of refilling the cups and plates she imagined were before her. Then she asked the cat another question and waited for a response. When there was none, her anger flashed back, flooding over her like a red tide.
“Don’t you do that to me, you fucking no-good monster!” she screamed. “I hate it when you do that to me. Hate it, hate it, hate it!”
As her voice rose, she grabbed the cat and began swinging it over her head, then brought it crashing down on the stone table. In her rage, she didn’t hear the crushing of the skull.
“You’ll answer me,” she raved. “God damn you, you’ll talk to me or I’ll kill you!”
Suddenly she hurled the cat against the wall of the cave and grabbed the bag once more. She reached deep into it, and when she withdrew her hand she clutched a large butcher knife. Her anger cresting, she fell on the cat’s limp body and began slashing at it with the knife, her voice rising as she cursed the unresponsive animal.
Suddenly she had the cat on the table again, and the knife flashed through the air once more. Cecil’s severed head rolled away from the torso and fell to the floor. Elizabeth stared at it, not comprehending what had happened.
“Don’t do that,” she breathed. “Don’t do that to me. I want you to talk to me. Talk to me!” she screamed once more, then stopped, her breath coming in gasps. She felt a pain throbbing through her head, and heard something that sounded like wind. Then the pain passed, and the sounds of the wind faded into a strange whimpering from above. She looked up into the darkness of the shaft.
Seeing nothing, she found the flashlight, and shined it upward. The beam illuminated Sarah’s dark face, her huge brown eyes blinking in the glare of the light.
Elizabeth smiled up at her, and her face softened.
“Sarah,” she almost whispered. “Did you see? Did you see that naughty baby? She isn’t like you. She isn’t like you at all. You’re such a sweet girl, so sweet …” She turned bade to look once more at the decapitated feline body, which lay, still clothed, on the rough rock. Then the light picked up the head, still encased in the old-fashioned bonnet, the eyes dully reflecting the glare from the flashlight.
“You should have talked to me,” she hissed. “Really, you should have.” She picked up the knife and placed it carefully on a ledge near the ceiling of the cavern.
Then she slipped the flashlight, still glowing, into her pocket and began to make her way back up the rope ladder. Sarah crept back from the edge as Elizabeth emerged from the pit.
“It’s late,” Elizabeth whispered. “But not too late.” Then she slipped the bracelet that was still on her wrist off her own arm and onto Sarah’s.
“This is for you,” she said. “It’s from Beth. She wants you to have it She says it should belong to you.”
Ignoring Sarah now, Elizabeth crept through the tunnel and emerged once more into the night. Quickly, she made her way back up the face of the embankment and disappeared into the woods.
Elizabeth lay once more in her bed, staring at the ceiling. She wished she could fall asleep again, but she couldn’t. She had awakened from a dream which had fled as she opened her eyes, and now sleep would not come to her. She thought she heard a noise outside, and went to the window. There, making her way slowly across the field, she saw her sister. Elizabeth went downstairs and met Sarah at the front door.
She was covered with mud and slime, and her hands were badly scratched. She stared helplessly up at Elizabeth.
Silently Elizabeth took Sarah upstairs and into the bathroom. She cleaned her sister up and threw the filthy clothes into the laundry chute. Then she tucked Sarah into bed.
Elizabeth wondered where Sarah had been. But soon she slept. It was a peaceful sleep, and there were no more dreams.
11
Mrs. Goodrich opened the trapdoor at the bottom of the laundry chute and watched the clothes tumble to the floor at her feet. She picked up a particularly dirty pair of blue jeans with a ragged tear at the knee and looked at them critically.
“Just look at that,” she said to the empty room. “I’ve never in my life seen anything so filthy. Looks like she’s been crawling around in some kinda slime.”
She fished out an equally dirt-encrusted shirt and examined it