Winch Mistress
By Clay Waters

Crowley Hall was built in 1958 to show the world that America took education seriously: Twenty-six floors streaking to the sky with some no-doubt-phallic symbolism meant to scare the Commies. It's the tallest dormitory in the North American higher education system, maybe the tallest in the world. We're 1#, right?

By the end of the night Matt and Neil and Mindy had trickled into my room on the seventeenth floor of this architectural wonder. Neil had lugged up a case of beer he'd won on some bet. He and Matt were playing some made-up game with the empties and dice.

Mindy weighed the silence. "Where is everyone tonight?"

"The fraternities are pledging." Neil leered her way. "It's anal-fantasy Friday. Indelible, hot-iron bare-ass branding."

"They use ice, actually," I said. "They blindfold them and put the ice on and it feels like heat for a second."

"What fun is that?" Matt smirked.

"It's brotherhood. They'd never really hurt a pledge brother."

Neil nodded, bored. "Whatever. Anyone want to go elevator surfing, while the building's halfway empty?"

"No thanks," I said. "I'm not good at that shit."

"Aw, you're a natural and you know it, Barb."

"I don't want to piss off the Operator."

"What are you talking about?" Mindy sat on my bed in the cross-legged, campfire manner of the Indian tribes who'd recently replaced the African-American in her personal cathedral of worshipful, white girl guilt.

"A ghost," Neil said.

I added, "A ghost conjured up by the Administration to keep people from elevator surfing."

"Well, that's all the more reason to do it, isn't it?"

"Four dead people is a good reason not to."

"You mean people have really died up there?" Mindy asked.

Neil nodded. "Four dead in twenty-two years. Three guys caught up in the winch and one other bastard tripped and fell down the shaft. That's too many for coincidence, don't you think?"

"Usually he just keeps it out of service about a week a month," I said. "Any more than that and the Dean would have to spend money to get it replaced."

Neil nodded enthusiastically. "You see? The Operator's a crafty guy. Matt, go get your stepladder."

"Want to go?" I asked Mindy. She shrugged. Typical. We had been together five weeks and I was noticing little things like that now. One of those awful words us liberals aren't supposed to say came to mind--rhymes with niche. Mama, I've got them Western patriarchal blues again.

I tucked the 2nd-to-last beer into my jacket, zipped up, and we

went to look at the elevator. Two elevators faced the west wing, the sort of low-bid budget-cut conjobs one could find in any inner city welfare zone, except the graffiti was intelligible. All those college educations put to good use.

The right-hand door opened. "Good. This is the one he hangs out in." Neil pulled the emergency stop and pointed to the loose Styrofoam ceiling tile, currently dripping some unidentifiable goo.

"That's how we go up."

"So, where is he?" Mindy was a wet blanket.

"You mean him?" Neil pointed to the Operator's signature, which some wit had stained in indelible red spray-paint across the back wall.

Matt came with the stepladder. "Mindy, has he told you the story? Neil, tell her the story."

"You see, Mindy, the Operator was once a freshman here at State. He was a shy kid, not much going for him. Until one night, one more lonely Saturday night, he went into the elevator shaft and never came out. Some say he died and now haunts the place like an evil spirit, some say he found something in there that made him immortal. Over here, he was nothing. But over there, he's king. All who enter his domain perish. He wrecks revenge on the world that rejected him."

"Who came up with that stupid story?" Mindy was tying her hair into a severe pony-tail.

Neil frowned. "Who invited her? Come on, it's a folk tale. A hundred years from now it will be like Little Red Riding Hood. Your grandkids will be rocking their kids to sleep at night with them." He looked at me suddenly, then grinned, abashed. "Oops, I forgot."

"Oh, stop being silly." I didn't want to talk about it. "Let's just get up there."

"You can always have a test-tube, you know." The step-ladder was one of the folding kind that could double as a bar-stool. Neil stood on it and removed the leaky panel, handing it to Matt, who laid it on the floor of the elevator. Neil went up first, then Matt, then me and Mindy, up into the shaft, brushing the soaked insulation.

"Yucch."

We pulled ourselves up, as if from under a floorboard. The shaft was hot with stale, sluggish air. "Let your eyes adjust," Neil cautioned. "You don't want to stumble into anything."

Surfaces came into focus. All of them, both smooth ones and complicated ones, were lubricant to the touch. Neil looked behind at me and Mindy, who were straggling. "There's more room than you think."

There was. A ledge about a yard across ringed the shaft on three sides, strewn with loose machinery of uncertain utility. It was so wide you could almost run laps.

The only problem would be someone summoning the elevator. If that happened, you made sure to be either completely on the ledge or completely on the elevator.

Between them was a six-inch gap. I put my hand on a shaft winch and Neil slapped it off.

"Hey watch it! How you wanna die? Fast or slow? Them's moving parts!" Neil dropped back into the elevator and grinned up like some big hairy-faced catfish floating in a pool of light. That's how I'd like to remember him. "Hop aboard!" He shouted. "But don't touch the center shaft. Grab the cables if you have to. Balance yourself with your legs, not your arms!"

We got on top of the elevator and braced ourselves. Neil jabbed a button with his thumb and scrambled back up as the machinery engaged and took us up.

Everyone who has ridden on top of an elevator comes up with the same odd esoteric cliche, even the nonsurfers: It's like night surfing, with the whoosh and suck of waves replaced with the low hum of straining machinery. Cave-penning of other eras flashed by as we rode up. One read Mason '67. "We're not the first to enter these parts." Neil sounded like a old cowboy movie. "No one touch the slow winch, unless they wish to be pulled leisurely apart over twenty floors."

"That's what happened to the Operator," Matt said. "But he soon pulled himself together."

"That's sick!" I laughed.

"Is the operator homosexual?" Matt asked.

"What does he eat?" Mindy wondered.

I stared into the central mass of twisting, pulling, stroking equipment powering the elevator up. "Hey Neil, which is the slow winch?"

"Don't know. Don't touch anything."

Shafts of light from the hallways of each floor we passed transformed Neil's grin into a vulpine leer. "Look up! Here comes the sky."

Above us, the thick black counterweight careened for our head, a headlong rush heightened by the rumbling of the elevator.

Mindy yelped and ducked; I didn't. It sailed past by a good three feet. She grinned, a little embarrassed but game. "You've done this before, huh? You didn't flinch."

I grinned. "Yeah." Mindy was getting with the program.

The matrix ground to a halt. We all groaned.

"That's OK," Neil said. "Someone's getting on. It'll give us something to look forward to." Nine beers just made Neil nimble. He skipped across the pulleys and hooks and cables like an old stage-hand, tightroping over the horizontal crossbeam that separated the haunted elevator from the normal one. A twenty floor fall lay on either side.

"Neil, be careful."

"I'm jumping across."

"No. That's insanity. Don't do it, Neil."

"I'm gonna do it."

My hand brushed the pink insulation. It felt peed-on. Then I tripped over something and fell right into it. I had the impression of musty cotton candy. Then it started itching.

"Fuck! Fucking fuck! Goddamn it!" I tried to get up, fell, and rolled back into it.

"OK, calm down, they'll call security."

"Neil is Mr. Wild and Crazy until there might be actual trouble involved, huh?" I was up and scratching.

"What's up your ass, Barbara?"

"Fiberglass."

"Is that how they teach you to talk in Honors English?" That was from Matt. "Matt, please explain the bug up your butt about my Honors English? You not make the cut or something?"

Mindy looked at me annoyed. No one gave a shit. "You're all like kids. I'm going back down."

We'd all cleared the top of the elevator but Matt, who was in the process of stepping off when he backed up over a stanchion. He pitched forward, just a little, brushing a sleeve against the central machinery. Just a brush. A millisecond earlier or later and no one would have ever even thought it a close shave. But that moment the elevator started up.

At first it was too slow to tell. Then Matt tried to jerk away and found he was being pulled into the matrix by his shirt.

"Ah. Ah shit! Help me!"

"Break out of it!" I started tugging at his shirt. But it was cold, and Matt was wearing a long-sleeved rugby shirt that wouldn't shed. We all tugged at him his rising body, but the machine kept taking him up and into the mix. We were hanging on to his sneakers when the sound of tearing fabric was followed by the soft squirt of tearing flesh.

Matt shrieked and shrieked, flailing his free arm at his fixed one. The bloating, skin-tight sack of blood that was his arm burst as his snagged body went up with the machinery, ripping and spilling him floor by floor. The screams ended, followed by a soft pitter-patter of blood down the shaft. A disembodied torso dropped down the shaft, dimly hitting the far bottom. The shaft smelled of dank metal blood--

"O shit. O shit fucking shit. O Jesus Christ."

Someone was screaming.

Someone grabbed my arm. "Calm down, calm down."

It was me.

The elevator halted somewhere over our heads. "Sc-scream like hell. Tell'm to stop." Neil's voice was all hiccuping shakes.

It stopped and stayed.

We picked our way across from the haunted shaft to the safe shaft, shuffling across in spread-eagle style. It took several minutes. By then the shock had worn off, replaced by fear. I was shaking with thoughts of police, Matt's friends, parents, administrators.

Neil knelt and examined a squat dark place on the wall. "The air's warm but it's not hot. I think we can use it."

"How you do know where it's going?" Mindy asked.

"What the fuck does it matter?" Neil was panicky.

"What if it dead ends in some central furnace somewhere?"

Neil didn't curse that. "Let's go anyway. Who first? How about the liberated lady?"

Mindy folded her arms.

"Guess it's me, then. Help me get this off, anyway."

We wedged our clammy fingernails along the four crevices of the grate. Mindy's catty nails provided the last jimmying twist, and the grate fell from its moorings and plunged down the shaft, riding the wall for one screeching second before clattering to the floor below. It sounded like a long way. Neil stuck his head in, felt the four sides of the square opening, turned around. "You two get behind me. This has to lead out. Otherwise there'd be no way in, right?" Neil tried to sound hopeful.

We scuttled in behind him, doing a slide and crawl down the declining shaft. "Damn! Watch out, bunch of nails."

The air changed, cooled. The shaft widened. "It's opening out," Neil's voice echoed back. "Watch out. You could really take a tumble here."

The shaft opened out onto a narrow catwalk. Total black on both sides, indicating a drop. Four feet or 400, there was no telling. I put my hands out and grasped both sides, sliding along, trying to sense Neil in front of me.

"There's another tunnel here." Neil was up on all fours, reaching up for the lowest of several steel rungs welded into the wall leading up to a smooth oval opening.

His hand was on the first rung when from somewhere hidden power roared to life. A hot halogen blared into the back of my skull, and the platform started shaking violently.

"Get back!" I screamed.

Neil tried to scoot back, to hug the vibrating platform, but could never get settled. Desperate, he grabbed at the serrated edge and blood spurted, like he'd put his hand in a circular saw. He shrieked and started to topple.

"Grab me!" I hooked my legs underneath and grabbed at his shoe bottoms, but he had jittered to the edge, like one of those little player figures from an old vibrating football game. He kicked out at my hand as he pitched over, the side screaming. Mindy was pushing against me, trying to hold me down.

Somehow I humped backwards to safety. Mindy was screaming and I had to slap her hard. "It's the Operator. He's making this happen."

Shaking, we made it back best we could towards the elevator shaft. It rested again on the 17th floor. The way back was shut, the ceiling tile back in place. I kicked down hard on it and it felt like kicking steelworks: somehow changed. The elevator started up again. We had an appointment.

The floors flashed by again just as in happier times, those carefree revels of ten minutes or a million years ago. I stared into the blur, half-hypnotized, waiting second by second for the bogeyman to show his face. Up to the top we sailed, then through the top, floating through layers of concrete and copper, through a viscous liquid that washed us briefly and left us dry.

Then the elevator doors yawned open in front of us. I jabbed Mindy forward. "Come on. I want to at least see him before he sees us."

We stepped onto an empty floor. The number beside the elevator button read 27, one more than possible. The wall was covered with dried blood and excrement, and other, doubtless more private, fluids. A sour smell of unwashed skin dominated the hall, mixed with the stinking-innards stench.

The empty TV room was across from the elevators, tuned to a snowy station. I put my hand to the slippery wall and flipped the light, stirring something behind a sofa. Something that had once been Matt loped out like an orangutan, groaning. Three other boy-like things shuffled behind him, all worse off than Matt, in gross decay.

"Hello, friends," came a voice behind.

The Operator's head brushed the 9 foot-ceiling. The rest of him was big enough to eclipse the elevator doors shutting behind him. One huge hand held a body. Mindy whirled to run but my hand was melted iron around her wrist.

The Operator's naked body was silver-skinned, bulging joints and synthetic-looking white hair and high Viking cheekbones and a sharp chin that made his face a large white triangle. A mouth of dull pearl was shaped vaguely into teeth, deeply set.

He held Neil in one enormous bone-fan of hand, biting off pieces of Neil. Nose, lip, groin, and most of the mouth was gone already, rendering Neil's screams meatless. His glasses had been smashed into his face and bloody shards fell onto the gray carpet as he shook in the Operator's grip.

"Thin and stringy." The Operator smacked his blood-engorged lips, throwing his huge head back with each bite. "That other one is much meatier-looking," he said, gesturing toward Matt. "I'll save him a while."

Matt started, seemed to recognize us. "Munda! Bubah!" His lax dental habits were in full canine display. The Operator slapped Matt's face and a couple of teeth spilled on the floor. Matt dropped to the floor and tossing them around quizzically, like dice.

The others milled around the Operator. They had shed their clothes and there color was tending from pink to grey, various body parts raked off in ragged chunks. The faces were like skulls where the skin had refused to shed.

Neil's wailing rose to a howl.

The Operator kicked him in the face. He whimpered, and began to drag his crushed face across the carpet, flaking off bits of bone and skin. The Operator approached us, taking our pale shaking hands in his own fans-of-bone and dragging us towards a dusty red rug. "Look over here."

He kicked it aside, revealing a jagged square cut into the floor. "This is fun. Recognize anything? That's the way you came in. The same way I did, twenty-two years ago. I was a pathetic sort back then. Just looking for a place to take a nice long jump into peace. Instead I landed in the amber. Now everything's splendid." The Operator smiled, showing his long teeth. "Look down at the bottom."

The bottom of the elevator was visible, but just barely, through the thick, translucent amber. It was like looking at a grille at the bottom of a swimming pool. "And there's the ceiling tile your friend left on the floor. My boys used to burn themselves silly trying to escape. They always came back up, looking like they'd been flipped on a grill. Watch this."

He ripped off a flake of Neil's face and dropped it in the goo. Neil watched it sizzle on the thick amber with childlike curiosity. It raised a faint puff of smoke before burning away. "You won't die either, no matter how hard you try. And I'm sure you will, before eternity is over. We're all dead now, you know." The Operator scraped a hunk of matted gristle off the end of his bloated white penis.

My hands went behind my back. "Oh yeah?" I palmed the unopened can of beer in my jacket, now warm. The Operator blinked, surprised at my cheek but patient. Up here I guess he was used to having his way. He just stared while I shook the beer can. He leaned in closer, his head Tiki-mask huge, white and tube-smooth like a toothpaste container. My fingers slipped off the tab and I prayed the laws of nature still has some force here.

I popped the top and spewed beer in his face.

He fell back, shrieking and clawing, face melting where the otherwordly flume of beer had hit. He wasn't so smooth-skinned anymore.

He lashed out, fanning the air and catching Mindy's shirt, then pulling. I pulled hard on her arm but he was too much. I tried to shake out the rest of the beer on him but the fizz was gone. He used Mindy as a shield and I just splattered her top.

My last view of Mindy was her woeful look for help. I swear I saw a faint constellation of freckles on the ridge of her nose. I'd always thought her utterly pale before.

Then the Operator opened his mouth wide and bit her head off. Mindy's skull bones cracked in his mouth with a crunching sound, followed by the soft, pulpy popping of rended muscles and sinews. Headless Mindy popped back to life, feeling for her missing part, while gouts of tomato red blood gushed out the top of her neck. I backed up running, hit the floor, pissing my pants, and as the

Operator came for me with Mindy's lip hanging from his mouth the sting in my crotch conjured up an image of a filament of insulation, stuck under my skin. I was beside the rug.

I threw the beer can his way and dove the other, into the amber goo. At first it stung but didn't burn. Then it burned as I clawed frantically for the bottom. Screams came but I didn't dare open my mouth. I prayed for one of two things to happen: That I'd come out the other side, or burn to death trying.

Then I was out of it. I dropped out of the sky, falling hard on my head on the elevator floor. I crawled out of the shaft and into the empty hall, putting my face to the floor, kissing the filthy carpet.

I'd been right, sort of. Fiberglass is a devil of its own, and the cotton-candy insulation I'd fallen into had clotted me, coating me with enough real world fiber to bring me back.

In what state I did not know.

I passed through the empty rooms of my lost dorm mates, watching myself in their mirrors. I wasn't there. People were coming back from parties. I walked into them and through them, screaming in their faces, to no effect. I went into my room and finished the beer Neil had started. It wasn't beer anymore. It was beer with all the molecules for beer drained out.

I stepped through a wall and grabbed a beer out of someone's fridge by putting my hand through the door. I took two, one for each coat pocket. I could grab things when I wanted to. Just like He had grabbed up Mindy.

I climbed back into the shaft, crossed the catwalk, mounting the good elevator. Crowley Dorm had 27 floors now, and I had to find my way back to the top.

Elevator: A black blast of old gothic iron and steel, the heavy stuff of monolith legend. The timeless winching of stiff concentric circles. Unleavened with the thinner, proton-purged metals, the recent bubbly vintages of aluminum and titanium.

Yes. Matt knew the words but not the tune. Maybe it takes a dramatist, a poet -- maybe even an Honors English student -- to understand the primal power of the dense, assured matter, stuff that can squeeze the life out of mortal man. Or woman.

In time I'll know the strengths and weaknesses of the Operator, discern the secrets of the Amber, the workings of the winches and levers, the purpose of every spanner and screw.

As I turn from the last of the light, my night-adjusting eyes project dots onto the darkness, a new constellation.

My discovery.

I name it Mindy.

It's my right.

It's my world.

I am Barbara.

Winch Mistress.