A fat drop of water clung to the white ceiling tile for an indescribably long period, before it surrendered to gravity and plummeted to the carpet. It made a gentle sound—POIT—as it added itself to the moisture already collected down there, on the floor of the Young Misses section, to the left of a rack of discount blouses and the right of more discount blouses.
It was a leak. It had been going on for hours.
Orrin stood there with the beam of the flashlight he only grudgingly employed, trained on the space above the damp carpeting, waiting for the next one to fall. Every drop of water caught the light on the way down, a tiny, brief flash. They could be tracer rounds—time to reload the gun—except they didn’t announce that the ceiling was about to run out of water. If anything, the next step was going to be an increase, possibly damaging the racks of discount blouses on both sides.
It’d rained all day, and now at three in the morning with the rain still going, Orrin had to think that what he was looking at was the first indication of something very bad rather than the final act of a minor inconvenience. If the roof above the ceiling had a leak, there was no telling how much water was pooled up there and how long it had been happening. The gradual darkening of the ceiling tile was a good sign, though, that a bigger mess was pending.
That was provided the tile was really darkening. It was hard to tell with the flashlight.
During the day, the sales floor of Mad Maggie’s Shop-O-Rama was a shadowless consumer mecca, a shining shopping plaza city on a hill, with industrial strength fluorescents to keep everyone awake and make the products look newer and cleaner and less flawed. But when the store closed, the main lights went away and the emergency lights kicked in. These were small spotlights mounted in odd places throughout the store, pointed at weird angles and creating a chthonic nightmare of shadows in every direction.
The shadows weren’t so bad as long as one resisted the urge to eradicate them, such as by using a flashlight to get around.
Orrin kind of preferred the nighttime version of the place. All the light made him uncomfortable. Sure, it was probably because he was mostly only there after hours, which meant the cozy half-lit aisles he was accustomed to looked artificial and alien in full light. He was also a night person by nature and a loner by social standards. He was reasonably sure he was those things first, and therefore a good night watchman, but it was possible he became those things in order to be a better night watchman. It was hard to say.
He’d been doing the job for a little over two years, which officially made him—even counting the other shifts—the longest-running office-holder. The watchmen who came before him could have simply gotten better jobs, which was possible since it wasn’t a well-paying position, although there were worse ones out there. But Orrin didn’t think that was the case.
When Mad Maggie’s hired him he was told the job had high turnover. That tended to mean his predecessors quit or were fired, at a frequency atypical in the eyes of the hiring manager. He was pretty sure the reason was that the others used their flashlights.
That was the thing he figured out his first month: the extra light just made the darkness worse. Shine a beam in semi-darkness and it ruins your night vision and makes the shadows seem deeper and much more foreboding. Sometimes, it creates the illusion things out there are moving when they aren’t, and it’s hard to climb out of that psychological rabbit-hole once you’ve started going down it.
So he taught himself to see in the native dimness of the off-hour lighting, figured out where all the weird shadows were—the ones that looked like something to run away from all got their own names—and things had been just fine since.
Then the ceiling in Young Misses started leaking, and that screwed up his whole schedule.
He’d been hearing the steady poit-poit-poit for a couple of hours before discovering the source. Now that he had, other than spending entirely too long watching the plump droplets flash across his light beam one-by-one he didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to do.
He turned to the nearest mannequin, a twelve-year old in a poodle skirt and a floofy blouse.
“I guess I should get a bucket,” he said.
She didn’t register any kind of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with this idea, because she had no eyes or mouth.
Buckets were in the maintenance closet on the other side of the room.
This implied a nearness not borne out by facts. Mad Maggie’s Shop-O-Rama was a repurposed warehouse, so getting to the other side of the room meant traversing a space that was once used to make battleship guns, among other things.
That was back in the Second World War, and probably for a little while after. Then, for some reason—probably not because battleships stopped needing guns, as that seemed unlikely—it became something else, and then something else again, and then something else after that. It housed an overstock of lawn statuaries in one of its iterations, Orrin was told. He didn’t know when or for how long, or even why an overstock of such a thing would exist, but he did know that he was glad to be the night watchman for Mad Maggie’s, and not for a warehouse full of statues, because the shadows in such a place would be so, so much worse. Mannequins were bad enough.
Getting to the maintenance closet meant exiting Young Misses by way of the central causeway, heading past Young Men’s, and then diving into the Kitchen section at about the halfway point, after the endcap of blenders. This also took him through the weird motor oil smell he was apparently the only one to notice.
It was an odor Orrin picked up on in three different places in the store, and it was especially curious because while Mad Maggie sold home furnishings, clothing, kitchen goods, plumbing supplies, toys, costume jewelry, electronics, gardening tools, seasonal doo-dads, and dry groceries, she didn’t sell motor oil. He’d checked. The only thing he found that came close was the cleaning stuff in the kitchen section, and when “seasonal” meant barbecue grills there was usually lighter fluid around. But neither of those smelled like motor oil.
He guessed that one of the things the warehouse was used for before the statuaries and after the battleship guns was auto storage and maintenance, but he’d never been able to confirm that. It didn’t help that when he asked around—either the night crew handing the store off to him or the day crew taking it back—nobody copped to smelling it too.
The other option, then, was that it was all in his head. If he had some deep-seated motor oil trauma to revisit, this might make sense. He didn’t, though.
At the end of the aisle, past the food processors and juicers, was a door leading off the sales floor and into a space used for the employee break room, locker rooms, manager’s office, and the employee bathrooms, along with the janitor supply closet. Orrin didn’t usually go there during his shift. There were no emergency lights in back, so in order to see he had to either turn on the bright fluorescents or use the flashlight. He didn’t even go back there for the bathroom; he used the customer one instead, which was nicer anyway, and it had an emergency light. It still meant leaving the floor, and when he did that he always had to do a pass afterwards, through the whole store to make sure nothing happened while he was away. But the bathroom was the sort of thing he couldn’t not visit, so he planned his trips near his scheduled rounds, and tried to keep his fluid intake down.
The visit in back blew up his night vision completely, because he couldn’t figure out which key belonged to the closet, and there were a lot of keys on a big ring. The fourth time he dropped the ring, he gave up trying to juggle both the flashlight and the keys, and just turned on the overhead light.
After dumping the mop, Orrin had a bucket-on-wheels that didn’t seem nearly large enough to handle the growing problem in Young Misses. He was starting to wonder if it wouldn’t have been a better idea just to head over to Storage and grab one of the big plastic bins instead. Sure, it would have ruined a sellable product, but the water was well on its way to ruining the carpet already. It would probably end up being a net gain.
Back on the floor, blinking repeatedly and waiting for his pupils to adjust, he tried very hard not to jump to any conclusions about what he was seeing that just wasn’t there.
That was the problem: there was exactly enough light to mess with your head. If it was total darkness, he could invent monsters in the dark if he wanted, but they were entirely subject to the limits of his imagination. In partial light, though, he was getting information from the world around him, and the animal part of his brain that held the fight-or-flight mechanism was going totally bananas as a consequence.
He could have sworn he saw something move, two aisles to his right. That would have put it at the start of the Sporting Goods section, and he knew for a fact that there were two particularly athletic mannequins in the middle of that extra-wide aisle, posed in mid-run so as to show off clothing to sweat in and sneakers to wear for it. Their peculiar stances—one man mannequin, one woman mannequin—combined with the lights to fool the eye into thinking a whole bunch of bad things that weren’t true. He knew this. But his peripheral vision wasn’t on board. So his heart raced and his breathing picked up, and no matter how often he looked over at Sporting Goods and talked himself out of seeing the movement that wasn’t really movement, the bile kept rising in the back of his throat and the panic set in, until finally he just closed his eyes and counted to ten.
This was a terrifying exercise in its own right, but it worked. The way he figured, if the part of his mind that knew perfectly well he was alone in a locked building—with nothing but inanimate objects and the shadow nightmares of his own imagination—if that part wasn’t driving, the smartest thing to do was also the dumbest: close his eyes and stand still. If the monster his instinct told him had to be out there didn’t grab him during the ten-count, it probably wasn’t there.
Probably.
It worked. It always worked, because of course it did. Because of course, he was alone. The running mannequins were just that. And to make absolutely 100% sure, he walked down to Sporting Goods, dragging the bucket-on-wheels with him, until he was in the aisle.
“Nothing but you guys, see, I told you,” he said, to his own imagination.
The mannequins had no comment, which was great.
He pulled the bucket past them and returned to the main concourse, as his vision got back to normal. The place felt comfortable, then. His heart rate slowed, and except for the fact that he could still hear the ceiling dripping, all was well. He would set the bucket up under the leak, maybe move the clothes racks further away from it in case the whole ceiling tile came down, then go back to his rounds and have a nice ordinary night.
That was when he heard the phone ring.
“Who’s there?” he shouted, without thinking much about it. Whoever was hiding in the store certainly didn’t need him to be announcing where he was while at the same time tipping them off that he knew they were there.
He spun around in place, until he was staring at the butt of the male jogging mannequin in stylish space-age fabric shorts.
Everything was where it was supposed to be. Two rows down, across from the last section of Sporting Goods, in the Home Health aisle, on the endcap, was a humidifier on a shelf. It had a long neck and offered omnidirectional humidification, and it cast a shadow that looked like a lizard head.
It was still there, it wasn’t moving, and the lizard didn’t much care that someone in the room was getting a call.
The phone rang again. It was a cell phone chirp, the generic kind that people get when they first buy a phone, before they change it to a Smashing Pumpkins song or something.
He didn’t know what to think about it ringing a second time. It was perhaps good news because that meant whoever owned the phone didn’t turn it off or answer it, which could mean there was nobody with him at all: just an abandoned phone.
That’s probably all it is, he thought. Someone lost their phone in the store and now they’re calling it to see where it ended up.
He’d find it, answer it, he and the owner would have a nice chat and he’d confess that the guy’s phone scared the balls off of him, everyone would have a nice laugh about it, and he’d leave the phone with the morning folks and that would be that. It’d end up being one of those funny stories he told about his time as a night watchman. The Night the Roof Caved In and the Phone Rang.
Everybody laugh now.
There was a problem with this theory: Mad Maggie’s Shop-O-Rama was probably the most infamous dead zone in town.
Everybody knew this about the place, to the extent that when families made plans to shop at Maggie’s, they either stuck together or set up a meeting place, because they couldn’t call one another in the store, and by this point everyone had evolved to where they had no way to cope with department store shopping without being tethered to one another electronically.
Orrin had heard lots of theories about it: the store was so massive they needed to put a phone relay in the store; the steel beams of the World War Two architecture interfered; the telecoms were punishing the store owners for some reason; there were aliens in the basement.
He didn’t think any of the theories were true, although he had a fondness for the last one, mainly because there was no basement, so it was verifiably false. The way he thought of it, the town probably had a lot of dead zones, it was just that they weren’t as notable because they happened in areas people drove through, or didn’t spend any time in. It was not, probably, that big of a deal.
Except when a phone was ringing in a place where that was historically impossible.
It rang a third time.
“It’s the storm,” he decided.
Saying it aloud made it truer, for some reason. The sound of his own voice demystified the sales floor in general.
The satellite signal is getting redirected by the storm clouds, making it so a call can get through. That was what it was.
He could check it on his own phone, but since there was no cell reception and the screen on the smartphone did to his vision the same thing the flashlight did, only worse, he didn’t have it. Still, that had to be it. And the lucky bastard who lost his phone in the store was going to be the beneficiary of this cosmically rare event.
Just as soon as Orrin found the phone.
He thought it was coming from the far corner. Sound carried really well at night, but the store didn’t have much of an echo to it, so that was probably about right. If he was pinpointing it correctly, that meant the phone was ringing in the Electronics section, and that opened up a whole new set of possibilities.
Like, maybe a display was going haywire—again, because of the storm, perhaps—and one of the sample phones was going off on its own.
That was a pretty good explanation. Orrin liked it.
He reached the edge of the Electronics section in time for the seventh ring, which never came.
“Hello?” he called out. Either the owner of the phone would answer or maybe the phone would. Neither did.
He didn’t go through electronics all that often, even though it was just about the least frightening section of the store: TV’s that weren’t on; phones under glass; video game consoles in lock and key underneath embedded display versions that could be played by passers-by, provided the display version wasn’t broken that day; racks and racks of movies on DVD, just in case there were still people out there who had DVD players and didn’t know how to stream films. None of what was there looked like a human, a lizard, or a hell-beast. No mannequins, and nothing but right angles. A Cubist nightmare, perhaps.
He stepped up to the phone counter. Mad Maggie’s offered the latest versions of most phones and contracts with three different carriers, which was a level of ecumenism that nearly offset the fact that nobody could try out their new phone in the store.
There was a long counter of test phones. These were tethered to the surface with heavy steel cables. Buyers could pick them up and hold them to their ear, but that was about all. They also had a second wire leading to their charge outlet.
He picked one up and flipped it over to confirm what he already thought must be the case: the battery pack was missing. The phones powered up when the store’s main power came on, and only then. It would have taken a miracle for one of these to ring.
“I mean, I guess I could be hearing things,” he said, once again reassured by the sound of his own voice.
“Let’s review our options: one of you powerless phones rang in the middle of a cell signal dead zone, someone left a phone somewhere else around here and it rang in the middle of a cell signal dead zone, or, I’m losing my mind. Thoughts?”
The committee of cell phones had no answer. Neither did the two-dimensional cutout of the pretty cell phone spokeswoman on the wall behind the counter. The mannequin in the Men’s Formal section on the other side of the causeway also offered no opinion.
Except for the part where he was polling the thoughts of nonliving objects, Orrin took the lack of response to be a good sign. Then he wondered for a couple of minutes how he would know if he was starting to go crazy from being alone in this place all the time, and decided he probably wouldn’t, until at least morning, and then decided not to let it bother him before then.
The tremendous crash on the other side of the room made him jump about five feet in the air. It also stopped his heart and turned him into a religious man, for a few seconds, until he realized what had happened: the ceiling in Young Misses just collapsed. The bucket he’d gone through all that trouble to fetch was still resting in the concourse at the edge of Sporting Goods, serving no particular purpose.
At least, he thought, I’m not hearing a phone ring any more.
“What a mess,” Leopold said.
It was two hours after Orrin called the morning shift supervisor, using the “just for emergencies” number taped next to the landline in the office. As it was the first time Orrin had ever classified anything going on in Mad Maggie’s as an emergency, the call got Leopold into work more or less as soon as he was awake enough to operate a car.
Considering Leo lived only three miles away, Orrin assumed the manager’s preparations also involved a shower and a stiff cup of coffee, neither of which fully eliminated the alcohol smell.
“Yeah, I tried to get…” Orrin kicked the side of the janitor bucket, which was still useless, but it was being useless much closer to the broken ceiling now.
“Points for effort, hombre, but that would’a been a teacup under a waterfall, I mean looky that.”
Leopold was a shortish guy who was maybe only a couple of years older than Orrin, but spoke as if he was a fifty year old trying to relate to high school kids in a 1980’s movie, and he dressed as if he was hoping mustaches and bowler hats were going to be coming back in style soon. Orrin was a full foot taller, and rail-thin skinny. Bernie, the elderly register lady who was usually the second or third one in the door after Leo, called them Mutt and Jeff. Orrin didn’t get the reference, but he thought Leo probably did.
They stood there and looked at the carnage for a few more seconds. Leopold was mindful of the hard-and-fast rule that sales floor lights do not come on more than an hour before open, and so he was using a flashlight to assess the damage, which just made it all look worse. Four tiles had come down, there was water and white foam tile debris all over the floor. The local prepubescent girls were going to have to go down the street to Belles & Bills if they wanted to pick up the latest in cheap chemises, for the immediate future.
The rain had subsided, though, so just about the only good thing that could be said about this situation was that there wasn’t also a steady stream of water coming down to destroy more merchandise.
“You know what I am going to have to do?” Leo asked, not apparently expecting an answer from Orrin. “I am going to have to call corporate. I’m sure we have insurance for this sort of thing. Don’t you think?”
“I’m sure.”
Orrin wasn’t sure, but this was a circumstance in which he wouldn’t suffer any for being wrong.
“We’ll have to get everyone in early to clean up, and cordon off the area, and… oh, and it’s a safety hazard. Should we open? Should we even open the store? I don’t know!”
“Call corporate.”
“Yes, right, yes. We’ll need signs. ‘Beach Closed’. Hahaha. Jaws reference, right?”
“Right.” Orrin didn’t know that it was, but Leo always assumed he and Orrin understood each other in a way that they actually didn’t. He sometimes wondered if Leo acted the same way with the other night watchmen, but decided he wasn’t sufficiently invested in Leopold to find out.
In all fairness, interacting with humans wasn’t something Orrin excelled at, whether they were decidedly odd ones or the ostensibly normal ones. This was presuming he himself could distinguish between the groups. Since he imagined he probably fit well in the decidedly odd ones category, he was not the ideal judge of who went where.
It was no coincidence, then, that he took a job requiring little interaction with people. Not that he didn’t sometimes want to have someone to talk to, but the mannequins were okay in that regard, on most nights.
Leo concluded his flashlight review of the damaged region and headed down the concourse, and then to the back and the office. Orrin followed, because now that there was someone else in the room with him, it felt weird being left alone.
A half an hour later, Leo had a plan. It involved getting all on-staff janitor people in early, locating every “CAUTION: WET FLOOR” sign in the building (there were only two) and committing the sin of turning the lights on early. This was to get some photos of the damage, which would then be uploaded to corporate, which would forward it to insurance adjusters and approved repair contractors.
Having the lights up was, as always, surreal. Orrin and Leo walked around the store, looking for signs of other future cave-ins. Now that the roof above the ceiling had been proven suspect, every minor tile discoloration was a possible new disaster.
Orrin gave the Electronics section an especially close review, although he wasn’t looking up. He considered asking if Leopold ever heard a phone ringing in the store, but decided it was a silly question to ask of someone who spent his days surrounded by people on the sales floor. Even if it was a dead zone, the ambient noise of human interaction would be more than enough to hide a ring tone.
“Hey,” he said, deciding to ask a different question instead, “what was this place used for, before?”
“Ahh… statues or something.”
“Yeah, before that.”
“Guns.”
“No, after that. Between.”
“I dunno.”
Leo paused to take a picture of a brown spot directly above the cardboard cutout of the cell phone spokeswoman. The spot was shaped like Wisconsin, and had probably been there forever.
“Why do you ask?” Leo asked. “You getting the jeebies?”
“The what?”
“You know. The willies. The spooks. Are you a couple of days from ending up huddled in the corner near the front, holding your breath until one of us opens the door? Are you heading for a Section 8?”
“No, of course not,” Orrin said, while privately wondering if hearing a phone ring where there couldn’t be one might actually be an indication that precisely this was happening. “I just wondered. I pick up a motor oil kind of smell sometimes.”
“Huh.” Leo shrugged. “Never heard that one. I do remember… maybe. Yeah, something about a fire.”
“There was a fire here?”
“Or near here. It could be something I heard one time. Was it just motor oil, or burning motor oil?”
“Burning, I guess. I don’t know if motor oil smells at all otherwise.”
“A fire. Look it up, could be my imagination.”
“Yeah. I’ll do that.”
Orrin didn’t look it up. As always seemed to be the case, he forgot about it—and everything else he promised himself he’d do—as soon as he left Mad Maggie’s.
He likened the threshold of the store to an airlock. Once he got on the other side of it he was too busy taking off his space suit and being checked for alien parasites and just generally rejoining the world to remember to look up local fires of the past fifty years. He was happy to be home, and to get some sleep.
Orrin got back to the store that night to find almost half of the Young Misses section was gone. The ceiling had been replaced by a green trash bag-quality layer of plastic, the floor was cordoned off with caution tape and orange cones, and the whole scene was surrounded by several space heaters and fans, which were not in use at the time of the store’s closing, but reportedly had been going all day.
This added a bouquet of mildew to the ambiance of the store—undoubtedly discouraging a number of shoppers. The trash bag ceiling was worse. It billowed with the air currents Orrin was not aware existed. This made a crinkly sound—probably not audible when the store was open—which threatened to drive him insane. Or, more insane, he supposed.
Over the course of the evening, he gained a profound appreciation of the sinister quality of the sound of plastic sheeting in the wind. Since it relied on the vagaries of a chaotic force, there was no way to predict when the plastic would go from silent to so loud he was nearly convinced something was trying to escape from the other side of it.
This made him unaccountably edgy, and that wasn’t a good headspace to be in when alone in the store. He was reminded of the first month he worked, when every stray sound was de facto proof of an armed incursion.
Sometime on the other side of Midnight, he finally began to calm down and stop hearing the noise the plastic was making. He could still hear it, but he was able to shove it in a corner, where all the other random sounds the store made also lived. Like the creaking that came from the front doors on certain nights, when the air in the antechamber cooled and the metal contracted. Or the periodic squeak from a plastic wheel here and there, as merchandise racks gradually succumbed to gravitational pull in slightly uneven sections of the floor. Here and there, an improperly stacked product might resettle, and this might cause a loud noise, but Orrin was used to that as well.
The smell of mildew bothered him for a while, too, but by his two A.M. rounds, he’d largely become immune to that, which was how he still managed to notice the motor oil smell had returned.
It was impossible to miss. In the past, it was nothing more than a faint odor that went away quickly. This time, it was profound, if that was a word that could be used to describe a smell. It came on so strong, Orrin nearly gagged at first. Then he held his arm up to his nose and looked around for a source.
He was standing in the Kitchen area. The smell was strongest near the frying pans, but didn’t emanate from any one thing. It was concentrated there, but in a five-foot space in the middle of the aisle.
Nothing was coming in from the ceiling, and there was no discoloration on the floor. The merchandise was unsullied and uninteresting and not covered in burning oil. It was a ghost smell.
If it was closer to the wrecked floor, he might have been able to entertain the idea that the moisture kicked up an older smell underneath, but Kitchen and Young Misses weren’t proximate.
It was, he decided, something he would just have to add to the quirks of the place. At least now he had an idea of a source location. He surrendered to the conclusion that he would not be solving this that evening, and finished the circuit of the store.
A half an hour later, the cell phone rang again.
Orrin was at the desk at the front, his default state when not walking around. He spent most of his desk time playing solitaire under the gentle illumination of the overhead emergency light. The sound was a shock, almost literally: his heart acted like he’d touched a live wire, as all the sublimated fear and dread from the prior evening came back aggressively.
“HELLO?” he shouted.
There were no clouds out. No storm to confuse the sky and bounce a cell phone signal around, so that explanation was plainly wrong.
The phone rang again.
Orrin jumped from behind the desk and started running toward Electronics, which was at the polar opposite end of the store. Between the heavy boots and loose belt holding a large collection of keys on chains and loops, and the fact that he was not terribly athletic by nature, Orrin no doubt looked like a jangly, uncoordinated mess on the verge of doing himself harm, but he wanted to get there fast because someone in this place was screwing with him.
That had to be it. An electronic device of some kind, a tape recorder of a cell phone set to go off at a certain time of night, just to mess with him. Maybe one of the other guards was playing a joke on him. Or Leo. Or some other random daytime person.
“WHO’S HERE?” he shouted after the third ring. His sprint was along the back concourse, which took him by Young Misses and the jogging mannequins, rather than past Kitchen goods and the oil smell. It was probably so he could see straight ahead into the Electronics all the way down the corridor, rather than turn and face it at the last second (as the other path would have him do) but he also didn’t want to smell the oil again, because it bugged him.
He got to the edge of the section before the fourth ring, and stopped. He could hear his breathing—he was panting—and the blood pumping through his heart, and the flapping of the plastic sheeting. Nothing else.
RING.
He jumped backwards, then calmed down enough to zero in on the source a little better, but only a little. It was from the left, where the life-sized cardboard display of the cell phone sales lady stood. He took a few steps in that direction.
“Whoever this is, you’re in a lot of trouble,” he said, raised voice but not shouting.
Whoever it was didn’t answer.
“Not kidding. It would be better if you came out.” When this didn’t do anything, he added, “I have a gun.”
He did have a gun, but not on him. It was sitting in its holster on the desk at the front of the store, because it rested awkwardly when he sat down so he always took it off until his rounds. Even if he did have it on, he barely knew how to use it.
The fifth ring came, and it sounded like it was right behind him, and that was terrifying. He spun around, brandishing nothing because his hands were empty, ready to punch someone or defend himself or just die from some ninja attack. And there was nobody there.
“C’mon,” he said, to himself this time. “What is it, in the ceiling?”
He did a circuit around the area, but there was no cell phone. Yes, there was a display of phones under glass, but they had no power—as he’d previously verified—and aside from the two-dimensional one the cardboard woman was holding up, that was all.
No, not all, he thought.
He was being an idiot. He’d walked past the thing a dozen times and didn’t even fully recognize what he was walking past, but there was a box at the end of the counter, on the floor. It was about three feet tall, had a lid with a lock, and a rectangular slot. The sign above the box read, RECYCLE OLD CELL PHONES HERE.
He stood in front of the box, and waited. It didn’t ring again.
Orrin was relieved by this, although he felt like he probably shouldn’t have been. Someone dropped a phone in there and the phone was still active for some reason, and now a call was coming in on the phone. Sure, the battery should have died by this time, and Mad Maggie’s was no less a dead zone now than it was the night before, but this was an answer anyway, and it was a pretty good one.
It also had a tendency to stop ringing whenever he got too close, and that was the part he thought he should perhaps be wondering about. Although it had only happened twice.
Coincidence, he decided.
That was probably it.
That wasn’t it.
Over the course of the next two weeks, at some time after midnight—always—the phone would ring. It was never at exactly the same time, and never for exactly the same number of rings. If he went near the box, the ringing stopped. Otherwise, it kept going, for sometimes up to an hour.
Orrin really didn’t know what to do. At first he tried asking day shift employees leading questions about the phones in the box, but this didn’t help. The questions included: how often is the box emptied; did any of the phones ever happen to, oh, goodness, let’s say ring; have other night guards commented on… odd noises…? The answers he got were that nobody knew when the box got emptied, of course the phones don’t ring, and no, why do you ask?
Further investigation—done when he should be sleeping, not wandering around the store—led to the discovery that the box had been sitting in electronics for longer than any of the current employees of Mad Maggie’s had been employed there, because none of them knew how to recycle the disposed-of phones, nor had they ever seen it done. They were also pretty sure nobody had a key for it, but it seemed more likely the key existed and whoever had it didn’t know they had it. All Orrin was sure of was that he didn’t have it, but he did have a dozen keys that had no apparent use on the key ring he was handed when he started working there.
At least once a night he tried convincing himself it was all in his head. That he found incipient psychosis preferable to a malfunctioning cell phone was sort of interesting, but that’s all it was. It didn’t make the ringing stop, whether it was real or not.
What he really wanted was to convince someone else to stay in the store with him during his shift, so they could hear it too. But to do that he would have to explain why, and he had a feeling as soon as he explained it he’d be looking for another job. If that person were another employee, management would find out their longest-tenured night watchman had finally made it round that final bend and needed to be rotated out. If they were not an employee—he didn’t know anyone who would do this for him, so this was a pure hypothetical—Orrin would end up fired for allowing a civilian into the store after hours.
This wasn’t the only thing making his job much more difficult of late, just the worst. Whoever was hired to fix the ceiling above Young Misses was apparently deeply inefficient, because the plastic tarp was still there. One night he decided it sounded like someone trying to breathe with a trash bag over his head, and as soon as he made that comparison that was all it ever sounded like.
After a week of repetitive cell phone abuse, he finally decided to get on a computer and research the warehouse more thoroughly. He was hoping for a felicitous discovery that would explain the impossible ringing, whatever that might be. (Aliens, maybe, buried under the cement floor. Not in the nonexistent basement; entombed in the foundation.) He didn’t find it, but he did find out that the building did indeed store vehicles for a time—emergency vehicles, actually, including fire trucks. This was over twenty-five years ago, and it was only for nine months, while the station down the road was torn down and rebuilt due to something unspecified by the historical record. Apparently the firemen even bunked in the building.
That was all he had, though. He figured the motor oil smell he kept picking up was some sort of combination of dry rot in the floor coupled with an old spill from one of the engines that used to be stored there, and the ‘burning’ part he just tacked on himself. This would be slightly easier to believe if he knew what motor oil smelled like when it was burning. He didn’t, and so he had no reason to think that was the exact nature of the odor, yet he remained convinced this was right.
By the eleventh night, he’d had all he could take. He was, as always, at the front of the store, listening to the staccato breathing of the suffocating giant in the middle of the store and sniffing a cinnamon stick he’d started carrying around in his breast pocket to try and scrub the stench of the oil from his nostrils—it wasn’t working—when the phone rang again.
“ENOUGH!” he shouted, jumping to his feet. “WHAT DO YOU WANT, DAMN YOU?”
In something like a real sprint he tore down the main concourse, his nightstick in his hand, not really thinking about anything but making the goddamn phone stop goddamn ringing, goddammit.
“AAAAHHHH!” he shouted, through the worst of the oil smell and around the corner, and of course… of course… the phone stopped just as soon as he got near enough.
“CALL BACK!” he screamed.
He knew there were security cameras in several key locations in the store, and he knew those cameras still recorded activity at night, because the little red lights stayed on. He also knew where the recordings were stored, although he didn’t have direct access to them. This meant his little trip down crazy lane was going to be captured, and someone was going to see it, and he 100% did not care any more.
“I’M RIGHT HERE! COME ON, WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO SAY?”
Motionless, holding his stick, hearing nothing but the rasp of the plastic tarp and his own breathing, he was undeniably completely alone. He was shouting at nothing and nobody.
Then the phone started ringing again.
He lunged forward awkwardly, a disturbed marionette, nearly taking out a display rack of outdated nineties films on his way to the phone counter.
Destroying something in the store was absolutely grounds for immediate termination, so his lack of hesitation in striking the lock on the phone box with his nightstick should have warranted, at minimum, a moment of contemplation, and it did not.
It was a good quality nightstick, made of some sort of carbon alloy, and while the lock was pretty decent too, the hinge holding the loop through which the padlock was threaded was more or less decorative, because it took only three blows to pop it.
Orrin lifted the lid and peered inside.
The ringing hadn’t stopped, but there were a hundred phones to choose from. He grabbed one, flipped it open, verified that it was not the right one, and tossed it on the floor and tried again.
It rang again, and it sounded like maybe it was at the very bottom of the box.
“I’m coming!” he said, trying phones two at a time now, still not getting the right one.
The decision to tip the box onto the floor wasn’t really a conscious one; it was just the next logical step, and then he was ankle deep in discarded electronics, spread out as far as Men’s Fashion, and only then did he find the right phone.
It was an ancient thing, by current standards. It felt like a walkie-talkie. He thought maybe he saw someone using a phone like this in of one of the nineties movies on the rack he nearly toppled.
He held it up and looked for a button to open the line, reminding himself at the same time that this was impossible, this phone was older than half of the employees at Mad Maggie’s, it couldn’t have a charge, or a phone plan. It couldn’t be ringing.
He found the button.
“Hello?”
There was static on the other end.
“Hello?” he repeated. “Who is this?”
“O…” someone said. A woman’s voice. “Orrin.”
“Who is this?” he asked. His mouth was bone dry and his heart rate was trying for a record.
“Orrin,” she repeated.
“WHO IS THIS? HOW DO YOU KNOW MY NAME?”
“You have to help us.”
He screamed, and threw the phone as far as he could. It impacted with the wall above a luggage display, something he didn’t see but heard well enough.
Then it was quiet again.
Finally.
Until another phone started ringing.
It was a different ring, certainly. Another phone, one he’d never heard ring before. He fell to his knees and started checking phones, but he wasn’t going nearly fast enough because then a second phone was going, and a third. And then all of them, all at once, a horrible cacophony of noise. He grabbed one and activated the line.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
“You have to help us,” the woman said.
“How does it end?”
The early afternoon flow of traffic through the boutique coffee shop was gentle but constant. It was warm outside, which got a lot of people moving along Market Street, and a decent number of those people wanted to celebrate the nice day with hot coffee in a portable cardboard cup. True, a number of them wanted iced coffee, but this was a statistically irrelevant percentage.
Oliver was just busy enough to interact briefly with new people when they appeared before him, and too busy to fully acknowledge their existences as individual beings with their own independent realities. They were known only by the names scribbled in marker on their cardboard cups, or if no name was required—if they didn’t require the services of a barista—then by their choice of bean.
He was really confused, then, when Ms. Medium French Roast took the cup he was handing over to her and then asked how it ended.
“What?” he asked, as his mind tried to catch up to the new reality, which was that Minerva was standing in front of him.
“Mad Maggie’s Midnight Madness. How does it end? Great title, by the way. Ivor will love it.”
“Ah, oh. Thanks. I didn’t…” I didn’t think you knew I worked here, Oliver was going to say, but then he would be admitting he did work there. Somehow it felt like if he said that, she would suddenly realize it. Like before that moment she might have thought he was a customer who’d jumped over the counter to assist in the pouring and distributing of caffeinated beverages. And that—again, as a customer—it just so happened he was wearing the same color Polo shirt as everyone else behind the counter.
“I didn’t write the ending yet,” he said.
“I know,” she said, flashing smile #12, which was the one where only one side of her mouth curled, in time with her eyes, which rolled upward, a display of exasperation that was only taken in jest, thanks to that smile. “I mean, how is it going to end?”
He was a little confused by the question.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I won’t know until I write it.”
She laughed.
“That’s wild, Ollie. Well finish it, I wanna know.”
Adding to his confusion was that it didn’t really even occur to him that she would have read the story already, or necessarily at all. After the last meeting, Wilson sent an email blast to the woo mailing list suggesting a process change: pieces to be discussed would have to be submitted in advance of the meeting so everyone could read it ahead of time. It was pretty obvious that this imperative sprang from the fact that the prior week, Oliver brought in an overlong epic fantasy. Minerva wasn’t a member of TAWU, though, so he had no reason to think she would have read a copy. Maybe she was more intrinsic to Wilson’s process than he let on.
A significant logjam had developed behind her in line, due to this incredibly brief, non-business-related exchange. It seemed as if nobody was all that put off by the extra delay. Possibly, if one is willing to wait five to ten minutes for four ounces of espresso, one is already temperamentally prepared for an ex tempore exchange of this magnitude. Oliver still felt the pressure to keep things moving, even if it was internally applied.
“Listen, I have to—”
“Oh, yeah, thanks for the coffee.” She raised the cup as a salute, and turned to walk off. He forced himself to turn away and address the next customer’s needs, when she returned.
“Almost forgot!” Minerva said. “Pallas, tomorrow night, are you in?”
“The… what?”
“Pallas! Have you been?”
His brain couldn’t make sense of the words.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“The club, the club I was telling you about. Tomorrow night?”
“Um… sure, I think. Maybe.”
“Catch me later, we’ll work it out.”
“Later.”
“At the meeting, man. See you then?”
“Yeah, yeah. Yeah.”
“Cool. Oh, and the story is great. Wilson thinks so too.”
He took the next customer’s order, and card, feeling numb and distracted, and unable to keep himself from watching Minnie leave the shop. The place—it was called the Jittery Canary, and featured a drawing of an over-caffeinated bird on all the signage—was below street level, with a patio space that was open on good days. When she left, Oliver could watch her heading past the tables and up the brick staircase to the street.
Before she did so, she stopped to have a conversation with an extremely large man, which was a little interesting only because Ollie couldn’t imagine anything she and this big hairy guy could have in common that would warrant a verbal exchange.
But, whatever. He ran the card in his hand to charge Mr. Italian Roast for his drink, checked the clock, and thought about how he was going to tell Minnie he couldn’t go to this palace place.
If Wilson liked the new story, he certainly took the long way around in saying so.
“Horror, Oliver? Honestly.” This was his first note.
“I’m not really sure what to do with that,” Ollie admitted.
Sometime between the prior week and this one, he’d arrived at the conclusion that he should be challenging his mentor’s criticisms at least a little bit. He told himself it was because Wilson was allowed to be wrong about these things—that not everything he had to say came from on high.
“Well, I don’t know. It’s so… base. Crude. Cheap.”
“Cheap?”
“Easy.”
“It wasn’t easy,” Oliver said.
“No, that isn’t what I mean. Writing is hard, we all understand that. You sat down and put together a bunch of words that when strung together made meaningful sentences that stacked up into paragraphs, and that’s great. You can hand those paragraphs over to anybody and say, here, read this, and assuming they can read, they’ll receive the information behind all those words you’ve assembled in more or less the way you wanted them to. What I’m saying is that the information you’ve chosen to convey with this gift is something other than an exploration into the human soul. You decided to communicate with their animal brain instead. You decided to try and scare them, with—I think—a ghost story. Is it a ghost story? We never get to find out.”
“It isn’t finished yet.”
“Yes, but do you imagine a ghost will eventually turn up, should you choose to finish this?”
“Yeah, I guess. I figured I’d work it out as I wrote.” Ollie had an idea of the ending, certainly, and it was unquestionably a ghost story, but it felt wrong to talk about that before it was done. “So are you saying being frightened isn’t a part of the human condition?”
“No, no, I’m saying fear is a crude component. I’m saying writing has the power to enlighten and illuminate and address, and I want you to think about aspiring for that.”
“What if I just aspire to scare the crap out of someone?”
This elicited a gentle laugh from the otherwise dead-silent members of TAWU, which also evidently woke them from their slumber.
“I have to tell you,” Jennifer said, “It… wasn’t all that scary.”
“There was dread,” Ivor said. “And it has a great title.”
Minerva, from the edge of the kitchen, covered up a laugh.
“Dread’s not bad,” Tandy said. “I mean, it’s good stuff, Ollie.”
“Just not scary,” Oliver said.
“Not… really.”
“I haven’t finished it yet. I was going to build up to a big scare.”
“Well, I thought it was scary enough,” Bibi said. “My phone rang while I was reading it, Ollie, and I jumped three feet.”
“That’s a good question, though,” Wilson said. “Is scary something universal? That’s a real challenge, right? The old gothic horror stories that used to frighten us seem pretty tame now. Weeping statues, and creaking walls in old castles just don’t do anything for us now, but maybe a moving mannequin and a haunted department store is what’s replaced all that. But you’re never going to write something that is going to scare both Bibi and Jennifer.”
“I think it’s possible,” Oliver said.
“I’m not saying what is or isn’t possible, I’m addressing the challenges of the genre.”
“But you could say that about anything,” Tandy said. “It could be a romance someone doesn’t find romantic, or a thriller people don’t think are thrilling. The best you can expect is to get the right reaction from most readers.”
“I think just about everyone can agree that Shakespeare is exactly as brilliant as we all say he is,” Wilson said.
“Shakespeare,” Ollie repeated.
“Or, Poe. Poe is as effective now as he was a hundred years ago. We might not find his stories as disturbing as we used to, but the impact is there.”
“So you’re saying, you expect me to be as good as Shakespeare and Poe?”
“No, Oliver, I expect you to expect that from yourself. And I don’t think you’re doing that. Do you mean to finish this story?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Give it a try. I think it would be good for you to have something finished. I’m also curious to see if you can follow through on the ending.”
“How do you mean?”
“Make it scary, Oliver. Something that gives Jennifer nightmares.”
Oliver didn’t stick around. Wilson had no other notes to give, and unlike just about every other time he’d attended, TAWU had nothing else to give him, collectively. He imagined if Wilson had opened up the floor there would be more feedback to be heard, but once the group decided any formal evaluation had to wait until there was an ending, whatever else there was to be said was put aside.
It wasn’t until he’d already left the apartment and reached the street that he remembered he was supposed to be telling Minerva about his unavailability regarding any plans to go someplace. This was perhaps just as well. If she knew where he worked she had to know he wasn’t making a lot of money—unless she assumed he owned the shop or something—and therefore likely knew he couldn’t go someplace fancy on his own dime.
Or not. Oliver had known a few wealthy people in his life, and they generally showed a lack of comprehension regarding what poor really meant. She could be one of those. She could also see him as a charity case or something. He was pretty sure that would be worse than being confused with someone who could afford to go clubbing.
Either way, he wasn’t going, and he hoped she would stop asking him.
There were certain parts of the city where the rent per month and the available square footage intersected at a point allowable for someone of limited means. Oliver lived in such a space, on the sixth floor of an apartment complex, alone. It met all of his needs, which was to say that he wanted to be alone most of the time and he wanted to live in the city all of the time, and so he surrendered certain basic comforts such as an actual kitchen.
It was precisely enough space for a single bed, a hot plate, a tiny refrigerator, a shower, and a toilet. The bathroom had a door for privacy, but he found that if he wanted the door to open and close he didn’t have enough room for the refrigerator, so he took the door off the hinges and stored it in the basement. (Ironically, the basement storage for the unit was larger, per square foot, than the apartment itself.) In the unlikely event he ever brought a girl over, and that girl elected to spend the night, he would have to make some hard choices about that bathroom just because, generally speaking, I can watch you pee from the bed is not the sort of thing most women would find enticing. Probably.
It took about forty-five minutes to get home by subway from Wilson’s: one train line into the center of town, and a second one out of that center and in a slightly different direction. Oliver was nearly convinced the two locations were, geographically, a lot closer than the subway made them feel, but had yet to examine a map of the city to determine how close, and whether walking was a better idea.
On the way, he saw a couple of posters he’d never noticed before, for a place he never heard of.
M PALLAS, they read. The vertical portion of the letters doubled as ionic columns holding up a roof, underneath which, men and women in bright colors were dancing. A disco ball dangled above them.
There was fine print, no doubt featuring locational details and what-not, but while this sort of place likely appealed to a certain sub-group of people, Oliver was definitively not a member of that sub-group. He also didn’t require any directions, even if he was going, because it was an odd but well-known detail of the city that all the big nightclubs in town were located on the same strip of road. If M Pallas was as big a deal as it was being made out to be in the subway poster, it was surely located on that strip.
It was a while before he realized this was probably the place Minerva had been talking about.
The apartment building had an elevator everyone was afraid to use. It creaked and bucked like it was riding the back of something old and powerful that didn’t want it on its back. It had a habit of stopping just below where it was supposed to, such that riders had to step up to get off. At least half of the building’s inhabitants also appeared to think the elevator was haunted, although the entire building—which was well over a hundred years old already, and which could be felt to move in heavy winds—lent itself to the sense that it was inhabited by spirits.
Oliver took the stairs, which was an adventure all its own. The handrail on the third floor landing was almost completely detached, every eighth or ninth step sagged to an alarming extent, and the hallway lighting was only hypothetical in several places. But he hardly even noticed these things any more.
The light on the sixth floor had a habit of flickering. He mostly ignored this too, but it was a little harder to sometimes, because the light bled into his apartment from under the door. When he turned out all the other lights, sometimes the periodic blinking created a kind of strobe effect that was hard to sleep through.
The flickering was particularly bad on this occasion, doubly annoying because it was taking him forever to select the right key to get into his own door. It didn’t help that he had a keyring that included all of the ways to lock and unlock things in the Jittery Canary.
As he stood there, fumbling with keys, he thought he saw someone at the far end of the hallway. It was a peripheral vision sort of thing, and it was probably just a shadow, but for a half-second he thought it was a young girl, just standing there, staring at him. With that thought came the kind of fear that manifested as acid reflux and some kind of vertiginous panic, until he looked at the space and found it empty. No little girl ghost here, just his imagination messing with him.
That’s the feeling, he thought. That’s what Wilson wants me to create.
The question was, how?
He got the key right, and let himself in, and ten minutes later he’d settled down on the bed with his laptop in hand with the last words of Mad Maggie’s Midnight Madness staring at him.
He held his fingers over the keys, and waited for the words to come. They did, but they didn’t belong to this story. They went elsewhere, for another letter and the newest assignment.
Wilson’s latest letter prompt was A, and Oliver had been trying to suppress where his mind went with that, but he just couldn’t do it.
A is for alien.