NO one noticed when the doors clicked shut and the locks flipped in their chambers. The glass doors warbled in their steel fixtures against the harsh wind tearing down the empty high street, and an atmosphere possessed by dusk rapidly drew towards the bitter cold of night.
Past the busy cash desks swarm bug-eyed and ferocious patrons, each waving garments over-head with ritualistic frenzy, cackling in tongues, demanding the attention of sweating workers who do their best in a heat unthinkable. Over discarded items and the litter of a thousand wretches, children rub sticky chocolate across miserable smiles and cry for mothers who sing at them whilst scrabbling at the last filthy dress on the rack.
Feel the heat squeeze salty beads of moisture from greasy pores. Feel the waves of noise bang and clash against, what you might have once called fine hearing. Feel every complaint or roar of vicious laughter race up to join the atmosphere of panic induced by nothing more than this; a store about to tipple into the eye of a storm, no more impeded by harmony.
Back at the door the lights flicker. As the shadows surge forwards and backwards, warded by the failing light, it is almost possible to notice a figure of impossible height. Wreathed in black, whining softly, the figure's stuttering form reaches out a ghastly arm and calls for attention. Its knuckles scrape and crack on the hardened glass. The hollow noise, enough to freeze the blood of any hardened soul, is a glimpse of death's embrace resonating in the knock of this doomed figure. And yet it falls on deaf ears. The figure maintains a vigil.
The chaos of this atmosphere, the clambering and the screaming and the heat, is so great that few notice the developing horrors. Few notice the doors are now locked and a figure beckons from the door, as you have. Even fewer smell the smoke, or taste the bitter salt on the air, and register that something is far wrong with this picture.
The lights dim almost imperceptibly and flicker like candlelight in the chill breeze of eve. A rush of wind, its source impossible to fix, rushes through the floor chilling all who notice it to the bone. Teeth clatter and fingers lose grip, children sink back slowly into the busy crowds, grappling for their mother's skirts. Breaths become bated, shallow, vaguely strangled in the close, maddening, air.
By the side of the till there is a large black sack, not unlike a suit carrier, which must be hauled up to the Manager's office as a greasy note dictates. As it is dragged across the floor it leaves an angry red smear on the cream tiles that no one-save a beady eyed brat-seems to notice. The Assistant reaches the lift just in time. As she steps onto the grubby corrugated floor of the rusted elevator, the floor almost claims her shoe.
Back at the cash desk a spectacled banshee shakes fistfuls of crumpled notes at a young worker, glaring wildly as her legs are enveloped by the floor. The Cashier instantly begins an accident evaluation sheet, because if these things aren't done properly, Trading Standards could have them all liquidated. Before the woman's mouth disappears she throws the notes in the air and complains venomously and, with that, her face vanishes beneath the tile leaving only a tangle of brown hair to sit, like a toupee, on the now-solid floor.
Most of the customers on the ground floor suffer such a fate. A few are left to run screaming to and fro in this macabre garden, amongst the tangled limbs of their fellow patrons and the cool breeze of the now functioning air conditioning. Few notice, as you now must, that the front doors have unlocked and slowly creak open as fresh customers shuffle into the store marvelling at the avant-garde displays.
? ? ?
IT is typical that a delivery like this, the ominous black sack heaped in the corner of the rusted elevator, should appear on the busiest day of the week. The Assistant should have been finished at twelve o'clock, but it must have been, at least, half past that. It was hot and the place took on an unwelcome reek: it stank like Hell and worse. She couldn't pinpoint the exact smell and breathed a sigh of relief when the doors slid open.
First Floor, Ladies' Suiting, is relatively calm. Patrons have not yet caught wind of the screams echoing up the stairs. The first mists of confusion are only setting in. The enormous pictures on the walls have only just begun to change. Fine silhouettes, an army of sharply dressed models, once frozen in uncomfortable stances, now stagger from their positions. Some stretch out maniacally, barking silent laughter, whilst others crawl into dark corners and weep, covering their ears and mouths.
When this catches on, there is suitable panic. Wide eyes and clenched fists, hands on mouths, hands in mouths, shuddering heads and bombastic movements, the realization of something leaving; the air sucked from the room. Everyone gasps. The pictures keep moving, playing host to storms and scenes of a foreboding nature.
Still the Assistant launches herself forward with fervour, muttering apologies wherever she can and barking at any shoppers unlucky enough to get in her way. Some hapless bystanders slip in the smears left by the black sack, only to rise shaking and stuttering at the gooey consistency smeared over their persons.
All the shiny white and polished wood seems somewhat grubby, tarnished and vaguely foul like furniture left in the street. Only when she reaches the other side of the floor does she stop to consider that she has absolutely no reason to be there, and races back to the lift as things get ugly.
? ? ?
FLOOR Two, Men's and Sportswear, is silent and pitch black. The Assistant shuffles out of the lift, letting the black sack slump over the doorway as she staggers to catch her breath. The air is damp and impossibly warm. The place has the uneasy stillness of a hospital corridor in the night. There is a soft droning but not of machinery.
The lights have failed, plunging all into darkness. Except not total darkness since there are small candles radiating out in web-like precision down the pathways. Step by step, inching forward slowly and silently, the Assistant begins to feel the first pangs of fear.
As she moves closer to the back walls, she notices the ground change. Where it was gleaming white and new, see it now, stained with hundreds of filthy footprints. Smell the foul effluence, hear the cacophony in the velvet darkness. Feel-
Feel the icy hand of it, wet, soft and hungry, clench around your arm as you kick out one of the candles in panic. Feel a weight of rank meat tumble on your body, slathering it with juices foul beyond the grave. The Assistant flails and races back into the light, slowing only when nothing emerges from the shadows to give chase.
When her heart rate has slowed and the dull ebbing of her pulse has retreated from her ears, she hears the sounds. All around her, in the pitch darkness, a lament of sobs and whispers drifts around the room. Squinting, the Assistant can see forms, just barely.
Groups of men cling to the walls tightly, holding hands and shaking. Every so often the thing in the shadows lets out a long mournful sigh, and the men snort in fear, shuddering against the walls. There is a flump of weight hitting the floor, the clambering of the thing, and the soft slapping of wet bodies. It begins to feast on the unlucky soul who fainted in the heat.
The Assistant races down one of the well-lit pathways, and hanging a sharp right into the equipment department, she slams a key code into the door and slides through to the relative safety of the Menswear staff area. It is well lit back here and there are few shadows to hide in. So she rests, slipping onto the musty sofa, whilst forgetting about everything.
? ? ?
HERE and there the other staff members perch, no two standing too close together or too far apart. The air is thick with accusation and morbid curiosity. The overall effect is somewhat jarring to the Assistant who awakens, with severely mixed feelings, to a room full of bloodied silent people staring at her.
She makes her way to the table and takes a seat, one of the new girls picks up her scarlet coat and swings it on, wandering to the door.
"You're seriously going out in that?"
The girl turns, confused and distant, a constant question on her brow. The Assistant takes out a rusted blade and slides it across the table-you might as well stick that in your heart right now.
The girl picks up the knife in a daze, turns, and leaves for the ladies toilet. The sobs stop and start, then dissipates to nothing. The door remains locked.
As she reaches over the table for a glass of water, the room shudders violently and the pitcher quivers over the edge of the surface to smash loudly on the laminate floor. Everyone gasps and prepares to flee, but the action fades as quickly as it started.
"It's the rain," someone says, "the rain, it's falling too hard. It'll wake the Old Ones."
Everyone frowns and turns away, waving arms and making sharp sounds of dismissal.
"You'll see," the Assistant says.
Over by the phone, a young man has the handset to his mouth and is whispering something into the receiver. The Assistant wanders over to whisper in his ear, "Where can I get the Manager's office key?" The man seems to start awake then turns to her.
"The Manager should have them."
"Last I heard she was in the basement."
"Basement's flooded, so?I hope not."
"Ok, so I'll make my way up-"
"Have you noticed-"
"You guys stay here, enjoy your break."
"You probably shouldn't-"
"See you."
He turns back to the receiver and carries on whispering. She steps out onto the floor and stops to listen. Over the Tannoy, comes a strained whisper, "Prowl?prowl?I wanted help on the desk but no one came there was a body but it disappeared after a while in the basement then the blood but it wasn't blood it was pus from the boiler it's all gone off?" It goes on and on. The Assistant makes it back to the lift just as the candles puff out in her wake and something slides towards her in the dark. She drags the black sack in and the door slams shut. Something reeking of flowery perfume slams into the door.
The lift stops on Three but the doors won't slide open so she presses the button for Four and the problem repeats. This time the inadequacy of the institute sets a fuse in her belly, and she screams every terrible word she knows. She considers calling someone but the janitors are zombies so the engineers have probably met similar fate.
She fits her fingers into the groove between the doors carefully, nails first, and wrenches with all her strength. Nothing. Not even a slight give. She pulls her lanyard from her neck and bashes the plastic fob into place, pushing the door millimetres apart. Her fingertips fit in and she splits a nail in her haste, the pain makes her hands tremble and, accompanied by the stench of the sack, she feels nauseous. Only whilst the doors slowly creak apart does she remember this usually happens when something leans against the doors.
It is somewhat jarring to find one of the fine porcelain-coloured store mannequins leaning haphazardly against the metal doors of the lift, its hand frozen in mid-air, where the door was only a second ago. More jarring, perhaps, is the fact the mannequin looks like it has been testing cosmetics; its face plastered with thick stodgy clumps of cheap mascara and bitter blue lipstick.
The rest of the floor is in a similar state. Mannequins stand here and there perusing the wares of the glass cabinets and many make-up counters. Most of them are in some way dolled-up. Their hair is matted with childish scads of foundation, their rigid fingers clumsily adorned with rings and bangles not sized for the inanimate shopper. Customers stroll around taking no notice of the garish display, even plucking items they desire from the fiendish looking dummies. It looks perfectly safe.
The Assistant lodges the black sack in the lift doorway. Stepping back, she notices how strange the lift looks now, with its rusted doorway and tattered metal insides, bizarrely decrepit against the cream walls of the Accessories and Cosmetics department. Still, there's the bag to be taken care off so she walks over to the cash desk to find a manager. Behind the desk one of her colleagues stands over two bodies. Both corpses heaped clumsily in the walk-space in a mess of blood. The girl looks round but her eyes are black. The Assistant frowns dubiously.
"What's going on?"
"I was blind but now I can see."
"And the bodies?"
"I found them. Out there. Something tried to cut them in half." She steps back and points to the corpses. "I didn't want to scare the customers, so I carried them here. You should join us."
"Ok, good job. And no. Have you seen a manager? I need a key to the Manager's Office." The Assistant points to the black bag.
"I was blind but now I can see. There are no managers left. One died in the basement, the others fell before the store, or soon will. Join us."
"Thanks. And no."
Nobody is being helpful, everything is wrong. This is a nightmare and she only wants to go home, she was due out hours ago. The Assistant pulls up her shirt sleeve but her watch is smashed and all the numbers are zero. All she has to do is take the bag upstairs and she can leave, and then she will be safe.
She very nearly believes it before the searing pain and the blood in her eyes. Right before the knife slides across her forehead and an impossibly strong hand yanks at her hair, pulling the gash wider and wider. The Assistant is blessed by low pain tolerance so she collapses to her knees after a spasm of utter agony. The convulsion shakes her attacker's hand loose, as the fall puts her away from the knife. All of a sudden a wave of near-celebratory violence washes over the department.
The glass cabinets on either side of the Assistant explode with the weight of shoppers. Everywhere mannequins slide into view, garish visages painted in chunks, and begin to decimate the population of the floor. Lifted into the air, slammed onto counters and cabinets, wrestled to the tiles, bashed off pillars, shoppers kick and scream for their lives. An old woman, hoisted high, looks crooked and ridiculous, her sprawling figure inspires no sympathy from tormented fellow-patrons, not even when the mannequin scalps her can anyone help. The action has become vogue, and now all the mannequins are doing it. The Assistant leaps into the lift holding her hair in place, then-blindly-she drags the sack into the rusted box and jabs at the buttons. She escapes with her life, barely, but she does not escape the sounds of the madness beneath.
Floor Five is little more than a thatched barn where a handful of shoppers roll on the floor under a few grubby tweed suits. Their faces spell out wild abandon whilst in the shadows an awful growling oscillates between animalistic prowl and the death rattle of something human. Noticing that the bizarre sound has already began a flirtation with her keener, less respectable, senses the Assistant holds her finger fast to the lift switch and is relieved at, what she assumes is, a lucky escape.
Skipping Floor Six, which had already been scored off the floor plan with hasty vicious gouges, the Assistant steps out on Kidswear, lets her charge flop impotently to the floor, then storms off to screech at a young mother in the process of dismantling an unmanned till. Close by, her red eyed child desperately beats a charity collection off the cracked tiles like a deranged monkey trying to navigate a coconut.
In this brief moment, hardly a calm in the storm but perhaps the closest thing, serenity does its best to settle. Through the floors of concrete and chaos only the loudest screams pierce the walls. Unrelenting sounds of construction and deconstruction maintain a vicious bass, a constant chugging, which gives the impression of pulse-like motion. The walls swell and contract, but so slightly that to notice is to look dangerously close.
On the floor immediately above, a loud crash shakes dust from between the obsidian tiles. A few of the meagre lights shudder out leaving large portions of the shop floor in uncomfortable dark. After cracking the young mother's head open with the till she had been vexing to prise open, the Assistant continues heaving the black sack across the floor to the fire escape. Behind her, as more lights flicker out and bodies run to and fro snatching at air, the child toddles over to its mother's corpse and there is a moment of darkest consideration that bereaves the soul of any onlooker, a moment of childish hunger that begins an action, so awful, it is probably best lost to the dark.
The fire stairs are old and doused in a sickly red light accentuated by the flames that have begun lickin
g their way towards the top. The heat is near unbearable and the stench of burning stabs at the Assistant's head. The wind on the ground floor, the smell of the lift, the reek of blood on the fourth floor, the smells cling to her nostrils. The smoke sneaks in with thin greasy black fingers to creep down her throat and she retches uncontrollably. A few floors down, one of the fire escapes creeps open then slams shut. She blacks out soon after.
? ? ?
SHE wakes up when the biting cold water seeps into the gouge on her forehead. She feels the straps across her chest and legs. She smells burning hair. She panics and fights the straps that bind her, arching her back and shaking with rage. To her right there stands a huge black prism which reeks of rotted fruit. To her left, rows of cleaners kneel and sway, faces turned down in hoods fashioned from large carrier bags with the company's logo emblazoned in crimson. The low thrumming of heart strings and vocal chords sounds like a riot in the ears of the terrified girl. A soft whine emanates from the prism and she shakes with fear. She dreams of a time when things were normal, but that dream becomes just as foul and twisted as this one. She opens her eyes and prays for something to happen, and it does.
The Head Janitor steps forward and places his hand on her stomach, smiling whimsically as his hand rubs the soft skin slowly.
"Hail the Conqueror Worms!" he gasps.
She spits and curses, calls him every name she can, and carries on faster as he raises the dagger. The seething masses abandon their plastic wrappings and hum louder than before, reaching a fever pitch as the smiling monk drives the dagger down. Down it flies as the Assistant screams and the dagger drives deep into the monk's stomach, he looks at her, bewildered, and then collapses back into his followers.
The Assistant becomes aware her ropes have been loosened, just as the midnight mass is spontaneously reduced to one sea of pale flesh and vein. There are no limbs visible, no faces or mouths, but there are too many eyes, eyes that stare wide and panicked from their new lodgings. The Assistant rubs the skin at her wrists and walks silently towards the fire escape as the humming of the disgraceful thing continues.
Racing up the stairs with the black sack bouncing awkwardly off the steps, the Assistant passes the entrances for floors Eleven and Twelve, the former emanating a stink far worse than the fire, whilst the latter is in possession of a sign which simply reads "NO" in thick black marker. She stops on Thirteen and peeks around the door.
It's surprisingly tidy and well-lit here. In the corner, a man in a tatty stormbreaker carves busts whilst across from him sits a swollen spinster adorned with shades of purple and black. She chuckles as the heavy chunks fall to the floor then nods enthusiastically when he presents her with a scrawny skeleton of whitest marble. The ribcage of the thing sags in ludicrous imitation of breasts, whilst the sockets are reduced, made narrow to represent the woman's small, beady gaze. Around them other customers wander about with their own ghastly busts, smiling with their eyes closed. The Assistant shuts the door quietly and continues up the staircase to Fourteen. There were other floors but the stairs don't go far enough and some of the doors have moved.
Floor Fourteen is barren and void of the madness that has gripped nearly the entire store by now. Cleaners crawl to-and-fro across the hairy floor, waxing it as they go. This month's leavers shake hands with various company officials and step into neat holes in the white-washed walls. Burgundy floor tiles show up dusty footprints left by the construction team. In the centre of the floor the area coordinator oversees some last minute changes to room separations.
Four men work quickly, bricking up a section of the floor. Behind the near-finished wall, in a small windowless room that smells like meat, a group of sales assistants play cards at a shabby table, seemingly oblivious to their premature interment. Dollops of concrete run down the wall like mucky tears, only to be scraped up, then reapplied to hold the bricks in place. Nodding silently to the men, the Assistant carries on across the floor to the office, heaving the leaking sack.
The Manager's office door is open. The Manager's office door is rarely open. The Assistant approaches and peeks in, the place reeks of garlic. A man sits on the couch shuffling through papers. She wanders in, sack in tow.
"Where have you been?" he asks, literally blank-faced.
She is too tired to respond, so pulls the bag over to the desk, lets it shudder to the ground, and then flops down on the sofa.
"What's in the bag?" she asks.
The man with no face gets up (grunting from some unseen orifice) then pulls the black sack up onto the huge desk chair with much strain. Unzipping the sack releases a foul stench that fills up the room instantly, but is somewhat lessened by the garlic. The Assistant gags and burrows her head into her armpit, momentarily envious of the man's lack of nostrils.
Sitting on the chair, with the black plastic sack peeled away like the petals of a giant black lily, is a desiccated corpse. No eyes, ears, or teeth, limbs as scrawny as the legs of a crow, and a few strands of sickly hair hanging long and stringy from a mottled scalp. The man goes to work pulling long thin tubes, which appear to be connected under the table, towards the corpse and sticking the polished brass ends into the rubber-like skin.
"Who's that?"
"New manager, he grunts."
"Where's the old one?"
"Basement, I think. She drowned."
"Oh. When will the new guy be up and running?"
"Few hours yet, got to do the blood, then there's induction, safety videos, and the paperwork of course."
"Of course?"
"It's still faster than most other ways. We tried everything; vacuum packing, freezing, dehydrating, tried them all and it didn't take?"
There's a moment of silence interrupted only by the sucking bubbling noises of the hoses as they push thick mauve liquid out of the desk up into the body. The Assistant doesn't care anymore, its home time.
"Do you need-"
"No, that's fine thanks, why not go play cards with the team? It would be good for you."
She doesn't even argue, there's no point. They wouldn't listen if she told them, so she wanders back onto the shop floor, past the builders braying loudly at rags, steps through the moist aperture and takes a seat with the rest of her co-workers. Someone passes her a hand and she takes it, staring out the shrinking hole at the Fourteenth floor.
The lights flicker and the tannoy crackles whilst a noise on the stairs promises chaos could still reach this floor. The tiny room is now darker than ever as the bricks are laid in place. Someone at the table breathes in the ragged after-sobs of a good long cry. The Assistant sighs and looks at the hand she has been dealt as the hand looks up at her. The lights flicker once more, drastically, and the hole is one more brick away from becoming a wall.
8. SEARCH HISTORY
Jonathan Hatfull, England
13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors Page 7
