The Night Children

by Kit Reed

  Besides, the parts you can visit are so exciting that you could spend a year and never see them all. What’s more, all those shoppers have made the town so rich that the grownups don’t really want to know what Amos Zozz is doing in the hall nobody sees. They shrug and look the other way, and the kids?

  There’s a lot of great stuff out there! We all grow up on the Zozzco jingles, singing along with MegaMall commercials on TV. “Spring and summer, winter, fall,” they sing, “Cool kids shop at the MegaMall.” Everybody who is anybody knows the dance. Everybody who matters has a ZZ T-shirt. Everybody who wants to be somebody, that is. Kids collect MegaMall coupons and free passes for rides in the amusement plaza by the hundreds every time you buy a ZZ Happy Burger or a ZZ Shake you get one. Obey the commercials and beg your mom to buy the special Zozzco Crackle, and you’ll find two in the box. The cereal is made right here in Castertown!

  Aren’t we all wearing Zozzco sneakers and doesn’t everybody want ten more pairs of ZZ jeans?

  Oh, there are other brands, but no kid wants them because every kid knows that ZZ makes the newest, hottest things. All the ads and commercials tell us so! As for our moms and dads, nobody wants to tangle with the corporation. Leave Zozzco alone and the money will keep pouring in.

  Everybody says whatever happens, smile and don’t ask questions. Grownups don’t ask. They hated being poor.

  If there’s anything weird going on out there in the unknown sector of the MegaMall, the grownups of Castertown don’t want to know. Nobody wants to upset the mysterious, powerful Amos Zozz. They’re afraid of him. Jule’s seen it in Aunt Christy’s face. Ask the grownups and they’ll deny it, but the children know.

  Say the wrong thing and they might end up in the Dark Hall. Awful things happen there. The place is haunted. No, worse. The danger is mystical. The Dark Hall swallows every kid foolish enough to come near, and the Dingos are dragging Jule Devereaux toward the dark sector, step by step.

  You bet Jule is scared.

  All the Dingos are scared.

  Even Burt Arno is scared, Jule can see it by the way his head is shaking as the hair rises on the back of his neck. She has to wonder what he has in mind for her. Does he just want to get rid of her, or is he planning some kind of sacrifice to the owner of the Castertown MegaMall? She doesn’t know.

  Scared or not, Burt’s Dingos go thudding along in their work boots with their breath exploding in a steady huh-huh-huh. Jule has no idea whether they’re close to their destination or whether they will have to trot along like this all night. She’s just glad the thud-thud of two dozen pairs of feet and the huh-huh-huh of two dozen Dingos breathing in unison drown out the slight, constant rustle that she hears overhead.

  The sound started as they rounded the first fountain and set off down the first corridor into the next sector, and it hasn’t stopped. Jule hears, but the Dingos are too intent on where they are going to notice. The sound keeps pace with them, never louder, never fading, slight but incessant. The gang forges on without question but Jule’s eyes snap wide. She is listening.

  It is coming from the balcony above.

  Holding her breath so she can hear better, she identifies soft footsteps overhead. Somebody on the second-floor balcony is keeping pace with them. She knows better than to stop. If she does anything at all, the Dingos will see. She can’t tell who’s moving along up there, but someone is following them. She sees a single shadow, loping along. As she watches other shadows fall in line, following the first. Soon there are many running along the balcony above her so silently that nobody but Jule Devereaux even guesses that Burt Arno’s little regiment is not alone.

  Jule has no idea who the strangers are, but she thinks they came in peace. Otherwise, wouldn’t they attack? If she warned Burt or Mag that their Dingos were being followed, would they be so grateful to her that they’d let her go?

  If Burt sent his tribe running after the intruders and they tangled, could she slip away during the fight? She isn’t sure. She glances up, hoping for a signal, and to her surprise a tall, good-looking boy with tousled hair shows himself for a split second—just long enough to flash her a beautiful grin.

  Oh, she thinks, looking at him for a few seconds too long, and in her astonishment, she breaks stride. Oh!

  Mag yanks her back to attention and the little bunch of Dingos trots on.

  When she looks again, he is as good as gone.

  The Dingos are making good time until the red eye of the next surveill camera completes its arc and begins the inevitable swing back their way. Time to duck. The little platoon has done this so often on this march that Jule knows the drill.

  Get down.

  Burt Arno crouches with one hand raised: silence. Behind him, the Dingos halt and crouch in a perfect imitation. Hissing, Mag jerks Jule’s hair and because she has no choice, Jule crouches too.

  As before, they will be perfectly still as the eye of the camera plays on the little formation on the corridor floor, sees no movement, and moves on. Crazy, Jule thinks, freezing with the rest. Why don’t the guards watching the surveill screens see two dozen kids playing statue? Why don’t they swarm out of their booth to investigate?

  A moving target is easy to spot?

  She doesn’t know.

  In the next stupendous second, she does.

  On the upper level, where Jule’s unknown allies have followed the Dingos silently, keeping low, everything changes. They move out into the lights. Kids of all sizes and ages leap into action on the balcony, flapping everything from beach towels and starters’ flags to bath mats to inflatable baby ponds at the mean red eye of the camera, waving and shouting, trying every trick they can think of to get the attention of the MegaMall’s guards. Hanging far out over the balcony rail, boys and girls jump up and down madly, like animal shelter puppies begging to be picked up, advertising: Children here.

  A siren shrieks.

  Advertising! Her unknown friends and their black-haired leader are trying to bring out the guards.

  Just as quickly, they vanish.

  Now she understands. Somebody up there risked exposure to bring down Security on the Dingos. For her? It’s a kind of rescue, she supposes. It is! This rangy, handsome friend that Jule didn’t even know she had just did something crazy. He and his gang just did everything but send up fireworks to alert the MegaMall guards, and she can’t help thinking they did it to save her. Whatever they were thinking, it worked.

  At the far end of the corridor, double doors fly open and a Security squad bursts out in black helmets and black uniforms, raking the corridors with high-intensity lights. Armed with bats and swinging weighted nets, they stand poised, deciding which way to go.

  Right, she thinks. If you want to get people’s attention, yell and wave!

  The little display on the balcony caught somebody’s eye up there in the Security booth, where nothing ever changes on the dozens of screens the Zozzco guards are paid to watch. In corridors where no outsiders come after closing time, any movement is like a red flag. Whether most of the guards were asleep or eating or playing cards or talking on the phone, somebody saw the commotion and hit the alarm.

  Her secret friends have brought out the guards.

  When she next looked up, they were gone. Smart!

  What the guards see, thundering out, is Burt’s unruly tribe. Trapped in the searchlights, Burt and his Dingos squawk, falling all over themselves in a mad attempt to escape.

  As for her allies on the balcony? It’s as if they don’t exist.

  Thudding along in shiny black boots, the Zozzco Security guards advance, closing in on Burt Arno and his scruff y Dingos with their leather jackets and their sad little tattoos and tarnished studs.

  A voice booms out of hidden speakers, “DON’T MOVE.”

  Dingos scatter.

  “STAND FAST.”

  Burt’s Dingos run like coyotes from a pride of lions, leaving Jule Devereaux frozen in the empty corridor, helpless and alone.

  “STAY WHER
E YOU ARE.”

  Ordinarily she’d be glad to see Security coming, at least she thinks she would, but these Zozzco guards look mean. Evil. Dangerous. They advance with visors down and bats raised. Boot heels sound in double time: Clack-clack. Clack-clack. They begin to trot.

  Even at this distance Jule is terrified. She wants to run, but the unwieldy metal bike lock securing her hands knocks over a trash barrel and she almost falls.

  The guards break into a run. Jule can’t decide whether to turn and face them or drop on her belly and let them tramp right over her. She doesn’t know what to do!

  Then she hears a harsh, low voice.

  “This way.”

  “Where?” Crazily, she spins, looking here, there. “Where?”

  “Over here.” Somebody smacks the overturned trash barrel and rolls it into a half turn, so the barrel lies between Jule and the oncoming guards like a protective wall.

  Instinctively, she drops to the floor. “Where?” She doesn’t see. She doesn’t see!

  “Here!”

  Then she does see. A brass grate in the floor slips aside, revealing a narrow opening.

  “Who?” Jule looks back; the guards are coming. Nearby, like an oversized slit in a mailbox, lies a hole in the floor. A black hole. She has no idea how deep it is.

  The voice is coming from below.

  “Come on, hurry!” A hand reaches up. Whose, she doesn’t know, any more than she knows what lies down there in the impenetrable darkness beneath the glossy surface of the MegaMall. A ragged voice orders, “Hurry. Down here!”

  EIGHT

  “THAT WAS CRAZY, SHOWING ourselves,” James mutters. “We could have been caught!”

  “We couldn’t let them hurt that girl.” No matter who the trapped girl was or what she looked like, Tick would have done the same. He’d risk everything to help any kid in that kind of trouble, but this one! She looked so brave, she looked so fiercely pretty, marching along . . . “Besides,” he says, because he can’t tell James any of these things, “if this works out, Security gets on the Dingos’ case and kicks Burt and his mad dogs out of the mall.”

  “You think they won’t rat on us?”

  “Who’s going to believe a nut case like Burt? Look. We were only on camera long enough to get their attention.” Tick is trying hard to sound braver than he feels. “So what if they do know we’re here? They don’t know who we are or where we are.”

  Tick’s Crazies are making their way to the new hideout by wildly different routes. He and James are running along a service corridor behind the stores, keeping low. James says what Tick is thinking. “What if they do?”

  Tick turns. “It was a risk we had to take. Besides, I took precautions. For instance, the hoodies. Even if they go back and rerun their tapes, they won’t know what we look like. Nobody will know it was us.”

  “Right,” James says. “The masks.”

  “And Dingo colors on the flags. To make Security think it was Dingos on the balcony too. If this works out, we’ll get rid of Burt and his nut jobs for good.”

  “It’s worth it if it works.”

  “No. It’s worth it because we saved the girl.” They saved her, but where is she? Where did she go after the Dingos scattered and the guards came down? He doesn’t know. Tick swallows hard.

  “I guess, but still . . .”

  “We’ve been good, we’ve been careful.”

  “What if we weren’t careful enough?”

  James is an old friend. His very first Castertown Crazy. They’ve been around here for a very long time. To make them both feel better, Tick says, “Trust me, nobody knows that the Castertown Crazies exist.”

  NINE

  DEEP IN THE COMMAND center at the heart of the Zozzco Mega-Mall, Amos Zozz sits in solitary state, watching the goings-on as his plasma monitors bring up pictures from every sector of the MegaMall. The wall to his right is hung with masks, one gold and ceremonial-looking, one a featureless, utilitarian gray and a third in the image of Amos Zozz as he would have been if he had kept his looks. Above the bank of screens on which he watches events in his sprawling commercial empire hangs a portrait of an extremely pretty little boy with short, curly hair.

  It’s an oil painting, copied from a photo made at a Sears store when Amos was very young. Before everything changed. Mama Zozz, who was the underpaid housekeeper for an enormously rich family on Long Island, saved up for months to have her beautiful baby boy’s photo taken by the store photographer. Dressed in a nice white shirt with a blue bow tie, handsome, manly little Amos stands in front of a blue backdrop that exactly matches his eyes.

  He looks nothing like that now. Hideously disfigured by what happened to him, the rich and powerful Amos Zozz is careful to keep out of sight. When he does meet the public, he will wear the jeweler’s triumph, a handsome ceremonial mask. Meanwhile, let that daughter he had by a highly paid surrogate mother become the public face of Zozzco.

  Since that awful day when he was seven, Amos has despised children, but he had to have at least one to carry on the family line. There’s no point to making money if you can’t keep it, and Amos will make sure Zozzco stays in the family. Where he used to pay a lawyer to conduct meetings and face the public for him, his daughter does it now. Let his idiot daughter Isabella flounce around acting important. He sighs. And to think he counted on her to produce a grandson who would make him proud.

  Never mind. He has the power, and he will keep that power. Working behind the scenes the way he has all his life since that childhood trauma, Amos Zozz rules the MegaMall. Soon he will rule the commercial world, which as everybody knows really means that in time Zozzco will have control in the world of politics because everybody knows that with money, comes power. In time, he thinks, Amos Zozz will rule the entire world.

  The world just doesn’t know it yet.

  Amos will always despise the children who made him what he is, a disfigured monster with a face that revolts everyone, but he owes those rotten little beasts a debt of thanks. Without the accident and the terrible cruelty that followed, he’d probably be just another ordinary man.

  Handsome, perhaps, but without money, Amos would probably be a low-level wage slave in a business owned by some other billionaire. Unless he was unlucky enough to end up like his mother, working for heartless rich people in a mansion where she was eternally underpaid and never thanked.

  If anybody gets to be rich and heartless, it’s me.

  It was a pair spoiled rich kids who ruined Amos for ordinary life but in the end, he owes them a big fat thank-you for making him the rich and powerful person that he is. Without the heartless Galt twins and the accident and the lawsuit that followed, Amos might be handsome and happy, but he wouldn’t be rich.

  The evil Galt twins lived with their beautiful, vain mother and disgustingly rich father in a mansion in Southampton, Long Island, where some of the richest people live.

  Amos never had a father, at least not that he knew of, so he and Mama Zozz had to live in the basement because they were poor and Mama was only the Galt family’s maid. Randy and Andy made fun of Amos all the time. They pulled his hair and they laughed at Amos when he cried, and if he told on them? Their father would have his mother fired and they would be really poor. Who would believe Amos? His mother was the maid. Randy and Andy called him “Amy” because of the blond curls. They tied him up and made him put on a dress. In first grade they loved to lock themselves in their beautiful play house in the garden and have candy and cake, and they made sure that Amos was watching through the window before they started to eat.

  They wouldn’t let him come in no matter how hard he begged, even though they all went to bed in the same house at night.

  “You can’t come in, this is our special place.”

  Then one horrible Saturday it rained. The twins got bored. Next thing Amos knew, he heard them calling, “Oh, Amy. Amy . . .”

  He was so excited. They wanted him!

  The play house door was wide open. “Com
e on in, we have chocolate cake.”

  Crash bang boom, little Amos was inside the twins’ sacred play house, burying his face in a great big fat piece of their cake. Then the door slammed. The twins locked him inside! A window opened and something big came in on the end of a stick. It was a . . . wham. It slammed shut and the thing on the stick hit the floor and cracked open. It was a hornets’ nest.

  It was horrible. Amos screamed and hammered and cried and cried until his throat swelled up and he couldn’t make another sound. He was trapped. Trapped, too small to fight off the hornets and too weak to break out of the play house, he felt new stings piling up on top of the first ones and there was nothing he could do.

  He had lost control of his life!

  By the time the gardener looked in and saw him, Amos was a knot of pain, hugging his knees as he rolled on the floor. Police had to come to get him out. They threw a gas bomb into the play house to kill the hornets. An ambulance came and took Amos away. He spent practically forever in the hospital, getting well. Nothing they did could make the bumps and swellings go down. The lumps stayed.

  No medicine they gave him and no surgery they tried would make his hair grow back the way it was.

  All Amos had left on his head were lumps and some ugly tufts. He hated Randy and Andy Galt more than anybody in the world. When he begged his mother to quit so he could go to a different school, she cried. They were poor, she told him. She begged him to understand. She needed the job!

  To make up for it, Mama bought him a long blond wig. The glue hurt the lumps on his scalp but every morning Amos glued it on, and every morning the Galt twins taunted him. His face looked bad and the other kids laughed, but as long as Amos could hide behind his expensive hair, he was OK.

  Until one awful day in fifth grade. Andy and Randy tackled Amos in the schoolyard. They yanked off the wig out there in front of all the other kids. The wig came off, along with the skin on his lumps and what little was left of his real hair. He could handle the pain. What still hurts to this day is the way everybody laughed. And laughed. And laughed.