It was easier to park when the three arrived for their night shift. A smattering of cars still loitered near the lights of the entrance, and Nora, Merlin, and Ursa marched into it like alien abductees.
‘Hey, if we find the ghost, we can leave early, right?’ asked Ursa.
‘Oh yes, that’s the law,’ said Nora, without so much as a smirk.
Brian was waiting for them in the staff room, as agreed. He’d sat himself directly beneath the damp patch on the ceiling, positing himself as someone apparently fine with being dripped on. This could be taken as a metaphor. ‘Righto, good to see you three,’ he said. ‘Heston’s here as well, but no sign of Monty just yet.’
Alkahest, never one to discard an expressive pose, sat once more with his feet on the table. ‘Brian is referring to Montparnasse,’ he offered.
The loss prevention manager let out a hearty chuckle. ‘Never used to have all these weird names when I were a lad!’ He’d never been a particularly observant man, which was something of a detriment to his performance at work.
‘Ha ha ha,’ said Alkahest. He didn’t laugh. ‘This guy. I swear.’
Nora looked from one man to the other, and promptly decided her team had to escape this awkward staffroom purgatory. ‘Why don’t we three do a bit of a sweep through the showrooms? We can, uh, check if anyone suspicious is trying to hide in a wardrobe.’
Brightening at the prospect of no longer being in the room, Merlin chimed in as well. ‘The old SMÅSTAD stowaway.’ He’d made a conscious effort to familiarise himself with the Ikea catalogue before their shift. ‘Good idea. You two stay here and wait for Montparnasse.’
*
Ursa held out both pairs of the mind-shielding headphones when they got outside.
‘Before that creep shows up,’ she said. ‘It’d be smart for you to put these on. I think I’ll be safe if I set up some mental defenses to keep him out of my head.’
Merlin reached up to take the black pair as Ursa began to murmur under her breath, ‘One maca two maca three macarena, four maca five maca something Pasadena…‘
He let them hang around his neck, more an accessory than anything functional.
Nora’s hand hesitated over the remaining pair of headphones. They were white with pastel-turquoise accents, and had fur lining that made them look more like earmuffs. Oh, and they also had fuzzy, light-up cat ears on top.
‘Tell you what,’ said Nora. ‘You keep hold of them.’
‘Heeeeeey, maca… Really? Are you sure?’
‘Yeah. They, uh…’ They didn’t fit her aesthetic. ‘They wouldn’t go over my hat, and I can’t take it off because, um, I have hat hair. You should definitely keep them.’
Ursa slotted them over her ears, unfazed or oblivious to Nora’s less-than-graceful lie. They did look cute.
Their sweep of the shop floor was to follow the route a regular shopper would take, travelling up an escalator that deposited them in the first of the showrooms.
Considering it was 20 minutes before the store was due to close, it wasn’t exactly strange that there were no customers. But even so, it had that air of kenopsia you find in empty hospitals or shopping centres. The three of them, quite unconsciously, huddled together as they hiked the showroom trail.
Until Nora stopped. ‘Something isn’t right,’ she said, and for maybe half a second her eyes flashed with a little ring of code, her Eldritch Sight coming on.
The section of the store marked ‘Living Rooms’ was designed to mimic the real deal, with a variety of sofas, and armchairs, and coffee tables and bookshelves, and lamps and rugs and cushions, and even tasteful, soulless art on the walls. The effect was completed with fireplaces that weren’t for purchase, and windows and doors to nowhere.
It was one such door that had caught Nora’s attention, though nothing about it registered as magical according to her Eldritch Sight. But it was odd somehow.
‘Is this… crooked?’ Bit sloppy for a showroom, if so. ‘See? It tilts to the left a bit.’
She indicated the top of the door frame, which was indeed crooked, tilting to the right. There was a gap of just a few centimetres.
‘Your other left,’ said Merlin.
Nora just blinked at the door. She reached up to feel the gap; there was an intermittent breeze coming through the crack. And the door was crooked on the left again. She felt it move.
Like it was shifting in slumber. Like it was breathing.
‘Haha, living rooms,’ said Ursa, with something of a manic air. ‘We should move on.’
The next area, ‘Offices’, was much the same – fabricated rooms to show off Ikea’s enhancement of your home and lifestyle. This one had a variety of desks and spinning chairs. Each desk had an approximation of an iMac on it, eliciting a snort of derision from Merlin.
In one corner, a young couple – a vanilla-human man and woman in maybe their early 20s – were admiring the plane of an ARKELSTORP.
‘Excuse me,’ called Nora. ‘I’m afraid it’s nearly our closing time. If you could make your way to an exit, that’d be…’ she struggled with a dusty corner of her brain marked Friendly Language for a moment, eventually settling on, ‘swell.’
‘Oh we’re just having trouble choosing between this one or a MALM!’ said the woman.
The man looked disgruntled, and checked his phone.
‘It’s true that the MALM is more affordable, but the ARKELSTORP has that natural wood finish that I think makes a place feel more authentic,’ said Merlin. ‘It’s more unique,’ he added, when he noticed the others had turned to stare at him.
‘That’s just what I’ve been thinking!’ said the woman. Her boyfriend/husband/brother/whatever checked his phone again, huffed out another sigh, then put it back in his pocket.
‘Well, unfortunately for a larger item like that, you’ll need to head down to the warehouse,’ Nora continued. ‘So… do that.’
Ursa watched the couple’s retreating backs, eyes narrowed. Nora watched her in turn. ‘You…’ Another trip to the Friendly Language corner – ‘…ok?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I don’t know if he was just doing stereotypical man things, but I suppose I’ll find out once I steal his phone.’
Nora watched as a spectral, pink Mage Hand shot forward from Ursa, towards the man’s back pocket. It was much too fast for any sort of pickpocketing finesse, because on another layer of reality, someone had just rolled a 1.
Nora moved without thinking. If she was going to get killed tonight, she didn’t want it to be because of an arcane slap on an Auditor’s ass.
The man straightened up as he felt the probing grasp of the Mage Hand, and turned to see a slightly-out-of-breath Nora with a rictus grin on her face. ‘M-may I help you?’ she choked out.
The couple left more quickly after that.
*
The hairs in Merlin’s nostrils detected something as they entered the ‘Kitchens’ section in their sweep. It wasn’t too strong, but it smelled like… well, like a bin bag full of rotten food. He checked his companions’ faces to see if they’d noticed too.
Nora looked uncomfortable. She might have noticed, or that might just be her resting face. Ursa absolutely hadn’t noticed; she was bopping away with her headphones loud enough to block her sense of smell. Merlin could hear the slightly muffled music as if they were on his own head:
‘…Don’t you worry about my boyfriend
He’s a boy whose name is Vitorino
I don’t want him, couldn’t stand him
He was no good so I…‘
Ursa pantomimed along with the laughter on the song. So no help there. Merlin broke off from the other two without so much as a word, and made like a breakfast cereal toucan.
His nose led him to one of the fridges, a built-in model KÖLDGRADER. The smell had gotten more pronounced as he’d closed in on it, with individual notes of rot and plastic and something effluent, and it was a near physical presence by the time he found the source. Gingerly, he reached for the handle.
A squelching sound greeted him as he wrenched open the door. Threads of something sticky stretched and parted as it moved, like melted cheese. The stench threatened to make him hurl. From an olfactory standpoint, that might actually have improved things.
Inside the fridge was the usual faire for a kitchen showroom: a selection of empty bottles and tupperware containers, and an assortment of plastic toy ingredients – chicken legs, vegetables, blocks of cheese, pots of marmalade; all to illustrate that fridges could be used to store food and drink.
And all of it was carpeted with mold. The plastic food had decayed as if it were meat, dripping with some foul fluid that seeped down the fridge’s walls and spilled out towards Merlin’s low-heel lace-ups. He took a step back. Flies buzzed around his vision, crawling in and out of the bubbling plastic pores of the ‘food’.
With an effort of will and surgical focus, he summoned up a Mage Hand of his own and extracted a plastic jar of jam. The fridge’s door closed with the soft sound of some crust being broken. He ignored it. Instead, he brought the jar to a nearby sink, and ran it under the cold tap.
‘What the fuck kind of haunting is this,’ asked Nora, joining him. She wore a similar expression of grim nausea.
‘Its nature eludes me. But it’s somehow made inorganic matter decompose like a corpse would.’ Merlin’s Mage Hand held its jar to the light. The contents were black and slimy. ‘You’re the one with experience of this.’
Nora looked from him, to the jar, and back again. ‘No, I’m not.’ Her eyes flashed, and her brow furrowed. ‘Nothing about this is registering as magical either. I don’t know how to explain it.’
‘Hmm,’ said Merlin. The jar had clouded over and begun to ooze with ichor again. He set it on the side and turned back to the fridge itself. ‘Perhaps if we–‘
Tinny music filled the air. Do you believe in life after love? I can feel something inside me say, I really don’t think you’re strong enough, no!
‘Hey, what are you guys lookin’ at?’ asked Ursa. ‘You gonna eat some toy food?’
Merlin turned to see her holding up the plastic pot of jam, the bristling mildew on it rolling in streams down her arm. He felt himself retch.
Ursa frowned at him. ‘It’s just plastic, Merlin.’ She inspected the little toy’s label, which read SYLT LINGON, and the crude plastic approximation of berries through the clear plastic, before noticing Merlin’s expression.
A light came on over Nora’s head. ‘Wait. What does this look like to you, Ursa?’
‘Uh. A fridge.’
‘No, the things inside it.’
‘Toy food? Not real food; do not eat.’
‘Nothing gross about it?’
‘Well, not if you’re just looking? I don’t know what it’d taste like.’
The fridge filled with horror and decay was something only Nora and Merlin were experiencing. Ursa, on the other hand, saw her companions apparently terrified of plastic food.
Nora drew her gun. ‘Whatever it is, it’s targeting me and Merlin. Ursa, you might need to take point.’
‘Oh,’ said Ursa. ‘I’ll, uh, pick a more appropriate playlist then.’
*
Ursa led the way into the ‘Bedrooms’ section of the store, with Nora and Merlin bringing up the rear.
The whole section was dark, lit only by one or two bedside lamps that flickered on and off like dying braincells. And hovering in the centre, a slightly closer patch of darkness… the specter itself.
It was coming closer. Nora aimed down her pistol’s sights, but couldn’t get a clean shot in the shadowy room. Merlin snapped his fingers, to conjure up a Firebolt to lob at it, but somehow the magic wouldn’t come.
Ursa wandered past them toward the sound of snickering coming from behind an ottoman. The lights were still on. The room was quiet. Merlin and Nora were staring wild-eyed at nothing in particular.
The figure behind the ottoman hugged its knees and tried not to laugh. When Ursa prodded it with her foot, its emerald grin quickly drained away.
Merlin and Nora heard a familiar voice say ‘Oh, you caught me then,’ as the lights came back on and the ghostly thing they’d been looking at turned out to be a HOVNÄS floor lamp.
Montparnasse was eyeing Ursa as if she were a stubborn stain. ‘How come you weren’t affected? I was aiming at all three of you.’
Before Ursa could answer, a black mass hammered down upon him and stuffed the barrel of a gun into his mouth. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ growled Nora.
‘Ic waff jus a pank,’ said Montparnasse around the pistol.
‘Well, nobody is laughing.’ Merlin was right next to him too now. His Firebolt was working just fine now, and he held one close enough to singe one of Montparnasse’s dreads.
‘No, but seriously, how come I can’t read your mind?’ asked Montparnasse, when things had calmed down a bit. He glanced over at Merlin. ‘Ohhhhh, the headphones?’ he asked. ‘Why aren’t you two wearing any?’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Nora, wiping spittle from her gun.
‘Ah, no need to explain. You just thought about it so I get the picture.’
Nora scowled at him.
‘Are you limited to reading only surface level thoughts?’ asked Merlin, a note of curiosity in his tone.
‘If I’m not concentrating, yeah. And if I do try and look deeper, usually people can feel it. So surface stuff is what I’m usually overhearing. Like how you were panicking before!’
This time Merlin scowled, and sedulously put his headphones on.
Montparnasse just kept talking. ‘Well, I say overhearing, I could turn it off if I wanted to. But why would I limit myself like that? Psionic power isn’t too common among the fair folk, so Queen Titania took a notice of me, even though I’m originally from the Winter Court. She knows I’m loyal, but she thinks I don’t take things seriously enough. This is my chance to prove just how much I can do for her. Maybe I could even join the Royal Guard!’
None of those with him were more than half-listening. Ursa’s playlist had moved on, her attention spirited away on the Vengabus. Merlin was stewing in his plans for revenge. Nora, without any headphones, made a mental note to see if her Patron could provide any thought-shielding in future.
Montparnasse stopped mid-sentence. ‘Nora. What the hell is that?’
‘What?’ asked Nora.
‘What?’ asked Merlin and Ursa, at the same time.
‘That thing you just thought about!’ Montparnasse was panicking, much more disturbed than when a gun was in his mouth. ‘The thing on your computer. Talking to you through your wrist. I don’t understand; what is that?!’
Nora’s thoughts quickly moved to violence, and all the ways she could shut him up.
Realising he’d hit a wall, Montparnasse switched to pleading with the others, though he couldn’t read their minds. ‘Listen, something’s not right. She doesn’t even know what it is herself, but she knows it isn’t normal! And she’s just fine accepting power from it? Ask her about it!’
But nobody gave him a response. The tannoy interrupted them. ‘Attention shoppers: the time is now 10pm and the store is closed. Please make your way to the exits. Thank you for shopping with us at Ikea Middlemarch.’
*
Nobody asked Nora about what Montparnasse had said on their way to the staff room. Nobody asked when it was agreed that the three of them would sweep the warehouse area while Alkahest, Montparnasse, and Brian himself would tackle the showrooms.
It didn’t seem like the right time.
While Ursa and Nora trawled through the boxes for any potential remains they could torch to deal with the haunting, Merlin found a convenient plug and booted up his laptop. Yes, they’d have to check the boxes to be thorough, but the apparent thousands of routers were preying on his mind. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was one of those hauntings where the house had been built on an ancient burial ground. In which case, the solution would be to… burn the Ikea down.
He negotiated with the local council’s website, which looked like it had been optimised for Mosaic 1.0, and unearthed the paperwork that had been submitted for planning permission to build the store.
‘It’s odd,’ he explained, when Nora and Ursa returned. ‘The floorplan is nonstandard for an Ikea, and you can see here that it’s been built around a central courtyard or something – this big empty space here – that the architect stated was a ‘place of outstanding natural beauty’ he wanted to preserve.’
‘I didn’t see anything like that,’ said Nora.
‘Right, because it isn’t real. Just page after page of the architect talking about his ‘inspiration’, and nothing in the real world to have prompted it. Anyway, did you two find anything?’
Ursa held up a phone that wasn’t hers. Its background appeared to be a smiling couple, who they’d last seen in the Offices section. ‘Just this,’ said Ursa, swiping to show hundreds of texts all reading:
help us
Then a single one that read:
FOUND YOU.
And the lights went off. After maybe half a second of terror, they remembered that they’d been told this would happen at 11pm on the dot. Nothing had ‘found them’. It was fine.
A scream came from the direction of the showrooms.
‘Well, this is why we’re here,’ said Nora, and took off running.
Sprinting along the reverse of their earlier route, the three skidded to a halt in the ‘Bedrooms’ section. A body lay in the centre of the path.
‘Oh, no, Montparnasse,’ said Merlin, clinically.
‘What a terrible shame,’ Nora agreed.
Ursa went over to inspect him. ‘I don’t think he’s dead, you know.’ There was a sort of hum in the room, just off the cusp of audibility. Sometimes, magic came to her as sound, and the air around Montparnasse still held the last fading note of a lullaby.
She knew that particular note. Something had cast Sleep.
Merlin took the opportunity to rifle through the unconscious Fae’s pockets, though all he found was a wallet. It contained about £20, a visa listing Montparnasse’s home as ‘London, UK, Earth#C0027’, and a picture of him in some kind of renaissance-era military uniform next to a tall woman with opalescent hair down to the floor. She was looking at him with a great deal of fondness.
‘I think I can wake him up.’ Ursa waggled her fingers in a mystical sort of way, then bopped Montparnasse on the nose, just hard enough to hurt.
‘Owgh!’ he said, shooting upright. ‘Oh god, where did it go?!’
‘Calm down,’ said Nora. ‘Where did what go?’
‘I, uh, I… don’t remember.’
‘You don’t remember? It knocked you unconscious.’
Montparnasse had the decency to look embarrassed. ‘Actually, I did that myself. See, whatever it was just burst out and snatched up Brian, and Alkahest took off running after it, but it had really affected me – maybe because of my psionics – and I could feel my sanity slipping… so I put myself to sleep and wiped it from my memory. And now I’m safe!’
He took in the three looming over him. Well, Merlin wasn’t really capable of a loom, but it’s the thought that counts. ‘Mostly safe, anyway,’ he finished.
‘Hmm. You’re coming with us.’ Nora pointed her gun at him, as a kind of rhetoric aid.
‘I’d really rather keep out of the way, if that’s alright,’ Montparnasse tried.
‘After the shit you pulled before? Nope, you’re staying where I can see you. Move.’
The four of them made their way backward through the showroom, more slowly now that there was an unknown monster that apparently ate both sanity and loss prevention managers.
Within minutes, they’d come to the very first section, ‘Living Rooms.’ Merlin was the first to notice the visible cloud of his breath in the sudden cold.
Each and every one of the ‘doors to nowhere’ was open. Crude stone corridors stretched out beyond them, dwindling to single points in the distance like diagrams on 3-point perspective.
All except the one door Nora had thought was crooked earlier. This was firmly closed.
Obviously, this was the door of most note. It’s human nature to be most interested in the one route sealed off to you. And it’s in a D&D party’s nature to spend at least 30 minutes trying to get a door to open.
After force, tools, Knock spells, and trying to somehow fit behind the doorframe had all failed, it was decided they’d need to try one of the others. But not without sending a canary first.
‘Go on then,’ said Nora, gesturing with her gun.
‘You know I’m from Outside, right?’ said Montparnasse. ‘That thing might not even hurt me.’
‘Oh, do you know what kind of bullets are in it?’
Montparnasse hazarded a glance at her thoughts.
Nora nodded at his dawning horror. ‘That’s right. Cold iron.’
Montparnasse sucked in a breath, then fled through the nearest door. He’d disappeared from sight by the time the others looked, despite the apparent lack of bends in the tunnel.
‘That’s not exactly heartening,’ said Merlin. Nevertheless, they had a job to do.
Eventually, the tunnel came to a T junction. It had narrowed down such that they were now in single file, Ursa leading the way again – she turned right. A slight breeze had been coming from that direction, and she was rewarded when the tunnel opened up.
They’d come out into a vast cavern, the ceiling so high in the dark that it couldn’t be seen. Far above, thousands of wireless routers were affixed to that ceiling, their lights blinking like synthetic stars.
Shelves towered around them, each filled with boxes filled with flat-pack furniture. There was a sign above, like the ones that had been in the warehouse and showrooms, only hanging from massive lengths of chain like a gothic pendulum. It read ‘Offices’. In the distance, above the shelves, another could be seen that read ‘Panic Rooms’.
‘I don’t remember seeing panic room stuff in the warehouse,’ said Ursa.
They weren’t in the warehouse. They were in the labyrinth.
Roll History 