13 Tales To Give You Night Terrors (10 page)

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
licking 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

MARY
heard from her brother roughly once every six months. When
Theo did get in touch, it was to tell her that he was going out of
the country so could she please not call, or that he had broken up
with his girlfriend so could she please not ask about her, or that
he had got a new job and would be very busy so could she please not
expect him to call. It was a situation that she was comfortable
with.

Theo was six years her senior and
she’d never really known him that well. When their parents died,
they shared some awkward moments at the funeral and wake she’d
organised, and then he’d gone home without their cousins noticing
he had even been there. As far as she was concerned, a card on his
birthday and at Christmas was the sum total of her sibling
duties.

So when she opened her laptop and saw
an email from him marked urgent on a cold October morning, she took
a moment, leaned back in her chair, took a sip of coffee and
thought for a moment before she opened it. What could be urgent in
Theo’s world? Money? Some kind of illness? Maybe something had
happened to one of his friends. She assumed he had to have
some.

STUCK IN NEW YORK.
HURRICANE. NEED YOU TO GO TO THE HOUSE AND CHECK SOMETHING.
INSTRUCTIONS IN FLOWER POT BY THE DOOR.

She read the email twice and had a
look at the news. Hurricane Sandy had hit the East Coast and
travellers were being advised that it could be at least three days
before planes could take off again. The message had been sent a few
minutes ago, so she fired off a response asking if he was OK, and
if there were any more details he wanted to share. Seconds later,
another urgent-marked email arrived.

JUST GO, PLEASE.
URGENT.

The prospect of a drive out of London
and into Kent wasn’t exactly what Mary wanted to do with her
Sunday. However, she wasn’t able to kid herself that it wouldn’t
happen. She knew that it was curiosity, rather than any sense of
obligation, that got her out of the flat and into the
car.

The roads were relatively clear; no
one else was daft enough to be driving on a snowy Sunday winter
morning. The stop and start of London traffic gave way to the dull
monotony of the motorway, and it wasn’t long before Mary had to
force herself to start paying attention to turn-offs and
increasingly tiny road signs. Theo’s house was a little way from
the centre of a small village, and stood alone just off to the side
of a lane lined with large overhanging trees. She’d seen it briefly
when she’d helped him move in a few years previously (her idea, not
his), and it was bigger than she had remembered. Bigger than he
needed, she assumed, but then reminded herself that she had no idea
what he was getting up to in there.

Mary parked her car in front of the
house and crunched over the gravel to the blue front door. Sure
enough, there was a cracked flowerpot, filled with soil and nothing
else. She had a moment of confusion when she bent down, carefully
lifted the pot, and saw nothing. Then she remembered that he hadn’t
said under. He’d said in. She dug her fingers into the cold, damp
soil and pulled out two small clear plastic bags. One contained the
front door key. The other contained a note.

She was surprised when she opened the
door and didn’t hear the insistent beeping of a burglar alarm.
Presumably no one came to bother Theo out here. She took off her
shoes and took the opportunity to have a quick look around the
downstairs area. It was slightly messy, but not shockingly so.
She’d always imagined Theo sitting under a layer of dust, but that
wasn’t the case. Natural light streamed in through the large
windows, but heavy blue curtains made it clear that Theo could sit
in darkness if he wanted to. The surfaces looked like they’d been
cleaned recently. She was impressed. She went through to the
kitchen, found a glass and ran the tap while she opened the
bag.