not a handle, but a crank, similar to those featured on casement windows throughout the house.
Flanking the crank were two curious items that appeared to be valves of some kind.
He opened the door, switched on the light, and stepped into a room measuring sixteen feet by twelve. An odd place in many ways.
A series of steel plates formed the floor. The walls and the ceiling also were covered in sheets of steel.
These plates and panels had been welded meticulously at every joint. During his study of the room, Fric had never been able to find the smallest crack or pinhole in the welds.
The door featured a rubber gasket. Now old and dried and cracked, the rubber had probably once made an airtight seal with the jamb.
Built into the inner face of the door was a fine-mesh screen behind which lay a mechanism that Fric had examined more than once with a flashlight. Through the screen, he could see fan blades, gears, dusty ball bearings, and other parts that he couldn’t name.
He suspected that the crank on the outside of the door had once turned the suction fan, drawing all the air out of the room through the valves, until something like a vacuum had been created.
He remained mystified as to the purpose of the place.
For a while, he’d thought it might have been a suffacatorium.
Suffacatorium was a word of Fric’s invention. He imagined an evil genius forcing his terrified prey into the suffacatorium at gunpoint, slamming the door, and gleefully cranking the air out of the chamber, until the victim gradually suffocated.
In fiction, villains sometimes engineered elaborate devices and schemes to kill people when a knife or gun would be much quicker and cheaper. Evil minds were apparently as complex as anthill mazes.
Or maybe some psycho killers were squeamish about blood. Maybe they enjoyed killing, but not if they were left with a mess to clean. Such murderous types might install a secret suffacatorium.
Certain elements of the room design, however, argued against this creepily appealing explanation.
For one thing, a lever handle on the inside of the door overrode the deadbolt lock operated by a key from the outside. Clearly, the intention had been to guard against anyone being trapped in the room by accident, but it also ensured that no one could be locked in here on purpose, either.
The stainless-steel hooks in the ceiling were another issue. Two rows of them extended the length of the room, each row about two feet from a wall.
Gazing up at the gleaming hooks, Fric heard himself breathing as hard now as when he’d just finished racing up eight flights of stairs. The sound of every inhalation and exhalation rushed and reverberated along the metal walls.
An itching between his shoulders spread quickly to the back of his neck. He knew what that meant.
This wasn’t merely rapid respiration, either. He’d begun to wheeze.
Suddenly his chest tightened, and he grew short of breath. The wheezing became louder on the exhale than on the inhale, leaving no doubt that he was having an asthmatic attack. He could feel his airways narrowing.
He could get air in more easily than he could get it out. But he had to expel the stale to draw in the fresh.
Hunching his shoulders, leaning forward, he used the muscles of his chest walls and of his neck to try to squeeze out his trapped breath. He didn’t succeed.
As asthma attacks went, this was a bad one.
He clutched at the medicinal inhaler clipped to his belt.
On three occasions that he could remember, Fric had been so severely deprived of air that his skin had taken on a bluish tint, and he had required emergency treatment. The sight of a blue Fric had scared the piss out of everyone.
Freed from his belt, the inhaler slipped out of his fingers. It fell to the floor, clattered against the steel plates.
Wheezing, he stooped to retrieve the device, grew dizzy, dropped to his knees.
Breath had become so hard to draw that a killer might as well have had both hands around Fric’s throat, throttling him.
Anxious but not yet desperate, he crawled forward, groping for the inhaler. The device squirted between his suddenly sweaty fingers and rattled farther across the floor.
Vision swam, vision blurred, vision darkened at the edges.
No one had ever taken a photo of him in a blue phase. He’d long been curious about what he looked like when lavender, when indigo.
His airways tightened further. His wheezing grew higher pitched. He sounded as if he had swallowed a whistle that had lodged in his throat.
When he put his hand on the inhaler again, he held fast to it and rolled onto his back. No good. He couldn’t breathe at all on his back. He wasn’t in a proper position to use the inhaler, either.
Overhead: the hooks, gleaming, gleaming.
Not a good place to have a severe asthma attack. He didn’t have enough wind to cry out. No one would hear a shout, anyway. Palazzo Rospo was well built; sound didn’t travel through these walls.
Now he was desperate.
IN A MEN’S-ROOM STALL AT THE SHOPPING mall, Corky Laputa used a felt-tip marker to write vicious racial epithets on the walls.
He himself was not a racist. He harbored no malice toward any particular group, but regarded humanity in general with disdain. Indeed, he didn’t know anyone who entertained racist sentiments.
People existed, however, who believed that closet racists were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have purpose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.
For a significant portion of humanity, having someone to hate was as necessary as having bread, as breathing.
Some people needed to be furious about something, anything. Corky was happy to scrawl these messages that, when seen by certain restroom visitors, would fan their simmering anger and add a new measure of bile to their bitterness.
As he worked, Corky hummed along with the music on the public-address system.
Here on December 21, the Muzak play list included no Christmas tunes. Most likely, the mall management worried that “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or even “Jingle Bell Rock” would deeply offend those shoppers who were of non-Christian faiths, as well as alienate any highly sensitized atheists with money to spend.
Currently, the system broadcast an old Pearl Jam number. This particular arrangement of the song had been performed by an orchestra with a large string section. Minus the shrieking vocal, the tune was as mind-numbing as the original, though more pleasantly so.
By the time that Corky finished composing pungent racist slurs in the stall, flushed the toilet, and washed his hands at one of the sinks, he was alone in the men’s room. Unobserved.
He prided himself on taking advantage of every opportunity to serve chaos, regardless of how minor the damage he might be able to inflict on social order.
None of the restroom sinks had stoppers. He tore handfuls of paper towels from one of the dispensers. After wetting the towels, he quickly wadded them into tightly compressed balls and crammed them into the drain holes in three of the six sinks.
These days, most public restrooms featured push-down faucets that gushed water in timed bursts, and then shut off automatically. Here, however, the faucets were old-fashioned turnable handles.
At each of the three plugged sinks, he cranked on the water as fast as it would flow.
A drain in the center of the floor could have foiled him.