Suffer the Children (23 page)

The lights of the searchers bobbed in the darkness around her, but if she was aware of them she gave no sign. Twice Elizabeth disappeared into the shadow of a tree only seconds before one of the searchers would have discovered her, and just before she emerged from the woods onto the embankment she passed within ten feet of her father. She neither noticed him nor made any sound that could have penetrated Jack’s concentration. He was too intent on overcoming his fear of the forest to have heard. He forged on, stolid in his grim search for Kathy Burton.

Soon Elizabeth was once again on the embankment over the sea. She listened to the surf, and it seemed to her to be a sound she was used to, a sound she had lived with for much longer than she could remember. She began making her way down the embankment,
until she disappeared into the black shadow behind the boulder.

The sounds of the surf, or something else, prevented her from hearing the snapping of twigs and the breaking of branches behind her as others fought a path through the woods above.

Kathy Burton wasn’t at all sure she was hearing anything, she had been hearing so much in the past hours. First there had been the sound of her own screams, echoing back at her like some vile, dying creature, hammering into her ears. She had screamed until her voice gave out, then had lain on the floor of the pit for a long time, crying to herself, her body heaving with exhaustion and fear. Then the panic had passed and she had begun listening to the muffled sound of the surf, which made a soft backdrop of noise, preventing silence from multiplying the terror of the unrelieved blackness. And then she had begun hearing the small sounds, the tiny scurrying sounds to which she had at first been able to attach no meanings. Her mind began producing images in the darkness, images of rats chasing each other around the cavern, circling just beyond her reach. As the images in her imagination grew stronger, she began to feel the rats, if rats they were, moving closer to her, sniffing the air toward her, and her fear grew. She retreated to the top of the rock that only a few hours earlier had served as the table for Elizabeth’s manic party.

She had stayed there, huddled against the darkness, and had felt herself growing smaller. She imagined herself disappearing, and it was the least frightening of her imaginings, for if she disappeared she would at least be away. And she wanted to be away, desperately.

As the hours had worn on, her joints had become stiff from the inactivity, and from the dank chill that pervaded the cavern. Finally she had been forced to move, but she had not dared to leave the flat surface of the rock,
afraid of what she might encounter in the darkness that surrounded her.

And now she heard a different noise, a scuffling noise from above. She felt a scream forming in her aching throat, but she held it back. The scuffling continued.

Kathy craned her neck, trying to find, somewhere in the darkness above, the shaft that led out of her prison. She thought she knew where it was, for there was the slightest draft, nothing more than a general disturbance of the air, and she was sure that the shaft lay directly above that tiny current of air that was the only real movement in the pit Earlier she had stood up and tried to reach the low ceiling of the cave, but it was just out of reach, and the inability to even locate the limitations of her confinement had only served to increase her fear. She lay on her back now, her face tipped upward into the draft of air she was sure came from the shaft.

And then she was blinded. She felt her face contract as the light struck her eyes, dazzlingly brilliant Like a doe trapped in the beam of an automobile’s headlight, she was frozen to the stone slab.

Above her, Elizabeth held the flashlight and peered down into Kathy’s terrified face. There was a wild look in Kathy’s eyes that somehow comforted Elizabeth, and she smiled to herself. Then she heard Kathy speak.

“Who is it?” Kathy managed, her voice sounding strange to her ears. “Please, who is it?”

“Be quiet,” Elizabeth hissed down at her. “You must be quiet here.”

“Elizabeth?” Kathy asked uncertainly. Then, when she heard no answer, she repeated the word.

“Elizabeth,” her voice rasped. “Please, Elizabeth, is that you?”

Above her Elizabeth continued to hold the flashlight steady with one hand, while the other hand pulled at the white paper that wrapped the bundle she had brought from the kitchen. When the paper was free, she spoke.

“Here,” she said, her voice almost as harsh as Kathy’s strained rasp. “Here’s your dinner.”

She flung something downward, and watched as the piece of raw and bloody meat slapped wetly into Kathy’s face.

Kathy didn’t see it coming, and when the slab of meat hit her she recoiled reflexively, and her voice found itself once more. A howling of fear mixed with revulsion at the unknown wet coldness that had hit her face roared out of her throat and filled the cavern with sound. The dull roar of the surf disappeared, and all the small noises were drowned in the sound of Kathy’s terror. And then Elizabeth’s voice, harsh and ugly, cut through the scream.

“God damn you!” Elizabeth shouted. “Shut your fucking mouth! Shut up!” she kept screaming, as Kathy’s voice slowly died away.
“Shut up!”
And then the silence closed over the cave again, until the murmur of the surf found its way in once more.

“Eat it,” Elizabeth commanded. “Eat your dinner.”

Below her, Kathy’s eyes began to adjust to the rent in the darkness. She looked down and saw the raw steak gleaming redly in the circle of light from the flashlight above. She stared at it and tried not to listen to Elizabeth’s voice commanding her from above.

“Pick it up,” Elizabeth was saying. “Pick it up, you little bitch, and eat it! Come on, pick it up and eat it. Pick it up. Pick it up. Pick it up.”

The voice from above took on a hypnotic quality, and suddenly Kathy found herself holding the limp and bloody object in her hands. And then the order from above changed.

“Eat it,” Elizabeth commanded. “Eat it. Eat it.
Eat it!”
Helplessly, Kathy moved the raw meat to her lips. The light clicked off.

Kathy sat for a long time, crouched on the slab of rock, the piece of meat clutched in her hands, listening
to the scuffling sounds dying away above her. And then, finally, it was silent; still she sat in the blackness, like some wary animal, waiting for an unseen enemy to leap forth from the night.

She became aware of the fact that she was hungry. Slowly her mind began to focus once more on reality, and she wondered how long she had been trapped in the hole, how long it had been since she had eaten. She thought about the bloody object in her hand. Somewhere in her mind she found some little note, some scrap of information, that told her that some people ate raw meat. She felt her stomach jerk, and for a moment she thought she was going to throw up. Then the nausea passed, and once more she felt the pangs of hunger. She made up her mind.

Kathy forced the raw meat into her mouth and began chewing. She was glad now for the dark. She knew she wouldn’t have been able to eat it if she had been able to see it.

The scuffling began again when she was halfway through the steak. She stopped gnawing at the meat and listened. It grew louder; then, when it sounded as though it was directly above her, it stopped.

Kathy started to say something, then thought better of it. Acting more on instinct than on reason, she suddenly leaped from the rock, something in her subconscious telling her that the danger from the pit was less than the danger from above. She huddled against the wall of the cavern and waited for the beam of light to come once more through the shaft, heralding a fear that would be bigger than the fear of the darkness and the silence. But there was no beam of light, no rasping, ugly voice obscenely commanding her from above. Instead, there was a sharp crash, as though some object—some hard object—had been dropped from above. There was another silence, and then the scuffling began again, fading slowly away until it melded fully into
the background of the surf. Kathy stayed huddled against the wall.

When her legs told her that she would have to move, she began groping her way once more toward the center of the cavern. Her hands found the large dab of stone, and she began cautiously going over its surface, not wanting to find the object that had been dropped, but afraid not to find it.

And then her fingers brushed against something. She drew away as though the object were hot, then moved back. She began examining the object with her fingertips. It was hard, and round, and sort of flat It seemed to be covered with some sort of cloth—and then she knew what it was. She picked up the canteen and shook it. It sloshed.

Carefully she unscrewed the top and sniffed at the contents. There was no odor.

Finally she worked up her courage and tasted it. It was water.

Thirstily, Kathy drank. The water was soothing to her painful throat.

As she awoke the next morning, Elizabeth’s eyes widened in surprise at the pile of dirty clothes sitting in the center of her bedroom. She stared at it curiously, wondering where the clothes could have come from. She decided that Sarah must have left them there during the night, and gathered them up. Depositing them in the laundry chute, she went downstairs for breakfast.

A few minutes later Sarah woke up, and she too found a heap of filthy clothes on the floor of the room. She got out of bed and put them on. Then Sarah, too, went downstairs and silently took her place at the breakfast table. Her parents looked at her in horror. Elizabeth stood up, came around beside her, and took her hand.

“Come on, Sarah,” she said gently. “You don’t want to wear those to school.”

Elizabeth led her sister back upstairs as Rose and Jack Conger looked at each other. Neither of them could think of anything to say. They were too frightened.

Time crept slowly through Port Arbello that week. Marilyn Burton, still valiantly postponing the inevitable, opened her shop each day, and each day she smiled at her customers and assured them that, no, she was sure nothing too bad had happened to Kathy and she would turn up. Deep inside, though, she knew that Kathy would not turn up.

Ray Norton expanded the search parties, and the men of Port Arbello began a systematic search of the entire area, each day sweeping a wider arc around the town. Norton did not expect them to find anything, but it kept them busy, and kept them from listening too closely to Martin Forager’s charges, repeated drunkenly in the tavern each evening, that the police weren’t doing anything. Norton hoped he could keep the searchers working for at least ten days, at the end of which time he hoped to have something more solid to go on than a simple vanishing.

The women of Port Arbello found they were drinking much more coffee than usual, and burning much more gas than usual, as they all took to transporting their children to and from school. All except the people along Conger’s Point Road, where Anne Forager had allegedly been attacked, and where Kathy Burton had apparently disappeared. The families on Conger’s Point Road did not discuss what was happening, nor did they consult each other on the best way of handling the situation. It was as though, individually, they had each
decided that nothing would happen if they did not admit that anything was wrong. So the children of Conger’s Point Road continued to walk to and from school each day. If anyone noticed that there was an unusual amount of automobile traffic on the Point Road as each of the mothers found an errand or two to do in town during the hours the children would be walking, no one commented on it. Silently they preserved the appearance of normalcy, and the sight of the constant search parties reassured them.

Thursday morning Elizabeth found herself almost running from the house to the Conger’s Point Road. She would have cut across the field, coming to the Road at the base of the woods, but she felt slightly embarrassed. When she got to the Road she glanced quickly to the right, then deliberately slowed her pace and tried to assume an air of nonchalance. For the third morning in a row, Jeff Stevens was waiting for her.

Tuesday morning she had assumed it was a coincidence. She hadn’t questioned him about how he happened to leave his house just as she passed the woods. Instead, she had simply fallen in beside him, and surrendered her books when he had taken them from her.

Wednesday morning he had been waiting for her by the Stevenses’ mailbox, and she wondered if he had been told to escort her to school. As if he had read her thoughts, he reached for her books and smiled.

“Tomorrow morning you can carry mine,” he’d said. “I’m glad you live out here. It isn’t any fun, walking by myself.”

So on Thursday morning Elizabeth approached Jeff and held out her hands.

“My turn,” she said, grinning at him. When he failed to respond, she spoke again. “You said I could carry your books today.”

Jeff handed his books over silently and told himself not to forget to get them all back before they were in
sight of the school. The teasing had been bad enough when he’d carried Elizabeth’s; if she were seen carrying his, he’d never live it down.

He tried to think of something to say, but nothing came to his mind. Which was all right with him, since he seemed to find himself stammering a lot when he tried to talk to Elizabeth. He wondered if he was developing a crush on her, and decided he probably was.

“You’re awfully quiet this morning,” Elizabeth said, making Jeff blush a deep red.

“I was … uh … I was just thinking about Kathy Burton,” Jeff managed to say, and the blush deepened. What was wrong with him? He’d known what he was going to say. Why couldn’t he just say it?

“I wonder what happened to her,” Elizabeth said, frowning a little. “Maybe Anne Forager wasn’t lying after all.”

“Except she’s still around, and Kathy isn’t.” This time Jeff pronounced each word carefully and managed not to stammer.

“I hope they find her,” Elizabeth said. “She’s a good friend of mine. She baby-sits for the Nortons a lot, and we used to walk together.”

Jeff suddenly found himself hoping maybe they wouldn’t find Kathy Burton. He wasn’t sure he wanted to walk with Elizabeth and someone else too. He decided being fourteen was lousy.