plaza

My name is Arthur Hinds. I’ve spent my whole life in a small town called Leybridge, on the eastern coast of England. Leybridge was popular with domestic tourists half a century ago and possessed a thriving port, but it is now a shadow of it’s former self. Time has hollowed it out. The jobs have gone, along with most of the former residents. Those who remain here now are the ones too poor or stupid to get out when they had the opportunity. I know how I might sound when I say these things, but I’m not bitter. Our situation isn’t special in any way. There are many places like Leybridge in this country, places forgotten by the powers that be, left to slowly moulder and collapse under the weight of their own history. And we have a lot of history round here. Some of it is the usual stuff, the folklore you can find everywhere. Petty jealousies, doomed love affairs, money owed, money stolen. All part of the rich tapestry of life in a dying town. But then there are other tales, too. Ones you’re less likely to overhear in the pub, except perhaps in the final hours of the night when everyone has drunk themselves sober and the darkness outside the windows seems to press against the glass. Those stories tend to revolve around the old King Plaza shopping centre. You can still see the burnt-out shell of it today, perched on the reclaimed floodplains near the motorway outside of town.

Several decades ago, I took my first job at King Plaza as a cleaner. Back then it was still being touted as a fresh start for the area, a much-needed source of investment that would turn all of our fortunes around. And to be fair, business was indeed booming for a while. Every weekend, the concourse would fill with out-of-towners looking to buy the latest brands of clothes or consumer electronics. Even those who couldn’t spare the funds would flock just to admire the glittering displays that changed every season, or to sit before the enormous fountain that lay in the central courtyard of the building, walkways criss-crossing above it like a spider’s web. The good times didn’t last long, however. Another shopping centre, a larger and more glamorous destination, opened up just a few towns over. It siphoned away the money and the visitors from King Plaza so completely, and at such speed, that nobody could prepare for it. Soon entire rows of storefronts were being shuttered, and the empty halls became a magnet for less savoury members of the local community. More than once I found used needles in the bathrooms and blood smeared on the stalls. Public opinion soured on the place, calling it an eyesore. The local papers who had called King Plaza a golden opportunity now proclaimed it should be either regenerated or torn down.

Maybe the decline could still have been reversed at that point, but then all that stuff happened with the boys. I wasn’t there, but I got called in the morning after to clean up, after the police had finished. It was bad. Really…really bad. Dean Taggart was twelve years old, and Michael Smith was thirteen. They were known to the local authorities as small time troublemakers, usually found near the scene of a tagged-up park bench or a burning heap of refuse. A pair of aspiring vandals already on the path to institutionalisation in some form or another. Not that they deserved it. God, no. Somehow they’d managed to hide in a stairwell until King Plaza had closed for the day. Usually a guard was supposed to check during their hourly sweeps of the place, but I heard the man on shift that night, a fellow called Stuart Brays, had been asleep in his office the entire time. At least until he heard the crash. No doubt those boys had wanted to spray-paint their aliases on the glass panels of the walkways above the fountain, a prime spot where everybody would be forced to admire their handiwork, before escaping under cover of darkness. What happened next was a…freak…accident. Everyone agreed. Who could have known that the steel cables suspending those walkways had been installed improperly, no doubt subcontracted out in some cost-cutting exercise? Who could have known that their tensile strength had been already pushed to the limit for months on end? As the cables snapped, flipping the walkway nearly upside-down in a heartbeat, one struck Michael across the neck and another struck Dean across his arms and chest, before disgorging both them thirty feet above the dried-out fountain basin. It’s possible that one or both of them survived for a little while afterwards. Only a little while. Stuart Brays quit before he was fired, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out all of our days were numbered from that moment on. Sure enough, I was let go the week after, along with the rest of the facilities team.

What was curious was that there was no press release from the owners in the wake of the accident. No interviews, no media blitz, no acknowledgement whatsoever from them of what had happened on their watch. People were furious, but there was nobody to pin the blame on, only a web of disparate connections that stretched out into the ether far beyond our town. It turned out King Plaza was run by a holding group with one of those meaningless names like ‘United Services Solutions’, a shell company within a shell company, totally faceless. We all assumed that whoever they were, they were money men through and through. They would take brutally rational action, based upon whatever their PR team or balance sheets compelled of them. What we didn’t know at the time was that King Plaza was not owned by rational people.

Even as plywood panels were being nailed down over the broken and paint-scarred windows of the building, fliers advertising a grand reopening of the shopping plaza were appearing on every lamppost and phone-box in Leybridge. People thought it was the work of pranksters, some tasteless joke, but they kept coming no matter how many we tore down. Lurid posters, the kind you’d see advertising a funfair, sprung up alongside the highway as you approached the town, one every twenty metres, promising UNHEARD OF DEALS and THE BIGGEST SAVINGS to everyone who showed up on the fateful day in question. The only issue was that the date was unreadable, a mess of multiple overlapping numbers that were blotted further into unintelligibility by the constant autumn rains. That was just the beginning, as the tactics deployed on behalf of King Plaza grew increasingly bizarre. Some might say unhinged. Clusters of balloons bearing their logo were found in the most incongruous of places, tied to tall tree limbs or bobbing at the bottom of drainage ditches, where they would steadily deflate and wither away entirely. There were even a few ad slots bought on the local radio, where a robotic text-to-speech voice promised us that the wait would soon be over. Those were pulled pretty quickly. Unsurprisingly, all kinds of rumours abounded. People didn’t like the business, not one bit. Why us? Hadn’t our community been through enough? And then there were the mascots.

I had to drive past the sealed-up box of King Plaza every day to get to my new job – I was a cleaner at the new shopping centre, in fact – and one morning I saw them waiting by the side of the road. A pack of mascots, presumingly bussed in from god-knows-where to the King Plaza car park, like some madman’s idea of a flash mob. They were there all hours of the day. In fact, I never actually saw them leave from that spot. Their costumes ran the gamut from minor sports teams to breakfast cereals. The only thing they all had in common was that every single one was sagging, water-stained and crusted with filth, as if their owners had been sleeping in them on the streets for months, if not years. Anyway. When the lights at the junction turned red, they would jump the barrier and swarm between the cars to do some kind of…dance routine, I guess you’d call it, although there wasn’t any music. Then as the traffic began to crawl again, they would all jog back and clamber into the parking lot. The first few commutes I managed to squeeze through unscathed, but then one morning the light stopped winking amber just as I’d reached the front of the line. Before I could react the mascots were all over my car. Some were dancing, and by that I mean swaying back and forth listlessly, but I distinctly remember one, a shapeless electric-blue bear, walking up to my vehicle and pounding on my bonnet with two big fists. I honked at it and it stopped and wandered off, as if it were suddenly bored of the game. Another one I saw in my rear view mirror, a tatty dark green…thing…a cactus, maybe? It was pacing through the ranks of cars and when it got to mine I heard the clunk of my locked door handle being tugged, hard. Just once, and then it glided away silently. I nearly got into a collision, I took off so quickly when the lights turned again. After I’d finished my shift tat night I couldn’t stop thinking about everything, and so I went to a pub in the town centre, just to be around others whiled I dulled my senses. I didn’t expect to bump into one of my ex-colleagues there. A guy called Marco Vintner, a local eccentric and self-professed amateur occultist. A technician by trade, he seemed to spend most of his time drinking at the grimiest venues in the town in a rough circuit. He covered his admittedly cheap lifestyle by providing A/V services for local events. Battle of the bands, the mayor’s speech at Christmas. That kind of thing. He’d spent some time at King Plaza hooking up the PA system and I’d had a few brief exchanges with him then because we both liked experimental music. He promised to hook me up with some of his material but I hadn’t seen him since. He asked me how I was doing, what was new with me, and we somehow got onto the topic of the weird stuff that had been happening recently. He didn’t say much, he just kept nodding and humming as I relayed everything, as if it all made perfect sense to him. When I got to the part about the mascots, he held up a hand to stop me. His eyes flicked up and to the right. I could tell he was thinking about how to say what came next. King Plaza is sick, he said. Not well. I asked him what he meant by that. You’ve felt it, he said. You know. I was about to argue with him, but his gaze was so intense in that moment I could only nod in the affirmative. We sat in silence for a while while we got steadily drunker, and eventually, he started again. He’d looked up the owners, that string of shell companies, and discovered they’d divested in the business as soon as the news broke about those boys. I asked him who was doing all those crazy stunts in that case. He looked very solemn, and then he told me it King Plaza itself. Now that it was empty it had started dreaming. That was the word he used. Dreaming. Dreaming new things into existence, to try and get us all to come back and wake it up properly. But it didn’t know what people wanted, because the dreams had been born out of lonely, fearful death.It could never know what we wanted, and that made it…dangerous. Not dangerous like a wild animal, he hastened to add. Dangerous like radiation. At this point I was keen to extricate myself from the conversation, for he was clearly not altogether there mentally. Inwardly I cursed myself for getting too friendly with him. Before I could think of an excuse, however, he got up to go to the bathroom and told me I shouldn’t worry, because he was going to fix matters. He was going to stop it dreaming. I didn’t see him again for quite some time after that. It appeared he’d dropped off the social radar entirely. When I asked about him at another pub a few weeks later, I was told he’d been there the other night, blackout drunk, claiming to be working on some project at his studio, which was a concrete shed that he rented off some old farmer in the middle of a field. Although I didn’t know him particularly well, I felt somehow responsible for whatever notions that had taken root in his disturbed mind. Eventually, I received a text message that I could only assume came from him. It said only ‘Friday night. Need your help.’ Unsure who I was replying to, I replied saying I had a shift and couldn’t make it. Which was true. It was only when I was driving back home in the earliest hours of Saturday morning that I remembered the message. King Plaza loomed on the horizon, backlit by browny-orange light pollution. As I drew closer my headlamps caught a glimmer on the other side of the barrier, in the car park. I slowed down. It was Marco Vintner’s bike, propped up against a shopping cart return station. I pulled over to take a look. That’s when I spotted across the asphalt that a section of the panelling on the west entranceway had been torn away, leaving a ragged hole big enough to stoop through into the darkness beyond.

The idea of going back inside distressed me, very much so, but I couldn’t just leave without investigating. What if Vintner had twisted his ankle in some pitch-black stairwell, or gotten trapped under a falling scaffold? There was no phone signal in the bowels of the building, a point that many visitors had complained about bitterly in the online reviews. And so I went back to my car to retrieve a torch before I crossed the lot. Most of the lights outside the building had been smashed, and so I stepped into near pitch-darkness as I approached. I got on my hands and knees and clambered inside. The first thing I noticed was that the dull roar of the highway had cut off completely. It was silent except for dripping water and a very distant buzz, one I felt as much as heard, like when you know a TV is on in another room. The dripping was coming from a collapsed section of the drop ceiling. It had left a slick patch of purplish mold on the floor. Little blooms of it studded the walls and clambered across storefronts, and more of it consumed some collapsing stacks of those handwritten posters that had been everywhere until recently. It was a surprise how relatively intact it all was, barring some superficial damage. Nobody had come to scavenge the place for copper, or even just to vandalise it beyond throwing up some tags. I guess that was further evidence of how completely the building had been shunned by the town. I followed a trail of collapsed cardboard boxes had been laid down to form a winding path through the complex. The graffiti and litter thinned out, then disappeared entirely. The previous visitors, probably kids or addicts, didn’t want to get too far in, and I didn’t blame them. I checked into the nearest units that hadn’t been closed as I walked. My torchbeam revealed more bare concrete, a few mannequin pieces scattered about. Then it caught on something bright red, with huge, pale eyeballs. I froze, until my brain caught up a half-second later and I realised what it was that I was looking at. One of those mascot costumes, puddled into a heap with ping-pong ball eyes resting on top, looking in different directions. I would have laughed if it hadn’t been so…incongruous. More were waiting for me as I went deeper, each in more nonsensical spots than the last. There was a purple one wedged in the crack between empty vending machines, a green one sprawled out on a bench, a yellow one pinned by the heavy shutters of a storefront as if caught halfway through crawling under them. Posed, obviously, but the impression they gave was that the inhabitants of those suits had all been…digested by them, all at once. I can’t tell you why I thought that.

I pushed deeper into the shopping centre until I reached the central courtyard. The glass ceiling had been covered with tape and cardboard, and only a few slivers allowed the night sky in. Directly beneath the skylight was the fountain. A pile of dessicated flowers and burnt-out candles stood at the lip of the cracked basin, alongside two big photographs of the boys. They hadn’t been a memorial service at the time. I remember turning away as soon as I saw them, as if to look further would invite something terrible into my life, something I wouldn’t be able to handle. Not far from there I found a maintenance door propped open with a cinder block. Those doors, which threaded throughout the complex, led to the stairwells, giving access to the basements and sub-basement under the building. That TV buzzing got louder as I approached, until I could pick out voices. The ebb and flow of them was all wrong. I stood at the top of the steps and listened for what felt like hours, until it twigged that I wasn’t listening to a conversation, or even someone talking to themselves, but some kind of recording. Eventually, I began to creep down, too confused to feel truly frightened.

I’d never gone down into the sub-basement when I worked there. There was no reason to, only if you needed to access the plumbing or electrical systems. It was much larger than I expected. My torch felt woefully inadequate at lighting up the furthest edges of the room, which was broken up by huge concrete pillars arranged every few metres. That weird sound grew clearer, and louder. It sounded like the same text-to-speech that had been played on the radio, but all cut-up and layered on top of itself so you couldn’t hear any one word, just a jumbled mush of syllables. And it was deafening. If that was playing next door to my house I’d be calling the police, that kind of loud. So loud I couldn’t think of anything else.

Then I noticed a pale shape at the very edge of my torch’s reach. A band of bright blue and a darker lump on one end. It was Vintner, lying halfway out of a children’s paddling pool, of all things, facing away from me. Next to him, right next to his head, was a tall speaker tied to a hand truck, blasting that awful noise. When I got close to him I could see he was fully clothed, but soaked through, and unconscious. First thing I did was yank the power cable out of the back of the speaker. Just so I could hear myself think.

“Vintner,” I said, crouching down and slapping his face. He was freezing, his skin spongy and clammy, and I wondered if he had hypothermia. I grabbed him under his armpits and pulled him out of the kiddy pool. At that he groaned and mumbled. He told me to wait. Wait, wait wait. I asked him if he was drunk, and he said yes, but that he needed to be. His voice was weak and slurring, barely audible. I said we were leaving, and he told me to turn the speaker back on. I laid him down and he immediately got on his hands and knees and retched, before he started crawling towards the power cable. That sound, he whispered, is the only thing stopping it from getting inside of us. It was when he said that that I suddenly grew aware of it, like catching movement in the corner of your eye. There was…a presence in there with us. Nothing had physically changed in our immediate environment. The basement remained empty except for us and the equipment Vintner had brought with him. But there was something squatting at the margins of my thoughts. I believed I was somehow sharing the inside of my head with another person. Or maybe not a person, but a thing. The sensation was…indescribable. It was so very, very heavy. Thankfully I was only exposed to it briefly, before Vintner started the speaker again and cranked up the volume to max. And then, with a strength that he summoned up from some final desperate reserves, he staggered to his feet, gripped my arm and led me to the stairwell.

I’m unsure what exactly would have happened if we hadn’t left in that moment, or if that discordant sound hadn’t pulled away from the presence bearing down upon my mind. The fragments and splinters of imagery and sensation it left in my skull still wake me, some nights, as if there was a residue or stain to it’s passing. A smell like a dry socket. A wasp nest filled with human eyes, staring down at us from a crack in the ceiling. Tumours suspended in black oil. My guess is that any further exposure, even a few minutes longer, would have driven me hopelessly insane. And then? Who can say what the thing in the sub-basement would have made me do, what humiliations and iniquities I would have perpetrated in it’s name to the wake it from it’s dream?

After the events of that night I fell out of contact with Vintner. He was angry when I left him outside King Plaza, having refused my offer to take a lift in my car. He told me I’d spoilt his plans, and that I’d put a lot of people at risk, and now he’d have to do it all himself. I stopped visiting my usual haunts and took on more shifts at work, returning home only to eat and sleep. I was trying to save enough money to move away from Leybridge, I told myself, but in retrospect I was avoiding him, even if I wasn’t conscious of the fact. Truthfully he scared me, a lot. Vintner didn’t message me again. From the stories I heard afterwards, his drinking got worse during that period. A lot worse. He grew increasingly erratic on the gigs he turned up to, if he even turned up at all. It got to the point where even his long-term business partners couldn’t stand working with him anymore. Some of them even mentioned the possibility that he was having a psychotic episode, given he the way he jumped and yelled at things nobody else could see. And then the stories just…stopped. He moved on from the area entirely, having burnt all his bridges and expended his meagre funds.

I looked him up a few years ago and found a Marco Vintner online that could have been him in the south of Scotland. I wrote him a letter, just in case, but I got no reply. It’s fine. It’s been a long time, and he doesn’t owe me anything. It’s just…I wanted to know what he saw, that night. I’ve come up with all kinds of theories in the intervening decades, some more plausible than others. Perhaps there was a gas leak. Perhaps the darkness and the noise shredded my nerves and whipped up some atavistic terrors hidden in my brainstem. Perhaps Vintner really did possess some form of gift, and there was something dreaming dark dreams far below the shopping centre. And that thing left him with invisible wounds, wounds that he could only distract himself from as they continued to burn and fester. I hope he arrived at some kind of peace, but I suspect the truth of his eventual fate is something altogether much quieter and sadder.