In the Strip Mall (Pt. 8)

Warren went back to browse and left Steve with Murdoch and Ezra to make sure the old hag didn’t try anything funny with him. All that shit she had been talking about weighed heavily on his mind. He thumbed through posters in the rack, Jim Morrison and N-Sync, Motley Crue and ‘Have a Day…’

It had been more than twenty minutes. Oh, well, it was always that way. Everyone just always went by their own time anyway. Everyone always totally disregarded watches. Time was time, meandering at its own rate. Maybe there was some credence to that spooky shit the old bitch was talking, about life and death and wandering men. Everyone he knew seemed to be trailing off somehow.

There was something unwholesome about Ezra, something of the quality he’d only experienced once before when he went to Domino’s to see about being a driver.

It was, like, the #1 Domino’s in the world. You could make decent money, as much as some suckers with PhDs in town. Since he liked Domino’s, he thought, heck, why not? He believed in the product, even though he knew it was shit.

However, they frightened him so much with their corporate spiel, that he couldn’t go back. In fact, after bearing witness to that, he decided corporate people were no longer people.

No, something happened to them. They were, like, normal people, but the world was too harsh with them, and it crushed them down to pinpoints and obliterated their souls. What was reared from the remains was all turned into monsters. It frightened him to think the same evil could be trying to eat his soul.

He could feel it, bristling out of the extremely tidy (to the extent that it was quite antiseptic) white, red, and blue interior, masking the asshole-pit of the kitchen, giant, backlit hyperreal pizza, and weirdly glowing wall-sized sigils, as unremarkably familiar and natural-seeming as trees and quartz outcroppings. He could feel it like a sick aura coming off the fat, friendly, Eastern European owner, Freddie — like invisible cactus skin.

The clinical edifice called to mind, for no apparent reason, a vision of the subterranean tunneling, the Worm hurtling along forgotten sewer-main concrete, toward his Satanic Magic, as the stuttering, queer manager made Warren feel like shit for missing two answers on the trainee pop-quiz. He wanted Warren to be ‘on’. He wanted him to get it right so they could work side-by-side, as buddies, like in WWI trenches. The storefront mock-up, the Worm, the queer stuttering manager, and Freddie: these were all parts of one amorphous, abstract monster, its lifeblood currency.

Warren felt the same prickly evil-like crystal clear spines emanating out of Ezra. Sarah still had his keys and wallet, he remembered, so they wouldn’t go anywhere until she was done. She wasn’t like most girls, though, at least, not most he had dated. She didn’t drag her feet. She pretty much knew what she wanted, and then, it was like in and out with her. Which was kind of odd, considering it had been more than twenty minutes.

Screams from the back room jump-started Warren into action. He ran through the veils. He found Steve frozen, fallen to his knees, vomiting all over himself.

Murdoch lay on the altar. There, the dark, tapestries wafting like curtains in the background, red velvets and purple satins and golden tassels and braided ropes and Persian rugs, as Ezra inserted a syringe into Murdoch’s forehead. She injected something into it. His skin was covered in some kind of scales. Some kind of horrible eczema had overtaken his skin.

His eyes were wide with pain. He would scream and scream and lose consciousness and then wake again and go on screaming. A grid of some sort had been drawn across his body. Bristling out from his skin at regular intervals along this grid, tufts of thick hair sprouted, needle-like. Ezra, Warren could be certain, had planted those there, or induced them to sprout out.

“His soul was impure,” Ezra said, turning to Warren. She held the hypodermic needle high like a wand. “Now, it’s mine.”

Warren grabbed Steve and hauled him out of the chamber. Once in the atrium of the shop, Steve floundered back to his feet and grabbed Warren’s sleeves. “What the fuck? You left him back there! You left him! Why did you fucking leave him! She’ll kill him!”

“I…” and at this Warren stumbled over his words. He could not think of what to say. The old woman was right, for some reason, he knew this, call it a gut feeling. She had eaten Murdoch’s soul. It was already too late. He felt the realization resound in his head like a stick striking a hollow wood block.

[Pt. 9 here → https://purevillainy.medium.com/in-the-strip-mall-pt-9-7e8d6706264f ]