[Original Novel] Pressure 2: Dark Corners, Part 4

^{Previous parts: 1, 2, 3}

The hulking meat mountain moved to bar the hatch. “Were. Past tense. Nobody’s leaving, as of this moment this entire facility is sealed.” Veins in his neck were visibly pulsating, seen up close. “You have a prisoner with you. Was he delivered?” James nodded. “Cell block six. No idea which specific-”

The radiant Summer sun shone a dull red through James’ eyelids. The feeling was more vivid than usual. The first realization he managed was that he’d been knocked out cold by the unidentified bruiser from the sub terminal. James cracked his eyes open and reflexively shielded them from the sun, to discover moments later that there wasn’t one.

He blinked. As is often the case when one’s most basic expectations are violated, it took him a minute of simply sitting and taking in his surroundings to recover. Once the mental restructuring was complete, it occurred to him that he should take inventory of himself. Same clothing, unusual only in that the normal recurring dream saw him wearing garments he didn’t actually own but which better suited the pastoral landscape.

There were no sunflowers. No Summer sun, no cottage. He sat, still dazed, on a cold concrete floor inside of what he initially figured for a factory of some kind. Rusted pipes ran overhead and snaked down walls.

Long stains, likely water damage, ran down those walls and into a corroded central drainage grate. The room was of moderate size and shaped like a large capital U, with a door inset in the convex wall behind him and tall windows inset in each of the 16 facets of the larger concave wall opposite it.

A cautious stroll to either end of the curved room revealed doorways at both ends, but no doors. He examined the frame more closely. There weren’t even hinges, no sign whatsoever that anything had ever been attached.

Through the doorway was some type of machine hall, grand in scope but ugly in a utilitarian, industrial way. Long rows of work stations with various tools, some of which he recognized, repeated down the length of the hall and by the end he thought he had a pretty good handle on what the building was for.

That comfort gave way to renewed confusion when he opened the doorway to the spiral stairwell. It was abnormally wide, with a diameter of at least twenty feet and needlessly large steps descending into darkness.

Some part of him couldn’t accept the break in routine and with each new room he explored, it seemed at least plausible that this door would open onto the familiar field of sunflowers he’d visited every night without fail....until now. And if not this door, then the next.

This was not his dream. It was alien. Someone else’s dream. Something entirely unfamiliar. As he returned to the machinist’s hall, James struggled to recall whether he’d ever toured an industrial building. Where was this imagery coming from? It became all the stranger when, upon scrutinizing one of the machines, he discovered it wasn’t designed to do anything.

Not that he imagined himself an expert on industrial machinery, but it was plain for anyone to see that the machine’s assortment of gears worked against each other, that the thick exposed red and black wiring deliberately shorted in several places. He stood back and internally fielded possible explanations, throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck.

Sabotage? But there wasn’t any clear way to reconfigure the machine that would make it do anything useful. No sign of damage either. Whoever designed it arranged the components this way deliberately, and either never intended for this machine to function or didn’t understand how to design one that would. “Engineered by idiots”, James muttered, and set off searching for tools.

The first tool he spotted had a recognizable handle, but the business end resembled no tool he was familiar with and it was impossible to guess what it might be used for. As much an exercise in abstract absurdism as the machine he’d just studied.

Still, if nothing else it made for a decent improvised hammer. As he turned back towards the machinist’s hall, a pile of papers caught his eye. Each step he took towards the pile of paper refuse caused the ink figures on them, presumably writing, to change.

Examining them up close confirmed this; When looked at directly they held almost completely still, but shifting the viewing angle caused the lines to swim around and rearrange, shifting back to a particular angle restored their original positions. It didn’t seem to matter, no matter how they were viewed the ink scribblings were gibberish. If it was a coherent language, James had never been exposed to it.

It was when he returned the paper to the pile that he felt a rigid form beneath it. Sure enough, a second tool, this one vaguely resembling a wrench but with ‘teeth’ like those on a worm gear. Neither the fixed nor moving portion of the gripping implement seemed to rotate, so why they should have this feature was a mystery.

James returned to the machinist’s hall, remembering the incompetently configured gears and envisioning different configurations that might at least freely rotate rather than working against one another. The first tool proved more useful than expected, none of the gears were permanently affixed but corrosion made them difficult to pry loose and only by using the larger of the two tools for leverage was James able to dislodge one.

Repositioning it on an empty rod, he reassessed the chain of gears and concluded that it ought to properly rotate if provided with power. Of course, that was a separate problem entirely.

James diverted his focus to the wires. There were small printed labels at two points that he intuited were the source of power and the point at which a switch was intended to connect. A bit of grunting and prying loosed the pin which fastened one end of the wire to its terminal, and soon he had the crude circuit set up such that bridging the two ‘switch terminals’ would restore power to the machine, if indeed there was a working power source somewhere in the building.

Gripping the smaller of the two tools by the rubber handle, he prayed it was sufficient insulation and used it to short the gap. The immediacy of the machine’s reaction gave him a start.

Somewhere deep within the casing a large electric motor whined, sounding very much like a jet engine being throttled up. The gears above him spun merrily, each turning the next, and looking around he took notice of electric lights flickering to life.

All emitted the same color, a dull orange yellow James assumed was typical of very old bulbs and only coincidentally the exact same color of the sunlight streaming in through the windows. Restoring power to the strange machine illuminated bulbs throughout various rooms that were dark when he first explored them. Only after an hour or so of exploring these rooms did James begin to feel disturbed by the discovery that no light, anywhere in the building, was any other color.

James returned to the stairwell. He’d decided against descending it earlier because everything below twenty feet was shrouded in darkness, but since restoring power the full length of the vertical shaft was now illuminated in the distinctive shade of sickly yellow emitted by every bulb and window seen so far.

After a moment of mental preparation he began to descend. Sudden panic took him, then immediately faded. Was there some significance to the first step? Some unseen threshold he’d just crossed?

A quick glance around the stairwell for reassurance, then James continued his descent. Thirty or so feet down he encountered the first of many ‘decks’. Not full floors, but places at which the shaft abruptly widened to accommodate an iron mesh walkway encircling the stairs with odd cages lining the outer wall.

Not jail cells, at least not obviously, as there were no bars. Rather the doors to each cell were chain link fence, and all fastened shut with identical rusted padlocks. All except for one, which hung open.

“I didn’t hit him that hard. Some just go down easy”. The conversation outside James’ cell was the first stimuli his conscious mind registered and he continued to focus on it as the rest of his senses were gradually restored.

He felt numb but found to his relief that all of his limbs responded. Intense pins and needles followed. More than likely they’d dumped him into this cell in a position that restricted circulation.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 5!}