Here we have an odd story. At first, it seems like it’s about one thing, but it does a complete one-eighty and turns into something else by the end, kind of like the movie, FROM DUSK ‘TIL DAWN.
Snell is a poet who has had it with “the bourgeois world that hates a poet.” In protest, he retreats into a department store, where he intends to live out the rest of his days. His plan is to live off the land, as it were. Sleep during the day. Forage among the goods at night. Continue to write his poetry without worrying about making enough money to survive. All he has to do is avoid the night watchman.
His very first night in, he has a run-in with the watchman, so he throws on a wrap and pretends to be a mannequin. The trick works, but as soon as the watchman has moved on, Snell looks at another mannequin and notices very human eyes looking back at him. It seems he’s not the only one to think of this idea. The department store is full of other people who live here, trying to hide from the real world. And it’s not just this store; it’s in every store. They even communicate from store to store, as if they were adjacent towns.
Pretty crazy, no? There’s a good comedy in this. And to top it all off, Snell quickly develops a love interest in Ella, one of the people he now lives with. But it takes a strange and savage turn near the end.
During the performance of a play that one of the department store dwellers has written (for people from a neighboring store), Snell suffers hiccoughs and flees the audience. He runs into Ella, and the two of them start hanging out more and more until he confesses his love to her. She says she’s in love with another. In fact, she loves the night watchman because he can go out of the store in the daytime, which is what she wants to do. (She grew up in the store because her mom accidentally lost her there when she was a kid.)
She tells Snell about the Dark Men. Apparently, they’re people who live in mortuaries instead of department stores. What goods do they survive on? Well, what do you think? Since the department store dwellers want to keep living in their secret world, they can’t let anyone know about them. Those who find out are detained, and the Dark Men are set loose on them. When they’re done, the offending person has been replaced with a mannequin. Snell, horrified, thinks people would notice, considering these new mannequins would be heavier. Her response: “No. They’re not heavier. I think there’s a lot of them—gone.” Talk about shudder-inducing!
SPOILER ALERT: Ella decides that she’s going to let the night watchman see her so he can take her out of there once and for all. This fucks Snell up, because if she stayed, at least he could still spend time with her. If she’s gone . . . well, he doesn’t know how to deal with that. He confesses everything to a friend he thought he could trust, and the next thing he knows, Ella’s gone, and the Dark Men have been called. Turns out, they might not be people after all, but something more beastly. And now, Snell plans to confess to the night watchman in order to save Ella and escape the store.
But . . . there’s the problem with this tale. There’s no ending. Snell, who narrates this piece in first person, says that he’s leaving this journal in case they don’t succeed. He hopes someone will find it and avenge their deaths. It seems like they might have lost that fight, but there’s nothing to really suggest which way it really went.
Also, he didn’t spend enough time with the Dark Men. The scene in which they arrive is almost a throwaway moment. END OF SPOILERS.
At first, you may wonder what this story is doing in this anthology, but by the end, you’ll know that, for all its flaws, it earned its place here.
[This story first appeared in PRESENTING MOONSHINE and cannot be read online at this time. However, it's been adapted a bunch of times, even once as a musical.]
No comments:
Post a Comment