Chapter Thirty-Three - A Customer-Friendly Experience

The first thing to hit Charlotte was the smell.

So many things cut apart, so many rotting bodies splashed across the floor of the shop. Stuffing soaked in blood and offal, skin torn apart under a thin layer of felt. The dolls and plushies that had attacked them were filled with once-living meat.

“Well,” Charlotte said as she raised her lantern. “That wasn’t pleasant.” She shook her sword to dislodge a bit of doll stuck on the edge of it.

Dreamer’s tentacles were retreating back to wherever they came from, leaving behind punctured bodies. “Yeah. Are all plushies like that?”

“I think these are the exception rather than the rule,” Charlotte said. “I imagine that this wasn’t all of them.”

“I can still feel holes,” Dreamer said. “There’s a big one that way.” She pointed down and towards the south side of the shop.

Charlotte drew a mental map of the North hill in her mind, then nodded. “How far?”

“About... sixty Abigails.”

“Abigail as measured from shoulder to shoulder, or Abigail from head to toe?” Charlotte asked.

Dreamer shook her head. “Abigail from hand to shoulder. That’s her patting range.”

“Right,” Charlotte said. She mentally converted that to about a metre, give or take. “That would place the big hole at about the middle of the hill. Still below ground too. I imagine you can feel a lot of smaller holes too, right?”

“Yeah,” Dreamer said.

“Great. More creepy murder dolls.”

“They’re easy to kill,” Dreamer said.

“That doesn’t make dealing with them any more fun,” Charlotte said. “Come on, let’s keep moving. I bet there’s a way to get to that big hole from here.” They moved towards the back of the shop. A door led into a workshop, one that was about as big as the front store, though with far more tables and workbenches. There were jars of buttons and bags of stuffing, but no incomplete dolls laying around.

Dreamer skipped past Charlotte, ignored a spray of needles that she caught on a tentacle, then grinned as she pointed to part of the floor that was cleared of furniture. “There’s a hole here,” she said.

“A trapdoor?” Charlotte asked as she walked over. There was a loop bolted to some planks, and a tightly fit square left on the floor that marked out the shape of the trapdoor. A cord was tied to the loop, leading up to the ceiling where a pulley waited. “Must be to allow the dolls to pull it up,” she muttered. She couldn’t imagine the little things being all that strong.

They worked together to open the trapdoor. To Charlotte’s surprise, there weren’t any traps that went off when the door was slid off the hole. There was just a darkened pit, with a ladder up against one side and not much else.

She brought her lamp out over the hole and looked over the edge. It wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. Maybe three paces down to what looked like a room with a wooden floor.

Dreamer stepped over the edge of the hole and crashed onto the ground below with the grace of a sack of potatoes. She pushed herself back to her feet, then looked around. “It’s safe!” she said.

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Charlotte sheathed her sword and set the lamp next to the hole before climbing down at a more discrete pace. She picked it up once she was almost down, then illuminated the room properly.

There wasn’t much to see. Some cobwebs in the corners, a few discarded boxes. The most interesting thing was an old stone-lined well near the centre of the room. She inched over to it. There was water not too far from the lip, and some copper pipes sinking into it. Likely there was some sort of pump in the shop that could draw water up.

“There’s a door,” Dreamer said. She was pointing at one of the walls where, indeed, there was a door left ajar.

Charlotte moved closer to it, then knelt down next to the entrance. There were markings in the dust. Like cloth gently passed over previously undisturbed ground, and smaller prints too. Not animals. Just round spots in a pattern similar to footprints. “The plushies have moved though here.”

“Should we catch one for Abigail’s gift?” Dreamer asked.

“I... don’t think that’s exactly the kind of gift Abigail would want,” Charlotte said.

“She wouldn’t want a plushie?” Dreamer asked.

“Oh, sure, but not one that’s... sapient? Sentient? I’m not sure. Certainly not one filled with rotten meat.”

“Okay,” Dreamer said.

Charlotte tore the door open while making sure to keep herself behind it. Nothing happened. She poked her head around, and squinted into what was clearly just a corridor.

There were more doors in the passageway. They weren’t evenly spaced, and not all of them were closed. Charlotte caught a glimpse of other basements, some of them filled with crates, other barren.

“It’s an underground access way to all the shops in the city?” Charlotte asked.

There were large pipes running along the ground, always at just a slight angle. One was leaking, and the faint stink that hit her clued her in.

“It’s the sewage system. That, and I guess a sort of accessway to different buildings. Strange.”

“It’s warm,” Dreamer said.

“Yeah, we’re below ground. I guess. That means it’ll be warmer.”

Something rumbled out ahead, and Charlotte paused, heart beating in her throat.

She was swept up in this sudden feeling of vertigo, as if the world was twisting on its side, but there was no such motion. Nothing had moved. She swallowed, pressing down the foreign emotion, the overbearing sense of wrongness trying to slip into her mind like a distant whisper.

“Smells like poop in here,” Dreamer said.

“Y-you don’t feel that?” Charlotte asked.

Dreamer looked up to her. “You mean the unending wrongness, the sense that you are tiny, a speck caught in a whirlwind drawing you ever closer to a single, tiny point in space where everything that you are and were will be ripped apart into nothing?”

“Uh... yeah,” Charlotte said.

“Nope,” Dreamer said. She grabbed Charlotte’s hand. “Come on. I think there’s weird stuff that way.”

***