It doesn’t happen all at once. The map may have returned to normal but the mall itself is somewhere between what it was and what it is supposed to be. Lines of static rush up from the floor, vibrating like guitar strings. Each store flickers from the strange and mundane back to its normal countenance. Bright, cheerful dress clothes manned by attendants with cheerful, if vacant, stares are washed away and replaced with unnaturally pale adults amidst a collection of dark couture.

  An empty storefront flickers into Maulie’s, and just like that, we’re back in the regular mall. The distortion, the directory with its lying layout, all of it relaxes.

  “So we’re looking for something in the store?” Winter asks me.

  I shrug. “I’m not sure, honestly. Did Maulie leave behind a sketchpad or something that we can reference against?”

  Grandpa Ghastly puts a knuckle to this mouth, debating it carefully. “It’s possible,” he allows. “I put a lot of her things away when…well, after it happened.”

  “Look, I was never a fan of yours,” Winter says, carefully taking Grandpa Ghastly’s hand and pulling it away from his face. “But you haven’t actually said the words. I know it’s painful, I know you’re in mourning. But do you think some of this might have occurred because you’re not willing to face your grief head on?”

  “Winter!”

  The older man fixes Winter with a warm, if devastated smile. “You might not be one of my kids, but I know you my friend. You’ve had no choice, having to face things head on all your life. I understand, and I don’t blame you in the slightest.” He pats her hand. “But I knew a little girl like you named Josephine once. And she had her walls up, too, just like you.” He watches her with careful eyes, and I’m so busy watching him that I miss what happens on Winter’s face, but Ghastly’s eyes twinkle in response.

  I turn. “Wait, what happened?” I look between the two of them.

  Winter, normally unflappable in any situation, is now very clearly flapped. I missed something, maybe a look or a gesture or an aside, and she looks panicked in a way that I have never seen her before. Even when she saw a ghost she didn’t look like she’d seen a ghost. But now she does.

  Ghastly smiles again, in performance mode again. “I think maybe Winter is right. I have been unfair to my dearest Maulie. I know that. Her loss is the greatest tragedy of my life, and I worry every day that I never made her feel as important as she actually was to me. That I never showed her in my actions just how truly she changed me, and how much I adored her. Losing her broke something in me. I have even wondered if it’s time to retire…” he waves a hand at his face, encompassing everything that he is.

  “Do you think that’s what she would want?” I ask carefully.

  “I grieve so much I can’t even say for sure. I just wish I could talk to her one last time. But even then, I know that anything I would say would pale in comparison to how I truly feel for her. Some people see through the disguise in time, or when our spirits align,” he nods at me, “but she saw through me from the very beginning. And I just—”

  The sentiment is bulldozed by the arrival of Mr. Vexwell, “There you are! I have been calling you for hours. You left my office and what, just disappeared?” The harried man looks even more at wits ends then he was earlier in the afternoon. That’s when I also notice that the skylights in the distance are dark. We’ve been here for awhile, and were touring the other mall when the map got infected, but even still it shouldn’t be close to dark yet. We should have hours yet.

  “Just a bit of a sightseeing tour,” Ghastly murmurs, sounding entirely at ease. As though he was not just conveying some deep seated feelings, or before that being dragged through a hellscape mall (which is in itself already a hellscape).

  “I hate working with tourists,” the slick man mutters to himself. It makes me wonder what his definition of tourist is, considering Ghastly is an institution around Hollow Hills. Then again, maybe he’s talking about the mall. That seems to make a good deal of sense.

  “He’s a real gem,” Winter murmurs. She appears to have shaken off whatever was bothering her a moment before. The arrival of the businessman seems to have put all of our hackles up.

  I adjust my backpack, wishing just for once that Wrath would make himself visible and threaten the guy with his claws. The thought of it makes me smile just a bit.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Ghastly continues, now feigning a bit of his normal charm and affability. “The kids and I were just doing a bit of looking around. We found some interesting things inside the store space, didn’t we kids. Some features you didn’t disclose before we signed the paperwork.”

  If there’s an egregore, there’s likely a symbol powering it. And with the space having been empty for so long, it could be misfiring. I’m still not sure how to solve for this - it’s like a live power line in the street. You have to contain it somehow, but it’s not like there’s a Thoughtform Task Force that you can call when netherworld energies are out of control.

  “We need this space open as soon as possible,” the man insists, and it’s fairly obvious he’s not listening to any of us. He is looking only for what he wants to hear, and he’s not getting it so everything else is pointless. “We have a contract!”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “The contract doesn’t say anything about a required opening date,” Ghastly replies mildly. “You were more concerned about the clauses for accidental hordes of altered state shoppers, and holiday schedules. We never put an opening date in writing. And besides which, you said yourself this space was empty for over a year. If it was that pressing wouldn’t you have found a tenant before us?”

  “What happened to the symbol?” I ask the greasy man abruptly.

  There’s an awkward, painful silence. Vexwell nearly stumbles in place, at first confusion splaying across his face and then replaced by panic. It’s a look of recognition, of understanding. “I-I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He laughs nervously. Even his laughter is annoying, condescending and smug. A momentary pause, and then a followup laughter, just as forced as the first.

  “That’s probably why he’s like this. Not the asshole part, I’m betting that’s his usual state. But the panic.” I turn to the side and speak directly to Ghastly. For his part, the older man in vampire garb nods solemnly. “I don’t know if he knows everything we need to know, but he knows something.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” the businessman demands.

  “You know about the symbol, and I’m guessing it has something to do with the flagship property,” I continue, barely looking at him. “But usually people that mess with things like sigils and symbols lose a bit of their sanity in the process. They’re not so focused on the bottom line, most of the time we’re lucky if they’re still wearing bottoms.”

  Winter gives me a weird look but I just shrug. You deal with one cultist in the nude and it scars you for life. I don’t deal with people who aren’t wearing pants, and I think that’s just a good rule of life.

  “Do you know something about this, Mr. Vexwell? Did you rent me this property while holding something back? I think that would make for a complicated situation for our lawyers to digest, don’t you?” Ghastly doesn’t lose the jovial tone, but there is a very adult sort of hardness to it now. He always sounds like a friendly, sociable grandparent, but in this moment he’s hardened and litigious.

  It’s a peak behind the curtain, of the man that Ghastly would be if he took off the costume and dressed up as an actual adult. I don’t recognize him in that moment and I wonder if there was a version of his life that would have brought him here, in a designer suit costume and hair just as slicked back as Vexwell’s. The businessman might be in his late forties or fifties, but Ghastly still has at least a few decades on him.

  “Of course I don’t,” the man blusters.

  “Really?” Ghastly presses. “So if my lawyers go back and review the contract and their team investigates Hollowmouth Mall, they’re not going to find anything that you didn’t report before we signed the contract. I know that the laws don’t apply the same way with houses. If you sell a house where a murder occurred and you don’t report it, you can be held liable. But opening a shop is a much more legal endeavor.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man repeats again, a new wildness in his eyes now that something is being threatened.

  “He knows something,” Wrath whispers in my ears.

  “I know that,” I respond immediately, irritated because the demon points it out before I can. “You know something,” I continue.

  Vexwell is about to say something, but my confirmation shuts him up yet again. Ghastly looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m usually better at knowing when a TA is messing with arcane forces and raising a zombie army, but I’m also good at sensing liars.”

  The older man’s expression takes on a moment of confusion but then he shrugs it off, as though this is not the time. “You’re not going to listen to a kid.” Still with that blustering tone. Still with that avoidant gaze.

  Winter sighs, the slightest bit dramatically. “I’ve texted your law firm. They asked me to record everything,” she says, as the red light on her phone camera alights. There’s an easy, calm tone to her voice.

  I’m impressed with how quickly she got ahold of his lawyers. It doesn’t even occur to me that she could be lying.

  “Do yourself a favor and tell us what you know.”

  Vexwell swallows, and then the truth comes out. “My dad… he ran the mall all his life. Only thing he could me was never let the anchor stores close down. Flagship stores, but he always called them the anchors. Then Terrors “R” Us went bankrupt and we had to find a new place. That’s never happened in thirty years, an empty flagship property. No one wanted to move in. Not until Maulie’s. And then the problems started…”

  “Anchors…” I muse.

  “There’s definitely something under the surface here,” Wrath murmurs just to me. Winter is not close enough to overhear him for once. Or maybe he’s speaking quietly just so she doesn’t hear him. “If there really was a thought form built to influence the mall shoppers, there’s a focal point.”

  I let his idea sit for a moment, both to consider the possibilities as well as to see if Ghastly or anyone else reacts. Finding out Winter could hear and see Wrath was a bit of a blow, and there have been a few moments where Ghastly has raised my suspicions. How much does he know about what really goes on in Hollow Hills, and how much is he hiding with his vampire act?

  “And what about the symbol?” I ask him again.

  “What symbol?” he asks immediately, not meeting my eyes. Well, at least the part where he tries to ignore me is over.

  “Oh don’t do that, Vexwell. It’s just embarrassing for you. Now unless you want me to not only bring my law firm into this, but also give them the names and contact information of every other flagship property in the mall, you’ll tell my friend what he wants to know.”

  “I don’t know, okay. I let your fans, you know the ones, tour the space when you first signed the lease, and when I locked up after they left, it was gone.”

  “My fans?” Ghastly asks blankly.

  “Those three women. The insufferable ones, who always complain about the lights being too bright and the temperature being too cold in here.”

  “The Ghouls,” I breathe, and Ghastly nods.

  “Would they have taken a symbol, though?” Winter asks.

  “They might have,” Ghastly says. “Especially if they thought it wasn’t something I would miss. A memento of the store before it opened, or something.”

  “That’s all I know, I swear.” Vexwell looks at the fake watch on his wrist. “Please, I have to make this meeting.”

  Ghastly waves him off, and the man scurries away, no longer the annoyed and pompous executive, but now just a scared son failing in his father’s legacy. The affable, gentle Ghastly returns the minute Vexwell departs. He looks up at me, a rueful smile now in place. “I apologize you had to see me like that. I never like to exhibit that behavior in front of my kids.”

  He apologizes like he just launched a thousand curses at the man, but all he did was tie him in legal knots. Even still, it’s a bit disturbing to see Ghastly being so… normal.

  “Now what do we do about the symbol?”

  Ghastly smiles. “I think it’s time for another meet and greet.”