Anton Strout: Deader Still

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.

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.”