Dorothy

Susan didn’t quite know what to think when she heard about something called the Shop of Horrors. It could be grotesque. Blood, guts, vital organs. Or creepy. Snakes, rats, maggots. Either way, the squat, pale yellow building on the right side of the road as she traveled north on Route 153 didn’t look too inviting. Somehow, it looked less like a place she wanted to stop in the daytime than at night. At least the broken neon sign that sputtered lights around the words Shop of Horrors in an uneven square were a jolly pink color.

Still, Susan didn’t want to stop. But her beater of a salt-logged, rust-bucket car had other ideas. The engine coughed and sputtered as she accelerated up 153, ramp to the Spaulding Turnpike on the left. The shoulder in front of the yellow building’s lot was not wide enough so Susan was forced to ease the car down the driveway. It stopped moving dead center of the U-shaped drive.

“This can’t be happening,” Susan said to the emptiness inside the car. It wasn’t that she was afraid, despite the pink light hiccupping through her car from the sign above. Susan was more concerned with her ability to get home at a reasonable time and then the need to get back to Dover for work the next day. Those burgers weren’t going to flip themselves, after all.

She glanced towards the highway. It was after midnight, but Susan wasn’t sure exactly what time. The beater hadn’t come with a dash clock and she hadn’t left Dairy Queen until eleven thirty. Susan leaned over the passenger seat and began rifling through her purse where her dinosaur of a cell phone was located. It wasn’t even cool enough to be a flip phone back in its day. It was white with black buttons set in a long, narrow plastic case. Her remote phone, as her sometimes boyfriend still called it.

Because of its cumbersome size and shape, the phone wasn’t hard to locate even in nothing but the pink light and even though it was on the bottom of the bag. Once she wrapped her hand around the cold plastic, Susan removed it from her purse and straightened up in her chair. She checked to make sure the beater’s doors were still locked—they were—and then spun her head around at the driveway, the shop, and the highway to make sure she was still alone—she was.

Susan sighed and took a deep breath. Her sometimes boyfriend, Roland, had warned her on numerous occasions that the beater was just going to quit one day. He couldn’t even fathom how it passed state inspection year after year. Susan didn’t know much about cars but the beater did start up every time she needed it to, so she figured that was fine.

Unlike her phone. Which Susan tried to turn on now with no success. No amount of holding the power button in would make the remote phone turn on. It wasn’t that she left it on at work all day. The thing was just old enough that quietly sleeping in power-off mode was enough to drain the battery.

Now I’m stranded, Susan thought, chucking the remote phone back into her purse. There were plenty of houses up and down 153 from where she was stuck but she didn’t think people would take too kindly to her banging on their doors at midnight. After midnight. Maybe close to one o’clock. Susan really had no way to be sure now.

And then there was a gas station south a bit at the traffic light where she had turned onto 153. The lights had all been off when she went by so it would not have been worth walking back for.

The pink neon lights sputtered above her, momentarily casting her vehicle in complete darkness, before resuming their merry little trek around the words Shop of Horrors. Susan turned to look at the building. The pale yellowness of it seemed to glow under the moonlight. Snow was stuck halfway down its roof as though it was melting under the light of the sun and then refroze before breaking off. Massive icicles as thick as Susan’s arms hung down past that from the eaves. She didn’t even remember the last time it had really rained, or snowed for that matter. This side of the building had no windows, not even on the red door. People used red doors as an accent to their white house all around New England, Susan had noticed in her short time there, but this was a pale red, a sun-faded red, that she didn’t think was put there for that purpose.

I can just go in quickly, borrow the phone, and come right back out, Susan thought. Even if she had to just have Roland come pick her up and abandon the beater there. Roland would come, even though he wasn’t her boyfriend at the moment. She still lived in the one-bedroom garden apartment in the basement of his house. It was only about twenty minutes away from where she was now. By car. But, still, Susan could walk if it was absolutely necessary.

Headlights illuminated a car driving south on Route 16 to Susan’s left. It was slowing down in anticipation of the stop light somewhere in its near future. If there was more traffic, Susan would consider flagging someone down. If there was more traffic and it was daylight out. She had no idea what kind of person would stop at this time of night. It must’ve been close to one or even after one then.

Gathering up her purse, Susan unlocked the driver’s door and climbed out of the car. Her face was instantly hit by the cold air. Thankfully there was no wind. Wind went right through her blue and black Dairy Queen uniform. Despite the cold, Susan lingered by her car, hiking her purse up on her shoulder. She gazed at the pale yellow building over the roof of her car.

Come on, Susan, you can do this, she told herself. It’s going to be grotesque and creepy. You can handle grotesque and creepy. You do every day at work.

Susan started towards the building, less because of her personal pep talk and more because it was too damn cold to continue standing around. Roland had told her, too, that she needed to buy herself some real winter jackets and boots and maybe some of those undergarment things now that Susan was living in New Hampshire. Maybe that was why they were no longer going out. Because Roland was too bossy, particularly about how Susan should spend her money. But, then, he did seem to be trying to look out for her. Which was probably why she’d agree to go out with him again sometimes.

She just hoped he was awake. Roland usually had no idea what time it was either. Every clock in his house was haphazardly set to a different, random time. Only one of them was accurate. Susan still had trouble remembering which one it was. If Roland didn’t answer, Susan didn’t know who else to call.

When she approached the sun-faded red door, Susan noticed that it was already cracked open. She got the distinct feeling that she had been being watched. It wasn’t like the beater was a quiet car on a regular day but it had made quite a lot of noise before dying outright just now. Glad she didn’t have to grab the door handle, Susan kicked the door opened farther with her ice cream splattered shoe.

The room was lit from the floor instead of the traditional model of ceiling lights. The light seemed to creep up around the edges of empty shelving units, corners of the room, and the counter that had an old-style cash register on it. It wasn’t normal white or yellow light either. It was blue, like electric blue or artificial flavoring blue.

Susan had to pause in the doorway, feeling the floor sticking to the bottoms of her shoes, while her eyes adjusted to the din. Her grip tightened on her purse. So far, there was nothing grotesque. But Susan gave the shop a point for being creepy. It seemed vacant, even though the lights were spinning on the sign outside in a welcoming manner. They were usually off when Susan drove by early in the morning, which she had always taken to mean the shop was closed.

No one was standing behind the cash register so Susan started scanning around the interior of the room with her eyes. She didn’t want to leave the safety of an easy escape. There was no evidence of a person anywhere.

“Hello?” Susan called, taking a hesitant step into the room. She could feel her hair brushing the low ceiling. Susan was a short woman by all accounts so it startled her that the ceiling was so close.

Something made a scratching sound in the far right corner of the room. Susan heard a car pass close by on the highway outside, probably right on 153 and not on 16 then. A missed opportunity. One of her purse straps slid down the top of her arm. Susan hiked it up before starting towards the back right corner.

“Hello?” she said again, a little louder this time.

“How may I help you, dearest?” a scratchy voice said from behind her.

Susan spun around, purse sliding down again from the effort. An old woman, hunched to a head shorter than Susan, stood between her and the door. Her face was angled downwards, square, wire-rimmed glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose, so that Susan was staring at her liver-spotted head through its sparse covering of blue hair.

“I, uh,” Susan started, barely able to hear herself over the sound of her pulse thumping in her own ears. “My car broke down in your lot. I was wondering if I can borrow your phone?”

The woman made a tsking sound with her tongue even as she nodded her head. “The phone is for paying customers, dearest,” she said. From what Susan could see of her face, it looked like the woman was barely moving her mouth.

Definitely topping the charts on the creep factor, Susan thought if only to give her mind something concrete to focus on. She glanced over her shoulder at the empty shelving units. “What kind of thing…do you sell?” she asked. When she turned her head back around, the old woman was no longer standing there. Susan shouldn’t have been surprised, considering she hadn’t heard the woman’s initial approach.

She turned again towards the counter. The old woman was just shuffling into a position directly behind the cash register. “Nightmares, dearest,” the old woman said.

Susan began to back up. “I have enough of those, thanks,” she said quickly, trying to be polite but also trying to get out now.

She turned just as the door slammed closed. Somehow, with the door closed, it was even colder in the building than it had been outside. Susan took a few quick steps towards the door and grabbed the handle, uncaring about the possible grime on it for the moment. Impossibly, the door was locked.

“Now, now, dearest, you can never have too much of a good thing,” the old woman said. “We just received a new shipment.”

Susan turned back around, pressing her back to the door as she did so. It seemed wrong to have her back to the old woman and the interior of her shop. Susan wasn’t such a big fan of horror movies, or movies in general, which was another point of contention in her and Roland’s sometimes relationship.

“Come see Dorothy, dearest, she has just the right thing for you,” the old woman said. She patted the countertop with a meaty hand.

“Really, I was just on my way out,” Susan said. She had a passing thought that the woman could see her Dairy Queen shirt and wished for once that she had let Roland talk her into getting that jacket.

“But you just got here, dearest,” the old woman said. She stepped straight through the counter. “And Dorothy likes company.”

Susan was unable to tell if Dorothy was the old woman’s name or something else entirely. She really didn’t want to find out and had even less interest in ghosts. Roland believed in them but Susan did not. That didn’t explain why this old woman had passed right through the counter. Her feet didn’t seem to make any sound as she shuffled forward either.

If Susan wasn’t terrified of letting the old woman come any closer, she would’ve hung around the door to search the ceiling for a projector. But since the old woman was determinedly shuffling towards her and the door had been quite locked, Susan beelined towards the right-hand side of the store. She had a brief moment of remembrance of the scratching sound but she really hadn’t heard it since she had first come in and, besides, the old woman seemed to be the more immediate concern.

“Come now, dearest, Dorothy doesn’t like it when you run,” the old woman said. She changed direction so that she was continuing towards Susan. “Dorothy doesn’t care for sweat.”

“Will you let me leave if I just buy a nightmare?” Susan asked. She had lived through her nightmares before. They weren’t that scary. And besides, nightmares weren’t real. Whatever was happening in the Shop of Horrors right in front of her face was perfectly real. Forget using the phone. She’d just buy a nightmare and walk out. And then not stop walking until she had made it to Roland’s house. Maybe he’d even let her stay on his couch if she told him what happened.

“Come now, dearest,” the old woman said. She passed right through one of the shelving units. “No one leaves Dorothy.”

Susan started inching along the wall, going towards the back right corner and putting more distance between the old woman and herself. The room was wider than she had thought. Rows upon rows of empty shelving units filled the floor space in front of her and the counter spanned the whole length of the wall opposite her. Dust and cobwebs lingered over the space and something that looked like broken glass littered the floor. Susan was thankful for her slip resistant rubber shoes.

One of the shelving units had toppled over some unnamed length of time ago. Its side boards sagged as the top leaned against a neighboring unit. Susan’s right shoulder hit the wall of the corner as she studied the broken-down unit. Somehow she had crossed the width of the room. The old woman was nowhere to be seen and now Susan could hear that sound again. It was louder but not quite loud enough that it seemed to be originating from the place where Susan now stood.

It was a rattling sound, not a scratching sound, she realized. Almost like the noise loose chain links made when they clicked together. Pressing her back into the corner, Susan swept her gaze around the building and the places she could see. The shelving units blocked up most of her view from this angle. The strap of her purse slid down her arm again. Susan took that as an invitation to try out the remote phone again. Maybe the battery wasn’t actually dead and the phone was just being finicky. The phone did that sometimes but usually it would just randomly turn off out of nowhere and not stay powered off even when there was charge in the battery.

The rattling continued as Susan dug and dug in her purse. She had thrown the phone back in. She knew she had. But each time she dove her hand into bag, she couldn’t seem to find it. Susan moved the bag around to the front of her body to physically look inside. Desperation made her spend entirely too many seconds focusing her gaze solely on the purse.

“Dorothy,” the old woman’s voice said, seeming to come from above Susan.

She looked sharply up, stilling her hand in her purse. The only thing above her was a filthy ceiling tile. Now that she was looking at it, Susan saw that the ceiling was one of those drop tile ones like what had been in her dorm room while in college. The boys in her dorm had made a game of pushing the tiles up and hiding things like drugs and booze in them. There had been about a foot and a half of space between the drop tiles and the real ceiling behind them. Susan wondered if that was the case here and if there was any possibility of someone—or something—crawling out of the tiles.

“Doooooorooooooothy,” the voice said as Susan resumed her frantic purse diving. She was so close to turning the thing upside down and pouring the contents all over the floor in front of herself. Not that it would do her any good. The phone had already proven itself dead.

The blue floor lights winked out, plunging Susan into complete blackness. Definitely not worth emptying her purse over. She wished she had agreed to carry that flashlight Roland had bought her for her birthday last year. Aside from being a terrible idea for a birthday present, it was heavy and decorated with pink camouflage that Susan didn’t care for. But, of course, Roland had been right again.

Susan swung the purse back onto her shoulder. She began to run blindly back the way she had come. That path she knew had been clear at least until she got to the wall on the other end. Susan knew she was supposed to sweep her feet out from her body in a crescent shape in this kind of situation, testing the ground and searching for obstacles, but she was too panicked to care. Her free hand would do, dangling in the air in front of her body. So long as what she was running into was chest height, Susan’s hand would find it first.

The lights flashed on.

The wall on the other side was no closer to Susan than it had been before. She glanced over her shoulder. The wall she started at was only two inches from her face. It was like she had been running on a giant hamster wheel.

The lights flashed off again as Susan whipped back around to run again. Probably going nowhere again. But Susan didn’t care. She couldn’t just stand there in the dark, waiting for something to happen.

“Dorothy doesn’t like sweat,” the old woman’s voice said again. Her figure, glowing white/blue from within, appeared on the path before Susan. Her body flickered like the candle of a flame before vanishing again. It eerily reminded Susan of a level on the original Donkey Kong Country game for the Super Nintendo. Roland didn’t care for classic video games.

Susan ran harder. Each time her feet slapped the concrete floor, pain seared up her legs. It hurt so much that it even pulsed behind her eyelids.

You know what this is? Susan thought. I’m sleeping. I never left the Dairy Queen parking lot. Roland is calling me to know where I’m at but I can’t hear it because I’m asleep so deep that this nightmare actually hurts.

Something crashed. The light flickered on and flickered off. It hadn’t illuminated the room long enough for Susan to have seen what had crashed. She stopped running and was breathing hard, panting, even sweating. The rattling had stopped at some point but Susan couldn’t say when.

“Dorothy.” This time it came out like a growl. Something halfway between the old woman’s voice and what a dog would sound like if they could talk.

Swallowing, Susan managed to control her breathing and shoved her back against the wall again. The sound of heavy breathing continued, though, from somewhere in the darkness in front of her.

The lights flicked on.

A large black shadow blocked Susan’s path not ten feet away, about where the old woman had been standing before

The lights went out.

She pulled her purse off her shoulder, holding the bag between her and whatever that thing had been. Susan could hear its breathing like a dog’s labored panting.

“Dorothy is here,” the old woman’s voice said, somehow sounding normal again.

The floor scratched. The chains rattled. Susan screamed and ducked her head under the bag, folding herself to the cold floor.

The lights flickered on, then off, on, then off. The shadow was getting closer with each pulsation. Until it was looming over Susan, hot and moist breath on her cheeks. She could see all of its pointy teeth and its lolling tongue the next time the lights flickered on.

This was the part where she was supposed to wake up. Even Susan’s nightmares had never killed her. She would keep running well beyond a normal human’s limit. She would see the bullet coming at her in slow motion but never feel its bite. She would see the starlight glint off a hooded attacker’s dagger seconds before it stabbed her throat but she never tasted the blood. Susan always woke up. Always.

Until now.

***

Kim was driving south on 153. It was getting to be close to ten o’clock at night but she was on her way to work at her new job. Kim worked the night shift. She had been working the night shift since graduating high school. It wasn’t like she minded working the night shift. Her roommate, who was really her older sister, had a thing or two to say about it though.

As Kim began slowing her car down, turn signal on to pull up the ramp that connected 153 to Route 16, flashing pink neon on the left-hand side of the road caught her eye. A lopsided square of pink neon bulbs was flashing on a low hanging sign in front of a long, squat, pale yellow building. The sign announced the building as the Shop of Horrors.

Kim checked the clock on her car’s dashboard and immediately changed direction, not caring that the car behind her honked when she turned left instead of right as her turn signal indicated. She had a little bit of time to kill and Kim was into the eclectic anyway. It was a fact that made her sister, Claire, hate going grocery shopping with her. Kim made them stop at every strange shop on the way there and all the weird boutiques on the way back. Even though they had grown up in southern New Hampshire and these shops never change. So said Claire, anyway.

Having never driven down this far on 153, Kim had never known the Shop of Horrors existed. It didn’t have much in the way of a parking lot so Kim parked directly in the middle of its U-shaped driveway. She removed her keys from the ignition and climbed out. The building was cute in a creepy way and made Kim smile. Grabbing her clutch purse off the dashboard, Kim closed the car door and approached the shop’s pinkish door.

It opened easily enough and Kim immediately noticed that the ceiling height was not designed to fit someone of her stature comfortably. She ducked her head and hunched her shoulders down as she stepped into the shop’s calming blue light. It was pouring out from the bottom of the shelves and the counter and all along the edge of the room. The building was at once colder than it had been on the outside.

As Kim’s eyes adjusted, she approached the nearest unit of shelving. She had no idea what kind of goods to expect at a place called Shop of Horrors. Or even one as nondescript as this one was from the outside. Already she knew that it was a place that Claire would not enjoy, even though Claire was the shorter of the two.

The shelves directly in front of Kim were empty. She swore she could even make out a thick layer of undisturbed dust on their surfaces. Kim took a step back and instead went to the left of the building, where she had seen a checkout counter. A short woman was standing behind an old school cash register, the kind that likely only accepted paper and not plastic. The woman looked out of place because she was wearing a Dairy Queen employee’s polo shirt and a large tattered purse on one shoulder.

“How may I help you, dearest?” the woman asked.