The mall is truly endless.
To the average shopper, this sounds impossible. The Westerville Shopping Center can only be so big; only so much can fit inside those polished halls, those new-age glass elevators, the parking tower that extends floors and floors upward, far beyond what a mall may ever reasonably be able to fill.
He’d lived long enough inside that mall to know that was bullshit.
It’d whisper things to you. Little by little you’d come to know it:
an abandoned storing room behind a pillar; a section left abandoned because customers couldn’t find their way in; wide stretches of parking lots deep underground only accessible by an elevator inside a long-deserted clothing shop, all the old decor still where it had always been. The place was more than just a labyrinth. The mall was alive.
His favorite spot was somewhere in the west wing: a hallway with glass walls left to rot after the architects failed to turn it into a hellish spiral of some sort. So they close up the entrance-- except, of course, for a maintenance door.
It was the last damn place with a view of the town.
So there he was: huddled next to the wall, cheek pressed to the cold glass, his tie hanging loosely from its usual spot around his neck. The wind howled outside, thrusting the incoming droplets into the pane with a fury only nature could muster.
This world was very, very strange.
----
There were so many people he knew so well. And yet, he could almost feel them fading from his memory. As if some being had come in with an eraser and wiped off just their faces-- just enough for him to know they existed, but enough to know they were forever gone.
What made them special, to deserve this purgatory?