Kill the Mall

by Pasha Malla

  The incantatory hissing seemed to be growing louder too, and with it the ponytails accentuated their movements—they were really going for it now, thrashing around with such melodrama and violence that they seemed ready to tear themselves loose from their respective heads.

  And still their master had yet to appear.

  I decided to make a move up the escalator, if only to escape the hissing masses and their lurid, histrionic ponytails. As I squeezed through that brainwashed horde, some hair brushed me. The ends pricked and needled my skin as if trying to find a way in. By some mercy I reached the bottom stair unscathed, but as I went to step aboard, both sides of the thing—up and down—came alive, plummeting in opposition to my ascent. Thanks to my earlier dancing for the ornately hatted woman, I was feeling limber: some indoor mountaineering presented a welcome challenge.

  And so, in my weighted boots, I began to climb.

  The hissing increased. Was it focusing? Growing more intense? Gathering? I could only keep my eyes on the mezzanine, put one foot ahead of the next and struggle against the escalator’s infinite loop. Each step had to do “double-” or, perhaps more accurately, “quadruple-duty,” what with the weight of the boots and the descending staircase—the tide against which I, ever the rapacious salmon, struggled. But if I persevered I would gain ground: I had to believe it! For it was faith that would propel me to victory. Faith and footsteps. Also my insatiable thirst for vengeance. Also the creepy hissing below.

  The mall’s second floor—my goal—was visible only as a levelling off of the top step, which flattened and vanished and was replaced again and again. Beyond it was the platform where I’d at last face my nemesis and literally “cut him down a size or two.” Thus cowing his followers below. With one snip of my scissors I’d not only put an end to the ponytail’s reign of terror but the infernal hissing and dancing of his minions and their false idol worship. In one fell swoop, or snip, all those copycat ponytails would droop as one. Or even fall to the food court floor in a great, shaggy cascade of defeat.

  Another step. A backslide. Another step. And again the escalator diminished my progress. I advanced by degrees, to be sure—but they were marginal. Perhaps I mounted one stair for every ten paces, factoring in the continuous sweep downward that compromised each effort. So, imagining that there was perhaps a total of sixteen stairs on the escalator in a stationary position, that would require me to climb 160 steps, or the equivalent of ten flights!

  But I would not be daunted. Below the hissing had reached a fever pitch, and I had to resist the image this conjured of the ponytails engaged in their hysterical aerobics, as rabid and feral as weasels. A fervour I knew all too well from my own former tongue-hair, how it had bucked against my teeth with heightening fervour until it tore itself free.

  It was only a matter of time before Mr. Ponytail would appear and deliver some sort of stunning oratory or performance and perhaps unleash this deranged horde beyond the confines of the mall. God, I thought, struggling up another step, was that his scheme? Not just dominance of the mall, but of the whole town? And why stop there? Why not consume the county, the region, the country—the world? He had to be stopped. And only I possessed the scissors to do so.

  Upward I strained, progressing one step, back nine, and so on. I will spare further excruciating details, as things proceeded thusly (my labours, the hissing masses, various neurotic monologues playing through my thoughts, etc.) for a time. Eventually I was only two or three steps away from the landing—from the stage upon which our final duel would be fought, where I’d vanquish Ponytail and liberate the toadies below from his tyranny. My legs were barely operational. I made one step, slid back, another—another!

  Finally I was a single stair away.

  The mezzanine was cast in shadows. In the murk I could make out a few of the storefronts—Kookaburra’s vitrine teeming with hideous sunflowers, like hydrocephalic, jaundiced heads lolling atop gangrenous necks. A putrid affair indeed. A few shops down the hall would be Dennis’s former denim concern, the House of Blues—now a house of ill repute, per Mr. Ponytail’s nefarious deceptions. Was he in there? Prepping himself for his showcase? With “mousse” and a brush? With the grinning spectre that Dennis had become?

  Tragic, all of it.

  I removed the scissors from my pocket and plunged forward another step.

  The showdown was at hand.

  I opened my scissors—flexed them, as it were. Ready to strike.

  The hissing below rose up around me and seemed to thicken the air. I was jettisoned from the escalator onto the landing of the second floor. Luckily the weight of my boots held me fast, but still I reeled like a drunk before the abyss. It took a moment to steady myself before I could get my bearings and examine what faced me.

  Well, you might have guessed it: hair.

  The whole second floor was a great mat of the stuff, seething up the walls and all over the floor, seeming to produce a hiss and whisper of its own. I was sure all that hair I’d carried within me was braided in there too. Where was Mr. Ponytail? Nowhere in sight. Or perhaps everywhere. Perhaps this was him, incarnate—or, rather, in carpet.

  Before I could turn to the escalator to “make myself scarcely there,” its internal mechanism or engine produced a great metallic clunk and the thing paused and then began churning in reverse—now ascending at breakneck speed. One step on the thing and I’d be flung into the hair net. Which, meanwhile, was beginning to climb over my boots, strand by strand, in a kind of webbing. Its texture was not that of your average billowing ponytail, but coarse and bristly and sharp. The sort of hair you’d not want to run your fingers through but apparently which wanted to run through my fingers, and toes, and holes. And soul.

  My god, was this how it would end? i.e., “it” being me?

  Perhaps as it should be, I thought. I’d tried. I’d been defeated. I was nothing; Mr. Ponytail had shown me as much. Even my scissors were no match for this massive onslaught. A fine end: eaten by hair. What a way to go.

  I hung my head and stood limply, waiting to be consumed. For the hair to haul me down and perhaps devour my body in some nutritional way, or else cart me off to its master’s quarters to be repurposed as art. I could just imagine my various bits and pieces arrayed upon the walls of the mall—a great mural of me, with that signatory slash marking my remains as Ponytail’s own.

  But then, amid it all, I heard a voice.

  A voice…calling my name?

  I looked up.

  K. Sohail!

  Striding through the hair with a push mower—the manual sort whose blades require ambulation to chop and turn. And chop and turn they did! Carving right through the hair carpet with a shower of clippings spraying hither and thither and a trail of tiles plowed bare in her wake. A trail, mind you, that closed over as the hair resumed its form, but a trail that allowed her passage all the same.

  And she was coming for me.

  To my rescue? It certainly seemed so.

  Quick, she cried. Loosen your boots!

  So loosen them I did, bending down and prying open the buckles. A few errant or ambitious filaments went for me as I did, and I had to tear my hand away lest they ensnare me in that doubled-over compromising position, hand to foot like a petrified yogi. But then yes they were loose! And K. Sohail was nearly upon me. What now?

  She arrived and—my, this was a surprise!—released her grip on the mower and hopped clean into my arms. What could I do but catch her?

  For a moment I held her like that—like an adult-sized baby, or a sack of human flesh cleverly shaped into an actual human. We’d never touched before. She was warm. She smelled of bleach. Her breath felt nice on my neck. I liked her very much then.

  But this was no time for feelings! The hair was making its ascent—up to the ankles of my loosened boots and rising.

  Now step free! she commanded.

  I was c
onfused.

  From the boots! Release yourself!

  And then I understood.

  One foot free—and my body began to tilt. The ghosts were churning. They were lifting us! What a scheme! How did K. Sohail know? Well, she was a caretaker. This is just what she did: took care. And she was taking care of me now as no one ever had. Amid these revelations I’d forgotten my instructions, and the hair was beginning to spill over the tops of my boots, to grip my flesh. K. Sohail yelled again: Do it! Now!

  I yanked my other foot out of its boot.

  Instantly we began to float.

  The few stray bits that had tried to clutch my skin tore free. But as we drifted away from the hair all over the floor, we were angling toward the ceiling, which—my god, this was a bit much—also swarmed with hair.

  Luckily K. Sohail knew just the thing. Paddling her hands, she manoeuvred us into the horizontal position of dream flight and steered us away. I did my best to help, though as I’ve mentioned I’ve never been much for swimming. Still, as a result of our combined efforts (surely I didn’t hinder us) we floated out over the food court.

  For a moment: stillness, hovering. And then I looked down.

  Far below was a scene of absolute horror. The ponytails had…flipped. Each one was splayed over its owner’s face, suctioned there like great spiders and seemingly pouring down into their open mouths. The hissing had been replaced by a gargling, desperate sound—but people were too tightly packed to escape. They could only bump blindly against one another as we lofted above and their own ponytails did them in.

  Don’t look, said K. Sohail, snatching my chin and pointing my face toward hers.

  I thought for a moment she might kiss me. But she nudged my face further back, so I was looking straight up.

  There, she said.

  She intended to steer us to the skylight.

  As we lifted, from the ring on her hip K. Sohail produced and readied a key.

  Sunshine blazed just beyond that little window. I waited; the ghosts did their work. We floated. We rose. Shortly we were bumping up against the food court’s high ceiling. I looked into K. Sohail’s eyes. But she was focused on the lock: key in, turn. A click. She nodded at me again. I pushed the glass. Out it swung. In poured light and air. And then we were moving through.

  WHAT’S YOUR NAME, I ASKED as we lifted into the daylight. Your good name. Your actual name.

  She smiled. Leaned close to my ear. And, in a soft voice, told me. All five syllables.

  Though of course I’d always known it.

  And then we caught a breeze, soared a little higher, and were gone.

  FINAL REPORT

  Not submitted.

  PASHA MALLA is the author of several works of poetry and fiction, including the story collection The Withdrawal Method and the novels People Park and Fugue States. His fiction has won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Trillium Book Prize, an Arthur Ellis Award and several National Magazine awards. It has also been shortlisted for the Amazon.ca Best First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Prize, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Pasha Malla lives in Hamilton.