With the hand holding the flashlight and using the distraction of the rumbling crash of noise outside, Penelope suddenly swept the top of the workbench free of the screwdrivers and hammer and let the still-lighted Mini Mag go with it. The abrupt noise and carnival of lights made the man twist about and emit an indignant shout.
The light spun around like a crazed toy top, showing varying degrees of angles within the basement, and the man let out an agonized whoop of protest at the sudden change. His massive arms began to flail for her in the alternating light and darkness, and Penelope felt a sudden sting as his hand raked down the side of her wrist. Biting back the cry of pain, she didn’t stay still and moved into the deepest shadows as she kept the figure in-between herself and the flashlight.
The man’s substantial shape moved swiftly toward the stairs and obstructed them, but Penelope wasn’t there. He grunted in confusion. The door burst open behind him and another man with long black hair, and holding a large flashlight yelled, “Who is it?”
The big masked man stumbled in confusion. The unnatural thunderclap from outside bewildered him even as did the puzzle of the missing thief. His head went slowly about, and it seemed as though he was sniffing the air. The more powerful flashlight of the second man swept over the room and found the moved workbench and the open safe. “Who is it? It is him? Has he come for us at last?”
There was a cough of noise as the man with the oversized kachina mask tried to speak. Finally, the guttural, barely vocalized word emerged from ill-used vocal cords. “Thief.”
“A thief,” the other man repeated slowly. “Just a thief. Where is he?” He took two steps forward, swinging the flashlight carefully about the room, and said, “Damn you. The safe is empty. He took everything. Why didn’t you stop him?”
The hoarse voice struggled to speak again. “Not gone.”
The black-haired man nodded. “I’ll have the people search the house. Make sure he’s not still down here somewhere. And then come help us. We have to get him before he leaves the house. Then you’ll have another…friend with whom to play.”
The rasping voice emerged again. “Not…him.” There was a pause while the enormous man exerted himself. “Her. Pa-Pa-Pa-nel-o-pee.”
“You know her,” the other man said with a note of wonder. “Pa-nel-o-pee?” he repeated. Then he comprehended the word. “Penelope. Find her. Rip her to shreds if she won’t give it back. And feel free to take your time.”
The hulking figure nodded, the shape of the mask tilting ominously.
*
Penelope knew that the big man wasn’t about to let her out of the basement, so with the distraction she chose the not so obvious alternative. With her comprehensive research on the house at Number 26 Durfrene Row, she had noted that Mr. Larry Cameron had spent nearly a half million restoring the house in 1965. He had replaced the gargoyles with carved granite replicas specially commissioned from Germany. He had purchased marble tile from Italy. He had spent a whopping $54,000 on the workmen and the materials to restore the grand staircase. Hand carved oak and mahogany were not cheap, Penelope realized. Mr. Larry Cameron, restorer extraordinaire and man who had paid attention to the smallest detail, had even replaced the dumbwaiters and the ropes that allowed them to work effectively.
Mr. Larry Cameron, wherever you are, thanks for saving my ass. She pulled open the covered doors of the dumbwaiter and crawled into the oversized box. Quietly she had pulled the doors shut behind her, so that it was not obvious that she had exited in this manner. Whether it was fate or karma or serendipity or the god that watched over thieves that had left the box at the bottom level she did not know, but she did know that she fit inside and that the ropes were made out of nylon. So forty-some-odd years wouldn’t have caused them to rot.
Ignoring the blood that spilled over her hand and all over the gemstone, she shoved the precious item in the pocket with the leather gloves. The latex glove on her right hand was shredded from the force of the blow that serrated her flesh, so she stuck the remnants in the pocket as well, pulling out one of the leather ones to replace it. Wasting little time, Penelope pulled on the dusty nylon rope for all she was worth. She didn’t know how the pulleys to the dumbwaiter were constructed, but she knew she had to pull three feet for every one she actually moved.
Realizing that the sound of the box traveling along its tracks wasn’t as noiseless as she would have wished, she continued to heave. The concealing clamor of the fireworks from the festival not a mile distant could still be heard even inside the confines of the box and would protect her for the moment. Penelope pulled harder, not wishing to be featured as the stupid thief trapped in a dumbwaiter on the headlines of The Dallas Morning News. What she really wanted was to be upstairs and out the same window she’d come inside from before anyone thought to bother with something as inconsequential as the grime-covered dumbwaiter that probably hadn’t been used for thirty years, right after Mr. Larry Cameron had gotten bored with it.
The box reached the first floor and the kitchen. She could see a dim light through the crack of the doors of the dumbwaiter. Penelope’s hand went out to open them, but then she heard a voice just outside where she squatted inside. She froze into position and closed her eyes. Oh, jeez, just once I need to listen to that nagging little voice that says, “Leave now.”
*
The watching man sat up straight in his car. Something was going on inside. There was an abrupt surge in the amount of lights bouncing around the windows which could be seen even through the closed blinds. Two black-garbed people opened the front door and lurched outside, frantically looking into the bushes along the front walkway. They peered over gates and tore the wizened shrubbery apart as if searching for something very valuable.
Putting the night vision goggles on, he ascertained that he hadn’t seen that particular pair of individuals before. That put the total number of followers so far to twelve. Like the apostles of Christ, and they seemed to have lost something very important to them, judging by the way they were intently combing the yard and anxiously looking down the sides of the street.
The man sunk down into his seat again. They wouldn’t see him. Never before had he seen such a frantic effort. Has the thief managed to elude the seatco? And if the thief has, then what has he brought out with him? What has he stolen that they want back so desperately?
The man’s head came up as he considered the scenario before him. This might be the opportunity he was waiting for, if only the thief managed to get out of the house in one piece.
*
Through the closed doors of the dumbwaiter and the uproar of the fireworks, Penelope wasn’t sure if she had heard correctly. Two men were talking quickly about something and one of them said something that sounded like “Penelope.” She opened her eyes and tilted her head to listen better, but they had moved away.
It isn’t safe to go into the kitchen, Penelope realized with dismay. She slanted her head to look upward at the ceiling of the increasingly small dumbwaiter box. But there were two other floors above her. There were windows up there as well. It wasn’t a surefire exit from the house, but it was better than the basement with that…man down there.
Pulling at the nylon rope again, Penelope fought her panic. All she wanted was to hurry her exit from this tiny trap she had voluntarily placed herself into, and that was when the box was yanked downward with a vicious pull that caused her to knock her head against the top. The dumbwaiter started to slip downward again, as someone began to pull it back into the depths.
The man in the basement, she comprehended. Penelope spared a look at her cut wrist. Blood probably had dripped on the exterior of the doors and pointed out her trail as if she had left large crumbs of bread. She jammed her hand around the rope and wrapped it about one wrist, cursing as it slammed against the roof of the dumbwaiter box. It hurt like hell, but the movement of the box stopped. She pulled a Leatherman Tool out of her pants pocket and grunted with overwrought approval. Awkwardly she got the blade
out of the tool, gracelessly using the secured hand as well, and began to saw at the rope that allowed downward pulling.
Penelope didn’t know what would happen when the rope was cut through. She hoped that the pulley mechanism which allowed the box to stop in mid-air when someone stopped pulling on the ropes, would maintain the box in its shaft. But she couldn’t be altogether sure that she wasn’t going to drop into the basement along with the rope she had cut.
Closing her eyes, she sawed through the last of the rope, and felt the dumbwaiter lurch downward in response. That’s not good. Penelope bit her lower lip. That is so not good.
Chapter Four
Friday, July 4th
Brush Parole (slang, origin unknown, probably American circa 1940s) - to escape prison
Abruptly, the dumbwaiter jerked to a bone-shattering stop. The rope swung back and forth, and metal components of the box rattled to a halt, leaving her hanging in space. Penelope opened her eyes again and disengaged the tangled rope from around her hand. She replaced the Leatherman Tool in her pocket so that it wouldn’t go missing.
There was a sudden echoing roar that carried up from beneath her, causing the dumbwaiter’s box to shake. She could hear it even over the boom of the fireworks from outside, and she clutched her hands convulsively around the rope. The huge man in the basement had pulled out the length of the rope to find the cut-off end and the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to pull her back down to him. He wasn’t a happy camper.
There wasn’t a lot of time left. The big weird guy in the dank pit was going to tell his buds upstairs to check the dumbwaiter, and Penelope didn’t have any time to waste. She put her shoulders and back into the effort. Yanking the rope again, the slashed end began to pile up around her body as it had nowhere else to go, and she didn’t have time to thread it through its proper hole.
Suppressing a troubled grunt that summed up her ongoing tribulations, she tugged harder.
*
The seatco was agitated. The black-haired man with the flashlight could hear the bellowing beast all the way from the first floor, eerily coordinated with the din of the fireworks from outside. It must have found the intruder. She was only an inconsequential little thief by the name of Penelope who would shortly be no longer for this Earth.
If it were possible, the man wanted to talk to her before the seatco ripped her arms from their sockets and before they had to dig through a steaming pile of viscera in order to find their rightful possession. He retreated to the pantry and exploded through the doors to the basement. He found the seatco pulling at the wooden pieces of the dumbwaiter’s doors, crunching each in a massive fist to negligible pieces of mulch. Even while it moaned and roared in helpless fury, it pounded on the brick walls of the basement, and pieces of grout and brick showered down. In the strong beam of light from the flashlight and the smaller beam of what must have been the thief’s flashlight, the seatco appeared to be every inch of the monster it was.
The black-haired man commanded the beast to stop in his own language. The seatco shut up suddenly, and turned toward him, shifting from one foot to the other. Its hands twitched in powerless anticipation. The oversized kachina mask moved restlessly from one side to the other. The beast struggled to find its voice. “Thief,” it said finally.
The man looked around. The flashlight skimmed over the room. No one was in the room with them. The girl was still missing. “Th-eff,” the seatco said again, trying to enunciate the word carefully. It pointed toward the wall with its oversized fist.
A rough-shaped black opening was what the seatco indicated. Shreds of a wood frame remained and bricks littered the floor where it had yanked fruitlessly. A section of nylon rope hung from the mutilated opening. One end had been jaggedly shorn off. The man rapidly understood. The thief had escaped through the dumbwaiter’s shaft. The seatco had sniffed her out like a great wretched bloodhound.
The man stuck his head inside the shaft of the dumbwaiter and pointed the flashlight upward. He could see the box of the dumbwaiter far above him, moving at an abbreviated clip. The thief was inside the box, and she was pulling herself upwards to what she considered the relative safety of the second or third floors.
“Upstairs,” the black-haired man said to the seatco. “Search her out and retrieve what she’s stolen.” The seatco turned away, lumbering off to his hole. It would have to leave the basement in its own way because its immense body would not fit through the only narrow door.
However, the man did not follow. Instead, he put the flashlight down so that it still showed the dark opening of the dumbwaiter and removed a weapon that he had tucked into his belt. He rarely had to use the lethal appearing Glock handgun. But it was a large caliber gun and would take down anything that he hit. It had a magazine capacity of nine rounds, and he already had one chambered. It was the culmination of technology of the culture above that he truly detested, but it was an accommodating tool all the same. It would efficiently ensure that a pesky thief would never have a chance to escape the house. It was true that he wouldn’t get to talk to her, but preventing her flight was more important.
Depressing his trigger finger several times, he fired upward and felt an intense joy as the bottom of the dumbwaiter exploded into an eruption of sparks and cascading wood chips.
*
Penelope saw the faint light of the second floor’s doors to the dumbwaiter and let the rope go. Metal railing shuddered and rattled for a moment, but the box didn’t move in the dreaded direction downward. She blinked with relief and went to crack the doors. However, the doors wouldn’t budge. She quickly determined that they had long ago been nailed shut.
Worming her way around the inside of the too small box, Penelope got her feet positioned so she could push with her legs. The wood groaned and paint chips crackled in remonstration but did not move. Dammit, she thought. She suddenly realized that the roaring protest of her escape no longer reverberated from below. Two beams of light suddenly appeared, shining through the bottom of the box. One came from the empty hole where the cut rope had gone. The other beam wormed its way around the nylon rope that guided the dumbwaiter box upwards. Someone was shining a flashlight up the shaft at her. Someone is looking at me.
Better not to be trapped in this little box, she thought urgently and slammed her feet against the dumbwaiter’s doors again. The decades-old wood screamed in agony. She renewed her efforts and kicked again. It divided with a harsh splintering noise that filled Penelope’s heart with hope. She kicked again and saw a small room filled with cardboard boxes. A dim light from a partially open doorway let her see that she was almost out. Another kick made the shredded doors fall awkwardly to the floor.
Penelope tumbled out of the dumbwaiter just as the bottom of the box disintegrated in a detonation of rapid gunfire. Flying shreds of fractured wood stung her cheek as she quickly turned her face away. Her eyes opened wide as she realized that a bad situation had just become a thousand times worse. They weren’t even waiting for the police to come. The owners of the house intended to kill her themselves, and the hell with the consequences. It was, after all, Texas, and everyone knew what happens to people who break into other people’s houses in Texas. Go ahead and shoot that light-fingered individual deader than dog snot, even if you have to drag them to your side of the property line.
Being inside a dumbwaiter in the middle of the house wasn’t any clearer than that. Penelope had broken and entered and she had their property slung across her back and shoulder and something very significant in her pocket. There wasn’t going to be a property line to dispute, and a dead thief wasn’t going to make allegations about what she had or hadn’t been doing in someone else’s house. She wasn’t going to carry tales about the very large, very strange individual in the basement dressed in an oversized Native American mask, appearing as though he was constructed of a hundred different people. She wouldn’t be complaining about how they had shot at an unarmed woman who had NOT made any overt threats toward them.
Although there wasn’t a board barring it, there was a sash that was impeded by nails pounded into the frame on either side. They effectively prevented someone either on the inside or the outside from raising the window more than an inch. Penelope didn’t pause. One of her feet launched outward and shattered the glass window. I don’t care if it is the second floor. I’m leaving. Right now. Glass fragmented and dropped away in a tinkling cascade of deadly jagged bits. She kicked away the remaining glass from around the edges.
Even though Penelope had quietly shut the hallway door behind her, she realized it had opened just as quietly. A shadow suddenly blocked out the meager light from the door, and Penelope knew well that she shouldn’t look over her shoulder, but she did.
*
The man with the black hair in the basement retrieved his flashlight and shone it up into the dumbwaiter’s shaft again. He saw the ruined bottom of the box and ragged pieces of wood hanging down. The rope was only a shred of nylon, and nothing could have prevented the occupant of the dumbwaiter box from being perforated by the bullets that had destroyed the wood and other parts of the box. But there was no blood dripping down. There wasn’t a body contained there. He cursed under his breath. The girl had the luck of the coyote. She was escaping from the most perilous situation and seemingly coming out unscathed.
Shadow People Page 3
