Horrorstor: A Novel

by Grady Hendrix

  She was nearly out the door when she heard whispering. Someone was close by, a mumbling scratching on her eardrums. She flicked the flashlight around, but she was alone. Then she pressed her ear to the wet wall and whispered, “Hello?”

  The reply was so loud, she jumped back.

  “… hide, hiding, can’t find me, can’t see me, keep going … ”

  The voice was harsh and sibilant. Amy recognized it instantly. “Ruth Anne?”

  Something thumped and rustled on the other side of the drywall. “Amy?”

  She pressed her hands to the wall, her fingers clawing helplessly at the paint. “Ruth Anne,” she said. “I’m going to get you out of there.”

  “No,” Ruth Anne whispered back. “They can’t see me in here.”

  “Who can’t see you?”

  “The Creepy Crawlies.”

  “Did you get in through the closet?”

  “I made a hiding place,” Ruth Anne said.

  Something sharp scraped against the other side of the wall. It sounded like fingernails, and then Amy remembered the hole scratched in the closet wall and the dark fluid smeared around it.

  “Are you hurt?” Amy asked.

  “It hurt at first,” Ruth Anne said. “It hurt a lot. But now they can’t find me.”

  “Go back to the hole,” Amy said, pressing her palms against the wall. “Can you find your way back to the closet? I’ll meet you there—”

  THUD!

  Something slammed into the other side of the wall, knocking Amy back. Ruth Anne gabbled in fear. “They’re coming!”

  “The hole! Meet me at the hole!”

  Amy ran back to the supply closet. She didn’t see how she could fit through, but if Ruth Anne could make it, then so could she. She crouched down, ready to crawl through, only to discover that something was already crawling out. A hand, black with grime, wrapped its fingers around the lip of the opening.

  “Help me,” Ruth Anne whispered.

  “Give me your other hand,” Amy said.

  She grabbed both of Ruth Anne’s wrists and knew immediately that something was wrong. Ruth Anne’s arms were slick with blood and gore, and Amy could barely get a grip. She wiped her palms on her jeans and tried again, pulling harder, guiding Ruth Anne’s head and shoulders through the opening. “It’s going to be okay,” Amy reassured her. “You’ll be home on the couch watching Real Housewives in no time. No more Creepy Crawlies.”

  Amy felt something wrong with Ruth Anne’s fingertips. They were hard like calluses but the nails were missing and all the surrounding flesh was raw. In gouging out a hole, Ruth Anne had worked her fingers to the bone, literally. Each digit ended in a bloody white tip.

  “Amy!” Ruth Anne screamed.

  Something had her. She was being yanked backward, back into the hole. Amy grabbed her by the shoulders, but whatever was pulling from inside the wall was too strong.

  “Hold on,” Amy said.

  “I don’t want to see them!” Ruth Anne gibbered.

  “I won’t let you go!” Amy said.

  She braced her feet against the wall and leaned back, but Ruth Anne was slipping from her grip, sinking back into the hole, sinking into darkness.

  “Help me!”

  Amy dove through the hole headfirst.

  Behind the wall was a cramped passage framed by drywall and metal ductwork. It was too low to crawl on all fours; Amy inched forward on her belly, using her feet to propel herself.

  Ruth Anne was sliding backward, her bloodied hands slapping at the aluminum ducts and failing to find purchase. Amy lunged forward, grabbing her wrists with both hands. The flashlight rolled away, strobing through the passage.

  “I got you,” she said. “I won’t let go, I swear.”

  Ruth Anne just shook her head. Suddenly her voice was calm, as if she’d experienced a rush of clarity about her fate. “You’re not strong enough.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “No, you’re not. There’s one of you and too many of them. But I want you to know something, sweetheart. This is not your fault.”

  Whatever was pulling Ruth Anne pulled harder, yanking her wrists from Amy’s grasp, dragging her deeper into the darkness. Amy wriggled forward but she wasn’t fast enough; she couldn’t keep up.

  “Ruth Anne!” she yelled.

  Her friend didn’t seem concerned at all. She was no longer resisting; she had stopped trying to fight back. “Don’t you worry,” Ruth Anne said. “If I can’t see them, they can’t see me.”

  Then without hesitation she hooked her bony fingertips into her eye sockets and raked them down her face.

  “No!” Amy screamed.

  She grabbed her flashlight and aimed it into the crawl space but it was too late: Ruth Anne was gone. All that remained were bloody handprints on the drywall. And the sound of a lifeless corpse being pulled deeper into the store.

  Ruth Anne had hugged her that morning when she thought she’d been fired. Snoopy was sitting on the sofa waiting for her to get home and watch TV. She hadn’t hesitated when Carl was hurting himself, she’d just stripped off her blouse and tried to stop the bleeding. Ruth Anne had been the best of them.

  Something hardened inside Amy and she promised herself she would get the others out. All of them. It didn’t matter what tried to stop her or what she had to go through. She’d quit on enough things in her life—she wasn’t going to quit on this. Whatever had happened to Ruth Anne wasn’t going to happen to anyone else.

  Amy hauled herself out of the hole, scraping the skin off her ribs as she went. She closed the supply closet door gently behind her and made her way through the back of house until she reached the swinging double doors that led to the café. She switched off the flashlight and pushed open one of the doors, slipping out onto the floor. In front of her, in the orange glow from the café windows on her right, Amy could make out the elevator and stairwell leading down to the Market Floor. Children’s was to her left, and she could see just enough of its shadowy shapes to navigate by.

  Her guard was down, so when something moved to her right, Amy clicked on the flashlight and pointed it into the café. The first thing she saw was a man’s back. He was wearing a rough gray coat with wide stripes running across it. As she watched, the figure reached with both arms to his right and took an Arsle café chair from the man next to him. They held it by the legs, at chest height, and passed it along as though they were ferrying furniture out of a friend’s house. Then the man passed the chair to another man on his left, who passed it to another, and another, and another, all the way around the ring.

  The sheer number of them took her breath away. She counted twenty-one before stopping; if there were more, she didn’t want to know. The men were ignoring her, passing around at least a dozen chairs in a circle, working rhythmically, mechanically, like pistons in a machine. Something moved in the darkness of the stairwell and Amy swung her flashlight toward it. Four of the shadow people were coming up the stairs. They were not quite as scrawny or filthy as the men in the café. They wore hoods, and from their belts swung truncheons; they advanced on her as inexorably as robots. Amy knew they were the warders, the guards, the ones who chased down escapees and disciplined troublemakers. She knew they were coming for her.

  Amy had taken her eyes off the men in the café for only a second, but when she turned back they had placed their chairs on the floor and were all staring at her.

  The saliva in her mouth went dry and her stomach filled with acid. If she had been able to gather her wits she would have run, but she felt stunned by the full force of the men’s attention.

  Their faces were the worst. They were smeared, obscured, covered in a black veil, as if something had smudged their features with a dirty eraser, leaving nothing behind but indistinct knobs of shadow. No eyes, no mouth, no nose, no humanity; their individuality rubbed out.

  Amy looked back at the stairs. The hooded men had reached the landing. Galvanized by their proximity, she turned toward Children’s and
ran.

  She snapped off the flashlight, hoping the darkness would hide her. She could hear bodies moving behind her, chasing her, but she didn’t risk turning around. She knew exactly where she needed to go. Darting and ducking around furniture, she passed through the dark burrows of Children’s, raced into the shadowy towers of Wardobes, skipped past Bathrooms, at last making her way to a Finnimbrun bedroom display. She dipped her flashlight to the floor and scanned the beam around. The ground was covered with dirt, smears of mud, and clots of black filth forming a trail past the Mesonxic closet organization system. Right back where she started. Opposite the closet, at the end of the narrow rust-colored hallway, a fake wooden door gaped like a clown’s mouth, inviting her inside.

  Basil was back there. Maybe Matt and Trinity, too. It was too late for Ruth Anne, but Amy could still save someone. She had to go. Forcing herself to breathe deeply, filling both lungs with the rank marshy stench that came wafting on the cold air spilling from the open door, she ran inside, flicking her flashlight beam around the walls as she entered the heart of the Beehive.

  Somehow the corridor had narrowed since her last visit, and the smell of rancid rot filled Amy’s head. Her flashlight swept the passage, lighting it from floor to ceiling, chasing the shadows away. The plaster on the crumbling walls was soaked and rotten like leprous skin, the gritty floor was soft and damaged. The ceiling glistened with stalactites of dirty water and slime.

  Amy ran down the passage. Up ahead it turned right, disappearing into darkness. When she reached the corner, she hesitated and then stuck her flashlight around, followed by her head. The corridor lay quiet and expectant, waiting for her. After another thirty feet, the passage split into a T. Amy turned left, guided by instinct more than anything. She turned left, then right, then right, then left again, moving deeper and deeper into the Beehive.

  The corridor narrowed even further until eventually her shoulders were brushing against the walls. She listened carefully for voices, hoping to hear Basil or Matt or Trinity. But all she heard was the gentle drip of water trickling down the walls and pooling at her feet. Claustrophobia was creeping in, and within her gut she felt the cold certainty that if she tried to retrace her steps, the corridors behind her would not be the same.

  Scripted disorientation, she reminded herself. Keep moving.

  Right, left, left, right.

  A needle of cold water fell from the ceiling and slid down the back of her neck, jolting her like an electric shock. She reached to wipe it away. The liquid was swirled with yellow filth, like pus from a lanced boil. The weight of the walls pressed in around her, making the air heavy to breathe, giving her a headache.

  Left, right, right, left.

  Amy turned a corner and froze. She had arrived in a different sort of corridor, one without the weeping plaster walls. The passage was lined on both sides with tall iron grates like doors, two feet wide and crisscrossed with flaking bars. She wasn’t sure what to do. Cold water tapped her hair, urging her forward. There was no telling if the grates were unlocked, or if anything hid in the darkness behind them. But she felt certain she was getting closer. The store had tried to keep her from finding this place; it had tried to confuse her, but she’d found it anyway.

  She took a step forward, then another.

  “Basil?” she whispered. “Matt? Trinity?”

  Up ahead on the left, a pale white worm squirmed out of a grate. Amy stepped closer and realized it was a finger. Human hands were creeping out of the grates, squeezing through the gaps and straining toward her, sensing her warmth. Filthy digits waved in the cold air like sea anemones, their fingerpads sniffing her out.

  Amy swept the corridor with her flashlight, and the grates erupted with pale flesh as hundreds of hands pushed themselves through the bars, the walls alive with fingers like living hair. As Amy dashed down the hallway, they scraped across her face, her thighs, her hips, her breasts. They tried to hook her clothing and burrow through to her skin.

  The passage ended in another T. To the left, Amy saw more of the same—more grates and hundreds of writhing hands. She went right. The water was dripping faster now, falling down like rain. Amy wiped her face with her sleeve. She rounded another corner—she was now totally and completely lost but knew she was getting closer to something. This new corridor had much larger rooms spaced much farther apart. She forced herself to aim the flashlight into each one. They all had furniture dragged in from the Showroom floor, as if the penitents were insects stocking their hive for winter. Inside one was a Kummerspeck desk with a chair arranged neatly behind it. In another, a Skoptsy futon mattress, vile with mildew, sagged against a wall. Still another featured smashed glass mixing bowls, the shards glittering in her flashlight beam and forming a thick carpet waiting to open veins and arteries.

  The last room at the end of the corridor was equipped with the Mungo Towel Rack System. It consisted of two brushed steel bars, each with an attractively streamlined curve: an upper bar for large towels and a lower thinner bar for hand towels and washcloths. It was one of the best sellers in Bathrooms and here it was with a man’s body hanging from it. His wrists were bound behind him, strapped to the top bar with leather thongs. His legs were bent and his feet were crossed one over the other and tied to the lower rack so that his body formed a grotesque sagging arc. A Widdiful pillowcase, dripping with dark fluids, was pulled over his head like a hood. Amy instantly recognized the shirt and pants. The figure stirred, and she heard the soft muffled sound of a bell.

  “Basil?” she whispered.

  He made a low, pained groan and thrashed from side to side, the bell unnaturally loud in the tiny room.

  “It’s me,” Amy said. “It’s okay. I came back.”

  She pinched the top of the pillowcase between two fingers and snatched it off his head. Steel straps were clamped around his skull, forming a cage held in place with iron screws and locked around his neck by a bolt. A crude metal bell hung from the collar. One of Basil’s eyes was swollen nearly shut. The other was caked with blood. His lower lip was split, and his cheekbones were bruised and swollen. He turned his pulped face toward Amy, trying to place her.

  “M’my?” he mumbled.

  “I’m going to get you down,” she said.

  Basil started panting in great bursts. Amy studied the leather thongs tying his wrists. They had been stretched so tight that their knots were like steel. Then she saw that Basil’s weight had pulled out the screws on one side of the Mungo base plate. She pressed the sole of her shoe against the wall, yanked on the bar, and Basil’s weight did the rest. He fell face first onto the floor, catching it on his shoulder and neck, howling in pain as the bell jangled wildly.

  With the tension off his bonds, Amy was able to pick apart the knots. She slipped his feet through the leather loops and gently lowered them to the floor. More complicated was the cage locked around his skull; she tried twisting the bolt threaded through the collar and gasped with relief when it started to turn. After that, it was a simple matter of spinning it loose, opening the hasp, and flinging it across the cell.

  Freed from its weight, Basil lay in a tangled heap, panting, with hot tears running down his face.

  “I’m going to turn you over,” Amy said.

  When she rolled him onto his side, he gasped. Amy grabbed his arms, pulling them out from underneath his body. She rubbed his wrists, trying to restore sensation. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

  “My arm,” Basil asked. “Is it broken?”

  Amy had no idea. She didn’t know what a broken arm looked like.

  “We’re getting out of here,” she said. “The store will try to stop us. It’ll disorient you, get inside your head, try to confuse you and control you. But if you stay focused, you can block it out. You have to fight, do you understand?”

  Basil looked pained. He closed his eyes.

  “I told you to go,” he said.

  “When have I ever done what you told me?” Amy said.

  Basil made a f
ace, and Amy couldn’t tell what it was. His lips stretched tightly over his bloody teeth and his cheeks and forehead crinkled up. She realized he was smiling.

  “S’responsible,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  He cleared his throat and spat out blood. “You’re Shop Responsible,” he said. “I knew it.”

  With Amy’s help, Basil pushed himself into a seated position and leaned against the wet plaster wall.

  “It was the warden,” he whispered. “Josiah Worth. He did this to me. He said I was weak, ineffective. He said he would manage the people in my care.”

  “You’re a fine manager, Basil.”

  He shook his head. “Where’s Trinity?”

  “She’s hurt,” Amy said. “But she’s still in the store. Matt’s trying to find her.”

  “He’s safe?”

  “Not really,” Amy said. She hesitated, not sure she could say the next part out loud. “I think Ruth Anne is gone.”

  “Gone how?”

  “Dead,” she said.

  Amy swallowed and felt a piece of glass in her throat.

  Basil rested his head against the wall and squeezed his eyes shut. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought her here tonight. I knew it. I got her killed. I screwed up and got Ruth Anne killed.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Amy said. “This is no one’s fault.”

  Basil shook his head.

  “It was my choice,” he said. “I brought you both here. It gave me an excuse to talk to you.”

  “What?” Amy asked.

  “I thought I could figure out why you’re popular,” Basil said. “Why everyone talks to you.”

  “I’m not that popular,” Amy said.

  “I’m boring,” Basil said. “I had to become a floor manager before anyone would talk to me.”

  Amy thought about it for a minute.

  “There are worse things than being boring,” she finally said.