The Mall (8 page)

‘What are you doing?’ Dan says from behind me. I jump guiltily and fumble to hide the envelope. His eyes drift to my pocket and it’s obvious that he knows exactly what
I’ve been doing.

‘What’s it to you?’ I say.

‘Chill. I’m just asking. I thought we’d decided to call a truce.’

For a second I feel slightly guilty. But ‘being nice’ isn’t one of my strong points. ‘Dan, don’t take this the wrong way, but you look like utter fucking
shite.’

He runs his hand self-consciously through his hair, which is almost entirely matted and grey with dust, like those freaky hobos back there. His pores are clogged with pinpricks of black dirt, as
if his face is teeming with blackheads, and his clothes are rumpled and stained. I’ve done my fair share of sleeping rough, but I can’t remember the last time I felt this disgusting.
Even though we’ve only been in this maze for probably a few hours – I can’t tell exactly because that hobo witch seems to have fucked the time on my phone – the dust and
dirt have eked their way deep under my nails, my eyes feel as if they’ve been sand-blasted and my teeth are furry and gritty. I would do almost anything for a shower right now.

‘You’re not exactly Angelina Jolie yourself,’ he says.

‘Yeah, well, I’m not going to win a beauty pageant any time soon, am I?’ I snap.

‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Forget it.’ I hold out my hand. ‘Give me your phone.’

‘Can’t you at least say “please?”’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Dan. I didn’t mean to offend your delicate sensibilities.’ I put on a girly-girl voice and flutter my eyelashes. ‘May I please,
pretty
please, borrow your phone if it isn’t too much of an inconvenience to you?’

Good Christ, is he blushing? Without looking me in the eye, he hands me the phone. I scroll down to the messages and read them again. ‘What’s this shit about a market? What kind of
market?’

‘Fuck knows.’

‘I tell you something, this is not spam, Dan.’

‘You’re a poet and you don’t know it.’ He lets out a giggle that verges on hysteria. Not good.

‘Are you okay?’ I say. ‘You’re not going to lose it, are you?’ Although I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

He rubs his face with the palm of his hand, looking about twelve years old. ‘I just can’t get my head around all this.’

‘You and me both.’

‘I mean, what the
fuck
is going on?’

‘It’s like we’ve both taken some really bad acid or something,’ I say. He shoots me a loaded look. ‘Don’t worry, shithead. I haven’t slipped you
anything. I wouldn’t waste my stash on you.’

He holds my gaze for several seconds and then nods as if he believes me. ‘I did have one idea,’ he says.

‘Go on.’

‘The kid.’

‘What about the kid?’

‘What if… you know… he was snatched and the people who are fucking with us are trying to put us off the scent?’ he says. ‘You know, like people-smugglers –
paedophiles or something.’

‘But you said you didn’t see him with anyone.’

‘Ja. But I’m just saying. It’s possible.’

‘We’re not in a Bruce Willis movie, Dan. Don’t be so fucking stupid.’ I wait for him to fire back at me, but he remains silent. ‘Look,’ I say, softening my
voice, ‘if they were badass human traffickers they’d just kill us, wouldn’t they? Besides, that doesn’t explain how they know our names.’

‘So what is this, then? Blind homeless psychos, tunnels and corridors that don’t seem to lead anywhere, mannequins in bondage and text messages from someone who not only knows our
names but sounds like the spammer from hell. Seriously, Rhoda. I’m beginning to think we’re in the twilight zone here.’

‘I’ve seen worse.’

‘You have?’

I haven’t – not even close. And I’ve been in some pretty fucking hairy situations in the past. But I’m not going to tell him that. ‘We’ve just slipped through
the cracks of society, Dan. Plenty of people opt out of working for the Man and paying their taxes.’ But most of them don’t eat rodents and live under malls.

‘You really believe that?’

‘Sure,’ I say. Fortunately lying
is
one of my strong points.

‘And the text messages?’

‘Some psycho hacker. Probably works at Vodacom. Has access to customer accounts. Must be.’

‘I’m not with Vodacom.’

‘Whatever. Something like that. I’m just saying.’ It’s clear that he doesn’t believe me, but what other explanation is there? None that either of us wants to dwell
on right now.

‘So, what’s the plan?’ he says, trying to sound game.

‘If the kid’s here we need to find him. That’s top priority. He could be in serious shit if he bumps into a nut-job like that freak of a woman back there. There’s only
one other way he could have gone.’ I point to the far end of the lot. It stretches back into the gloom, and it’s impossible to make out any details at that end, thanks to that same
disturbing pitch-blackness we met in the dead-end stairwell. ‘And for that we need a proper light. Any ideas?’

‘Hey! That old woman’s got a paraffin lamp in her stuff. I saw it when she was getting out the food.’

‘She’s never going to give it to us, and we won’t be able to nick it without her noticing.’

‘Then we’ll have to trade.’

‘With what? Apart from my phone and your crappy watch she didn’t want any of our stuff.’

‘Yeah. But what about the other stuff?’

‘What other stuff?’

‘You know.’

‘Oh fuck off, Dan.’

But there’s no other option.

‘That thing stinks!’

‘Trust me,’ Dan sighs, ‘if the old witch had a torch I’d much rather have taken that.’

Oily black smoke billows out of the top of the lamp, which looks like one of those old-school oil lanterns you see in BBC adaptations of Jane Austen or whatever. It clearly hasn’t been
cleaned for a while and the fuel smells more like petrol than paraffin. Still, at least it’s providing enough of a glow so that we can walk without braining ourselves on the jagged pipes and
concrete pillars that loom out of the darkness every so often. And I guess it was cheap at the price. I’d given the hag the ketamine in exchange, and I was only going to sell that on anyway.
It’ll probably do her and her cronies some good.

We’re making slow progress, but even so, the parking lot seems to be stretching on further than it has any right to. But at least there’s no debris scattered around, just the
occasional loose wall panel spilling the severed worms of thick conduit wires. A rat scuttles past my foot, and it sounds like it’s dragging something fairly heavy behind it. Thankfully Dan
doesn’t wave the light its way. Neither of us really wants to know the details of that particular scenario.

‘We’ll have to find an exit or something soon,’ Dan says. ‘This thing’s getting almost too hot to hold.’

I unwrap my hoodie from around my waist and hand it to him, and he balls it around his hand. ‘Thanks,’ he says.

We shuffle along for a few more metres and then Dan stops abruptly.

‘What?’

‘Look!’

To our left, I can make out the shadowy edges of a wide concrete ramp, which presumably leads down into the deep darkness of the floor below.

‘Oh great,’ I say. ‘Down another level. What the fuck were they thinking going down this deep?’

Dan doesn’t answer.

As we get closer, a large laminated sign that’s stuck onto the wall in front of us emerges. Dan holds the lamp up to it, and the red plastic letters shine in the lamp’s glow. He
reads it aloud: ‘“Level X. Authorised personnel only past this point. Danger; Gevaar; Ingozi.”’

‘Level X? That’s like ten or something in Roman numerals, isn’t it?’

‘Hang on, there’s something else written below.’

He waves the light along the edge of the sign, but the print is too small for me to make out the words.

‘Well?’ I say. ‘What does it say?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Of course I bloody well want to know! What does it say?’

‘It doesn’t make sense. It reads: “Do not attempt to enter under any circumstances. All trespassers will be corrected.”’

‘What the fuck do they mean by “corrected”?’ I ask.

There’s a long pause before Dan answers. ‘It makes me think of getting caned at school. Or corrective surgery.’

I don’t really want to consider either of these options, but now Dan has put some seriously gothic imagery in my mind. I try to shake it out. ‘Oh for fuck’s sake. This is
totally mental.’

‘So what now?’

I pull out the stompie and light up. I take a couple of drags and watch the thin grey smoke melding and dancing with the black emissions from the paraffin lamp. ‘We don’t have a
choice,’ I say. ‘Trousers down it is.’ Dan smiles at me for the first time, and even though the yellowish light makes his too-white skin seem ghoulish, he actually looks like a
different person. ‘I mean,’ I say, nipping the butt and leaving one last drag for later, ‘after what we’ve already been through, how bad can it really get?’

This floor seems to extend even further along than the one above. Enough parking for all the cars in Joburg. The ceiling is lower down here and I’m starting to feel the
walls pressing in. And the cigarette and blow aren’t helping to calm my heart or soothe my stomach, which is bunched into a tight knot of nausea.

Dan pauses and holds the lamp out to me. ‘Can you hold it for a while? It’s burning my fingers.’

He passes the lamp to me, and even through the hoodie’s layers I almost drop it when I feel the heat. He must have really struggled to hold it for so long. ‘Fucking hell, Dan! You
should have said something earlier!’

He shrugs. ‘Ja. It wasn’t—’

‘Shhh!’ I say. ‘Hear that?’

‘What?’

‘Listen!’

The sound drifts back towards us.

‘Is that… music?’ Dan says.

Both of us keep absolutely still. It comes again. It’s a jaunty folksy tune that for some reason reminds me of the Mos Eisley Cantina riff in
Star Wars
.

We quicken our pace, and I almost forget about the uncomfortable heat of the lamp. A stark white door with a reassuringly normal metal handle appears out of the gloom to greet us, the only
feature in an otherwise solid concrete barrier ahead.

‘You think it’s locked?’ Dan asks.

‘Only one way to find out.’

He pulls open the door and both of us have to shield our faces against the sudden glare of light that blasts back at us. We’ve been in the dark for so long that my eyes tear up, and it
takes me a second to realise what I’m seeing. It’s another one of those narrow stairwells, this one at least heading upwards. The stairs, walls and ceiling are tiled in a seamless white
mosaic, giving it the antiseptic look of an institutional corridor. With the door open the sound of the music floats down towards us with more clarity. And there’s something else – a
familiar low rumbling sound.

‘Shit,’ Dan breathes. ‘Voices! There are people up there!’

‘You think this leads back into the mall?’ I say. ‘Like a back entrance or something?’

Dan shrugs. ‘Fuck knows, Rhoda. We’re way underground now.’ His eyes are beyond tired. He’s wearing the same expression you see on disaster victims on CNN, one of weary
acceptance.

‘You want to take a break?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I want to get this over with.’

I place the lamp carefully on the ground, and, without speaking, we both start heading up.

I’d expected the stairwell to lead upwards for ever, like everything in this fucking place. But after navigating just a few flights, we’ve reached a white
melamine door and neither of us is rushing to pull it open. From the sounds we can make out from here, it’s already clear that whatever we’re about to encounter it’s not going to
be the bland muzak and polished shopfronts of the mall. The music actually sounds creepily similar to old-school funfair calliope music – the kind that scores low-budget horror films. Every
so often there’s a sudden burst of deep, humourless laughter and the rumbling murmur of what has to be a large crowd of people. But it’s not just the eerie music and voices that are
holding us back. There’s another one of those fucked-up laminated signs stuck on the door:

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Dan. We have a choice here. We can try and go back the way we came and run into that… creature, or we can go through this door. But I’m telling
you, I really don’t have a good feeling about this.’

Dan rubs both hands over his face, and holds my gaze for a long second. ‘The message said something about market day. This is the place…’ I’m pretty sure that the fear
in his eyes is mirrored perfectly in mine. ‘Christ, Rhoda,’ he says. ‘Let’s just do it.’

He holds out his hand, and, without hesitating, I take it.

He opens the door and we step through.

chapter 8

DANIEL

Everything’s white. Rhoda closes the door behind us and we lean back against it, waiting for our eyes to acclimatise. Gradually details start to emerge from the
snowsheer glare. Powder-white floor, powder-white walls, a hall the size of, say, your average church or Pep store, but featureless, just a square box with glaring white floors and walls. Bright
spotlights set into the powder-white ceiling like polka dots pierce down at us. We can hear the same crazed hurdy-gurdy music as we did outside, but now more distant, smothered and forced, like a
live band is playing from inside the walls, its members suffocating in the concrete as they play. Its volume shifts in waves, coming up and then receding as if we’ve imagined it, before
fading in again. There are markings stripped out in silver duct tape on the floor, mapped-out boundaries in two dimensions tracing a convoluted design. Labels chalked out on the floor –
illuminator, apothecary, tavern, weaver – make it clear that this is the layout of the market. But there’s nothing here.

‘Is this it?’ I ask. ‘Are we supposed to pretend, or what?’

Rhoda stalks around the hall, leaving dusty shoe prints on the floor as she goes. She tries the door.