Then the ceiling in Young Misses started leaking, and that screwed up his whole schedule.
He’d been hearing the steady poit-poit-poit for a couple of hours before discovering the source. Now that he had, other than spending entirely too long watching the plump droplets flash across his light beam one-by-one he didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to do.
He turned to the nearest mannequin, a twelve-year old in a poodle skirt and a floofy blouse.
“I guess I should get a bucket,” he said.
She didn’t register any kind of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with this idea, because she had no eyes or mouth.
Buckets were in the maintenance closet on the other side of the room.
This implied a nearness not borne out by facts. Mad Maggie’s Shop-O-Rama was a repurposed warehouse, so getting to the other side of the room meant traversing a space that was once used to make battleship guns, among other things.
That was back in the Second World War, and probably for a little while after. Then, for some reason—probably not because battleships stopped needing guns, as that seemed unlikely—it became something else, and then something else again, and then something else after that. It housed an overstock of lawn statuaries in one of its iterations, Orrin was told. He didn’t know when or for how long, or even why an overstock of such a thing would exist, but he did know that he was glad to be the night watchman for Mad Maggie’s, and not for a warehouse full of statues, because the shadows in such a place would be so, so much worse. Mannequins were bad enough.
Getting to the maintenance closet meant exiting Young Misses by way of the central causeway, heading past Young Men’s, and then diving into the Kitchen section at about the halfway point, after the endcap of blenders. This also took him through the weird motor oil smell he was apparently the only one to notice.
It was an odor Orrin picked up on in three different places in the store, and it was especially curious because while Mad Maggie sold home furnishings, clothing, kitchen goods, plumbing supplies, toys, costume jewelry, electronics, gardening tools, seasonal doo-dads, and dry groceries, she didn’t sell motor oil. He’d checked. The only thing he found that came close was the cleaning stuff in the kitchen section, and when “seasonal” meant barbecue grills there was usually lighter fluid around. But neither of those smelled like motor oil.
He guessed that one of the things the warehouse was used for before the statuaries and after the battleship guns was auto storage and maintenance, but he’d never been able to confirm that. It didn’t help that when he asked around—either the night crew handing the store off to him or the day crew taking it back—nobody copped to smelling it too.
The other option, then, was that it was all in his head. If he had some deep-seated motor oil trauma to revisit, this might make sense. He didn’t, though.
At the end of the aisle, past the food processors and juicers, was a door leading off the sales floor and into a space used for the employee break room, locker rooms, manager’s office, and the employee bathrooms, along with the janitor supply closet. Orrin didn’t usually go there during his shift. There were no emergency lights in back, so in order to see he had to either turn on the bright fluorescents or use the flashlight. He didn’t even go back there for the bathroom; he used the customer one instead, which was nicer anyway, and it had an emergency light. It still meant leaving the floor, and when he did that he always had to do a pass afterwards, through the whole store to make sure nothing happened while he was away. But the bathroom was the sort of thing he couldn’t not visit, so he planned his trips near his scheduled rounds, and tried to keep his fluid intake down.
The visit in back blew up his night vision completely, because he couldn’t figure out which key belonged to the closet, and there were a lot of keys on a big ring. The fourth time he dropped the ring, he gave up trying to juggle both the flashlight and the keys, and just turned on the overhead light.
After dumping the mop, Orrin had a bucket-on-wheels that didn’t seem nearly large enough to handle the growing problem in Young Misses. He was starting to wonder if it wouldn’t have been a better idea just to head over to Storage and grab one of the big plastic bins instead. Sure, it would have ruined a sellable product, but the water was well on its way to ruining the carpet already. It would probably end up being a net gain.
Back on the floor, blinking repeatedly and waiting for his pupils to adjust, he tried very hard not to jump to any conclusions about what he was seeing that just wasn’t there.
That was the problem: there was exactly enough light to mess with your head. If it was total darkness, he could invent monsters in the dark if he wanted, but they were entirely subject to the limits of his imagination. In partial light, though, he was getting information from the world around him, and the animal part of his brain that held the fight-or-flight mechanism was going totally bananas as a consequence.
He could have sworn he saw something move, two aisles to his right. That would have put it at the start of the Sporting Goods section, and he knew for a fact that there were two particularly athletic mannequins in the middle of that extra-wide aisle, posed in mid-run so as to show off clothing to sweat in and sneakers to wear for it. Their peculiar stances—one man mannequin, one woman mannequin—combined with the lights to fool the eye into thinking a whole bunch of bad things that weren’t true. He knew this. But his peripheral vision wasn’t on board. So his heart raced and his breathing picked up, and no matter how often he looked over at Sporting Goods and talked himself out of seeing the movement that wasn’t really movement, the bile kept rising in the back of his throat and the panic set in, until finally he just closed his eyes and counted to ten.
This was a terrifying exercise in its own right, but it worked. The way he figured, if the part of his mind that knew perfectly well he was alone in a locked building—with nothing but inanimate objects and the shadow nightmares of his own imagination—if that part wasn’t driving, the smartest thing to do was also the dumbest: close his eyes and stand still. If the monster his instinct told him had to be out there didn’t grab him during the ten-count, it probably wasn’t there.
Probably.
It worked. It always worked, because of course it did. Because of course, he was alone. The running mannequins were just that. And to make absolutely 100% sure, he walked down to Sporting Goods, dragging the bucket-on-wheels with him, until he was in the aisle.
“Nothing but you guys, see, I told you,” he said, to his own imagination.
The mannequins had no comment, which was great.
He pulled the bucket past them and returned to the main concourse, as his vision got back to normal. The place felt comfortable, then. His heart rate slowed, and except for the fact that he could still hear the ceiling dripping, all was well. He would set the bucket up under the leak, maybe move the clothes racks further away from it in case the whole ceiling tile came down, then go back to his rounds and have a nice ordinary night.
That was when he heard the phone ring.
“Who’s there?” he shouted, without thinking much about it. Whoever was hiding in the store certainly didn’t need him to be announcing where he was while at the same time tipping them off that he knew they were there.
He spun around in place, until he was staring at the butt of the male jogging mannequin in stylish space-age fabric shorts.
Everything was where it was supposed to be. Two rows down, across from the last section of Sporting Goods, in the Home Health aisle, on the endcap, was a humidifier on a shelf. It had a long neck and offered omnidirectional humidification, and it cast a shadow that looked like a lizard head.
It was still there, it wasn’t moving, and the lizard didn’t much care that someone in the room was getting a call.
The phone rang again. It was a cell phone chirp, the generic kind that people get when they first buy a phone, before they change it to a Smashing Pumpkins song or something.
He didn’t know what to think about it ringin
g a second time. It was perhaps good news because that meant whoever owned the phone didn’t turn it off or answer it, which could mean there was nobody with him at all: just an abandoned phone.
That’s probably all it is, he thought. Someone lost their phone in the store and now they’re calling it to see where it ended up.
He’d find it, answer it, he and the owner would have a nice chat and he’d confess that the guy’s phone scared the balls off of him, everyone would have a nice laugh about it, and he’d leave the phone with the morning folks and that would be that. It’d end up being one of those funny stories he told about his time as a night watchman. The Night the Roof Caved In and the Phone Rang.
Everybody laugh now.
There was a problem with this theory: Mad Maggie’s Shop-O-Rama was probably the most infamous dead zone in town.
Everybody knew this about the place, to the extent that when families made plans to shop at Maggie’s, they either stuck together or set up a meeting place, because they couldn’t call one another in the store, and by this point everyone had evolved to where they had no way to cope with department store shopping without being tethered to one another electronically.
Orrin had heard lots of theories about it: the store was so massive they needed to put a phone relay in the store; the steel beams of the World War Two architecture interfered; the telecoms were punishing the store owners for some reason; there were aliens in the basement.
He didn’t think any of the theories were true, although he had a fondness for the last one, mainly because there was no basement, so it was verifiably false. The way he thought of it, the town probably had a lot of dead zones, it was just that they weren’t as notable because they happened in areas people drove through, or didn’t spend any time in. It was not, probably, that big of a deal.
Except when a phone was ringing in a place where that was historically impossible.
It rang a third time.
“It’s the storm,” he decided.
Saying it aloud made it truer, for some reason. The sound of his own voice demystified the sales floor in general.
The satellite signal is getting redirected by the storm clouds, making it so a call can get through. That was what it was.
He could check it on his own phone, but since there was no cell reception and the screen on the smartphone did to his vision the same thing the flashlight did, only worse, he didn’t have it. Still, that had to be it. And the lucky bastard who lost his phone in the store was going to be the beneficiary of this cosmically rare event.
Just as soon as Orrin found the phone.
He thought it was coming from the far corner. Sound carried really well at night, but the store didn’t have much of an echo to it, so that was probably about right. If he was pinpointing it correctly, that meant the phone was ringing in the Electronics section, and that opened up a whole new set of possibilities.
Like, maybe a display was going haywire—again, because of the storm, perhaps—and one of the sample phones was going off on its own.
That was a pretty good explanation. Orrin liked it.
He reached the edge of the Electronics section in time for the seventh ring, which never came.
“Hello?” he called out. Either the owner of the phone would answer or maybe the phone would. Neither did.
He didn’t go through electronics all that often, even though it was just about the least frightening section of the store: TV’s that weren’t on; phones under glass; video game consoles in lock and key underneath embedded display versions that could be played by passers-by, provided the display version wasn’t broken that day; racks and racks of movies on DVD, just in case there were still people out there who had DVD players and didn’t know how to stream films. None of what was there looked like a human, a lizard, or a hell-beast. No mannequins, and nothing but right angles. A Cubist nightmare, perhaps.
He stepped up to the phone counter. Mad Maggie’s offered the latest versions of most phones and contracts with three different carriers, which was a level of ecumenism that nearly offset the fact that nobody could try out their new phone in the store.
There was a long counter of test phones. These were tethered to the surface with heavy steel cables. Buyers could pick them up and hold them to their ear, but that was about all. They also had a second wire leading to their charge outlet.
He picked one up and flipped it over to confirm what he already thought must be the case: the battery pack was missing. The phones powered up when the store’s main power came on, and only then. It would have taken a miracle for one of these to ring.
“I mean, I guess I could be hearing things,” he said, once again reassured by the sound of his own voice.
“Let’s review our options: one of you powerless phones rang in the middle of a cell signal dead zone, someone left a phone somewhere else around here and it rang in the middle of a cell signal dead zone, or, I’m losing my mind. Thoughts?”
The committee of cell phones had no answer. Neither did the two-dimensional cutout of the pretty cell phone spokeswoman on the wall behind the counter. The mannequin in the Men’s Formal section on the other side of the causeway also offered no opinion.
Except for the part where he was polling the thoughts of nonliving objects, Orrin took the lack of response to be a good sign. Then he wondered for a couple of minutes how he would know if he was starting to go crazy from being alone in this place all the time, and decided he probably wouldn’t, until at least morning, and then decided not to let it bother him before then.
The tremendous crash on the other side of the room made him jump about five feet in the air. It also stopped his heart and turned him into a religious man, for a few seconds, until he realized what had happened: the ceiling in Young Misses just collapsed. The bucket he’d gone through all that trouble to fetch was still resting in the concourse at the edge of Sporting Goods, serving no particular purpose.
At least, he thought, I’m not hearing a phone ring any more.
“What a mess,” Leopold said.
It was two hours after Orrin called the morning shift supervisor, using the “just for emergencies” number taped next to the landline in the office. As it was the first time Orrin had ever classified anything going on in Mad Maggie’s as an emergency, the call got Leopold into work more or less as soon as he was awake enough to operate a car.
Considering Leo lived only three miles away, Orrin assumed the manager’s preparations also involved a shower and a stiff cup of coffee, neither of which fully eliminated the alcohol smell.
“Yeah, I tried to get…” Orrin kicked the side of the janitor bucket, which was still useless, but it was being useless much closer to the broken ceiling now.
“Points for effort, hombre, but that would’a been a teacup under a waterfall, I mean looky that.”
Leopold was a shortish guy who was maybe only a couple of years older than Orrin, but spoke as if he was a fifty year old trying to relate to high school kids in a 1980’s movie, and he dressed as if he was hoping mustaches and bowler hats were going to be coming back in style soon. Orrin was a full foot taller, and rail-thin skinny. Bernie, the elderly register lady who was usually the second or third one in the door after Leo, called them Mutt and Jeff. Orrin didn’t get the reference, but he thought Leo probably did.
They stood there and looked at the carnage for a few more seconds. Leopold was mindful of the hard-and-fast rule that sales floor lights do not come on more than an hour before open, and so he was using a flashlight to assess the damage, which just made it all look worse. Four tiles had come down, there was water and white foam tile debris all over the floor. The local prepubescent girls were going to have to go down the street to Belles & Bills if they wanted to pick up the latest in cheap chemises, for the immediate future.
The rain had subsided, though, so just about the only good thing that could be said about this situation was that there wasn’t also a steady stream of water coming down to destroy more merchandise.
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“You know what I am going to have to do?” Leo asked, not apparently expecting an answer from Orrin. “I am going to have to call corporate. I’m sure we have insurance for this sort of thing. Don’t you think?”
“I’m sure.”
Orrin wasn’t sure, but this was a circumstance in which he wouldn’t suffer any for being wrong.
“We’ll have to get everyone in early to clean up, and cordon off the area, and… oh, and it’s a safety hazard. Should we open? Should we even open the store? I don’t know!”
“Call corporate.”
“Yes, right, yes. We’ll need signs. ‘Beach Closed’. Hahaha. Jaws reference, right?”
“Right.” Orrin didn’t know that it was, but Leo always assumed he and Orrin understood each other in a way that they actually didn’t. He sometimes wondered if Leo acted the same way with the other night watchmen, but decided he wasn’t sufficiently invested in Leopold to find out.
In all fairness, interacting with humans wasn’t something Orrin excelled at, whether they were decidedly odd ones or the ostensibly normal ones. This was presuming he himself could distinguish between the groups. Since he imagined he probably fit well in the decidedly odd ones category, he was not the ideal judge of who went where.
It was no coincidence, then, that he took a job requiring little interaction with people. Not that he didn’t sometimes want to have someone to talk to, but the mannequins were okay in that regard, on most nights.
Leo concluded his flashlight review of the damaged region and headed down the concourse, and then to the back and the office. Orrin followed, because now that there was someone else in the room with him, it felt weird being left alone.
A half an hour later, Leo had a plan. It involved getting all on-staff janitor people in early, locating every “CAUTION: WET FLOOR” sign in the building (there were only two) and committing the sin of turning the lights on early. This was to get some photos of the damage, which would then be uploaded to corporate, which would forward it to insurance adjusters and approved repair contractors.
Unfiction Page 5