Amy turned to Matt. “Please, let’s get out of here. We’re safer if we go together—”
“I have to get Trinity,” Matt said. “I can’t leave her in here.”
“Fine. We’ll go by the break area and get Trinity and Ruth Anne. Then we’ll all leave together.”
“Carl!” Basil shouted with relief. “Are you okay?”
Amy followed the beam of Basil’s flashlight across the Bright and Shining Path to the Sylbian bedroom display. It was purple with white trim that made it look like an elderly woman’s guest bedroom, and Amy had always imagined that it smelled like lavender. In the back left-hand corner was a doorway leading to a short hall fitted with the Mesonxic closet organization system. That’s where Carl stood, staring at them.
“You really scared us,” Basil said.
Amy could see the wound pulled across Carl’s throat, his blood black in the flashlight beam. His eyes were bulging. One of his eyes had rolled up inside his skull so that only the white was showing, while the other stared sightlessly up and to the left. Still grinning, he stood completely motionless.
Then Carl raised one hand and beckoned them closer.
“Oh, crap,” Amy said.
“We’re getting out of here,” Matt said.
Carl slipped sideways into the walk-in closet, disappearing from view. Basil started forward, taking the light with him. Matt grabbed his arm. “Amy’s right,” he said. “This is crazy. Let’s leave this for the professionals.”
“I am a professional,” Basil said. “This is what being a professional means. You can’t just walk away from a disaster and hope someone else cleans it up.”
He went after Carl, and Matt and Amy followed. Staying in the darkness was not an option. If Basil had the light, they had to follow. They stepped into the Sylbian bedroom set and the maple floor creaked beneath their feet. They walked to the rear of the bedroom display, the air getting thicker with every step, and rounded the corner into the narrow closet.
The short hallway was designed to showcase the Mesonxic closet storage system—a series of shelves, cubbies, drawers, and hanging rods that made optimal use of even the smallest space. Three white dress shirts on display hangers swayed slightly in a cold breeze. At the end of the narrow purple hallway was another fake wooden door, like the one Amy had shown Ruth Anne earlier. A cheap optical illusion cut into drywall to fool the eye.
The door was ajar.
“I’m going to throw up,” Amy said.
“Not on the stock,” Basil said.
“It doesn’t open,” Amy said. “That door doesn’t open. It can’t open.”
Basil pulled on the handle and the door swung open, revealing the entrance to a long dark hallway. Until he’d opened the door all the way, Amy could pretend that maybe this was just a mirage, a weird shadow, something to do with the EMF stuff Matt had been talking about. But this was no trick. This hallway couldn’t be here. This hallway was impossible.
And if this door opened, what about the other fake doors? What about the fake windows? If she went around the store and lifted all the blinds, what would she see?
A cold wind, putrid and marshy, blew out of the doorway, ruffling Amy’s hair. She felt like she was standing in front of an open refrigerator full of rotten food. The display shirts swung wildly on their hangers. It was the Brooka smell again, the bathroom smell, the smell of the séance.
“This is a hallucination,” Amy said, desperately wanting to believe her own words. “You try to walk through that door and you’ll break your nose.”
The glow from the Maglite lit up the first few feet of the hall. Its white plaster walls were rank with yellow water stains. Its dirty floor was unfinished concrete. It stretched for twenty feet before taking a sharp turn to the right.
“Did you hear that?” Basil asked.
The three of them listened.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Matt said.
“It’s Carl,” Basil said. “He’s in there.”
Then he walked through the closet and stepped over the threshold, and the hallway swallowed him whole. Matt started to follow and Amy grabbed his arm.
“Don’t,” she said.
“He’s got the light,” Matt said. “We’ll never find our way out in the dark.”
“But this isn’t the way out. This is the way in. It’s all wrong.”
“We have to stick together,” Matt said.
He twisted out of her grip, followed Basil into the closet, and entered the impossible hallway.
Amy could see Matt and Basil, backlit by their flashlight, walking away from her down the corridor, and she hurried after them. At the end of the narrow Mesonxic she hesitated and then stepped into the doorway.
Immediately the tight walls shut her off from the store like a fist closing around her skull. Matt and Basil were a few steps ahead, the wall at the end of the hall getting brighter as they got closer, the shadow of the corner bouncing up and down.
Amy’s feet crunched down the dirty hallway behind them. In the bright white circle of the light, the walls looked sick, covered in overlapping stains and mildew blooms. “We need to get out of here,” she said to their backs, panic bubbling in her voice. She didn’t want to be scared, but it was a physical body-wide reaction she couldn’t fight. “Seriously, guys, the store doesn’t go this way. This hall shouldn’t be here. It shouldn’t even exist. We should not be in here.”
Something shocked Amy’s leg and she jumped.
“Yah!”
Matt and Basil instantly whirled around.
“It’s my phone,” she said gratefully, pulling the vibrating cell out of her pocket with both hands and showing it to them. “Hello?”
“This is the dispatcher at the Brecksville Police Department. Our unit still can’t find the feeder road. Are you sure it’s off Route 77?”
“I drive here every day,” Amy said. “Don’t you have GPS or something?”
“The computer is showing that address you gave me is invalid,” the dispatcher said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that, according to our system, the address doesn’t—”
The woman’s voice cut off and the phone’s screen went black. Amy pressed the Power button but her phone was dead, useless as a brick.
“What did they say?” Basil asked.
“I’m not sure they’re coming,” Amy said. “We might be on our own.”
“I know you two are panicking,” Basil said. “But we need to find Carl. He—”
“He’s not Carl anymore,” Amy said. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see what we saw. Trinity called out to all the spirits in the store. She invited them to join us. And something in the store took over Carl. He called himself a warden. A healer of souls. He said we were all penitents—”
“Josiah Worth!” Matt realized, turning to Amy. “That’s the guy I was telling you about earlier. The warden of the Cuyahoga Panopticon. The prison from the nineteenth century.”
“Oh, enough with the Ghost Bomb crap,” Basil said. “Carl is a homeless man in severe mental distress. Per the Orsk Leadership Culture Handbook, we need to find him, comfort him, and call for medical assistance. That’s official store policy.” He aimed his flashlight down the hall. “The guy’s probably halfway to Bedrooms by now.”
“This hall doesn’t go to Bedrooms,” Amy said. “It goes to the Beehive. To a nineteenth-century prison. Please stop acting like this hall is normal. You must know it doesn’t really exist.”
“Of course it exists,” Basil said. “We’re standing in it, aren’t we?”
“It could be a hallucination,” Matt said. “A product of EM fields or some kind of toxic venting.”
“You really think so?” Basil asked.
Matt punched the wall as hard as he could. The impact shook loose a shower of damp plaster flakes. He unclenched his fist and shook out his hand.
“Nope,” he said. “I guess not.”
“Please, Basil,” Amy sa
id. “We have to turn around. I respect that you’re a store manager and you’ve been trained for these situations, but I’m scared, okay? I’m your employee and I’m frightened, and I’m asking for your help. Can we please turn around? Can we please find Trinity and Ruth Anne and get out of here?”
Basil hesitated, weighing the choice. Amy knew from taking the Shop Responsible test that Orsk managers had a responsibility to both store guests and store partners.
But what if a manager had to choose one over the other? What was the priority? These were questions the test hadn’t posed, and Basil was struggling.
“Tell you what,” he decided. “Let me just look around the corner. If I see Bedrooms, we’ll keep going. If I don’t, I promise we’ll turn around.”
“Sounds good,” Matt said. “Go take a quick peek and we’ll wait right here.”
“Hurry,” Amy said.
Basil headed for the corner, taking the light with him. Amy stood still and tried not to touch the filthy walls. She could taste the swampy stink coating the roof of her mouth, turning her saliva bitter and sending it trickling down the back of her throat.
“Are you still here?” she whispered.
For a single, terrifying moment, Matt didn’t answer. Then he illuminated his face with the pale blue glow of his phone. “Still here.”
Up ahead, Basil was pointing his flashlight around the corner. He hesitated, squinting into the darkness, playing the beam back and forth over something.
“Basil?” Matt whispered.
Amy heard it first.
It wasn’t quite a noise but a displacement of air, a feeling of something big that filled the hall, something big that was coming up from the depths. It was the sound of far-off movement. It was the sound of something coming for them. Amy broke.
“Go!” she said, turning around and running blindly into the dark, barreling back out of the hallway, shoulders banging into walls. Matt was right behind her, holding out his cell phone, supplying just enough light for them to see the doorway at the end of the corridor. Amy was certain it was going to slam shut at any moment, trapping them in the Beehive for good.
Then all at once they were outside, back in the clean orderly world of Orsk, back in the narrow walk-in closet, surrounded by the Mesonxic organization system. They kept running. They didn’t wait to see if Basil made it out. He was on his own. They barreled out of the closet and into the room display, hit the Bright and Shining Path at full speed, and didn’t stop until they swerved off and collapsed behind an island counter in a Kitchens display. Matt buried the glow of his cell phone in the folds of his hoodie.
“Did you see them?” he whispered.
“See who?”
“In that hall. There were people.”
Amy didn’t know what she’d seen and what she hadn’t. They crouched behind the island, ears straining for any movement in the dark.
“What’s that noise?” Matt asked.
Amy listened. She heard a gentle crystal ringing. Matt aimed his phone behind them at a shelf of Glans water goblets, all quietly chiming against one another. Then she felt the rhythmic vibration in the floor.
“Something’s coming,” she said.
Matt’s cell phone flashed white. Its screen shattered.
He lunged away from her, and shattered glass smashed to the floor all around them as something invisible swiped the shelves clear. Amy ducked and squeezed her eyes shut as a torrent of shards rained down. Then there was silence. After a moment, Amy looked up.
“Matt?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer. She couldn’t see a thing. The store was completely black. She didn’t even know which way she was facing.
“Matt?” she whispered. “Please, tell me you’re here.”
No answer. Had he abandoned her in the dark? Was he crawling toward the front entrance right this second? And could she really blame him? Together they’d ditched Basil, and now Matt had ditched her. They were all on their own.
Then she heard it: shallow breathing in the darkness. She lunged toward the sound and brushed Matt’s shirt with her fingertips. “Are you all right?” She ran her fingers up his arm and felt cold wet fabric caked with sand and grit. His flesh was cold; his skin was stone. And as Amy realized this person wasn’t Matt at all, he was already pushing his rough fingers inside her mouth and toppling her to the floor.
Amy tried scrambling away but the hands found her and they were all over her, hundreds of hands, dragging her from her hiding place, pulling her across the floor, smashing her into walls and furniture. Twisting, screaming so loudly and for so long that she forgot she was screaming, Amy clawed at the maple flooring but only succeeded in peeling off one of her fingernails like a wet postage stamp. Cold, dirt-encrusted hands grabbed at her ankles, her wrists, her throat, her face. Amy’s mind popped like a light bulb and only then did she finally go quiet.
After that it was all hands, dragging her, pushing and shoving and groping and pulling, and the whole time it was so dark she could have been asleep. Every breath she took was thick and filthy with the stench from the hallway.
People, or things that were shaped like people, thronged around her in a crushing mob, their muddy clothes suffocated her, the bodies underneath their rags as dead as marble; her head was filled with their stench, her bones were chilled by their cold. The hands lifted her up and slammed her down into a chair, knocking the wind out of her in one shocked gasp. Some distant part of her mind recognized it as a Poonang high-backed armchair with its cushion removed. A strap was cinched hard around her chest, and when she inhaled it tightened, collapsing her lungs, flattening her ribs, keeping her from drawing enough air to scream.
She tried to kick but the shapes in the darkness held her legs, and straps bit into her shins. The shapes forced her wrists down and fastened them to the arms of the chair, and then more bands encircled her flesh, more and more of them stretched over her thighs, around her knees, across her ankles, her waist, her shoulders, her neck. When she tried to move her head, she realized that it had been strapped to the back of the chair, leaving her no choice but to stare straight ahead.
Over the ripe stink, she smelled hot, scorched plastic and realized dimly that they were using the heat sealer, the one that locked thin plastic straps around bundles of cardboard in the trash room. Roughly, the hands tightened the straps, the sharp plastic edges slicing through her skin and muscle to grip bone.
All over her body, the bands cut into her flesh as they were pulled taut. She was a plastic bag full of blood being squeezed and compressed until she was about to burst. Breathing quickly and shallowly, she could barely deliver air to her lungs. A whine escaped her. It would have been a scream if she could have opened her mouth wide enough, but her jaw was strapped shut as well.
Where was she? Home Office? Bedrooms? It was too dark to know. Her surroundings were crowded with humanoid shapes, and she could feel the cold and the stink radiating from their bodies. Yet despite their presence, the space felt empty, as if everyone around her was hollow. As if they were un-persons. As if they weren’t really there.
Then a voice whispered from the darkness.
“It’s for your own good, you know.”
Amy whimpered.
“Sh, sh, sh,” Josiah hushed. “This is what you have always needed. You have no secrets from me.”
Amy tried to struggle but was unable to move.
“I understand your madness,” he whispered into her ear. Amy could hear the air wheezing in and out of the flap of torn skin across his throat. “Madness is an inflammation of your blood, an excitement of your arteries. My tranquilizing chair constricts the impetus of blood toward your brain and lessens muscular action, reducing the frequency of your pulse. If necessary, I may bleed you of inflammatory humors, or apply ice baths or boiling water treatments, without altering your position and without opposition.”
Amy felt Josiah moving to the other side of her head. She strained to turn her eyes in his direction, trembling
with effort as she tried to see him in the dark.
“Your madness is a typical case,” Josiah said. “Your spirit is agitated and restless, and you engage in pointless activity, roaming about in an excitable frenzy to no great effect.”
His words resonated with something deep inside Amy’s mind. She did run around, trying desperately to get somewhere, and what was the point? Was there a point?
“You want to be well,” Josiah said. “That is the natural state for even a broken woman such as yourself. But although your spirit is willing, your flesh is weak. My tranquilizing chair allows you to stop fighting your nature. It masters your flesh. You will sit in contemplation here as your hot blood ceases its fevered circulation. And your brain, deprived of this poison, will at last achieve the stillness you crave. It is humane and merciful, a freedom from your torments. And if you die, isn’t the stillness of death preferable to the vain agitation and senseless chaos of your life? It will be a great peace for you, Amy. A great peace.”
A hand stroked the top of her head, and though she tried to recoil from its touch, she was unable to move. Eventually Josiah’s hand stopped stroking her head, and then she didn’t hear him anymore.
After a while, she didn’t feel like Amy anymore.
She was a thing. A thing tied to a chair. And slowly she began to go insane.
She wasn’t used to being completely still. In real life, Amy was always adjusting herself, moving, flexing, bending, unbending, rearranging her arms and legs. These options had been taken from her. She could feel her muscles cramping, her joints stiffening, the blood pooling in her swollen feet, and the frustration and pain made her want to scream. If only she could get enough air into her flattened lungs, or open her mouth wide enough to make a sound.
Her spine was pressed hard into the wooden back of the chair, becoming a column of pain running from her tailbone to the base of her skull. Her shoulders were on fire. Her neck burned from holding up her heavy skull. Her kneecaps ached as if they were going to tear through her skin. She felt everything below her knees go numb. But her fingers were the worst.
She tried to flex them, to wiggle each one just a tiny bit, but they were tied down so tightly it was as though something had closed its mouth around them and wouldn’t let go. When she tried to stretch them, they only strained hopelessly against the bands. She felt gravity pulling blood into her fingertips, causing them to swell like juicy red grapes. With every heartbeat, she felt her pulse throb beneath her nails.
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