After she left I looked back at the pile of clothes. What could she possibly have meant about the Super being in on it. In on what?
While I was thinking, I heard a scratching noise coming from behind the rack of washers and a rat poked his nose around the corner. I held very still, tightening my grip on the broom handle in case it decided to come my way. It was tentatively sniffing the room and moving farther away from the machines. There wasn’t a sound but its claws on the tile.
It decided to check out the wet pile of clothes. It moved closer, sniffing.
Suddenly it’s feet started furiously scrabbling back against the tile. It started squealing, but a sock wrapped around its head and shut off the sound. The rat was frantic now, but it was being pulled inexorably toward the pile.
After a few minutes its head was no longer visible. It stopped struggling and went limp. But it kept being pulled. Slowly it disappeared until only the tail was left. Then that disappeared, too.
Some people might have been shocked, but I’ve seen a lot in my years. There was that amusement-park scale I had to disassemble after some guy floated off it. But if I start telling those stories I won’t finish this one.
If the pile of wet laundry didn’t just eat a rat, I was hard pressed to describe what HAD just happened. But my dark ops training kicked in and I tried to catalog what I knew so far. It wasn’t much. The pile wasn’t wet clothing. At least 4 people had disappeared recently. There is evidence that 2 of them were preparing to deal with the pile. It was able to grab hold of things. It could swing a club. And it had some oomph. I decided to put aside a possible involvement on the part of the super as hearsay.
There were more things I didn’t know. How aware was the pile of its surroundings? Did it understand what was happening or just react to stimuli? Was it camouflaged as clothing or was the clothing some kind of addition? Could it camouflage itself as other things? And what, if anything, could hurt or kill it?
Don’t go all PETA on me. If that thing has a habitat then it’s free to live there. Right then it was in mine, and it didn’t belong. It was either it or me, and I had no plans of it being me.
This being New York City, I wasn’t going to go to my illegal stash of weapons and bring one here. So it was plan B, at least for now.
I wondered if it was always wet. I started looking around the area as best I could without getting too close. I had no idea how far it could reach with those socks, or what else it might reach with. But I couldn’t see any evident leaks that would explain it being wet. I assumed it kept itself wet. And that led me to wonder if it had to be damp to survive. Finding that out would be a lot less dangerous than trying to carry one of my weapons through the city.
I went to the supply closet and go two big space heaters and one of those rug dryer fans. I brought them in, set them up to dry out the pile, and stood back to see what would happen.