Animals

56.

STILES' POV:

Malia and I had figured out that Lorraine Martin's tape had not been recorded at Eichen House, and thanks to Malia's hearing, she led us to Lydia's lake house. I was all up for this idea and figuring everything out, until an hour went past and we were still sitting in front of the record player. Nothing had happened so far. I stared at Malia who was sitting with her face directly in front of the record player concentrating very hard. I continued to kneel next to her, but soon I began to tap my fingers on my leg because I was running out of patience, "What are we doing? This room wasn't even made for us. No, we need someone like Lydia or Meredith, and we're just sitting here listening to a stupid record player play a record that doesn't play anything." I waved my arm out then walked towards the record player and turned it off, "Come on. There's plenty of other things we can be totally useless doing." I walked towards the door.

"Stiles," I sighed and walked back into the room to see she was still sitting on the ground beside the player.

"Yes?"

She didn't look at me, "I can still hear it."

I took a few steps towards her, "But it's not on."

"Then it's something else." she said as she got herself up to her feet, "Something spinning."

I looked around the record player, and then finally looked towards the back and the wall behind it. There was a black board going into the wall. I pushed the table the record player was on out of the way and held onto the black cord. I looked up at Malia and she shrugged her shoulders,  giving me the go-ahead to pull on it and see what happens. I yanked on it and it went up, I continued to yank on it and it further up the wall until it cut across it. Ms Martin is going to kill me. I looked over at Malia and let go of the cord and we both began to pull away the dry wall. Behind the wall were three large objects that looked like they had spinning tapes going on in them.

"What is this?" Malia asked the winning question.

"A dead pool." the second I said the three words, Malia was throwing her fist at the objects, I quickly grabbed onto her, "You can't just smash it into pieces. Okay?" I let go of her wrist, "If this thing's being used to disseminate the list, then it's probably going to keep going until everyone's dead."

"Then what do we do?" Malia turned to me.

"It needs some kind of prompt or command or something, right?" I half stated, half asked even though I wasn't sure if Malia knew what I was talking about. My attention moved from my thoughts when Malia stepped towards the machines again, "No, no, no."

She yanked her arm away from me, "What about a key?" she pointed up to the key hole at the top of the middle machine.

****

I turned my phone towards the machines so Lydia could see now that we were video chatting with her, "You see it?" I asked her and turned it back towards me, "There's got to be a way to turn it off, right?"

"I don't know." she answered, "I don't know anything about computers from the 1970's."

Just as I was about to answer her, Malia made herself known in the conversation, "Neither do we."

"Okay," Lydia sighed, "Where's the monitor?"

"Lydia, there is no monitor." I repeated to her, "There are buttons, knobs, spindles, no monitor." I let my phone fall down as I walked towards the hole in the wall again.

"Wait, turn the phone back." I held my phone back up and gave her a confused look, "Point it at the carpet."

I stared at me phone, "What?"