Fic: The Axeman
Title: The Axeman
Author: pdragon76
Recipient: kogsy21
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Whump, cussing.
Disclaimer: Supernatural and its characters are the property of Kripke.
Author's Notes: Set after 4.08 Wishful Thinking. Many thanks to my betas. Third paragraph break taken from the US Patent & Trademark Office records, as referenced in the text. Fourth paragraph break promotional text quoted from an 1882 Otis Bros. & Co. advertisement (United Technologies Archive). /nerd
Summary: When the axe falls, the contingency comes into play.
Two components - the interaction of which is designed so that one prevents the catastrophic failure of the other. So flawless a concept that the base principle would remain unchanged for nearly one hundred and fifty years.
}-*-{
It was five blocks from where they parked the car. On the way to 488 Broadway, Dean nearly took out his groin on a fire hydrant and right there Sam decided it wasn’t a hangover. The stupid jerk would have to sober up before he graduated to a hangover.
Working with Dean on the back end of a bender didn’t traditionally make much difference. It had always been one of his more annoying traits, the way the job was laid into his foundations like he could do it in his sleep. Or as the case may be: wide awake with every capillary in his eyeballs blown to shit. Sam had been stuck in the car with him all the way from Lower Manhattan to Broadway, and the alcohol stench made him glad neither of them smoked. Anyone lit a match near Dean right now, he was liable to take out the whole of New York City.
Sam should have been entitled to go off his nut about it. What he wanted to do was grab the elbow of Dean’s jacket and pull him up on the street, have it out. He probably should, and not only because they were about to dispatch a violent poltergeist from a malfunctioning elevator.
Everything was still raw and unexplored after Dean’s admission on the pier in Concrete. And like most things between them these days, Sam hadn’t worked out yet where that left them both exactly. What he did know was that they were approaching some sort of critical mass, and Dean didn’t seem remotely close to executing a last minute self-correct.
Sam was not looking forward to the impending chat.
I get that you went to Hell for me, and it was so unspeakable you have to drink yourself unconscious to get a decent hour’s sleep, but I was hoping we could have a frank discussion about liver failure.
Given the choice between that conversation and entering a building with inebriated backup, Sam knew exactly where his ballot and cowardice lay.
“That’ll be our elvalator,” Dean noted redundantly, pointing to the aged cast-iron sign on the building’s façade that read: ELEVATOR.
Sam hustled him inside with a shepherd’s arm. “I think maybe I should do the talking.”
}-*-{
In 1853, four years before the first passenger elevator is installed on Broadway, the World Fair brings the Crystal Palace to New York city. Beneath the jeweled circus-top perches a modest Yankee tinkerer upon a structure of his own design. He awaits the fall of an axeman’s blade against the solitary rope which sustains the platform.
Afterward, there are gasps and applause and hearty slaps upon backs. Much talk transpires of showmanship.
Contracts are forged.
}-*-{
The elevator doors were jammed fast on all floors except the fifth, which figured because when was anything ever easy? Sam pried the steel panels apart, and thunked the crowbar across Dean’s chest as barrier when he leaned to take a look.
“Yeah, I don’t think you should be leaning over any open pits right now.”
Dean made an irritated face and pushed childishly against Sam’s weight. “What?”
Sam poked him with the bar hard enough to send him back a couple of steps, then tilted to look down the darkened shaft. The rescued occupants of the elevator had left the wide, rectangular roof hatch open in their haste, and a strident pole of light speared up from the carriage. It was hard to tell exactly from the angle, but Sam estimated the abandoned car was about three floors down.
He smelled Dean’s whiskey breath at his shoulder again.
“I say we climb down and take a look.”
“Uh, no. You’re staying up here. I’ll go check it out.”
Dean grabbed a fistful of Sam’s shoulder and jerked him roughly back from the open shaft so that he stumbled into the far wall.
“What are you - my boss?” he muttered and set about climbing the shaft access ladder before Sam could scrabble back to do anything about it. Instead, he dispensed a few perfunctory noises of exasperation, then shouldered the duffel and followed suit.
Sam was a good floor up when Dean slipped and, if he hadn’t been coincidentally glancing down, he would have missed the show entirely. It probably wasn’t much more than fifteen feet to the carriage, but Dean bounced his chin off the open lip of the raised roof hatch on the way down.
“Hooooooooly shit,” Sam remarked, full of sibling respect for a hard surface well-kissed. “You all right?”
“Ow.” Dean sounded like someone else might be to blame.
When Sam got his flashlight aimed into the shadows beside the hatch, Dean was flapping clumsily to his feet like a winged bird on the uneven roof of the car. He tapped his fingers to his bloody chin.
“Motherfucker,” he said with feeling.
Sam tried again. “Dean. You okay?”
“Yeah.” He slipped on the metal beams beneath his feet, caught the tangle of wires and cables dangling down the centre of the shaft to stop himself from falling.
“Watch your ste-” Sam started to say, and that was when Dean promptly stepped back, directly into the open roof hatch.
}-*-{
To all whom it may concern:
Be it known that I, E.G. Otis, of Yonkers, in the county of Westchester and State of New York, have invented a new and Improved Hoisting Apparatus; and I do hereby declare that the following is a full, clear, and exact description of the same, reference being had to the annexed drawings, making a part of this specification, in which-
1. Having the pawls ff and the teeth of the racks CC hook formed, essentially as shown, so that the weight of the platform will, in case of the breaking of the rope G, cause the pawls and teeth to lock together and prevent the contingency of a separation of the same, as herein set forth.
- US Patent & Trademark Office, No. 31,128.
Patented Jan. 15, 1861.
}-*-{
The fall lacked Dean’s usual grace. The hole was a cruel half-foot too narrow to allow clean passage, and it was actually kind of impressive how he got the sole of his boot up next to his ear like that on the way through. In another lifetime, it might have been funny, but watching Dean take a hit these days was a strangely paralyzing affair. Always that surge of blind panic to navigate before Sam could compel himself to action, a split second’s throwback to bloodied boards and one more grisly end he couldn’t prevent. But he was learning to beat it back and work around.
“Did I just kick myself in the face?” Dean wanted to know when he came to.
“Yeah. Nice work.” Sam was squatting to get a look at the bloody tear in Dean’s jeans. “There goes Plan A.”
“What the hell was Plan A?” Dean groaned.
“That would be the plan where we stay outside the haunted elevator.” Sam hadn’t brought in the kit, which was at least as stupid as drinking on the job. He shrugged out of his hoodie and lost his overshirt instead. “Hold still, you’ve got a slice in your thigh here.”
He had to rip the jeans more to get his fingers in and when he did, he felt a warm, slick gush at the wound’s edge. Dean twitched and caught his protest between his teeth. A second later, the seep of crimson darkened and grew ominously on the denim of Dean’s inner thigh.
“Whoa. I think I just opened that up.” Sam clamped his palm down over the slippery gash and felt the muscle seize. “Whoops.”
Dean’s face scrunched, but he stayed quiet and still.
Sam leaned to send a hand through Dean’s jacket, found his hip flask tucked inside the inner pocket. He set it between his knees and one-handed the screw top.
Dean rallied at the theft. “Hey, what’re you-?”
Sam angled the temporary gauze of his hand away and upended the remainder of the whiskey over the cut. Dean arced noiselessly at the liquid assault, and if Sam moved fast, he could probably get the worst of it over in one hit. Folded down its longest points, the shirt went twice round Dean’s thigh, and Sam tied it tight while his brother tensed mutely through the sharp spike in sensation.
He clapped Dean’s cheek sportingly, forced a grin. “There you go. That shoulda sobered you right up.”
Dean sent a few hard breaths through his teeth, blinked. “Uh-huh.”
Sam rose to his feet, wiped his bloodied hands on his jeans for lack of any alternative.
He was staring up at the roof hatch, deciding there was no easy way to get Dean through it in a hurry, when the elevator fell.
}-*-{
The Otis
Standard Hydraulic Elevator:
Adopted by U.S. GOVERNMENT,
Upon Report of Eminent Experts
appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury.
Safe, simple and economical.
The year is 1864. A good tradesman stands by his work and is a man of his word.
}-*-{
It was about a six foot drop. Sam’s heart leapt up into his mouth and the EMF in his pocket let out a screech, but then the brakes engaged and the carriage squealed to a halt.
“Holy shit!” Dean yelped from his seat on the floor. “Did you feel that? Revert to Plan A.” He motioned wildly at the doors. “Let’s go to Plan A. Right now.”
Sam couldn’t agree more. He speared the wedged head of the crowbar between the seam of the doors, widened his stance and put some grease behind the lever. “I’m on it.”
}-*-{
The year is 1878. The controller is designed with the interests of any lady or youth in mind. Only the slightest force need be brought to bear to produce travel in the desired direction. Some degree of skill, however, must be employed to bring the car to an even and level halt.
}-*-{
When Sam pulled back the panels, they were straddling the third floor. He could see an inch-wide strip where the top of the open elevator overlapped the closed doors of the shaft. Before they’d dropped those six feet, they were likely almost level.
He stabbed at the space with the jimmy in frustration. “Crap.”
Dean was staring up at the control box above his head. “Problem is, these fuckin’ things are all run by computers these days.” He sniffed, shifted and winced. “Gimme a wrench and a proper goddamn motor, and we might have a workable situation here, ghost or no ghost.”
Sam threw down the crowbar and moved to the panel. “Lemme look at this thing. I might be able to override it.”
Dean held up a hand. “Hang on. Why isn’t there any EMF?”
“There was. When we dropped.”
“So why isn’t there any now?”
“I dunno.” Sam jabbed at the fifth floor button, looked to the open doors for any movement.
“Okay, so if you’re hitting the buttons there and we’re not moving, we should be getting EMF, right? If the poltergeist’s causing the malfunction, we should be getting EMF when the failure occurs.”
Sam cocked his head. “Yes. We should be getting EMF.” He produced the reader from his pocket, frowned down at it. “Except we’re not getting EMF.” He thought for a second. “Could this actually be a mechanical problem?”
“No. You said we had a read. There’s definitely somethin’ here.”
“Good, because honestly? Right now I think mechanical failure scares me more than a spirit.”
“Agreed.”
Sam applied the crowbar to the control panel until the facing let out a Crack! and popped free. Behind it he found a dismaying complexity of wires and circuitry threading to and from the call buttons.
“Remind me, whose idea was it to send the night guard home?” Dean asked dryly.
“Mine.”
“That’s worked out well, don’t you think?”
“Well, the night guard’s not trapped in the elevator,” Sam snapped, “so I’d say it’s working out okay for him, which was kinda the point.”
Dean let it drop, went quiet. Sam jabbed a few buttons experimentally.
“Sam?”
“What?”
“I think I’m bleedin’ through your dressing here.”
When Sam checked, the bandage was drenched. “Whoa. Okay, I’m gonna need your shirt.” He held Dean’s jacket while he shrugged off the flannel, then helped him slip it back on.
“You’re looking kinda gray. You all right?”
“Little dizzy,” he confessed. “Although I am pretty drunk.”
“Puke-dizzy or pass-out-dizzy?” Sam asked. He gnawed a rip in the hem of Dean’s shirt and sent the breach up the fabric with a hard yank on each side.
“Can I do both?” Dean smiled wanly.
“Not at the same time, please. No, thank you. I’m gonna go twice, and tighter this time, okay?”
Sam waited while his brother got a hand curled around the hip rail above him, braced. Dean closed his eyes, nodded permission.
Again, with the goddamn silence. When he was done, Sam cupped a hand at the back of Dean’s neck, rattle-roused him. “Hey, look at me. You all right?”
Dean gazed at something a thousand yards through him. “Why are we not getting EMF?” he redirected stubbornly.
Sam tugged his cell from his jeans. “I dunno, but you’re bleeding pretty bad and I think we could do with some help.” He twisted, angled the phone and waited for a signal that wasn’t forthcoming. “How the fuck am I not getting reception in the middle of New York City?”
Dean threw up a weak hand, rolled his eyes. “Awesome. That’s great.”
The EMF reader wailed, and the elevator tugged smoothly upwards.
Sam scrabbled to his feet as the car came level with the third floor and slowed. “W-w-wait, we’re stopping.”
The reader warbled into silence, and after a moment’s pause, the outer shaft doors began to pull back with a Ding!, at the exact same time as the inner doors began to close. Sam didn’t find the crowbar fast enough.
“Nononono.” He snapped his arm and the jimmy back out of the elevator’s closing mouth before it pinned him. “Shit!”
From outside the panels they heard a scratching, and then a dull, reverberating thumping. He looked down at Dean’s puzzled face.
“What the hell is that?”
}-*-{
It is 1903, the year of the first gearless traction electric elevator. The urban landscape is forever changed. Evolution of design has produced a remarkable subtlety of motion and a disconcerting peculiarity of sensation. It has become virtually impossible to discern whether the car descends, or the ground itself rises.
}-*-{
For a while nothing happened. Sam emptied a half-full water bottle from the duffel down Dean’s throat and toyed with loosening the tourniquet-tight dressing, until a foreboding liquid gush dissuaded him beneath the first untangled knot. He swiftly yanked it fast again, and Dean bit back a groan.
“Sorry. That wasn’t a very good idea.”
They both flinched as the vandalized panel above Dean’s head sparked and popped, and the ground floor indicator began to flash.
Sam scanned the elevator’s interior helplessly. “Shit.”
The car shuddered, pinged, and then plummeted. Sam’s heart got all the way out his mouth this time before the EMF went wild and the car’s brakes caught. The jarring stop produced a combined, involuntary Oooof! of shock from the both of them.
“Fuck, I thought that was it,” Dean said breathlessly. He tilted a sweaty temple against the elevator wall and closed his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
Sam stayed stock-still, lungs heaving and senses straining. The panel let off another small firework and the EMF reader spiked. The ground floor button recommenced its lazy blink, but the carriage began a jerking, uneven ascent.
“I don’t like this,” Sam put forward as possible Understatement of the Year.
“Sam, get out,” Dean said abruptly. “Climb out.”
“No.”
“Dude, this fuckin’ thing is gonna go.”
“I can’t get you through that hatch.”
“Exactly. Go for help.”
Between the spirit and Dean’s wound, Sam doubted either of them was under any delusions about how long he might have to mount a rescue. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“If you don’t get your fuckin’ ass out of here, we’re both gonna die.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
The carriage stopped suddenly, and they spent a taut half-minute waiting for another plunge. Nothing happened. Eventually the adrenaline abated and the lactic acid crept in, demanded movement. Sam bent on a stiff knee to check the dressing on Dean’s leg.
“You’re getting cold.” Sam pulled at the lapels of his brother’s jacket, covered him more securely.
“Goddamn it, Sam.”
“Shut up. I’m gonna get these doors open.” Sam turned his attention back to the closed panels with renewed urgency. He checked the signal on his cell again. “This has to be some sort of interference. We’re in the middle of fucking Manhattan for Christ’s sake.” He threw the useless hunk of circuitry onto his duffel, turned his frustration on Dean. “And you might be holding up a little better if you weren’t so hungover.”
“Yeah? Well, I’d drink less if you weren’t such a pain in the ass.”
He could see from the look on his face Dean wasn’t serious, but it made Sam want to curl in a ball with his head in his hands. Everything about Dean these days made him want to curl in a ball with his head in his hands. There was so much now his brother couldn’t possibly know. Like how it was to want someone back so bad, and then get your wish and have it be so awful. To have them so nearly-there and yet so broken, and to know you were the reason.
He punished the doors for a while, until his arms arched and his t-shirt was damp.
“It might actually help,” he panted, flung the crowbar into the corner of the car with a clatter.
“What?” Dean grunted.
“Talking about it.”
Dean looked weary.
“Can you not start with me while I’m bleedin’ out in a goddamn elevator?”
}-*-{
It is 1924. The counterweight counterbalances the load of the car, such that the strain on the power source is reduced to only the difference between the two.
An introduced imbalance results in catastrophic engine overload and full system shutdown.
}-*-{
The thumping was back - a dull, metallic, repetitive Bong!. It made Sam think of submarines, and how they might as well be sunk two thousand leagues for all the difference it’d make.
Dean was sliding like ball bearings on a smooth surface, and Sam couldn’t keep him together.
“Cut m’damn leg. You believe thisshit?”
“Don’t talk.” The shivering was more twitching now.
“You gotta promise, Sammy. Cas-cast…they’re not gonna...”
“Dean, don’t.”
“She’s bad newssammy. Shissalways been bad newssammy.”
“We don’t have to talk about this now.”
Dean’s eyes fluttered. “Am I there yet?”
Sam slid his fingers inside Dean’s, gave his hand a rattle. “Dean. Dean. Don’t shut your eyes. Keep ‘em open.”
“You here or ’m I there?”
“You’re here. I’m here. We’re both here.”
“Wheressat?”
“Right here. You have to stay here.”
He tried pretty hard for a couple more minutes, but then even angry demands lost sway. Sam grabbed the crowbar, stepped up to the doors and showed God and his angels what they could do with their cease and desist.
He was dripping - wild and hoarse - when the panels wrenched open.
Ruby nearly took the iron bar in the face, and she didn’t flinch an iota.
“Finally,” she drawled, jaw jutting in annoyance. “I’ve been chasing this stupid yo-yo up and down the stairs for half an hour.”
Sam gaped at her, stunned, and the jimmy toppled backwards out of his grip. He barked in surprise, recovered enough to drop and spin for a handful of Dean’s collar.
Ruby’s eyes fell to the floor of the car, took in Dean’s bloodied, inert form and the swirls and smears where Sam’s shoes had slipped. Her nose crinkled, and she sighed. “Oh, gross.”
Slick red tracks marked their wake as Sam hauled a ragdoll Dean clear of the elevator.
“Call 911.”
}-*-{
In 1853, the World Fair brought the Crystal Palace to New York City. The axeman won the crowd, but it was not the axeman’s show.
The manner in which the rope breaks is incidental. What matters is what follows.
}-*-{
Sam didn’t catch the question the first time, had to get right out of his chair and stretch an arm across the hospital bed, lean in close. “You say something?”
“Did I fall?”
It was less than a whisper. Sam blinked down at his brother’s lidded, vacant gaze. Couldn’t tell if Dean knew where he was, much less who he was talking to.
“Yeah. You fell. But you’re okay now. You’re gonna be okay.”
Dean labored over two onerous breaths, and the obvious effort twitched Sam’s cheek.
“Am I late?”
That had to be the meds talking, because as far as Sam knew, Dean had no more pressing engagements than the current plasma replacement. He frowned. “No. I gotcha. We gotcha out in time.”
Dean drifted after that. When Sam left, he told himself he was just stepping out for a minute. He was going to get some air, clear his head. But the keys were in his hand by the time he hit the parking lot.
She was waiting for him. Down the far end of the access corridor, leaning near the open maintenance panel marked “OTIS”. She uncrossed her arms as he approached, pushed off from the wall with her shoulder and tilted her head in that habitual way that was both invite and rebuke.
“So your spook was the friendly variety,” she said, holding up something small. “Plain old mechanical failure. He was only trying to help. Probably saved your butt.”
It felt like a long time since he’d last seen her. He reached out and took the circuit, turned it in his fingers.
“Non-genuine part.” She fisted her hands in her front pockets. “For a corpse, this Otis guy takes his warranty crap pretty seriously.”
She hunched her shoulders like she might have been cold, but he knew she wasn’t. Ruby never felt cold.
Sam put the circuit in the front pocket of his hoodie.
“So?” She shook her head around the word, as though it needled her that she had to ask.
Sam sniffed, frowned at the wall behind her. “He lost a lot of blood. They had to transfuse him, but he’s…” his eyes drifted skyward in search of the generic hospital-supplied term, “…resting comfortably.”
“Good.” There was something a fraction defiant in her tone and her face.
“What are you doing here, Ruby?” he asked bluntly. He was so very tired. Beneath the physical fatigue, he could feel the deeper ache and burn of the night’s mental torque.
“Besides saving the damn day?” She swiveled through her hips, gave him a lopsided shrug. “You haven’t called in a while.”
“No,” Sam agreed. “I haven’t.”
“So I was just…” she brought her fingertips to her mouth, as if something forgotten had re-occurred to her, and a vague smile played on her lips, “…checking in, I guess.”
Sam stood there while his feet both refused to leave and declined to stay, and his gaze lingered on her fading smirk. His brow furrowed. “I have to get back to the hospital.”
“So get.”
He could tell she said it sharper than she’d intended.
Sam stop-started around a different remark before he said, “Seeya.” He turned on his heel and began to walk away.
“You’re welcome,” she threw after him, like a grenade.
It froze him in his tracks, and inside the pocket of his hoodie his fingers traced the hard corner of the circuit. He gave his taxed shoulders a rolling shrug, blinked long.
Back on the street, his breath frosted with the frigid, witching-hour air, and his lips buzzed with her memory all the way down Broadway.
Author: pdragon76
Recipient: kogsy21
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Whump, cussing.
Disclaimer: Supernatural and its characters are the property of Kripke.
Author's Notes: Set after 4.08 Wishful Thinking. Many thanks to my betas. Third paragraph break taken from the US Patent & Trademark Office records, as referenced in the text. Fourth paragraph break promotional text quoted from an 1882 Otis Bros. & Co. advertisement (United Technologies Archive). /nerd
Summary: When the axe falls, the contingency comes into play.
Two components - the interaction of which is designed so that one prevents the catastrophic failure of the other. So flawless a concept that the base principle would remain unchanged for nearly one hundred and fifty years.
}-*-{
It was five blocks from where they parked the car. On the way to 488 Broadway, Dean nearly took out his groin on a fire hydrant and right there Sam decided it wasn’t a hangover. The stupid jerk would have to sober up before he graduated to a hangover.
Working with Dean on the back end of a bender didn’t traditionally make much difference. It had always been one of his more annoying traits, the way the job was laid into his foundations like he could do it in his sleep. Or as the case may be: wide awake with every capillary in his eyeballs blown to shit. Sam had been stuck in the car with him all the way from Lower Manhattan to Broadway, and the alcohol stench made him glad neither of them smoked. Anyone lit a match near Dean right now, he was liable to take out the whole of New York City.
Sam should have been entitled to go off his nut about it. What he wanted to do was grab the elbow of Dean’s jacket and pull him up on the street, have it out. He probably should, and not only because they were about to dispatch a violent poltergeist from a malfunctioning elevator.
Everything was still raw and unexplored after Dean’s admission on the pier in Concrete. And like most things between them these days, Sam hadn’t worked out yet where that left them both exactly. What he did know was that they were approaching some sort of critical mass, and Dean didn’t seem remotely close to executing a last minute self-correct.
Sam was not looking forward to the impending chat.
I get that you went to Hell for me, and it was so unspeakable you have to drink yourself unconscious to get a decent hour’s sleep, but I was hoping we could have a frank discussion about liver failure.
Given the choice between that conversation and entering a building with inebriated backup, Sam knew exactly where his ballot and cowardice lay.
“That’ll be our elvalator,” Dean noted redundantly, pointing to the aged cast-iron sign on the building’s façade that read: ELEVATOR.
Sam hustled him inside with a shepherd’s arm. “I think maybe I should do the talking.”
}-*-{
In 1853, four years before the first passenger elevator is installed on Broadway, the World Fair brings the Crystal Palace to New York city. Beneath the jeweled circus-top perches a modest Yankee tinkerer upon a structure of his own design. He awaits the fall of an axeman’s blade against the solitary rope which sustains the platform.
Afterward, there are gasps and applause and hearty slaps upon backs. Much talk transpires of showmanship.
Contracts are forged.
}-*-{
The elevator doors were jammed fast on all floors except the fifth, which figured because when was anything ever easy? Sam pried the steel panels apart, and thunked the crowbar across Dean’s chest as barrier when he leaned to take a look.
“Yeah, I don’t think you should be leaning over any open pits right now.”
Dean made an irritated face and pushed childishly against Sam’s weight. “What?”
Sam poked him with the bar hard enough to send him back a couple of steps, then tilted to look down the darkened shaft. The rescued occupants of the elevator had left the wide, rectangular roof hatch open in their haste, and a strident pole of light speared up from the carriage. It was hard to tell exactly from the angle, but Sam estimated the abandoned car was about three floors down.
He smelled Dean’s whiskey breath at his shoulder again.
“I say we climb down and take a look.”
“Uh, no. You’re staying up here. I’ll go check it out.”
Dean grabbed a fistful of Sam’s shoulder and jerked him roughly back from the open shaft so that he stumbled into the far wall.
“What are you - my boss?” he muttered and set about climbing the shaft access ladder before Sam could scrabble back to do anything about it. Instead, he dispensed a few perfunctory noises of exasperation, then shouldered the duffel and followed suit.
Sam was a good floor up when Dean slipped and, if he hadn’t been coincidentally glancing down, he would have missed the show entirely. It probably wasn’t much more than fifteen feet to the carriage, but Dean bounced his chin off the open lip of the raised roof hatch on the way down.
“Hooooooooly shit,” Sam remarked, full of sibling respect for a hard surface well-kissed. “You all right?”
“Ow.” Dean sounded like someone else might be to blame.
When Sam got his flashlight aimed into the shadows beside the hatch, Dean was flapping clumsily to his feet like a winged bird on the uneven roof of the car. He tapped his fingers to his bloody chin.
“Motherfucker,” he said with feeling.
Sam tried again. “Dean. You okay?”
“Yeah.” He slipped on the metal beams beneath his feet, caught the tangle of wires and cables dangling down the centre of the shaft to stop himself from falling.
“Watch your ste-” Sam started to say, and that was when Dean promptly stepped back, directly into the open roof hatch.
}-*-{
To all whom it may concern:
Be it known that I, E.G. Otis, of Yonkers, in the county of Westchester and State of New York, have invented a new and Improved Hoisting Apparatus; and I do hereby declare that the following is a full, clear, and exact description of the same, reference being had to the annexed drawings, making a part of this specification, in which-
1. Having the pawls ff and the teeth of the racks CC hook formed, essentially as shown, so that the weight of the platform will, in case of the breaking of the rope G, cause the pawls and teeth to lock together and prevent the contingency of a separation of the same, as herein set forth.
- US Patent & Trademark Office, No. 31,128.
Patented Jan. 15, 1861.
}-*-{
The fall lacked Dean’s usual grace. The hole was a cruel half-foot too narrow to allow clean passage, and it was actually kind of impressive how he got the sole of his boot up next to his ear like that on the way through. In another lifetime, it might have been funny, but watching Dean take a hit these days was a strangely paralyzing affair. Always that surge of blind panic to navigate before Sam could compel himself to action, a split second’s throwback to bloodied boards and one more grisly end he couldn’t prevent. But he was learning to beat it back and work around.
“Did I just kick myself in the face?” Dean wanted to know when he came to.
“Yeah. Nice work.” Sam was squatting to get a look at the bloody tear in Dean’s jeans. “There goes Plan A.”
“What the hell was Plan A?” Dean groaned.
“That would be the plan where we stay outside the haunted elevator.” Sam hadn’t brought in the kit, which was at least as stupid as drinking on the job. He shrugged out of his hoodie and lost his overshirt instead. “Hold still, you’ve got a slice in your thigh here.”
He had to rip the jeans more to get his fingers in and when he did, he felt a warm, slick gush at the wound’s edge. Dean twitched and caught his protest between his teeth. A second later, the seep of crimson darkened and grew ominously on the denim of Dean’s inner thigh.
“Whoa. I think I just opened that up.” Sam clamped his palm down over the slippery gash and felt the muscle seize. “Whoops.”
Dean’s face scrunched, but he stayed quiet and still.
Sam leaned to send a hand through Dean’s jacket, found his hip flask tucked inside the inner pocket. He set it between his knees and one-handed the screw top.
Dean rallied at the theft. “Hey, what’re you-?”
Sam angled the temporary gauze of his hand away and upended the remainder of the whiskey over the cut. Dean arced noiselessly at the liquid assault, and if Sam moved fast, he could probably get the worst of it over in one hit. Folded down its longest points, the shirt went twice round Dean’s thigh, and Sam tied it tight while his brother tensed mutely through the sharp spike in sensation.
He clapped Dean’s cheek sportingly, forced a grin. “There you go. That shoulda sobered you right up.”
Dean sent a few hard breaths through his teeth, blinked. “Uh-huh.”
Sam rose to his feet, wiped his bloodied hands on his jeans for lack of any alternative.
He was staring up at the roof hatch, deciding there was no easy way to get Dean through it in a hurry, when the elevator fell.
}-*-{
The Otis
Standard Hydraulic Elevator:
Adopted by U.S. GOVERNMENT,
Upon Report of Eminent Experts
appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury.
Safe, simple and economical.
The year is 1864. A good tradesman stands by his work and is a man of his word.
}-*-{
It was about a six foot drop. Sam’s heart leapt up into his mouth and the EMF in his pocket let out a screech, but then the brakes engaged and the carriage squealed to a halt.
“Holy shit!” Dean yelped from his seat on the floor. “Did you feel that? Revert to Plan A.” He motioned wildly at the doors. “Let’s go to Plan A. Right now.”
Sam couldn’t agree more. He speared the wedged head of the crowbar between the seam of the doors, widened his stance and put some grease behind the lever. “I’m on it.”
}-*-{
The year is 1878. The controller is designed with the interests of any lady or youth in mind. Only the slightest force need be brought to bear to produce travel in the desired direction. Some degree of skill, however, must be employed to bring the car to an even and level halt.
}-*-{
When Sam pulled back the panels, they were straddling the third floor. He could see an inch-wide strip where the top of the open elevator overlapped the closed doors of the shaft. Before they’d dropped those six feet, they were likely almost level.
He stabbed at the space with the jimmy in frustration. “Crap.”
Dean was staring up at the control box above his head. “Problem is, these fuckin’ things are all run by computers these days.” He sniffed, shifted and winced. “Gimme a wrench and a proper goddamn motor, and we might have a workable situation here, ghost or no ghost.”
Sam threw down the crowbar and moved to the panel. “Lemme look at this thing. I might be able to override it.”
Dean held up a hand. “Hang on. Why isn’t there any EMF?”
“There was. When we dropped.”
“So why isn’t there any now?”
“I dunno.” Sam jabbed at the fifth floor button, looked to the open doors for any movement.
“Okay, so if you’re hitting the buttons there and we’re not moving, we should be getting EMF, right? If the poltergeist’s causing the malfunction, we should be getting EMF when the failure occurs.”
Sam cocked his head. “Yes. We should be getting EMF.” He produced the reader from his pocket, frowned down at it. “Except we’re not getting EMF.” He thought for a second. “Could this actually be a mechanical problem?”
“No. You said we had a read. There’s definitely somethin’ here.”
“Good, because honestly? Right now I think mechanical failure scares me more than a spirit.”
“Agreed.”
Sam applied the crowbar to the control panel until the facing let out a Crack! and popped free. Behind it he found a dismaying complexity of wires and circuitry threading to and from the call buttons.
“Remind me, whose idea was it to send the night guard home?” Dean asked dryly.
“Mine.”
“That’s worked out well, don’t you think?”
“Well, the night guard’s not trapped in the elevator,” Sam snapped, “so I’d say it’s working out okay for him, which was kinda the point.”
Dean let it drop, went quiet. Sam jabbed a few buttons experimentally.
“Sam?”
“What?”
“I think I’m bleedin’ through your dressing here.”
When Sam checked, the bandage was drenched. “Whoa. Okay, I’m gonna need your shirt.” He held Dean’s jacket while he shrugged off the flannel, then helped him slip it back on.
“You’re looking kinda gray. You all right?”
“Little dizzy,” he confessed. “Although I am pretty drunk.”
“Puke-dizzy or pass-out-dizzy?” Sam asked. He gnawed a rip in the hem of Dean’s shirt and sent the breach up the fabric with a hard yank on each side.
“Can I do both?” Dean smiled wanly.
“Not at the same time, please. No, thank you. I’m gonna go twice, and tighter this time, okay?”
Sam waited while his brother got a hand curled around the hip rail above him, braced. Dean closed his eyes, nodded permission.
Again, with the goddamn silence. When he was done, Sam cupped a hand at the back of Dean’s neck, rattle-roused him. “Hey, look at me. You all right?”
Dean gazed at something a thousand yards through him. “Why are we not getting EMF?” he redirected stubbornly.
Sam tugged his cell from his jeans. “I dunno, but you’re bleeding pretty bad and I think we could do with some help.” He twisted, angled the phone and waited for a signal that wasn’t forthcoming. “How the fuck am I not getting reception in the middle of New York City?”
Dean threw up a weak hand, rolled his eyes. “Awesome. That’s great.”
The EMF reader wailed, and the elevator tugged smoothly upwards.
Sam scrabbled to his feet as the car came level with the third floor and slowed. “W-w-wait, we’re stopping.”
The reader warbled into silence, and after a moment’s pause, the outer shaft doors began to pull back with a Ding!, at the exact same time as the inner doors began to close. Sam didn’t find the crowbar fast enough.
“Nononono.” He snapped his arm and the jimmy back out of the elevator’s closing mouth before it pinned him. “Shit!”
From outside the panels they heard a scratching, and then a dull, reverberating thumping. He looked down at Dean’s puzzled face.
“What the hell is that?”
}-*-{
It is 1903, the year of the first gearless traction electric elevator. The urban landscape is forever changed. Evolution of design has produced a remarkable subtlety of motion and a disconcerting peculiarity of sensation. It has become virtually impossible to discern whether the car descends, or the ground itself rises.
}-*-{
For a while nothing happened. Sam emptied a half-full water bottle from the duffel down Dean’s throat and toyed with loosening the tourniquet-tight dressing, until a foreboding liquid gush dissuaded him beneath the first untangled knot. He swiftly yanked it fast again, and Dean bit back a groan.
“Sorry. That wasn’t a very good idea.”
They both flinched as the vandalized panel above Dean’s head sparked and popped, and the ground floor indicator began to flash.
Sam scanned the elevator’s interior helplessly. “Shit.”
The car shuddered, pinged, and then plummeted. Sam’s heart got all the way out his mouth this time before the EMF went wild and the car’s brakes caught. The jarring stop produced a combined, involuntary Oooof! of shock from the both of them.
“Fuck, I thought that was it,” Dean said breathlessly. He tilted a sweaty temple against the elevator wall and closed his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
Sam stayed stock-still, lungs heaving and senses straining. The panel let off another small firework and the EMF reader spiked. The ground floor button recommenced its lazy blink, but the carriage began a jerking, uneven ascent.
“I don’t like this,” Sam put forward as possible Understatement of the Year.
“Sam, get out,” Dean said abruptly. “Climb out.”
“No.”
“Dude, this fuckin’ thing is gonna go.”
“I can’t get you through that hatch.”
“Exactly. Go for help.”
Between the spirit and Dean’s wound, Sam doubted either of them was under any delusions about how long he might have to mount a rescue. “I’m not leaving you here.”
“If you don’t get your fuckin’ ass out of here, we’re both gonna die.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
The carriage stopped suddenly, and they spent a taut half-minute waiting for another plunge. Nothing happened. Eventually the adrenaline abated and the lactic acid crept in, demanded movement. Sam bent on a stiff knee to check the dressing on Dean’s leg.
“You’re getting cold.” Sam pulled at the lapels of his brother’s jacket, covered him more securely.
“Goddamn it, Sam.”
“Shut up. I’m gonna get these doors open.” Sam turned his attention back to the closed panels with renewed urgency. He checked the signal on his cell again. “This has to be some sort of interference. We’re in the middle of fucking Manhattan for Christ’s sake.” He threw the useless hunk of circuitry onto his duffel, turned his frustration on Dean. “And you might be holding up a little better if you weren’t so hungover.”
“Yeah? Well, I’d drink less if you weren’t such a pain in the ass.”
He could see from the look on his face Dean wasn’t serious, but it made Sam want to curl in a ball with his head in his hands. Everything about Dean these days made him want to curl in a ball with his head in his hands. There was so much now his brother couldn’t possibly know. Like how it was to want someone back so bad, and then get your wish and have it be so awful. To have them so nearly-there and yet so broken, and to know you were the reason.
He punished the doors for a while, until his arms arched and his t-shirt was damp.
“It might actually help,” he panted, flung the crowbar into the corner of the car with a clatter.
“What?” Dean grunted.
“Talking about it.”
Dean looked weary.
“Can you not start with me while I’m bleedin’ out in a goddamn elevator?”
}-*-{
It is 1924. The counterweight counterbalances the load of the car, such that the strain on the power source is reduced to only the difference between the two.
An introduced imbalance results in catastrophic engine overload and full system shutdown.
}-*-{
The thumping was back - a dull, metallic, repetitive Bong!. It made Sam think of submarines, and how they might as well be sunk two thousand leagues for all the difference it’d make.
Dean was sliding like ball bearings on a smooth surface, and Sam couldn’t keep him together.
“Cut m’damn leg. You believe thisshit?”
“Don’t talk.” The shivering was more twitching now.
“You gotta promise, Sammy. Cas-cast…they’re not gonna...”
“Dean, don’t.”
“She’s bad newssammy. Shissalways been bad newssammy.”
“We don’t have to talk about this now.”
Dean’s eyes fluttered. “Am I there yet?”
Sam slid his fingers inside Dean’s, gave his hand a rattle. “Dean. Dean. Don’t shut your eyes. Keep ‘em open.”
“You here or ’m I there?”
“You’re here. I’m here. We’re both here.”
“Wheressat?”
“Right here. You have to stay here.”
He tried pretty hard for a couple more minutes, but then even angry demands lost sway. Sam grabbed the crowbar, stepped up to the doors and showed God and his angels what they could do with their cease and desist.
He was dripping - wild and hoarse - when the panels wrenched open.
Ruby nearly took the iron bar in the face, and she didn’t flinch an iota.
“Finally,” she drawled, jaw jutting in annoyance. “I’ve been chasing this stupid yo-yo up and down the stairs for half an hour.”
Sam gaped at her, stunned, and the jimmy toppled backwards out of his grip. He barked in surprise, recovered enough to drop and spin for a handful of Dean’s collar.
Ruby’s eyes fell to the floor of the car, took in Dean’s bloodied, inert form and the swirls and smears where Sam’s shoes had slipped. Her nose crinkled, and she sighed. “Oh, gross.”
Slick red tracks marked their wake as Sam hauled a ragdoll Dean clear of the elevator.
“Call 911.”
}-*-{
In 1853, the World Fair brought the Crystal Palace to New York City. The axeman won the crowd, but it was not the axeman’s show.
The manner in which the rope breaks is incidental. What matters is what follows.
}-*-{
Sam didn’t catch the question the first time, had to get right out of his chair and stretch an arm across the hospital bed, lean in close. “You say something?”
“Did I fall?”
It was less than a whisper. Sam blinked down at his brother’s lidded, vacant gaze. Couldn’t tell if Dean knew where he was, much less who he was talking to.
“Yeah. You fell. But you’re okay now. You’re gonna be okay.”
Dean labored over two onerous breaths, and the obvious effort twitched Sam’s cheek.
“Am I late?”
That had to be the meds talking, because as far as Sam knew, Dean had no more pressing engagements than the current plasma replacement. He frowned. “No. I gotcha. We gotcha out in time.”
Dean drifted after that. When Sam left, he told himself he was just stepping out for a minute. He was going to get some air, clear his head. But the keys were in his hand by the time he hit the parking lot.
She was waiting for him. Down the far end of the access corridor, leaning near the open maintenance panel marked “OTIS”. She uncrossed her arms as he approached, pushed off from the wall with her shoulder and tilted her head in that habitual way that was both invite and rebuke.
“So your spook was the friendly variety,” she said, holding up something small. “Plain old mechanical failure. He was only trying to help. Probably saved your butt.”
It felt like a long time since he’d last seen her. He reached out and took the circuit, turned it in his fingers.
“Non-genuine part.” She fisted her hands in her front pockets. “For a corpse, this Otis guy takes his warranty crap pretty seriously.”
She hunched her shoulders like she might have been cold, but he knew she wasn’t. Ruby never felt cold.
Sam put the circuit in the front pocket of his hoodie.
“So?” She shook her head around the word, as though it needled her that she had to ask.
Sam sniffed, frowned at the wall behind her. “He lost a lot of blood. They had to transfuse him, but he’s…” his eyes drifted skyward in search of the generic hospital-supplied term, “…resting comfortably.”
“Good.” There was something a fraction defiant in her tone and her face.
“What are you doing here, Ruby?” he asked bluntly. He was so very tired. Beneath the physical fatigue, he could feel the deeper ache and burn of the night’s mental torque.
“Besides saving the damn day?” She swiveled through her hips, gave him a lopsided shrug. “You haven’t called in a while.”
“No,” Sam agreed. “I haven’t.”
“So I was just…” she brought her fingertips to her mouth, as if something forgotten had re-occurred to her, and a vague smile played on her lips, “…checking in, I guess.”
Sam stood there while his feet both refused to leave and declined to stay, and his gaze lingered on her fading smirk. His brow furrowed. “I have to get back to the hospital.”
“So get.”
He could tell she said it sharper than she’d intended.
Sam stop-started around a different remark before he said, “Seeya.” He turned on his heel and began to walk away.
“You’re welcome,” she threw after him, like a grenade.
It froze him in his tracks, and inside the pocket of his hoodie his fingers traced the hard corner of the circuit. He gave his taxed shoulders a rolling shrug, blinked long.
Back on the street, his breath frosted with the frigid, witching-hour air, and his lips buzzed with her memory all the way down Broadway.