The Mall Page 5

  ‘Shouldn’t you buy her a drink first?’ I say.

  ‘Nah,’ he fires back. ‘She’s a good Christian girl.’

  Before I can stop myself, I’m giggling, and after a second or two, Dan joins in. I try to control the laughter, but it seems to be erupting from deep inside me, and tears are now streaming down my cheeks.

  Finally I manage to get myself under control. I take a deep breath, propel my body upwards and swing my legs over the pile. I slide down, narrowly avoiding being blinded by a curled finger.

  My brief shriek escapes before I can stop it.

  ‘What is it?’ Dan calls, twisting his body and sliding down feet-first.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  ‘Fuck! Ugh!’

  This is seriously sick. There are a couple of mannequins propped up against the wall next to the pile, but these aren’t as innocently naked as the others. One of them is strapped to a wheelchair-like contraption, which has toppled over onto its side. Its handles are wrapped in barbed wire, and it’s only when I squeeze past it that I realise that the doll strapped into it has no mouth, just a shiny blank nothingness. The other one is partially hidden in the shadows, but they’re not deep enough to conceal the chain looping around its neck, the rusted handcuffs around its wrists, or the fact that its eyes have been gouged out, leaving gaping holes.

  My phone beeps, and I scramble in my pocket.

  ‘You got a signal?’ he says hopefully.

  I check my LCD screen, but the reception bars are still flat.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Just a message.’

  ‘So if there’s no reception, how did you receive it?’

  ‘How the fuck would I know?’

  I click through and read it.

  What the fuck? I pass my phone to him. He scans the message and then his own phone beeps. He pulls out his phone and stares at the screen, his eyes wide.

  ‘Well?’ I say.

  He hands me his phone.

 

  ‘Huh?’

  There’s the sound of cracking plastic, and I glance behind me. The doll pile is shifting; the bodies on the top starting to roll forwards as if someone (something?) on the other side is trying to scramble upwards.

  ‘Go!’ Dan screams in my ear, shoving me forward so hard that I almost trip over my feet.

  Before I’m really aware of what I’m doing, I’m sprinting towards the exit sign, vaguely aware that Dan is shrieking, ‘Nononononono!’ behind me. I slam my shoulder into the door, but it’s too heavy to budge. Dan throws his body into mine and his added weight provides enough momentum for us to slip through. I have to grab onto a rusty banister to stop myself from tumbling down the steep stairwell that stretches into the gloom in front of us. The door slams behind us, and both of us descend, taking the stairs two at a time.

  We only start to falter as the light gradually fades. The stairwell bends to the right and leads down into inky darkness. Grasping the banister as tightly as I can, I start edging down the stairs, one at a time. They’re getting narrower and steeper as we go, and several feel crumbly and shift beneath my feet. Both of us are breathing so heavily that it’s impossible to tell if anything’s following us or not, but we haven’t heard the door banging again, which has to be a good sign.

  The light has now faded completely and I wait for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. They don’t. The darkness around us is impenetrable.

  ‘I really don’t like this,’ Dan says.

  I save my breath and don’t bother answering him. I creep further forward, now clutching the banister with both hands and moving down sideways like a crab. The air feels colder the deeper we get, and reeks of urine and something else – a smoky, familiar odour.

  Then I hear something echoing towards us through the walls.

  I’m almost sure it’s the sound of voices.

  I listen again, but this time there’s nothing but a faint mechanical whirring.

  ‘Come on,’ I say to him. ‘There’s someone down here.’ But how much further can we descend? There’s not much chance of us exiting into a street somewhere, we’re way too low for that. Christ. Would the kid have come this way? We’ve been choosing our direction almost at random.

  I increase my pace slightly, but then my foot hits empty air, and I have to cling to the banister to stop myself from plummeting forwards.

  ‘Dan! Stop!’ He bumps into me, and I struggle to regain my balance. ‘Just wait, you fuckwit!’

  ‘What’s going on?’ he whispers.

  ‘We’ve come to the end of the steps. There’s nothing in front of me.’

  ‘Huh? How come? It’s a concrete stairway.’

  ‘I don’t know! I’m just telling you how it is.’

  Holding onto the edge of the banister I drop my leg down as far as I can and swing it around experimentally. Nothing.

  ‘Shit. Can you see the floor from there?’ he says.

  ‘Of course not. Hand me your phone.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘So I can use the light. Mine’s useless.’

  His clothes rustle as he fumbles around, and then I feel the phone pressing into my palm. I shine the screen towards the darkness below me, but it’s way too dense for the light to have any effect other than to illuminate the edge of the steps.

  ‘Keep as quiet as you can.’ I drop the knife down and hear it clank onto a solid surface less than a second later. ‘It’s not too far. Wait for me to get clear before you drop.’

  I sit on the last step and let my legs dangle over the edge. Counting to three, I jump forward into the gloom, praying that I won’t impale myself on anything sharp or break a limb. But I land on both feet, stumbling forward with the momentum. My shoe knocks against something that skids away with a metallic clatter. Must be the knife. I reach down and feel across the floor’s dusty, rough surface. My fingers close over the handle and something skitters over my hand. Something with too many legs.

  ‘Ugh!’

  Dan lands heavily behind me. ‘What?’

  ‘Christ! I don’t know. Probably a spider or something.’

  ‘Ugh! I hate spiders.’

  ‘Look, shine your cellphone around again.’

  He sighs as if I’m asking him to do something unreasonable, but finally does as he’s told. He flinches and knocks against me as several pairs of pinprick eyes glow back at us half a metre from where we’re standing. The light snaps off.

  ‘Relax, Dan. Just rats.’

  ‘I hate rats!’

  ‘Listen.’ True enough there’s the sound of scuttling feet on concrete and something brushes over my shoe. ‘See? There had to be some somewhere.’

  ‘What now?’ he says.

  ‘I’m going to start moving forward.’ I reach across to my right and my fingers graze a brick wall. ‘Give me your hand.’ His palm feels clammy and hot and I hold it as loosely as I can as we shuffle forward, using the wall as a guide. It starts to curve to the left, and then, bit by bit, I start to make out the details of our surroundings. It’s clear that we’re in a low-ceilinged tunnel, and the more it curves, the lighter it becomes.

  ‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ Dan says, burping out a giggle.

  I drop his hand and start jogging towards the exit, ignoring the stitch in my side and the fact that my lungs feel like they’ve been napalmed. Dan shuffles up behind me.

  It’s only a matter of metres before we reach the end of it.

  ‘Oh God,’ Dan says as we both stare out at the scene in front of us. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

  We’ve ended up in a vast area the size of an airplane hangar. The soot-caked brick walls instantly remind me of old disused London Underground sta
tions – although there’s no sign of a train. The ceiling is scored with ancient fluorescent lights, mostly broken or dim.

  ‘Hello?’ I call out. ‘Hello?’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dan hisses. ‘We don’t know what kind of people are down here.’

  ‘At least we know there are people here,’ I say, pointing towards the fires flickering in the dented oil drums around us. The floor is covered with debris, old bundles of rags, cardboard boxes and the occasional blackened mannequin and overturned shopping trolley. A couple of bloated, albino rats totter sluggishly away to our right and disappear behind a rusted structure that might once have been a car. Although the ceiling is high and a faint cool breeze seems to be wafting in from somewhere, the stench of piss is thick in the air.

  Dan stares up at the ceiling. ‘I think I know where we are,’ he says. But he’s not looking where he’s going. He stumbles over one of the rag bundles and, before I can react, a scabby, filthy hand darts out from its depths and clasps his ankle.

  chapter 6

  DANIEL

  Surely this isn’t real. You can’t feel this way for so long and still be living. It can’t be real. It’s a dream. I’ll wake up.

  Wake up. Please wake up.

  Once again I’m cowering in a dark place, in fear for my life. Peering over the incomplete counter I’ve ducked behind, I make out a half-finished parking garage, rusted girders sticking out of concrete columns, warped and battered scaffolding jacks holding up the ceiling. A wide sweeping arc of shopfronts funnelling into a food court. I’m holed up in what would have been a restaurant with a romantic view over the parking lot.

  Rhoda scoots next to me. For about ten seconds, I’d forgotten about her. It was a relief. I don’t want to be doing this with her. I want her out of my nightmare. I want to go home. But she’s trailing me like a rabid dog. As long as she’s here it’s impossible to fool myself.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing running like that?’ she pants.

  ‘They were going to get me.’

  ‘Get you?’ she snorts. ‘I don’t think a posse of blind hobos is likely to “get” you.’

  ‘What? They’re not bli—’

  But they are. The two men anyway. One of them yells out in our direction, but not exactly at us. His words are incomprehensible. I can feel his anger, though. A recognisable rage, in some bizarre way more frightening than the terror of being chased by that screaming elephant thing.

  The trio of rag-people mill around at the kerb of the parking lot, grumbling. They have a grey, mouldy sheen over their skin, like potatoes forgotten in the cupboard under the sink. The rags that used to be their clothes have the same coating, so when they move, they look like parts of the concrete walls and floors shifting in chaotic patterns. They have grey eyes, too, mole-eyes atrophying in the barely lit cavern. They must have lived here for years.

  After all this running, I don’t know if I’m relieved or depressed or terrified to know that we’re still in Highgate bloody Mall. We must have been running around in circles for hours. A few years ago there was talk about opening a new wing of the shopping centre. Working at the bookshop, we heard the subterranean thumping of jackhammers and mallets for a couple of months, then the financial crisis hit and everything went quiet. Talk of the new wing just petered out as if it had never really happened.

  Here we are. The new wing. I’m amazed they got this far and then just left it. But what’s weird is that this place should only be one level underground. We’re way lower than that. There’s no hint of sunlight, or moonlight, or anything outside. I have no idea what time it is. My watch is broken and the cellphone seems to be fucked. Currently its time reads: <27:79>.

  ‘Come on,’ Rhoda says.

  I hesitate.

  ‘They’re not doing anything, Dan,’ she says. ‘They’re staying where they are.’

  ‘What if they try and grab us again?’

  ‘They got a fright, that’s all. You stood on one of them.’

  I feel like a complete fucking moron. Middle-class white boy runs away from poor people. I follow her into the food court from where we’ll have a better lookout. The tables and chairs bolted into the centre of the food court, never used by diners, are dusty and slashed in some places with dark stains, a sticky substance long-since dried. We sit down at a table facing the parking lot. Twenty metres away, the three grey people stand at the kerb, discussing us in low tones.

  ‘Now what?’ I say, out of habit.

  ‘Jesus!’ Rhoda pokes her dirty finger at my face. ‘Can’t you make a decision for yourself? Just once?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I say wearily. I didn’t really expect an answer. This is my dream. I have to decide what to do next. ‘You dragged me down here,’ I remind her. ‘I’ve got nothing to do with any of this.’

  ‘You’re supposed to know where we’re going.’

  I get up and stalk back into the restaurant. I need to piss, and right now if I have a choice between sitting next to that putrid freak and a hand-to-hand battle with the fucking elephant thing with my dick hanging out, I’ll choose the latter.

  When I get back, the table’s empty. Rhoda’s at the edge of the parking garage, her dirty clothes blending in with the bums’. I suppose I don’t look any better. She’s standing about two metres away from them and I can’t make out what’s going on. I hear raised voices but I don’t know whose. I almost follow the impulse to go and help her out, but I think twice. She’s probably the sort of feminist who objects to chivalry, and I’m not going to risk being embarrassed or sworn at or smacked by her again. She’s made her own fucking bed.

  The middle figure of the three comes forward, raising herself taller than the men, who stand around staring at nothing. She’s just as grey and dusty as they are, but her clothes are not quite as ragged; she’s fashioned herself some sort of robe and a headcloth.

  She takes a step up onto the kerb and Rhoda shifts a couple of steps backwards. The grey woman swoops along to the table where I’m sitting. I try to stand up, catch my foot on the leg of the table and sprawl backwards, knocking the back of my head on concrete. I lie there trying to get up but my foot is still caught as she comes to stand right over me.

  ‘What do you want here?’ she says in a ravaged croak.

  ‘I, I. Uh, she…’ I try to point out Rhoda, who is standing a little way back from us.

  ‘Why are you here?’ the woman insists, letting out a barking fit of lung-scouring coughing. A gob of phlegm spatters just past my head, and I crick my neck trying to avoid it.

  Finally I pick myself up off the floor, rubbing my throbbing head. It’s so fucking sore I want to cry or scream or both.

  ‘We’re looking for a kid,’ says Rhoda. ‘A small boy who came down here. He—’

  ‘There are no children here. Get out. It will follow you.’ The woman raises her voice, and I can hear the fear around its edges, underneath the wetness.

  ‘Can you help us?’ Rhoda presses. ‘We can help you.’ She disgorges her pockets onto the table: a few coins, keys, tissues, two half-smoked cigarettes, her cellphone. She doesn’t empty her jacket pockets, where I know she keeps the other cigarettes and her stash.

  ‘You must get away,’ the grey woman repeats, her eyes darting between the far side of the food court and the booty on the table.

  ‘We’ll leave you alone as soon as you tell us where the kid is,’ says Rhoda.

  The grey woman looks at the pockets of my jeans. The outlines of my phone, my wallet and my keys bulge out blatantly.

  ‘Come on,’ hisses Rhoda.

  ‘Fuck, I need this stuff,’ I complain as I dump everything on the table.

  ‘For this, food.’ She picks up Rhoda’s phone. The woman rifles her grimy fingers through the wallet Mom gave me for my birthday. I’ve only got fifty bucks and a few coins. She takes it all, leaving a dusty smear in its place.

  ‘We don’t want food,’ Rhoda says. ‘Just tell us about the kid and we’ll be on our way.’


  The woman ignores her and walks back towards two braziers across the lot, trailed by the men. We just stand there, Rhoda cursing under her breath.

  ‘Hey,’ I say, too late to make any difference, ‘that’s my stuff.’

  ‘You want food?’ the woman calls back at us. ‘Something fresh today.’ She lets out a dry cackle that sounds as if it hasn’t been exercised for centuries. The men chuckle to themselves, their laughter ricocheting hollowly through the silent space.

  ‘So. You want food?’ Rhoda says to me, doing a pretty good impression of the old hag.

  My stomach grumbles. I’m fucking starving. I wonder if she’s got any chips. I’m really hungry for chips.

  ‘I’d think there’s more important things to worry about tonight, but come on,’ she shrugs.

  We follow.

  The woman leads us into a stinking alcove, walls scuffed with person-filth up to waist height, flattened cardboard boxes and plastic sheeting layered into a nest. The men feel their way to the fire, shuffling with tiny steps as if it’s pitch dark. The grey woman digs behind a wall of cardboard for a plastic bag, barks a phlegmy series of coughs into her hand then rummages in the bag.

  I hope to God that the seeping wax-wrapped package she pulls out isn’t the meal we’ve just bought. But no gods are listening: it is. In addition, she finds a bottle of water and an unwrapped half-loaf of white bread, which she wipes on her top before handing it to us.

  ‘Eat there,’ she says, indicating the tables at the food court where we spoke. ‘Then you go.’

  ‘There’s no way I’m eating—’ I start, but Rhoda nudges me.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Rhoda. I thought at least she’d argue.

  We walk back across the parking lot to our table.

  ‘This shit is not a meal. Come on. You’re prepared to fight about everything else. Why couldn’t you…’ But I know I’m wasting my breath.