What she wrote: An insane survival move

HALLIE EPHRON: Jenn's post on Saturday about her insane bout of BOULDERING (what WAS she thinking??) and her question: what have you don't lately that had you questioning your sanity, or words to that effect... got me remembering the  research I did in order for Ivy, my massively pregnant main character in NEVER TELL A LIE, to escape from a locked attic in a Victorian house. 

(Fortunately I consulted experts in rope climbing and did NOT attempt it myself.)

To make it work, I had to give the Victorian house a dumbwaiter and research what kind of cables would still remain today. Then I had to give Ivy a back story: competitive rope climbing in high school. Then figure out how she'd use her rope climbing expertise to escape. (Oh, and I also needed a straitjacket to show up earlier in the novel. In fact, there already was one.)

Just researching rope climbing was terrifying.

Here's a part of the scene where Ivy repurposes that ancient straitjacket, harnesses her rope climbing skills, and makes it out alive. 

At last Ivy felt a vibration as the front door to the house closed. A little later the car door slammed. The engine turned over.

Now was her chance—her only chance. She had to get moving.

She scooped the straitjacket off the floor, held it out in front of her and rolled up the body, leaving the arms and dangling straps sticking out at either end. Then she raised the panel to the dumbwaiter. Draped the rolled-up straitjacket over the edge of the opening.

She sat on the dumbwaiter sill and swung her legs over, inside the shaft. Staring straight ahead, she braced her sneakers against the side walls.

Was she insane? She was thirty-three years old and massively pregnant. Still, her arms and legs were strong. And her other options were nil.

The baby shifted inside her, and Ivy felt a rippling arc across her belly like a shooting star. It could work. It had to. She would do whatever it took to keep this baby safe.

Don’t think. Just do!

Ivy grabbed the rolled-up straitjacket and leaned forward, fighting off a wave of dizziness and anchoring her senses on the steady patter of rain.

Don’t look down.

She wrapped the center of the thick canvas roll like a candy cane’s stripe around the cable—once, twice, three times—then pulled the spiral taut. Last, she buckled the straps at the ends of the sleeves together.

There would be no coach or teammates at the ready to climb up and rescue her, no mattresses piled up at the bottom if she fell—just a thirty-foot drop through pitch black to the packed-earth floor of the basement.

Visualize.

She took hold of the canvas-wrapped cable with both hands and slowly transferred her weight to her feet, resting them on the edges of two-by-fours on either side of the shaft.

It’s nothing more than a high curb, she told herself as she hooked one leg and then the other inside the strap sling and set her feet back on the ledges. She lowered her behind slowly into the buckled straps, bending at the knees, pushing down and feeling the spiral of canvas gradually tighten.

So far, so good. She ignored the fear that licked like flames at her insides.

She shifted more of her weight into the sling, feeling for two-by-fours farther down, just in case the spiral of canvas failed to generate enough friction to grip the cable. The cable rasped and groaned, but it held fast as the spiral of canvas kinked.

It was working. Now to descend.

Ivy transferred weight to her feet, easing up on the strap sling. The canvas spiral loosened. She tugged it down.

Would Melinda be arriving at the police lab already? Parking the car? How many more feet before Ivy reached the second-floor opening. Nine? Eight? In three-inch increments, that was going take… The math was discouraging. Hopefully, she had that long.

Ivy felt for a lower foothold, then inched the canvas spiral down. She could barely see her hands in front of her face. Above her, growing dimmer, was the rectangle light where the panel to the attic remained open.

She repeated the sequence again, and again, and again—bracing her feet against the shaft to loosen the canvas spiral and shift downward, then lowering herself into the sling, tightening the canvas roll, lowering her feet to the next foothold. She tried not to think about the darkness closing around her. Her every move echoed in the shaft.

Peristalsis. Eleven letters. She said the word, then spelled it as she continued inching her way down the cable, proceeding entirely by feel, imagining that the dumbwaiter was a snake and she was prey, slowly working her way through its digestive tract.

Arms and legs trembling with fatigue, Ivy kept going. Just as she was lowering her behind into the sling again for what felt like the hundredth time, the phone started ringing. The sound was reverberated in the shaft.

Ivy tried to ignore it. She felt for a lower foothold. Found it. The phone rang again.

She transferred her weight to her feet.

The answering machine clicked on. The canvas spiral loosened and she tugged it down a few more inches. Found a fresh foothold. The new voice message played, assuring the word that yes, she was just fine and still waiting.

“Ivy, where the hell are you?” It was Jody, screaming at the answering machine. “You know this makes me completely crazy. Are you screening this call?” A long pause. “Damn you!”

In the background, Ivy could hear Riker’s shrill cry: “Da-oo”

“If my son grows into a juvenile delinquent, it’ll be your fault. Would you pick up the frickin’ phone?”

I’m here! Ivy wanted to scream back.

“Honest to God, you can be such a pain,” Jody said, and hung up.

Focus. Concentrate.

Ivy’s clenched hands felt sweaty, slippery like they used to get during rope drills for Coach Reiner, especially when she reached the top of the rope and looked down.

She could imagine Melinda, chatting up the receptionist and flashing Ivy’s driver’s license. Banking on her disguise to fool the technician.

Soon Ivy had to reach the second-floor dumbwaiter opening. How much farther? She found herself staring down into inky blackness. She gasped and shuddered, panic rising inside her. One foot slipped off its perch. Then her other foot slipped. She fell with a lurch, and a moment later she was dangling from the straps by her armpits. Her legs bashed against the rough plaster wall, and her own screams echoed around her. The tough leather cut into her underarms.

But the canvas spiral had tightened and held fast. She flailed for another foothold, and at last she felt an exposed two-by-four on one side and a wider ledge on the opposite side to anchor her feet against. She rested for a moment, panting and catching her breath.

The wider ledge—Ivy looked down and saw a sliver of lighter gray, seeping through at just that spot. She steadied herself, sweat trickling into her eyes, legs shaking. All she had to do now was raise the panel and climb out. She envisioned her fingers uncurling, her hand reaching out and pushing the panel up.

Three, two one…let go! With a clean swipe, she reached out in the dark, felt for where she knew the lower panel had to be, and pushed. Then she grabbed back onto the canvas-wrapped cable.

The cable shimmied and creaked, but the panel hadn’t budged. Or… Was it her imagination, or did the band of gray light seem just a bit wider?

A shadow moved across it, and for a moment Ivy froze. Then she recognized the sound of Phoebe's claws on the wood floor just beyond.

She reached out again and gave the panel a harder push. The band of light widened to a quarter inch.

She wedged her toe in the opening, and it rose an inch more.

There was Phoebe, just on the other side. The dog put her paws up on the sill, sniffed at Ivy’s sneaker, and woofed.

“Shoo,” Ivy said, as she pressed with her foot, raising the panel halfway. The dog rested her white-whiskered muzzle on the sill. “Go away!” Phoebe’s back end wiggled in ecstasy. “Phoebe, sit!”

The dog obeyed.

“Stay!”

She lowered its head onto her paws. Amazing.

Little by little, Ivy managed to raise the panel the rest of the way. When it was open as wide as it would go, she planted her feet on exposed two-by-fours on either side of the shaft, grabbed onto both sides of the dumbwaiter opening, and shifted her weight.

The straitjacket loosened. Ivy held her breath as it slithered away into the darkness below.

I do not remember how the movie makers who turned my book into a Lifetime Movie Network movie ("And Baby Will Fall") filmed this scene, but it's THE one that readers often say kept them up.

I hope Jenn will use her experience bouldering in one of her novels. Combined with fantasy? Why not!

Is there a scene in a book or movie (Dorothy drenches the wicked witch? Tunneling to freedom in THE GREAT ESCAPE??) that's stuck with you where a character risks life and limb to get untrapped?