"Be honest. Have we been taking it too slow?" Sweet Marianne asked, sitting up in bed and looking sexy. My move was to say yes super quick and then, Step 2, climb on top of her and try out some things I'd been thinking of but before I’d even done Step 1 she'd dodged out of the way, pulled on one of her beautiful linen dresses and asked me, voice burdened heavily with implication, to take her shopping at the evil mall.
I was outflanked. Pure and simple. It took everything I had to get these beautiful girls into bed with me and by the time they were there I'd played every card I had and it was necessary to make concessions I found unpleasant. We got in the car, Marianne and I, and we drove to the evil mall.
"Put on some music," Marianne moaned, sweet Marianne, and I put the Bee Gees on the stereo and tried to get my mind off that tight body and the evil mall by remembering all the words to "Massachusetts". I looked at her face while I was singing. It was as still as marble. “Massachusetts” is one of the Bee Gees’ finest, in my opinion. I added a little falsetto and swayed my shoulders but she paid no attention. I stopped singing for her and sang for myself. And the lights. All went ooout. In Massachuuusetts. I was pretty good at it, singing the Bee Gees. I could do the falsetto but also the lower register singing, which if you know Massachusetts is primarily the mode he uses. There’s only one Bee Gee left now. The others are dead.
The evil mall was new in town. They built a mall and they made it look spooky like Halloween, with no lights on the outside and flickering fluoro tubes in the basement carpark and empty shopfronts where things moved in the shadows at the back and shrieking figures jumped at the glass and left bloody marks before disappearing. It was a great attraction. A lot of malls are purely functional, and if they try something out they paint from the same palette as every other mall. But after a few months of people being abducted and their bodies showing up in the mall, strung from the ceilings and pierced by meathooks and missing their hands and tongues and eyes, we began to realise - OK, so this is not merely the scary mall, it's the evil mall. It didn't stop anyone from going there. It had the Apple Store and the big supermarket with the salad bar and organic produce and Uniqlo. If it was evil, well, what wasn't.
“Isn’t this exciting?” Marianne squealed as I eased the car past cavernous and dimly lit wings of the parking garage. As we wound down the corkscrew tunnel leading further into the complex my nerves wound up. I nearly swerved into a parking bay but there was a man standing in it, a horror of a man, normal in every way except that it looked like all his normal parts had been stitched together by an incompetent craftsman. He stood there trembling, his normal blue eyes in his normal face, skin blushing with sunburn and freckles, hair dry and sandy, lips peeling, nose normal, chin normal, all of it looking as though it had been assembled by an incompetent editor who couldn't smooth out the puckering skin or buff away the wax sheen. He was holding something behind his back and I didn’t wait to see what. Marianne fiddled with her seatbelt and I slammed on the brakes and we ran to the escalators.
It was an unexceptional Thursday night in the evil mall. People drank smoothies, ate McDonalds, bought Nike sneakers from the Nike sneaker concept store. Evil happened, of course. We watched as a little boy was wrenched away from his father and dragged into a garage of some kind and the door locked as the poor man wailed and slammed his body against it. It did not budge. “This mall,” I whispered to Marianne, “forces us to be complicit. The evil was not just in the boy being abducted, but in our unwillingness to prevent it.”
Marianne nodded without much interest. She still looked good. She looked damn good. She had a nice ass and she dressed well. But I wondered what the future held for us and could not ignore the thought that it was not much. We were in this place, this evil mall, where so much adversity was possible, and I wondered what would happen if it happened to me. Would she grab my shirt and stop them from dragging me away? Absolutely not. Wouldn’t happen, couldn’t as much as hope for a little resistance from her fingers as I was spirited away. What if I escaped the evil, clawed my way out, King Odysseus, find a vessel, set sail, use the knowledge of my weaknesses to withstand the sirens, use rat cunning to blind the cyclops, use instinct to traverse Scylla and Charybdis, get home a beggar, find Marianne and prove our love and fidelity to one another. It was a hopeless dream. I looked at her with tears in my eyes and she looked back, the same as ever. We ran through the evil mall together. There was no point in tomorrow.
She skipped ahead of me into Kmart and turned with a cheeky expression to say, "Let's raid the Pick & Mix." Numb with ennui, I followed. We scooped M&Ms, sour worms, Gummi bears into our pockets, her giggling with the naughtiness of it, I a husk. The first domino had fallen. If Marianne with her beautiful round ass and her sense of fun was not possible, then what was? I let the scoop drop from my hand and staggered weakly into the aisle, where a creeping red ooze engulfed me up to my calves and began to drag me under. "Marianne," I gasped. She did not come.
"Marianne," I gasped a second time, and she craned her neck up over the shelves and squealed. I began to sink. As the ooze reached my armpits Marianne tottered around, her mouth completely jammed up with saliva and gelatin. "Mmmfff!"
I slipped under, kicked, clawed, thrashed. My flesh was burned by chemicals. I sank through boiling concrete, every nerve cauterized. A true and real hell. It spat me out on parking level B3. I was flayed of skin and fat, a science prop, but I was alive. The sad cases from the Better Business Bureau who opposed the mall were gathered there. A bunch of decrepit grey landholders in yellowing shirtsleeves who thought that their pathetic livelihoods deserved more. They nodded solemnly at me as I picked myself up off the concrete and tried to wipe the blood out of my eyes. They had satchels slung over their shoulders with the rag ends of molotov cocktails poking out of the top. A few of them held hunting rifles. “Ho, brother!” One of them hailed me and held a baseball bat out, handle first. I took it half-heartedly.
“What’s going on here?” I asked them, and they told me their plan to cleanse the evil mall, root and branch, with fire and ammunition, to excise those demonic manifestations that so threatened every resident of our suburb - not just the individuals who paid such a high price for access to consumer goods, but the souls of all of us who allowed such wickedness to prosper while we bought our sushi and our AirPod Pros - in the name of righteousness and civic responsibility.
“How will you do it?” I asked, and they explained that they would light up anything or anyone that did something evil during their sweep of the mall. Up the fire stairs we trooped. Harold and Jeannie Baker took the elevator. When we rendezvoused on the first floor their blood and viscera coated the inside of the elevator. “Aw, nuts,” said Dolores Gbogbo. She was a doctor on the main street. You could tell this kind of thing pissed her off.
We retraced our footsteps, killed an imp, fanned out across the first floor. Find something evil, stab it, blowtorch it, bag it. Blood etc was shed. The senior citizens from the BBB were surprisingly well drilled. “We’ve been practising our manoeuvres down at the creek,” Dolores told me as she lobbed a graceful firebomb through the front window of H&M at a trio of pale hags who were busy hauling an amphibious horror through a purple orifice. They shrieked remarkably modern insults as they sizzled. Dolores shook her head and handed me an extra pair of earmuffs from her belt. Then up the escalators we grimly trudged, stopping just briefly to wave at BBB auxiliaries on the lower floors who were tipping dead ghouls over balcony railings into the water feature below.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked Dolores and Bill Bradley, who ran the newsagent. “Why waste blood and ammo against such a monolith as this mall? Do you not suppose that your efforts, valiant as they are, will be answered by the dispatch of more demons et al from corporate? Moreover, don’t you have other stuff to do?” We’d all seen Bill down at the farmer’s markets, buying gruyere and leeks to make pastries for his pathetic grandchildren. We’d all seen him at the liquor store pretending Jagermeister was medicine. He had watery eyes and a tendency to tune out when you were talking to him. He had his own demons to battle, no pun intended. He hardly needed a militia in his life.
“It’s about safety,” Dolores said, a steely focus in her eyes. “It’s about being able to sleep well at night. Could you close your eyes knowing there was a nest of rattlesnakes in your home? Or would you do what needed to be done, whatever the cost?” She took me by the shoulders. “Your children may sleep sweetly in their rooms. It is your responsibility to bust up the laundry, if need be. Or get a snake catcher to come and get them. But in this case there is no snake catcher. Do you understand?”
“That’s the obvious answer,” I told her. But she shrugged and said, “Doesn’t this just feel right?”
We cleaned out the Build-A-Bear Workshop, the Anthropologie, the cinema. Into the restrooms and prayer annexes we flooded God’s holy light, which on this occasion took the form of a half-dozen underarm molotovs. “Praise His name,” murmured Janice from the daycare centre. On the top floor we regrouped before our assault on Kmart. I told them - my comrades in arms - about sweet Marianne. “Show her mercy,” I told them, “but bring her to me.”
We filtered through the clothes racks and the stationery and the toys and home storage and outdoor goods and DVDs and at the service counter at the back we concentrated our fire at an unholy gland from which the red ooze issued forth. As it spluttered and disintegrated the ooze abated. They placed sweet Marianne at my feet. Her hands were zip tied. “We found her braiding a demon’s hair,” scowled elderly, arthritic Todd Foster.
I shook my head with disappointment at her. “How could you just leave me to die?” I moped.
She squinted at me and shrugged. “I don’t know who you are,” she said.
“It’s me,” I said, choking up, “Graeme. My skin was seared off. This is the fruit of your inaction.” She shrugged again, and I shook my head again: redundant, I agree, but I wanted her to understand that I expected remorse rather than this matte-finish ennui. I signalled to Todd to free her.
“Let’s get you home,” I sighed, and for a second I saw the boredom on her face, sweet Marianne, before the lights all went out and the building shook and cracks shot through the ceilings and plaster rained down on us. There was a screeching in the air, although who could say whether it was the screech of metal on metal as the mall began to cave in or the screech of some demonic beast let loose by the paroxysm of destruction that had just transpired, but I reached out for Marianne’s hand, and I did not find it. I croaked her name but she did not answer. Neither did Todd or Bill or Dolores, nor anyone else as I crawled hand over hand towards the dim green EXIT sign, only to find it blocked by a fallen Lego display, which I tried to dislodge, but with my hands slimy with blood and unable to find purchase on the wire rack, and with my general unwillingness to risk spilling sharp Lego bricks all over the floor which I would have to traverse, I ditched that idea. Then, turning, listening to the screams of the others dwindle to a gurgle and then cease, I followed the smooth linoleum that moved more easily underneath my slick exposed organs, hauled myself towards the front of the store, where, finding it locked, I called out for help and none came. I died. Or I thought I did, but actually awoke eight hours later when the Kmart shift manager for the morning arrived and unlocked the roller door I’d been leaning against and stared at me in disgust. “God, I hate the flayed ones,” she muttered. But she had to live with me now.