I head home after therapy, not entirely certain I feel better or if I just feel different. Wrath is pacing in the front hall when I come in, looking unusually interested. “What took you so long today?”

  “I had therapy.”

  “And you went by yourself?”

  I shrug. “He’s weird but kind of harmless.”

  “Weird people are never harmless. They’re all secret assassins or cultists who know the secret name of the moon.”

  I give him a long look. “What’s going on with you?”

  “The maul thing,” he admits. Wrath walks into the drawing room and throws himself on the fainting couch. “That wasn’t a poltergeist. Or at least not a normal one. I think something else is going on there.”

  “Yeah, I had the same thought,” I admit. “I should probably call Grandpa Ghastly and we should head over there to maybe look around.” He’d given me his cell phone number before I left yesterday, although I’d been too nervous to even just text him.

  “Are you going to call Winter again?”

  I turn to him. “What’s going on with you and her? One minute you’re hot, the next you’re cold. I know you don’t like me having other friends, but it’s weird.”

  “She’s weird. She can see me. No one should be able to see me. Don’t you get what that means? There’s more to her than she’s told you.”

  “But she told me why she can see you.”

  “And you think it’s really that easy?” Wrath stretches like he just made the most savvy rebuttal in history.

  I roll my eyes and refuse to keep bickering with the big baby, instead walking into another room to call Ghastly. Pox is in the kitchen playing in his little playpen box with a scattering of loose screws, bolts, and other shiny objects I found around the house. He’s not quite as possessive as he was when we first brought him up rom the basements. I rub the cloth cover of his head as he throws one of the screws across the box and goes to chase it.

  Ghastly sounds pleased to hear from me and agrees to meet at Maulie’s later that afternoon. Before I go back to deal with Wrath, I arrange a ride from Rlyft. I’m sure the last time I was just overreacting. This time will definitely be better.

  I decide to leave Wrath at home again, taking advantage of some alone time before I head to the maul. It feels weird to do things without him, but something about the last couple of days has me pulling away. I’m not sure what it is, but I just feel like I need some space. It’s weird.

  The driver from Rlyft is a lot less disturbing this time around. Again they don’t talk to me, which is a welcome sort of thing, and again they seem to fade in and out of view, but I pull one of my textbooks from my bag and spend the time studying and before I know it, we’re pulling up to the kraken’s nest. Hollowmouth looks slightly more ominous in normal daylight, which is an interesting occurrence. It’s like the bluer the sky, the darker the windows at the front of the building.

  I head inside, now knowing exactly where I’m heading. Grandpa Ghastly is outside of Maulie’s, enjoying a cup of coffee as I walk up.

  “My boy, it’s good to see you. Glad to see the undesirables didn’t scare you away like my last two contractors.”

  I grin a little. His enthusiasm today is infectious. “Of course not. I promised to help.”

  “I’m not sure how much help you’ll be able to be,” he says, a hint of mourning in his tone, “but I know you survived the Hollow Roast and I have faith in you.”

  “I’m just going to look around, and see if I notice anything. Most often, there’s something where it’s not supposed to be. That’s what causes a whole lot of problems around here.”

  We head to the gate and he unlocks it, but when he goes to walk in with me, I block his way with my body. “I don’t want you to get hurt,” I say carefully. He looks offended, but I continue on, “You remember what happened at the Hollow Roast, right? I’m not saying it happened because I showed up, but a lot of times it seems like I’m the tripwire that sends things into overdrive. I don’t want to put you in any danger. Just let me look around, and that way, if anything goes wrong, I’m the only one in the line of fire.”

  “My boy, you can’t be serious. You think I’m going to let you go in there alone?”

  “I’m not alone,” I say confidentally, but it’s only after I get him to shut the gate that I realize I inadvertently lied. I’m usually never alone. I have Wrath with me. But for some reason, I left him behind today. Why would I do something like that? That’s foundational to my nature. It’s always Theo and Wrath. It’s never Theo on his own.

  What have I done?

  I don’t have time to think about it, though. As soon as the gate closes, it’s like the store knows I’m in here all alone and that my nerves are already on edge. Lights that were normally stable a moment ago now start to flicker erratically. There’s an odd smell, like something decaying in the walls. Items stocked on the shelves take on a more malevolent cast, faces normally smiling and happy now sinister and scheming. Out of the corner of my eyes even simple objects like nail files seems to drip with blood in the strange half-light of the store.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Maulie’s after dark is a different experience entirely, and I almost wonder if that’s by Grandpa Ghastly’s design. That would be impressive, a store that turns darker when the lights go out. He could cater to a whole different host of clientele with something like this.

  Or maybe, I reconsider as I pass a row of dolls that look particularly more bloodthirsty in the flickering lights, it would be catering to a new class of victims. There could be a draw for that too, I suppose.

  What am I looking for? Maulie? Or something else. I don’t know what I’m doing here. And I don’t know why I’m doing it without Wrath. I nothing else, he’d be here to tell me what I already know: this is a bad idea. But not helping Grandpa Ghastly seems like a worse idea.

  I look back to the entrance, but now it’s dark, as though the sun has completely set and the mall has shut down. Even though I know it’s only the afternoon, and Ghastly is outside, it adds to the ominous nature of what I’m doing.

  Nothing immediately jumps out at me, and that’s thankfully a literal observation. I walk the length of the storefront, but nothing seems out of the ordinary. The lights and the atmosphere are trying to freak me out, but it’s nowhere near Morecroft on a bad day. I’m glad Grandpa Ghastly showed me where the door to the back area was, because in the flickering lights I might not have noticed it. Nothing about the store is being obviously possessed, so I decide to check the back.

  Walking into the back hall, the same issue with the flickering lights continues, though when I opened the door the lights were fine. Whatever is going on is intent on following me. Or wants me to know that I’m the reason for its behavior, maybe.

  The office is dark, I pass it by. The stock room, though, has the flickering lights same as the hallway. Something wants me to go in there. I do so, interested if nothing else. “Let’s see what you have to say.”

  It’s a relatively large space of shelving units filled with boxes labeled with Maulie’s as the delivery address, and a ‘care of John Brown’ notice underneath. A few rows in and I see boxes that are visibly older, a thick layer of dust upon the top and sides of the shelves. These boxes are labeled to Antoinette Marshall. I’m guessing that was Maulie’s real name.

  At first glance there’s nothing out of the ordinary ordinary here. The lights continue to flicker, though, and a few times the flickering picks up in intensity, as though something is particularly eager to show something off to me. There is nothing obvious in the moment, though. Just boxes stacked on top of boxes. I walk to the end of a row, then turn a corner. The rows continue on. I keep walking, the lights continue to stutter. Piped in elevator music from the mall exterior comes in, but the longer I navigate the stock room, the more the music shifts.

  At first, it retains its jaunty, relaxed beats though over time a deeper percussion and somberness seems to leak into the sound. Eventually, like an infection, the music becomes somber and eerie, much more normal in a store as thematic as Maulie’s.

  “This is good. The clientele will love this,” I say out loud, realizing that I’m not speaking to whatever it is that’s making itself known inside the store. I don’t know if it’s an actual ghost, if it’s actually Maulie or not, but talking to it helps me think in some ways.

  Another intersection, and I turn back the way I was going initially. By now I feel like I should have walked at least most of the length or width of the stock room, but no walls have shown up. In fact, I look in all four directions, and I can’t see any walls at all. The shelves just move endlessly in each direction.

  “Now we’re talking.”

  My pace picks up and I start to hum along with the deathly dirge that has taken the place of the elevator music. Maybe this is more like crematorium music instead. If anything, the music calms me more than I think it’s intention. I trace my steps back to the beginning, and the door that should be there isn’t. Just more endless shelves.

  I glance at the stock, more out of curiosity than anything else. The labels have changed, becoming something much older. Instead of pre-printed stickers from a laser jet printer, now they look like something from the dot matrix era, on a sheet of paper that is taped to the surface.

  I wander a bit at random after that, knowing that where I go makes no difference. The room, or maybe the shelves, seem to realize that they’re not getting the effect out of me that they desire. Things continue to escalate. The rows start to become impossible large, towering over me. The boxes become more and more precarious, slanting and swaying from unnatural heights.

  I glance at a particular row of them again, only this time the labels have changed back, but instead of being addressed to Grandpa Ghastly, they’re addressed to me.

  Theo King, Morecroft Mausoleum, c/o Hollow Hills Crematorium. “When you want to get dusted, get Hollow dusted!”

  “I’d never be buried in the family mausoleum. I’m not family, just a caretaker. The Manor would never allow it.” I raise my voice a bit, hearing an echo as it travels through the now endless room. There’s no answer, just a noise that could either be a throaty chuckle or the air conditioning kicking on.

  I walk towards another intersection. The threat of overflowing boxes wasn’t doing the trick, so now the shelves are packed with items, bulging outwards. The path forward and backward becomes narrower and narrower until I have to squeeze through just to make it to an intersection where I can breathe normally.

  The normal antics weren’t working, however claustrophobia? That one works really well. I can feel the sweat pooling against my shirt, can feel the warmth of my skin. My breathing increases. All the items on a checklist of an upcoming panic attack.

  “Okay, okay, maybe we got off on the wrong foot,” I call out. “No need to make anyone uncomfortable. It’s perfectly normal to want a lot of empty space around you and not like it when objects or people start closing in. No reason we need to get personal.”

  The temperature in the room drops noticeably. What is happening? I’m giving it what it wants. I keep thinking of it like there’s a spirit behind this, but that still feels like the wrong deduction. I don’t know why. Maybe because the spirit Maulie was so different from the one in reality. Something could be posing as her, but it would abandon the costume fairly easily. If it was something targeting Ghastly directly, it wouldn’t be messing with me now. If it was any other kind of haunting, it wouldn’t stray from one location, but this happened out in the mall as well as in the store backroom.

  No, something more is going on here. And I don’t think I know enough to narrow it down just yet.

  Behind me I hear a door creak open slowly, and the low, demonic voice of Maulie say, “He carved an invitation with his grief. Soon, they’ll be together again…”