PANIC (7 page)

They can see the ugly cracks in the pavement from here, all grown up and filled in with weedy grass and wildflowers. Vines curl around the links of the fence. Nature insists itself but the colossal building and its plaza are here to stay. For sure no one has tended to this place in years but it stands like it belongs.

Danny had his flip camera out, panning it slowly along the fence. He tried to make the first shot a good one, since he could only capture about an hour of footage total. He narrated along with the camera movement for his audience.

“So we found a way into Raceway Galeria, the ghost mall, the place where nobody’s ever been inside. My name is Danny. I’m not gonna show you my face or tell you my last name ‘cause I don’t want to get busted for trespassing.”

Ben smiled at this. Stupid Danny, he thought. The crappy little mic in the camera could barely pick his voice up as it is, nevermind over the wind rushing through the trees.

“Danny, don’t give your name, man.”

“Crap,” Danny said. “It sounds like crap anyway.”

He takes the shot again, not saying anything this time.

Danny flipped the camera back down, satisfied with the shot he’d set up. Ben was crouched down, holding a stick. After a little intense staring down the ridge, he threw the stick to see how far it was to the hole in the fence. It seemed awfully steep to get down there when they couldn’t exactly tell how to get back up.

Ben took the chance to seem brave.

“It’s getting darker, guys.”

Danny tapped his jacket pocket with the camera in it. He held onto a branch and leaned over the ridge, making a show of surveying their point of entry. Both he and Ben were outdoing each other trying to seem all business, intrepid like a boy Lewis and Clark. Neither moved from the spot, though.

Jerry, the youngest and most honest of the three, chuckled nervously.

“This is too much.”

Ben takes that as his cue.

“You scared, Jer?”

“I don’t see you going down there, Ben.”

“Well, I don’t wanna get snagged on barbed wire, doofus.”

“Look how big the hole is...”

Danny zips up his jacket and takes a tentative foot forward, turning his body to the side as if clinging to the steep, sloping face of the hill. The soil comes up in his step, sliding down the hill with every careful sideways step he takes. The brothers don’t even notice he’s gone and continue arguing with each other, about the fence, about the hill, if they hid their bikes well enough, if their mom will worry if they’re gone for too long.

“...doesn’t matter, Jer. I can just say I forgot my cellphone at home so we didn’t answer when she calls...”

Their voices are growing fainter as Danny gets closer to the cleavage in the fence. It’s blown inward, invitingly. The opening bows forward, bordered by the twisted razors of the barbed wire bent out of shape by the impact. Overhead, the top row of cyclone remains intact, forming a barbed wire garden arch. If he weren’t so worried about tumbling down the slope, he’d pause to record himself crossing the opening in the fence.

Ben catches himself, seeing Danny almost at the entrance all by himself. Suddenly the hill doesn’t seem so secure and the brothers make their way down, slowly. Their sneakers dig into the soft hillside.

“Hey, wait up!” Ben calls, his voice going up an octave.

Danny sits at the foot of the arch on a stone jutting up out of the loamy ground and waits for the brothers. He pans the camera upward, capturing the accidental majesty of the barbed wire arch, looking like a bolt of lightning streaking across the sky, frozen in place and cast in stainless steel. They are careful not to tumble as they descend. He stands and they cross together onto a slab of asphalt big enough to hold all three of them.

They’re all tight with adrenaline. It’s legally trespassing, now. Behind them, looming over them was everything they’d ever known. In front of them lay the megalith, a hollow chamber of mysteries. The clouds overhead seemed to bunch up, gathering around everything but the building.

“Awesome,” says Jerry, not realizing the truth of his words.

“That wasn’t so bad,” said Ben, always knowing the exact right way to spoil the mood.

Danny was looking at the display on his camera, getting a nice, clear ground level shot of the huge building.

“Fuckin’ A.”

The parking lot stretches in every direction around them, sunbaked and dull. The sun has passed behind the mountains and the sky is purple all over. This is when the halogen floodlights would come on, either by direction from a control booth inside the booth or sensors on the poles. They stand silent and dark instead, tall spires marking off quadrants, delineating the space. The cracked moonscape engulfs the boys. They wisely stick together as they cross, heading for a dark, low niche.

If the mall opened, domed lights embedded in the underside of the awning would bathe this side entrance in warm orange chemical light and illuminate the name of the department store etched into the glass, maybe Macy’s or Montgomery Ward.

Instead, the entrance is boarded up with sturdy wooden slats, nailed in place and secure shut with a heavy chain.

They picked the worst possible time to be exposed in an unlit place, too late for the sun’s light and too early for the moon’s. Jerry stays close and they hustle a little fast. Jerry feels 8 years old again and wants someone to hold his hand. Danny steps carefully, but quickly. He avoids every crack he sees below his feet, just to be sure not to tempt fate by violating superstition. Ben’s mouth is shut, following closely behind Danny.

The moon will rise in a sliver, soon, casting an eerie blue glow on this fabricated stone monument.

They see it all at the same time, a storefront with a long, horizontal window. It’s done up in red brick like an old time saloon. The long store window is shattered, burst outward, spilling shards all over the sidewalk and fire lane of the pavement. The object that likely smashed the pane lays prone in the parking lot at the apex of the spray of glass.

Danny feels the pit in his stomach, seeing the crook of an elbow, the ridge of a nose, something unmistakably human.

It’s a mannequin; a head, a torso and a set of arms clasped together as if praying or winding up for a pitch. It’s twisted, impossibly, head facing backward, body facing downward.

They approach it, avoiding the glass glistening faintly in what little light there is. The face has a knowing smirk, perpetually amused by something. The features are high-angled, superior, the hair closely cut and sculpted in waves.

The handsome half-man lay on the pavement like the victim in a crime scene. Anyone looking would notice he was hurled from the inside.

“We can get in there, dude.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Let’s go in through the window.”

“I can’t even see, no way am I climbing over broken glass.”

Danny has his hand on his pocket, feeling the weight of the camera.

“Let me just...”

Ben, the lieutenant, waves him off and walks off with his brother.

He makes a short video of the mannequin, looking not directly at the scene in front of him but making sure it’s framed correctly by watching it through the monitor mounted in the camera. If he looks at the scene instead of what the camera sees, he won’t be recording what he thinks he’s recording.

He starts at the dummy’s torso, the smiling face agog at something up in the sky. He begins tracking the camera along the glass shards and up to the smashed window and further up still, following the trapezoid edge of the complex, settling on the faded grand opening banner. This could be the opening shot, he thinks, bringing the camera back down slowly. He forgoes the commentary this time, thinking it will be better if he overdubs it later.

The camera comes back down to its original position, with the mannequin framed in the shot, in that crippled pose. The head faces the camera straight on.

Danny closes the camera. This place will make the best video yet.

S
IX

“OH, SHIT, LOOK!”

Ben grabs Danny by the shirt and points him in the direction of the highway, where the main entrance is. A bright orange flashing light, tall as a man, glows softly at the end of the parking lot. It pulses as it turns, signaling its warning. Headlights come on, dimmer than they expect. They slowly creep forward in no hurry, bobbing up and down slightly as the vehicle manages the deep cracks in the road.

It hasn’t started up so much as woke up, like it forgot it had a job to do.

“Crap. Hide!”

The uneven asphalt has bought the boys some precious time to get in cover and they crowd in the shadows of the overhang. Ben grabs Jerry’s arm, hard.

“You didn’t say anything about security!”

“They didn’t see us at all, chill.”

“They had to, they’re coming right over here!”

“Chill, Ben,” Danny says. “He’s just patrolling.”

It’s an old Jeep, blocky and heavy, back from when a car was mostly metal. Somehow it cruises along, nearly silent. It doesn’t creak, even when it bounces. The engine doesn’t purr or choke.

There’s no other sound in the basin but those tires crunching the pavement as the jeep rolls along.

They watch it prowling, hoping it’ll pass.

“Let’s get inside!” Ben says, gesticulating.

The entrance to the mall doesn’t give when Ben tries the chain, yanking it back and pushing it forward. He jerks it frantically and Danny whips his head around.

“Calm down! Stop making so much noise and he won’t come over here!”

Jerry peeks his head around the corner and the Jeep is taking its time, trundling up. He gets an idea.

“Move, Ben, let me try.”

He sidles up to slats that have been fastened in place in front of the glass entrance.

“Just try to hold it. C’mon, quick,” Jerry says, decisive and confident, unlike his older brother. The two other brothers pry the slat with their hands and it wedges outward as much as it can under the formidable strain of two middle school boys.

It looks just wide enough to pass his skinny body through and he does, hurriedly, ducking under the chain and covering his jeans and shirt in years-old dust.

“I’m gonna loosen the chain,” Jerry says, feeling suddenly alone. “So we can all get through. Just sit tight!”

The boys on the other side keep silent because of the approaching security vehicle.

The window is covered in thick dust and is only faintly lit by the mall’s central skylight. He has the chain in his hand, loosening it, but he can’t help looking beyond the glass door, the first eyes to lay upon the mall since it was abandoned. It looks amazingly pristine, at least as far as he can tell through the occluded light. Dust hangs in the air, hermetically, floating as if in zero gravity. He can see it’s two floors shaped like a huge cross stacked on top of another, joining in a blocky, abstract fountain sculpture that practically reaches to the skylight. It is serene in its eeriness and distracts him from the chain, momentarily.

He can hear the boys pressing themselves up against the slat in the corner, trying not to be conspicuous at all. He can hear the tires come to a rest and the chassis whine as it rocks on its suspension.

S
EVEN

BEN WHIMPERS.

DANNY tries to hide his white sneakers in the shadows as much as he can. The Jeep has rolled right up to the mannequin, its tires sprinkled with tiny slivers of glass. It idles for a few seconds, then cuts off with a metallic click. The siren is still flashing, the orange beam mindlessly circling the parking lot. The light doesn’t seem to shine on their faces or reveal that the two boys are clinging to each others’ shirts. The light says they’re in trouble for sure, yet nobody has emerged from the vehicle wielding pepper spray or a heavy flashlight beam. With no engine running, the approaching night is silent and still again, except for the distant sound of insects in the grass and trees nearby.

The engine pings, settling. Nothing. Danny cranes his head upward, to see into the driver’s seat of the vehicle, stretching up until he can’t anymore. There’s no one in the vehicle. The door hasn’t been opened or closed. Theres no hunched over back leaning over the seat and there’s a good bet nobody’s laying on the floor. There’s no one in the vehicle.

E
IGHT

JERRY HAS FORGOTTEN about the chain and lets it drop. It smacks against the wooden slats making a hollow, hard sound that reverberates in the enclosed space.

He feels utterly alone although his companions are a mere foot away, separated by a makeshift barrier.

There are shapes moving around in the sepulchral ruin, where the dust hangs like fog on the surface of a swamp. A weak shaft of light illuminates the fountain, barely, and the shapes drift, breaking the light here and there.

The fountain is an abstract spire, a bare girder twisted upward to the skylight, a homage to Pennsylvania steel.

Not shapes, impressions of shapes. Hints of hints.

That can’t be right, there’s nothing and no one in the mall. It’s as dead and musty as it smells and nobody has touched it since the last night it was locked up more than two decades ago. It’s a stillborn; a monument nobody wanted, shut and locked up out of embarrassment.

Yet, there’s no sign of life. No waste, no paper fluttering around, no squeaking of rats or slinking of stray cats, no graffiti, no smashed in storefronts. His heart is fluttering, beholding this privileged sight.

Jerry hears something break the stillness, diffusing the light. He can’t quite see it but he can definitely hear it heading in his direction. He can imagine the heads turning to see him, all at once.

Two feet, then four. Then six. Then eighteen. Feet. Some bare and rigid, not lifting and planting like a real foot but sticking out straight and coming down stiff, as if marching. Some teeter on fashionable heels or high topped sneakers.

He has his back pressed to the slats, trying not to holler out and get them all in trouble.

The glass door parts inward, drifting open slowly as the assorted legs come toward him through the heavy dust. The smell is powerful, like a pool with no chlorine in it. Mildew. Stagnation. Slow decay. He reaches his hand between the slats to try to get their attention, waving wildly like a mute.