The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

IV

In Which We Go Shopping, and Rather Wish That We Hadn’t

LET’S DRIFT BACK THROUGH Biddlecombe on this cold dark night, drift like smoke.

Like Shadows.

Wreckit & Sons had once been the largest shop in Biddlecombe. It sold almost everything that anyone could possibly want: pins and pots, breadbaskets and bicycles, televisions and tea trays. It was four stories tall, took up an entire block of the town’s center, and its shelves stretched for miles and miles. Its basement was so huge and poorly lit that a man named Ernest Tuttle had once got lost there while trying to buy a tennis racket and a socket wrench, and promptly vanished. His ghost—a pale, moaning figure—was said to haunt the store, until it was discovered that it was not, in fact, Ernest Tuttle’s ghost but Ernest Tuttle himself. He had spent two years trying to find a way out, and couldn’t understand why people kept running away from him. When they pointed out that he was pale and moaning, he replied that they’d be pale, too, if they’d been trapped in a basement for two years living only on rice cakes, and they’d probably moan a bit as well. His feet hurt, he told reporters, and he believed that the mice had adopted him as their king. He still hadn’t managed to find a tennis racket or a socket wrench either.

The store was another of Hilary Mould’s buildings, but it wasn’t quite as offensively awful as the others. There was something almost grand about Wreckit & Sons. In the right light—somewhat dim, a bit murky—it resembled a cathedral, or a temple. Arthur Bunce, the man who had originally asked Hilary Mould to design the store, took one look at it and promptly went mad. Instead Mould bought the building himself, and he disappeared shortly after. The building remained empty for many years until a gentleman named Wreckit took a fancy to it, and opened his department store there.

But if Wreckit & Sons sold a lot of things that people might want, it also tried to sell a lot of things that nobody could possibly want. As he grew older, Mr. Wreckit became more and more eccentric. He began calling it Wreckit & Sons for starters, which annoyed his daughters greatly, as he didn’t have any sons. His buying habits changed. For example, he bought two thousand three-dimensional Chinese-made photographs of this man:

The man’s name was Max Schreck, and he was famous for playing the vampire in an old film called Nosferatu. Max Schreck was so strange-looking that it was whispered he might even be a real vampire. The 3-D nature of the photos bought by Mr. Wreckit meant that Max Schreck’s eyes followed you around the room, and NOBODY wanted this man’s eyes following them around the room. Mr. Wreckit sold precisely one of the pictures, and that was to himself. He kept it hidden under a blanket.

Mr. Wreckit also bought one hundred unicycles, but it was only when they were shipped to him that he discovered they were not actual unicycles but merely bicycles that were missing one wheel. If it is hard to ride a unicycle, it is significantly harder to ride a bicycle that is 50 percent down in the wheel department. Mr. Wreckit tried. The resulting bang on the head made him even stranger.

He bought teapots with no spouts, sieves with no holes, and steel piggy banks with a slot for the money to go in but no way of getting it out again. He bought televisions that only picked up signals from North Korea, and radios that tuned in to frequencies only dogs could hear. He sold gloves for people with six fingers, and gloves for people with three fingers, but no gloves for people with four fingers and a thumb. His fire extinguishers started fires, and his fire lighters wouldn’t light. His fridges boiled milk, and his ovens were so cold that when a penguin escaped from Biddlecombe’s Little World of Animal Wonders, it was later found to be living in one of them, along with its entire family and a single confused chicken.

Nobody seemed able to reason with Mr. Wreckit. He had simply gone bonkers. He was nutty as a fruitcake. Nevertheless, as he was the sole owner of Wreckit & Sons due to the absence of any real sons, and refused to talk to his daughters because they weren’t men, he was free to run the business into the ground and there wasn’t anything anyone could do to stop him.

So Mr. Wreckit did, in the end, wreck it. The store went out of business. Mr. Wreckit, broke and crazy, retired to a cottage on the Devon coast. When asked what had possessed him to destroy his own business, he replied, strangely, “That’s a very good question. What did possess me?”

But he had no answer. On his deathbed, he apologized to his daughters. His last words were: “The Voice in the Wall made me do it.”

Nobody wanted to take over Wreckit & Sons after that, and the building stayed empty. It stood at the end of Biddlecombe’s main street, a great block of not-quite-nothing, for it always seemed as though the spirit of the old store was still present, infusing its bricks and mortar, its wood and its windows, waiting for the moment when its doors might be opened again, and people could get lost in its basement.

But nobody came, and the spirit slept.

• • •

So it was that the store had been closed for what seemed like a very long time—and was, actually, a very long time.¹² Two generations of Biddlecombe children had grown up without any memory of  Wreckit & Sons being anything other than an empty shell, its ground-floor windows boarded and its doors locked. Eventually people just stopped noticing it, although strangers would sometimes pass through the town and gaze up at it. And when they asked who had designed such a building, the residents of Biddlecombe would shrug their shoulders and point at the statue of Hilary Mould, assuming they could find it.

But if the history of Wreckit & Sons was odd, its oddness didn’t stand out quite so much when monsters and demons began invading Biddlecombe, even if they didn’t leave a lot of proof behind once they went away again, monsters in ponds and spectral voices from golf courses excepted. Psychiatrists spoke of mass hysteria, and comedians made jokes about the townsfolk. Experts arrived and took readings. They dug in the ground, and tested the air, and poked at people who didn’t want to be poked, thank you very much, and warned that, if the experts continued to poke them, they’d find their poking sticks stuck somewhere the sun didn’t shine.¹³ With so much strangeness going on, suddenly Mr Wreckit’s old store began to seem not so strange after all. But it was. It was very, very strange, and strange things have a habit of attracting more strangeness to them.

• • •

In the basement of Wreckit & Sons, something moved. It was pale and naked, but it eventually managed to find a suit that fitted it, and a shirt that wasn’t too yellowed, and a smart gray tie. As thousands of eyes followed it round the room, it wiped the dust from an old mirror and smoothed its hair.

“What is my name?” it asked.

The Voice in the Wall told him.

You shall be called Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.

“How do you spell that?”

The Voice in the Wall spelled the name.

“But you say it’s pronounced Sinjin-Chumley?”

Yes.

“Are you sure that’s right?”

Yes.

The Voice in the Wall sounded a bit miffed. It was so difficult to find good help these days.

The newly animated Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley looked doubtful.

“If you say so.”

I do.

The Voice in the Wall directed Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley to a safe, and told him the combination. Inside the safe was a great deal of gold, along with details of secret bank accounts. The bank accounts were all in the name of St. John-Cholmondeley, even though they had been set up more than a century earlier.

“What do you want me to do?” asked Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.

The Voice in the Wall told him, and Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley set to work.

Wreckit & Sons was about to reopen for business.¹⁴

12. Well, long in human terms, which is all that concerns most people. That’s a little narrow-minded, though, and if you only think in those terms then perhaps you should take a long, critical look at yourself in the mirror. Frankly, you’re not the center of the Multiverse, no matter what your mum and dad might say, or your nan, or your auntie Betty who never got married—mainly because, according to your dad, nobody could get her to shut up long enough to ask her—but comes around to “babysit” occasionally and just seems to drink a lot of your parents’ sherry before falling asleep.

Sorry, where were we? Oh yes, long lives. Anyway, what seems like a long time to you is the blink of an eye to lots of other species. The Llangernyw Yew is the oldest tree in Europe, and is reckoned to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old, while certain specimens of black coral have been found to be over 4,200 years old. Meanwhile, the giant barrel sponge Xestospongia muta, which lives in the Caribbean, is one of the longest-lived animals on Earth, with some such sponges now over 2,300 years old. Mind you, they don’t do a lot of shopping, your black sponges, and so couldn’t really have done much to help Wreckit & Sons stay open. Then again, Wreckit & Sons did sell sponges, so the black sponges, had they known, would probably have been quite pleased to see it close. Things that live for thousands of years tend to have long memories, and know how to hold a grudge.

13. “In a cave?”

No.

“In a very deep ocean?”

No.

“Hmm. Up someone’s bottom?”

Possibly.

14. Are you on the edge of your seats now? If we had a sound track to this book (of which more later) that kind of ending to a chapter would come with a three-note theme along the lines of “Dun-dun-dah!”

About that edge-of-the-seat business: in a sense, we are always on the edge of our seats because of electromagnetic repulsion, which means that the atoms that make up matter never actually touch one another. The closer atoms get, the more repulsion there is between the electrical charges of each atom. It’s a bit like trying to make the same poles of a pair of magnets touch: it just doesn’t work. So you may at this moment think that you’re sitting in a chair reading this footnote, but you’re actually hovering ever so slightly above it, suspended by a force of electromagnetic repulsion a billion billion billion billion times stronger than the force of gravity. You are officially a hoverperson.