A chime overhead was followed by an annoyed voice: “Attention, customers, the store is closing in five minutes. The store is closing in five minutes.” Tyler heard the half-warning, half-reprimand, but he weighed it against the large pile of jeans he had yet to try on, and decided to ignore it. He had never found such promising and aesthetically pleasing bargains, and it would be a shame to leave them here. Plus, they have to wait for everyone to leave, right?
While he was undoing the clasp on his fourth pair of jeans (which fit him perfectly! Success!), the lights dimmed and there was a metallic grating sound from somewhere in the distance. Maybe his comforting thought was wrong. Maybe the bitch running the counter really was that stiff, just didn’t care. He ran from the dressing rooms, clumsily trying to latch his belt at the same time, and was met only with the security lighting, pouring down in isolated spires over the faceless mannequins littering the store, the gargoyles of the fashion age.
The registers were all off. The metal sound must have been the iron gates now in place across the store entrance and front windows. The only sound now was the steady hum of the air handlers… actually, the humming had just cut out. Tyler could only imagine that the cheapskates running the store had decided to cut the power at night to conserve power. Which sucked for him, because now he was amidst dead silence in a sea of cotton and polyester.
Tyler’s first instinct was to yell for someone to open the store, a guard or something had to be patrolling the mall. He walked up to the gates, and to his dismay, found that there was nothing but complete blackness on the other side of the chain links. “Hey! Hey, is anyone out there?” he yelled, at first a bit cautiously, then with growing vigor. It wasn’t working. In fact, it seemed like the more he yelled, the less… the less he could stand to yell again. What was going on? He tried to put his arm through a hole in the gate, and his hand fell upon something warm and solid. The shape wasn’t describable. It felt like a tree that was full of hot water. But it was so black beyond the gate that he couldn’t tell.
The shape writhed and slid past his hand. It was alive? Or at least it was moving? What the hell was this? He pulled back his arm as fast as he could. He couldn’t see out there, but something inside him told him that whatever was out there… could see him.
There was a crash in the back of the store. Tyler again recoiled, this time back into the fence, then jumped again, remembering what his hand had just lit upon out there. His mind was racing with thoughts? A joke? Some sick joke? Was that what this was? Shouldn’t my eyes be adjusted by now? Why is my heart racing so fast? Why can’t I catch my breath…
The thought hit him like a brick. The air handlers. Somehow his breathable air was being cut out. He was nervously sucking in all of the last of his breathable air. But how? This place is huge.. unless someone was purposely trying to pump out the air… or unless something very big was gulping it in…. no, that’s stupid. That’s stupid.
He was pacing in the front of the store, too scared to try the gate again, too scared to venture to the back door of the store. He reached for his cell… Shit, he realized. The pants he had worn in to the store are still in the dressing rooms. No way… He had to do it. If he wanted to get out… He was starting to get dizzy. All of the mannequins were watching him, like some sinister hand had come from the darkness and pushed their eye-less faces down to observe his fear.
The crashing in the back of the store was louder now. He saw some rustling among the shirts displayed along the side walls. The rustling was coming to the front of the store. Something was crawling under the clothes. Something was coming toward him. He wished he wasn’t breathing so damn loud, he wished his legs didn’t feel like lead. He needed to think clearly. He needed to think at all. Move, he thought. Move…. “Move!” He yelled to himself, and he ran to the opposite wall of the store.
He began making his way along the far wall back to the dressing rooms. He was going to reach that phone and call whoever he could to make this better. Who would he call? Who did he know? What the hell? He thought. His mind was muddy water. Swirling between his ears. He wasn’t seeing properly now. The air was becoming intoxicatingly weak. He stumbled into one of the accessory racks and a bunch of studded belts fell to the floor, their clattering filling his head like it was the only sound in the world. He had to keep going. He had to keep running.
He emerged from the retail area and fell onto the floor of the changing room hallway. The cold tiles greeted his skin like some farce of a bed, tempting him to rest there forever as his breath continued to weaken. He was crawling now, he was opening the door to his dressing room. He was rooting through the pockets of any clothes he could find. He was pulling a cell phone from the folds. He was staring at its illuminated screen. He was staring at a text message that had just arrived. The words were all in double… no, his vision was all in double… fading. His mind was interpreting it far too slow. As he fell unconscious and the crashing met him and ripped through him, the phone slid across the tile and its screen was reflected on the marble wall… it read, “Play time is over.” The store become one avalanche of clothes, and flooring, and counters, and mannequins. All coming to a stop in a stack on some plane strewn with the litter of so many more stores, of pools, of cars, of homes. An enormous arm lifted up a handful of figurines from one of the stacks, up until it was even with a gleaming pair of young eyes and a crooked smile half-filled with teeth. “Play time is over,” it crooned. And it let go off all of the plastic bodies, of all of the lifeless forms, like a crane machine at the arcade, and they fell surely back into the earth, some breaking as they hit, one twisted figure, a boy in new clothes with a look of horror painted across his visage, atop them all.
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