mouth. It was dripping on his coat. Maybe he needed stitches. Now what was he going to do? Sashay down there and say, “Excuse me?” What was she doing on the path, anyway? Did she want money? She ought to just go up to the Metro and beg there like all the other panhandlers. The woman had to be unhinged, a real lunatic.

She was still staring at him.

Then he entertained a horrible thought:
what if she comes after me?
Worst of all, he’d lost his phone so he couldn’t call the police. If he turned around and ran back in the forest, he would cut himself off from civilization. His mind spun. An abandoned rock quarry was someplace in the woods behind their building. Their real estate agent had mentioned it when they were looking at the condo. Blunder in the dark into an abandoned rock quarry and fall down some big hole he couldn’t see, well, no thanks.

And there was the gorge as a last resort. If he climbed down in it, he could bypass the path, crawl through the boulders, and get to the back of his building.

The woman was still blocking the path. The dim streetlight fell over her monstrous body. He couldn’t go down there. Instead, he scrabbled down the hill into the formidable gorge that now looked like the best deal, expecting to circumvent her. Boulders jutted up through frozen leaves, broad stones covered with moss that hid little caves and secret places filled with scummy water, weeds, and icy mud. There were more weeds than he’d realized, and they snared his ankles. He struggled through the bog and gasped at the cold water, but he didn’t care if he got wet. He just wanted out of the woods.

There, he’d lost her.

Then he heard a heavy thump behind his back. He turned around to see the enormous woman had hopped on top of a flat rock a mere twenty feet away. She hunkered down like a gargoyle, watching him flounder in the bog. His heart thundered in his chest. Instead of an escape route, the boulders hemmed him in like a stone pen.

He didn’t know she could leap. Nobody could leap that far.
My God, what a pig
. She was huge, like a rolled sausage ready to burst out of her skin. He could make out the details of her coat now, a massive gray wool cape bunched up around her fat neck. Then he saw her lizardlike feet covered with scales, and his bloodstained hand rose to his mouth.

That’s impossible
.

Each foot ended in stout toes that sprouted cruel claws the color of raw liver slapped down on a chopping block. The scales rippled and the claws gripped the edge of the rock. He dimly remembered a conversation with his wife.

“The woman who lives next door to us has claws.”

“That’s ridiculous. She can’t have claws.”

“No!” Ian cried.

Her swiftness shocked him. One moment she was squatting on the rock, and the next she came after him in a savage rush, spreading her cape wide and giving him a terrible glimpse of the body hidden underneath. Mouth open. Hungry. Ian swerved and rolled. He heard her attack the boulder, beating against it, cape flapping, thrashing, the slash of long claws around the side. He gasped and rolled and scraped his face.

Blood gushed down his chin. The smell seemed to spur her on.

She shrieked, a chilling
kree-ee-ee-ee
that tapered off like weird laughter, and slashed at him again. This time her talons raked like knives, got his leg, hooked his boot, and wrenched it off. Did he still have a foot? Yes, it went down in icy water as he tripped.

Ian screamed and flung himself around the boulder. Excruciating pain shot through his leg. Warm blood bloomed across his pants and spread down his calf. The murderous creature coiled and attacked again, claws extended, raking his other leg. Blood streamed down his pants and filled his only boot as he rolled in terror behind the boulder.

And she came again,
slash
, and he threw his body around the boulder, gasping, panting, blood booming in his ears, bracing himself to roll before she lunged and tore him to pieces.
Slash
.

He rolled again.
Slash, slash
. Pain pressed down in an all-consuming vise. Hot, sticky blood soaked his pants and covered his hands. He couldn’t keep it up. At some point he would collapse, and she would have him.

Another thump sounded. She’d given up the vicious game and hopped on top of the boulder where she could see him from all sides. He could see her clearly now, too. Cape billowing, mouth open, illuminated by the ghoulish streetlight flooding the gorge. Her shadow streamed over the boulder like a finger pointing from hell.

He could see his shredded flesh in her claws. The next time she jumped, it would be for the kill. Instinct told him that he had a tiny window before she made her fatal leap. He summoned all his strength, threw his body between three boulders, and scrabbled between them as she shrieked.
Get down, get down, get in a cave, get in a crevice, get down
, he thought, legs smashed in as far as he could get them, arms mangled up against his chin, skewed rock over his head, spine jammed under the rock, mud and filthy ice water up to his waist.
Get down
.

“No,” the wretched professor sobbed.

“Kree-ee-ee-ee,” she wailed. Her long cape passed overhead.
Thump
, she landed above him. Her sharp claws swept down,
slash
, as he slid in the creek up to his chest. Water sloshed and oozed into his face as the claws missed his skull and raked his hair.

She couldn’t get him, not yet. Not from that angle, not with his body in the freezing water. She wouldn’t give up, though. His blood was draining away, and he numbly wondered if he would bleed to death if she didn’t kill him in the next few minutes.

Suddenly he heard something else, something altogether different. A branch snapped, and another, and leaves crashed. Sounds from another life, a wholesome life, a life before he fell off the edge of sanity into this nightmare. He could see deer. A herd, young, alive, running for their lives, leaping into the forest. Their eyes gleamed and white tails flashed as they bounded away.

“Kree-ee-ee-ee,” she screamed and flew after them like a shadow.

Don’t move
. At any minute she might be back. He was out of her reach where he lay inside the crevice, down in the water, so he stayed there with all his senses on alert. He began to slowly adjust to the water. He didn’t feel the cold as long as he stayed still under his waterlogged coat.

I have to get out of the water
, he dared to think.

More time passed. He tensed his muscles, slowly, slowly pushing up so his chest was above water. The muddy ooze sloshed, receding to his stomach, but the water still covered his legs and hips. He wondered how long he could stay that way before hypothermia set in. Unbearable pain flamed up when he moved his legs, but if he stayed still the pain faded to a deep bone-boring pressure and then dangerous numbness.

How much time had passed? Had he been there for hours? He didn’t know, but he had to wait until daylight. If he could make it until daylight, he would be all right. Other people would come out on the trail, and they would help him.

I have to get my legs out of the water
, he thought, but the next moment his head snapped up. Incredibly, he’d dozed off. How long had he been asleep? Was he drifting away because he was tired, or because he’d lost too much blood?

She knew where he was hiding. Shut his eyes for two seconds, and she could be on the top of the boulder. He wouldn’t even know it until she struck.

The attack wasn’t anything personal, he went on to think in a disembodied way, as if he were on the edge of a great abyss, dangling his legs over the edge, allowing his mind to roam for a while before he succumbed to the darkness rolling up toward him. He contemplated lions pacing the African plains, slaying zebras in the hot dust and eating wildebeest at the water hole, cats with long teeth stalking mice, hawks swooping after rabbits, and insects devouring each other in life’s brutal waltz. This morning he’d been a professor, tonight so many pounds of helpless flesh.

He’d always thought he would die in a nuclear war. London, Washington, D.C., they were both targets. He’d grown up outside Washington where his older brother had lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, hid under his school desk on cue, practiced for the atom bomb. And he’d always assumed that one day civilization would tip into final madness, the missiles would bloom like evil flowers all over the world, and he would disappear along with millions of others, shadows burned into the rubble in the blink of an eye.

Or maybe he’d leave the earth from something more mundane, a heart attack or a slip in the bathtub. But not like this, on the ground like a cornered animal.

His mind drifted to his wife as the darkness lapped against his legs. He could see her face, the freckles across her nose and how her eyes crinkled when she laughed. He could feel the warmth of her body against him. A fight with her about money seemed a distant, inconsequential luxury from some layer of life he’d passed out of now. When he shifted his weight, agonizing pain brought him back to the present.

I have to get out of the water
.

Ian dragged himself out inch by inch, in horrible pain, clenching his teeth to keep from screaming. The boulders and his heavy coat offered some protection from the wind, but he was soaked with one shoe gone and his shredded pants covered with blood from wounds he couldn’t see.

Frostbite. I will die of frostbite
.

Somehow he managed to peel the socks off his feet. The cold air bit into his bare skin. He struggled out of his soaked shirt, pulled up the wet coat, and wrapped the shirt around his frozen feet. His lacerated legs wouldn’t respond, so he dragged them up to his chin and rubbed his hands up and down his calves and feet, wincing when he touched his wounds. He stopped to rest his head against the boulder.

Keep moving
, he thought, and then,
after I rest. Just for a minute
.

But Ian ceased to feel his legs altogether and began to dream again. He was at home in the dining room, working on the draft for his textbook, finishing the introductory pages about Plato and the structure of the city state.

The dining room was pleasant. He was back in his comfortable chair, his laptop on the polished table beside a mug of French roast, his favorite mug with the oval portrait of President John Adams that he ordered last summer from the Massachusetts Historical Society. John Adams winked at him from the side of the mug. Early winter sunlight streamed through the window. The fire gave a hearty snap. He gazed at the bookshelves and admired the fine job his wife had done organizing the books. For a moment he thought he heard her calling from another room, something about the phone.

“Sweetheart, it’s in my coat pocket,” he tried to tell her, but when he reached for the phone, he touched ice.

Sleet. Cold, heavy rain blew over the gorge, covering the boulders with a silver blanket, icing over his wounds and hiding his fierce struggle. Ian was dreaming again, this time that he’d left his body like a pile of old clothes. He found himself floating over the gorge, past the streetlight into the night sky.

M
onroe kissed Annie. They were curled up in bed together, watching
Casablanca
while the ice storm blew against the windows.

He leaned against her, his bare legs intertwined with hers under the sheets. The gold wedding band he’d given her looked good on her hand. She wore an apricot lace camisole and he wore an old Saints jersey. They’d thrown the rest of their clothes on the end of the bed.

In the movie Humphrey Bogart was on the couch with Ingrid Bergman, and she was stringing him along, hiding the husband in the woodwork.

“I want to talk to you about something,” Annie said.

The microwave dinged in the kitchen.