Angels and Operators: Then You See the Hanging Chains
Installment Seventy-Six
Previous Installments (In Reverse Order)
It’s late at night. You’re back at Pierce’s house. It buzzes like an electronic cicada, thrumming with the resonance of Operator influence. There’s a twitching feeling in your stomach. It’s your connection to the fetus in Judy’s thumb. It feels the danger. You’re lucky that your hesitant, foolish, so-called “sane” self didn’t doom the champion with its caution and indecision. But everything is all right now. Your true self, the one with senses open to the screams and cries of the universe, is now in command.
With a flashlight borrowed from a nearby hardware store, you inspect the condition of Pierce’s windows. That’s what the message from the angels told you to do. You sweep the light quickly, briefly, across each of the panes, so as not to alert the monsters inside.
Finally you come to the basement windows along the alleyway between Pierce’s house and its neighbor. They’ve been blacked out. Looks like black garbage bags taped to them, from the inside. You test them. One of them, the one furthest back from the street, is loose in its frame. With some effort, you manage to pop it out. You squirm carefully through it, landing awkwardly on the concrete basement floor.
The beam of your flashlight sweeps across a pile of boxes. Then the components of an old stereo... a utility shelf, tilting under the weight of jars, tools, and mildewed copies of Popular Mechanics... One box in particular radiates nearly palpable menace. It’s labeled hangers.
Then you look past it to see the hanging chains, suspended from a cage of metal scaffolding. Affixed to them are several pairs of handcuffs. A rusted meat hook dangles over a drain. You step back, tripping over a nearly full case of duct tape.
Muffled voices sound, emanating on the other side of the door at the top of a set of worn wooden stairs. You can only hear half the conversation, and then only barely: “I say we get rid of it all.” It’s Dom’s voice, now with the buzzing thrum of the Operators audible within it. Then the other voice speaks. Then: “It’s because he’s crazy that I’m worried.”
The doorknob rattles, as if a key is turning in its lock mechanism.
Now what do you do?
Under the hood
Last week, in which you decided what message to take from the mysterious poster, was a squeaker. Two votes separated the winner (check the condition of Pierce’s windows) from the runner-up (find Mr. Bloom), 39% to 37% of the vote. Kidnapping Judy came in third, at 12%, with 6% each wanting to get a hook and hang either Pierce or Dom on it.