The Mall of Cthulhu (14 page)

She walked down the corridor and into the main atrium and couldn't pick up her target among the crowds of shoppers, diners, and ferris wheel riders. She estimated that there were twelve white men with baseball caps in the crowd. Which one was her target? She looked around at pushcarts, but she didn't even know which one might be Ted's. Most of them were closed metal shutters rolled up over their merchandise, though one or two people who were definitely not Ted were closing up their carts. She waded into the crowd. As she continued to look, she noticed that one of the baseball-cap wearers was alone and moving more purposefully than your average mall shopper. He was not distracted by any of the merchandise on display and did not even glance at the window display as he passed Victoria's Secret. It wasn't anything close to a positive ID, but it was the best she had to go on right now. She was Laura Summa Cum Laude Harker, goddammit, and she'd never taken an incomplete, and she wasn't about to start that now.

Her target headed into Mexico Maria's without even glancing at the menu on display next to the door, and Laura counted to five, then walked in. The hostess, a blonde woman in a long black skirt and a peasant blouse that bared her shoulders said, "Welcome to Mexico Maria's! Party of . . . one?"

"Actually, I'm meeting somebody. I just need to take a circuit and see if they're here," Laura said as she blew by the podium.

"Lot of that going around," she heard the hostess mutter in disgust. Laura scanned the dining room and saw her target exiting the restaurant on the street side. She pretended to continue to scan the crowd, and then she did a double take as she saw . . . Ted? With a woman? A really hot woman? Who could possibly be a lesbian? Who was in tears? She had a flash of annoyance—she'd spent the entire day cramped up in a gross van largely because Ted had convinced her that this was real, that it was important, that they had a job to do. And now he was kicking back with a pitcher of margaritas and a woman whose hotness was marred by excessive piercings, but who was at least the right gender to be attractive to Laura. It crossed Laura's mind to go and grab Ted, to tell him the chase was on, that he had to help out here, that this was his goddamn assignment, but then she thought if Ted was actually getting somewhere here, she didn't want to spoil it.

It was only as she crossed the threshold of the restaurant and hit the street that Laura realized she'd just put Ted's mental and/or sexual health ahead of the fate of the entire Earth, which is what was at stake here if Ted was right. Weird. Her target hopped into a cab, and Laura memorized the medallion number: J1701. It wasn't much, but she wasn't going back empty-handed, and the guy was clearly a cultist, because who the hell cuts through an entire mall and a restaurant just to go get a taxi?

Speaking of which, she was feeling very conspicuous standing here looking stupid on the street. She walked down the block and re-entered the mall through the Industrial Dessert Company, where she told the black-attired host that she was meeting somebody, could she just wander around the cavernous restaurant and look for them? "Well, can you describe the person? It's been a slow night, I might remember."

Laura looked at the guy and said, "I'd really prefer to look around," and made a beeline for the bathroom.

Once she'd made the decision to pee, her bladder decided the matter was urgent, and she barely made it to the stall before unleashing a torrent of urine. The relief she felt as the last drops dribbled out was, she thought, a physical pleasure comparable to an orgasm. For just a few seconds, she felt relaxed, content, and confident that everything was going to be fine.

This feeling didn't even last through the hand wash, though. These Cthulhu guys really were up to something horrible, and, judging by what they did to Brother Leonard, they had the ability to do horrible things, and Laura wasn't sure they could be stopped.

Laura's dread multiplied when she climbed back into the van and saw Killilea's face. "I got a hack number!" she said.

Killilea looked at her blankly. "Well, I don't know who's going to follow up on it, because Boston's not interested."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I just got off the phone with Nguyen"—he said it like "nyen," Laura noted, though somebody else had said "win," and still another had said "new-yen"—"and he said exactly what I thought he would say about the Angry White People."

"What did he say about that guy disappearing?"

"He said, 'while the video is impressive, the Bureau's position is that people meeting secretly to perform magic tricks do not constitute the same threat to national security that transnational terrorist networks do.'"

"Well, shit. Something's going on. People don't just disappear like that."

"Nguyen's of the opinion that there may have been dry ice and a secret trap door involved. He said the video is inconsistent with a murder, and in any case that's Providence PD turf, so he won't even get us a warrant. He might pass the tape on to Providence PD, but there's really nothing solid enough to indicate that a crime was committed, and if we don't believe they made a guy disappear, then we also don't believe they can make a mall disappear, so we're back up to Boston and hoping that nothing worse happens during the Celtics playoffs than a first-round loss."

"Well, fuck. So we have to wait for these guys to pull their presto change-o trick on the whole mall? We just get to sit here and watch it happen?"

"Well, actually, there is another shift coming in half an hour, so they may get to watch it happen, but yeah, pretty much."

Laura sat in silence. There had to be a way. There had to be somebody who would take this seriously. Or, if there wasn't, there had to be a way that they could stop it. Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe it would be up to Ted.

That thought led Laura for the first time to contemplate the idea that the bad guys might win here. She wondered what that would be like. Would she die, or live in a world of horror so unimaginable that she couldn't even imagine it? Or, as had happened ten years before, would Ted actually, improbably, save the day? She knew that her life and her afterlife had once hinged on Ted's ability to act decisively, to do something improbably heroic and horrific, and this should have been comforting, but back then she hadn't known how much was riding on Ted's skinny frame.

She wanted a drink.

Ted and Cayenne had finished their first basket of tortilla chips and were two-thirds of the way through their first pitcher of margaritas. They were awaiting burritos grandes and a soft taco platter. They had already covered most of the events of the day and their thoughts on mall culture when Cayenne said, "Okay, well, I guess I'm buzzed enough to tell you why I work here, but you have to swear to tell me why you work here."

Ted thought about this. There was really no way Cayenne was in on this whole Cthulhu plot—was there? Well, he had a choice to make—assume the worst, just to be safe, and shut down what looked like it might become something wonderful, something better than he'd had in a long time, or trust her, and risk that she'd run screaming when she heard the truth like they all did, or, worse yet, that she was in on the plot to get Providence stomped by the Old Ones, and she would kill him. But if that were true, she'd kill him anyway. Bleh. He took a long drink from his margarita glass, then instantly regretted it.

"Gah! Brain freeze!"

"Ooh, I hate that."

"Agh!" Ted rubbed the spot above his right eye—"Feels like somebody's jabbing an ice pick behind my eye." He saw Cayenne looking expectantly at him, then realized she was waiting for his answer. What's it gonna be, boy, yes or no? a female voice in his head said, and he wondered briefly what song that was from before he answered. "Okay. I will absolutely tell you the truth about how I came to be an obsolete cell phone skin salesman, and one who is shockingly successful, as it turns out, but I think we're going to need another pitcher."

"Deal." Ted's burrito grande and Cayenne's soft taco platter arrived, and they asked for another pitcher.

"You know, you get, like, beef, chicken, and fish tacos here," Cayenne said, "and if I'd had one less drink, I could probably come up with a pretty good tuna taco joke, instead of just the idea that I should make a tuna taco joke."

"Hmmm—how about, 'I'll give you some of my burrito grande if you let me eat your tuna taco?'"

Cayenne looked at Ted for a long moment, and then laughed. "It's not bad, except that burrito means 'little ass.' Which really makes 'burrito grande' kind of an oxymoron, right? Big little ass?"

"Isn't that where Custer died?"

"Nah, I think that was Little Big Ass."

"Right." They chewed in silence, and Ted wondered if he'd really said that stupid tuna taco thing. Jesus, he was turning into a cheeseball in his old age.

"So," Cayenne said after making significant inroads on the steak and chicken tacos, "the reason I work in the mall is just because I was bored, and I had nothing else to do, and I spent a lot of time sitting at home by myself taking drugs, and that got boring, and pretty much everything I used to do got boring, and so I figured, well, in high school I was way too cool to work in retail in the mall, because I was alternative, or something, so I figured, well, I've tried pretty much everything else, and so I might as well try this. And it turns out to be an okay way to kill eight hours without having to think about . . . everything."

Ted knew enough about not wanting to think about . . . everything to know that this was the point at which he did not ask exactly what everything was. "I know what that's like," he said.

There was more chewing, and Cayenne took a long drink of margarita and said, "Ow! Fucking brain freeze!" and then started to cry. "Well, shit, so I'm crying already, so here goes, I guess, so my dad murdered my mom and my brother murdered my dad, and I found my mom's body and watched my brother blow my dad's head off, and I talked him out of turning the gun on himself, which seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but he's not a big guy, he's had a hard time in jail, and he won't even speak to me, so basically that's it, I'm an orphan and my brother won't speak to me and I've seen more violence than I should have had to see, and there was a lot of insurance money that I was able to spend on a lot of drugs. But, like I said, nothing dulls the mind like spending eight hours in the mall."

Cayenne wiped the tears off her face and blew her nose. "So there you go. I'm damaged goods. What about you?"

Ted paused. This was it. He owed her the truth after that, even though telling her the truth would probably be a dealbreaker. Oh well.

"Well, you're not going to believe me, and you're going to think I'm insane—"

"Shit, Jonathan, I'm insane too, obviously."

"I don't mean mood disorder insane. I mean thought disorder insane, as in tinfoil hat kind of insane. But oh well, here you go. This part you can look up: ten years ago at a certain Ivy League University in Wilmington, Delaware, there was a terrible sorority fire. At least eight people died. You can search the archives of every paper online and find the stories.

"But, well, what they don't tell you is that that house burned down because it was full of vampires, and that I was responsible. I ran out of the house covered in blood and reeking of gasoline, and I am not in jail, which ought to also be evidence that I'm not completely nuts. I got a big payoff from the University and did a lot of drugs and followed my friend who I saved around the East Coast while she had a life.

"And I should say that my friend is a lesbian, just so you don't think I'm involved in some kind of long-term relationship, though I'm guessing you're probably losing interest with every word. Anyway, I was working in a Queequeg's for pretty much the same reason as you're working here, and my place of employment got shot up, and, to make a long, improbable story short, I got away and found out that the same people who shot up the Queequeg's are planning something big at this mall, and, as doomed an idea as this is, I am actually trying to prevent it."

Ted looked up for the first time since he started speaking. Cayenne was looking at him with her mouth open.

"So," she said, "are the people trying to attack the mall vampires too?"

Ted looked at her. "Are you fucking with me? Is there like a Buffy joke coming or something? I mean, I don't want to get hostile or defensive or anything, but I know how insane this sounds, and I know this ends with you avoiding me, and I just—"

"I'm not fucking with you. I mean, I . . . okay, I have a pretty hard time believing you, but, I mean . . . ." She was crying again—"I can tell that something awful happened to you. I think it's like this club where we can recognize the other members. Anyway, so, I don't know if I believe you about the vampires or anything, but I believe that you're haunted like I'm haunted, and that's enough for me to not want to tell you to fuck off. And, yeah, I have a hard time believing in vampires, but I had a pretty hard time believing that my daddy who used to sing to me . . . well, you know. What happened in my family is shit that happens on TV shows. It doesn't happen to people like me. It can't. Except that it did. So I guess ever since I found my mom's bloody body, I've had a pretty hard time saying definitively that anything is impossible."

Without thinking, Ted reached across the table and grabbed Cayenne's hand. He didn't say anything, Cayenne didn't say anything, and they just looked at each other. It was the single nicest moment Ted could remember.

And it was broken up far too soon by the return of the waitress, who said, with forced perkiness, "Are you folks all set? Need another drink?"

"Just the check, whenever you have a minute," Cayenne said, and before the sentence was fully out of her mouth, the waitress had slapped the pleather check-holder down on the table.

"You have a great night," she called back over her shoulder. I already have, Ted thought, and then he thought it would probably be good if he actually said that, but if he said it now, it would sound stilted.

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he saw something—somebody that looked an awful lot like Laura running out the front door. Shit! Was the operation actually happening? In the time they'd been in Mexico Maria's, Ted, despite having told a very truncated version of the story, had completely forgotten the urgency of his mission, the fact that he'd sent Laura this urgent text message just a few hours ago, the fact that the fate of the entire world might be hinging on what went on in his mind.