Gift-Wrapped & Toe-Tagged: A Melee of Misc. Holiday Anthology

by Dr. Freud Funkenstein, ed.

  Reasons: none that she could think of. A joke, perhaps. A really strange one.

  Maybe she could ask Derek for the explanation now; because here was his shadow in the light from the foyer, and there was the sound of him opening the spring catch from the inside. The heavy glass door swung inwards, and Derek’s gangling silhouette moved into the frame.

  In the time that it had taken for him to unlock the door and emerge, Mercedes had backed around behind the nearest concrete pillar. She was barely aware that she’d done it until she felt the coldness of the untreated surface against her hands. Derek stood, bonily awkward and almost comically skinny, and he peered out into the darkness.

  ‘Mercedes?’ he said softly; so softly that it was almost impossible to hear. And then he moved out, letting the door swing shut behind him. From her place in the shadows behind the pillar she saw that this man of sticks and bones, this sudden stranger, was carrying a large insulated screwdriver from the electronics workshop. Its narrow shaft was almost a foot long. He let it swing by his side, a natural extension of his arm.

  He obviously hadn’t seen her, because after calling her name he was now walking straight out across the middle of the plaza, towards the escalators. Foyer music was seeping out as the glass door closed slowly on its spring; it was the sound of a Scottish accordion band, something traditional for the season, and it was growing fainter and fainter as the gap narrowed and Mercedes wondered if she could make a run for it and catch it before the lock could re-engage.

  Several times she almost went, and each time she told herself to wait another second so that Derek couldn’t dash back and reach her before she could get the door closed against him; until finally, the faint click of the door told her that the chance had slipped away with all her hesitation. She heard the distant echo of Derek as he started his descent of the escalator; he seemed almost jaunty, as if he was out on a job that was no more than routine.

  But his eyes. His eyes had been like dead scales.

  If the plan had been to give her a scare, then he’d done a first- class job. But she couldn’t persuade herself that this was the explanation, partly because it was too much part of a sequence that linked back all the way to that bitter rainy morning in the derelict street. She’d been sensed, she’d been seen; and now she was to be gathered in. Derek—strange, gangling, skinny Derek—was the arm of the reaper.

  What was he doing, down below? Perhaps he didn’t know that she was already inside the plaza, and had gone down to wait for her. Or else—and this seemed more likely—he’d given her time to get in and now he was securing the door in some way so that she wouldn’t be able to leave again.

  There was only one way for her to go. Upward, to the rooftop car park. The prestige hotel’s main entrance was on that level, reached from the street by a spiraling ramp. If you didn’t come in a car, preferably one with a high showroom tag, then the hotel didn’t want to know you.

  At least she’d be safe up there. She’d find people, probably a big New Year party in one of the conference suites. She’d stay there until dawn, and to hell with explanations.

  Moving as silently as she could, Mercedes set out to cross the plaza. She felt as conspicuous as a fly on a white rubber sheet. The entrance to the stairway was an anonymous pair of red ply doors situated between the frontages of a bridal wear store and a toyshop that had recently gone belly-up. The big shop front sign with its bunnies and frolicking ladybirds was still in place, but the window beneath it was empty and drab. With a slight sense of relief and a prayer that the doors shouldn’t creak, Mercedes let herself through into the stairwell.

  It was narrow and undecorated, and it smelled of drains. She took out the small flashlight and shone it ahead to find her way; three floors up to the roof, she reckoned, and then another fire door with a push-bar just like the one to the service road. The flashlight, hardly stronger than a decent candle, threw out long, angular shadows and moving bars across the walls as she ascended. Somebody had used the middle landing as a toilet, more than once.

  At the top, she had to put all of her weight against the bar. She didn’t weigh much, and the bar didn’t seem to want to move. It was waist-high, and it was supposed to hinge downwards under pressure to withdraw the long bolts at the top and bottom of the door; that was the theory, anyway, but the practice didn’t seem to be working out. What was supposed to happen if they ever had a fire? Wasn’t somebody supposed to check these things?

  She tried to imagine smoke and flames, a panicking crowd. They’d come up those stairs at quite a lick, and they wouldn’t be about to stop for anything; so Mercedes took a few paces back and then ran at the door, hitting the bar as hard as she could.

  The door flew open, and hit the wall to the side of it with a crash that echoed all the way back down the stairwell.

  But it wouldn’t matter if Derek heard it, because by the time that he could get up the stairs she’d be across the roof and into the hotel. For the second time she emerged into the cold of the night, but this time it was like a release rather than a chore; the sight of stars and the low cloud that glowed faintly as if the city burned beneath it had never been more welcome to her. She was at a comer of the roof, the stairwell head being a brick tower close to where the station kept its radio car. She could see this in the shadows only a few yards away, grimy windscreen reflecting the neon tracery of a department store sign on the next block. Straight ahead, less than a hundred yards across the asphalt, was the painted-on driveway and the entrance to the hotel.

  It was wide and glossy and glassy and bright. Automatic doors led through to the lobby, where expensively-carpeted steps climbed past display cases to a mezzanine level with reception desk, low sofas and coffee tables amongst potted plants. Hotel staff in dark suits or crisp whites could be seen moving around inside.

  And between the hotel and Mercedes stood a roll-across metal gate.

  She ran to it, grasped it, shook it; the barrier hardly moved at all. It was eight feet high and topped with spikes. A monkey might have made it over or a snake might have made it through, but Mercedes had no chance at all.

  People were coming out of the hotel, and she called to them; ‘Hey,’ she shouted, ‘Over here, help!’ But as the automatic doors hissed open the group of seven or eight came spilling out with a party roar that drowned her completely, and within seconds they were at their cars and switching on their music systems in a kind of stereo war so loud and so discordant that she couldn’t even hear herself. The cars started out in a jerky convoy, windows open and blasting as they drove off in a swirl of abandoned streamers and festive debris. As the last set of tail lights disappeared into the downward spiral, they left behind a windblown silence in which Mercedes was calling hoarsely to the night air . Five floors below, somebody was sounding off as the traffic before him made a slow start at the lights.

  Mercedes let go of the barrier. She’d been holding on so hard that it was now difficult to get her fingers to disengage. What was she going to do now? Go back below, and risk meeting Derek on the stairs?

  Or was Derek up here with her already?

  She moved to the nearest shadow; and just in time. She saw the stair head door swing outward in silence. Derek stepped forward in the doorway and waited, listening. Mercedes held her breath. He turned his head slowly from side to side like a blind thing, as if trying to locate her with some deep radar sense that went beyond sound or vision; and then, moving with a stealth that looked faintly absurd in one so tall and so angular, he melted off to check around the back of the stairhead.

  He’d left the fire door wide open. It wouldn’t take him long to check around behind, and then he’d be back and he’d see her as she ran. She’d hesitated once already and missed an opportunity at safety; now she was on her way even before she was certain that her decision was a wise one.

  He appeared so fast that he must have expected this, been listening for her; but even so he mustn’t have been prepared for her to jump so soon, because she was just
able to get in and slam the door before he could dive through after. She wrenched up on the bar as hard as she could; Derek’s weight on the other side of the door actually helped her, because he unwittingly pushed it home that last vital fraction of an inch that allowed the long bolts to engage with a bang.

  Mercedes was in darkness now, and again she fumbled out the flashlight in order to check that the bar was secure. As she ran the light over, a soft tapping that was almost a scratching began.

  ‘Mercedes?’

  The door began to rattle; just faintly, as if under no more than fingertip pressure.

  ‘Mercedes?’

  Three round, crashing blows against the door that echoed like explosions in the stairwell and made her step back in fright; but the door held solid, and then came that soft whisper again.

  ‘It’s me, Mercedes.’ And then, slyly; ‘You know who I mean, don’t you?’

  She began to descend, the flashlight showing the way ahead once more. The batteries were starting to fade now, the light yellowing and getting dimmer, but she couldn’t bring herself to switch it off even for a moment. She wondered what on earth she was going to do when she reached plaza level again.

  She’d be shut in, but Derek would be shut out. So far, so good. But she was guessing that he’d maybe pulled the wires on the buzzer, which meant that she wouldn’t be able to get Don’s attention inside the station; which left the option of perhaps trying to break into one of the shops in order to get to a phone and call the police. She'd never broken into anything before, and wasn’t even sure how she’d go about it.

  And suppose she got to a phone. What then? What exactly was she going to tell them? Because what had actually happened? She’d made an unofficial trip out, and she’d missed a broadcast. Derek had covered for her, and then emerged to come looking. He’d followed her to the roof, where she’d locked him out. There wasn’t one element in the sequence where all the unreasonableness didn’t seem to be on her side, All that she could offer was her fears, and her reading of the undercut rents of the situation. It was like a perfect melody with wrong harmonies that only she could hear.

  It didn’t help. She knew, deep down where it counted; there had been a mutual recognition between her and the presence at that derelict site, and now that same presence was wearing Derek like a glove. Perhaps it had even caused him to make that phone call to the newsroom that had sent her out in the first place; the station'll commercial production studio had harmonizers and equalizers that could turn a man’s voice into a reasonable facsimile of a woman’s if the added on-line interference was bad enough to cover the deceit.

  It wasn’t Derek, not in the true sense; this was the sandman, and he was bringing her a dream. But it wasn’t the kind of dream that anybody would want to lie half-awake for, in drowsy anticipation.

  Down on the plaza again, she went across to the indoor garden near the top of the escalators. It was a half-hearted affair, with most of the borders just empty dirt because all of the plants had starved away from daylight; there were small trees in barrels, a few rustic benches for shoppers, and a wishing well for local charities which had a stiff wire mesh just under the surface of the water to stop kids from reaching down and helping themselves to the pennies. Mercedes chose a fair-sized stone from one of the border walls, and tried its weight. It was loose-laid, and so no problem to move, and she found that she could just about carry it.

  Staggering along like the world’s most heavily-pregnant woman, Mercedes headed for the radio station foyer. Halfway there she stopped a moment to rest, and that was when she heard it; the sound of a lift somewhere else in the plaza, a sound that would be lost during normal shopping hours but which was now like a warning signal in the cavernous silence. It said that Derek was back inside. It said that he was coming for her.

  Her first attempt to smash the big foyer window had no effect; she couldn’t believe it, but the stone simply bounced back in her hands and set the whole pane shivering. The second time, she threw it hard and let go; this attempt put a sudden and terrifying split into the glass that travelled outward from the point of impact like forked lightning. For one moment she stood in deep awe of what she’d done, and then she set about breaking enough of a hole out of the reinforced window for her to step through.

  There was no time to feel guilty, or even to begin to enjoy it. The glass fell out in big plate-sized pieces onto the foyer’s cord carpet, and she felt something catch and tear at her coat as she bent to crawl through the opening that she’d made. Inside, as she straightened, she was taken by the bizarre feeling that she’d squeezed out of one world and into another; here it was warm, and the lights were late-evening soft, and the foyer speakers were relaying Here Comes Summer at a low murmur. Odd choice, she thought as she pushed into the inner corridor, a degree of professionalism reasserting itself as she entered home territory; but then, as she moved down past the offices towards the studios and what she’d been certain would be a degree of safety, she heard the record ending and the DJ coming on-air to link into the next track.

  The DJ wasn’t Don.

  In fact, he wasn’t anybody who worked at the station at all; his name was Dave Cook, and he’d left six months before on the promise of a contract in television. The contract had never materialized, and now he was working at some really tiny new station over on the Welsh border. Mercedes started to run towards the studio, already half- knowing what she was going to find; the sound of the long-departed Dave Cook was a strong indication, and the absence of the red transmission light over the studio door seemed to confirm it.

  She burst in. There they were, a neat triptych behind the sound console; Don and his two young ladies, one on either knee with his arms flung around them, their faces black as old iron and their necks wired together with a microphone lead. Their eyes were all bulging and their tongues were all sticking out; Yah Boo, they seemed to be saying, Sucks to the World.

  The door behind Mercedes closed on its damper with a quiet thump, tapping her on the back and pushing her to go forward into the studio. She took one halting step, and looked around her in bewilderment. Her place of safety was suddenly old, bad news. Over by the big surprise behind the console was the sight that she’d been on the way to expecting; four full twelve-inch metal spools of tape in a stack, with a fifth playing on the deck. These would be the standby tapes, the emergency fallback material kept in a locked cupboard for occasions of serious equipment failure or evacuation of the station. It was supposed to be somebody’s job to keep them up to date, but that somebody obviously hadn’t.

  It almost didn’t shake her to walk around to the other side of the desk; Don and the two girls didn’t even look real and their expressions were nearly comic, as if death was a bad joke that had simply jerked them away in the middle of its punchline. One outflung, long-nailed hand brushed at her coat as she carefully squeezed by them, and she delicately drew herself aside to avoid further contact.

  Mercedes had been shown the basics of driving a desk on her first day at the station, but the details had gone whistling down the same hole as so much of the useless information that they’d been throwing at her around that time. She saw a long bank of color-coded faders, another of equalizer dials, a row of needle indicators that bounced and bopped along with the outgoing music; there were pieces of masking tape making crude labels with messages like off-air p/bk and tx and Do not use!, this last with a small skull-and-crossbones added, and the whole array was topped with a mess of running order sheets and unsorted commercial cartridges.

  The absurd thought that occurred to her, as she tried to make sense of the layout, was that at least she’d now have no problem in convincing anybody that she’d been in real danger. All that she needed to do now was to find a way to get a mayday message out, and fast. Derek might have tied up the phone lines somehow, but he’d had to leave the station’s output running. She could make her plea for help live and on-air, and somebody would come.

  Somebody would.

  W
ouldn’t they?

  None of the sliding controls on the desk seemed to be making any damn difference to anything; the transmission lights stayed dead, and the Beach Boys played on as the tape reels turned. She looked frantically from one side to the other, knowing that she had minutes or less to get her message out and then to find somewhere to hide. Every fader was up but the mike still wasn’t open, which could only mean that Derek must have pulled the necessary patch-leads around the side of the desk. With no technical knowledge, Mercedes didn’t have a hope of putting herself on-air.

  He’d killed the studio. He’d tied up all the outgoing phone lines. What did that leave?

  It left the incoming request line, the one that would be hooked up to an answering machine. The signal fed directly into the desk, but Mercedes had seen the TOs using a white phone to speak to callers off- air during tracks. She had to reach across Don to take it from its hook; it was an awkward maneuver because she didn’t want to touch him, and managing this wasn’t easy because she didn’t want to look at him, either.

  Lifting the phone had automatically switched the line to the handset. She broke in on what sounded like a couple of giggling kids phoning in for a dare.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘this is an emergency. I want you to put your phone down and then call the police. Tell them . . .’

  ‘Hello?" one of the kids said.

  ‘Yes, hello. My name is Mercedes Medina, I’m a newsreader here. Please call the police and say . . .’

  But whoever it was on the other end of the line, she wasn’t listening; Mercedes heard the scuffling of a hand being placed over the mouthpiece, and an awed voice saying, ‘It’s her that does the news!’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘please! I need your help for something very important . . .'

  ‘Hello?' the kid said, returning.

  ‘Please listen to me! Don’t talk and don’t go away! People are dead here!’

  But the voice which answered her then was not that of a child; it was one that she recognized instantly and with a cold, crawling sense of helpless fear. It was the heavily-processed facsimile of a female voice that she’d first heard only an hour before.