Drawn Into Darkness(82)

Then another seething, bubbling sort of snoring sound turned my attention away from Stoat and toward the stove, where I saw a large pot boiling over.

The spaghetti! Or linguine, whatever. I had forgotten all about it. Not only would it overcook, but the sauce needed to be stirred or it would burn. In fact, I already smelled it scorching.

I felt a moment’s concern, then rebelled against it. There went Stoat’s dinner. Nyah, nyah. Served him right. Lying there taking a snooze.

A sensible woman would have felt relief that he was not threatening her for a few moments, but I had deteriorated way beyond being sensible. I hated him. I wanted to lie down and sleep too. Slumping in the chair as far as I could, I rested my chin on my collarbone and closed my eyes. Almost instantly I dozed off, for what might have been ten or fifteen minutes but seemed like a few seconds.

Then an intensely irritating shrill peeping sound awoke me. At first I could not think what it was other than just egregiously the last straw, the icing on my crappy cake, the cherry on top of my wretched captivity. Then, wincing at the clamor it made, I realized it was the smoke detector.

I looked. Smoke was starting to rise from something on the stove.

I looked at Stoat lying on the living room floor. He showed no signs of hearing the smoke detector. Maybe he was conked out or in a coma. Maybe he was deaf. Maybe he was dead after all.

Which would have been delightful under other circumstances. But right now, if the stove went on burning Stoat’s dinner long enough, the house would catch on fire. With me in it. Unable to escape.

It was a definite “Oh, shit!” moment.

Despite the obvious fact that I could not move, somehow I had to get to that stove. My feet touched the floor in close proximity to the chair legs. I pressed my toes into the linoleum and shoved, but nothing much happened. I attempted a sort of seated hop. Nothing. Wisps of smoke wafted over my head now. If I could have opened my mouth, I would have screamed. I panicked, and somehow my panic enabled me to fling my entire body into levitation mode. Lo and behold, the chair and I moved a few inches, although not exactly in the direction I wanted.

I tried again, of course. And again, and again, I have no idea how many times, with varying degrees of success, although I could not correct or predict my heading. The chair and I scratched a wavering path across the linoleum in the general direction of the stove as the smoke in the kitchen fast-forwarded from wisps into clouds into a billowing overcast that hung only inches above my head. The panic that energized me now was fear of suffocation, asphyxiation, dying of smoke inhalation even before my house burst into flames. Damn Stoat and his damn spaghetti and his damn duct tape.

By the time I finally flumped my way to the stove, smoke settled like a kind of attack fog around my head, stinging my eyes, depriving me of proper breath, making me cough through the tape covering my mouth. And what the hell did I expect to do about it anyway, stuck in a chair with my hands behind me? I couldn’t even see, let alone think. More frantic than ever, I ducked my head in an attempt to find better air, and in so doing I banged my nose against the stove knobs that turned the burners on and off, which gave me a thought.

I nudged one of the knobs with no effect, and the heat from the stove top singed my hair and nearly blistered my face, meaning it was probably way too late for my pitiful heroics to make any difference. By being a good Stoic I could have sacrificed myself and let an appropriately hellish inferno take Stoat along with me. But the survival instinct trumped philosophy. Slewing my head at an improbable, muscle-straining angle, I positioned my duct-taped mouth on the handle of one of the knobs, pressed against it until my teeth hurt, and attempted to turn it to the “off” position.

Attempted more than once. Heads are not trained in fine motor skills, let alone working through duct tape, so it was not easy. But I finally, clumsily, very nearly toppling into the stove, got one burner turned off. I leaned sideways and stretched my neck to reach the other, applied my muffled mouth again and turned it—not quite off, but it would have to do. With no strength left, unable to breathe properly or open my mouth to pant, feeling weak and queasy, I let fear advise me once more and did something desperate and counterintuitive. I deliberately tipped myself over onto the kitchen floor.

Ow. I banged my already-banged-up head pretty good.

But there was still some air down there. I could breathe again.

And I could let myself sag onto the linoleum. I could rest.

So that’s what I did. With no idea whether I would ever get up again, I lay on the floor, let my legs hang from their bindings, closed my eyes, and relaxed. Despite the yammering of the smoke detector, I actually dozed, dreaming I was back in the swamp with Justin, walking through drippy Spanish moss that groped us and Spanish daggers that tried to neuter us and a variety of other insults. Justin struggled with tangled vines and I scratched mosquito bites and we had a great conversation about what we would eat when we got out of there. He wanted to gorge on Snickers bars. I just wanted to bury my head in a five-gallon tub of chocolate-chip cookie dough ice cream.