by Anton Strout
“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 locking 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.
I decided to follow Jane’s initial advice to “shut it” and I let her concentrate. If I didn’t, she might grab the wrong book off the shelves of the Black Stacks and I’d be screwed. Right now she was my only hope.
With the volume of rats reaching waist height now, I figured there had to be a way to at least get above them or on top of them, packed in as they were. I attempted to pull myself up. It felt like I was fighting my way out of a pit of quicksand, only quicksand tended to bite a lot less. At least my upper body was protected by my leather jacket, but my legs were still being scratched to hell.
The writhing rat mass shifted underneath me. My balance gave out and I toppled over. My body immediately sank into the rats, tails and claws flicking against my face as I hurriedly tried to curl myself up into a protective ball. A tail slid into my ear and I pushed it away with my phone, stifling a scream. I didn’t want to even think what would happen if I opened my mouth.
“Not to rush you,” I said through clenched teeth into the phone, “but right now would be a good time for … anything!”
“I’m not sure if this will work,” Jane said, “but I think I found something.”
Although magic wasn’t my thing, I was willing to give it a shot. Dire circumstances made strange bedfellows.
“Lay it on me,” I said. “Read it to me.”
“No time to explain it,” she said. “It’s not somatic. Just hold out the phone and put me on speaker.”
As much as I didn’t want to expose any part of myself, I pushed the speaker button and extended my arm. Instantly I felt tiny noses and heads trying to jam their way up the sleeve of my jacket.
“Okay,” I shouted through gritted teeth.
Sound started coming through the phone, but it wasn’t speech, or even Jane’s voice. If anything, it sounded like the first computer I had ever owned trying to dial into a network, all electronic hisses and whirs. The rats around me became frantic.
A crackle of electricity shot out through the phone and into the sea of rats. Smoke but no flame rose from the mass around me, and I felt myself slowly lowering to the floor of the room as, one by one, the rats turned into gelatinous, rust-colored goo.
Nothing beats the smell of burning rat hair, and although there had been no fire as such, the air was filled with the charred odor.
Even through my gloves, the phone became unbearably hot and it started melting in my hand like it was made of chocolate. I pulled the glove off my free hand, pried off the back of the phone, and tore my SIM card free. Near-death experience or no, there was no way I was reprogramming all the numbers I had stored.
2
As I waited for Connor and the Inspectre to finish lowering the remains of the rope after they disabled the guillotines, I paced back and forth, squicking my way through the rat goo underfoot. My nerves were shot. My clothes were soaked with the rat frappé, but I wouldn’t allow myself to freak out right now. I was too concerned about Jane. She must have been out of her mind worried once we had lost communication. If I could have climbed the walls to call her back, I would have.
When the rope finally made its way down, I looped it around my waist, granny-knotted it secure, and let Connor, Wesker, and the Inspectre hoist me up. As I reached the top of the well, I pulled myself up over the edge and collapsed with a sticky squelch onto the hideous red carpeting of the convention hall, the fluorescent lights blinding me as I lay there. I was exhausted and could barely move, but I was able to turn my head and take a look at the well I had just crawled out of. The giant gypsy who had rented it to us knelt beside it, inspecting it.
A shadow fell over me and I turned to see Thaddeus Wesker standing there, shaking his head. He was holding his phone. I reached my goo-covered hand up for it, feeling the strain in my arm from climbing.
“Phone,” I said, opening and closing my hand like a kid wanting a toy.
“Very good,” Wesker said as if speaking to a child. He pointed at one of the Wheels of Misfortune. “And that’s a circle. Now what other simple objects can you identify?”
“Well, I can count to one,” I said, flipping him off. “Now give me the phone. I have to call Jane.”
I almost couldn’t believe I was talking back to Wesker so boldly. I guess after being entombed in living rats, he didn’t seem that intimidating in comparison. It was close, though.
“She just called me,” he said, sliding the phone back inside his suit coat. “She knows you lived, regrettably.”
“Why did she call you?” I said, jealousy rearing its ugly head before I could think.
“She works for me, remember? I had told her I was coming down here to supervise,” he said, dismissing me with a wave of his hand. “Besides, as the head of Greater and Lesser Arcana, I think she and I have to have a little chat about what just happened.”
His ominous tone made it sound like it wasn’t going to be a particularly pleasant conversation. Not that any of his conversations were pleasant.
“Is Jane in some kind of trouble?” I asked. Wesker just gave me a wicked smile. I turned to the remainder of my rescuers. Connor shrugged and looked to the Inspectre.
“Not sure, my boy,” Quimbley said. “But in all my years I’ve never seen someone do anything quite like that.”
“Liquefy rats?”
“Oh goodness, no,” he said with a chuckle. “That I’ve seen countless times. My old partner in the Department used to do it during feeding time at the reptile house out at the Bronx Zoo. Poor snakes didn’t know what to do … What I mean to say is that I’ve never seen it done over the phone. Technomancy. That’s something you don’t see every day.”
“I’d like to know just what the girl is doing even dabbling in it,” Wesker said. “We’re not even offering technomancy right now. Not many in-house people can do it.”
I really didn’t give a rat’s ass, liquefied or not, about the magical logistics of it all. If I could get a closer look at the winch, maybe I could figure out just what the hell had gone wrong. The gypsy was still squatting by the well.
“Aren’t there supposed to be safety features on this thing?” I asked with righteous anger in my voice. “The rules for the Oubliette state one peril and a set of tools to contend with it. I got the peril of fighting those rats plus guillotines, and I was down there with useless tools. That’s not how it’s supposed to go. I spent weeks studying it.”
Julius Heron was still crouched over, peering intently at the side of the well.
“There are safety features,” he said. “It seems that all of them failed … simultaneously.”
“What are the odds of that?” I asked.
Wesker laughed. “About the same as you staying in a relationship with Jane.”
/> I ignored him.
Sudddenly, he shot up. “This Oubliette’s been tampered with,” Julius said. He leaned down and ran his fingers over a section of the well, but I didn’t notice any difference at first. After a few seconds, though, something wavered in the pattern and I could see a spot in the stonework that differed from the rest.
Connor bent down next to it. His hair fell across his eyes. He pushed it out of the way and studied the Oubliette. “Looks like someone has it in for you, kid. Not surprising, given our line of work.”
“So who’s out to get me this time?” I asked. I turned to look specifically at Wesker. “I can probably spit on one of them from here.”
“I don’t much care for what you’re implying, boy,” Wesker said, narrowing his eyes at me.
“You did spend a lot of time working undercover with cultists,” I said. “And the only reason I trust you at all is because you helped turn Jane away from them. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve given up their ways. Maybe you had a hand in rigging the Oubliette to fail.”
Wesker looked indifferent and shrugged. “Sometimes things break,” Wesker said, his voice flat and unapologetic.
“I’m awfully sorry, gentlemen,” Julius said. He clasped his hands together. “The Brothers Heron are world renowned for their commitment to quality, and we stand by our equipment. It wasn’t our fault. There was outside interference.”
“Stand by it?” I said. “Sure, just as long as you don’t have to be in it. I could have been killed.”
“Again, my apologies,” Julius said, but his voice was much less apologetic this time. I backed down a bit. “I’ll wheel it back to my booth and my brothers and I will try to figure out what exactly happened here.”
“I say,” the Inspectre said, “I trust there will be some kind of discount, what with your machine almost killing our young charge here.”
“That,” Julius said, “is a matter I will have to discuss with my brothers. If you will excuse me …”
