My Little Haunting chapter 5 by Emerson Van Wie

Chapter 5: 

The mall had closed three years earlier.

Seth went because his wife used to love it, not the shops particularly, she liked the food court, the fountain, the strange little stores that sold trinkets and oddities. She liked people watching so much she could spend hours sitting on a bench, inventing lives for strangers.

He hated waiting for her.

The entrance was boarded up, but a service door at the side of the building had been left unsecured. He slipped inside.

The air smelled of dust and damp carpet. His footsteps echoed through the empty atrium.

Storefronts stood behind metal shutters, their signs faded. A plastic bag drifted across the floor, caught in a current of air he could not feel.

He followed a corridor toward the food court. The fountain was dry. One time, she leaned over it, dropping a coin into the water and closing her eyes.

“What did you wish for?” he had asked.

She had opened her eyes.

“If I tell you, it won't work.”

“That's not how wishes work.”

“Maybe that's why yours never do.”

He had laughed then. But now, at the far end of the food court, a single light flickered above a table. He approached it cautiously, looking around every which way trying to see something he couldn’t.

On the tabletop lay a paper shopping bag, folded neatly at the top. Inside was a picture of small porcelain figurine of a woman holding a parasol.

He recognized it immediately.

His wife had bought the doll here years ago from a shop that sold imported trinkets. She had insisted it looked like her grandmother, although the resemblance had never been apparent to him.

He picked it up.

A speaker crackled overhead.

He dropped the photo, shocked and almost trembling at the blaring sound..

What followed was not a voice, exactly. It was the faint echo of a recording, badly distorted by age.

“Attention shoppers…”

Static.

He backed away.

The speaker clicked off. At the far end of the food court, an escalator began to move. He watched its steps carry nothing upward into darkness. Something else scraped behind him.

He turned.

The figurine from the photo stood upright on the table.

He ran away. 

At the service door, he stopped to catch his breath. His hands were shaking. He checked his pockets for his keys, then his phone, then the notebook he carried everywhere.

The notebook was missing. In a hurried panic, he returned to the food court. It lay on the table beside the figurine where a page had been opened.

His own handwriting stared up at him.

“I didn't go.”

He closed the notebook.

The phrase had been written weeks earlier, in a passage about the night his wife died. He had told himself he was asleep when she called. He hadn’t written if he heard the phone or not.

He turned the page.

Beneath the sentence, in handwriting that was not his, were four words.

“You were awake.”

He dropped the notebook and fled the building.

Outside, traffic moved along the road. The sun was setting behind the rooftops.

He stood beside his car until the sky darkened.

Then he went home and checked his phone records.

He had not looked at them since the funeral.

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check out more creativity by Emerson at @evwphotos