The Point of the Pit: Part Two

The Point of the Pit
by Zeroin

Part Two: Vince

Vince stared at the ceiling, chewing his gum like cud, a thoughtful look (or at least as close to a thoughtful look as someone like Vince could manage) on his face. "So, whatcher sayin', Armie, is that all the poor saps on the hooks are traitors?"

Armand nodded. "Traitors and political prisoners, spies…stuff like that. People who deserve it." Next to him, Paul was busy at his station, monitoring what appeared to be a series of constantly-shifting graphs. "That's what I think, anyway." He sat back in his chair, looking expectedly at the guest, chewing on his lip.

The guest nodded. "Seems reasonable. The government's got to do something with traitors." He stared out at the racks, watching them hang there like clanking strings of macabre baubles. He looked at them and felt no remorse, traitors or no. Death held no meaning for men like him; life was not precious and death was not pitiful in the mind and eyes of the guest.

Vince was scowling. "Well, it sure makes sense, I guess. I just always thought they were fired employees, or somethin'." He gnawed on his gum and returned to staring thoughtfully at the ceiling, eyebrows knit together. "You know, or somethin'." No one paid him any mind, and he made no further comment.

There was quiet in the room. Paul busily typed and clicked, Armand busied himself with straightening his wrinkled coverall, Vince stared hawkishly up at the smooth, clean ceiling, and the guest stared at the vile racks, eyes drifting across the bodies. He looked at them, examined their scarred, chalky flesh, riddled with splotches of red and purple-black bruises. Jaws hung open, tongues lolling out like dead slugs. Eyes varied; some stare straight ahead, some were turned in different directions, some were rolled and some hung from the sockets on gristled cords. Blood dripped from every available orifice, including ones that weren't normally present in human anatomy. Hooks and spikes and claws and chains and clamps and cages with barbed bars jutted every which way, half-hidden by thick layers of what looked like corpses (none of them, not even Armand, were sure if they were dead or not, even now).

As he stared at the immobile human mosaic before him, absorbing its every eldritch detail, a thought, like a windborne feather, spun and wound through his subconscious, weaving its way across neurons in astronomical sparks of electricity, until it effervesced in his frontal lobe in a flash of neural lightning. It hung in his head, an orb of curiosity hanging as the fading shower of revelation fell around it.

He turned around, and looked at his companions. Paul and Armand were still at their stations, poking away at their panels. Vince was over at the vending machine, perusing the merchandise with his head in the nimbus and his hands in his pockets.

"I had a thought," he began slowly, hand stroking across the rise of his cleanshaven chin. The orb flashed and crackled behind his dark, sable eyes.

They all looked at him with querying looks. Vince idly slipped his Slider through the slot on the vending machine as he looked at the guest. A candy bar dropped from the racks and into the dispenser tray. It lay there, untended and ignored. Armand's fingers laid poised on the instruments of his station, looking expectantly at the visiting party. Paul's head was half-tilted in the guest's direction, left brain seeped in the technicalities of his job, right brain poised to listen to whatever was to be said.

The guest, well-aware that he had everyone's attention, rubbed his chin, stubble bristling against his fingertips, and continued. "So," he said, addressing them all but really only talking to Paul and Armand, "you get shipments in her every day?"

"Yeah," Paul said, idly flipping switches and pushing buttons. "Every half hour, actually. We have twenty-five minutes to transfer each set of racks from our station. After the contents are counted and recorded, we send them down the tunnel at the bottom." Here he pointed out the window, at the Pit's lower maw, silver, gaping like a too-stretched orifice. "And we never see them again."

The guest's eyebrows rose. His fingers ceased rubbing. "Never?"

"Never," Paul confirmed, nodding sternly.

"So..." The guest turned fully to Paul, leaving Vince to look at his back. The rat-faced man scowled a little, mouth twisted in a tiny tilde sneer, and bent down to get his candy. "So you don't have any idea what happens to the racks after you send down the tunnel?"

"Not a clue." Paul pressed a final button and turned to the guest, lacing one leg over his knee, arm draped over the back of his work chair. "But like I said, I'm not the only man here with an opinion." He gestured at Vince, whose scowl turned into a smirk. "Vincent over there's entertained many a visitor with his 'theory' on that, as it happens." He gave both Vince and his guest a smile dripping with sweet saccharine.

Vince returned the smile, teeth glinting like shined flint, looking almost triangular in the monotone shadows cast by the glaring flourescents. Armand shifted nervously in his chair. A tingle of anxious static crawled across the guest's flesh, raising bumps across his skin. Both of them could feel the grating, red-razor tension that hung between Paul and Vince like taut steel wires, waiting to snap in an explosion of frayed metal. The dislike and the contempt, hidden under a paper veil of courtesy, flashed between the coworkers in miniscule sparks. Armand, a frequent witness to these underlying emotions, had begun to liken their silent conflict to that of soldier versus snake, good versus evil, God versus Satan.

Vince, smirking like a slinky tomcat, slid a chair from the table and over to the other three men. He sat down with an exaggerated sigh of content and stretched his shoulders in a way that reminded Armand of pictures of a rooster he'd once seen: one with the bird ruffling its feathers, standing tall, proud, and deceptively large. The only thing wrong with this rooster was that it had the eyes of a snake, the smile of a shark, and the body of an oily, vile man.

Vince took a large bite out of his candy bar and said, through masticating teeth and crushed chocolate:

"Well..."

***

The racks slid down their tracks, sliding past the cracks, the cracks in the walls. Past the cracks, down the tracks, slid the racks, bodies swinging to and fro to the sound of silent music, macabre and moldering. Sparks sprayed in Roman candle fountains from the tracks as the racks swung 'round a corner, blood drifting behind in a maroon-red flare. The racks, and the bodies, and the creaking, squeaking cacophony that accompanied them were gone before the sparks had touched the stone sides of the tunnel.

The racks rocketed down their rails, the grinding hum of bodies shifting together overpowered by the screams of tortured iron and steel, scraping together, shooting sparks and spewing smoke, friction turning the wheels of the racks red-hot. They shot down the tunnel, orange iron demons carrying a vile cargo to the depths of hell.

They slowed as they reached their destination. It was not the brimstone-laden, burning, churning depths of Lucifer's lair; instead it was almost a carbon-copy of Paul and Vince's Pit. It was exactly the same, right down to the shiny steel sides--but in place of the multitude of sensor-circles there was a wall of folded metal beams and bars, clinging to the steel like newborns, curled and contracted around themselves. The beams--and half of this second Pit--were splattered with blood, dried stark maroon in waves, splashes, curving arcs, Jackson Pollock tapestries of crusting liquid. The splatters stretched up almost to the top, where there were still the faintest dots of red spread across the shining expanse; and all the way to the bottom, growing thick and dark.

The racks slowed, stopped, and swung slightly with the remnants of momentum. Its cargo hummed and clanked, settling into an inclined line as it locked into place, the clamps shutting closed with echoing CLANGs.

There was a silent pause. The bodies were still. The racks were still. Even the blood was still, congealing on blue-white limbs and orange-red iron.

A chittering of clicks, like the sound of buzzing, biting insects, erupted from the beam-laden wall, rebounding off the sides of the Pit and down the tunnels. The beams and bars unfolded themselves, stretching out from the wall, gears grinding as they extended, flexing and turning as they reached out towards the racks, groping for them with insectile appendages.

There was a hiss, shots of steam along the tops of the racks, and a groaning grind from the bottom of the Pit. With great creaks and tiny squeaks, cage doors shot open and clamps released, freeing nearly thirty-thousand bodies into the air.

The beams and bars reached, groped, stretched, water shifting in hydraulic joints, gears clanking together, claws click-click-clicking--and clutching, thin metal phalanges wrapped around unmoving necks, arms, legs, waists, heads, worn-away treads cutting scalloped shapes into the yielding, bruised flesh. The insectoid arms clamped and drew back, retreating back to their wall, prey in hand. Bodies hung from the trembling limbs, dangling in the air, bearing looks of shuddering intensity, frozen in place by death or drugs; who knew?

They hovered over the Pit's third great maw for mere seconds before the arms released them, huffs of steam and squeals punctuating the action. As soon as the bodies had been freed, the arms screeched and closed back in on the racks, ready to do it all over again.

Down they dropped, turning slowly, limp limbs bending gracefully in the air, hair flapping around their heads in matted halos. They fell, and fell, turning and spinning, dancing as they dropped towards doom, wind flapping in their wounds.

The bodies poured down, down, and the dull thuds came together to form a disgusting music, a rising symphony of cadaverous impacts. Each note in this evil orchestration was a crescendo, the low whistle of the plummet building up to the sound of impact--sometimes a thud, sometimes a gong, sometimes a smack, and, on the occasions when the bodies would land head-first, a splat followed by the drip drip dripsof descending droplets of bright blood. Heads split, eyes popped, limbs cracked, and bodies fell, hitting the steel, jittering slightly, clinging momentarily, before slipping down the slope, joining their companions in the great black rift that slit the Pit from end to end.

They slid in, and were seen no more.

The arms were busy above, lifting bodies off hooks and spikes, out of clutching cages and from the ensnaring chains, working their way down the racks, tossing the bodies down into the depths with quicksilver speed. Occasionally a body would cling to the side of the rift, gravity and momentum having failed to fully deliver it, and an arm would descend and nudge it in. Sometimes it would be one body, sometimes a clump of two or three, and, on at least one occasion, six or seven limp, staring bodies piled on the rift’s rim in a tangled knot of jutting, blue-gray limbs, skin pallid and matte. All were pushed into the rift without pause, tumbling in like unstrung marionettes.

The crescendos faded away, tempo dying down as the ritardando grew and grew. The noise slowed and thinned, until it wasted away, disintegrating into silence. The clockwork arms drew back to the wall, curling and folding back into place, clanking and chittering as they did so. The racks quietly dripped blood, hanging, empty, from the black tracks above.

Silence.

There was an awful, eldritch grind--then a rising, shrieking squeal--and then the noise of a great engine, rumbling and roaring itself awake, rising ponderously from an ungentle nightmare sleep. It snarled from somewhere beneath the second Pit, belching up a vile plume of oily black smoke that stretched up from the rift like a rising snake. It met the ceiling and billowed outward, rolling and gathering against the steel, hanging over the rest of the Pit like a faux thundercloud.

There was a flash of color, the blur of movement, and a strange, wet, squelching sound.

A torso, ragged at its wound of a waist, slid down the wall of the Pit, down the sloped bottom, and back into the rift. As it did, long, streaming ribbons of blood spewed from the shadowed hole, adding a whole new coat to the painted walls. It leapt from the rift in great splatters and jets, sent flying by unseen machinery. It wasn't long before ragged scraps of flesh and chips and chunks of sliced bone joined the blood, flapping and spinning in the air like gory confetti. Occasionally whole limbs would go flying out of the rift, legs and arms spinning clumsily, heads spiraling as they corkscrewed high up--then came down, jaws hanging and eyes rolled, dropping back into blackness.

The grinding grew, the engine bellowed like an injured lion, machinery squealed and buzzed, and suddenly the bottom of the Pit was filled with a tornado of gore, swirling through the air as it was ejected at insane velocities from the mechanical bowels. The gore came up, hung, and came back down, slipping and sliding back into the rift, siphoned off to who-knew-where. Limbs tended to come up several times: once attached to bodies; once not; once flayed; once raw and white, devoid of covering, glazed with blood. Then they were consumed in the great churning grind, lost in its massive, noisome snarling. Had this Pit been hell, whatever lay beneath the darkness of the rift would have been Cereberus, the tri-headed hound of the underworld, guardian of the deep trenches of death.

The Cereberus machine let out its final growl, jetted its final arcing splash of pureed flesh, and let out a terminal puff of charcoal-black smoke before it wound down into silence, unseen tick-tock machinations slowing and stopping, their clicking and clacking fading into minute echoes that quickly and obscurely dwindled unto death.

A loud and grating horn let loose its roar, and the racks, empty and cold, slid down the tracks, into the maw.

Into darkness.

End Part Two