Feeding Frenzy #8
He bent down, grasped the iron ring and tugged. “Bloody hell, it feels like it’s been super-glued flat.”
“You need something to lever it up.” Jacinta looked round, then crossed to the desk and grabbed a claw hammer from the miscellany cluttering it. “Try this.”
Adam forced the twin claws of the hammer as far under the edge of the iron ring as he could and heaved on the handle.
For long seconds nothing happened, and then suddenly, with a teeth-grating screech of metal, the ring shifted.
A few heaves later Adam and Jacinta were able to curl their fingers around it.
They stood side by side, their shoulders pressed together, and tugged until the ring was standing vertical.
“What now?” Jacinta said, straightening up and slapping her rust-smeared hands together.
Adam knelt beside the trap door. “Pass me one of those Stanley knives and I’ll try to scrape some of this gunk out from around it.”
For the next ten minutes the two of them worked on loosening the compacted dust and dirt which all but cemented the thick wooden door to the stone floor in which it was set. By the time they had finished they were both sweaty and dishevelled.
Still on hands and knees, Jacinta raised her head. “That’s weird.”
“What is?”
“Listen.”
Adam tilted his head as if that would make his hearing more acute. “I can’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. There’s no music.”
It was true. For the past three days, the staff in the music department on the second floor had provided themselves and their fellow workers with an incessant soundtrack to accompany their labours.
Adam had found much of the music execrable, which was another reason why he had enjoyed working in the sort room – at least before the slithering, scurrying sounds had started.
However, although there were no speakers in the sort room, the music from the shop had still filtered through as a dull murmur invariably accompanied by a muffled beat.
Now, though, there was nothing. The silence seemed laden, like a dramatic pause.
“Maybe whatever was on has finished and they’re too busy to replace it,” Adam said.
Jacinta shook her head. “It’s a loop system. When one CD finishes, the next one automatically starts. When the last one ends, the first one starts again. The only way there’d be silence would be if someone took all the CDs out or switched the power off.”
“Well, maybe that’s what’s happened,” Adam said. “Maybe they’re swapping the CDs over.”
“Seems strange, that’s all. It makes me feel as though we’re the only ones here.”
Be nice if we were, Adam didn’t dare say. “It is quiet, isn’t it?”
Before Jacinta could reply the lights went out.
She screamed and clutched at him. He might have enjoyed it if she hadn’t dug her nails into his skin.
“Ow!” he cried, the darkness making the cavernous room seem suddenly full of echoes. “That hurts!”
“Sorry,” she muttered, though released her grip only marginally. “What’s happened?”
“Power cut, that’s all. The leckies have probably shorted something.”
“It’s pitch black. I can’t even see my hand in front of my face.”
“Hang on, I’ve got something in my pocket. Here we go.”
A thin beam of light cut through the blackness. Adam turned it on to his own face and grinned reassuringly. “Torch key-ring,” he said. “Stocking filler from my mum last Christmas.”
“Thanks Adam’s mum,” said Jacinta weakly.
She was still holding on to him, though not as fiercely.
Now Adam was enjoying it. He shone the torch around.
Shadows bulged and dipped like soft dark shapes shying away from the light.
“It would have been a nightmare trying to find our way out of this place in the dark. Sharp edges everywhere, boxes all over the floor. We’d have been black and blue by the time we got to the door. ”
“You don’t still want to get this open, do you?” Jacinta said, giving the trap door, beside which they were still kneeling, a couple of gentle taps.
“I think we’ll leave it until-“ Adam said before Jacinta squeezed his hand hard.
It wasn’t that which caused him to leave his sentence unfinished. It was the sound of movement from all around them. Adam shone his torch above their heads, half-expecting to see the ceiling alive with snakes.
“What the fuck is that?” Jacinta said, her voice glassy with panic.
“It’s what I heard before. What does it sound like to you?”
Her eyes were wide, her skin the colour of porridge. “Who cares? It’s a bloody infestation. Let’s get out of here, Adam.”
They scrambled to their feet and ran hand in hand to the door. While Adam shone the pencil-thin beam behind them, sweeping it from side to side like a sword, Jacinta punched the four-digit code into the access panel.
“Shit!” she shouted as her jittering finger hit the wrong button and she was forced to start again.
“Stay calm,” Adam told her. “They’re only noises. We haven’t actually seen anything yet.”
“Don’t tempt fate,” she muttered. “There, done it.” She pushed down the handle and they all but tumbled on to the shop floor, the torch-beam slicing wildly through the darkness.
“If it’s any consolation, I think someone’s fucking with us,” Adam said after they had slammed the door behind them.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, listen at the door now. The sounds have stopped, cut off like a recording. I know this door’s thick, but you’d be able to hear something through it, wouldn’t you?”
Jacinta looked puzzled, and now that they were out of the sort room her fear was turning to anger. “But who’d do a stupid thing like that?”
Adam shrugged. “Maybe this whole thing is just some big set-up. Maybe someone’s fucking with my head.”
It was almost reassuring to think that. What he tried not to think about were the flaws in his reasoning.
If this was some elaborate plan, then what was its purpose?
To frame him for murder? Drive him mad? Adam couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want to do either of those things.
But even if it was a set-up, there still remained the question of how its protagonist knew what he’d been reading, not to mention how, for God’s sake, he had managed to execute the attack in the bagel shop?
Adam shoved the flurry of questions to the back of his mind and tried to concentrate on the here and now. If similar questions had occurred to Jacinta, she was keeping quiet too. “Let’s just find the others,” she said. “Nothing’ll happen to us if we’re all together.”
Adam shone the torch ahead of them. To their right was the stationary aisle, to their left the magazine section.
Directly ahead, bookshelves marched down to the front of the store in ever-darkening rows until the blackness swallowed them up.
There was not a soul in sight, nor any sound of movement or voices in the darkness.
“Hello?” he called. “Anyone here?”
The answering silence seemed like the deepest he had ever known.
“I don’t like this,” Jacinta said, pressing herself against him.
“They probably just congregated upstairs when the lights went out, and because we were in the sort room nobody thought to tell us. Either that or the pizza’s arrived.”
Jacinta shot him a look that made it clear she wasn’t fooled, but said, “Let’s go and see then.”
Sticking close to one another, moving slowly as though to avoid unseen pitfalls, they crossed the shop floor.
The range of the torch beam was limited and Adam couldn’t help thinking of a primitive man attempting to keep unseen night-creatures at bay with a burning brand.
They passed History and Genre, and then the lance of torchlight was reflected back at them from the metal steps of the motionless escalator.
“If they’re in the café we should be hearing something by now,” Jacinta whispered.
“Maybe they went to the break room. Maybe there’s more light up there. We’ll probably find them having a candle-lit supper.”
“What time is it?”
Adam directed the torchlight on to his watch. “Twenty to eight.”
“Pizza’s not being delivered until nine.”
“All right, a candle-lit cup of tea then.”
They ascended the escalator, treading as quietly as they could, though there was no particular reason not to draw attention to themselves.
The first floor, in actuality the third if basement and ground were taken into account, was as silent and deserted as the one below.
Neither Adam nor Jacinta felt inclined to call out, but Adam performed a perfunctory sweep with his torch.
Blocks of light that were the plastic sleeves of videos, CDs and DVDs winked at them; shadows that were only suggestions of shapes solidified momentarily into shelves, a central information desk, a table stacked with movie books.
Cardboard boxes stood open on the floor, books and CDs, which had been in the process of being sorted, piled around them.
“Upstairs?” Adam said.
Jacinta nodded, but said, “What if there’s nobody there?”
“There will be.”
“But what if there isn’t?”
“If there isn’t…I guess we’ll just have to assume that everyone’s gone home without telling us.”
Jacinta was silent for a moment, then in a small voice she said, “And what if they’ve not gone home? What if something’s happened to them?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Jacinta said it so firmly that Adam knew what she really meant was: I don’t want to say it in case it’s true.
“If something had happened there’d be…evidence,” Adam said.
She sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Come on.” He turned away from the top of the escalator, towards the café area whose windows overlooked the street outside. They had taken several steps when he stopped abruptly enough for Jacinta to walk into him. “What’s wrong?”
He hardly dared say it. Trying to keep his voice casual he said, “I’ve just noticed that there are no street lamps on outside. The power cut must be more widespread than we thought.”
He made to move off again, but before he could do so Jacinta grabbed his arm. “Adam, you haven’t read a book recently where everyone in a shop disappears without trace, have you?”
He tried to smile. “No.”