He raced off to investigate. Ruth Anne closed her Sudoku book. “You think someone really sneaked into the store?”
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Amy said. “But there’s new graffiti in the bathroom, and I’d swear it wasn’t there twenty minutes ago.”
“I’m starting to feel like I shouldn’t have done this,” Ruth Anne said, toying with the cap of her Blistex. “I wanted the extra hours, but I just figured I could do my puzzles. I didn’t think we’d actually see anybody.”
“Nothing bad is going to happen,” Amy said, just before Woody Woodpecker’s laugh filled the room. She checked her phone: help.
“I turn off my phone when I’m in the building,” Ruth Anne said. “That way I never get them.”
Basil burst into the room, sounding winded. “I got it closed but I can’t lock it. We’ve definitely had a security breach,” he announced. “We’d better start patrolling the floor right away.”
He walked over to the dry-erase board, drew a rough map of the store, and started writing down their schedule. “I’ve divided the store so it’s easier to search, and I’ve assigned everyone a zone. For this first pass, Ruth Anne will do the Showroom. Amy, you’ll cover the Market Floor, and I’ll tackle the Self-Service Warehouse.”
“Wait, we’re splitting up?” Ruth Anne asked.
“There’s a lot of ground to cover,” Basil explained.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Amy said. “And there’s some graffiti in the women’s bathroom you need to see.”
“Graffiti is the least of my worries,” Basil said.
“It’s kinda weird—”
“I’d feel a lot safer if we all walked together,” Ruth Anne said. “What am I supposed to do if I find someone? I mean, that’s the idea, isn’t it? You want me to find someone. But what happens when I do? And I’m all by myself?”
Basil suddenly looked like he had a very bad headache. Clearly he had put a lot of time and effort into drawing his diagram without thinking through the details. Splitting up might have been a viable option when a bunch of flat-pack-wrangling roughnecks like Tommy, Gregg, and the others were going to patrol the store, but what would Ruth Anne do if she encountered an intruder all alone? What would any of them do? Demonstrate an Agreeable and Approachable Attitude?
“If we travel together, we’re too easy to evade,” Basil said. “We need to split up. We’ll have a bigger search footprint that way.”
“Ruth Anne and I will go together,” Amy said. “Think of the liability issues. We’ll cover the Showroom, and you do the Market Floor and the Warehouse.”
The mere mention of the word “liability” convinced Basil to accept the proposal. “Fine, but we need to get started right away,” he said. “For all we know, someone’s out there right now trashing store property.”
It was nearly 11:30 p.m. when they emerged on the Showroom floor, next to the café with Children’s to their left. Just ahead was the stairwell that led down to the Market Floor.
“Stay alert and keep your eyes peeled,” Basil said in his best leader-of-men voice. “We’ll meet back in the break area after this first patrol. If anything happens tonight, that’s where we’ll regroup, okay? And if you see anything suspicious, call me immediately. I’ve been trained for these situations. Remember: your safety is my responsibility.”
“Right,” Amy sighed.
They split up.
Amy cut through the café toward the top of the escalator.
“We’ll follow the Bright and Shining Path,” she said.
Then she realized there was no one walking beside her. She turned and saw Ruth Anne lingering on the other side of the café.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth Anne called. “Do you want to check the café first? I’m not even really sure what we’re looking for.”
“Teenagers? Insomniacs? I don’t know,” Amy said. “Come on, we’ll do the café last.”
“Are you sure?”
“If you want to do the café first, we can do the café first.”
“No, you’re right,” Ruth Anne said. “We’ll do it your way.”
She didn’t move.
“Are you coming?” Amy asked.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth Anne said, finally walking across the café to Amy. “This Showroom feels spooky. It’s so different from the Youngstown store.”
“They’re exactly the same,” Amy said.
“Why would anyone sneak into a store?” Ruth Anne said. “You’ve never actually seen that happen, have you?”
“Customers do all kinds of crazy things,” Amy said. “I remember this giant fat dude who came in one day near closing, took off his shoes, folded up his pants, and crawled into a Müskk and fell asleep. No one even noticed him for an hour. And Pat told me that once he found some woman and her kid hiding in a Lingam after hours. He was walking through Bedrooms and the door of the wardrobe opened and the two of them came creeping out. He almost died.”
They reached the top of the escalator. Before Amy turned onto the Bright and Shining Path, she paused at the line of framed photos showcasing store management.
“You know,” she said, “I like Basil a lot better when his mouth isn’t moving.”
Ruth Anne looked like she wanted to say something sharp. Then she stopped herself.
“He’s a nice young man.”
“He’s a tool bag,” Amy said.
“Not everyone you disagree with is a bad person,” Ruth Anne said.
“Basil is.”
“He has a lot of responsibilities,” Ruth Anne said.
“Like what?” Amy asked. “Making sure that every unit goes out minus one screw? Making the schedule suck for as many partners as possible?”
“He’s raising his little sister,” Ruth Anne said. “She’s nine years old, and Basil’s practically her daddy. He pays for everything, from her socks to her school fees.”
Amy shuffled through her playlist of possible comebacks and came up short.
“Okay, I didn’t know that,” she said. “But he still sounds like a company training video. ‘Orsk this, Orsk that, worship Orsk, hail Orsk.’ ”
“Orsk has been real good to him,” Ruth Anne said. “He’s from East Cleveland. Have you seen what that place looks like?”
Only on the ten o’clock news, Amy thought.
“When he started here, he was on the verge of giving up. Orsk gave him a job and turned his life around. Some people get church, some people get A.A., others get gangs. Basil got Orsk.”
Conversations like this were frustrating because what could Amy say? Either she could agree that St. Basil needed a church named after him, or she could reply with some sarcastic remark that would make her seem petty. She’d had a lousy life, too, growing up in a crappy trailer with a mom whose idea of family time was playing Hide the Vodka. But if she brought that up now it would look like she was trying to compete with Basil, and there was no way she could win a Who’s Got It Worse? contest. Not with someone who grew up black in East Cleveland.
“Let’s just do our stupid patrol,” Amy said.
Then she turned away from the escalator and followed the arrows past a giant stack of Orsk catalogs, at the entrance of Living Rooms and Sofas.
“You know,” Ruth Anne said, “I worked in the Youngstown store for thirteen years without ever having a problem in the Showroom. But the first day I started here, I got real lost. Not the funny kind of lost, either. This was the scary kind.”
Amy wasn’t listening. She was still smarting over her argument with Basil about the stupid Shop Responsible test. It wasn’t failing that bothered her. It was everyone knowing that she failed.
Ruth Anne kept chattering away. “I was going to visit Diane in Kitchens. You know Diane Darnowsky? She wears all those Santa Claus buttons around Christmastime? Well, I was going out to see her, but I got so turned around, it took me half an hour. My whole lunch break. Scared the dickens out of me. I was panicking, thinking the store was actually moving around
behind my back. By the time I reached Diane I just wanted to sit down and cry myself silly. I never went back out on the floor again.”
“Are you serious?” Amy asked. “You’ve been here eleven months and you’ve never gone out on the Showroom floor?”
“You change when you get older,” Ruth Anne said. “You’ll see.”
“It is weird in here with no people,” Amy admitted. Ruth Anne’s nerves were probably rubbing off on her. She started humming the theme from The Twilight Zone: “Doo-dee-doo-doo, doo-dee-doo-doo.”
“Stop, please,” Ruth Anne said. “It’s bad enough without you doing that.”
Amy stopped at a dun-colored information post. A map of the Showroom was painted on the side, with a giant YOU ARE HERE marker right in the middle of Living Rooms and Sofas. “It’s just a big loop like every other Orsk. Just like Youngstown,” she said, tracing a circle through the map. “I gave a tour to a bunch of trainees this morning. They picked it up right away.”
Ruth Anne looked at the map the way a cat watches TV. Amy could tell that she had no clue what she was seeing.
“See where it says YOU ARE HERE?” Amy asked.
“Mm-hm,” Ruth Anne said, unconvincingly.
“That’s where we are. There’s a map in every department so you can find your way. Like a trail of bread crumbs. As long as you’re paying attention, you can’t get lost.”
Ruth Anne still looked skeptical.
“Just follow me,” Amy said. “We’ll be back at the break area in half an hour.”
They wound their way between bins of pillows, small-person play areas, countertops, info posts, and marketing banners hanging from the ceiling. Big impulse bins obscured corners, and at times Amy couldn’t see the Bright and Shining Path through the maze of furniture. The massive Showroom floor receded to a vanishing point, warping and bending weirdly as it went, and after a while Amy felt as though she was wandering through a vast, trackless wasteland dotted with furniture from some vanished civilization.
They passed a row of six different Smagma bookshelves, each of them holding hundreds of copies of the same book (Design Is Good, orange and black dust jacket; Orsk bought them by the truckload), and then finally reached Kitchens, Amy’s favorite part of the store. Her secret shame was that, after growing up with a two-burner hot plate and a toaster oven, she dreamed of having an Orsk kitchen.
She stopped in front of a gleaming all-white Harb-blo display and turned to Ruth Anne. “Could you imagine being able to afford something like that?”
Ruth Anne’s breathing was shallow; a sheen of sweat glistened on her upper lip. She hunted through her pockets and pulled out a tube of Blistex. Applying it seemed to calm her breathing.
“I have that kitchen,” she admitted. “Only my cabinets are slate gray instead of arctic white.”
Amy felt stupid. Of course Ruth Anne could afford a nice kitchen. She wasn’t drowning in loans for a college she’d dropped out of. She wasn’t shopping for clothes at Goodwill. She probably had retirement investments and her car wasn’t pissing oil all the time. As for Amy, she couldn’t even conceive of paying for something that cost more than a hundred dollars.
“What’s that noise?” Ruth Anne asked.
Amy listened. It was coming from the sink—something scratching on metal. She walked toward it.
“What is it?” Ruth Anne asked.
“Ergh!” Amy said, jerking back.
A plump black rat slithered bonelessly out of the drain. It scrabbled against the side of the sink and then its claws found purchase and it heaved itself up onto the counter. Ruth Anne clapped her hand over her mouth.
“What do we do?” Amy asked.
Both watched in horror as the rat waddled along the counter and then squeezed into the narrow gap between the refrigerator and the wall. They heard it slide down the drywall and plop onto the floor.
Ruth Anne grabbed Amy’s wrist. “My feet!” she exclaimed.
“What feet? Where?”
“I don’t want it touching my feet!”
Ruth Anne darted up the Bright and Shining Path, and Amy followed. They had reached Dining Rooms before they stopped. Ruth Anne anxiously reapplied her Blistex.
“I’ve never seen a rat in here before,” Amy said. “Basil is going to freak.”
“The plumbing’s not even hooked up,” Ruth Anne said. “That means it was inside the cabinet. And rats are real social animals. Where there’s one, there’s always a dozen.”
Amy shuddered, and they started walking again. The store felt endless, sprawled out around them all silent and secret, branching mazes and warrens full of furniture, like an infinite dollhouse. She tried to speed up, but Ruth Anne kept slowing down.
“Maybe we should go back and check Kitchens again,” she said. “We came through there pretty fast. We might have missed somebody.”
“Let’s just keep going,” Amy said.
They passed into Bedrooms, a vast plain of mattresses ringed with room displays. Ruth Anne stopped at one that showcased the Pykonne Collection.
“What about that closet?” she whispered. “Do you think we should check behind the door?”
“You think someone’s hiding in there?”
The color drained from Ruth Anne’s face. “Maybe?”
Amy walked over and yanked on the knob.
“Ah!” Ruth Anne squeaked prematurely.
“It’s fake,” Amy said, rattling the door, and the display wall shook. “These doors to nowhere are all over the store. You really don’t ever leave the check-out area, do you?”
Ruth Anne shook her head.
“Look at this,” Amy said.
She reached behind a curtain and pulled the cord on a set of blinds. They rose to reveal four windowpanes made of cloudy white plastic screwed into the wall. “Amazing view, right?”
Ruth Anne had her eyes squeezed shut.
“It’s okay,” Amy said. “There’s nothing to see. It’s all fake.”
Ruth Anne cracked open one eye, then both eyes, and looked embarrassed.
“I didn’t want to see the Creepy Crawlies,” she said.
Amy laughed. “The what?”
“When I was a little girl, I used to be scared of the dark,” Ruth Anne said. “My parents moved me into my own bedroom, and I couldn’t sleep for weeks. Every night I saw the Creepy Crawlies in the shadows. Nasty greasy dark stains on the wall, creeping down to get me. I couldn’t tell anyone, but I had to do something. It wasn’t enough to close my eyes, because I might peek. I thought if I couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see me. So I used to tie my socks around my head like a blindfold. Isn’t that silly?”
“What would they do if they saw you?”
“I never found out,” Ruth Anne said. Her voice got quiet. “Bad things.”
The silence grew uncomfortable.
“Come on,” Amy said. “You’re freaking me out.”
They continued walking, but Amy stuck a little closer to Ruth Anne, mindful of the older woman’s nerves. All this talk about Creepy Crawlies had her on edge, too.
The Showroom floor stretched off silently into the distance. They could hear the blowing of the big air movers up in the ceiling, but the music was turned off and the whole store had a sense of expectant listening. Behind them something cracked, and both women jumped.
“Keep going,” Amy whispered.
They walked faster now. It took all of Amy’s willpower not to run off wildly into the furniture, screaming and making noise so that some human sound would fill the vast emptiness. Abandoned aisles curled off the Bright and Shining Path like arms pointing the way into dead ends and cul-de-sacs, the ends of beds peered at them from doorways as they went by. They passed an information pillar, and wooden yardsticks hanging from a peg gently clacked together in the air conditioning. The rustle of their clothing felt too loud. The blood humming in their ears drowned out any sounds. Ruth Anne kept twisting around to make sure no one was behind them.
A movement caug
ht Amy’s eye.
Up ahead, something was squirming on a Müskk bed. A hairy ball writhed on the pillows like a nest of rats, and then it pinched itself in two, the shapes leaping off the bed and scrabbling backward. Amy blinked. She couldn’t tell what she was seeing.
Then one of the shapes unfurled a limb and waved.
“Hey, guys, what’s up?” Matt called.
Breathless, he wiped at his beard. On the other side of the bed, Trinity was pulling down her black T-shirt.
“Hey,” she said, red faced.
Ruth Anne let out a sob of relief and gripped Amy’s arm.
“What the hell?” Amy asked.
“We’re setting up base camp,” Matt said.
“On a Müskk?” Amy asked, incredulous. “You broke into the store to hump on a filthy Müskk? Do you know how many kids have wiped their boogers on that thing?”
She sank down on the edge of a Sculpin display platform and started to laugh. Ruth Anne took a big ragged breath and started laughing, too. It felt good. It felt like a living thing to do in this sea of dead furniture. Trinity blushed, and Matt gave an embarrassed grin.
“We didn’t break in,” Trinity said after everyone settled down.
“Then how’d you get inside?” Amy asked.
“Hid in a couple of Liripips and waited for the floor to clear.”
“So technically we didn’t break into anything,” Matt said.
“Basil is going to be pissed,” Amy said.
“You can’t tell Basil,” Trinity said.
“Why?”
“He wouldn’t understand. We’re here to conduct a complete parapsychological investigation.”
Amy and Ruth Anne just stared at her.
“In layman’s terms,” Matt explained, “we’re ghost hunting. This place is teeming with potential paranormal energy, so we brought the necessary equipment to measure it.” He gestured to four enormous black gear bags lying beside the bed. “MEL meters, infrared cameras, portable motion detectors, voice-activated recorders for EVP, the works.”
“How’d you squeeze those into a Liripip?” Ruth Anne asked.
“They were out in the car,” Matt said. “Once the coast was clear, we snuck down to the partners’ entrance and brought them in.”
Horrorstor: A Novel Page 4