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.
17
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