In the somewhat distant past, there was a large department store in what had been the center of the shopping area in the center of the city. This part of the city was no longer considered central, but it was still a major shopping plaza, even as the concept of the department store dwindled in significance over time.
The store had been huge: eight levels of public showrooms, with another eight floors above that containing stock and business offices. It was important enough to the downtown area that when the city decided to create the Dunston Street stop, in the Seventies, they put it right next to the giant department store and added an exit ramp that permitted their customers to enter the store at the basement level. In the winter, shoppers could park at the edge of town, hop on the train, and shop for the entire day without taking another breath of unfiltered air.
The appeal of the all-in-one shopping experience waned over the years, and the store eventually went the way of the dodo and the buggy whip. The spot it occupied had since been replaced by a modest, two-story version of essentially the same kind of department store, which put out its overstock on deep discount in the basement. The entrance-via-subway-tunnel was the most interesting aspect of the store, although most shoppers used it as a pass-through to get to the street and perhaps do some shoplifting along the way.
It was a story everybody who’d ever taken the Dunston Street stop was familiar with, because a nicer version of it was on a plaque affixed to the wall next to the store entrance. Briefly, Oliver entertained the notion that he’d literally just come up with that story, rather than that it was always true, but he discarded the idea because it made his head hurt, and was in every other sense simply not helpful. Minnie and Wilson were messing him up with this craziness.
“We should stop here,” Oliver said.
“Is that what the message says?” Minnie asked.
“Not exactly, but we should stop here anyway.”
Getting off the tracks was difficult and disgusting. There were ladders embedded in the platform in a couple of places, but needless to say, they were the kind of ladders that cried out for a pair of gloves, and they didn’t have those. Once that was accomplished, though, it was nice to be standing in a spot where humans were supposed to be. It felt like rejoining the land of the living. Seeing other people around would have probably helped, but one thing at a time.
“Do you think this is where that other guy went?” Minerva asked.
“Maybe, if he can read the same signs I can,” Oliver said. “Or if he’s the one leaving them. That’s assuming he still exists. I could have forgotten to write about him.”
Nobody laughed.
“I’m kidding.”
“We know,” Minnie said.
The way from the landing to the store was a concourse that had an empty popcorn stand, an empty donut stand, and an entrance that led directly to the street. There weren’t any donuts on display, but the popcorn smelled fresh enough.
The door to the store was open. Off-hours, there was a big roll-gate pulled down over the glass doors, and that gate looked like something that could withstand a blast from a bazooka. If it had been closed, Ollie was prepared to ask Minerva to use the pulse cannon on it, because he thought getting inside was important.
He led the way in. The basement shop was a lot of bargain bins full of frequently pawed-over blouses and skirts expertly assembled by children in third-world countries, or so he assumed.
“Why are we here?” Minnie asked.
“Escalator,” he said, pointing the way. She shrugged, and followed.
“Where’s Wilson?” he asked, noting that she was the only one there, suddenly.
“I dunno, I think he’s waiting in the tunnel.”
“Why… never mind, we’ll go back and get him in a minute. Do you have that map Ben gave you?”
“Yeah, yeah, hang on.”
She pulled it out of a side pocket and handed it over. Oliver carried it over to the base of the escalator, which was where the map of the store was located. He put Ben’s map up next to it.
“It’s not a street map,” he said. It matched up to the first floor layout perfectly.
“Look at that,” she said. “So X marks…”
“Home goods,” he read. “Let’s go.”
He headed up the escalator to the main shopping floor, which was significantly larger than the basement level. That was obvious almost immediately; he felt as if he’d been deposited into a warehouse.
Curiously, and unlike the basement, the entrance doors on the ground floor were all locked and chained. He wondered if that meant the employees all escaped through the basement, and just forgot to lock it on the way out.
“All right so, if we head that way…”
He stopped when he realized there was nobody next to him to speak to.
“Minerva?”
He’d gone a few steps from the escalator and turned down the first aisle already. He didn’t remember doing this, but given where his feet were, there wasn’t any other real explanation. But when he backtracked to where he thought the escalator was, he didn’t find it.
“What the hell. Minerva?”
There was a support beam near the front door, and on the beam was a map like the one he’d just been looking at. He looked at it again, and was confused by the revelation that it had no spot for an escalator on it. Ben’s map, still in his hands, also didn’t have a spot for it, but it never did so that wasn’t news.
Still, the escalator has vanished somehow, and both Minnie and Wilson had vanished along with it. To make matters worse, now he was trapped in a locked department store.
Then, on the other side of the sales floor, somewhere in an unseen far corner, a cell phone began to ring.
Chapter Eleven
The Ghost in the Machine
“Hello? Is someone there?”
The light in Oliver’s hand flickered and dimmed, as if the power that compelled it to amplify vanished at the same time the escalator did. It didn’t go away completely, though, sticking to something close to the power output of a regular flashlight.
The phone continued to ring. Nobody was around to answer it, but the idea that somebody might be calling gave him hope that an entire city of people hadn’t literally ceased to exist.
“Hello?” he repeated. “Wilson? Minerva? Anyone here?”
There was a rustling, to his right. It made him jump, and once he was done jumping, it made him seek out the source of the noise.
The floor layout was racetrack-oval, with paths leading off in both directions. He shoved Ben’s treasure map in his pocket and headed around the short bottom part of the oval. Around the corner—there was a wall bisecting the center of the oval—was a mannequin-heavy clothing section with a plastic tarp drooping from the roof. It looked like a tumor that was breathing.
This is ridiculous, he thought.
He’d somehow ended up stuck in the middle of Mad Maggie’s Shop-O-Rama, which was insane because he made up Mad Maggie’s. He might well have made it up based on a dimly remembered understanding of the very floor layout he was now stuck in the middle of, except that the actual store—it was called Daniel’s—wasn’t this big.
The possibility existed, then, that the store was now mimicking the story, and not the other way around.
The phone was still ringing. Oliver directed his flashlight down the main drag, past the annoyingly accurate running mannequin display in the sporting good section, to electronics. The same cardboard cutout as the one in the subway greeted him with a cardboard wave and a cardboard smile. He headed her way.
On the route, he got to take in the creepy shadows cast through the joint efforts of the emergency lighting, the display endcaps, and the wide assortment of humanoid dummies in active wear, formal wear, sleepwear, and other miscellaneous wears, ready to jump up and move around. Perhaps they could help him storm the doors, break out, and fight an alien invasion.
Stranger things have happened, he thought, although that was probably
untrue.
What he didn’t feel was fear or dread, or any kind of anticipatory concern that something in this store was about to jump up and harm him. He thought maybe that was the problem with the actual story: there was no real danger, just the things the main character—Orrin—convinced himself of. The fear was all in his head.
It probably would have made a better movie, he decided. He’d never written a screenplay, but maybe that would’ve been the way to go.
Oliver reached the electronics section, stepped past the friendly, smiling cardboard spokeswoman and found the recycle bin. It wasn’t a surprise that the ringing was coming from inside there, because of course it had to be.
There was still a lock on the lid. He reached down to his belt, at his right hip, and was surprised to discover a ring of keys there, which hadn’t been there before. The smart thing to do would be to take the keys to the front door, unlock it, and get the hell out of this place. Then he could either go find Minnie and Wilson, or go the hell home and sleep off whatever this was. He didn’t think he could treat the entire city losing touch with reality the same way he did a drinking bender, but he was willing to give it a try.
But, he didn’t do that, because the phone was still ringing and he was going to have to answer it. And when it was obvious he didn’t have the right key—the lock had a tiny keyhole and he didn’t have one small enough to fit it—he headed over to gardening supplies, found a mallet, and swung it at the top of the container until it caved in. This took a few minutes, but it was tremendously satisfying, so he was a little disappointed when the lid finally caved. He tipped the container over, scattering outdated handhelds all over the floor.
The ringing came from a flip phone that required an antenna to be extended before functioning properly. Oliver was pretty sure he saw one of these in an old TV show once, but it was the first time he’d held one.
He flipped it open.
“Hello?” he said.
Static. He remembered the night he got a call like this in his apartment, and just the thought of that night made him reconsider how scary or not-scary the moment he was now experiencing was.
“Hello?” he repeated.
“O…You have to…Wilson…”
“Minnie, is that you?”
“You have to come back.”
“I can’t, the… the stairs vanished, I don’t know how to get out of… where are you? Where did you guys go?”
Static. He’d have thought she’d hung up except for the interference.
“Join…”
“What? Minnie, what?”
“Join us.”
Then the line went dead.
“Well of course it did,” he said, putting down the phone.
All of the phones were supposed to start ringing next, because that was how things went in the story. It was actually where he left off, because once that started happening he didn’t know where to go. He figured if he ever picked up the story again, he’d edit out the whole all the phones were ringing thing, because that was creepy, but not all that scary.
Also, what’s a guy supposed to do with a hundred ringing phones? Answer them one at a time? Orrin would have probably been so freaked out, he turned and headed for the door, and since—unlike Oliver—Orrin could leave when he wanted, he’d probably do that.
So for the story to work, Oliver would have to create a situation in which Orrin was trapped inside. Up the stakes, make it so the danger is real, that sort of thing.
How would I keep him inside? he wondered. The key could stop working, or he could lose the key ring, or…
“Or the exit could vanish,” he said. “Crap.”
For just a half-second, he actually was afraid. Not because he appeared to be caught in his own unfinished horror story, but because he was stuck in the middle of a rewrite of that story.
But that didn’t make sense. Of course the regular exit was still there, because it had to be. He never introduced anything into the story that would allow for the front doors to just disappear; if he had, it would have blown up the whole thing. The reader would drop out. Any reality-altering event like that had to be telegraphed by something smaller first, and he hadn’t done that in any part of the story.
Ergo, the front door was still there. It was just the escalator that was missing, but it was missing because Mad Maggie’s had no basement. Weirdly, this made sense to him.
He was stuck in a rewrite of some kind, though, because the phones on the floor weren’t ringing. As long as that was true, he had no impetus to flee the premises, and yet the story had to head in that direction because there was nowhere else to go.
The scary part was that he didn’t know what was supposed to happen next if those phones didn’t start ringing.
Then somebody touched his shoulder.
His response was something like the reaction to a live electrical wire: he yelped, jumped away from the contact, and turned all at the same time, which resulted in his feet getting tangled up on themselves and him falling over onto the scattered outdated phones on the floor.
There was nobody behind him, aside from the cardboard spokeswoman, and she didn’t look like she’d moved.
“Of course she didn’t move,” he said, to the nearest mannequin, “she’s cardboard.”
The mannequin appeared to agree, albeit silently.
He scampered to his feet, clumsily.
“So who did that?” he asked, trying for a confidently loud, low voice but landing on whiny, high-pitched, and scared. “Come on, I just want to know how to solve this.”
There wasn’t any response, but the tarp at the other end of the room did make a little noise. It wasn’t helpful.
“That’s the deal, right? You guys are ghosts or whatever, and you need me to do something or fix something or… join you, whatever the hell that means. Is there a curse? What’s the issue?”
Nothing. He turned to the mannequin again, the one opposite the electronics. She was a part of the business casual section of the store, and wore a smart pantsuit with a frilly blouse.
“Well, I tried,” he said.
The mannequin nodded.
He tried to convince himself that hadn’t actually happened, but he was doing that convincing while also fleeing, as this seemed prudent.
The run to the doors was more exhausting than anything he’d done earlier in the evening, and that was crazy because not at all long ago he ran over two kilometers in battle gear, in the rain. Yet he was winded before he even reached sporting goods. He had an awful idea that the reason for it was that the character of Orrin the night watchman was in worse physical shape than the character of Opie, the soldier.
I’m just tired, that’s all.
None of the mannequins jumped in his way en route, which was nice. This was probably because the one Oliver saw move didn’t move at all, and it was a trick of the lighting, and he was just allowing his own imagination to spook him. Ironically, in this instance, just because it was all in his imagination didn’t mean the mannequin hadn’t moved. Both of those things could be 100% true.
He got past the tarp and the water-damaged floor and turned the corner. From there it was a straight line to the exit. Already, he had the keys in his hands.
Someone was standing at the door.
He stopped running, of course. That was the proper reaction when confronted with a ghost.
It was a woman. She was barely visible in the shadows that seemed in some ways to partially blur her existence, but he could see enough to conclude that it was a her. She looked a little like Minerva, too. He didn’t know what to make of that.
At first he thought she was standing on the other side of the front doors, because she was out of focus. She wasn’t; she was on the inside, but she also wasn’t anywhere. When he directed the flashlight at her, the light found nothing physical to illuminate. It passed right through.
“I guess this is how the story keeps me from leaving. Cool, cool.”
She raised an unfocused arm a
nd pointed at him, which was a little unsettling in a lot of ways.
“What? Look, just tell me what you want so I can fix this or whatever.”
Join us.
She didn’t say this, precisely. The words appeared in his head, but didn’t pass through his ears first.
“No thanks?”
Join us.
“I don’t know how you’re doing that, but no. I wouldn’t even know how.”
It was an annoying impasse. He was kind of spooked by the appearance of a ghost, just like he was unnerved by a nodding mannequin, but these things had only temporary shock value. Connecting jump-scares to real-world threats was difficult; no wonder he never finished the story.
Then he thought maybe that was the problem.
“You want me to finish, don’t you? Well I don’t know the ending. I had a couple of ideas, but I never really decided which one to go with. And look, you’re just a light show and a voice in my head. It’s spooky, but a couple of hours ago a flying alien tried to eat me. I don’t think you’re going to top that.”
Join us.
“I went with ghosts because ghosts scare the crap out of me, but now that I’m here… I mean, maybe it would be different if I were responsible for your death. That’s how these things are supposed to go, right? But I’m not. Or rather, Orrin wasn’t. He was just a night watchman.”
We will help you.
“What? What does that mean?”
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and directed the light that way. It fell on a dais that until a second ago had a male mannequin modeling flannel pajamas. The stand was empty.
He had exactly enough time to register this fact when a white plastic arm slammed down on his wrist and knocked the light out of his grip. It skittered across the floor, while the owner of that plastic arm grabbed Oliver by the collar.
Ollie shouted and elbowed the dummy in the gut. This didn’t have the kind of effect one would expect it to have if this were a person and not a facsimile of one, but since the point he struck was a swivel spot—where the torso was attached to the waist—it was still effective. The mannequin managed to register surprise on its featureless face as it lost its balance and fell over backwards.
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