Not a big surprise

Your Christmas is Most Like: Miracle on 34th Street

Sweet and caring, Christmas is about helping for you. While Santa may not exist, you try to share his spirit.

What Movie Is Your Christmas Most Like?

More of the Mega Mall

Chapter 6
“Haven’t Seen You Around Much Lately.”

     He stared into the window for what seemed like minutes, but was really only seconds.
     Then he looked down at his hands. Or, where his hands should have been, since he was holding them out to be seen.
     Not a damn thing.
     No feet were visible down at the end of his non-existent legs, either.
     Well, this just about damn well did it.
     He would have called for a time out, but there were no referees anywhere nearby.
     The wouldn’t have seen him anyway.
     He looked around and saw nobody was left in the parking lot.
     All the lights were shining their melancholy blue-white light down on the asphalt, making circles now unbroken by cars or carts.
     A slight wind whistled through the space. He wondered if the wind was whistling through him too.
     Everything had taken on that half-light color that the lamps cast over the parking area.
     He felt in his pocket, and was glad that he felt things. He was here, it was just that he didn’t reflect light.
     He took out his key ring, and it was noisy, but invisible.
     He tried to put the key in the lock, but finding invisible keys and putting them into locks was more trouble than one would think.
     He had a couple of keys that were similar. These had a stripe of colored tape to identify them. Red was the outer door, blue the mall entrance, and green was the bathroom.
     Invisible tape is no help at all.
     Then, he dropped his keys.
     Oh, hell, how would you find them?
     He’d have to kick till he heard them jingle.
     But, when he looked down to the ground, there were his keys. Plane as day the red tape was on the topmost key.
     He reached down for the keys, and when he touched them, they were gone again.
     Before he could think anything about that, he heard the noise.
     Not the jangle of his keys, but something that sounded like children laughing.
     At the far corner of the mall he saw them.
     Tiny, naked children were pointing at him and laughing.
     They were emaciated like few children he had ever seen outside of those “send money” ads on TV.
     Then he realized something.
     They saw him!
     “Hey, you kids!” He yelled out as he started running in their direction.
     They stood up and watched for a moment. They didn’t seem scared.
     He looked down at the ground for a moment.
     That is a bad idea when you are trying to run, but you cannot see your feet.
     He took a header and fell flat on his face.
     The laughing began again.
     He immediately got up, but they were gone.
     He sat on the sidewalk, with his back to the wall.
     What the hell was going on?
     “Hey, what happened?” Came Molly’s voice.
     “We thought you were right behind us.”
     He looked up at the idling car with wife leaning out the window.
     He saw her see him, and smiled.
     He looked at his hands, and smiled.
     “You fall down?” Molly asked.
     “Just a little disoriented,” TD said.
     “Now are you going to meet us at home?” His wife asked.
     “Yeah, right home,” He told her.
     “Good, I’ll head out if you don’t need me.”
     “Molly?” He hesitantly questioned, “Is there any kind of nudist daycare place around here?”
     If he had allowed a flock of pigeons to fly out of his ears she might have looked more seriously at him.
     “That may be the strangest question you have asked me since Shannon was born.” She laughed.
     He laughed back.
     “Yeah, just a joke”
     “With the humor left out.”
     They both laughed.
     “I’ll be right home.”
     She drove away and he walked to his car, refusing to look back.
     Even though the laughing of the children echoed ever so faintly behind him.

What happens next?

Chapter 7
“Lack of Judgment Day”
     It was one of those nights we all have now and then.
     If he had slept, he hadn’t been aware of it.
     We usually have more of them as we grow older and unconsciously hold on to our waking moments more dearly.
     But, that wasn’t what he had been doing.
     He had begun to question a lot of things. Not the least of which was his sanity.
     When he reluctantly gave up on sleep, it was 5 am.
     He dragged himself out of bed and moved into the hallway, down the stairs and into the kitchen.
     He made himself some instant cocoa and sat in his chair.
     After listening to the grandfather clock tick off a couple of minutes he rose and went to his desk. He fumbled through a couple of drawers until he found the booklet he was looking for, and took it back to his chair.
     It was an informational pamphlet about the mall.
     All the merchants had been issued one of the booklets just before the place opened.
     It had a history of the area, and all the pertinent census of power, water and the like.
     He read through the history half expecting to find that the mall had been built over a ruined pyramid that held a dozen curses.
     There was no such notification in the pages in his hand. Not that this was the sort of stuff you wanted to put in this kind of publication.
     “Hurry and invest your money in a place that will swallow your soul while returning 12% on your upfront investment!”
     Not expecting that sort of free flow of information.
     No Native American history to be found, no Civil War battles, no famous people who lived or died here. The most important thing about the area was that the last Stagecoach stop on the Oregon trail was located a couple of miles from here.
     Oregon trail? Wouldn’t that be the Sante Fe trail, he wondered?
     Maybe they all came through here.
     He knew that Westport over in Kansas City was a general jumping off point, as well as Joplin a couple of hundred miles to the south in Missouri.
     Well, this was getting him nowhere.
     It was now 5:15am and he decided that he could go in early and get some inventory work done, as long as he was up anyway.
     Without making a sound he slipped into his room and took his clothes, came back to the living room and got dressed, and made it to his car without waking anyone.
     He knew he didn’t really have that much stock work to do, it was just to get back on the horse. He never wanted to find himself unnerved by having to walk into his own place.
     He turned on the radio and was treated to the regular stupidity of morning “comedy” radio.
     It was sad to him how being “Politically Incorrect” had become an excuse to be as crude and hateful as you could imagine, and call that funny.
     He flipped over to the news, but there was nothing new.
     He got some music from a CD he had of big band music, and things looked a little better.
     The sky in the north was bright red with the coming dawn.
     North?
     That was the direction of the mall.
     He crested the hill and saw an amazing sight.
     There was a swirling tornado of fire spiraling up from the mall and going hundreds of feet into the sky.
     It was like something Biblical. Red and yellow tongues of flame were licking the clouds themselves.
     He reached the parking lot, and stopped at the outermost edge.
     He dared not come any closer.
     He got out of his car and looked up, and yet could not see the top of the spiral of fire.
     Then he noticed something even more unusual.
     He reached back into the car and turned off the CD, just to be sure.
     There was no sound.
     In the distance he heard a few crickets, and a bird. But there was no sound of crackling flames.
     Other than itself, the fire was creating no light!
     He turned to look past himself and his car.
     There was no shadow cast by either.
     When he turned back to the fire, it was gone.
     Wait, he thought, didn’t I see light from the flames before I got here? Wasn’t the sky lit by the flames?
     Did that end when he got here?
     What the hell was all this?
     He walked to the building.
     A building that had been engulfed in flames seconds before. He reached out his hand to touch the door of his bar.
     It was cool to the touch.
     He turned his back to the door, slid down to the ground and sat.
     He was losing his mind.
     He sat there for at least another half hour without moving.
     Somehow he knew.
     Knew whatever was going to happen had just locked and loaded.
     He wished he had stayed in bed.

Chapter 8
“Chat du Chat”
     TD didn’t have much choice. What was there to do?
     He went about the day doing what was familiar. When things get outrageously insane, filling the time with the mundane seems to bring some sense of sanity back.
     He set up the bar, started the coffee, turned on the big screen television and waited for opening.
     All the time eaten up by preparation left him with about two and a half hours to wait.
     In about an hour the kitchen staff would start showing up.
     In another half hour the other shops would start coming to life.
     Right now, the place was nothing but quiet.
     He thought he might turn up the sound on the TV and listen to the news or something, but found himself unmotivated to get out of the booth.
     Maybe after he finished this first cup of java he would feel like doing something.
     He closed his eyes and thought he might fall asleep finally.
     From behind him he heard something.
     His eyes slammed open and he turned in the direction he thought the sound had come from, but nothing was there. Least of all the only animal he knew that would make that sound.
     There was no cat there.
     TD Jackson hated cats.
     Not because they were scary or anything, but because they were frauds.
     They were among the dumbest animals on the face of the Earth.
     But they were cunning.
     But cunning was just a justification for the heroic false face of opportunism. They did whatever presented itself, very quickly, so people thought they were smart.
     But the damn things had no strategy. They couldn’t think out a plan. They just waited for an opening and used it.
Many of the people at the top of the political ladder were the same.
     All rep, no ability.
     Dogs were nearly as stupid as cats, but at least they knew they were dummies. They made no bones about it.
     Cats allowed people to fawn on them, and because they did, cats thought they deserved it.
     Like the idol rich.
     Paris Hilton.
     TD had known people his whole life who had worked for everything they had gotten, and they were still treated as something less than acceptable.
     Cats licked their fur till they threw up, and the Egyptians made Gods out of them.
     TD hated cats.
     But there was no cat standing in the bar.
     But the sound had been of a cat, of that he was sure.
     Maybe it got away before he saw it.
     He got up and walked to the inside mall door, looked out and the coffee cup fell out of his hand.
     It shattered on the floor and he hardly noticed.
     His eyes couldn’t move from the image before them.
     On the mall concourse he saw thousands of cats. All striding about in complete confidence.
     Every surface was covered with cats.
     Walking cats, perching cats, preening cats, stretching cats, everywhere the eye could reach.
     And they were all jet black.
     When the cup hit the floor, they all looked at TD.
     He didn’t know why, but he opened the door to walk onto the concourse.
     When the door cracked open the cats vanished.
     The mall was empty once again, with the exception of TD Jackson, who was, to say the least, beginning to get mad.
     Somebody was screwing with him.
     At that moment, when his anger was about to turn to rage, he felt something touch his calf.
     He looked down to see a black cat rub its body against his leg, and then become a puff of smoke.
     The small cloud of black smoke wafted out into the mall and dissipated.
     The goose bumps on his legs were about the size of marbles.
     Then he heard some thing else.
     Skittering, jabbering fast animal sounds.
     With a dread inkling, he slammed his door shut, and locked it from within.
     A moment later he saw something no one should ever see.
     A wave of grey rats, no less that a foot long each, running over each others bodies and making a tide no less than four feet tall, turned the corner and slammed into his door.
     The faces of the rodents were smashed up against the door. They were all looking at him with their eyes bulging and their teeth gnawing.
     Even to the point that the crush of other rats began to crush them into something reddish grey and unrecognizable, the sound didn’t stop.
     It just added the squeal of the dying rats to it.
     Not the entirety of the door was plastered with them.
     He thought it might be about to burst open. Then, it began to bend. Like it was made of rubber, the glass door bowed at the middle and bent in towards TD.
     He stepped back and, for a moment, wondered just what he would do if this tide of hungry rodents got in?
     Then the phone rang.
     He thought in an insane second, “Maybe it’s the exterminator, wondering if they should come by!”
     When it rang a second time, it was the only sound.
     The rats were silent, no, the rats were gone.
     No sign they had ever been here.
     No blood, no fur, no damage was anywhere to be seen.
     With a reluctant curiosity he opened the door again.
     There was no sound or smell out there that shouldn’t be.
     He took a deep breath rather than pinching himself.
     Then, it happened again.
     The black cat brushed against his leg and vanished into the morning quiet.
     He was not aware of the phone ringing for a couple of more insistent rings.
     With a true feeling of disassociation, he entered the bar and walked to the phone.