The Store

The building is what is referred to as pueblo style, with adobe walls and a domed roof. It does not seem at all to belong in this run-down residential neighborhood populated almost entirely by carelessly tended mobile homes planted in the middle of untended overgrown patches of weedy lawns.

There is no signpost standing beside the building, nor awning over the front door. Rather, THE STORE is painted directly above the glass door itself in tall uneven black letters.

Don’t ask me what it is that possesses me to walk up to that glass door and pull it open. I can’t tell you. The only thought running through my mind is that this looks like a place better avoided, and I can feel a thin trickle of sweat running down the back of my neck as I lay my hand on the nondescript pewter handle. Yet something compels me to enter all the same.

“Welcome to The Store,” the young lady behind the front counter greets me. She gives me a wide smile that displays far too many teeth. The pupils of her yellow eyes are vertical, like those of a cat.

The smile I give her in return feels weak and shaky.

The store itself, as far as I can tell, reveals nothing out of the ordinary. It appears to be some kind of secondhand shop like Good Will or The Salvation Army. There are rows upon rows of clothing racks filled mostly with items that no one would actually wear by choice unless they were blind, desperate, or possessed the fashion sense of a stereotypical tourist.

One of the overhead florescent lights is flickering and stuttering. I glare up at it with one hand shading my eyes as though my displeasure will convince it to behave itself.

Hanging from her feet by the struggling florescent, over-sized leathery wings like those of a bat folded around her body, is what appears to be a middle-aged woman. Her eyes are closed and she appears to be sleeping.

I attempt to make as little noise as possible as I hurry beneath, not wanting to wake her.

At the end of the aisle a man stands with his back to me, pawing through a bin of hats. When he senses me behind him and turns in my direction I find myself wondering in bemused horror what he could possibly want with a hat. He doesn’t have a head.

I turn and flee back in the direction of the front door, disturbing the sleeping bat woman thing in the process. She opens crimson eyes and swoops down from the ceiling, shrieking as she reaches for me with human fingers tipped with inhuman claws.

Grabbing at the pewter handle of the door I find it locked. Of course it is. Neither pushing nor pulling will budge it.

The toothy cashier, the bat creature and the headless man are advancing upon me with jerky motions. They look absurdly like characters in an early and badly executed stop motion film yet they manage nonetheless to turn the blood in my veins to ice water as I struggle futilely to force the door open and escape.

I feel nothing but gratitude when the irritating beep of my bedside alarm clock pulls me out of my nightmare.

My hand is trembling slightly as I reach over to silence the clock. I’ve had weird dreams before, sure. Everyone does from time to time. But this is the third time this week I’ve woken up to this particular dream.

After a long shower and breakfast I retire to the living room to watch a little TV before I have to go in to work.

I didn’t ask for the 3:00-11:00 shift. In fact I hate it, but being the newest hire at Domino’s, I guess it makes sense that they’d shove the shit shift off on me. I have every intention of asking to be switched to an earlier shift once I’ve worked there for a year or so, provided that the boss continues to be impressed with my performance.

The day starts with a delivery to one of our regular customers, who orders a large sausage and black olive pizza almost every day. As usual, she is so stoned by the time her pizza arrives that she has completely forgotten placing the order and is delighted when I show up at her door with one. Delighted enough to leave me a ten dollar tip.

The day’s deliveries go pretty much as usual. The customers are, for the most part, satisfied. There are one or two complaints that the pizzas weren’t delivered fast enough, accompanied by paltry or nonexistent tips. I guess some people expect their pizzas to be delivered in flying cars that aren’t required to obey traffic laws.

I knock on the stained glass door of an expensive looking three story house. It is answered in a moment or two by a youngish man still dressed in his office clothes with his tie loosened about his neck.

He offers me a friendly smile when I hand the pizza box to him and lifts the lid to inspect the pie, nodding his satisfaction.

“Is that the pizza?” A young boy, maybe seven or eight, barrels down the stairs and tugs on his father’s arm until he lowers the box enough for the child to see. “Yuck, there’s onions on it!”

The young man gives me a little grimace which I answer with a sympathetic eye-roll. Kids.

“Don’t tip him, Dad, there’s onions on it,” the boy complains when his father hands me the payment plus an extra five dollar bill.

As I head back down the walkway and the door swings shut behind me I catch his father’s admonishment that onions can be picked off.

I buckle myself into the company car with the plastic pizza delivery sign on top and drive back to Domino’s for a fresh bunch of pizzas.

“Hey, Flash,” Donnie greets me as I approach the counter. In the three weeks I’ve been employed here my coworkers have slapped the nickname ‘Flash’ on me by virtue of my name being Barry. I wonder how those customers who complained that I wasn’t able to get their pizzas to them in a timely enough manner would feel about that.

I pick up the stack of five or six boxes sitting on the counter and frown slightly at the addresses on the tickets.

“This isn’t one of the neighborhoods I usually cover.”

“Well, nah, but Wolverine called out today so we need you to pick up his deliveries.” ‘Wolverine’s real name is, of course, Logan. In case you’re wondering, no, not everyone in the pizza parlor has been given superhero nicknames. Just the two of us who actually happen to share a first name with well-known superheros.

Following the car’s GPS unit, I find myself in a neighborhood a good ten or twelve miles outside of my accustomed delivery route.

This seems to be a less affluent neighborhood, populated almost entirely by carelessly tended mobile homes planted in the middle of untended overgrown patches of weedy lawns. The uncanny resemblance to the neighborhood of my reoccurring nightmare causes little shivers to dance up and down my spine as though someone has just dumped a bucket of ice water down the back of my shirt.

Don’t be dumb, Barry, I chastise myself. Just deliver the pizzas.

By eight ‘o’ clock I have offloaded the last of my deliveries and am just about to pull the car out to return to the pizza parlor when a structure that has no right to be sitting in the middle of a residential neighborhood catches my eye.

No.

The building is what is referred to as pueblo style, with adobe walls and a domed roof. There is no signpost standing beside it, nor awning over the front door. Rather, THE STORE is painted directly above the glass door itself in tall uneven black letters.

With a shaking hand I turn the engine off and pull the key out of the ignition. As I push the driver’s side door open and step out of the car my brain is screaming at me to sit back down behind the wheel and get the hell out of here. But I can’t. I have to see. I have to prove to myself that this is nothing but an ordinary, if oddly located, clothing store.

I force myself to pull the front glass door open.

“Welcome to The Store,” the cat-eyed young lady behind the front counter greets me. In my dream her teeth had been normal looking despite the fact that there had been five or six dozen of them crammed into her mouth, but now I see that they are long and thin, like a mouthful of hypodermic needles.

Again, my brain is screaming at me to turn and run. But my body won’t listen.

I don’t want to glance up at the flickering florescent light directly above me, dreading what I may or may not see hanging from it.

She is there, sleeping. The leather-winged bat woman creature.

Down at the end of the aisle the headless man has abandoned his search for a hat to wear on the stump of his neck and is instead blindly running his fingers over a hideous denim vest studded with rhinestones. He turns in my direction and raises one hand to offer me a friendly wave.

I turn and run back for the front door.

My hurried passage below disturbs the bat-thing’s sleep. She cracks open lazy red eyes and emits a disgruntled mutter, but does not abandon her perch to attack me.

Unlike my dream, I find that the front door swings open with nary a protest when I shove at it with trembling, sweat-slicked palms.

“Good night, Barry,” the fanged cashier calls after me in a voice that reminds me of a coffin lid swinging open on its hinges as the door closes slowly at my back. “We’ll see you in your dreams.”