Chapter Text
A tetanus-inducing shriek of metal on rusted metal, and light split the darkness - in a manner more akin to a butter knife hacking away at a birthday cake than anything more traditionally striking, but it was light, nevertheless, where there had not been light before. Tired, artificial streetlamp light that wheezed its way in past four pairs of legs, three of them poised in a hopeful sort of way, anticipating what would happen when the roll-up door finally rolled up and left their owners framed for maximum effect.
The fourth pair of legs was crouched and accompanied by a pair of arms, and hands, all straining to widen the existing gap with a series of grunts and curses.
On the other end of the line, two of the legs leapt into sudden, jerky action, dancing up and down. “ Ohgod . I just saw a rat!”
From the crouched figure, a snort.
“No shit, what did you expect? Oooooh, I’m gonna break into the creepy, haunted abandoned mall, but I better only see ghosts, not any of the real live gross animals that like living in gross abandoned buildings!”
“For the record, I’m not hugely keen on seeing any ghosts either.”
“Yeah but you’re still here , so shut up and help me lift this.”
The musophobe remained standing, but one of the other pairs of legs bent and added themselves to the effort.
“I sort of hope we don’t see any ghosts, too.”
“ Thank you , Tendi. See? I’m not the only one having misgivings.”
“Because ‘ghosts’ are actually usually carbon monoxide poisoning, and if we started seeing ghosts after being in there for only a little bit we’d have a whole other set of worries on our hands. I definitely wanna see the rats, though. Oh!” A swivel, to address the fourth person. “Rutherford! Do you think there might be a rat king?!”
“I don’t see why not.” There were now three people struggling against the weight of the door. “These kinds of places have terrible infrastructure, you could easily end up with an opening to the sewer if some contractor put the flooring in for cheap. Then you’d get all kinds of things swarming out of it.”
The last man standing sighed. “Remind me why I signed up for this at all.”
“‘Cause you’ve got three friends left since you finished college, they’re all out here anyway, and there’s fuck all else to do on your own on a Friday night,” the ringleader supplied. “Also, you’re a really weird coward, and somehow the idea of being alone on Friday thirteenth in October freaked you out more than exploring an abandoned mall with us on the same Friday thirteenth.”
“Yeah, that’ll just about do it.” The shrug in his voice was audible as he bent to help out at last.
With one final heave from all four, the door screeched upwards. It didn’t improve the lighting situation much.
Rutherford dug out of his bag what ended up being a heavy-duty flashlight, when he switched it on. There was some mildly alarmed squeaking and skittering from further down the passage (prompting a full-body shudder from the figure on the end), but otherwise the fat, cold white beam sat in dead air, and revealed nothing of any note - just a bare concrete service corridor, clearly built with no thought given to the bland sort of way in which it must have eroded small chunks of resolve from the minds of customer service workers of yore, who’d once traversed it daily.
“ Eurgh ,” said the ringleader. “I’d forgotten how grim the architecture was in this place. Like, they designed it specifically to crush our souls.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, Mariner” - the speaker’s head was twisting this way and that, apparently checking for vermin in the corners - “but I’d be surprised if they gave enough of a shit about you to want to crush your soul.”
“Pff, probably. The guy who owned this place was a reeeaaaal creep, like, how many malls do you know about where you can actually say who owns them, right?”
“Actually”- Tendi piped up.
“Okay no, famous ones and super small-town ones don’t count, you are not supposed to know who owns Mediocre Capitalist Hellscape Clone #4839, you just let those things sprout like a fungus like god intended. But this dude kept showing up and doing these super-conspicuous tours around the storefronts, and he’d come up and speak to us about how happy he was that we wanted to be part of his corporate family or whatever, but you could tell he wasn’t actually seeing a person in front of him at all? Just a fucking, robot or a cardboard cutout or something, I think that’s genuinely what he assumed other humans were. Maybe that’s why this all went bust, he ran out of people who could stand to work with”-
“ Woah ,” Rutherford stopped in his tracks, abruptly, and Mariner walked into him. “Look at this weird thing! I was gonna say weird little thing, but it’s really not. Boimler, hold this would you?”
Without waiting for an answer he thrust the flashlight at his friend, then knelt down to run his hands over a thick, sinuous mass lying across the corridor. Tendi was more tentative, looking but not touching.
“It’s not a snake, is it? It looks… dead.”
“Naw, just a plant. No need to be sad. Huge for something that’s been growing less than a decade, though. I mean, look at the wall over here! It’s completely split the concrete! Or… hm.”
Frowning, Rutherford rubbed his chin and leaned closer.
The flashlight beam disappeared, swinging around to point down the corridor.
“I heard a noise.” Boimler sounded genuinely disturbed, in a way that the rats and potential ghosts hadn’t yet managed.
“A rat noise?” Tendi, by contrast, sounded hopeful.
“A noise that I’m worried about because I don’t think it was a rat noise.”
“Oh nooooooooo.” Mariner loomed up and propped her chin on Boimler’s shoulder. “The crumbling shitty architecture that’s falling apart before our eyes made a spooooky noise ?”
“Okay, one, architecture-falling-apart noises are actually very scary when you’re inside the architecture in question. Two, no. It kind of sounded like… a people thing?”
“What kind of a people thing?” Rutherford reclaimed the flashlight and started forwards.
“Voices, maybe? Look, I’m not saying I really think this place is haunted, but, y’know. What if we aren’t the only ones here? That could land us in real trouble, not fake made-up ghosts trouble. I think we should turn back.”
Mariner made a dismissive noise. “You know squatters aren’t fuckin’, inherently dangerous, right? Like, I know uptight is your whole thing , but”-
“That’s not what I’m thinking about, actually!” Boimler whisper-snapped. “Sure, this place is abandoned, but it’s probably still in some company’s name on a contract somewhere. Probably that creepy guy you were talking about! He sounds exactly the kind of crazy who’d still send in security, to make sure people aren’t trespassing on his useless, busted property!”
"... Okay, maybe you have a point, but I'm still not gonna"-
"Guys," said Rutherford. "Where's Tendi?"
Assuming an oh shit sort of expression, Mariner whipped around in an almost complete three-sixty, before apparently realizing that she wouldn’t see anything even if it was there, on account of the darkness. They’d left the paltry street-light well behind by now.
“... Teeeeendiii?” Boimler clearly meant it to be a call for his friend, but the stage-whisper didn’t carry very far. “I mean, she probably just saw a rat and went after it, right?”
“Yeah, but where did she go?” To illustrate his point, Rutherford traced the beam of his torch across the wall in a wide sweep: every few metres or so stood a doorway leading into one of the retail units. One or two appeared mostly locked and intact, but the rest were in varying states of disrepair, leaving an assortment of openings, which looked more than a match for a determined trespasser in pursuit of a rodent that’d caught her fancy.
“Is this the part where we split up and look for clues?” asked Boimler, somewhere in the dark. He had a faint note of hysteria in his voice.
From Mariner, there was only a shriek.
“ Boimler! Dude! I said you had a point, okay, there is literally no need for you to try and do some stupid jumpscare to get back at me!”
“I…” Boimler swallowed, audibly. “What am I supposed to have done?”
“Don’t give me that bullshit, you fucking shoved me, you’ve had your fun, stop trying to turn it into a whole psychological thing.”
“Rutherford?”
“Not it.” Rutherford’s face loomed out of the darkness some way away, in the glare of the flashlight. This time, both of the others yelped. Then quietened, very abruptly, as another skittering noise came from further down the corridor.
It sounded much too big to be a rat.
A door slammed.
“I mean,” said Mariner. “That could be a security guard, right? Or a squatter? Something definitely shoved me. Physically. Like, I’m pretty sure it must have been alive.”
“ Tendi?! ” Boimler called again, much louder now.
“Yes?”
All three of them screamed. The beam of light flared wildly as Rutherford dropped his torch. There were a series of scrapes and footfalls that was - hopefully - Tendi squeezing out of a ruined doorway, and then the light reappeared as she took charge of it, faintly illuminated behind the glare.
“I found a rat!” she announced, happily, and then - “What’s got you guys so spooked?”
“Uhh,” said Rutherford.
“Yeah, this place really has an atmosphere , doesn’t it? It’s brilliant. Anyway, come and look at the rat!” So saying, she took the flashlight and started back from whence she’d come.
“Tendi, noooo,” Mariner moaned faintly, followed by the sounds of her stumbling after her friend. Boimler offered nothing more than a loud sigh.
There was a sudden squeak of hinges, and Tendi made a surprised little noise. “Oh hey, I thought this thing would be completely stuck! That’s pretty good condition for being out of use for ten years, right? Lucky the rat was in this shop.”
“Yeah…” Rutherford sounded unconvinced, and also, from some small, rough susurrations, like he might be running his fingers over the concrete wall. “... Tendi, can I have a light for a second?”
The beam pivoted from somewhere inside the store - allowing just enough to leak out through the doorway that more thick plant tendrils could be observed, creeping towards the ceiling. They probably weren’t actually, actively moving. Probably.
“These are really weird,” said Rutherford. “Like, really, really. Look, Boimler”- he snagged the other man by the arm in passing, clamping him to his side and pointing emphatically - “that big one further back, I thought it’d pushed its way through the concrete and broken it. And it looks like the same thing happened here. There’s little offshoots in all the cracks around the main growth, see?”
“Uh-huh. That’s great, buddy.” Boimler patted Rutherford’s arm and made to leave, without success, finding himself still pinned in place.
“But the offshoots are much smaller than the cracks, so there’s no way they could’ve made those. And if I just…” Tongue between his teeth, Rutherford extended his free hand and wiggled a fingertip into the main fissure. “Yeah! There’s just the tiiiiiiniest bit of space, still! This thing didn’t split the wall, it’s moving into a gap that was already there. All the bits of plant we’ve seen are doing that.” His voice had been getting progressively giddier as he spoke. “No idea how it’s grown so fast, but this is fascinating . It’s almost like it’s holding things up where the mall’s starting to fall apart!”
The tendril squirmed, in apparent discomfort, against Rutherford’s finger. Both men yelled, jumped, and started shoving at each other to get through the shop door first.
“Wha-?” Mariner didn’t manage to say anything else before the door banged shut at Rutherford’s back. Tendi, across the room, was peering at them curiously - Boimler shot her a look as he bent over, breath heaving, with his hands braced on his knees.
“This,” he panted, “had better be one really impressive rat.”
A clatter behind him made him turn his head, expression suddenly full of trepidation.
His eyes met Rutherford’s, which were equally worried. Rutherford tried the handle again. The door didn’t budge.
“Well, fuck.” Mariner threw up her arms and swiveled on her heel towards the opposite wall. “Only way out is through, huh?”
They’d found themselves in some kind of back storeroom, surrounded by boxes, piles of paper, heaps of fabric, and odd pieces of machinery, that hulked out of the darkness as indistinct shapes when Tendi swung the torch around. Everything had a strange dearth of dust and certainly no sign at all of interference from rats. For whatever reason, they’d chosen to keep away.
“Geez,” Mariner muttered. “What were these guys up to? Looks like they abandoned their entire stock, the fuck kind of trouble do you have to be in to clear out that quickly?”
“You never talked to them while you were here, then?” asked Tendi, holding aside the curtain that separated the backroom from the main store.
“Hah! No, obviously , I was like fifteen and I hated everything about my job, I wasn’t gonna go round asking random dodgy storeowners what their financials were like on my break.”
She followed Boimler and Rutherford through the doorway, then immediately brought herself up short and shuddered.
“Ugh. Tendi, why’d you have to pick a clothing store to get us trapped in?”
There were mannequins in the dark room, and lots of them. The overall effect was not terribly settling.
“‘Cause this was the store with the rat in?” Tendi replied, with an air of stating the obvious. “Ooh! This is them now!”
From behind the central display came a whirr that very much did not sound like a rat, but also a chittering noise which did. A dot of red light appeared in the shadows and Boimler was heard to whimper, but when Tendi swung the torch downwards she revealed - instead of a demonic, glowing-eyed rodent - a robot vacuum, trundling across their path. With a rat sitting atop it. The rat peered up at the group and squeaked hopefully, more in a manner suited to enquiring after treats than defending its territory with feral ferocity.
“What.”
Neither of the boys contradicted Mariner’s assertion. Tendi, on the other hand, cooed.
“Aren’t they cute? And so well-behaved, too, for living out here away from people! Whoooo’s a good semi-domesticated social animal? Oh, I hope there is a king around here too but either way, I wanna see the colony they come from so bad! ”
“Yeah, that’s not happening.” Mariner looped an arm through Tendi’s and started dragging her towards the store’s entrance.
Tendi went willingly enough, albeit still wiggling her fingers and pulling cutesy faces at the rat. Boimler, by contrast, detoured around the other side of the display specifically to avoid it. Rutherford alone paused, staring down at the creature and its mount.
“Is nobody else gonna ask where the roomba came from?”
“Nope!” Mariner called back. “It’s probably haunted and at this point that is none of my business.”
As she gained the mall’s main promenade at last, still hauling Tendi along, she called up into its rafters: “Hear that, ghosts? Whatever weird thing you’ve got going on with the rats and the cleaning equipment here, we don’t care! Just gonna leave you to it, no judgment, appreciate it if you don’t kill us on our way out!”
The grimy, barrel-vaulted skylight - combined with a full moon overhead - at least meant that this part of the building was cast in a very dim gloom, rather than total blackness. Not that what could be seen through it was likely to put anyone’s mind at ease - where before there’d been little but dark, there were now various ominous, dark shapes, instead. What on the one hand was clearly a pair of broken-down escalators, nevertheless under these conditions evoked nothing so much as the ribcage of some fallen leviathan. The disused central water feature, from which emanated a sharp, echoing drip, drip , like a repeating resonant note (and a swishing, as of a tide, despite no real wind having found its way into this part of the building) may as well have been fathoms deep, for all that its being here, at this hour and in this lighting, implied. And out on the promenade the growth of the strange plant had exploded, zig-zagging its way across even the ceiling, so that vast leaves obscured the giant window in places. Tendrils hung down all over, from the upper walkway especially, and although there really was no breeze, from the corner of one’s eye, they certainly seemed to be swaying, slightly.
It all provided some visual interest, if nothing else, but the expressions on everyone’s faces suggested that they weren’t massively fussed about being interested in this place for much longer. Even Tendi had found something to be trepidatious about.
“Um, Mariner? I think something’s up with that fountain…”
“Then why are you goingtowardsit, Tendiiiiii …” Mariner trailed off with an exasperated groan. Tendi dodged the grab she made and continued on her established trajectory, still carrying the torch.
“What’s she doing now? ” Boimler wailed softly, as he hurried over.
“Something about the fountain being fucked which you would expect, Tendi , since it’s been sitting abandoned for ten years! ”
“Ooh, but what’s fucked about it?” asked Rutherford, perking up somewhat and jogging past the other two with a clear mind to join the investigation. “Maybe there’s life in it by now! Definitely a bunch of algae, bugs, if we’re lucky, some frogs…”
“Uuuuuuuugh,” said Mariner, pitching her head backwards as she dragged her feet after the other two. Boimler brought up the rear, looking very much like he would rather not be doing so. “If you see a frog, can we please leave , finally?”
Tendi stood before the pool by now, in some respects resembling a diminutive lighthouse. The flashlight shone out over the water and cast ghostly ripple-reflections across the surrounding surfaces. Something about this place, finally, seemed to be genuinely troubling her.
“The water’s not stagnant.”
“What?!” Rutherford sounded like he didn’t know whether to be excited or alarmed. “How? Do you think it could be something to do with this freaky plant? Maybe the roots got into the filtration system.”
When she turned over her shoulder to look at the others, Tendi’s eyes were wide, and fearful - not the kind of fear about unknown dangers that everyone else had up til now been exhibiting, but a fear that she knew exactly what to be wary of, and that that wariness was fully justified.
“The water’s not stagnant, because it’s moving.”
“What, you think Hypercapitalist Creep installed a wave machine before he left?” Mariner was trying for flippant and not really fooling anyone.
Boimler didn’t say anything, only pressing himself further in towards the middle of the group as they gathered round the pool.
Tendi tilted the flashlight downwards just slightly, almost reluctantly. Uneven currents washed about, haphazardly, under its gaze.
“I think,” she said, “there’s something in the wat- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! ”
Something certainly breached the surface, in that moment. A glistening, scaly, sinuous and notably large something; an expanse of ridged skin that could have gone on for who knew how long underneath the water, followed by a thrashing, pointed tail.
By the time the tail disappeared, all hell had already broken loose. As Tendi screamed she threw her arms upwards, and the flashlight landed in the pool with a hollow splash. Plunged into darkness in the company of an unidentified aquatic monster, the other three also, predictably, panicked, and though there was at first much unintelligible shrieking and bumping into each other, the group eventually bowed as one to genre convention, and went haring off in assorted different directions.
After a minute or so, a figure emerged from the depths of the fountain.
It paused for a moment, one foot on the low wall and the other on the floor, twisting its head this way and that for sounds of life. There were a handful of commotions that could be heard at a distance, but none in the immediate vicinity, and this appeared to satisfy the creature. Pushing off from the wall in a movement that resembled a full-body shrug, it padded with wet footsteps over to one of the nearby shops. A flickering flashlight swung from one of its hands.