Deader Still

by Anton Strout

  “Come on,” Connor said, heading off to our right. “I think Inspectre Quimbley and Wesker said it was set up down this way.”

  “So why is Wesker going to be here?” I asked. “Does the director of Greater and Lesser Arcana have nothing better to do than come ridicule me? We’re Other Division. He doesn’t even hold any jurisdiction over us.”

  “But he does hold it over anything magical happening in the tristate area,” Connor said, “so Inspectre Quimbley is letting him make sure that the Oubliette rental goes smoothly.”

  “So Wesker’s hope that I fail is just a bonus for him today, is it?”

  “Something like that, kid,” Connor said.

  The traffic of humanity thinned out a little over in this section of the Javits Center. We turned down one aisle and walked until it dead-ended at a hanging blue curtain. Connor pulled it aside.

  “After you,” he said.

  I stepped through into an open space about twenty feet square. The Inspectre and Director Wesker were there, and smack in the center of the curtained-off area was the Oubliette itself. I had only seen pictures of one before, but up close and in person the object that would decide my fate in the Department was a bit underwhelming. Essentially it looked like a prop from a stage show—a round stone well on a wheeled platform. It looked like the kind of well people made wishes on, complete with a little wooden roof and a winch bar running between the beams, with rope coiled around it. Although it didn’t look deep enough to even stand in, I knew that once I was lowered inside it, it would open up into the magic and dangerous well I had been studying.

  As Connor and I crossed to the Inspectre, a hulking figure rose up from behind the well, a giant of a man who looked like he could be brothers with Penn Gillette.

  “Don’t tell me I have to fight a giant, as well,” I whispered, hoping he couldn’t hear me.

  “Heavens no,” the Inspectre chimed in. He had a booming British accent and a walruslike mustache. “Unless, I suppose, that’s one of the options on the challenge wheel for the Oubliette.” He waved the huge man over. “Julius, come here.”

  The giant came over, moving much more nimbly that I would have expected for a man of his size. He held a wooden easel in his hand.

  “This,” the Inspectre said, patting me on the shoulder, “is the young man who’ll be testing in the Oubliette today. Simon Canderous.”

  Julius put down the easel and offered his hand. I took it. With hands that big, he easily could have palmed my entire head like a basketball.

  “Julius Heron,” he said, sounding like that should mean something to me. He looked hopeful. “Of the Brothers Heron?”

  I nodded uncertainly.

  “Nothing?” he asked. “You’ve . . . never heard of us?”

  “Sorry,” I said, “no.”

  He looked disappointed. “We’re world renowned . . .”

  “I’m sure you are,” I said, “but I’m kind of new to all this and I don’t get out much.”

  His face brightened. “That’s probably it. Anyway, good luck,” he said, and headed back over toward the well.

  Julius set up two easels and attached the Wheels of Misfortune to them, miniature versions of the one Pat Sajak uses. One Wheel listed the types of equipment I might be given to survive with, while the other listed the challenges, sporting names like Scarifying Scarabs, Sinking Sand Trap, Grievous Guillotine, Watery Grave, Leaping Lizards, and Ravenous Rats. A chill ran down my spine. Although I was a native New Yorker—and therefore rat-familiar by association—the idea of them in particular creeped me out like nobody’s business.

  As I tried to shake off the heebie-jeebies, the Inspectre turned to Wesker. “Is everything about ready?”

  Wesker walked around the well once and checked out the Wheels. He gave the Inspectre a nod.

  “Now, then,” the Inspectre said, “all that’s left is the pat down. If you’ll permit me . . . ?”

  I held my arms apart and spread my legs farther apart. This felt dangerously similar to my past brushes with the law, but I knew it was simply to make sure I wasn’t bringing anything into the Oubliette that would prove helpful in the test.

  The Inspectre stopped when he felt the leather holster I usually hung my retractable bat in. It didn’t help that I had forgotten to remove the bat from it. He gave me a stern look.

  “Sorry,” I said, reaching inside my coat and pulling the bat out of it. I handed it over. “Force of habit.”

  “You mean being a cheater?” Wesker asked, moving closer, no doubt to keep an eye on me.

  I ignored him, but after the Inspectre was done with his search, Wesker started looking me over as well.

  “What’s that?” he said, pointing at a rectangular-shaped item in my front pocket.

  “My cell phone,” I said, “but if I get to the point where I have to throw it at whatever challenge awaits me down there, I’ve probably already failed, right?”

  “Leave the boy alone now, Thaddeus,” the Inspectre said. He turned to me. “Shall we?”

  I stepped over to the well and looked down. The shaft plunged into darkness, and I got a sense of disorienting vertigo from the difference of its depth compared to the shallowness of the showroom floor. With little effort, Julius helped lift me up onto the edge of it and then handed me the winch rope to secure around my waist. I pulled off my gloves and tied the rope around myself. Julius gave it a tug.

  “Too tight?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “It does make me feel like a giant yo-yo, though.”

  Connor laughed. “No arguments here, kid.”

  “Would you rather go down there?”

  “Been there,” he said, backing up, hands raised, “passed that.”

  The Inspectre stepped forward. “Enough horsing around,” he said. His face was serious and he lowered his voice to a whisper. “Listen, my boy. Keep your wits about you and you’ll do fine.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But remember. While many regular Department members have washed out in the Oubliette before, no member of the Fraternal Order of Goodness ever has.”

  Nothing like a little last-minute pressure to get the heart going. Before the Inspectre could say anything further to unnerve me, I pushed myself off the edge of the well and began my descent into the Oubliette.

  I focused my mind on everything Jane and I had gone over together. Right now I was in the forty-foot shaft that would eventually open into a large, circular, stone-clad pit. I’d have to watch out for a central hole in the floor, a pit within this pit, the lower one traditionally used for excrement and dead prisoners—at least in nonmagical Oubliettes out there in the world.

  After about twenty seconds of being winched slowly downward, I looked back up the stone-walled shaft. Three heads were peering down from above.

  “What’s the matter, Simon?” Wesker sneered. “Don’t care much for small spaces?”

  “Leave the kid alone, Thaddeus,” Connor said. “I bet you wet yourself when they put you through this.”

  “Listen, you ungrateful toad . . .”

  “Hey,” I shouted, “can I have a little quiet? Trying not to die down here!”

  “Let the boy concentrate,” Inspectre Quimbley said, the ends of his mustache dropping down into the shaft like hairy little stalactites.

  “Go get ’em, kid,” Connor shouted. “You’ll do fine. Besides, I don’t want to have to break in a new partner.”

  “We do have safety measures in place, you know,” the Inspectre said, more to Connor than me. He sounded offended.

  While the three of them continued watching and talking amongst themselves, I attempted to shut them out. I had to keep my mind focused on the test.

  The chattering overhead stopped and I looked up. The Inspectre gave me a hearty thumbs-up.

  “Alrighty,” he said. “We’re spinning the Wheels now.”

  From the top of the shaft a click-clack-clicking began, and I could actually feel energy in the air as the magic started lock
ing in around me. I waited with dread for whatever both Wheels stopped on. I knew I could do this. I had to do this, and I would. I was up for any of the challenges presented to me, but what I really dreaded hearing was . . .

  “Ravenous Rats,” Wesker said, rolling the R’s and savoring every evil-sounding syllable of it. It was hard to believe he was one of the good guys sometimes.

  “Are you kidding me?” I shouted up. “Are you fu—?”

  Before I could finish my expletive, the twin blades of one of the other challenges on that Wheel—the Grievous Guillotine—shot out of the wall above me, cutting the rope and dropping me like a sack of seriously screwed Simons. As I fell, I clawed at the sides of the pit, barely slowing the last twenty feet of the fall. I hit the ground hard, but thankfully the leather of my coat cushioned a great deal of the blow. With the wind knocked out of me, lying there and not moving would have been nice. Not that I had that kind of time—the rats would be coming soon.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I shouted up at them. “Why the hell did the guillotine go off? The challenge Wheel already selected the rats. One peril, that’s the rules of the test!”

  “Hang on,” Connor said, his voice full of uncertainty. “We’re experiencing some kind of technical difficulty, kid.”

  “You hang on!” I shouted back. “If something’s gone wrong, just get me out of here. Lower the rest of the rope.”

  “That would fall under the banner of technical difficulty,” Connor said. “The winch is jammed.”

  None of the Oubliette challenge was going according to what I had studied, and now I heard the sound of approaching rats. I rolled onto my side, feeling an ache in my lower back. I positioned my arm on the stone floor to push myself up, but one of my still-gloveless hands came to rest on something, and my mind automatically slipped into psychometric mode.

  Given the distractions of pain and trying to orient myself, I didn’t even get a chance to think about controlling my power. Suddenly, I was sucked into the past of someone else who had been in this Oubliette. This poor guy was neck-deep in slithering snakes, and thanks to the fact that I was experiencing everything he was, I was treated to the sensation of a thousand twisting tails and flicking tongues all over my body. With desperation, I concentrated on pulling myself out of the vision, but found it near impossible with so much sensory input overwhelming me. I closed the eyes of the person I was, blocking out at least the visual of him slowly going under in a sea of snakes. That seemed to help, and as I returned to my own mind I traded the sound of incessant hissing for the squeak and chittering of the approaching rats.

  As the first of them came skittering out of holes in the stonework, I quickly pulled my gloves off of my belt and slid them on just in case I came across anything else I might accidentally touch that would trigger my power. I scrambled to my feet and looked up. The opening above was a pinprick of light now, and I could no longer make out the features on the three faces looking down on me. I could, however, still make out the sound of the second Wheel still clacking away.

  I yelled up to the opening of the well. “What about the other Wheel, the one that picks my survival equipment?” I asked. “When do I get my equipment?”

  “That still seems to be functioning,” the Inspectre said with cheer in his voice. Finally, I heard the other Wheel slow to a stop. The Inspectre read off it. “Your equipment is . . . a wooden stake and holy water. Should be conjured up any second, my boy.”

  Great. Even the equipment being provided wasn’t the proper gear for facing this challenge. A torch had been the preferred method of fighting rats that I had studied—even the club option would have been welcomed—but a stake and holy water? If I had been facing vampires, I would have been all set. I doubted either item would have much effect on the rats, unless these were some strange new breed of vampire rats. The holy water would prove useless. The stake, however, at least had a pointy, jabby end, so it still held a hint of promise.

  As if on cue, an audible pop of materialization came from directly over my head, and I looked up in time to see the two items in question falling toward me. The thin metal vial of holy water fell first and I caught it deftly with one hand. The stake, however, was falling end over end, and rather than let the pointy end possibly jab into my hand, I opted to let it fall to the ground. Or rather, it would have fallen to the ground if the ground wasn’t fully covered with the growing spread of rats. Instead, the stake sank into the sea of rats and disappeared from sight.

  What I wouldn’t have given to have had my retractable bat right then. I kicked at the rats, but my feet were slow to move through the growing depth of rodents and it was of little use. To find the stake, I was going to have to reach into the mass of rats, no matter how much the idea squicked me out. Thank God I at least had my gloves with me.

  The circular room was now calf-deep in rats, and because of their sheer volume they could no longer avoid the guillotine blades popping in and out of the walls. Still-twitching bits of rats started flying through the air. I bent over the spot where I had last seen the stake and thrust my hand down into the writhing mass of still-living rats. As I fished around, I pulled my face as far from the rats as I could. The thought of them clawing and biting at me made me want to scream, but I kept searching. I could feel tiny teeth pulling and working their way through the thick leather of my gloves, and I stood back up.

  More rats were climbing up my pant legs, nipping at the denim and digging their claws in. I tried to brush them away, but for every rat I swatted, two more appeared out of the swarm.

  I looked up. “Hey, guys. Two perils. Still imperiling me! A little help here,” I shouted.

  I could see the hands of Inspectre Quimbley and Connor frantically uncoiling what remained of the rope from the jammed winch. Even with the two of them working on it, the end of the rope was still well above me. By my quick calculation, I’d be three feet over my head in rats before they could lower it far enough. There was nothing I could do.

  I heard a shrill squeak of pain and looked down. One of the rats had been tearing through the fabric on my jeans but reeled back when it tried to bite me and came across something hard in my pocket. My cell phone. In my panic, I had almost forgotten they had let me keep it. I batted the rodent away and tore my phone free from the gaping hole. I was thrilled to see I had service down here. Maybe it was the magical nature of the Oubliette, but right now I didn’t care. I did what I was sure any other guy would do when he was up to his knees in supernaturally generated rats—I called my girlfriend. After all, not every guy had a girlfriend who dabbled in magic.

  After I dialed, the phone rang for what felt like forever before Jane answered.

  “Tome, Sweet Tome,” she said. “You spell it, we sell it. This is Jane speaking.”

  “Jane,” I said, thrilled to hear her voice.

  “Hi, hon,” she said. “Did you like the catchphrase? I’ve been trying them out for the store. What do you think?”

  “Not now,” I screamed. The bites were increasing.

  “It wasn’t a very good one, was it?” she said. “How about . . . oh, my God, you have the Oubliette today, don’t you? Is it over? How did you do?”

  “Later,” I shouted. “I’m in the Oubliette and kind of in a sitch right now. A knee-deep-in-rats sitch that’s about to become a neck-deep-in-rats sitch any second now. And the guillotines are going off as well. I’m fucked, hon. I thought that since you’ve been working with Arcana for a bit . . .”

  That seemed to kill any chatter in her and she went silent. The rustling of paper filled the line.

  “Hon . . . ?” I said. “Hello?”

  “Be quiet,” she said. “I’m looking for something . . .”

  “I just wanted to tell you that I love you,” I said, wading through the rats. “You know . . . if this doesn’t turn itself around fast.”

  “Just shut up,” Jane said sternly this time. “I need to concentrate.”

  “Where are you?”

  �
�I’m in the Black Stacks,” she said over the sound of more page flipping. “And I’m trying to save your life, so shut it.”

  “You’re in the Stacks? You think looking through Cyrus Mandalay’s prized collection of diabolical books is going to help us out?”

  “It’s not his anymore,” Jane reminded me.

  I thought of the last time I had seen him, the night he’d escaped from the Metropolitan Museum of Art when the Department had come down on his whole ectoplasmic Ghostsniffing ring. Being trapped down here in the Oubliette with all these rats almost made me miss that chaos-filled night.