The Mall of Cthulhu (12 page)

"Thank God. Because I woke up at four, totally freaking out about how I'm going to get killed, how this thing is way bigger than we thought it was, how I was over my head, I'm a crappy secret agent."

"Well, with a couple of notable exceptions, you've done great so far."

"I know, I know! Hey, what the hell are these things you bought for me to sell at the pushcart?"

"Two gross of cell phone covers for a model Nokia no longer makes. They were very cheap, and I don't want you distracted from your real work by having any actual customers."

"Cool!"

"Alright, I gotta go. I gotta turn my phone off while I'm doing the surveillance, but I'll call you when I can. Be careful—you're on your own for a few hours."

"I got it!"

When the FedEx guy—white, red-faced and grumpy, had arrived at Ted's apartment, he'd had a moment of panic until he realized that the guy was most likely delivering the cell phone covers and not here to kill him for trying to prevent the summoning of the Old Ones. Sure enough, Ted signed for the package and the FedEx guy went on his surly but peaceful way. Carrying his wares, Ted trudged down to the Providence Towne Centre. He was trying to think more like an undercover agent, and right now he was thinking that lugging a couple of big, clear plastic bags full of crap down the street was not the greatest way to stay inconspicuous.

Once at the mall, Ted wandered around looking for the management office, because he had no idea where his unpushable pushcart was located. Eventually he saw a narrow, linoleum-tiled hallway tucked in between the Wilsons Leather and Natural Wonders. He walked back until he came to a white metal door that said, in plain black letters, "Mall Office."

Ted opened the door and found himself in a small, white room, lit by fluorescents in the drop ceiling. In the center of the room was a nondescript brown desk, and behind the desk was a middle-aged black man in a blue suit.

"Uh, hi, I'm Jonathan, uh, Salem? The lady at the Harker company sent me down here to sell stuff at a pushcart?"

The guy extended his hand and said, "John Thomas." Ted shook his hand and used all the energy at his disposal to suppress a fit of giggles that was fighting its way to his mouth. "Yes. I currently have two cart vacancies. Your employer didn't express a preference, so I guess it's up to you. I've got one outside Industrial Dessert Company, and one outside Ye Olde New England Candlery."

Near where Cayenne worked! Score! Also, up there on the third level, he could keep watch on more of the mall than he could on the first level. Ted tried to quiet the part of his brain that said he'd need at least four other people to really watch the mall effectively.

"Uh, well, I like the candle smell better than the smell of the food at Industrial Dessert, so I guess I'll take that one."

"Are you sure? That first-floor location sees a lot of foot traffic."

"But not enough to keep the cart in business, huh?"

"No, they were doing great—I just got too many complaints from family diners that they had to explain to little Jimmy what a novelty condom cart was, like little Jimmy doesn't know that from sneaking down and watching Cinemax on Friday night, but whatever. I don't see how they could object to their precious angels seeing some cell phone covers."

"All the same, I think I'd rather have the candle one."

"Okay. You know where it is?"

"Yeah."

"You got signage?"

"Sorry?"

"Signage? You know, a sign?"

"Oh. They didn't provide me with one."

"Well, I'll let you open today, but tomorrow you have to have one up. Here's a sheet with the approved fonts, sizes, materials, and manufacturers. Make sure they get one here soon. All the carts have to have signage."

"Okay. Signage. Got it."

The mall manager rose and shook Ted's hand, and Ted walked back from the spartan office to the relative opulence of the mall. He took the first escalator up and walked for a full five minutes until he came to the empty pushcart.

He threw his bags down and looked at the Rings and Things cart. The stool was empty. No sign of Cayenne.

Well, that was fine anyway. He wasn't here to flirt. He was here to surveil. Or whatever. Look. Watch. Keep the mall under surveillance. He hoped the FBI was watching. He did feel good knowing that Laura was around somewhere, even if he didn't know where. He wasn't alone.

He was ravenously hungry, though. Laura had been so excited and had gotten off the phone so quickly that he'd forgotten to ask about another cash infusion. He really didn't know how he was going to get any money. His merchandise was specially designed not to sell, and anyway, as he looked at the cart, he realized that he was supposed to provide his own cash register. Which he didn't have. While he hoped the FBI was watching carefully enough to prevent any attempt to call forth the Old Ones, he also hoped the FBI didn't look too closely at him, because if they were at all observant, they'd notice that he was only somebody who was pretending to work at a pushcart.

Ted moved the stool to the end of the cart closest to Cayenne's cart and tried to remember to look alert. But what was he looking for, anyway? He'd only recognize one of the cultists. Would they walk in here with a gigantic leather-bound book and a bunch of bayberry spice candles and draw a big old chalk circle on the floor and invoke their evil masters? Or would they just mumble something under their breaths and rip open a hole in the fabric of reality, bringing gigantic octopus-headed evil deities through to romp through Providence?

Ted suddenly felt like his stomach was clenching around a block of ice as he pondered what it would really look like to have the Old Ones loosed upon the earth. Would it really be the end of the world? Would the Old Ones prefer to rule over a barren wasteland with bad geometry, or would they be happy to have insignificant human gnats doing their bidding? Would seeing them drive everybody completely insane? Ted figured the best-case scenario if the cultists succeeded was that these giant monsters would go on a Godzilla-style rampage and kill tens or even hundreds of thousands of people before the US military took them down. And the worst-case scenario was that life on Earth would be transformed into an unfathomable nightmare forever. Ugh.

Ted looked at the old people in their white walking shoes strolling by, at the hot young moms pushing strollers, at the teens obviously skipping school, and he envied them their ignorance. They went to bed every night thinking vampires were just something from the movies, and that horrific alien Gods were just figures out of overwritten horror fiction. They had no idea that everything they cared about or valued was teetering along like a unicycle-riding clown on a tightrope.

Well, this was a depressing line of thought. Ted tried to call back the heroic adventurer he'd believed himself to be, the one who was active in the face of danger, the one who was going to win. He suspected that guy wouldn't come back until he'd eaten something.

He went back to putting the old cell phone covers up on the little shelves. Just as he was deciding where to put the last of the Hulk movie tie-in cell phone covers, Ted saw Cayenne walking toward her post with a gigantic cup and a small bag from Queequeg's. "Hey! Cayenne!" Ted called.

Cayenne looked up and smiled. "Hey, Jonathan. You weren't kidding about coming back, huh?"

"Yeah." He tried to think of something else to say. Because I am hunting devotees of horrifying deities? Because you're hot? Because I am pursuing a career in obsolete merchandise sales?

"So." She said. "Did you ever get any food?"

Ted smiled. "You know, I didn't. I'm having some difficulty accessing my money right at the moment . . . "

"All your assets tied up in obsolete cell phone skins?"

"Something like that. So, no, I haven't eaten anything since lunch yesterday. I think I'm going to have a mystical experience."

"Well, do you wanna eat my muffin?"

Ted stared at Cayenne for far longer than he should have. Finally he realized she was holding out the small bag from Queequeg's and actually offering him a baked good. "Oh wow, that is really sweet. Are you sure? I mean, I don't want to poach your mid-morning snack."

"I had breakfast. Go ahead."

Ted opened the bag, saw the famous Queequeg's double-chocolate muffin, and had a brief flash of exploding glass and crumbs when Half-caf had shot up the baked goods just a few days and an entire lifetime ago. He felt a brief upswell of nausea as he remembered the gore everywhere, the intestines, the brains, the blood. With a great effort, he turned off the movie of the shooting, banished the horrible images from his mind ("If you're going to wake me up screaming every night, you can at least have the courtesy to leave me alone during the day," he told them.), and took a bite of the muffin.

Suddenly his mouth was filled with saliva, and he thought his brain might explode with pleasure as he ate the most delicious thing he had ever tasted. He looked up seconds later and realized that Cayenne was looking at him slack-jawed, and that stuffing his face like that might not have been the best impress-the-strange-but-hot-girl move.

"Wow." She said. "You really were hungry."

"Yeah," Ted said, crumbs dribbling from his mouth. He could feel himself blushing.

"So," Cayenne said. "What brings you to an exciting career in pushcart sales?"

Shit! Ted had no cover story at all! How could he be so stupid? What could he possibly say? He tried to stall. "I will tell you, but how about you first."

"Are you sure you want to hear it? It's actually a really sad and weird story."

"Are you sure you want to tell me? I mean, I didn't mean to get personal . . . "

"Well, see, that's hard, because when you have some horrible thing happen, then everything relates back to that, and so even the most innocuous question gets personal."

Ted didn't know exactly what to feel. He felt that Cayenne might be a kindred spirit, somebody as traumatized as him. On the other hand, she barely knew him and was verging into what was probably going to be oversharing territory. His crazy-o-meter was beeping, and he was afraid the full crazy klaxon alarm would sound in his mind if he let her keep talking, so he had to steer the conversation to more innocuous territory.

"Okay, okay, let's save that stuff for later, then. Tell me about a childhood injury."

She told him about a tire swing and a broken arm, and just as Ted was getting ready to tell the story of when he'd been pushed off a slide and bitten a hole in his cheek, a pack of teens approached Cayenne's cart and peppered her with questions. Ted took the opportunity to look around the mall, and he realized he should've been doing this all along. He felt a little bit guilty about being a crappy secret agent, especially with the fate of the Earth, or at least Providence, hanging in the balance.

So he looked around and tried to take in everything he could see about the atrium end of the mall. Two white-haired, white-sneakered matrons were making a circuit of the mall. Were they really geriatric fitness walkers, or were they just unlikely cultists? He reminded himself to watch them. Nobody else looked too out of the ordinary, but, of course, to judge by Mr. Average, the cultists didn't look too out of the ordinary. There were two guys in sunglasses wandering around down in front of the video game store. They were carrying big shopping bags that were obviously way too light to be stuffed with purchases. They wore jackets that looked a little too bulky even for the mid-spring temperature outside, much less for the seventy-one climate-controlled degrees in the mall. He hoped they were FBI guys, and he hoped they were being so obvious so they could act as deterrents to people hoping to rend the space-time fabric. The other options were that they were cultists preparing to provide covering fire when the ritual went down, or that they were FBI agents trying and failing to be inconspicuous.

He continued to eye the mall and realized that it was going to be impossible to weed out the cultists from the normal people. The fact that the cultists in the power truck had all been white guys in their thirties didn't mean he could rule out the Black, Asian, and Latino shoppers in the mall. And he couldn't assume that everybody white was in on it. Because, for one thing, that would implicate Cayenne, but also it would just make his job impossible. So, okay. He created a profile in his mind—a thirty-something white guy with a quick temper. That fit both Half-caf and Mr. Average, and he'd just have to assume that's what they were all like until he got new information.

The teens had dispersed from Cayenne's cart, and Ted tried to remember what they'd been talking about. But then one of the teens was actually at his cart. "No way! I've been looking all over for this! I got my mom's ghetto hand-me-down phone, and—well, look"—the kid—a white boy dressed in Celtics warmup gear that looked like it was sized for an actual member of the Celtics and not the five-and-a-half-foot kid in front of him—reached into the folds of his pants and pulled out a phone bearing a pink and blue skin. "Now how I'm supposed to make a call with this? You know? I'm gettin' digits from girls, I can't put it in my phone! How's that gonna look? 'Hang on, baby, let me just get out my pink and blue phone'—how much, yo?"

Ted had thought it so unlikely that any of his merchandise would sell that he hadn't even begun to think of a price. "Uh, five bucks. Three for ten."

"All right! Here you go, my man!" The kid hit Ted's hand with a twenty and walked away with six manly phone skins. "I know mad kids with this phone! You're gonna be popular!" the kid said, and he practically skipped away.

Cayenne was smiling at him. "Well, I had no idea you had such a brilliant business plan."

"Yeah," Ted said as he stuffed the twenty into his pocket, "neither did I."

"Hey—I'm gonna go get a sandwich. You want one?"

"Sure," Ted said, and reached in his pocket for his newly-acquired cash.

"It's on me," she said. "Just watch the cart and make sure nobody steals my inventory, willya?"

"Absolutely."

Cayenne returned with a chicken Caesar wrap and a Greek salad wrap. They ate in silence, mostly because Ted was still ravenous. He worked very hard not to shove food indiscriminately into his mouth.