The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy (18 page)

There were no shouts or footsteps as we approached the school. “No night watchman,” said Jackson reassuringly. “I told you. He would have appeared on the master schedule.”

“Good,” said Elizabeth. “Alone to wreak our mischief.”

“There should be an iron-grate-like thingy somewhere. According to the blueprints …” Jackson was pacing aimlessly, staring at his phone.

“Uh, Jackson? We are standing directly in front of an iron-grate-like thingy.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

This part of VORTEX was a Jacksonian contribution. Trawling Selwyn’s blueprints in an idle moment on the admin server, he’d seen something labeled
Dumbwaiter
. It was as narrow as a grandfather clock. “Okay okay okay,” he said nervously. “It should just slide up.”

He grabbed a bar and heaved. Playing
Sun Tzu’s Art of War
doesn’t exactly develop one’s upper-body strength, so I joined in. Turns out pencil-drawing and gerbil-training don’t either. “Milksops,” muttered Elizabeth. She squeezed between us. “One, two, three,
shove
.”

There was a raspy squeaking noise that at first I thought was coming from Jackson’s windpipe, but the grate gave way. It slid up into the wall and we stood on tiptoes, pushing, until we heard it lock into place like a garage door.

Behind it, there was another door.

“This is the true portal,” said Jackson.

Elizabeth opened her mouth and then closed it again. One snide comment about the use of the word “portal” in a non-video-game context: suppressed.

Jackson was running his hands over the door with his flashlight in his teeth. “Doesn’t seem to have a keyhole,” he murmured. “Which is good, since the renovation notes indicated nothing of the sort.”

“Why don’t you try the obvious method?” said Elizabeth.

Jackson aimed his index finger at the door.
“Alohomora.”

Elizabeth walked up to the door and shouldered it. It gave way. “
That
obvious method.”

We peered inside.

“It’s tiny,” said Elizabeth. It was maybe three feet deep and no wider than the entrance, eighteen inches or so. “It’s going to be tough to fit all three of us in here.”

“Maybe one of us should go down first,” said Jackson.

We looked at each other. Nobody volunteered.

“Guess we’ll have to squeeze in,” he said.

It was definitely a squeeze. I took Baconnaise from my pocket and held him at my neck to protect him. “Why couldn’t they have had the foresight to build this for three full-sized people?” said Elizabeth.

I spit. “Dreadlock in my mouth,” I informed her.

“Gross,” she said.

“My sentiments exactly.”

“It’s grosser for me than for you.”

“Are you kidding? Your dead protein filaments were in my
mouth
.”

“My hair is coated with your
saliva
.”

“Guys,” said Jackson. “Squeezing into this thing is not the only item on our agenda.”

Elizabeth snapped back to attention. “Does it move?”

“One would presume so, yes.” Jackson was snippy, I knew, because he was beginning to think his brilliant plan would be foiled right from the start. If the dumbwaiter didn’t move—if it was defunct, if it needed a key, if we couldn’t figure it out—then we couldn’t get into the school. We’d fail. We’d return to boring, betrayed life.

Jackson was playing his flashlight over the interior walls. “No buttons,” he mused.

“It’s not an elevator,” I said.

“Think, think, think.” He had his eyes closed. “Think like ink. Aha! I’m Mr. Ink Cartridge. I can’t push buttons.”

I always knew Jackson was going to crack one of these days.

“The signal to descend must be shutting the iron grate.”

Oh. Shit.

“Oh,” said Elizabeth. “Shit.”

“Can we shut the door from the inside?” I said.

“I hate to say it,” said Jackson, “but it’s not very smart for all three of us to imprison ourselves on a Friday night in a dumbwaiter that hasn’t been used for thirty years.”

I had enjoyed the interlude. It’d been cozy, to be squished between Elizabeth and Jackson, to rub Baconnaise’s soft fur against my neck, to wait for something to happen.

“We’re going to have to split up,” he said.

“I wish there were four of us,” said Elizabeth. With three, one would always be alone.

“Get out,” I said. “Let’s get out so we can talk rationally.”

Outside, our collective body warmth quickly dissipated. It was about fourteen degrees.

“Jackson,” I said, “you’re the only one who’ll have a shot at fixing this thing if it breaks. You have to stay out here.”

“We could both go,” Elizabeth said to me.

I wanted to say yes. There was only one thing that sounded worse than descending alone in an antique dumbwaiter, and that was being stuck alone in an antique dumbwaiter.

“It’ll be better if only one of is—is incapacitated,” I said.

“Let me go.”

“I’m going.” I barely recognized my own voice. I never sounded that firm.

“This better not be some retrograde, anti-feminist, male-savior complex,” said Elizabeth, but she stepped back.

“I’ve got Baconnaise. I won’t be alone. And I’ve got my phone.” Though I doubted the T-Mobile network covered dumbwaiter rides to hell.

“Send the dumbwaiter up empty if you can,” said Jackson hurriedly, “and we’ll know that it works. Otherwise, you’ll have to let us in by the human back door.” According to Jackson’s research, that door only opened from the inside.

I stepped into the dumbwaiter. “See you soon,” I said, trying to sound breezy.

Jackson was fumbling in his coat pocket. “Here.” He gave me a baggie of trail mix. “Provisions. Just in case.”

“That’s so tactless, Jackson,” said Elizabeth. “Though if you
do
get stuck, you could always pull a Donner Party—”

“And what, eat himself?” said Jackson.

“No, eat Baconnaise.”

“Eighty calories max. Also lacking vital micronutrients. Not worth it.”

They were still debating whether that’d count as cannibalism when I pushed the inner door shut. It was instantly pitch-black. “I’d never eat you,” I said into the darkness.

Baconnaise wriggled in response.

I turned on my flashlight, but then I could see what a small cavern I was in. And I thought I should conserve my batteries, just in case. So I turned it off.

I’d been telling myself that it wouldn’t be that bad. It was that bad.

I started to panic. I braced my hands against the walls, just to have something to touch, and I couldn’t even feel them. I guess that was a side effect of the panic, but it felt like nothingness, as if I were a consciousness floating in a senseless sea,
an out-of-body experience that made me realize how much I liked my body, how much I liked my eyes and my ears and my hands, and I’d never really thought about it before but it was very cool that they could bring the world into my head. I need to spend more time appreciating them, I thought. I would hold a Sense Appreciation Day. And then I thought I might scream.

But I didn’t want to scare Baconnaise. I grabbed him and tried not to squeeze too hard—

And that’s when he came to me. Ezra Pound came to me.

I relaxed. It’s just death, I thought, but it’s
not
death. I could hear my breathing, and I could feel the metal walls with one hand, Baconnaise with the other. And I could see the glinting tabs of my zippers, which must have beguiled what unknowable light there was. I could see.

And there was a crank, the noise of machinery groaning to life, and the dumbwaiter began to move.

The trip down was rough. I was very happy that my tongue did not happen to be between my teeth at the moment of impact.

But Baconnaise and I both survived. And as soon as I clicked on the flashlight, I realized that the door had caught at the story above the printing presses, so the dumbwaiter was now open to the subbasement. The printing press seemed like a welcoming friend.

I turned on the lights. After I spent thirty seconds blinking and stumbling about like a wounded bat, I saw a button on the wall by the dumbwaiter. There was just one. I’ve had misgivings about pressing unlabeled buttons ever since watching
a History Channel program about the random hiding spots for nuclear warheads, but I gave it a shove with my thumb. It worked. The dumbwaiter clanked upward.

When the dumbwaiter came down again, Baconnaise and I found ourselves stupidly grinning at an empty chamber. Then I saw Jackson’s phone. He’d typed me a message.
Can’t make it descend from the inside. Send us keys to real door. Key cabinet to your left
.

A few minutes later, I heard clattering on the stairway. Jackson seemed strung out.

“VORTEX is the Swiss cheese of plans,” he said.

“He’s been developing this metaphor for a while now,” Elizabeth told me grimly.

“Uh, it stinks?”

“It’s full of holes.”

“Hey, man, cheer up. There was one hole. It’s the doughnut of plans.”

“Let’s get to work.” Jackson stalked over to the key cabinet. “Do they realize what a liability it is to have these keys out in public?” He grabbed a bundle, and another.

“We’re not in public,” said Elizabeth, shuddering a little. The subbasement felt even eerier at night. All that looming machinery made it feel like a mad scientist’s laboratory, and I couldn’t forget that we were a good forty feet below ground.

Jackson tossed Elizabeth one bundle of keys and stuck one in his pocket. “They’ve got a complete set in here, the morons.”

“The janitors probably use it,” I said.

“Duh,” said Jackson. I was insulted until I realized he was talking to himself.

“Let’s go,” said Elizabeth.

We flipped off the lights and followed her up the stairs to the school. It was so shadowed and still that even the familiarity of the building was creepy.

“Here we are,” said Jackson. This was where we would split up.

“We could stay together,” said Elizabeth.

“We need to minimize our time in here,” he said briskly. “Anyone could come back after the episode. There’s a lot of kTV people running around with access.”

We’d rehearsed all these arguments already. We needed to investigate two places, so we needed to break into two groups.

Elizabeth hesitated. I watched her. I would have barely shaded her high cheekbones, I decided. They were the brightest points of her face, two round summits topping angular mountains. I’d have thoroughly cross-hatched the shadows beneath her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Text if you’ll be more than an hour.”

“See you then.”

Jackson began to spin away, but I grabbed him. I’d intended to hug him, but he was Jackson, and I was me, so instead I awkwardly slapped his shoulder.

“Waste of time,” he muttered, but I noticed that he patted me back.

“Do you want Baconnaise?”

He considered it, which I took as a sign that he was more nervous than he was pretending. “Keep him.”

Elizabeth real-hugged him. “Go,” she whispered.

Resolutely, Jackson turned. Elizabeth and I went down the opposite hallway.

Jackson was heading for the art studio that had been taken over by the kTV production team. After school yesterday I’d chatted up Thomas, my cameraman pal, and in a fit of boredom he’d told me a lot about their editing software. I’d put my cell phone in my front shirt pocket, recording. After Jackson finished mocking me for my dumb questions, he’d said that he thought he could hack into their editing program from afar. But first, he’d need to familiarize himself with the real apparatus in their lab.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth and I would search the papers. Need you ask where?

In the Snake’s lair. In Coluber’s office.

Our goal was to find something incriminating. Something that proved Coluber was profiting from
For Art’s Sake
, either as a kickback from kTV or because he was skimming off the top of what Selwyn got. Of course, Elizabeth and I couldn’t do much hacking. I kid: we couldn’t do any hacking. “It doesn’t matter,” Jackson kept saying. “He’d never store felonious files on his school computer’s hard drive. We won’t waste our time.”

So instead, we were kicking it old-school, searching his files in the grand tradition of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. We’d take photos of anything interesting so we could analyze it later. Jackson called this real-life hacking. I called it breaking and entering, but somehow, I still found myself outside his office, watching Elizabeth jiggle a key in the lock.

“Shh,” I said as she gave a
pfft
of frustration.

“Don’t you
shh
me.”

“Stop making noise then.”

“It fits. I can tell it fits. It’s just not turning.”

“It has to work. Jackson said it would work.”

“Ooh, and whatever Jackson says is—oh.” The tumblers fell into place, smooth metal sliding against smooth metal. I could almost feel the rightness as the key finally turned.

“Wait, wait,” I said, fumbling in my pocket for the supplies Jackson had handed me.

“I don’t want Baconnaise—” she hissed.