The Readymade Thief

by Augustus Rose

  All she could think about was how thirsty she was. She watched the dust motes swirl in the light of the projector. When he leaned in and put his hand on her belly, she flinched but she didn’t move. “Come,” he said. “Tell me where it is. Let’s unlock the universe together.”

  Lee tried to gauge the angle of his body in relation to hers. With her eyes she followed the projector cord to the wall. It was the only source of light in the room. She calculated the distance between her and the door and kept an image of the route in her head. Then she launched herself forward and dropped to the ground, feeling his hand swipe the air above her head. Had she any hair, he might have grabbed her by it. As she rolled away from him, she took hold of the cord. She yanked, expecting the room to go dark, but the gray light from the monitors still glowed. Lee was on her back on the floor and the Undertaker was standing now, looking down on her curiously. Lee managed to get to her knees by the time he’d reached her, that blank, curious expression never leaving his face.

  Lee swung the cord with all the strength she had, and it whipped through the air, the heavy three-pronged plug slashing his face. He winced and put his hand to his nose. His expression changed, all the placid curiosity erased in an instant. He reached into his suit pocket and came out with a flat silver wand, which opened to a straight razor, the steel glinting dully.

  Lee launched away from him, across the room. She reached the door, grabbed the handle, and yanked it open just as she felt the man grab her by her hood and yank her back and up. As if she were a puppet made of straw. With one hand he held her off the ground, then slammed her against the wall. Instinctively, she turned so that her shoulder took the impact and not her belly. Lee felt the wind nearly leave her. He let her crumple to the floor.

  The man picked the razor up and held it against her cheek, then slid it down in a slow caress. She felt the blood flow down her neck before she felt the cut itself. Lee reached into her pocket and brought the little object up between them. “This is what you want?”

  His mouth went a little slack, and he became completely still, as though afraid moving might destroy it. He pocketed the razor and reached out a trembling hand. “May I?”

  “You want it?” She spat in his face, a warm mix of blood and saliva, then threw the thing as hard as she could across the room. The man got a panicked look on his face as the thing hit the monitor bank. It bounced off, and for a moment Lee hoped she’d broken it, but then she saw it roll, intact, across the room. She took that moment to launch herself at the door again. But he grabbed her and smashed her head against the wall. This time everything went black.

  EIGHTEEN

  SHE didn’t know how long she’d been down—the combination of the drugs and the head blow made time untrustworthy—but when she opened her eyes, she was alone. The room was silent. Even the music, faint before, was now gone.

  Lee got to her feet using the wall for balance. Her costume lay draped across the sofa like a molted skin. The little Calabi-Yau space, whatever it was, was gone. The monitors were black. Lee went to the controls and flipped the main switch.

  The monitors blinked on. From an angle within the wall, the big clown head stared back at her stupidly. In the parking lot, most of the cars were gone, but Annie’s parents’ Audi was still there. Another monitor showed the hall outside the costume room, just below her. She could see the Policeman there, leaning against the railing and staring down at the lit end of a cigarette. Three others showed angles on empty rooms in depthless black-and-white: the dance floor, the costume room, and a large round room filled with steel bunk beds. Everything was still, each monitor like a photograph. Then Lee saw a lump on the dance floor shift. She noticed others sprawled across the floor, then, on another monitor, a few kids on bunk beds in the round room sleeping off the excesses of the night. None of them looked like Annie.

  Lee scanned the walls along the ceiling, looking for ducts. Nothing. Then she spotted something on the other side of the room: a steel floor vent set into the carpet. A heating duct? She went to inspect it. It was attached to the floor with four screws. She rifled around in the kitchen drawers until she found a bread knife, which she used to remove the screws, then pry the grate loose. Lee eased herself down the shaft as slowly as she could.

  It shot straight down a good ways, Lee had no idea where. To a burning furnace, for all she knew. But there was no turning back now. Every five feet or so was a small lip where the sections joined, and she used these to brace herself, pushing her feet against each lip and resting before lowering herself again until she reached an L that sent the shaft running horizontally.

  Lee scrunched herself into a squatting position and made her way forward. She could hear the hum of air running through the vents. The tight shaft continued in total darkness, then she saw a faint glow at the far end. As she crawled toward it, the swell of her belly became truly noticeable for the first time. Not because she was so much bigger but because her body wanted to protect what was inside her. It made crawling difficult. The glow resolved itself into light from a vent, and when Lee got to it she peered through the slats. She was above the dance floor. Lee kicked the vent off and dropped down. The stark fluorescent lights made the room look like a bus station in the middle of the night. The floor was made from thick black rubber mats like one might find on a playground, sticky and streaked with grime. The whole place smelled of old sweat. Plastic bottles and cigarette butts and bits of trash littered the room, and as at a bus station, there were several sleepers along the couches on the perimeter, one up on the empty DJ platform. Each of the sleepers wore a costume that looked shoddy in the light, like a stage prop from a children’s play. The whole place looked sordid and cheap.

  Lee went to a boy lying on the floor beside a couch and shook him by the shoulder. He sputtered in response, tried to turn away, and finally shot up, rubbing his eyes. His face had a postcoital serenity that turned to panic when she told him that the police were on their way.

  “Get up.” She handed him a shoe, which had come off somehow as he slept. “Wake up everyone you can find, get them out of here. You only have a few minutes.”

  The boy sat staring down at his feet, one shoe on, one off, before seeming to decide that the easiest solution was to take off the shoe that was on. He left without waking any of the others, shuffling in the wrong direction at first before finding the door to the exit tunnel. Lee woke the others in turn, each of whom left quickly.

  From the middle of the room, Lee spotted the surveillance camera perched like a bird of prey just above the DJ station. The circular walls were concrete covered in thick, dark, velvety curtains. Two large vertical ventilation shafts ran floor to ceiling, one on each side of the room. One was an inlet vent for air from the surface. Another must have been the heating vent, and it broke off near the ceiling and sent off a horizontal shaft lined with outlet vents.

  Then Lee noticed something she hadn’t before: near the center of the room, one of the big rubber mats was torn and broken around the edges. When she got closer, she saw a handle embedded in the floor. She reached down and lifted. The panel pulled up easily. A circular stairwell, encased in a gray steel tube, led down. There was no handrail, so Lee stuck close to the wall as she made her descent. About twenty feet down she hit a landing and a steel door. The stairs continued down.

  Lee listened at the door, but there was nothing to hear. She eased down on the handle, and it slowly opened into another round room with the same dimensions as the dance floor above. Rows of steel-framed bunk beds lined either side, and the floor was strewn with old books and magazines, leftover food containers, and dirty clothes. The beds were messy with blankets and sleeping bags, and breathing lumps slept on several of them. Lee went from bed to bed looking for Annie, nudging the lumps awake and telling the groggy, confused teenagers to get the hell out. Then she recognized a pair of feet with green toenail polish Lee had applied herself. They were sticking out from under a pil
e of plush blankets. Lee nudged her awake.

  Annie moaned languidly and turned onto her back, blinking up at Lee and smiling. “Lee! Hey, Babylove . . . come in with us.” She shifted to make room, and Lee saw the other form in the bed, beneath a leopard-spot blanket.

  It was just a boy, no older than Annie, rawboned, in a gauzy wifebeater and loose tighty-whities. He had a buzz cut like the jocks in her school used to wear, but he was too skinny to be a jock. Plus, he had an earring. He gaped around the room, disoriented, until the sight of Lee sent him fumbling for his pants.

  “Who are you?” The boy’s voice was low and scratchy, like he’d already inhaled a lifetime of cigarettes.

  Lee turned to Annie. “Get dressed. Now. You need to get out of here. It isn’t safe, you understand?”

  “What time is it? Where’s my phone?” Annie asked the air. “I need to get home before my parents wake up.”

  The boy had gotten his shirt on and was one leg into his pants when Lee grabbed him by the arm and dragged him to the other side of the room. She turned back to Annie, who was rummaging for something in the bedding. When she’d gotten the boy out of earshot, she pushed him up against the sink and hissed into his face. “Where is he?”

  “Who?”

  “The Undertaker. Where is he? Where are the rest of them?”

  The kid raised his hands. “Hey, I don’t know anything about anything. I met your friend last night and we . . . Wait—are you her girlfriend? I’m sorry, I—”

  “You’re not part of any of this?”

  “Of what?”

  The boy seemed genuinely confused, but Lee didn’t know if she could believe him. She didn’t really have a choice. A plan was beginning to form in her head. “What’s your name?”

  “Teddy.”

  “Are you okay to drive, Teddy?”

  “Of course. I don’t do any of that shit, I’m straight edge.”

  “Let me see your license.”

  Teddy just stared at Lee, and Lee saw a bit of defiance begin to dawn in the boy’s eyes.

  “Give. Me. Your. Fucking. License. Teddy.” Lee reached around the back of his pants until she found his wallet, dangling from a chain. He didn’t resist. Lee opened it. She pulled out his driver’s license. In the picture he was a girl, with long straight brown hair and the collar of a prairie dress framing her neck. Elizabeth Pinter. She was seventeen years old.

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Fuck off. I get enough bullshit in my high school.”

  Lee handed the wallet back. “I’m sorry about that. But I really don’t care about it, either. You know the way out of here?”

  “Sure.”

  “Annie’s got her parents’ car outside. The blue Audi. I want you to drive.” Lee remembered the madness in the Undertaker’s eyes, his talk of retribution, and it occurred to her that if she did what she was planning to do, they might come after Annie. “Ask her if she has a relative she can go to. Just for a few days. I want you to drive her there. Not her home, you got that?”

  “What if she doesn’t have any relatives around?”

  “Then drive her to your home.”

  “I don’t think my parents—”

  “Fuck your parents, Teddy. You will drive her somewhere safe that is not her home, and then you tell her to call her parents and get them out of there, too. Do you understand me?”

  Teddy just nodded.

  “Good. And Teddy?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lee got close up in his face. “You live at 4826 Sansom Street. If anything happens to Annie, if you let any harm come to her, I will hunt you down and hurt you. You understand?”

  Teddy nodded, very quickly, looking not at Lee but at some point beyond her.

  Lee left him there and went back to Annie, who had managed to pull half her clothes on before falling back asleep. Lee woke her and got her standing. She took Annie’s head in her hands and kissed her, once on each eye. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Annie just teetered there, confused and a little giddy from the kisses.

  “Go with your friend, okay? He knows what to do.” Lee pulled Annie out of the bed and nodded to Teddy, who took Annie around the waist and left the room.

  The room smelled of mildew and ammonia. Lee sat on a bed and stared up at the surveillance camera. If someone was still here, he or she was watching her now. Lee got up, gave the finger to the camera, and opened the door. She went down.

  NINETEEN

  THE level below let her out onto a narrow circular floor surrounding the tube of the stairwell, which was in turn surrounded by a circle of doors. Lee walked around the corridor twice, looking up at the small, rust-colored figures riveted into the wall above each door. She recognized them by now, though she couldn’t tell which was which. Duchamp’s nine Bachelors: Delivery Boy, Gendarme, Cavalryman, Undertaker, Flunky, Busboy, Policeman, Station Master, Priest.

  Several of the doors were cracked open, the rooms unoccupied. Lee poked her head into a wedge-shaped room the size of a cruise ship cabin. It had a neatly made bed in a metal frame bolted to the wall; a desk at the far end held a computer and several books. She edged into the room and opened an old armoire. Hanging inside were three antique policeman’s uniforms, their thick blue wool moth-gnawed and faded. They were quite old, she supposed, but in the fluorescent lighting they looked like one of the moth-eaten uniforms her uncle the reenactor wore. He’d died young and was buried in one of those suits.

  She looked into another open room, almost identical but emptied. Except for an open file box. Lee could see a stack of paper inside. She came into the room and picked one up off the top: Edie’s MISSING poster. There must have been hundreds of them, maybe a thousand. Lee stared down at the paper dumbly until she understood: Edie had never disappeared at all. It had been a ruse to get Lee to the silo—they had bet on the fact that she’d go looking for her here. They’d been in control the whole time. They were still in control, running her through this underground maze.

  The stairwell went down to another landing, this one with a door on the landing and a steel gate on the floor to more stairs. The gate was locked. She heard footsteps coming down. She tried the door.

  Lee came into a round room much larger than the Bachelors’ rooms; it took up the entire level. There was something off about the space; it felt smaller than it should, judging by the levels above. Maybe it was just that the room was so crammed with stuff. Where the walls upstairs were beige-painted concrete, these were paneled in dark-stained wood and hung with old oil paintings. A bed on an elaborate iron frame stood at one end. Lee might have been standing in a preserved bedroom of some old European château. In a dark wood armoire hung four identical black suits that she recognized as the Undertaker’s.

  Lee searched the room for another vent cover. She knew there had to be one here somewhere, but it was hard to spot through all the clutter. One wall was covered in African tribal art: masks, totems, fertility figures with huge erect penises, and a long wooden spear with a polished steel head. A hand-crank Victrola stood in one corner, and on the large oak bookshelf was an antique grinding machine on a three-legged base. The books were all leather-bound. A marble chess set stood on a table by the bed. The wall opposite was taken up by a full-sized reproduction of The Large Glass. Like the one beneath the museum, it had the missing elements intact.

  There was no television, no stereo equipment, no computer, no laptop or cell phone charger coming from a wall outlet. Nothing at all that could be placed as part of the past thirty, fifty, maybe a hundred years. Something about the freakish obsessiveness of it all—the idea that all this death and destruction was somehow connected to some old goon’s fetish for the past—made Lee sick.

  A door opened into a small bathroom, its porcelain sink lined with antique shaving instruments—a fur brush, a straight razor—as well as a cake of shaving soap and an ol
d cologne bottle. On its label was a small photo of a homely woman in a black feathery hat. There was a claw-foot tub with rust stains like dried blood running along the water line and around the drain. Lee uncorked the bottle and sniffed, recognizing his sandalwood cologne, like forest loam. When she put it back, she saw the vent in the wall above the mirror. She knew they could see her as long as she was in any of the main rooms, but she might be able to get to where she wanted to go if she could make it back into the ventilation system.

  Lee climbed on top of the sink, grabbed the razor, and set to the screws. She was working on the last one when she heard the door to the bedroom open. She dropped the vent cover into the tub, not caring about the noise as she pulled herself up and into the shaft.

  Lee fell straight down and nearly crashed through to the bottom of the shaft, but the steel bowed and held. Pain shot up both legs, and she squatted gingerly to make sure that she could stand. She thought of the baby, and her body tensed involuntarily. She’d known a girl from school who had gotten pregnant and then miscarried eight weeks in during track practice. The girl had acted relieved, telling the story with a “whew” and an exaggerated wiping of her brow, but Lee could see the sorrow in her eyes. The thought of miscarrying here, of bleeding out the baby here in the darkness, made her more afraid of anything the Undertaker might do to her. Lee craned her neck up. Not much light came through from the room above, but she thought she saw a shadow move.

  Dim shafts of light bled through a series of vent covers ahead, and she crawled toward them. An acrid, chemical smell tickled her nose, then feathered her lungs. She reached a vent cover and peered through. The room was the size of the room with the bunk beds, except it was filled with lab equipment: long-necked beakers and coils of tubing and large square machines and bottles of chemicals. At the end of the vent shaft she could see a huge fan enclosure leading to an outlet shaft. And just to the right of it, stacked against the wall, a tower of huge plastic chemical drums. Here was the room she’d been looking for. The drums would be full of combustible solvents. If she could set a fire down here in the lab, she thought she could make it up and back out before the whole place went up.