Horrorstor: A Novel Read online

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  eBook ISBN: 978-1-59474-727-4

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59474-526-3

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  01: Brooka

  02: Drittsëkk

  03: Arsle

  04: Liripip

  05: Müskk

  06: Kjërring

  07: Wanweird

  08: Frånjk

  09: Mesonxic

  10: Hügga

  11: Bodavest

  12: Alboterk

  13: Kraanjk

  14: Jodlöpp

  15: Littabod

  16: Ingalutt

  17: Gurnë

  Epilög

  About the Author

  It was dawn, and the zombies were stumbling through the parking lot, streaming toward the massive beige box at the far end. Later they’d be resurrected by megadoses of Starbucks, but for now they were the barely living dead. Their causes of death differed: hangovers, nightmares, strung out from epic online gaming sessions, circadian rhythms broken by late-night TV, children who couldn’t stop crying, neighbors partying till 4 a.m., broken hearts, unpaid bills, roads not taken, sick dogs, deployed daughters, ailing parents, midnight ice cream binges.

  But every morning, five days a week (seven during the holidays), they dragged themselves here, to the one thing in their lives that never changed, the one thing they could count on come rain, or shine, or dead pets, or divorce: work.

  Orsk was the all-American furniture superstore in Scandinavian drag, offering well-designed lifestyles at below-Ikea prices, and its forward-thinking slogan promised “a better life for the everyone.” Especially for Orsk shareholders, who trekked to company headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, every year to hear how their chain of Ikea knockoff stores was earning big returns. Orsk promised customers “the everything they needed” in the every phase of their lives, from Balsak cradles to Gutevol rocking chairs. The only thing it didn’t offer was coffins. Yet.

  Orsk was an enormous heart pumping 318 partners—228 full-time, 90 part-time—through its ventricles in a ceaseless circular flow. Every morning, floor partners poured in to swipe their IDs, power up their computers, and help customers size the perfect Knäbble cabinets, find the most comfortable Müskk beds, and source exactly the right Lågniå water glasses. Every afternoon, replenishment partners flowed in and restocked the Self-Service Warehouse, pulled the picks, refilled the impulse bins, and hauled pallets onto the Market Floor. It was a perfect system, precision-engineered to offer optimal retail functionality in all 112 Orsk locations across North America and in its thirty-eight locations around the world.

  But on the first Thursday of June at 7:30 a.m., at Orsk Location #00108 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, this well-calibrated system came grinding to a halt.

  The trouble started when the card reader next to the employee entrance gave up the ghost. Store partners arrived and piled up against the door in a confused chaotic crowd, helplessly waving their IDs over the scanner until Basil, the deputy store manager, appeared and directed them all to go around the side of the building to the customer entrance.

  Customers entered Orsk through a towering two-story glass atrium and ascended an escalator to the second floor, where they began a walk of the labyrinthine Showroom floor designed to expose them to the Orsk lifestyle in the optimal manner, as determined by an army of interior designers, architects, and retail consultants. Only here was yet another problem: the escalator was running down instead of up. Floor partners shoved their way into the atrium and came to a baffled halt, unsure what to do next. IT partners jammed up behind them, followed by a swarm of postsales partners, HR partners, and cart partners. Soon they were all packed in butt to gut and spilling out the double doors.

  Amy spotted the human traffic jam from across the parking lot as she power-walked toward the crowd, a soggy cup of coffee leaking in one hand.

  “Not now,” she thought. “Not today.”

  She’d bought the coffee cup at the Speedway three weeks ago because it promised unlimited free refills and Amy needed to stretch her $1.49 as far as it would go. This was as far as it went. As she stared in dismay at the mass of partners, the bottom of her cup finally gave up and let go, dumping coffee all over her sne
akers. Amy didn’t even notice. She knew that a crowd meant a problem, and a problem meant a manager, and this early in the day a manager meant Basil. She could not let Basil see her. Today she had to be Basil Invisible.

  Matt lurked on the edge of the semicircle, dressed in his usual black hoodie. He was glumly eating an Egg McMuffin and squinting painfully in the morning sun.

  “What happened?” Amy asked.

  “They can’t open the prison, so we can’t do our time,” he said, picking crumbs from his enormous hipster beard.

  “What about the employee entrance?”

  “Busted.”

  “So how do we clock in?”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” Matt said, trying to suck a strand of cheese off the mass of hair surrounding his mouth. “There’s nothing waiting inside but retail slavery, endless exploitation, and personal subjugation to the whims of our corporate overlords.”

  If Amy squinted, she could dimly see Basil’s tall, gawky silhouette through the front windows, trying to direct the human traffic jam by waving his spaghetti-noodle arms in the air. Getting even this close to him sent a cold bolt of fear through her stomach, but his back was turned. Maybe she had a chance.

  “Good thoughts, Matt,” she said.

  Seizing her moment, Amy ninjaed her way through the crowd, ducking behind backs, stepping on toes, and slipping into open spaces. She entered the atrium and was immediately enveloped in the soothing embrace of Orsk—where it was always the perfect temperature, where the rooms were always perfectly lit, where the piped-in music was always the perfect volume, where it was always perfectly calm. But this morning the air had an edge to it, the faint scent of something rancid.

  “I didn’t think this escalator could run in reverse,” Basil was saying to an operations partner who was pounding on the emergency stop button to no effect. “Is this even mechanically possible?”

  Amy didn’t stick around to find out. Her sole objective for the day—and for the next several days—was to avoid Basil at all costs. As long as he didn’t see her, she reasoned, he couldn’t fire her.

  The Cuyahoga store had been operational for just eleven months, but it was already an open secret that it was falling short of corporate sales expectations. The failure wasn’t due to a lack of customers. On weekends especially, the Showroom and Market Floor were packed with families, couples, retirees, people with nowhere else to go, college kids and their roommates, new families with their new babies, grim-faced couples buying their first sofas … a legion of potential customers, clutching maps, bags stuffed with lists of model numbers written on sticky notes, with torn-out pages from the Orsk catalog, credit cards burning holes in their pockets, all of them ready to spend.

  Yet for some inexplicable reason, sales weren’t hitting projections.

  Amy had transferred to Cuyahoga from the Youngstown store fifty miles away. Initially she was okay with the move; she lived halfway between the two locations, and her commute hadn’t changed. But after eleven months in Cuyahoga, she’d had enough. She filed a transfer request to get back to Youngstown, and now the computers at Orsk Regional were chewing over the paperwork. Help was on the way, if only she could last a few more days.

  The problem was Basil, the newly appointed deputy store manager. A tall black guy with perfect posture and dry-cleaned work shirts, he’d been targeting Amy ever since his promotion. He was always coming into her shop to second-guess her decisions and offer advice she didn’t want. She knew he was building an HR case against her, accumulating a long list of missteps and failures. When the staff cuts came—and everyone knew cuts were coming; you could sense a weird sort of tension in the air—Amy knew she would be at the top of Basil’s list.

  So she was on her best behavior while her transfer request made its way through the system. She arrived on time every day. She smiled at customers and didn’t blink at last-minute schedule changes. She made sure her uniform (beige polo shirt, blue jeans, Chuck Taylor sneakers) was impeccable. She fought her natural tendency to talk back. And, most important, she steered clear of Basil, determined to stay off his radar.

  With a high-pitched mechanical scream and the shredding of gears, the escalator came to a halt, then reversed direction. Basil tried to pat the operations partner on the back, while the operations partner tried to high-five Basil. The result was awkward.

  “Way to live the ethos, man!” Basil cheered, clapping a few times.

  Then the crowd of floor partners funneled onto the slotted steps, ascending to the second-floor Showroom.

  Rather than follow everyone and walk right past Basil, Amy decided to go the long way. Defying the intentions of an entire think tank of retail psychologists, she walked backward through Orsk, starting at the rear (the checkout registers) and moving clockwise through its entire digestive tract toward its mouth (the Showroom entrance at the top of the escalator). Orsk was designed to move customers counterclockwise, keeping them in a state of retail hypnosis. Going the opposite way felt like walking through a carnival spookhouse with all the lights turned on: the effect was ruined.

  She ran past the registers and down the massive central aisle of the Self-Service Warehouse, with its soaring fifty-foot ceilings and towers of shelves. Flat-packed furniture rose up on tiers of industrial shelving, disappearing into the misty distance down endless gray rows. A bleak, prefabricated city built of cardboard and fourteen-gauge steel, the warehouse loomed over her for forty-one belittling aisles before she reached the sudden drop in ceiling height that marked the border crossing onto the Market Floor.

  She rushed through the perfumed air of Home Decorations and its crates of scented candles, sped past the bland-tastic art of Wall Decorations, and pushed through the swinging-door shortcut that teleported her from the bulb-warmed air of the Lighting Gallery into Tableware, where she reached the staircase leading up to the Showroom.

  Taking the steps two at a time, she surfaced next to the café on the Showroom floor. The Showroom was the centerpiece of the Orsk experience—an ocean of furniture awash with room displays staged to look like real homes decorated with Orsk furniture (all available for purchase in the Self-Service Warehouse downstairs). Amy zipped through Children’s, heading for a shortcut between departments, when she noticed someone staring at her and skidded to a halt.

  A man was standing in the distance, up near the Magog bunk beds, and even from far away Amy knew he wasn’t a store partner. Orsk employees came in four different colors: floor partners in beige shirts, replenishment partners in orange shirts, operations partners in brown shirts, and trainees in red shirts. The man staring at Amy was dressed in dark blue. He didn’t belong. He might have been a customer who sneaked in early.

  But before she could investigate, the man turned and darted into Wardrobes. Amy just shrugged—whoever he was, he wasn’t her problem.

  Staying away from Basil until her transfer came through—that was her problem.

  She took the shortcut into Storage Solutions, picked her way through several rows of Tawse and Ficcaro storage combinations, and finally emerged in the lowlands of Home Office, a shop populated with nothing but desks. Basil stood waiting next to the information post that Amy called home, with six trainees in red shirts clustered behind him.

  “Good morning, Amy,” he said. “I need you to take these trainees on the main aisle walk.”

  “I’d love to,” Amy said, smiling so hard her face hurt. “But yesterday Pat asked me to floor-check inventory.”

  “I need you to take these trainees on the main aisle walk,” Basil repeated. “Someone else can do the floor check.”

  Amy was about to protest further—something about Basil compelled her to argue with every word that came out of his mouth—when her cell phone unleashed a shrill Woody Woodpecker laugh, informing her that she’d received a text message. Basil watched in disbelief as she fumbled the phone out of her pocket.

  “Of course,” Basil announced to the trainees, “Amy knows that partners are never permitted
to bring their phones onto the Showroom floor.”

  “It’s another help message,” she explained, showing him the phone’s screen.

  A few weeks earlier, several floor partners had started receiving one-word texts reading help from the same private number. Proliferating like rabbits, the texts came pouring in at all hours, and they were freaking people out. Corporate claimed that IT was powerless to address the issue since it was technically not Orsk related. They advised partners to block the offending number or consult with their service providers. Amy had tried both suggestions, but the occasional help still slipped through.

  “All partners must leave their phones in their lockers,” Basil said, letting the full force of his disapproval fall on Amy like a rock. “Where Amy should have left hers before she clocked in.”

  That’s when Amy realized she hadn’t clocked in—she was essentially working for free until she could sneak back to the time clock and swipe her ID. She didn’t dare mention this now, not with Basil already riding her case. Amy would honor the first commandment of keeping her job: Do not look like an idiot in front of anyone who can fire you.

  “All right, everybody,” she said, forcing a smile for Basil and controlling her panic. “My name is Amy and this is the Showroom floor. This is where every new customer begins their relationship with Orsk, so it’s where we’ll start, too. The store is 220,000 square feet, and our customers navigate the floor plan using the Bright and Shining Path.” She pointed to a series of big friendly white arrows on the floor. “It’s designed to take a customer from entrance to checkout in the optimal manner. There are shortcuts throughout the store, and I’ll show you those when we get to them.”

  Amy had given this speech so many times, she was barely paying attention. Instead she was thinking about Basil and all the reasons she disliked him. It wasn’t because he was three years younger and five promotions ahead of her. And it wasn’t that he was skinny and geeky, all shoulder blades and elbows, a taller Urkel from Family Matters. And it wasn’t the endless stream of phony inspirational corporate-speak that flowed out of him all day long. No—Amy’s problem with Basil was that he acted like he felt sorry for her, like she was his charity case, like she required extra attention, and that made her want to punch him in the face.