Authors: Ramsey Campbell
Nigel's nerves almost jerk the plug out of his grasp before he manages to relax. "Just me trying to insert this."
"Not you for a change. Is it Agnes, Anyes, whoever?"
Nigel can't hear her. When he lifts his head to try, the rough underside of the desk claws at the back of his neck. He crouches lower and scrabbles at the socket with the prongs until they snag the triangle of holes. He thrusts them home so hard his shoulder redoubles its throbbing. As he extends a finger to the switch he mouths "Please" before pressing it down.
Dimness springs into view in front of him. Three wastebins stand guard near three plugs in sockets, while two further sockets are unattended even by plugs. He backs out from under the working surface, and a blurred distorted shape crawls after him: just his shadow. As he seizes the edge of the desk and hauls himself to his feet, Ray hurries across the lividly illuminated office to the stockroom door and opens it on blackness. "Agnes," he shouts, "was that you?"
Nigel is about to conclude that it wasn't when she answers. Perhaps she was deciding whether to respond to the mispronunciation of her name. "I'm in the lift. It's stuck."
Her shout is muffled and shrunken by distance. If the lift stopped when the power failed, Nigel wonders why she's appealing so belatedly for help. "I'll go to her while you see to the fuses, Ray," he offers. "Let's move the computers and spread some light around."
"Someone's coming in a minute, Agnes," Ray yells as Woody bellows "What's the situation now?"
"We can see and we're getting some more light," Angus tells him.
"That shouldn't take much time, should it?"
"I'd hope not," Nigel says without striving too hard to be audible as he turns to the desk. Now he understands why the dim glow that clings to everything in the office is grey as fog: the computer screen is. The icons on it look drained of all colour, in danger of losing their outlines and sinking into the depths. He's afraid that if he tries to improve its appearance the terminal may crash. Instead he moves along to his own computer. He's stooping to unplug it when he freezes in a crouch, and the throbbing of his shoulder is imitated by his skull. "Oh, for the love of—"
Ray pokes his greyish face out of the gloom next door. "What's up now, Nigel?"
Is he ensuring Woody hears? He's loud enough that Woody demands "Right, what is?"
Nigel isn't to blame. The holes between the desk and the wall are—holes just large enough for the wires from the computers to pass through. "We aren't going to be able to move these unless we take the plugs off."
"Who's got a screwdriver? I've not, have you?"
Nigel owns up to the lack and Angus gestures it while his ill-defined shadow wags its swollen hands behind him. As Nigel pulls out drawer after drawer under the work shelf Ray says "Better try switching them on."
Nigel presses the button on his computer and more viciously on Ray's. The greyness of the screens turns luminous, and two sets of icons bob sluggishly up. They look too tentative for Nigel's liking. "What's happened to the computers?" he's increasingly anxious to know.
"The main thing is they're lit up, isn't it?" says Ray. "I can stand how it is."
The office must be three times as well lit as previously. More to the point, the staffroom has grown brighter, and Nigel can even distinguish the faint outlines of racks in the stockroom. However difficult he may find the next few minutes, Agnes is in a far worse situation. How ashamed would he deserve to be if he neglected to help? "I'll have to," he tells the others and especially himself.
"Maybe I won't leave you in the dark too long."
Surely Ray is undertaking not to rather than saying he'll consider it. He props the stairway door open with a chair and leaves the staffroom at a trot before his footsteps start losing their momentum on their journey downwards. Nigel is tempted to wait until Ray arrives at the fuses or even deals with them, but that's too cowardly for him to bear. He hurries through the staffroom, past the table that looks coated with glimmering greyish plastic, into the stockroom.
The moment he steps through the doorway he's flanked by blocks of darkness that feel solid as earth. He can just distinguish the ends of the shelves they've buried, bony outlines the colour of fog at night and not much less inclined to shift. Perhaps being relieved of most of their stock has left the shelves more capable of movement; as he ventures between the next pair, whose edges resemble ash both in greyness and a tendency to crawl, they begin to jangle as though whatever contents they still hold are inching towards him. He tries to concentrate on seeing ahead, though there's a distraction in that part of the dark as well. The nearly shapeless blotch that's slithering along the aisle to beat him to his goal has to be his shadow, especially since it hesitates whenever he does, but he's surprised that he can even glimpse it in the suffocating dimness. He's unable to make out the third set of racks, but he knows by their stealthy jangling that he has passed between them.
Now that they're behind him he would expect them to stop vibrating with his footfalls. Once they fall silent he attempts to gain some control over his swift unsteady breaths. He senses as well as remembers that he has reached the space largely occupied by the wooden bin topped with wire mesh where all the cartons of new stock are unloaded. The shelves beyond it are fixed to the walls, and it's surely impossible that he's hearing any movement from them. However surreptitious it sounds, the noise must be under the wire mesh—the feeble squealing of bits of polystyrene that his footsteps have disturbed, though it makes him feel he's roused a nest of insects in the blackness. At least by keeping well clear of it and to the left of it he knows he's within an arm's length of the bare wall. He's stretching out his hand in that direction when he almost drops into an inadvertent crouch, though the dark hasn't seized him and Woody's voice wasn't intending to. "No need to call it quits down there," it says. "No need to call it a day. You can see better than us."
He's addressing the staff on the sales floor, of course. Until Nigel divests himself of the impression he even thinks he hears a muffled underlying echo, but he's certainly too far from the office. As his splayed fingertips locate the wall, Woody reduces himself to interrogating Angus through the door about the latest situation. Nigel's fingers slide over the chill slippery plaster and then, sooner than he was expecting, lurch off its edge to encounter metal. It's the more recessed of the two doors to the lift shaft. He raps on it with his knuckles and calls "Agnes, can you hear me?"
She gives no indication that she can. He presses his ear against the door, which is so cold it feels like the threat of an earache. If there's any response beyond the door it's blotted out by the savage drumming of his pulse. He runs his fingertips over the door and digs them between it and the frame, where he succeeds in hauling open a gap of a few inches, through which he shouts "Agnes, it's Nigel. Are you all right?"
He hears his flattened dull voice plummet down far too deep a well, which he hopes is as much of an illusion as the chilly damp it seems to breathe at him. He's wondering if Agnes is refusing to answer because of the way he pronounced her name when she says "I don't know where I am."
"You're below me somewhere. I'm at the top doors. I'll come down." It's Agnes that he mostly means to reassure by adding "Down the stairs, that is."
"Can you see where I am?"
"I can't see a thing, to be honest. Ray's gone to operate on the fuses," he says, only to realise Ray should be more than there by now.
"Will you be able to find your way?"
Presumably that's intended as concern, but his nerves don't welcome it. "No question of it. I'm coming immediately," he says, and rather more than that, because the last two words burst into a flurry of extra syllables that bloat them shapeless. "I'm coming now."
He lets go of the door, which meets the frame with a clunk. As he runs his fingers over the metal a fingernail catches on the edge of the second door. Once he has found the wall again he shuffles sideways until he arrives at the corner. Now he's facing the stairway, and it feels as if the blackness of the lift shaft has been tilted to receive him. He reaches into it with his left hand, lower and lower. At last he touches an object like a stick that someone's holding up for him to find: the banister. He restrains himself to grasping it with only one hand and takes the first step down.
He doesn't like wobbling on one leg while he gropes for the stair with the other foot. It must be the blind dark that makes him seem to have to stretch farther than he ought to need. He plants his heel as far back on the tread as there's space for, and slides his sweaty prickling hand down the banister, and lifts his other foot to hover above the oppressive depthless dark. It's just the night, he tries to tell himself—the same night in which Laura will be asleep, her face calm and still on the pillow, perhaps unconscious of a lock of hair that's tickling her cheek. The thought nerves him to shout at or into the dark. "I'm on the stairs now, Agnes. I won't be long."
"Don't be."
Her response sounds more distant than ever. Of course it's muffled by the wall. He wishes he could think how many steps lead to the delivery lobby: surely less than a couple of dozen. Since he's performing the identical action each time he clings to the banister and lets a foot sink into the blackness until it meets a stair, why isn't the process growing easier instead of seeming ever more dangerous? Perhaps that's because he didn't count the steps he has already taken, thus losing all sense of how far he has yet to descend. He could shout again to Agnes, but he's wary of discovering how remote she may sound. The edges of stairs scrape the backs of his ankles, and whenever a foot settles on a tread he feels as though he's leaning out too far over the blackness. He takes another wavering pace downwards that only the banister renders slightly less perilous—and then his fist closes on emptiness. Before he can catch his balance he flounders off the stair on which his left foot was supporting all his weight.
He's staggering across the lobby to crash into a wall, unless he sprawls headlong on the concrete. He flings out his right hand so violently in search of anything to grab that the action throws him against the doors to the lift shaft, dealing his shoulder a bruise that may even outdo its twin. "It's me," the darkness suggests he ought to call. "It's Nigel. I'm here."
"Where?"
He almost wonders that himself, because her voice is farther beneath him than seems possible. She must be sitting down—on the pallet truck, no doubt. "Very close," he assures her as he feels for the edge from which the doors open on the shaft. He drags a gap wide enough to insert his fingers; at least, he struggles to. His fingers won't penetrate even as far as their nails. The doors might as well be a solid block of metal embedded in the wall.
He hauls at them until the throbbing of his shoulders unites across his neck while waves of grey light surge into his eyes. He has the irrational notion that his inability to see what he's doing is the reason he's so useless. Why hasn't Ray fixed the fuses by now? How much longer will it take him? Nigel is wondering if he can shout loud enough for Ray to hear when he realises he shouldn't have to. He has nearly allowed the dark to get the better of his brain. There ought to be plenty of light within reach.
He lets go of the unyielding door and closes his eyes until the waves of false illumination fade, and then he opens his eyelids a slit to peer across the blackness that's the lobby. There is indeed the thread of a glow under the delivery doors opposite the lift, although it's so thin he is barely convinced he's seeing it. "Hold on," he calls. "I've seen something I can do and then I'll be back."
Agnes is silent. Perhaps she thinks it was stupid of him to tell her to hold on, which he supposes it was. He paces through the unseen lobby towards the promise of light and fastens his hands on the bar across the doors. It can't be as rusty as it feels; that must be the prickling of his fists. He flings all his weight against it and hears a shifting that someone less in control of himself might imagine was the sound of an eavesdropper retreating outside. Then the bar splits in two with an emphatic clank, and the doors swing so immediately wide that Nigel reels out of the building.
He has let the light in. This should be all that matters, but he can't help wondering why it doesn't appear to be shining from above him. He turns to squint at the rear wall of the shops. The source of the illumination isn't above the giant X; the spotlight is smashed, and so is the one behind Happy Holidays. The whitish glow is at his back, and creeping closer, to judge by how his shadow that lies face down in the lobby is shrinking and blackening—shrinking as though it's desperate to conceal itself.
He swings around to confront the luminous fog. A glow about the size of his head and more shapeless than globular blunders almost into the open before it either merges with the fog or sinks into the glistening tarmac. At once the lobby doors are pulled shut by their metal arms and lock with a triumphant clank, shutting him in not much more than darkness.
He stumbles through the clinging chilly murk to fetch up against the doors. They're just as unresponsive as he feared. No amount of bruising alternate shoulders on them will move them. He could pound on them, but what effect would that have beyond distressing Agnes? It would take Angus far too long to find his way down to them. The fog or rather its inertia must be gathering in Nigel's brain, because he has to make an effort to remind himself that he can head for the front of the building. There'll be light as well as a way in.
He has taken only a couple of steps between the dim walls—one of concrete, one of fog—when he notices there's light behind the bookshop too. It's more of the kind he encountered as he left the building. It dances lazily through the fog, making his shadow prance on the wall of the shop to keep him company. It would be more welcome if there weren't other signs of life in the fog. He can hear something else on the move, shuffling towards him while dragging a package that sounds worse than waterlogged. Indeed, the noise makes clear that there are two of whatever is approaching.