Horrorscopes: Twelve Tales of the Macabre

Bargain Price

It has been said that appearances are a glimpse of the unseen. It's been said, but it's wrong. Appearances are projections in the mind of the beholder. What can be seen is only what can be recognized; anything incomprehensible is immediately given false shape. If a man sees a creature not of this world, a being so unimaginable that his mind risks damage upon revelation of truth, that man's mind will associate the creature with something else, something ordinary. A tree, a cat, anything which would spare the man's sanity. It is a mechanism man has evolved in an unpredictable universe.

It's also a weakness which is exploited by the unimaginable.

Every day, we see things we believe to be normal. We see them, look through them, and go on with our day. We scrutinize them, see nothing out of place, and go on with our day. If man can be credited with one true evolutionary accomplishment, it's that he has grown far too busy to be bothered by the rest of his environment.

The people bustle. Like ants, we bustle; in one direction or another. We are possessed of heedless, often purposeless motion. We scamper through our lives, unwitting or unwilling to see what is right in front of us. We talk on our cell phones and make our appointments, we barely glance at the world around us from the windows of our cars, and we never realize we are being devoured by entities we can't even see through the falsity in our own minds.

This is where the other doctors have started scribbling notes, so go ahead. You won't offend me. This is where the shrinks think I become disconnected; where I stop talking about societal philosophies, stop speaking in metaphors, and start gibbering nonsensical delusions. This is where the other doctors started prescribing their pills and their therapies without even taking the time to hear me out. So go ahead and doodle on your pad. But I'm gonna have my say.

Have you ever visited a department store during a busy time of day? Of course you have, we all have. We look around at the people, all the different sorts of people. Some of them are shopping by an itinerary, they know exactly where they're going and precisely what they're after. Others are wandering; aimlessly, listlessly wandering. They don't know what they're looking for, so they look at everything, ponder everything. In their heads, they're mulling over prices, searching for bargains, and weighing the usefulness or selection of each product. The itinerant shoppers have done this already, they're on a fast track. The wanderers are sponges that just want to hop in and start absorbing. But do you know what both kinds of shoppers really are? They're food.

You scribble in your pad, but I'm not delusional. You can take it to the bank.

Humans are sustenance for the stores. Not all of them, don't look at me like that. But some of them. Some of the shops you visit on your way home from work, where you buy your khakis, where you buy your spouse an anniversary present. Some of these places aren't brick and mortar structures built by man, but living, breathing entities just slightly outside of our realm of recognition. So our minds play a little trick, they do a little dance, and voila! We see a jewelry store instead of some otherworldly beast.

I know what you're thinking. You're wondering why—if these shops are predatory creatures in disguise—no one has noticed that men and women are disappearing as they're being devoured. And the answer's simple: Our bodies aren't being eaten. Our energies are.

Think about it. It's noon. You're on your lunch hour. You need to pick up some light bulbs for the garage, some chips and salsa for your dinner party tonight, or a new outfit for that big date tomorrow. You go into the shop like it's any other day and you do your shopping. Whether you're an itinerant or a wanderer, you do your shopping. And you buy at a bargain price. You're in the store maybe fifteen minutes, but by the time you come out, you feel sapped. Drained. Like someone stuck a needle in your arm and pumped out a couple pints of blood.

You cross the parking lot to your car and your mind is on your next task, your next errand, but your body is starting to drag behind. Your awareness is starting to drift. You get behind the wheel, drive off into traffic and all you can think about is getting down the road as fast as you can. You cut in and out of traffic, you go a little over the speed limit, but it's all right. Because everyone else is driving the same way. Maybe not that old lady driving home from church. Maybe not the second-shifters who are on their way to work. But the other shoppers? Sure, they're driving just like you are.

You see, I've spent a lot of time watching the stores that I've identified to be monsters. I see the people go in, looking fine, looking normal. And I see what happens when they come out. They look tired, so tired. They look older. They look like they strapped themselves into some infernal machine and transferred a few minutes of their life over to their robot overlords, or something. I swear this one time, I saw a man go into an IKEA and come out with his hair graying at the temples.

And it happens just like that. People are fooled into thinking these creatures are just ordinary shops. They go in and the beasts start sucking away their vitality, in sips instead of gulps. They go in for fifteen minutes of shopping, and they come out seventeen minutes older. Then they speed down the road to their next errand—thirty minutes at the J.C. Penney, thirty eight minutes older when they come out. Next, a four hour marathon session at the mall?

The time adds up. The weariness adds up, week by week it accrues. I watch the people coming and going. I see them rushing in looking contented and I see them coming out looking stressed. I can tell which ones are on their first stop of the day and which ones have been running errands all morning. I can tell which ones frequently shop at one of the monsters and which ones tend to unconsciously avoid them. I see them go about their days and I know they're losing their lives a few minutes at a time. I see their health fading, I see their sex drives weaken, their aspirations peter out. I see their livelihood sucked away like juice in a child's sippy cup. I've watched it for years and I was always smart enough to keep it to myself. Before.

What do you mean why? Because I knew it would get me locked in here. It doesn't take much thought to realize that if I go around telling people the truth it's gonna sound crazy enough to get me locked away in a little room. That if I started to talk about these otherworldly monsters I would be sat down at cute little acrylic tables and interviewed again and again by skeptical and self-important doctors with beards and accreditations and accolades in their respective fields. And these doctors would doodle away on their notepads and think about how many plastic gnomes they need to pick up for their lawns this spring or which brand of shoe will give them the most miles per dollar.

But it's the things they don't think about that they should give attention, wouldn't you say? For instance: if I'm insane, why have I never displayed any disconnection? Why is my so-called delusion so sharp, so consistent? Why do I go on and on about this subject and show no other symptoms of psychosis? Most important is the question that none of the doctors so far have asked me. Why did I start to talk about it at all? If I knew for so long, kept my silence for so long, why did I start to tell people these crazy things to get me locked up in here?

It's because there are more of them now. Years ago, there were only a few. But now, the stores are popping up everywhere. Entire strip-malls of them. By the park. By the school. Catty corner from your home. They're everywhere. And with all of these creatures feeding in the same places, the stores are getting hungrier and hungrier.

Soon, they won't be satisfied with sips.