The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  I asked him what was up but he couldn’t tell me. I’m not sure he even knew.

  You have to watch those kids all the time. I couldn’t do that job. Couldn’t take the stress. The children are so unruly, and so tiny. I’d be terrified all the time, of losing them, of hurting them.

  There was a bad mood to the place after that. We’d lost two people. The main store turns over staff like a motor, of course, but the crèche normally does better. You have to be qualified, to work in the crèche, or the ball room. The departures felt like a bad sign.

  I was conscious of wanting to look after the kids in the store. When I did my walks I felt like they were all around me. I felt like I had to be ready to leap in and save them any moment. Everywhere I looked, I saw children. And they were as happy as ever, running through the fake rooms and jumping on the bunkbeds, sitting at the desks that had been laid out ready. But now the way they ran around made me wince, and all our furniture, which meets or exceeds the most rigorous international standards for safety, looked like it was lying in wait to injure them. I saw head wounds in every coffee-table corner, burns in every lamp.

  I went past the ball room more than usual. Inside was always some harassed looking young woman or man trying to herd the children, and them running through a tide of bright plastic that thudded every way as they dived into the Wendy house and piled up balls on its roof. The children would spin around to make themselves dizzy, laughing.

  It wasn’t good for them. They loved it when they were in there but they emerged so tired, and crotchety and teary. They did that droning children’s cry. They pulled themselves into their parents’ jumpers, sobbing, when it was time to go. They didn’t want to leave their friends.

  Some children were coming back week after week. It seemed to me their parents ran out of things to buy. After a while they’d make some token purchase like tea lights and just sit in the café, drinking tea and staring out of the window at the grey flyovers while their kids got their dose of the room. There didn’t look like much that was happy to these visits.

  The mood infected us. There wasn’t a good feeling in the store. Some people said it was too much trouble, and we should close the ball room. But the management made it clear that wouldn’t happen.

  You can’t avoid nightshifts.

  There were three of us on that night, and we took different sections. Periodically we’d each of us wander through our patch, and between times we’d sit together in the staffroom or the unlit café and chat and play cards, with all sorts of rubbish flashing on the mute TV.

  My route took me outside, into the front car lot, flashing my torch up and down the tarmac. The giant store behind me, with shrubbery around it black and whispery, and beyond the barriers the roads and night cars, moving away from me.

  Inside again and through bedrooms, past all the pine frames and the fake walls. It was dim. Half-lights in all the big chambers full of beds never slept in and sinks without plumbing. I could stand still and there was nothing, no movement and no noise.

  One time, I made arrangements with the other guards on duty, and I brought my girlfriend to the store. We wandered hand in hand through all the pretend rooms like stage sets, trailing torchlight. We played house like children, acting out little moments – her stepping out of the shower to my proffered towel, dividing the paper at the breakfast bar. Then we found the biggest and most expensive bed, with a special mattress that you can see nearby cut in cross section.

  After a while, she told me to stop. I asked her what the matter was but she seemed angry and wouldn’t say. I led her out through the locked doors with my swipe card and walked her to her car, alone in the lot, and I watched her drive away. There’s a long one-way system of ramps and roundabouts to leave the store, which she followed, unnecessarily, so it took a long time before she was gone. We don’t see each other any more.

  In the warehouse, I walked between metal shelf units thirty feet high. My footsteps sounded to me like a prison guard’s. I imagined the flat-packed furniture assembling itself around me.

  I came back through kitchens, following the path towards the café, up the stairs into the unlit hallway. My mates weren’t back: there was no light shining off the big window that fronted the silent ball room.

  It was absolutely dark. I put my face up close to the glass and stared at the black shape I knew was the climbing frame; the Wendy house, a little square of paler shadow, adrift in plastic balls. I turned on my torch and shone it into the room. Where the beam touched them, the balls leapt into clown colours, and then the light moved and they went back to being black.

  In the main crèche, I sat on the assistant’s chair, with a little half-circle of baby chairs in front of me. I sat like that in the dark, and listened to no noise. There was a little bit of lamplight, orangey through the windows, and once every few seconds a car would pass, just audible, way out on the other side of the parking lot.

  I picked up the book by the side of the chair and opened it in torchlight. Fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.

  There was a sound.

  A little soft thump.

  I heard it again.

  Balls in the ball room, falling onto each other.

  I was standing instantly, staring through the glass into the darkness of the ball room. Pudda-thudda, it came again. It took me seconds to move, but I came close up to the window with my torch raised. I was holding my breath, and my skin felt much too tight.

  My torchbeam swayed over the climbing frame and out the window on the other side, sending shadows into the corridors. I directed it down into those bouncy balls, and just before the beam hit them, while they were still in darkness, they shivered and slid away from each other in a tiny little trail. As if something was burrowing underneath.

  My teeth were clenched. The light was on the balls now, and nothing was moving.

  I kept that little room lit for a long time, until the torchlight stopped trembling. I moved it carefully up and down the walls, over every part, until I let out a big dumb hiss of relief because I saw that there were balls on the top of the climbing frame, right on its edge, and I realised that one or two of them must have fallen off, bouncing softly among the others.

  I shook my head and my hand swung down, the torchlight going with it, and the ball room went back into darkness. And as it did, in the moment when the shadows rushed back in, I felt a brutal cold, and I stared at the little girl in the Wendy house, and she stared up at me.

  The other two guys couldn’t calm me down.

  They found me in the ball room, yelling for help. I’d opened both doors and I was hurling balls out into the crèche and the corridors, where they rolled and bounced in all directions, down the stairs to the entrance, under the tables in the café.

  At first I’d forced myself to be slow. I knew that the most important thing was not to scare the girl any more than she must have been already. I’d croaked out some daft, would-be cheerful greeting, come inside, shining the torch gradually towards the Wendy house, so I wouldn’t dazzle her, and I’d kept talking, whatever nonsense I could muster.

  When I realised she’d sunk down again beneath the balls, I became all jokey, trying to pretend we were playing hide-and-seek. I was horribly aware of how I might seem to her, with my build and my uniform, and my accent.

  But when I got to the Wendy house, there was nothing there.

  “She’s been left behind!” I kept screaming, and when they understood they dived in with me and scooped up handfuls of the balls and threw them aside, but the two of them stopped long before me. When I turned to throw more of the balls away, I realised they were just watching me.

  They wouldn’t believe she’d been in there, or that she’d got out. They told me they would have seen her, that she’d have had to come past them. They kept telling me I was being crazy, but they didn’t try to stop me, and eventually I cleared the room of all the balls, while they stood and waited for the police I’d made them call.

  The ball r
oom was empty. There was a damp patch under the Wendy house, which the assistants must have missed.

  For a few days, I was in no state to come in to work. I was fevered. I kept thinking about her.

  I’d only seen her for a moment, till the darkness covered her. She was five or six years old. She looked washed out, grubby and bleached of colour, and cold, as if I saw her through water. She wore a stained T-shirt, with the picture of a cartoon princess on it.

  She’d stared at me with her eyes wide, her face clamped shut. Her grey, fat little fingers had gripped the edge of the Wendy house.

  The police had found no one. They’d helped us clear up the balls and put them back in the ball room, and then they’d taken me home.

  I can’t stop wondering if it would have made any difference to how things turned out, if anyone had believed me. I can’t see how it would. When I came back to work, days later, everything had already happened.

  After you’ve been in this job a while, there are two kinds of situation you dread.

  The first one is when you arrive to find a mass of people, tense and excited, arguing and yelling and trying to push each other out of the way and calm each other down. You can’t see past them, but you know they’re reacting ineptly to something bad.

  The second one is when there’s a crowd of people you can’t see past, but they’re hardly moving, and nearly silent. That’s rarer, and invariably worse.

  The woman and her daughter had already been taken away. I saw the whole thing later on security tape.

  It had been the little girl’s second time in the ball room in a matter of hours. Like the first time, she’d sat alone, perfectly happy, singing and talking to herself. Her minutes were up, her mother had loaded her new garden furniture into the car and come to take her home. She’d knocked on the glass and smiled, and the little girl had waded over happily enough, until she realised what she was being summoned.

  On the tape you can see her whole body language change. She starts sulking and moaning, then suddenly turns and runs back to the Wendy house, plonking herself among the balls. Her mother looks fairly patient, standing at the door and calling for her, while the assistant stands with her. You can see them chatting.

  The little girl sits by herself, talking into the empty doorway of the Wendy house, with her back to the adults, playing some obstinate, solitary final game. The other kids carry on doing their thing. Some are watching to see what happens.

  Eventually, her mother yells at her to come. The girl stands and turns round, facing her across the sea of balls. She has one in each hand, her arms down by her sides, and she brings them up and stares at them, and at her mother. I won’t, she’s saying, I heard later. I want to stay. We’re playing.

  She backs into the Wendy house. Her mother strides over to her and bends in the doorway for a moment. She has to get down on all fours to get inside. Her feet stick out.

  There’s no sound on the tape. It’s when you see all the children jerk, and the assistant run, that you know the woman has started to scream.

  The assistant later told me that when she tried to rush forward, it seemed as if she couldn’t get through the balls, as if they’d become heavy. The children were all getting in her way. It was bizarrely, stupidly difficult to cross the few feet to the Wendy house, with other adults in her wake.

  They couldn’t get the mother out of the way so between them they lifted the house into the air over her, tearing its toy walls apart.

  The child was choking.

  Of course, of course the balls are designed to be too big for anything like this to happen, but somehow she had shoved one far inside her mouth. It should have been impossible. It was too far, wedged too hard to prise out. The little girl’s eyes were huge and her feet and knees kept turning inward towards each other.

  You see her mother lift her up and beat her upon the back, very hard. The children are lined against the wall, watching.

  One of the men manages to get the mother aside, and raises the girl for the Heimlich manoeuvre. You can’t see her face too clearly on the tape, but you can tell that it is very dark now, the colour of a bruise, and her head is lolling.

  Just as he has his arms about her, something happens at the man’s feet, and he slips on the balls, still hugging her to him. They sink together.

  They got the children into another room. Word went through the store, of course, and all the absent parents came running. When the first arrived she found the man who had intervened screaming at the children while the assistant tried desperately to quiet him. He was demanding they tell him where the other little girl was, who’d come close and chattered to him as he tried to help, who’d been getting in his way.

  That’s one of the reasons we had to keep going over the tape, to see where this girl had come from, and gone. But there was no sign of her.

  Of course, I tried to get transferred, but it wasn’t a good time in the industry, or in any industry. It was made pretty clear to me that the best way of holding on to my job was to stay put.

  The ball room was closed, initially during the inquest, then for “renovation”, and then for longer while discussions went on about its future. The closure became unofficially indefinite, and then officially so.

  Those adults who knew what had happened (and it always surprised me, how few did) strode past the room with their toddlers strapped into pushchairs and their eyes grimly on the showroom trail, but their children still missed the room. You could see it when they came up the stairs with their parents. They’d think they were going to the ball room, and they’d start talking about it, and shouting about the climbing frame and the colours, and when they realised it was closed, the big window covered in brown paper, there were always tears.

  Like most adults I turned the locked-up room into a blind spot. Even on night shifts when it was still marked on my route I’d turn away. It was sealed up, so why would I check it? Particularly when it still felt so terrible in there, a bad atmosphere as tenacious as stink. There are little card swipe units we have to use to show that we’ve covered each area, and I’d do the one by the ball room door without looking, staring at the stacks of new catalogues at the top of the stairs. Sometimes I’d imagine I heard could hear noises behind me, a soft little pudda-thudda, but I knew it was impossible so there was no point even checking.

  It was strange to think of the ball room closed for good. To think that those were the last kids who’d ever get to play there.

  One day I was offered a big bonus to stay on late. The store manager introduced me to Mr Gainsburg from head office. It turned out she didn’t just mean the UK operation, but the corporate parent. Mr Gainsburg wanted to work late in the store that night, and he needed someone to look after him.

  He didn’t reappear until well past eleven, just as I was beginning to assume that he’d given in to jet lag and I was in for an easy night. He was tanned and well dressed. He kept using my Christian name while he lectured me about the company. A couple of times I wanted to tell him what my profession had been where I come from, but I could see he wasn’t trying to patronise me. In any case I needed the job.

  He asked me to take him to the ball room.

  “Got to sort out problems as early as you can,” he said. “It’s the number one thing I’ve learned, John, and I’ve been doing this a while. One problem will always create another. If you leave one little thing, think you can just ride it out, then before you know it you’ve got two. And so on.

  “You’ve been here a while, right John? You saw this place before it closed. These crazy little rooms are a fantastic hit with kids. We have them in all our stores now. You’d think it would be an extra, right? A nice-to-have. But I tell you John, kids love these places, and kids . . . well, kids are really, really important to this company.”

  The doors were propped open by now and he had me help him carry a portable desk from the show floor into the ball room.

  “Kids make us, John. Nearly forty per cent of our customers have youn
g children, and most of those cite the kid-friendliness of our stores as one of the top two or three reasons they come here. Above quality of product. Above price. You drive here, you eat, it’s a day out for the family.

  “Okay, so that’s one thing. Plus, it turns out that people who are shopping for their kids are much more aware of issues like safety and quality. They spend way more per item, on average, than singles and childless couples, because they want to know they’ve done the best for their kids. And our margins on the big-ticket items are way healthier than on entry-level product. Even low-income couples, John, the proportion of their income that goes on furniture and household goods just rockets up at pregnancy.”

  He was looking around him at the balls, bright in the ceiling lights that hadn’t been on for months, at the ruined skeleton of the Wendy house.

  “So what’s the first thing we look at when a store begins to go wrong? The facilities. The crèche, the childcare. Okay, tick. But the results here have been badly off kilter recently. All the stores have shown a dip, of course, but this one, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, it’s not just revenues are down, but traffic has sunk in a way that’s completely out of line. Usually, traffic is actually surprisingly resilient in a downturn. People buy less, but they keep coming. Sometimes, John, we even see numbers go up.

  “But here? Visits are down overall. Proportionally, traffic from couples with children is down even more. And repeat traffic from couples with children has dropped through the floor. That’s what’s unusual with this store.

  “So why aren’t they coming back as often? What’s different here? What’s changed?” He gave a little smile and looked ostentatiously around, then back at me. “Okay? Parents can still leave their kids in the crèche, but the kids aren’t asking their parents for repeat visits like they used to. Something’s missing. Ergo. Therefore. We need it back.”

  He laid his briefcase on the desk and gave me a wry smile.

  “You know how it is. You tell them and tell them to fix things as they happen, but do they listen? Because it isn’t them who have to patch it up, right? So then you end up with not one problem but two. Twice as much trouble to bring under control.” He shook his head ruefully. He was looking around the room, into all the corners, narrowing his eyes. He took a couple of deep breaths.