Anton Strout: Deader Still

“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-click ing 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.