Almost as soon as they entered the toilet haunted by a pair of hands and who knows else, Zoomer’s police-issued light went out. “At least our galoshes are holding up,” Petty tried to shine another bright spot on their investigation, figurative this time, the most important kind some say. But Zoomer and Ziegler suddenly were nowhere to be found. In the darkness, Petty must have stumbled into a commode and fallen down into the sewer itself, the source of it all. As soon as this happened all the bathroom lights came back on by themselves and all the pissers and otherwise who had followed the police trio in easily found their own way to commodes and urinals and, if needed due to limited space, sinks and even waste bins and wall corners by this point.
Light also eventually found Petty again as he bumbled and stumbled down that pretty if stinky sewage cascade seen in the below snapshot to a confluence of flows in a more open area. Rattling sounds behind him. He turns.
“*There* you are you little devils,” he said, but the spotted hands kept to their task, fiddling with a bike chassis, almost as if they were trying to repair it in their inept way while actually just scuffling it about aimlessly on the concrete floor. “You know, that bike is lacking wheels,” Petty tried to help, understanding the hands probably couldn’t see and were working on limited feel alone. “Or a seat for that matter. You’ll never be able to get it to work if that’s what you’re trying to do.” No “answer” from the hands; did they even *hear* him? he thinks. No ears too after all. That must be it, he determined. He decides to go over and gently rattle the chassis himself, make the hands aware that he’s here too.
But as he bends down and grasps the bike part…
… he’s suddenly leaning against the wall on the other side with his feet in it instead, his hands grasping something else. Inside he sees the center which is also the end. He unfolds, revealing the full truth. “WOW-za,” were the last words he speaks in this post. We can proceed.
(to be continued)





















