Page 23 of The Girl on Hallow's Eve

“Shut up!” she hisses. “You need to be quiet. I don’t know where he is.”

“Who?”

“The man who did this to Ellen and Gloria,” she says, gesturing at the mangled body at their feet without looking down. She doesn’t need to see it again. “He was here a few minutes ago, but I lost sight of him. We need to call the police.”

“We need to get the hell out of here,” Peter says, backing away.

He turns around and starts to run back toward the entrance. Mindy goes to the nearest cashier’s stand and grabs for the phone. Gabe is right behind her, but before she can even get the phone to her ear, she hears a scream. By the time she turns, Peter is on the ground with the hooded man kneeling on him, each vicious swipe of his blade scattering bright red droplets of blood across the clothes hanging on either side of the aisle, showering the sand-colored tile floor in thick, horrible splatters.

He’s right in the middle of the walkway to the entrance. There’s no getting out without going straight past him. Mindy pulls the phone to her ear, ready to dial and run, but there’s no sound coming through the earpiece. No dial tone. No ring. Nothing.

She drops the phone and scrambles away from the counter, running for the only thing she can think of. The escalator. It will get her to the second floor and the skywalk she can only pray is accessible. Gabe sees her and takes off after her. The hooded man has noticed them and as Mindy runs, she sees him rise up from Peter’s bloodied body and start toward Gabe. She runs faster. The escalator is only feet away. She jumps onto it and ignores its gradual movement upward, skipping over as many steps as she can to get up to the top as fast as possible.

She reaches the top and turns to look at Gabe. He’s nearly at the bottom.

“Go!“ he shouts, and she does what he says.

She runs for the nearest counter and checks the phone. It’s silent and she drops it before racing toward the glass door leading to the skywalk. The vibrant lettering advertising the convenient path is worthless. The door is locked. She lets out a curse and slams her fist against the door, but the shatterproof glass of the panels won’t even allow her to break through and escape. But even if she did, it would be useless. If this door is locked, it probably means the one to the next store is as well.

A chilling, nauseating sound she can’t even describe breaks the oppressive silence. It’s something between a scream and a gurgle, the sound of metal grinding and a low, rhythmic thumping. Running toward the escalator again, she stops at the sight of blood spreading across the floor. At first, she doesn’t know what’s causing it. Then she sees the blond hair caught in the mechanism. A few steps more reveals Gabe’s body being mangled by the teeth of the escalator stairs, his hair tangled in the mechanism feeding him in.

He’d been pushed into it, his head possibly held down to ensure it caught. Which means the hooded man is here.

Her head swims and her vision spins with ragged, aching breaths that don’t give it enough oxygen, or maybe give it too much. She feels the man on every side of her, watching her, predicting her movements while waiting for them, knowing exactly what he’s going to do and delighting in her terror.

She isn’t going to give in. Not now. There might be no point, but she’s going to try. She won’t offer herself up.

Taking a second to look at the directional signs, she finds the second skywalk entrance and darts for it. Mindy does all she can to focus out of her peripheral vision, determined to catch any hint of dark shadows or movement that might give her warning before the man catches up to her. For the first time, she wonders where the man started. Who was the first to die?

Sherwood

I don’t think when they came up with the idea for the live footage of the mall party the producers of the news considered the sheer volume of the event. As George goes deeper into the mall, it gets more difficult to understand him over the music pulsating through the building. Even with his microphone, his voice is largely muffled, and there are times when it seems he just stops talking altogether because he knows it’s pointless.

The frustrated look on his face goes through phases as he talks, lessening when he has something to talk about and deepening when he’s just walking around or interviewing a particularly shrill or repetitive guest. Each time it gets worse, it lasts for a couple of minutes and then suddenly disappears into a bright smile or a gush of talking, and I wonder if someone has a bud in his ear and is telling him to change his attitude or if he is just hitting moments of self-awareness.

He spent a good amount of time hanging out near the salon watching women get their nails done, even patiently nodding along as the technician listed off all the different color options and effects that are available. When he finally takes his leave with a flurry of indirectly-applied compliments, he starts across the mall.

“We could just walk right back across the mall from where we came and go to the other half, but I want to show you something,” George tells the camera. “Savvy shoppers learn to make their way through the stores. You won’t repeat your steps, you’ll encounter fewer crowds, and you’ll probably find a few things to pick up along the way. Not a bad idea with the holiday season coming up and all the sales bringing customers in.”

He walks toward the store and says something else, but I don’t catch it.

“Are you having trouble understanding him?” I ask.

Sam nods. “Sometimes. There has to be a team outside handling the equipment. I wonder why none of them have done anything about his volume level.”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I’d think that would be something they’d make sure they had in place before they went on the air. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense that they would bother to have their top field reporter out offering commentary on the entire live segment if nobody could tell what he was saying half the time.”

George goes into the store and instantly, the volume of the music lessens. The further he goes, the quieter the music becomes until it’s more of a background layer of sound than the overwhelming output of the footage. Now the only sounds are of shoppers giggling and talking to each other and the tell-tale chimes of credit cards.

The reporter takes a fairly looping path through the store, showing off different departments that are predictable for anyone who has been to a department store, but would be undeniably appealing to anyone looking forward to getting their hands on the hottest Christmas gifts in the coming months. As he crosses the store, he points out the escalator, telling viewers that this store connects to the other anchor stores via a skywalk located on an extended partial floor coming up from the second floor of the mall. The two stores with main entrances on the second floor have walkways that lead directly to these floors, while the two located on the main floor have a second floor and then another stairwell leading to a glassed-in lounge area leading to the skywalk.

Sam and I didn’t get a chance to see the glassed-in lounges for ourselves during our tour. Since the stores weren’t open yet and they have the only access points for the skywalk, our guide wasn’t able to show them to us, but she described them. It’s probably the feature of the mall I was most impressed with, even without getting to actually see it up close.

The architecture of the mall makes it so that the skywalks aren’t clearly visible from the parking lot at the main entrance. Instead, they are positioned at angles so that the view when walking across them is of more of the landscaping and distant farmland than of the parking lots and cars. The lounges offer sitting areas where shoppers can relax away from the crowds for a few minutes before moving along to the next store.

I’m hoping George McCarthy will take his live tour up to the next floor to show off the feature, but it seems like he’s just continuing on. At the last second, he reconsiders and I get my wish when he hops aboard the escalator. The view from the camera showing his ascent is a bit disorienting, and it’s a relief when both he and the cameraman creating the point of view for everyone watching from home step off the top step and onto the next floor.

He does a cursory exploration of this floor before making his way up to the lounge. Here, the sound of the music from the rest of the party is all but silenced.

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