Olivia (3 page)

At the top, he put her down.  “Stay,” he said, patting her arm, then moved away.

She waited, hugging herself, fighting back hysteria and tears. 
I want to wake up
, she thought wretchedly.

A soft light bloomed in a corner, outlining the shape of the creature who had brought her here.  He turned towards her with a blunt, pallid lump of a candle held in a bowl.  He looked at her.  She looked away.

It was a small chamber, not a natural cavern, whose walls and low ceiling had been shored up with cut timber.  The floor, fairly smooth and fairly level, had a roundish mat in the middle of it made of woven reeds.  Behind her, the chimney they’d just climbed out of opened in the center of a sort of abstract mosaic which covered that entire wall, made from clay shards, cracked stones, broken bricks, glass, metal pieces, even animal teeth and bones. There were a few openings to lead out, but apart from the lit candle and a few low, cut-stone benches, she could see no other furnishings.

“Take the light,” he instructed.

She did.  It was smoking heavily, and smelled foul, like burnt bacon.

“Come with me,” he said, already passing through one of the doorways and out of sight.

She followed him, numb to her surroundings, until they came out in a wide, tall chamber with a glow of embers burning in a small fireplace.  He stopped in front of the hearth, pulling the photo album from his belt.

“Please, don’t!” she cried, rushing forward.  “Don’t burn it!”

He held the book out to her at once.  “It is yours,” he said.  “Yours.”

She took it from him and cradled it, feeling the urge to weep rising steadily inside her, billowing out like smoke.

Perhaps he sensed it.  He took the candle from her and placed it on a low table beside a small alcove along one wall.  “This is a place for you,” he said slowly, making curious patterns in the air over the alcove, as if he were smoothing out invisible sheets.

She looked at the fire pit, which put out a surprising amount of heat despite its small size.  The smoke was drawn up through a narrow chimney.  Presumably, it was being funneled out through the top of the mountain, where it would be utterly disregarded.  Mountains always had steam coming off them, didn’t they? 

The thought took away what lingering shreds of rescue remained, and she turned away, as though removing the fire from sight would magically restore her hope, but all she could see was the reality of this room.  Because that’s what it was…not a monster’s cave, but a room.  Someone had carved it out, carefully shored up the walls and ceiling, padded the hard, cold stone of the floor.  There were two low tables on either side of the fire, and one rather high table a little further back in the room.  All three held unlit candles and nothing else.  The walls, what she could see of them in the flickering light, had weird markings painted on them in certain places where the rock had been made flat.  In the middle of the room, centered before the fireplace, was a wide pit full of sleeping bags, animal skins and fleeces, even an old canvas tent.  A bed.  His bed.

Frightened all over again, she looked back at her captor.  “Where am I?” she asked, shivering.

He glanced at her arms, then bent and put a few greasy, black lumps on the old red coals, waking up sparks and new heat.  He straightened, reaching for her, but lowered his hand when she backed rapidly away.  “This is a place for you.  For you to be,” he amplified, gesturing again to the alcove.  He spoke slowly, as though unsure of his words.

She crept towards him, then around him, and placed her photo album inside her alcove.

He seemed to relax.  “Good,” he said, patting her arm.

“Can I go back to sleep now?” she asked, her voice breaking a little on the last two words.

His brow furrowed as he translated her request, then furrowed further as he contemplated its meaning.  “Sleep there,” he commanded, pointing at the pit.

She started to obey, but he stopped her with an upraised hand, then pointed at her clothes.  “Remove those things you wear,” he said.

Olivia started crying, reaching up with shaky hands to obey him.  She wept in shuddering, gasping breaths, head bowed and face turned away in a mixture of submission and shame.

When there is no choice
, she thought,
there is no fear. No fear!  Stop crying this instant!

Fear had nothing to do with it though, and deep down she knew it.  She was tired, she had been uprooted and taken to a horrible place by a horrible person, and she had no hope of ever leaving or finding her way home, but she was not afraid.  Depressed, despairing, repulsed, and exhausted, she succumbed to tears, but not to hysterics or panic.  She knew she was his.

Naked, she stepped into the pit, dropped to her knees, wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and rolled over, sobbing.  She heard him move, heard the low rustle of her clothing being moved to one of the tables.  He put out the candle, poked listlessly at the coals in his fireplace, then came to the side of the pit.  She could feel his eyes upon her, and it made her feel worse. 

She heard another sound then—the low whisper of leather on leather as he removed his loincloth and set it with her clothing.  He stepped into the pit, knelt next to her, and unpeeled the sleeping bag.

She moaned and twisted deeper into the hodgepodge of bedding.

He did not move at once, only watched her, then lay down on his side, clumsily pushing one wing out behind him and stretching the other over the both of them like a blanket.

She felt its weight, feather-light, on her hip and thigh, and it was real.  The animal smell of him permeated the bedding underneath her and it was real, too.  She lay, shuddering with the effort of repressing her sobs, and at last, the inner storm began to abate.  She took several gulping breaths, and finally quieted, her hands balled into fists.

She could feel him watching her, hear him listening.  After a while, his hand brushed her waist and rested there.  His palm was at once rough and soft, like well-worn leather. When she didn’t throw it off or fall into weeping again, he slid closer.  She felt his breath on her neck and shoulder.  He moved up against her, and his fur was soft as an otter’s, hard with the muscle and sheer mass of him.  He was real.  It was all real.

A tear slipped out of her eye, over her cheek, and into the pit, but it was alone.  She tucked her head into the crook of her arm and closed her mind away from thought.

Horror is a creature that should not be and refuses to leave.

Horror is being cut from your own life like a tumor.

Horror is having no explanation.

Horror is, and it doesn’t care.

CHAPTER TWO

CAPTIVE

              1

Olivia dreamt she was in the front office of the advertising company where she worked.  She was dressed in the tie-dyed T-shirt she used to wash the car, but no one seemed to notice.  Her boss was wearing a leather loincloth and black socks.  Susan Greely from sales walked by with her price list and a saucepan.  There were bats hanging from the ceiling in profusion, flapping their wings.  It was a horrible sound, all of them flapping and flapping.

Olivia twitched and the dream receded.  She struggled to find it again, because the reality that waited for her, she knew, was somehow even more horrible.  She reached out as though to seize her dream and pull it back into her head, and encountered the slithery topside of a nylon sleeping bag.

She opened her eyes, and the first thing she focused on was the edge of a wing draped over her. 

The wing, she decided, was quite beautiful.  If it was just the wing, she supposed she could get used to it.  As long as she didn’t think about the creature whose hand rested comfortably around her middle and whose sleeping breaths puffed against her shoulder, she would be fine.

She moved her head just enough to see her watch, tilting it to catch the light thrown by the dying coals in the fireplace.  It was nearly four-thirty in the afternoon.  She hadn’t slept in so late since college.

College.  How could somebody who went to college, who still had eight thousand dollars in unpaid student loans, end up here?  It wasn’t right.  It wasn’t fair.  It didn’t even seem
legal
.

Olivia settled back into the bedding, letting her eyelids droop heavily.  She watched the wing through her lashes, drowsing.

Far away through the caverns, a woman’s high-pitched terrified scream suddenly jarred both of them to full wakefulness.

Olivia’s captor bolted upright, wings fanning out so swiftly that one struck Olivia in the head and knocked her sprawling in the pit.  He immediately folded them flat against his body, crawling forward to peer at her.

He lifted her hair out of the way to check the side of her head, then turned her face this way and that, frowning as he stared intently into her eyes.  He started to grumble something, then stopped himself, and began again in cautious English.  “Do your eyes hurt?”

“Do my…?”  Olivia lifted one hand in confusion towards her face, then she realized what he must be talking about.  “I’ve been crying,” she said bleakly.

The very tip of his thumb carefully pried her left eyelid a little further open and he leaned even closer, close enough to kiss if she were so inclined.  The thought worked a shudder through her and he growled low, as if in answer, as he searched her eyes.  “Red eyes,” he said, slowly and carefully, either mistrusting his English or to prevent her from panicking.  “Red and…swollen.”

“Yes,” she whispered.  “It’s fine.”

His gaze seemed to pull back somehow, no longer staring at her eyes but into them.  His nostrils flared once, as though he were trying to smell the truth.  He withdrew his hands and stood, backing out of the pit and watching her.  When she didn’t move, he grunted to himself and turned away to retrieve his scant clothing.  He dressed quickly, his ears pricked at the caves beyond and his attention elsewhere as he knotted his loincloth expertly through its wide buckle and fastened the deep, pouch-like belt around his waist. 

Olivia suspected she might still be a little stoned; she realized that she had just been staring at the process of donning a loincloth but had not even seen the nakedness it now concealed. 
Never mind
, she thought. 
You’ll see it soon enough
.

Her captor made a final adjustment to his coverings and directed a deep, rumbling grunt at her, then tipped his head back with an almost human expression of self-directed irritation.  When he spoke again, it was in his guttural English.  “Stay here,” he told her, and left.

Olivia climbed out of the pit and into her clothes.  She felt painfully alert, as though sensations were screaming at her from every side.  She listened so hard she fancied she could hear the blood rushing over her eardrums, and waited for the scream to be repeated.  Last night, tucked naked beneath the creature’s broad black wing, she thought she knew the reason why she and the others had been captured.  Now, straining for the echoes of that scream, she wondered if she had been very much mistaken—if they had, in fact, been intended as food. 

Of course, one did not necessarily negate the other.

Olivia shuddered and scrambled into her clothing, then crawled under the table.  She sat there as long as she could endure the cramped position, but succeeded only in freezing her butt numb on the stone ground.  Gradually, she unlocked her limbs and finally crawled back into the pit long enough to fish out a sleeping bag.  This she carried to ‘her’ alcove, where she curled herself up in warmth and opened her photo album. 

There was dust on the binding; she hadn’t looked at this in years.  It had been a present from her father on her sixteenth birthday, but she hadn’t added much.  It bothered her now to know how easily she’d been able to dismiss those memories, just like she thought she’d always have them.

The first page had pictures of her mother and father when they were younger, their wedding picture, and a family photo from both sides, showing all the aunts and uncles and spouses.  Her father’s neat printing named all the faces and dated each event.  On the next few pages were mostly baby photos.  She had no brothers and sisters; it seemed every milestone of childhood, however trivial or insignificant, had been captured here on film in a triumphant parade.  There were pictures of her in Christmas ruffles of cranberry red and holiday gold.  A baby Valentine on a heart-shaped satin pillow with a toy bow and arrows.  A Halloween pumpkin, her chubby face surrounded with green leaves.   First fishing trip.  First Girl Scout recital.  First attempt to ride a bicycle.  Olivia with Dad at a school-sponsored picnic.  Olivia with Mom at the county fair.  Olivia as the Goddess Athena in the school play, holding up an olive branch that was actually a cunningly disguised twig culled from the apple tree in the backyard.  Olivia the teenager, captured in a series of school photos and class pictures, birthdays and field trips.  Then, Olivia’s only two contributions—high school graduation and college graduation—and that was it.

Olivia brushed at her eyes, but found them dry.  The rest of the pages were empty, ready for her to fill.  She knew she never would.  She closed the book, drew up her knees and buried her face in her arms.

How long she sat like that, she didn’t know.  Her body got used to it, stopped trying to focus in on funny sounds or stray thoughts, and just settled, not relaxed, but only numb.  Numb was good enough for her.  But it didn’t last forever.  Eventually, she heard a scrape of toe-claws on stone, and in the next moment, her captor was there, coming around the side of the pit to peer at her uncertainly.  He had a canvas backpack in one hand.  It looked heavy.

“My name is Olivia,” she said.

That stopped him.  He tipped his head back a little, running her words through his mind.  “Olivia,” he said slowly, and again, “Olivia.”  He murmured the sound over and over, drawing it out, committing it to memory.  Her name in his mouth was a travesty, garbled and grumbled and strange.  Then he raised one hand, placed it to his chest, opened his mouth…and said nothing.  His gaze drifted back behind him.  He stared into the darkness, his hand motionless over his heart, and finally looked back at her.  He lowered his hand.