Intensity

door in tiny increments, until she was gasping so hard that she was no longer able to curse with frustration.
        The weight of the door and the position of the two deadbolts began to work to her advantage. The locks were close together, one set directly over the other, not evenly spaced like hinges, so the heavy slab tried to twist on them as if they were a single pivot point. Because a greater length of the door lay above the locks than below, the top tipped outward, induced by gravity. Chyna took advantage of these inevitable forces, yanked harder, and grunted with satisfaction when wood splintered again. The entire five-inch width of the padded slab swung free of the jamb on the side that had been hinged. With the frame no longer in the way, she pulled the door to the left, and on the right side, the deadbolts slid out of the striker plates.
        Suddenly the door came toward her, free of all restraint, and it was too heavy to be lowered slowly out of its frame. She backed rapidly into the cellar, letting the slab thud to the floor of the vestibule just as she vacated it.
        Chyna waited, catching her breath, listening to the house for any indication that Vess had returned.
        Finally she reentered the vestibule. She crossed the fallen door as if it were a bridge, and she went into the cell.
        The dolls watched, unmoving and sly.
        Ariel was sitting in the armchair, head lowered, hands fisted in her lap, exactly as she had been when Chyna had spoken to her through the port in the door. If she had heard the hammering and subsequent commotion, she had not been disturbed by it.
        "Ariel?" Chyna said.
        The girl didn't reply or raise her head.
        Chyna sat on the footstool in front of the armchair. "Honey, it's time to go."
        When she received no response, Chyna leaned forward, lowered her head, and looked up at the girl's shadowed face. Ariel's eyes were open, and her gaze was fixed on her white-knuckled fists. Her lips were moving, as though she were whispering confidences to someone, but no sound escaped her.
        Chyna put her cuffed hands under Ariel's chin and lifted her head. The girl didn't try to pull away, didn't flinch, but was revealed when her veil of hair slid away from her face. Although they were eye-to-eye, Ariel stared through Chyna, as if all in this world were transparent, and in her eyes was a chilling bleakness, as if the landscape of her other world was lifeless, daunting.
        "We have to go. Before he comes home."
        Bright-eyed and attentive, perhaps the dolls listened. Ariel apparently did not.
        With both hands, Chyna enfolded one of the girl's fists. The bones were sharp and the skin was cold, clenched as fiercely as if she had been suspended from rocks at a precipice.
        Chyna tried to pry the fingers apart. The sculpted digits of a marble fist would have been hardly more resistant.
        Finally Chyna lifted the hand and kissed it more tenderly than she had ever kissed anyone before, more tenderly than she had ever been kissed, and she said softly, "I want to help you. I need to help you, honey. If I can't leave here with you, there's no point in my leaving at all."
        Ariel didn't respond.
        "Please let me help you." Softer still: " Please ."
        Chyna kissed the hand once more, and at last she felt the girl's fingers stir. They opened partway, cold and stiff, but would not relax entirely, as hooked and rigid as a skeleton's fingers in which the joints had calcified.
        Ariel's desire to reach out for help, tempered by her paralyzing fear of commitment, was achingly familiar to Chyna. It struck in her a chord of sympathy and pity for this girl, for all lost girls, and her throat tightened so severely that for a moment she was unable to swallow or breathe.
        Then she slipped one cuffed hand into Ariel's and the other over it, got up from the footstool, and said, "Come on, child. Come with me. Out of here."
        Though Ariel's face remained as expressionless as an egg, though she continued to look through Chyna with the otherworldly detachment of a novitiate in the thrall of a holy visitation, her head spinning with visions, she got up from the armchair. After taking only two steps toward the door, however, she stopped and would not go farther in spite of Chyna's pleas. The girl might be able to envision an imaginary world in which she could find a fragile peace,