Outside the Wire Read online

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  I had once read a penny-dreadful’s detective tale of how a lock had been picked with a pair of hatpins. However, standing there in the dim room it seemed an unlikely proposition.

  I had used three long pins to secure my hat to my hair. I removed them then and set the fashionable little felt disc on the top of the tabulator after ensuring my bun was intact. I slid two pins along the doorjamb and twisted, poked and stabbed until I succeeded in lodging them both irretrievably. Despite my inspired attempt, the door remained solidly closed.

  I felt quite foolish looking at the hatpins and holding the third. But in truth, I felt the dire circumstance allowed for more trepidation than self-reproach.

  There was only the one locked exit. The wall vent appeared to be too small for me. The walls were concrete blocks. As I looked around my cell, I noticed for the first time that the ceiling had a vent as well.

  I set the hatpin down and placed the chair on the desk beside the tabulator while both cursing my short Sicilian heritage and praising my forethought at wearing sensible walking shoes. Then I scrambled up onto the chair and balanced as I pushed up at the brass vent plate. On closer inspection I could see that were I to reach it there was still not enough space for me to wiggle through.

  I heard a little metallic tap from under the desk. Then another. I shimmied down my teetering tower of furniture and searched the floor. Nothing unusual.

  Then I noticed two little screws on the floor. I bent down and as I watched, another screw fell and made a metallic tap on the tile. They had come from the corners of the vent grate.

  I watched as the fourth screw rotated counterclockwise of its own accord. And then it too plinked off the dusty tile. The grate was no longer secured, and it fell from the wall. I reflexively grabbed it half way to the floor. It shook violently in my trembling hand. The plaster around the vent looked puckered and reminded me of a fabricated sphincter. There were little flakes along the rough sides of the hole that looked like dried meat.

  I looked closer and found a blood-soaked fingernail pulled out at the quick.

  "Oh, no. Oh-no, oh-no, oh-no."

  Something moved deep in the vent hole. Metallic rattling. Something small slid against smooth metal. Many somethings that I did not like at all. The rattle grew louder as something approached.

  I grabbed the hatpin with one hand and slammed the grate atop the hole with the other. I held it tightly with both hands while the rattling continued. There was something just on the other side of the grate, but I couldn't see. The something brushed the other side. A rat?

  Lord, but I hate rats. Maybe a snake? I hate snakes more.

  My hand, pressed there against the little holes of the vent, was sliced. I pulled it back at the sharp pain and there was a thin, deep slash on the palm, little pearls of blood rising up. Whatever was on the other side of the grate pushed full force, and I almost lost hold with my one hand, still holding the hatpin. Then it was cut too.

  I switched hands, trying to keep the vent from coming free and prevent another laceration.

  What was back there? I pulled my feet up and pressed them against the grate. I had better leverage that way and I laid back.

  "Help!" It was probably useless to yell, but I was wet-myself scared. I screamed it over and over again, not caring that I sounded too shrill.

  I felt the bottoms of shoes being nicked time and again. The pressure against my feet increased. The corner of the grate bucked and I moved my foot to keep it down. And then the other corner popped away. Whatever was back there started to thrash against the grate.

  I stared at the ceiling and tears blurred my vision. This was wrong.

  The grate pushed away, and I stomped it back against the wall slightly askew. From the slim gap at the corner a thin, headless black snake slid out. No, not a snake. It was a length of insulated cable. There were thin slivers of copper wire poking out of the end where, if it had been a snake, the head should be. It waved back and forth seemingly of its own volition.

  Then another slid out at the opposite corner. I kicked at them and lost my purchase on the barrier. The entire grate flew away as the hole expelled a Medusa's head of writhing black cables.

  Thick strands wrapped around my ankles and undulated up my thighs, twisted around my waist. Securely bundled, they dragged me into the hole that had seemed too small.

  I kicked. I screamed. I thrashed. I grabbed at the sides of the vent hole.

  "Please! Please-please-please." I sobbed maniacally as I slid in through the puckered orifice.

  I tried desperately to hold on, but the pulling was irresistible. I slid in and down the vent. I snaked down through spaces almost too narrow for me. I bumped and scraped and left patches of skin and a few shirt buttons as I twisted downward toward the rotting tomato smell.

  The confinement fell away all of a sudden and I fell out of the conduit onto a concrete floor. Exposed electrical light bulbs dangling, girder ceiling, cinder-block walls, most likely the sub-basement. I looked down between my feet in the direction I was being pulled.

  The cables ran across the floor and up into a hole in the bottom of a huge squared appliance. In the dim light it was hard to tell, but looking closely I could see that it was not an appliance at all, but rather a sweaty mass that writhed within an oblong crate of silver wire mesh. Three feet, by three and perhaps seven or eight feet long. An eye blinked and then slid beneath a twisting coil of flesh. Though I saw the thing I could not fix my mind on what it was. The mass of wires that held me ran through a gap in the wire mesh and into a floating darkness in the mass. The corners of the dark space pulled up and made that hole look like a leering grin. Twelve feet.

  Colund sat to the left of the sweating device at a tabulator, a twin of the one I had been using. He looked over his shoulder and down at me.

  "Help me!" I screamed and twisted. I tried to scramble up into a sitting position. Ten feet.

  "We've almost finished Miss Farragolo,” he said. He didn't turn from the tabulator and continued to jack the lever.

  "What's going on?" I screamed. Eight feet. The hole at the bottom of the caged mass dilated open and then closed. Snick. Snick. I couldn't help but think of a dog snapping at a treat it was about to receive.

  "Pishacha is our latest addition. He was enslaved in the Hindu Kush in eighteen forty-seven, but a use wasn't found for him until the tabulator was developed. These little devils can store ungodly amounts of information. And the speed of calculation once the proper algorithms are installed. Amazing. He's the fusion of demonology and automated tabulation, a perfect union, don't you think?"

  "Help me," I cried. Five feet. I didn't want to sound so helplessly feminine. I cleared my throat; tears streamed down my face

  "Teddy said using a woman so was unconscionable, and I had my reservations about a woman in this role as well, but all seems well with Pishacha. And though your algorithm won’t be used, you're still serving a greater good here.” Mr. Colund cooed to the machine-thing.

  My feet slid up to the lip of the open hole. I could see now that it really was a mouth, pressed to an open square in the wire, eighteen-inches on a side.

  A terrible bubbling feeling welled up in me.

  Could stood and then squatted down an arm’s length away and said, “We are preparing for the nineteen-hundred census, and expect with our latest addition here to be awarded the contract. Manual tabulation can’t hope to compete with what we have here.”

  I thrashed side to side and could just touch Mr. Colund. He brushed my hand aside. I bucked and then remembered the hatpin I still held. I stabbed it into Colund's surprised face.

  He squealed.

  I shimmied and twisted and pushed him down toward my feet.

  As his hands shot to his face, I grabbed him by the shirt-front and pulled him over and atop me. Questing cables snaked out of the demon’s mouth and flailed blindly. They swept across Colund's b
lood-flecked face. He started to brush the cables away one handed, the other hand pulling at the hatpin, and the cables wrapped and twisted around his wrist.

  More cables emerged and swept gently across the twisting man's face. Then they wrapped quickly around his head and neck. Colund let out a muffled scream and went rigid. The cables loosened their hold on me, and I scrambled away.

  Colund's head and shoulders disappeared. A spasm rippled through his lower body.

  The edges of the hole reached out as the man was pulled in and it reminded me of a child sucking down a wet spaghetti noodle.

  The entirety of his body was gone in an instant. I sat on the floor listening to the wet crunching sounds over my sobbing gasps. Then silence.

  I sat there with my back against the far wall. An old ticker tape device, identical to the one I had seen in the little room, sprang to life. I walked cautiously and read:

  P*I*S*H*A*C*H*A*I*S*F*E*D