Having the lights up was, as always, surreal. Orrin and Leo walked around the store, looking for signs of other future cave-ins. Now that the roof above the ceiling had been proven suspect, every minor tile discoloration was a possible new disaster.
Orrin gave the Electronics section an especially close review, although he wasn’t looking up. He considered asking if Leopold ever heard a phone ringing in the store, but decided it was a silly question to ask of someone who spent his days surrounded by people on the sales floor. Even if it was a dead zone, the ambient noise of human interaction would be more than enough to hide a ring tone.
“Hey,” he said, deciding to ask a different question instead, “what was this place used for, before?”
“Ahh… statues or something.”
“Yeah, before that.”
“Guns.”
“No, after that. Between.”
“I dunno.”
Leo paused to take a picture of a brown spot directly above the cardboard cutout of the cell phone spokeswoman. The spot was shaped like Wisconsin, and had probably been there forever.
“Why do you ask?” Leo asked. “You getting the jeebies?”
“The what?”
“You know. The willies. The spooks. Are you a couple of days from ending up huddled in the corner near the front, holding your breath until one of us opens the door? Are you heading for a Section 8?”
“No, of course not,” Orrin said, while privately wondering if hearing a phone ring where there couldn’t be one might actually be an indication that precisely this was happening. “I just wondered. I pick up a motor oil kind of smell sometimes.”
“Huh.” Leo shrugged. “Never heard that one. I do remember… maybe. Yeah, something about a fire.”
“There was a fire here?”
“Or near here. It could be something I heard one time. Was it just motor oil, or burning motor oil?”
“Burning, I guess. I don’t know if motor oil smells at all otherwise.”
“A fire. Look it up, could be my imagination.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that.”
Orrin didn’t look it up. As always seemed to be the case, he forgot about it—and everything else he promised himself he’d do—as soon as he left Mad Maggie’s.
He likened the threshold of the store to an airlock. Once he got on the other side of it he was too busy taking off his space suit and being checked for alien parasites and just generally rejoining the world to remember to look up local fires of the past fifty years. He was happy to be home, and to get some sleep.
Orrin got back to the store that night to find almost half of the Young Misses section was gone. The ceiling had been replaced by a green trash bag-quality layer of plastic, the floor was cordoned off with caution tape and orange cones, and the whole scene was surrounded by several space heaters and fans, which were not in use at the time of the store’s closing, but reportedly had been going all day.
This added a bouquet of mildew to the ambiance of the store—undoubtedly discouraging a number of shoppers. The trash bag ceiling was worse. It billowed with the air currents Orrin was not aware existed. This made a crinkly sound—probably not audible when the store was open—which threatened to drive him insane. Or, more insane, he supposed.
Over the course of the evening, he gained a profound appreciation of the sinister quality of the sound of plastic sheeting in the wind. Since it relied on the vagaries of a chaotic force, there was no way to predict when the plastic would go from silent to so loud he was nearly convinced something was trying to escape from the other side of it.
This made him unaccountably edgy, and that wasn’t a good headspace to be in when alone in the store. He was reminded of the first month he worked, when every stray sound was de facto proof of an armed incursion.
Sometime on the other side of Midnight, he finally began to calm down and stop hearing the noise the plastic was making. He could still hear it, but he was able to shove it in a corner, where all the other random sounds the store made also lived. Like the creaking that came from the front doors on certain nights, when the air in the antechamber cooled and the metal contracted. Or the periodic squeak from a plastic wheel here and there, as merchandise racks gradually succumbed to gravitational pull in slightly uneven sections of the floor. Here and there, an improperly stacked product might resettle, and this might cause a loud noise, but Orrin was used to that as well.
The smell of mildew bothered him for a while, too, but by his two A.M. rounds, he’d largely become immune to that, which was how he still managed to notice the motor oil smell had returned.
It was impossible to miss. In the past, it was nothing more than a faint odor that went away quickly. This time, it was profound, if that was a word that could be used to describe a smell. It came on so strong, Orrin nearly gagged at first. Then he held his arm up to his nose and looked around for a source.
He was standing in the Kitchen area. The smell was strongest near the frying pans, but didn’t emanate from any one thing. It was concentrated there, but in a five-foot space in the middle of the aisle.
Nothing was coming in from the ceiling, and there was no discoloration on the floor. The merchandise was unsullied and uninteresting and not covered in burning oil. It was a ghost smell.
If it was closer to the wrecked floor, he might have been able to entertain the idea that the moisture kicked up an older smell underneath, but Kitchen and Young Misses weren’t proximate.
It was, he decided, something he would just have to add to the quirks of the place. At least now he had an idea of a source location. He surrendered to the conclusion that he would not be solving this that evening, and finished the circuit of the store.
A half an hour later, the cell phone rang again.
Orrin was at the desk at the front, his default state when not walking around. He spent most of his desk time playing solitaire under the gentle illumination of the overhead emergency light. The sound was a shock, almost literally: his heart acted like he’d touched a live wire, as all the sublimated fear and dread from the prior evening came back aggressively.
“HELLO?” he shouted.
There were no clouds out. No storm to confuse the sky and bounce a cell phone signal around, so that explanation was plainly wrong.
The phone rang again.
Orrin jumped from behind the desk and started running toward Electronics, which was at the polar opposite end of the store. Between the heavy boots and loose belt holding a large collection of keys on chains and loops, and the fact that he was not terribly athletic by nature, Orrin no doubt looked like a jangly, uncoordinated mess on the verge of doing himself harm, but he wanted to get there fast because someone in this place was screwing with him.
That had to be it. An electronic device of some kind, a tape recorder of a cell phone set to go off at a certain time of night, just to mess with him. Maybe one of the other guards was playing a joke on him. Or Leo. Or some other random daytime person.
“WHO’S HERE?” he shouted after the third ring. His sprint was along the back concourse, which took him by Young Misses and the jogging mannequins, rather than past Kitchen goods and the oil smell. It was probably so he could see straight ahead into the Electronics all the way down the corridor, rather than turn and face it at the last second (as the other path would have him do) but he also didn’t want to smell the oil again, because it bugged him.
He got to the edge of the section before the fourth ring, and stopped. He could hear his breathing—he was panting—and the blood pumping through his heart, and the flapping of the plastic sheeting. Nothing else.
RING.
He jumped backwards, then calmed down enough to zero in on the source a little better, but only a little. It was from the left, where the life-sized cardboard display of the cell phone sales lady stood. He took a few steps in that direction.
“Whoever this is, you’re in a lot of trouble,” he said, raised voice but not shouting.
Whoever it was didn
’t answer.
“Not kidding. It would be better if you came out.” When this didn’t do anything, he added, “I have a gun.”
He did have a gun, but not on him. It was sitting in its holster on the desk at the front of the store, because it rested awkwardly when he sat down so he always took it off until his rounds. Even if he did have it on, he barely knew how to use it.
The fifth ring came, and it sounded like it was right behind him, and that was terrifying. He spun around, brandishing nothing because his hands were empty, ready to punch someone or defend himself or just die from some ninja attack. And there was nobody there.
“C’mon,” he said, to himself this time. “What is it, in the ceiling?”
He did a circuit around the area, but there was no cell phone. Yes, there was a display of phones under glass, but they had no power—as he’d previously verified—and aside from the two-dimensional one the cardboard woman was holding up, that was all.
No, not all, he thought.
He was being an idiot. He’d walked past the thing a dozen times and didn’t even fully recognize what he was walking past, but there was a box at the end of the counter, on the floor. It was about three feet tall, had a lid with a lock, and a rectangular slot. The sign above the box read, RECYCLE OLD CELL PHONES HERE.
He stood in front of the box, and waited. It didn’t ring again.
Orrin was relieved by this, although he felt like he probably shouldn’t have been. Someone dropped a phone in there and the phone was still active for some reason, and now a call was coming in on the phone. Sure, the battery should have died by this time, and Mad Maggie’s was no less a dead zone now than it was the night before, but this was an answer anyway, and it was a pretty good one.
It also had a tendency to stop ringing whenever he got too close, and that was the part he thought he should perhaps be wondering about. Although it had only happened twice.
Coincidence, he decided.
That was probably it.
That wasn’t it.
Over the course of the next two weeks, at some time after midnight—always—the phone would ring. It was never at exactly the same time, and never for exactly the same number of rings. If he went near the box, the ringing stopped. Otherwise, it kept going, for sometimes up to an hour.
Orrin really didn’t know what to do. At first he tried asking day shift employees leading questions about the phones in the box, but this didn’t help. The questions included: how often is the box emptied; did any of the phones ever happen to, oh, goodness, let’s say ring; have other night guards commented on… odd noises…? The answers he got were that nobody knew when the box got emptied, of course the phones don’t ring, and no, why do you ask?
Further investigation—done when he should be sleeping, not wandering around the store—led to the discovery that the box had been sitting in electronics for longer than any of the current employees of Mad Maggie’s had been employed there, because none of them knew how to recycle the disposed-of phones, nor had they ever seen it done. They were also pretty sure nobody had a key for it, but it seemed more likely the key existed and whoever had it didn’t know they had it. All Orrin was sure of was that he didn’t have it, but he did have a dozen keys that had no apparent use on the key ring he was handed when he started working there.
At least once a night he tried convincing himself it was all in his head. That he found incipient psychosis preferable to a malfunctioning cell phone was sort of interesting, but that’s all it was. It didn’t make the ringing stop, whether it was real or not.
What he really wanted was to convince someone else to stay in the store with him during his shift, so they could hear it too. But to do that he would have to explain why, and he had a feeling as soon as he explained it he’d be looking for another job. If that person were another employee, management would find out their longest-tenured night watchman had finally made it round that final bend and needed to be rotated out. If they were not an employee—he didn’t know anyone who would do this for him, so this was a pure hypothetical—Orrin would end up fired for allowing a civilian into the store after hours.
This wasn’t the only thing making his job much more difficult of late, just the worst. Whoever was hired to fix the ceiling above Young Misses was apparently deeply inefficient, because the plastic tarp was still there. One night he decided it sounded like someone trying to breathe with a trash bag over his head, and as soon as he made that comparison that was all it ever sounded like.
After a week of repetitive cell phone abuse, he finally decided to get on a computer and research the warehouse more thoroughly. He was hoping for a felicitous discovery that would explain the impossible ringing, whatever that might be. (Aliens, maybe, buried under the cement floor. Not in the nonexistent basement; entombed in the foundation.) He didn’t find it, but he did find out that the building did indeed store vehicles for a time—emergency vehicles, actually, including fire trucks. This was over twenty-five years ago, and it was only for nine months, while the station down the road was torn down and rebuilt due to something unspecified by the historical record. Apparently the firemen even bunked in the building.
That was all he had, though. He figured the motor oil smell he kept picking up was some sort of combination of dry rot in the floor coupled with an old spill from one of the engines that used to be stored there, and the ‘burning’ part he just tacked on himself. This would be slightly easier to believe if he knew what motor oil smelled like when it was burning. He didn’t, and so he had no reason to think that was the exact nature of the odor, yet he remained convinced this was right.
By the eleventh night, he’d had all he could take. He was, as always, at the front of the store, listening to the staccato breathing of the suffocating giant in the middle of the store and sniffing a cinnamon stick he’d started carrying around in his breast pocket to try and scrub the stench of the oil from his nostrils—it wasn’t working—when the phone rang again.
“ENOUGH!” he shouted, jumping to his feet. “WHAT DO YOU WANT, DAMN YOU?”
In something like a real sprint he tore down the main concourse, his nightstick in his hand, not really thinking about anything but making the goddamn phone stop goddamn ringing, goddammit.
“AAAAHHHH!” he shouted, through the worst of the oil smell and around the corner, and of course… of course… the phone stopped just as soon as he got near enough.
“CALL BACK!” he screamed.
He knew there were security cameras in several key locations in the store, and he knew those cameras still recorded activity at night, because the little red lights stayed on. He also knew where the recordings were stored, although he didn’t have direct access to them. This meant his little trip down crazy lane was going to be captured, and someone was going to see it, and he 100% did not care any more.
“I’M RIGHT HERE! COME ON, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY?”
Motionless, holding his stick, hearing nothing but the rasp of the plastic tarp and his own breathing, he was undeniably completely alone. He was shouting at nothing and nobody.
Then the phone started ringing again.
He lunged forward awkwardly, a disturbed marionette, nearly taking out a display rack of outdated nineties films on his way to the phone counter.
Destroying something in the store was absolutely grounds for immediate termination, so his lack of hesitation in striking the lock on the phone box with his nightstick should have warranted, at minimum, a moment of contemplation, and it did not.
It was a good quality nightstick, made of some sort of carbon alloy, and while the lock was pretty decent too, the hinge holding the loop through which the padlock was threaded was more or less decorative, because it took only three blows to pop it.
Orrin lifted the lid and peered inside.
The ringing hadn’t stopped, but there were a hundred phones to choose from. He grabbed one, flipped it open, verified that it was not the right one, and tossed it on the floor and tried again.
It rang again, and it sounded like maybe it was at the very bottom of the box.
“I’m coming!” he said, trying phones two at a time now, still not getting the right one.
The decision to tip the box onto the floor wasn’t really a conscious one; it was just the next logical step, and then he was ankle deep in discarded electronics, spread out as far as Men’s Fashion, and only then did he find the right phone.
It was an ancient thing, by current standards. It felt like a walkie-talkie. He thought maybe he saw someone using a phone like this in of one of the nineties movies on the rack he nearly toppled.
He held it up and looked for a button to open the line, reminding himself at the same time that this was impossible, this phone was older than half of the employees at Mad Maggie’s, it couldn’t have a charge, or a phone plan. It couldn’t be ringing.
He found the button.
“Hello?”
There was static on the other end.
“Hello?” he repeated. “Who is this?”
“O…” someone said. A woman’s voice. “Orrin.”
“Who is this?” he asked. His mouth was bone dry and his heart rate was trying for a record.
“Orrin,” she repeated.
“WHO IS THIS? HOW DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?”
“You have to help us.”
He screamed, and threw the phone as far as he could. It impacted with the wall above a luggage display, something he didn’t see but heard well enough.
Then it was quiet again.
Finally.
Until another phone started ringing.
It was a different ring, certainly. Another phone, one he’d never heard ring before. He fell to his knees and started checking phones, but he wasn’t going nearly fast enough because then a second phone was going, and a third. And then all of them, all at once, a horrible cacophony of noise. He grabbed one and activated the line.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
Unfiction Page 6