Intensity

untouchable.
        Chyna recalled times, as a young girl, when simply hiding from her mother and her mother's more dangerous friends had not provided her with a sufficient sense of security. Sometimes the arguments or the celebrations became too violent or too boisterous; the chaos of noise and crazy laughter and cursing spun like a tornado around her even where she had concealed herself, and her fear spiraled out of control, until she thought that her heart would burst or her head explode. Then she went away to more welcoming places in her mind, through the back of the old wardrobe into the land of Narnia, which she had read about in the wonderful books of Mr. C. S. Lewis, or to visit Toad Hall and the Wild Wood from The Wind in the Willows , or into realms that she herself invented.
        She had always been able to come back from those escapements. But on occasion, she had thought about how wonderful it would be to stay in that faraway place, where neither her mother nor her mother's kind would ever be able to find her again, no matter how hard they looked. In those exotic kingdoms, there was often danger, but there were also true and faithful friends like none found on this side of magical wardrobes.
        Now, peering through the screened port at the girl in the chair, Chyna was sure that Ariel had sought refuge in just such a far place and was detached from this sorry world in every way that counted. After a year in this dismal hole, from time to time suffering the attentions of the sociopath upstairs, perhaps she had wandered so far along the road of inner adventure that she could not easily-or ever-return.
        In fact, the girl raised her gaze from the book and sat staring neither at Chyna's face in the door port nor apparently at anything in the room, but at something in a world twice removed from this one. Even in the inadequate rose light, Chyna could see that Ariel's eyes were out of focus and as strange as the eyes of any of the dolls that surrounded her.
        The killer had told the men at the service station that he had not yet touched Ariel in "that way," and Chyna believed him. Because once he had taken her innocence, he would need to smash her beauty; and when that was done, he would kill her. The fact that she was alive argued that she was still untouched.
        Yet day after day, month after dreadful month, she had lived in exhausting suspense, waiting for the hateful son of a bitch to decide that she was "ripe," waiting for his brutal assault, his sour breath on her face, his hot and insistent hands, the terrible irresistible weight of him, every indignity and humiliation. In her single room, there had been nowhere to hide; she could not escape to the rooftop, to the beach, to the attic, to the crawlspace, to the upper limbs of the tree in the backyard.
        "Ariel."
        The refuge to which she had escaped might be in the pages of the book that she now held. She functioned in this world, grooming and feeding and bathing and dressing herself, but she lived in some other dimension.
        Chyna's heart rolled in a sea of sorrow in a storm of rage, and through the port in the upholstered door, she said, "I'm here, Ariel. I'm here. You aren't alone any more."
        Ariel's gaze didn't shift out of dreams, and she was as still as any of the dolls.
        "I am your guardian, Ariel. I'll keep you safe."
        As the girl followed a long and winding road farther into her private Elsewhere, her hands relaxed, and the book slipped out of them. It slid off the edge of the chair and thumped to the floor, and all except a whisper of the sound was absorbed by the special walls and ceiling. She was not aware of having dropped the volume, and she sat unmoving.
        "I'm your guardian," Chyna repeated, and wondered vaguely at her choice of words.
        She was more afraid for Ariel than for herself, and her heart was racing faster than ever before.
        "Your guardian."
        Hot tears blurred Chyna's vision, disabling tears, an indulgence she could not afford. She blinked furiously until her eyes were dry and her vision was clear.
        She turned from the locked inner door and angrily pushed open the outer one.
         Tatta-tatta-tatta-tatta-tatta…
        As she stepped out of the heavy sound-baffling of the vestibule and into the first room in the basement, the rattling pipe seemed louder than she remembered.