Moonshine City still had that new building stink.
Aya stared at the white lines in the parking lot as rain dotted the asphalt. These lines were the only traces left of MAPITA Mall, that charmingly run-down shopping center that had stood here for two decades before. Aya could practically hear the crackling carnival tune of the old crane game machines outside the pharmacy upstairs where she and Keisuke used to play for counterfeit Pokémon plush dolls.
“ ‘Shop happiness.’ ” Kayo pointed to Moonshine City’s towering logo on the front entrance like a second sun. The same slogan was printed on the hundreds of banner flags hanging along the autowalk from one atrium to the next.
The new mall was the centerpiece of Hitobashi City’s “Town Revival” push. With three hundred customizable coworking spaces, two food courts (one for local cuisine, the other for international), six VR escape rooms, a Showa-style shooting arcade, and a boutique for every fashion period and fetish you can imagine, there’s a little nook for everybody. Nevermind the phone calls to the head of the town committee at 3 a.m., or the faceless mannequins sent to Fujiwara Co., the architects in charge of the construction. The dazzling new mall had been featured in the latest issues of Popeye and Men’s No-Non, with a special live TV tour of the space featuring the idol sensation Magical Girls Deluxe in mini moon skirts and blouses to match the mall’s logo. Even adventurous weekenders board hour-long trains from Tokyo just to visit the city-within-a-city.
Moonshine City has something for everybody.
“Do you think they take Mastercard?” Aya asked as she followed Kayo in.
Aya sat at one of the cafeteria-style tables, watching a cartoon dumpling sing about the seasonal menu on the screen bolted to the wall. “Watermelon bubble tea! Kagawa-style cold udon with a mountain of summer veggies! Smoked eel bowls! Locally sourced!”
“If you stare at the screen long enough, they say the dumpling will tell you the secret of life,” Kayo said, putting down the tray with a paper boat of takoyaki slathered in sauce and green onions.
The two girls halved wooden takeout chopsticks and turned on their cellphones at the same time, both clicking to their favorite mobile game, Demon Cats. The Dynamic Duo—that’s what people had been calling them since middle school because you’d never see one without the other close by. Kayo, the tall and loud one, the leader, and Aya, “the other one.” Freshman year of high school, Kayo tried to start an occult detective club at school, spurred by her summerlong marathoning of Doctor Who and Death Note episodes, but Aya was the only person she could recruit.
“Did you hear about Aki?” Kayo asked, not looking up from her phone.
“That he got kicked out of Ueno Zoo for trying to climb into the panda pen?”
“No, no.” Kayo glanced around the crowded food court to see if there were any familiar faces. “His sister said he uploaded a video of himself wandering around some abandoned mall a few stops away. Like talking to the mannequins and laughing at nothing. It was creepy as hell, but the weirdest shit is that no one’s been able to reach him since.”
“Like he turned off his phone?”
“Like he vanished off the planet.”
Brown sauce dripped onto Kayo’s new Demon Cats x UNIQLO t-shirt.
“Fuck.” She clicked her tongue. “This shit better come out.”
Aya watched her friend rush off to the bathroom, dodging strollers, chairs, and giggling couples like a star quarterback hurtling through a zombie apocalypse. Just as she was about to pick up another octopus ball, a faint ring cut through the food court cacophony. Aya winced, putting down her chopsticks. The ring seemed to chime through her whole body like a massive tuning fork. What the hell is that? She swallowed hard to clear her eardrums. Her ears popped, saliva sliding down her throat. The ringing finally stopped.
“Project Happy Station. Coming soon to a mall near you!!”
Aya looked up at the screen. The singing dumpling was gone. A new commercial was playing with 8-bit fanfare. On the screen, faceless mannequins shambled around a dark hall until they fell into a large hole in the ground. The hole fed into a chute that dropped them down into a giant aluminum vat several floors below. Some fell directly into incinerators. The remaining mannequins basked in the vat of sticky golden liquid until they were expelled from an opening in the bottom. Crawling back to their feet, they now had faces, hats, clothes, shoes, but their mouths were abnormally large, an impossibly wide line of teeth.
The screen glitched.
This time, Aya’s face appeared. Except paler, hair longer and shinier, bigger eyes.
“You’re pretty hot,” her doppelgänger said.
Aya looked around, but no one else in the food court was paying them any attention.
“They don’t get you. When’re you going to figure that out?” her doppelgänger sighed.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Aya said, feeling stupid for responding to a screen. It was the same feeling she had when Kayo made her try one of those love simulation games and her phone would ring with fake calls from her virtual boyfriend each night. “How are you today?” Kei, Boyfriend Option #2, would ask in that lush familiar voice actor voice during his 10 p.m. call, the time she’d set for their daily “check-in.” She’d picked Kei, the two-dimensional bespectacled student body president, purely for his name and thick glasses.
“You know that better than I do, don’t you?” Her doppelgänger smiled the way Aya wished she could. Perfect teeth and pimple-free skin, clump-free sky-high lashes. The way Keisuke’s new girlfriend probably did. “You don’t need them. I’ve already taken care of everything.”
“Everything?”
The doppelgänger unbuttoned the top of her blouse and the camera zoomed in on a skin-colored fastener at the base of her neck. She tilted her head and smiled, raising her hand to her neck, pulling ever-so-gently on the fastener, the first clip of flesh . . .
Kayo returned, wiping her hands with a Demon Cats hand towel from her purse. There was still a faded wet brown stain on her shirt.
“The dumpling tell you its secrets?” she asked, following Aya’s nervous look to the screen.
The cartoon dumpling was dancing around with anthropomorphized discount tags and plates again.
“Yeah, two-for-one sale on the secrets of the universe,” Aya said, unbuttoning the top button of her shirt, patting the skin just to be sure there was nothing there. “Too bad I’m broke.”
Kayo laughed, still dabbing at the stain. She motioned toward the screen with her chin. “Then just use that last-minute discount to ask it how to make Keisuke fall in love with you.”
The first time Aya met Keisuke, he was organizing his Pokémon cards on a bench outside the discount supermarket in MAPITA Mall.
“My mom said Pokémon is too violent,” Aya said, standing over him with a pack of cigarettes her father had sent her to buy. She remembered the boy from the neighboring class, always reading alone at his desk during breaks.
Keisuke looked up at her over the rim of his thick glasses, blinking. Without a word, he flipped through his cards and pulled out two cards—one with an orange dragon, the other with a blue one.
“Fire beats water, BUT—” He pulled out a third card with a rhinoceros-looking creature. “Ground beats fire.”
“And water beats ground,” Aya finished, looking at his cards so she didn’t need to look at him. She’d spent hours studying the different characters on her hand-me-down phone as her parents argued in the kitchen.
A woman toting a screaming toddler in one hand and a Baskin-Robbins cake in the other walked past them like a siren.
“It’s not about violence,” Keisuke said, sliding the card back into his deck. “It’s about strategy. It’s about figuring out weaknesses and strengths. It’s about how to train your Pokémon to bring out the best in them.”
Aya could only nod. There was something mesmerizing about a boy who could speak about cards like gods. The only thing she could speak so confidently about were the designated times she was supposed to get her mother’s pills ready.
“Where’s your mom?” she sputtered when he went back to organizing his cards.
“Waiting for them to put the discount stickers on the ready-to-eat food,” Keisuke answered, not looking up. “It usually takes a while.”
“Yo, Aya.”
Keisuke walked past the vending machines with his tailored blue Oxford shirt and his posse of followers with cockroach-like durability for his verbal abuse. He might as well have been a classic Greek statue in a soy sauce-stained high school uniform.
Aya swallowed back the urge to vomit, mustering the last of her nerves to wave nonchalantly at him as his posse watched. How long had it been like this? A wall of strangers between them?
“Yo. Here for shopping?” she asked, amazed at how calm she sounded. She motioned at his Muji paper bag with her chin.
“Something like that. Do you know where the Zoff is?” He glanced at Kayo, flinching slightly like someone catching sight of an abnormally large rodent, before turning back to Aya. “I need new glasses.”
“It’s on the fourth floor. Past the tentacle cat Hello Kitty statue and next to the Ghibli Store.”
He made a sound from the back of his throat. Aya knew he had always been bad with directions, though she doubted the rest of his posse knew.
“It’s a little confusing, but uh—”
“She could totally show you the way,” Kayo interrupted with a grin.
Keisuke’s minions perked up like raccoons at fresh garbage.
“Yeah, sure, if you don’t mind,” their king answered.
Three things Aya had never told anyone:
(1) She hated Barbie—an aunt bought her a My-Size Barbie during first year of elementary school, telling her she could dress up the plastic-eyed doll in her own clothes and accessories. Aya was convinced the doll would wake up in the middle of the night and murder her to steal her identity.
(2) She had been in love with Keisuke Harada since the fourth grade when he beat all the other kids at dodgeball, huffing like an asthmatic Mad Max in thick glasses and a Pokémon t-shirt.
(3) Her doppelgänger hid in mirrors, screens, and night-time windows. She wanted to be friends.
The elevator smelled like artificial strawberry flavor. Keisuke’s posse felt miles away, sipping on fountain drinks in the food court. Hikaru Utada’s throaty new song scratched over the speakers above the number pad.
Aya tried not to breathe too loudly.
She fought the urge to bring up the dodgeball game, how it sometimes played in her head like a favorite bookmarked video on YouTube. Stalkers bring up the past where they’re nothing but invisible characters, she thought. And Aya wasn’t a stalker.
“When did you start wearing contacts?” she asked instead, pressing 4. The elevator doors closed, and her mind automatically swept over to a reel of smooth hotel elevator doors, rotating beds, and neon spotlights.
“I have swimming practice after class now so it’s easier that way,” Keisuke answered, eyes on the numbers above the door. He’d grown more than ten inches since the fourth grade, the envy of all the other boys in their class. She barely recognized him the summer after his mother remarried. He hadn’t come to MAPITA Mall for weeks, no message or anything, and then she saw him at the train station the day before classes started. He was dressed in all name-brand clothes with a neat new haircut like someone going to a wedding.
“I liked your glasses,” Aya murmured.
“A lot of the other kids used to make fun of me because of how thick they were. Even my stepdad did.”
She knew that, but she never had. She missed those glasses.
The elevator doors opened. The floor was lit up with neon emergency lights, an emerald sea of little running stick-men. Mannequins lined the walls with big smiling mouths, an eyeless audience. Aya’s blood ran cold.
“I think this is the wrong floor,” she said, tapping on the elevator’s close button.
“Looks like the right floor,” Keisuke said, staring at the large red 4 on the LED panel.
“The Zoff isn’t here.” Aya frantically tapped the other floors on the number pad, but the doors still didn’t move.
“Let’s just take the stairs,” Keisuke said, getting off the elevator like someone disembarking from a burning boat. The emergency lights buzzed along the walls as they stepped through the dim-lit hall. The mannequins watched them—their wide mouths seemed to be moving, undulating, but it was too dark to be sure.
“Do you have an appointment with the Viewmaster?”
An eyeless mannequin in a blue tuxedo stepped out of line.
Keisuke glanced at Aya as if she might, as if she were acquainted with the monster. She shook her head. Themed escape rooms had gotten popular, and maybe they’d simply stumbled in on one of the new ones during a soft opening. A fellow part-timer at the convenience store where Aya worked had dressed up as a mannequin for Halloween the year before and had gotten yelled at by the manager for scaring customers.
“The Viewmaster’s expecting us,” Keisuke lied the way Aya’s mother sometimes had when the bank called about unpaid credit card bills. Aya was both terrified and impressed.
“Come this way,” the mannequin directed.
The two followed the mannequin through a pair of metal doors into a hall of familiar-looking stores and stands: novelty shops selling cat-shaped mug cups and glittery notebooks, bag shops with walls of colorful backpacks and leather purses, escape rooms with advertisements of other mannequins battling dragons and deadly mannequin-eating plants.
Each shop was filled with mannequins walking around, chatting, and shopping. None paid Keisuke or Aya any attention.
The three stopped in front of a giant neon sign that read “The Viewmaster.” A frenzy of sound spilled from the arched entrance. Coin chimes, hyper-cute kiddie voices singing invitations, frenetic Vocaloid music. Neon pink and blue lights speared across the ceiling. Arcade games flanked one side, pachinko machines the other, and at the far end was a line of crane games, each machine filled with plush dolls.
Screens along the wall played a documentary-style video featuring mannequin factory workers, glossy body parts stacked in giant vats, rolling red conveyor belts, crematorium-sized towers puffing smoke, bodies boxed and taped. At the end, an eyeless mannequin girl opened a delivery box and was soon hugging her new girl-shaped plush doll.
“A New Body. A New You.”
“Something for everybody.”
Keisuke and Aya turned around, but their escort had blended back into the crowd of mannequins outside.
Keisuke walked up to the change machine and took out his wallet. He slid a 1000 yen bill into the slot and three black coins tumbled out of the opening.
“Might as well try it out. They’re probably beta testing some new indoor horror theme park or escape room. They might be taking videos and will upload them onto YouTube later. Wasn’t Aki in one, looking like a weirdo?” he said, heading over to one of the crane game machines.
Keisuke never used to call anyone a weirdo. “Yeah, that makes sense,” Aya said, feeling like a miserable parrot. She reluctantly took out the only 1000 yen bill in her wallet, the one she hid inside a good luck amulet so her mom wouldn’t find it when the older woman went through her things, looking for Aya’s part-time job money.
Goodbye dinner. She sighed, sliding the bill into the change machine and picking up the three shiny black coins that came out.
“Hey again, pretty girl.”
The mannequin girl in the screen above the crane game machine had turned into her doppelgänger.
“It’s dangerous here. But you know that, don’t you? Or did you want him to like you that much?”
Keisuke was already playing one of the crane game machines, leaning over the panel to get a better look at the position of the claw. There was a giddiness to his face that hadn’t been there earlier. He’d always been the one who liked playing these games, while Aya liked to watch him.
“Do you like the shape of his collarbones? Or are your eyes just stuck?” her doppelgänger asked.
Aya couldn’t stand the way her doppelgänger grinned at her, like the girl already knew all the ugly thoughts in her head. Instead, she glanced over to the crane game machine next to the screen. It was filled with plush dolls, fluffy bead-eyed girls all wearing outfits eerily similar to the ones Kayo had. Some wore glasses, others sported miniskirts or pink wigs like the one Kayo wore during a holiday play in middle school. One was wearing the same brown-stained Demon Cats x UNIQLO t-shirt.
“Want to play a game?” her doppelgänger asked, waving to her on the screen. The Vocaloid pop music crescendoed in the background in a vibrating flurry of synthesizers, so loud that Aya could barely hear the doppelgänger’s next words: “A body is just a placeholder. You outgrow it. You find one that fits better. So why not take yours off? Try on a new one?”
“My body?”
The plush dolls in the machine seemed to wave at her now too. Little felt and cotton creatures. Little skin and organ creatures.
“ ‘What is essential is invisible to the eye,’ ” the doppelgänger recited from Aya’s favorite childhood book. Her grin darkened, reaching for the base of her own throat, to the skin-colored zipper. “But everything else can be sewed on.”
Aya felt hands on her face, even though she couldn’t see them. They seemed to be kneading her skin.
“I know you better than anyone else. I know what you want. So let me help you.”
Aya watched her doppelgänger pull on the zipper, her neck opening. Wider and wider until she could see something in the cavern of her throat—another face.
“A winner! A winner! We have a winner!”
The manic voice pulled Aya out of her trance. She turned toward the flashing lights of the crane game machine behind her.
“Hey look, this is so trippy,” Keisuke said, holding a plush doll of himself wearing a Pokémon t-shirt and glasses. He took out his phone with his other hand and held the doll up to the glass to take a photo.
That’s when Aya saw it, poking out of the top of his blue Oxford shirt. The skin-colored fastener on the base of his neck.
“Did you get one too?” Keisuke asked, walking over to show her the plush doll. “Creepy as hell, but kinda cool too.”
The clothes on the doll were stitched in perfect lines, down to the lightning-striped sneakers he used to wear every day of fourth grade. For a moment, she thought of those summer days at MAPITA Mall, how they’d sometimes go to the food court and buy neon green melon soda floats from First Kitchen, and he’d show her his cards or the latest manga he was reading. How long had it been since he’d shown her something without an audience? Without his posse hovering a few feet away?
Aya looked at the fastener on his throat again.
“No. It’s harder than it looks,” Aya lied, squeezing the three coins in her pocket.
“Want me to get you one?” he asked, glancing into the crane game machine with a gambler’s high. There were so many little Ayas, ones with bleached blond hair, ones in frilly dresses that would embarrass her to wear in real life, ones with sunflower eyes and blue-painted lips. Which one would he like best? “Like old times.”
On the screen, Aya’s doppelgänger winked at her with her gaping eye holes.
“Would you?” Aya asked, trying to sound the way she imagined Keisuke’s girlfriend sounded. She’d never seen her, only heard the rumors about the pretty girl he’d met at his part-time job at the dentist’s office near the station. She was on the track and field team at her school, but still made time to take care of her sick aunt. A real beauty with a heart. Aya wanted to inspect the girl’s teeth too, pluck out each one with the pliers from her mother’s toolbox. If she slotted those teeth into her own mouth, would that give her the same smile?
Keisuke handed her his mini-me plush doll the way he used to with the Pokémon and shiba dog plushies and slotted one of his black coins into the machine. “Just watch me,” he said, eyes brimming with confidence. The metal claw moved right, swinging above the wide-eyed dolls like the claws of a god. Which one would be the winner?
I know you better than anyone else. I know what you want. So let me help you.
Aya raised her hand to the fastener on his neck, taking hold of it carefully, like a surgical knife. It was warm in her fingers, like living skin. Gently, she pulled the zipper down, the flesh opening neatly until she could see his spine and the narrow cavity inside his chest. Where his heart should have been, there was a small cage, and inside it, a half-rotted doll in a button-down shirt, its face already unrecognizable. He was exhausted, wasn’t he? She opened the cage door. The doll fell out and crumbled to dust on the floor. With her other hand, she slotted in Keisuke’s plush doll and closed the door again.
“A winner! A winner! We have a winner!”
Mannequins had gathered by the entrance of the Viewmaster with their shopping bags and oversized fountain drinks, giant mouths open but silent. They were watching.
The crane game machine flashed its lights. Keisuke didn’t move. Aya’s doppelgänger was gone from the screen. Instead, Aya felt a faint pulsing in her throat, a warmth in her chest. Her mouth widened into a grin. She pressed her face into Keisuke’s back, breathing in the smell of him, the smell of the old mall. It had been so long.
“Hey, did you hear about Aki?” Kayo said as they rode the autowalk toward the food court. The summer “Shop Happiness” banners hanging from the ceiling had already been replaced by an autumn theme with happy jack o’lanterns and red foliage. “His sister said he came back. Just went on some trip to ‘find himself’ with a girl he met online. Apparently neither of them really knew how much it costs to find yourself, so they ended up coming home.”
Aya made a noise in the back of her throat as she messaged someone on her phone.
“Hey, did you hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Aya said, looking up to give her friend a big grin before returning to her messages.
Kayo had never seen her friend so busy, so upbeat. It was hard enough getting her to come out on weekends now that she was seeing Keisuke every day. She didn’t even pick up the phone at night anymore. It almost felt like her friend was making a whole new life without her. Was Keisuke leading Aya on? Kayo had mentioned that possibility several times, but she’d been brushed off like a nagging insect. Kayo didn’t want to admit that it hurt her feelings, how her best friend didn’t seem to trust or listen to anything she said anymore. What happened to the Dynamic Duo?
“I’m meeting Keisuke later at the new First Kitchen that just opened downstairs,” Aya said, finally putting her phone back into her pocket. She ran her tongue over her teeth to make sure there was nothing stuck between them. “So, I don’t think I can do the Demon Cats raid tonight. But I’m sure there’ll be a ton of other people there anyway, right?”
“Yeah, no big deal,” Kayo said, squeezing her Demon Cats bag. Who cares about playing a dumb game together anyway? “I guess that talking dumpling really did know all the secrets of life?”
“Something like that. You can figure out a lot just by looking.”
What the hell does that even mean? Pretentious. So fucking pretentious. “Yeah, I guess I just gotta keep looking,” Kayo said, feeling a scratch in her throat.
As they entered the food court, a dancing dumpling hawked the latest seasonal menu items from chestnut tarts to grilled Pacific saury.
It danced and watched, knowing there was something for everybody.
Originally published in Escalators to Hell: Shopping Mall Horrors, edited by Jennifer Jeanne McArdle and Michael W. Phillips Jr.
