She didn’t use the pocket-light she had provided herself with, for fear of attracting attention while still within the house. The real need for that would be later, over there in the woods. The stairs accomplished without mishap, it was a fairly easy matter to slip the bolt on the back door and get out without too much noise. There was a full moon up, but whether it would be much help where she was going, she doubted.
She stole around to the back of the rickety tool-house and retrieved the long-poled pitchfork she had concealed there in readiness earlier in the evening. Its tines were bent, and with a little manipulation, it might serve as a sort of grappling hook if... if there was anything for it to hook onto where she was taking it. A button was all she needed, a rotting piece of suiting an inch square. Evidence. Until she had that, she couldn’t go to Kendall about this, she had to keep on working alone. Not after what she had admitted to him that morning.
She struck out across the silver-dappled fields. The trees closed around her finally, a maw of impenetrable blackness after the moonlight, and she brought her pocket-light into play, following its wan direction-finder in and out between the looming, ghostly trunks.
The bed of the quicksand loomed whitely even in the dark. There was something sinister about it, like a vast evil eye lying there in wait. The thin coating of water over it refracted the shine of her light to a big phosphorescent balloon when she cast it downward on it. She discovered her teeth chattering and clamped them shut. She looked around for something to balance her light, finally nested it within a bush so that the interlaced twigs supported it. She shifted a little farther over along the bank and poised the pitchfork like someone about to spear fish.
She lunged out and downward with it. The soft feel of the treacherous sand as the tines clove into it was transferred repugnantly along the pole to her hands. That was all she had time to notice. She didn’t even see it sink in.
A leathery hand was pressed smotheringly to the lower half of her face, a thick anaconda-like arm twined about her waist from behind, and the light winked out. Her wrists were caught together as they flew up from the pitchfork-pole, held helpless.
“Got her, Ed?” a quiet voice said in the dark.
“Got her,” a second voice answered.
There hadn’t been a warning sound around her. They must have been lurking there concealed ahead of her, to be able to spring the trap so unexpectedly.
Her pinioned hands were swung around behind her, brought together again. The hand had left her mouth. “You int’rested in what’s down in there?” the man behind her asked threateningly.
“I don’t know what you mean. Take your hands off me!”
“You know what we mean. And we know what you mean. Don’t you suppose we’re onto why you’re hanging around our place? Now you’ll get what you looked for.” He addressed his father. “Take off her shoes and stockings and lie ’em on the bank. Careful, don’t tear ’em now.”
“What’s that for?”
“She came out here alone, see, early tomorrow morning, and it looked so pretty she went wading in the thing without knowing what it was, and it got her.”
She kicked frantically, trying to impede them. She was helpless in their hands. Her ankles were caught, one at a time, and stripped.
“They’ll dredge for her, won’t they?” Dirk Mason mentioned with sinister meaning.
“She’ll be on top, won’t she?” was the grisly reassurance. “Once they get her out, they’ll be no call for them to go ahead dredging any further down.”
She ripped out a scream of harrowing intensity. What if it had been twice as shrill as it was, it couldn’t have reached past the confines of these woods. And who was there in these woods to hear her? “Think we ought to stuff something in her mouth?” the older man asked.
“No, because we gotta figure on her being found later. Don’t let it disturb you, no one’ll hear her.”
She was fighting like something possessed, as any animal fights for its life, but she was no match for the two of them combined. Not even a man would have been.
They were ready for the incredible thing they were about to do now. “Grab her legs and swing her, so she goes out far enough.” There was a moment of sickening indecision, while she swung suspended between them, clear of the ground. Then her spinning body shot from them.
Water sprayed over her and she had struck. The fall was nothing. It was like landing on a satin quilt, the sand was so soft. She rolled over, tore her arms free, and threshed to a kneeling position. There was that awful preliminary moment in which nothing happened, as with that stone she had seen Johnny throw in yesterday. Then a sudden pull, a drawing, started in — light at first, barely noticeable, giving the impression of being easy to counteract. And each move the wrong one, fastening it tighter around her bared feet, ankles, calves.
Meanwhile, something was happening on the bank, or at least, farther back in the woods, but she was only dimly aware of it, too taken up in her own floundering doom. It reached her vaguely, like something through a black mist. An intermittent winking as of fireflies here and there, each one followed by a loud crack like the breaking of a heavy bough. And heavy forms were crashing through the thickets in several directions at once, two of them fleeing along the edge of the pool, others fanning out farther back, as if to intercept them. There was one final crack, a floundering fall, and then a breathless voice nearby said: “Don’t shoot — I give up!”
A light, stronger than the one she had brought, suddenly flashed out, caught her, steadied, lighting up the whole pool. Her screams had dwindled to weak wails now, simply because she hadn’t enough breath left. She was writhing there like a crazed rumba-dancer, still upright, but her legs already gone past the knees.
“Hurry up, help me with this girl!” a voice shouted somewhere behind the blinding light. “Don’t you see what they’ve done to her?” The pole of the same pitchfork she had used was thrust out toward her. “Hang onto this a minute.” She clutched it with both hands. A moment later a noosed rope had splashed into the water around her. “Pass your arms through that and tighten it around you under them. Grab hold now! Now kick out behind you!”
For minutes nothing happened, she didn’t seem to move at all, though there must have been at least three of them behind the rope, judging by the amount of pull it was exerting. “Are we hurting you?” Then suddenly there was a crumbling feeling of the sand all around her trapped legs and she came out flounderingly, like a dead fish.
Kendall was one of them, of course, and even the brief glimpse she had of his face by torchlight made her wonder how she could have ever felt averse to running into him at any time. She certainly didn’t feel that way now.
They carried her out of the woods in a “chair” made of their hands and put her into a police-car waiting at the edge of the fields, although she was already beginning to insist that her feet were all right, just “pins and needles” with numbness.
“You’d better get back there and go to work. Even before you got the rope around me, the downward pull had stopped, I noticed. I seemed to be standing on something.
“We got them both,” Kendall said. “And of course the mere fact that they would try anything like that on you is the give-away, evidence or no evidence.”
“How did you get out here on time?”
“One of those inquiries I sent out finally paid off. A commercial traveler named Kenneth Johnson was reported missing, from way over in Jordanstown. He was supposed to show up at Indian River, out beyond here in the other direction, and he never got there, dropped from sight somewhere along the way, car and all. He was carrying quite a gob of money with him. He left three weeks ago, but it wasn’t reported until now, because he was only expected back around this time. I only got word around eleven tonight, a little over an hour ago. I thought of the Masons right away, but mainly thanks to you. I started right out here with a couple of my partners to have a little talk with them, look around, but never dreaming that you were still here yourself. Then a little past the next house down, the O’Brien place, we met the kid, Johnny, running along the road lickety-split, on his way to phone in to us from there and get help. His mother had finally gotten pangs of conscience and thrown off her fear of her husband and step-son long enough to try to save you from what she guessed was going to happen.”