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The Hidden Mall: 🔥 Where There’s Smoke…

Oct27

Skinny-Liv and Abigail rushed through the door, only to find themselves in a room lined all around with doors.  Behind them, they could hear faun-Liv shouting.  “Not that way!  No, not that way!”

“Shit.”  Abigail closed the door behind them.  “If you were Liv – well.  Which way would you go?”

“Never the first door, never the last door, never the middle door,” Liv answered immediately.  “Probably – well, look, the problem is, I didn’t drink the magical Kool-Aid candy or whatever it was.  I’m not the one leaving my friends – or self, whatever – behind.  So I could be wrong.  And if I’m wrong, we might never see her again.”

Abigail huffed.  “That’s not – we have to.  We have to find her.  She’s my friend.”  She knew she sounded plaintive.  She also knew she was pleading more with the universe than with this Liv in front of her.  “She’s… I keep an eye on her.” Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall: Liv, Liv, Liv

Oct9

Oh was exactly what Abigail didn’t want to hear.  She pulled clean-Liv towards the fountain, biting her lip, wishing she had a weapon, any sort of weapon, even a fork.  

How had Liv gotten so far away?  How had she let Liv get so far away?

This Liv didn’t listen to her, and the one whose hand she was holding was trying to get away, and – “I am not cut out to be the responsible friend,” Abigail muttered.  She shoved aside a clothing rack and hauled Liv in toward the fountain.

Dirty-Liv was naked, in the fountain, which was easily deep enough to serve as a bath, and she was staring at –

At Liv.

“Fuck.” Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall: Cozy and Clean?

Sep27

Liv-clean opened the door and peeked inside.  “I think we’re still in the same world,” she murmured.  “And I don’t think it has anything to do with Beavers, but I think – well, come on.  I think it’s a store.”

“A store.”  Dirty-Liv grumbled.  “If it involves clowns, knives, or fish, I’m going the other way.”

Abigail was with her on that one.  “Let’s peek?”

They ducked in through the doorway and looked around.  It was – well, it really did look like a store would look, if it were inside several trees all at once.  There were large branches stuck out from the walls at strange angles holding clothing on hangers, and in the front was a desk like a register.

“Hello?” Abigail called out, at a loud whisper.  “Hello?”

“There’s dust everywhere,” Liv pointed out.  “Half the malls we’ve been to have been abandoned.  This one looks – a little less recently abandoned, maybe?  I can get clothes that fit.  Even if I do want a shower.”

“There’s a fountain back here,” Clean-Liv called.  “We could all clean up.  And maybe leave something for payment.  I mean, I guess we could just take things.  It’s not shoplifting if they’re not coming back, is it?”

“Cleaning up sounds great.”  Even if Abigail was still wearing her normal clothes, she still felt like she’d – well, fought an army and waded through an ocean in them.  “Is there any food?”

“Would it be safe to eat, if there were?”  Dirty-Liv sounded worried.  “We gave in to eating after a while, but I never have figured out if it was safe.”

“Well, you’re… you’re still alive, right, and it didn’t make you sick?” Abigail offered.  

“But what if it was like Persephone and the pomegranate and I’m stuck?  We never did find a door that opened into anything like normalcy.”  They could hear splashing from the other side of the small store, where Liv’s voice was occasionally obscured.

“Well… then you’re probably stuck, now, but we could find a nice, cozy mall to settle down in if it comes to it?  I don’t want to.”  She held up both her hands, stopped as she remembered she was still holding on to a Liv, and shook her head.  “Not that I WANT to stay in the mall.  I want to go home.  We all want to go home.  But maybe – well, maybe we should start thinking about a Plan B?”

“So far,” Liv-Dirty pointed out, “we haven’t seen anything like a nice or cozy place since the first weird one.  Not unless you count this, and I’m not really sure this counts as cozy yet.  We’d have to see if there’s sharks or bears or something first.  Come on back here, you two, there’s plenty of room.  And Liv, grab some clothes in your size.”

“You’re not actually my size anymore.   I know the clothes hide it, but you’ve lost a lot of weight.”  Liv picked up a couple handfuls of clothes and handed a couple to Abigail.

“I want to be happy about it, but believe me, you do not want the Mall Hopping Weight Loss Plan.  Come on back, the water’s – oh.”

🌲🌳🌲

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The Hidden Mall: Into the Woods

Sep15

“If we see a faun,” Abigil muttered, “I’m running away.  Just so you know.  All right, so, we’re going to go…”  She consulted her mental map.  “This way.”  She jutted her chin. “And we’re going to go quietly, Liv-one, because Liv-two is right.  It’s snowing.  We want to move quietly.  Liv-two, we need to deal with that wound, okay?  Snow tracks are bad enough, but you’re trailing blood.  And we want to move fast, because we’re going to freeze to death if we don’t move.”

They took a hurried moment, Abigail holding tightly to Liv-one’s hand, while Liv-two cleaned up her wound – a scrape high on her leg – and tied it with half of the scarf Abigail had used.  She cut the scarf with a long, nasty knife – Abigail didn’t ask where she’d gotten it.  She wasn’t sure she wanted to know how long that Liv had been in the malls. Or, for that matter, where Abigail-two had gotten to.

And then they hiked.  They were moving in a mostly-straight line, not because Abigail thought it was a good idea, but because the trees were way too dense to move through otherwise.  Once, when she thought she saw an opening, the trees seemed to shift, and the opening was gone.

The only positive, as far as she could tell, was that the snow was falling fast enough that their tracks were obscured.  There was no wind, either, which was a blessing of sorts.  

She was still pretty sure they were going to freeze to death.  Wherever they were didn’t seem to have doors, didn’t even seem to be a mall.

“Hunh.”  Dirty-Liv stopped and frowned. “Did you see that?”

“S-s-s-ee what?” Clean-Liv was clinging close to Abigail.

“Oh, come on, if I’m not that cold, neither are you.  Did you see something moving in the trees?”

“There’s no room for anything to move,” Clean-Liv complained.  “It’s all packed together like – hunh.”  She frowned at the trees.  “Abigail, do you see that?”

“What?”  Abigail hated the way she wanted to snap at her friend, and the way her heart sank at Liv’s did-you-see.

“There, between the trees, or maybe in the trees.”

“Don’t tell me it’s a beaver,” Dirty-Liv groaned.

“No, but it’s, look.”

They looked.

Abigail frowned.  

It was a doorway.  In a tree.  It was a little small – all of them would have to duck – but it was definitely a doorway.

“Well,” Abigail muttered, “at least it’ll get us out of the snow.”  She tilted her head.  “Go ahead and open it, I guess.”

🌲🌳🌲

 
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The Hidden Mall: Blood, Thicker Than

Sep5

There was blood everywhere.  Abigail fell down onto the floor and yanked off her cardigan, wrapping it around her ankle quickly.  Too late, she realized she’d let go of both Livs.

“Liv-” she called, but the dirty one was chasing after the clean one, leaving a trail of blood behind her, too.

Somewhere in her bag she had something better for this than a sweater she’d actually been fond of.  She dug through her bag one-handed, holding pressure on the wound with the other hand.  There.  The scarf wasn’t the best thing, but that and the Kleenex and she had a bandage of sorts.   She pressed the Kleenex against the wound until the blood seemed to slow, then checked. Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall Fourteen: Books and Bad Decisions

Aug28

🏬🛍️

Abigail pulled her feet back with a yelp. “Okay, okay we need higher ground. Come on, maybe this one has a food court on the second floor. We can climb on a table.”

She hadn’t even gotten the words out when the cleaner Liv was tugging her – not towards the food court but up onto a bench. “Here. This should get us out of the water for a minute. And we can see the map from here.” She pointed at the dim map, no longer lit-up from within but still showing proudly things like the food court. “I still feel like if we could just get into Rue 21, maybe we could find our way back to the first mall. And if we could find that, maybe they could help us find our way home. One home, all the homes. Anything.”

“The first mall?” asked dirty-Liv sharply. “You don’t mean the place with that awful store that bought regrets, do you? Urrgh. Something about that place was just creepy. Made my skin crawl. And then there was that bookstore…” Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall Part XII: Rescue

Aug19

Liv was shooting Rick distrustful glances the entire way, but Abigail couldn’t quite say she blamed her. Rick was a bully, after all – or, at least, their Rick was, and she had noticed Rick hadn’t protested that he’d never throw them into a fountain or anything like that.

Still, he seemed to be leading them fairly. This mall, too, was different from the one back home – all the stores were slightly different, the doors were in all the wrong places, and the food court looked downright creepy. Abigail’s stomach reminded her pointedly that it had been quite a while since lunch, but she had no interest in the food from those very plastic-looking stands.

Was any place at all safe to eat from? Even if they made it back home, was she ever going to feel like she could eat again? She licked her lips. As long as she didn’t come upon any pomegranates, she figured she might be safe.

“Almost there,” Rick grunted. “Now, as long as we don’t-”

Too late, of course. Since this whole thing was already ridiculous. A crowd of plastic people walked around the corner and took up a stance way too much like dance-fighting for Abigail’s tastes.

“Through that door,” Rick muttered. He was pointed as surreptitiously as someone his size could over at the jewelry story (Jay Jewelry) and a door hidden just behind the counter. “I’ll do what I can.”

He was a linebacker. He could do quite it a bit, it turned out, against people with slow reaction times and stiffened joints. Abigail tugged Liv through the little black door before the Jay Jewelry woman (And she didn’t look any more plastic than they normally looked!) could stop them.

There was a plastic-looking person -very plastic, this time, not the sort of stiff-looking almost-human of the ones out in front – sitting behind – no, as part of a console that looked like something out of a 1980’s computer movie. The person had six arms, and all of them were attached to some sort of keyboard. They were moving very slowly, but all six arms were doing something.

“We’ve gone from Narnia into Dr. Who,” Abigail muttered. “Okay, mister plastic. Stop it now. Let the people go- what?” Liv had pulled away from her and skittered under the console. “Liv!”

“Got it!” Liv yanked on a long series of cords and suddenly everything went dark.

“Shit, shit. Okay, come on. Let’s get out of here before everything goes even stranger than it is.” She reached for Liv, grabbed a hand, and pulled.

“Abigail?” Someone took her other hand.
“Liv? Are you holding my hand?”

“I am, yeah.” That came from both sides.

“I- all right. Let’s go. Now. One of you find a door.”

“Wait, what, one of-” both of them said it at once.

“I am going to – no, just grab any hands you can, find a door, and let’s get out of here.”

If she ended up with three or four of Liv, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do. Maybe not have to explain to Liv’s mom if she lost one along the way. “I hope one of you is actually my Liv.”

“Wait, what?” said the voice on her left. “Got it!” said the voice on her right.

She was going to take that. “Door?”

“Here.” A sliver of light appeared. “Let’s go.”

Still holding on to both hands, Abigail plunged through the doorway.

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The Hidden Mall Thirteen: Deep Water

Aug15

🏬🛍️

Abigail noticed her feet touching water before her vision cleared. She was seeing spots, spots everywhere, then bright shining streaks of light.

Both hands clenched tightly. Hopefully, one of those people was “her” Liv. The other one, well, some other Abigail was probably looking for her.

Rick had said – he’d said something about Abigail and Liv doing something. Which meant that in a world with another Rick there was also another Abigail and so on.

She didn’t want to think about that in the context of the creepy-clown-factory mall. Continue reading →

The Hidden Mall Part XI: The Narnia Thing

Jul31

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
Part X
🏬🛍️

Well, what were they going to do? She took Rick by the arm and steered him with them, leading him towards their escape. “If this is a trick…” she muttered. She didn’t finish the sentence, because she wasn’t quite sure what she’d do if it was a trick. She had one hand on Liv, one on plastic-Rick, and they were in a mall full of plastic people.

They walked as stiffly as they could towards a back door, Rick getting stiffer and stiffer the closer they got. By the time Liv pulled the door open, Liv being the one with a free hand, Abigail practically had to drag Rick into the behind-hallway.

Here it was bright and shiny, no grey, no bare wiring, nothing. It was as if the mall continued into the behind-space, which made Abigail more than a little concerned. “Sit down,” she told Rick. He sat, stiffly, the way her dolls had sat, their legs sticking out. She looked at the back of his neck.

There it was, just inside his hairline, a tiny little thing that looked plastic. Abigail dug in her purse until she found her tweezers.
She didn’t need to tell Rick to hold still; he wasn’t moving at all. Still, she was careful as she pulled out the little thing.
Rick twitched, shuddered, and fell over, his whole body shaking with spasms.
He was making such a scene Abigail almost missed Liv trying to sneak off. She grabbed her friend by the arm. “So. Do we try to rescue other people here?”

Liv twitched. “I want to see the beavers!”

“Liv, first things first, okay? First. There are people here who are stuck with these things in their necks. Do we try to take them out, do we find the source of the problem, or do we go for a doorway and not worry about them?”

“This place ins’t real anyway!” Liv tried to pull away. “I want to go back to the nice place, with the bookstore!”

“I want to go back, too, Liv.” Abigail tried to sound patient. She wasn’t feeling very patient. “But, first. This place. Plastic people. Do we help them?”

That seemed, finally, to get through. Liv looked at Rick, who had stopped twitching and was trying to sit up. “What if he was, uh, special? Too stubborn or something?’
“Thanks,” Rick snarled, and then paused, staring at them. “Wait. I saw you. You were like the rest of us. And then you went off…”
“I don’t want to know,” Abigail put in quickly. “I really don’t. That wasn’t us, or, at least, it was a different us. There’s passageways, uh, behind the mall, and we’re just trying to get back home. It’s a long story. Anyway, CAN we help people? Do you think?”
“I think I have to try,” he mumbled. “It was my girlfriend who got us into this. Well, I thought she was my girlfriend. I guess she was as plastic as all the rest of them.” He made a face. “So I can help, yeah. Come on, I know where the controller station is. And you have those tweezers.”
“What about going home?” Liv complained. “What about the Beavers?”
“We’ll get there, Liv. But – this is the Narnia thing to do, right?”
Rick laughed. “Nerds,” he laughed, and then, more gently, and a little surprised. “Hunh. That’s why you helped me. Nerds.” This time he said it with affection.

“Nerds,” Abigail agreed, not so much tired as resigned. “That’s us, Rick. Come on, let’s find the White Witch and destroy her.”

Live considered that, looked over at Rick, made a face, and nodded. “It’s the nerd thing to do. Rick, if you shove me into a fountain again, I’m feeding you to the evil clowns.”

“Evil clowns?” He actually looked worried. “I thought the plastic people was bad enough. There’s evil clowns, too?”

“Different mall,” Abigail explained. “Come on. We still have to get back home before Liv’s mother picks us up, and that’s a long way away by any measure.”

“You nerds are weird,” Rick complained. “Come on, this way. I’ll get you in.”
🎒🏦

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The Hidden Mall part X: Plastic Bullies

Jul24

🏬🛍️

It turned out that plastic versions of their high school crushes did not run all that fast. That was quite a relief, because the real Greg was on the track team and the real Kevin was on swim team.

The problem, however, was that there were other people in the mall – other plastic people, smiling and fake and too-well-dressed – and they didn’t seem to like the idea of a disturbance.

Say, the sort of disturbance caused by two mussed-up, not-plastic girls running through the mall.

Soon they were being chased by fifteen of the things – Abigail refused to think of them as people – their feet moving almost-silently and none of them making a sound. Nobody grunted or panted or, well, anything.
“Did we land in the Stepford Mall?” she couldn’t help but ask.

“Less talking more running – here!” Liv dragged Abigail towards the escalators.

“This is no time for being lazy, Liv!”

“No, I have an idea. Remember that time when the mall was almost empty? Here, run. Faster.”
Liv aimed them at the down escalator, and up they ran, skipping steps. Behind them, the plastic people lined up to take the up escalator, like good plastic citizens of the mall.

“Brilliant, Liv.” There would be more people up above, probably, but maybe they could act sufficiently plastic to pass muster.

They stiffened up at the top of the escalator and put on blank, plastic smiles. Abigail thought of her most critical great-uncle and the smile she gave him when he wouldn’t shut up. Together, they made it past three groups of plastic people.

Then, suddenly, someone was grabbing at Abigail’s wrist and at her shirt. She stiffened. It was – oh, no, it was Rick Fancy, the biggest, most obnoxious jock in school.

His stiff smile moved, just a little. “Help…” The word was a wheeze, like he could barely talk. “..me.”

Abigail stared at him. Next to her, Liv was tugging on her arm.

“How?” Abigail asked softly. There was another set of plastics coming down the hallway.

He fumbled at his neck, but couldn’t seem to reach whatever it was he was going for. Some sort of controller? Then the other plastics were up to them.

Abigail managed the biggest, fakest laugh she had ever pulled up and patted Rick on the arm. “That’s funny. Funny Rick.”

None of the other plastics had talked, but it was so … well, Barbie-like that it seemed to be close enough. The plastics turned and walked away stiffly.
🎒🏦

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