by David Nickle
Auntie must have said to herself, “Oh, just one more!” a dozen times over the past days. And how many hours had she spent just wrapping these things?
As she eased the door closed, Emily smiled. Well, a fair number of those presents were for Auntie, from her only niece. Emily had also said “Oh, just one more!” a lot lately.
And “just one more,” she reminded herself, means a lot more overtime than usual.
Emily crunched her way down the crisp snow of the walk, admiring the decorations and lights strung on the eaves of the neighbours’ houses. All up and down the street coloured light battled the dark, a deliberately joyous affirmation in the face of winter. It was a successful affirmation: She didn’t feel the cold at all as she stood waiting to catch for the bus to work.
Emily had never seen so many shoppers in the ValueLand. They crowded in through the glass doors of the Consumer’s Cornucopia Shopping Plaza like hungry ants, each searching out its crumb within the labyrinth of the mall. For the first hour or so of her shift, Emily had been able to distinguish faces, attitudes, even personalities in the crush. Pretty soon though, the constant parade of glazed-over eyes, trembling, clutching hands and anxiously twisted mouths had blended them all together in her mind into one dark, Platonic Shopper. The Shopper was simultaneously everywhere: arguing with the counter girls, taking Sgt. Gulf dolls from one shelf and replacing them on another (wrong) one, dawdling in the middle of the high traffic areas, spilling Coke on the floor, giggling in the corners.
This mall was a good object lesson in what happened when adults took over Christmas.
Emily had been on the ValueLand security team for six months, and floor supervisor for one of those. On days like this, she felt like the last good cop in Hell’s Kitchen.
From where she stood, she could see several aisles of tall gun-metal grey racks, each crammed with plush toys and combat dolls. Arms and legs hung limply out above the heads of the oblivious shoppers. Hundreds of glassy eyes stared up at the blinding fluorescent, or in at the box-crammed backs of the shelves. As she watched, a woman with a nervous expression grabbed a striped tail which jutted from a rack above her head, and pulled mightily. The whole pyramid of dolls on that shelf bulged slowly, then overflowed and began spilling down around her head. She shrieked and waved madly at Emily. “Help!”
Just then, Emily saw something out of the corner of her eye. One aisle over, visible to her through a gap in the jumbled toys, an oafish teenaged boy slipped a Super Soaker water pistol, still in its box, into an inside pocket of his mottled brown winter coat. He buttoned the coat and walked rapidly towards the exit, dodging robotic consumers.
“’Scuse me, ma’am.” Emily felt the now-familiar adrenalin rush that came with seeing an actual shop-lifting in progress. She hopped over the prone toys and sidled to the end of the aisle. From behind her came a helpless sounding, “But wait—” which she ignored in her sudden excitement.
Emily had felt this before. As the blood began to pound in her ears, every sensory detail of every shop-lift she had witnessed came flooding back to her. An Incident.
Her training took over.
The boy’s head bobbed up and down intermittently in the crowd. Emily ducked in and out of the moving forest, intent on her prey. He was approaching the check-out. This was the crucial moment.
“That’s the crucial moment.” Mitchell, her supervisor, had told her this her first day in training.
Old Mitchell was the archetypal security guard; he had the pinched face, nerveless mouth and hunched shoulders that fit perfectly into the polyester armour issued by Value-S. He underlined each point in his carefully crafted talks by tapping the blackboard with a yardstick. “The crucial moment.” Tap. “Will the perp buy or not? You must watch carefully. Use all your attention. Remember your concentration training. Breathe calmly. Empty the mind. Let your senses be a vessel, containing only the perp and the checkout. Observe.” Tap.
Emily tried to empty her mind, but the busy shoppers milling around her kept refilling it: “No, you idiot! Not that one! Granny’s allergic!” and “Quick, or she’ll get it first!”
Some guys swung by her, laughing, and she shrank back, certain they were laughing at her. Emily had problems around boys. After all, she had grown up plainer than she’d hoped. When she was a child, she’d thought she looked like Chanel, but these days she thought she looked like Sandra Bernhardt. Her lips were too gross, and her hair insisted on sticking out everywhere. And her nose had developed these distressing blemishes—well, her aunt called them freckles, but Emily knew better. And the way her elbows and knees stuck out when she walked had to be visible a mile away.
She peeked out after a few seconds. The boys were gone. So was the kid in the brown coat.
Emily stalked up to the checkout, furious at herself. No wonder they laughed at her, the way she screwed even the simplest thing up. Old Mitchell would be shaking his head now, pursing his lips the way he did when his coffee had too little cream in it. He would never have let this happen…
Wait! There he was, edging for the door. Quickly, her heart thudding, Emily ran up to Mabel, the check-out girl nearest the kid. Mabel’s name-tag was on upside down, and she had a fixed grin on her face that didn’t move when Emily grabbed her shoulder and turned her around.
“Did he pay?” she demanded, waving at the kid, who was nearly at the doors.
“Who? Pay?” Mabel blinked lazily at her. Her hands continued bagging toys as if she had somehow gone beyond needing vision; some prescience told her what each thing was, how much it cost, even its code number. If Mabel had served the kid in the brown coat, she certainly didn’t know it.
“Thanks anyway.” Emily passed through the checkout. The world had closed down now, to her and the perp. All she saw was his brown back as he neared the doors…paused in them…stepped through.
Tap. “That’s the moment,” Mitchell had said. “You’ve got him! Now it takes a cool head and a hard heart to walk that long mile between the two of you, to clap your hand on his shoulder, and say:”
“Excuse me sir, but did you pay for that?” Emily hadn’t quite clapped her hand on the kid’s woolly arm, but thought that stopping next to him with her hands on her hips was probably good enough.
The kid froze mid-step. “Eya,” he said, and “um ah,” and then: “Pay for what?”
He turned around, and for an instant the look of trapped terror in his eyes dissolved. Suddenly, the perp was all confidence. He sneered at her, and the middle finger of his left hand rose in the age-old salute of defiance.
“I didn’t pay for nothin’, baby,” he drawled. “Wadda ya gonna do about it?”
Emily took a deep breath—not because of nerves now, nerves were a problem of the past. It was just that she needed a lot of air for the next stage.
“This,” she said, in her you’re-under-arrest voice—and she moved.
With one hand, she grabbed the perp’s shoulder. He might have tried to squirm away, but she wrapped her other hand around his extended middle finger and bent it backwards so that the knuckle cracked. The noise must have been louder to the perp, because he immediately began to shout that she had broken his finger, and only stopped when Emily explained that the finger wasn’t broken now but would be soon if he didn’t come along and stop making a scene.
“Police brutality!” hollered the perp, as Emily slung his arm behind his back and pressed his rude little finger into the small of his back.
“I am not the police,” replied Emily, “and I am hardly being brutal at all if you think about it. Now if you will kindly come with me to the office.”
“Ow!”
“Don’t be a baby,” she said, and pushed the perp past the main checkouts. Customers were looking at her and the perp with a mixture of horror and curiosity, and probably she would get a talking-to about the visibility of the take-down. It wasn’t that the management objected to roughing a perp up a little bit; it was just a case of not frightening the customers.
>
Personally, Emily thought the ValueLand customers could use a little fear in them. Particularly at this time of year. She opened the office door with her elbow, and herded the perp in.
“Now,” she said, closing the door behind her. “It’s just you, me and a whole stack of forms. How do you want to play this, smart boy?”
Instead of answering, the perp sat down in one of the hard-backed chairs. He flexed his bent middle finger, and when he looked up at Emily, his eyes were wet with tears.
“Glad to see you’re ready to co-operate,” said Emily.
Four hours later, Emily retired to the stockroom to get her composure. It was comparatively quiet here among the giant stacks of cartons, with only the chugging of distant forklifts and the occasional swear word from the stock boys mingling with the Christmas muzak.
She needed the time alone. The perp—Jebediah Fuller, as she finally managed to learn—had managed to bawl uncontrollably for a full hour and a half. Finally, she was able to calm him down enough to get a home telephone number from him. His parents, of course, weren’t home, but Emily left the usual threatening message. By the time she’d finished the paperwork and sent Jebediah off with the ValueLand rub-on “Thief” tattoo on his forehead and a lifetime ban from the store, it was past time for her break.
Normally, the stock room was a safe haven for Emily, but not tonight. Something about these heaps of boxes, and the packing foam strewn liberally in the corners, disturbed an old, unwanted memory in her. Nervously, she twined her fingers in her hair as she sat, and hummed along with the faint tune from the loudspeakers.
I wish you a merry Christmas
And a happy new year;
A pocket full of money
And a cellar full of beer,
And a great fat pig
To kill every year.
No wait, those weren’t the words. At least not the words sung these days, but Emily had heard them once before. With a start she looked up, and remembered.
She had once stood in a room more vast than this, a place like a hangar lit by high arc lights. That room had been crammed from floor to ceiling with boxes, and the boxes had been full of rectangles of paper, of all colours.
It was a long time since she’d thought of Santa’s Letter room, and the dreadful secret she had learned there. Emily hugged herself and kicked at the concrete underfoot. It wasn’t fair. Bad memories should stay forgotten, once you decided to forget them.
She’d been doing a good job so far this year. What was Christmas to her? No more than a season. Why should it be any more? So what that she had once been changed into an elf, and served as one of Santa Claus’ little helpers at the north pole. That was long ago, when she was a child. And Santa was dead now, like her parents.
Still…ValueLand sometimes seemed to her to be following in his footsteps. She didn’t approve of the Sgt. Gulf dolls or the Geraldo Interrogation kits that were big sellers every yuletide. They reminded her unpleasantly of Santa’s failed attempt to destroy the children of the world by giving them exactly what they asked for.
She closed her eyes, and for just a second behind her lids she saw a place like a giant iron cathedral, so dark and heavy that the tundra petalled up around it and the sky bent down to touch its smoking stacks. The inside of her skull was lit with blowtorch light that stuttered randomly from the tall square-paned windows, and in her ears there grew a deep, submerged rumbling like a swelling of the earth itself, overlaid with trip-hammer snaps and biting saw-shrieks.
The Mill. Even after all this time the Toy Mill drew her back to its memory, by sheer gravity.
Emily stood up, sniffing. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes, then hurried back to the brightness and noise of the ValueLand showroom.
Droves. She had never really understood that word before. But here they were, obviously and unmistakably droves of people. An hour to go till closing, but it might as well be forever. As the evening progressed, the crowds seemed increasingly wild-eyed and desperate, searching for inspiration among far too much produce and catching the Dantean hysteria from one another in moments of eye contact in the crowded aisles. Tinsel glittered overhead, and strange sharp-edged mandalas hung between the toy racks, turning to display their barbs in long rows of diminishing perspective. Emily propped herself wearily underneath a display of robotic carollers who pivoted left, right, left, right, waving blank song books and silently mouthing. She watched the flickering crowd indifferently, trying not to think.
There sure were a lot of kids here tonight. They usually outnumbered the parents by about two to one, but right now it was more like five to one. She watched a group of them, all bundled up in bulky blue coats with Maple Leafs toques pulled down over their ears. They were stalking grim-faced into one of the more crowded aisles, not examining the toys to either side. One hung back, taking up position at the end of the aisle, looking around himself alertly.
Funny, she thought. Maybe they were up to something. She couldn’t bring herself to care much, but watched anyway. There was nothing else to do.
The main group had vanished down the toy-choked aisle. The one they’d left behind now reached into his pocket and pulled out something small and flat. He examined it, turning it one way and another.
It was probably a catalogue picture of the toy he was looking for. A few weeks ago, Emily would have compassionately gone to him, and helped the little tyke find his object of desire. Now he was just another disappointed shopper, and she couldn’t help him.
He looked at the picture, then up at one of the stock boys who had come bustling past pushing a cart loaded with plastic grenades. The tyke shook his head and returned his gaze to the picture.
Emily’s attention wandered. There seemed to be a commotion happening at check-out—or rather, the constant commotion there seemed to be intensified. She should probably investigate. With a sigh, she pushed herself away from the display.
When she happened to glance over at the far aisle, the kid with the picture was gone. She wouldn’t have thought twice about it except that there was a crumpled piece of paper lying on the floor there. Idly curious (and wanting to put off finding out what was happening at check-out) she walked over and picked it up, smoothing it with one hand on her hip as she sidestepped down an aisle full of foam bats and balls. She was halfway along when the picture became flat enough and she brought it up to look at it.
It was a picture of her. Her yearbook picture from last grade, in fact. She hated that picture, it made her look like she had an overbite. But what was that kid doing with it?
He’s not a kid. She stopped at the realization, a prickly sensation worming its way up her spine. Hesitantly, trying not to appear obvious about it, she looked behind herself.
A small head ducked around the far corner of the aisle. Emily dropped the picture.
Walk normally, she told herself. She tried to whistle, but since she’d never been very good at it she only produced a kind of light wheezing sound as she kicked nonchalantly through the yuletide debris.
She looked up. Four squat man-shapes blocked the end of the aisle. Emily glanced quickly back. Three more were coming up behind her.
She grabbed the biggest thing she could find—a lime-green foam bat as long as her leg. “Go away,” she said determinedly, trying to use something like old Mitchell’s tone of voice.
“It be her!” yelled one of the short guys, and as one they leapt at her. Fortunately they got in each other’s way, and the four from ahead of her fell into a heap. She seized the moment and swung the foam bat mightily at the others.
“Lookout, she’s got a—” The speaker didn’t finish, as the bat took him square in the forehead. His toque went flying, revealing a bald head and two pale, sail-like ears, pointed like knives. He blinked in surprise and she hit him again, low this time. He tumbled headlong into a large cardboard box. She dodged behind it, putting her back up against the metal racks.
“Help!” she shouted.
The other four elfs unta
ngled themselves as the first group shuffled the box out of the way. One of the four reached inside his crackly new nylon coat and produced a large, well-oiled pistol with a sausage-sized silencer on it. “Stick ’em up!” he wheezed.
“Go away!” She thumped him on the head with the bat.
He looked annoyed. “Stop that!”
She hit him again, and simultaneously kicked the cardboard box. The first elf had been trying to get out of it and it capsized now, dumping him on his two friends. Just then Emily felt a pair of stick-thin but eerily strong arms encircle her waist from behind. An elf had crept across the shelf from the next aisle and now clung like a barnacle to her, chuckling evilly.
She screamed and jumped, swinging the bat wildly and feeling it connect. She weighed a lot more than the elf holding her by the waist so she dragged him with her as she spun around. A flood of toy boxes spilled out after him and his big boots kicked up as he tried to hang on.
The pistol went off with a deep chuff as its owner ducked flying galoshes. Spang spang whine went the ricochet, and somewhere down the store, a fluorescent tube exploded in a puff of blue fire and white dust. A startled shopper screamed.
Emily spun around again and the elf holding her fell into the cardboard box with the first one. Three more were coming across the shelves from the next aisle, one holding a nylon net in front of him.
She thwanged the elf with the gun again and again it went off, this time into the floor. Chips of concrete flew up and the other elfs hit the deck swearing. Before they could get up again, Emily rolled onto the shelf across the aisle from the ones with the net. She wormed her way in among hundreds of Barbie dolls stacked on it in ranks. A hand grabbed her ankle but she kicked back and caught something soft. The hand let go.