Eyes in the Fishbowl Read online

  At one time I used to think that Alcott’s toy department was just one step below Paradise—but that was when I was a kid. I hadn’t even been there for several weeks, but right away I got the feeling that something was different. It hit me as soon as I stepped off the escalator. For one thing, there didn’t seem to be nearly as many clerks as usual, and for another there was a new detective staked out between dolls and stuffed animals. He was all dressed up in an expensive tweed suit and he was kind of half-heartedly pretending to be shopping, but it was pretty much wasted effort. There are some cops who have COP written all over them so loud and clear that you couldn’t mistake them if they were wearing lace negligees.

  But, at least, since the guy was new he wouldn’t recognize me, so I just got into the act and pretended to shop, too. First I looked into a junior planetarium that cost around two hundred dollars, and then I checked out a practically life-sized plush tiger that was a bargain for eighty-five. I was still putting on an act for the benefit of the tweedy cop—like I was some rich kid trying to decide what to buy for my little brother’s birthday—when I saw Mrs. Jensen coming out of the toy department office. The office was in the storage area behind the children’s book department, and the door was camouflaged with a book shelf to keep customers from strolling in by mistake. Mrs. Jensen is quite an old lady and she’d been the head buyer for the toy department for years and years—so of course, I knew her pretty well. She wasn’t the kind of person you could kid around with, but she’d been patient with me all those years when I used to visit Alcott’s toy department almost every day. I hadn’t seen her for quite a while, though, so I decided to step over and say hello, and maybe get her version of what was going on.

  When I came around the corner of the display case where I’d seen Mrs. Jensen go, she was squatting down counting something in the storage bins under the case. I came up behind her, but she didn’t seem to hear me and I didn’t want to interrupt her counting so I just picked up a model car that was on top of the case to look at while I waited for her to finish. It was one of those beautifully-made intricate miniature models, all real steel and chrome with real rubber tires. I was crazy about them when I was a kid, but I got pretty well bored with the thing that day while I waited. Mrs. Jensen finally seemed to have finished her counting, and she was just staring straight ahead as if she was thinking or trying to figure something out. At last I got impatient and gave a little cough to get her attention.

  I was standing pretty close to her, but it wasn’t a loud cough and I certainly didn’t expect a reaction like the one I got. Like I said, Mrs. Jensen is an old lady, but she shot to her feet like a five-year-old and whirled around with her hand up to her throat. A funny little scream, more like a strangled squeak, came out of her mouth and her eyes behind the rimless glasses looked faded with fright.

  She saw me then, and in the next few seconds her expression went from blind terror—to recognition—to relief—to embarrassment—to anger. It would have been funny except that she’d scared me almost as much as I’d scared her. I mean, it’s kind of nerve-racking to be screamed at for nothing at all, and besides it occurred to me that maybe she was going to clutch her heart and topple over—and it would all be my fault.

  But she didn’t have a heart attack, after all. Instead she started bawling me out. “Dion,” she said when she finally got her voice back, “what do you mean sneaking up behind people! What do you mean—” She noticed the model car in my hands then and she reached out and snatched it away. “What do you mean handling things? Wearing things out? No wonder things are getting broken. No wonder things are scuffed and shopworn before they’ve been on the shelves a day. No wonder—”

  She was still sputtering along like that when a deep voice interrupted, “Is something the matter, Mrs. Jensen?” And there stood the tweedy cop who had stopped pretending to be a customer and was standing over me, kind of twitching the way a cat does just before he pounces.

  Seeing the cop standing there seemed to bring Mrs. Jensen back to her senses a little. “Why—why—no,” she stuttered. “It’s only that Dion here came up behind me and startled me. I know the boy. It’s all right.” She managed a very wobbly smile. “It’s perfectly all right, Mr. Crane.” She took me by the elbow and started steering me out of the department. “I’m sorry, Dion,” she said on the way out. “I don’t know what came over me to make me act that way. It’s just that I’m tired—and nervous. Things haven’t been—that is, things haven’t been going well in the department lately. I’m just not myself. I’m sorry I scolded you so.” We’d gotten to the beautiful handcarved archway of elves and animals that led into the toy department. Mrs. Jensen turned loose of my elbow, and I started off.

  “Well, good-by, Mrs. Jensen,” I said.

  “Good-by, Dion,” she said. “Oh, by the way. I almost forgot in all the—” she smiled kind of sheepishly, “—excitement. Did you want something? Could I help you with something?”

  “No,” I said. “Not really. I was just going to say hello. I haven’t been around for quite a while, so I thought I’d just say—hello.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Jensen said, and her smile was finally back to normal. “How nice of you, Dion. Hello to you, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “Hello.” And I left.

  I went on up through Housewares without noticing anything else strange, but I kept thinking about Mrs. Jensen and wondering what had gotten into her to make her act so jumpy. She’d always seemed like a pretty calm person before.

  I was about to get on the escalator to go up to the sixth floor, Furniture and Antiques, when I heard the closing bell ring. That meant it was five-thirty and time I stopped playing Sherlock Holmes and went home to dinner. But just a few minutes later, right at the very moment that I stepped on the down escalator on the second floor, suddenly all hell broke loose somewhere below me on the mezzanine.

  The escalator was crowded with a closing time rush of downward bound customers, and the first scream seemed to freeze everyone still. But at the second scream, everyone suddenly decided that the escalator was moving too slow and started to run up or down. Probably the curious ones were trying to get to where the scream came from to see what had happened, and the scarier ones were trying to go in the opposite direction. But since it was hard to tell where the sound had come from, both types seemed to be heading both ways. Whatever they had in mind, what they actually accomplished was a kind of mass wrestling match, on a moving escalator. But the escalator kept going down, so eventually we all got dumped on the mezzanine landing.

  The mezzanine was full of people running in all directions. As soon as I got untangled from the crowd, I got behind a statue of a Grecian lady and surveyed the scene. Fur-coated customers, black-dressed sales ladies and plain-clothed detectives were whizzing by like crazy. But it was so noisy I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, and I couldn’t make any sense at all out of what was going on. There were a couple more screams, not quite so loud, in the direction of the dressing rooms and then a janitor came running by carrying something that looked like a big butterfly net.

  The whole thing was so interesting that it never occurred to me I might get myself in trouble by hanging around, until I saw Mr. Priestly getting off the elevator. I’d only gotten behind the Venus, or whatever it was, to keep out of the flight pattern; but all of a sudden I realized how it would look. There I was, a guy who was already suspected of being a troublemaker, if not a shoplifter, hiding behind a statue on a floor where goodness knows what had just happened. And to make matters worse, I suddenly remembered the tweedy cop in the toy department. He’d probably be only too glad to testify that I’d just been scaring the buyer in the toy department half to death—even if she was too nice to press charges. It didn’t sound good. In fact, it even sounded suspicious to me, and I knew I was innocent.

  Priestly was pretty close to me when I saw him, but he was looking the other way, towards the dressing rooms. I wasn’t positive, but I didn’t think he’d seen me�
�not yet, anyway. I eased out from behind the statue and started to stroll back towards the escalator. I couldn’t get to the down one without going right past him, so I took the up one, thinking that I’d go up a few floors and then catch the elevator straight down to the street floor.

  I don’t know why I went clear up to the sixth floor before I crossed over to the elevators, except I was thinking that if I got on up there I’d be clear at the back of the elevator and all the people who got on at the floors in between would hide me from view when we stopped at the mezzanine.

  No one else in the whole store seemed to be going up, so I kept on going up all by myself: third, fourth, fifth. And when I got off at the sixth floor, everything seemed to be deserted there, too.

  As I walked across to the elevators, I didn’t see a single person on the whole floor. Either the salesmen had gone home already, or else they had been called down to help with the emergency on the mezzanine. I pushed the down button and waited.

  I was thinking hard about something—the scream, I guess. I was trying to figure out what had caused it. It didn’t seem like something being stolen could cause that sort of scream, not even if it had been the Hope Diamond. It hadn’t been an angry scream, or even outraged, that scream had been fear. I’d gotten about that far in figuring it out, when I realized that I’d been waiting quite a while. I checked the little pointer above the door and all of a sudden it dawned on me that the elevators had quit running.

  My watch said six o’clock. I’d known that it was a little past closing time, but I hadn’t thought it was that much. That meant I’d have to risk the escalator, and I was on my way back to it when I heard men’s voices—it sounded like two or three of them on their way up. I whirled around and hurried in the opposite direction. It had occurred to me that there was one more way downstairs. So I dashed off across the huge floor, ducking around highboys and love seats, thinking to myself that it was a good thing I knew about the emergency staircase.

  The emergency staircase was clear across the building from the escalators, and on the sixth floor it was in a little hall right between two of the furniture display rooms. There were a lot of display rooms fixed up to look like different rooms in houses—living rooms, dining rooms and so forth—but I knew just which two to look for. I ducked in between a red and white bedroom and an orange and yellow dining room, and there it was—the door to the stairway. The only thing was—it was locked.

  I’d been scared before, but there was something about jerking on that locked door that made me push the panic button. I could hear the voices coming closer across the floor, and the word TRAPPED kept flashing across my mind like one of those blinking billboards. I had a crazy urge to do something, anything, in a hurry—and what I did was pretty stupid. I ducked into the red and white bedroom and slid under the bed.

  Chapter 5

  I’VE HEARD THAT your whole life can pass before your eyes in a few minutes when you’re about to die, and I can believe it. I know for a fact that an amazing amount of insignificant stuff can shoot through your mind when you’re only trapped under a bed on the sixth floor of a closed department store. As I lay there and listened to the voices of the men coming closer and closer, all sorts of useless thoughts popped into my mind. I don’t remember most of it, but I do remember realizing that if I had to spend the night there, under that bed, my dad wouldn’t even miss me until way after midnight. This little chamber orchestra that he plays with had a date to play for some women’s club way out in the suburbs, and he wouldn’t be home until late. Of course, the guys from upstairs would probably be down, particularly if it turned out to be a cold night. They came down to study by our fireplace whenever they felt like it, even when we weren’t there; but they wouldn’t worry about me. For all they knew, I might be at the movies or spending the night with a friend.

  I don’t know why, but realizing that no one would be worrying about me made me feel worse than ever. It didn’t make sense. If my dad was home and worried, all he could do would be to call the police. And the kind of mess I was in wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to be rescued from by the cops.

  I could hear the two men doing something not far away. They were moving around from place to place as if they were checking to see if everything was ready for the night. Now and then I caught bits and pieces of their conversation—enough to know they were just salesmen, not detectives with dogs—and enough to tell that they were discussing what had happened on the mezzanine.

  Once I heard one of them say something about “—nothing to get excited about. Whether she admits it or not, that girl in the Pet Shop must have let it get out.” The other voice came from farther away and it sounded fast and jittery, as if he were pretty excited. I couldn’t hear much of what he was saying, but when he finally stopped the closer voice answered, “That’s a lot of nonsense. The old gal must have been hysterical or off her rocker. It must have been in there all the time and she just didn’t notice it. It couldn’t have been flying.”

  The jittery voice had moved closer. “Well,” it said, “she seemed so positive. But I suppose it might have climbed up the wall and she saw it falling off and imagined it was flying.”

  “Sure,” the first voice said, “there’s bound to be a logical explanation.”

  They both moved away then, and after a while it got very quiet and most of the lights went off. As I began to calm down a little, I began to notice that I was very uncomfortable. The bed was so low that I had to stay flat on my face. I couldn’t raise my head more than an inch, and some kind of a metal cross bar was pressing into my back. The air was stuffy; the dust in the thick rug choked me so that every few minutes I had to fight back a sneeze.

  But in spite of the discomfort, I knew that getting up my nerve to crawl out into the huge open emptiness of the store was not going to be easy. And crawling out would be only the beginning. After that would come getting down six flights. The escalator would be stopped, but I might be able to walk down it. Then, there would be goodness knows how many watchmen and cleaning crews and policemen with dogs—not to mention getting out of the building through doors that would probably be locked from the inside as well as from the out. With all that to worry about, it wasn’t any wonder that it seemed easier just to lie there, at least for the moment.

  I told myself that I had to start planning—deciding what I was going to do—but for a long time all I seemed to be able to do was torture myself with “if only” possibilities. “If only” I hadn’t waited so long for the elevator before I realized it had stopped running; “if only” I’d risked being seen by Mr. Priestly and taken the down escalator in the first place; “if only” I’d tried to bluff it out with the two salesmen instead of hiding, like telling them I’d been in the men’s room and hadn’t realized the store was closing.

  But the chance to do any of those things was gone, and when I came right down to it there were only two things left that I might do. One was to stay there under the bed all night and hope to go out in the morning with the early shoppers. And the other was to crawl out now and start trying to find a way out without being seen. The only problem was that knowing about the extra watchmen and the dogs made me pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to make it either way.

  There was one other possibility that came to mind, but I didn’t consider it even for a minute. That was to go looking for the nearest guard and turn myself in, explain as well as I could, and face the music. Of course, there wasn’t a chance that they would believe all of my story, but they might believe part of it, and because I was a first offender they might let me off pretty easy. However, I’d never be able to set foot inside Alcott-Simpson’s again. Like I say, I didn’t consider it for a minute. Somehow I was going to have to find a way to get out without being caught.

  I don’t know how long I lay there trying to get up my nerve to make a move, but it seemed like half a lifetime. I thought about the dogs a lot—what it would be like to be found by one—a huge shaggy head with long gleaming fangs lun
ging in towards me from the side of the bed. I pictured it coming in from different spots around me and each time the part of me closest seemed to shrivel in expectation. But for a long time I didn’t hear anything that sounded at all like a dog, and after a while I began to worry about other things.

  As time went by it got quieter and quieter, and as it did I began to listen harder and harder. The faint sounds of the city seemed a thousand miles away, and I could almost feel all the dark floors of the store stretching out around me like a huge deserted city. Then I began to think again about the screams on the mezzanine and what I’d overheard the salesmen say. I thought about what it could have been that could “crawl up a wall” and frighten someone enough to cause a scream like that. I even began to imagine things crawling in towards me under the edge of the bedspread—horrible vague things that crawled up walls and maybe flew—

  Then I began to hear things. First I heard footsteps. Not like a watchman’s feet, firm and heavy, but a light quick brush of sound that seemed very near and yet so soft that I couldn’t be absolutely positive. Then there were voices that were the same way—whispers so soft that I never quite got to the point where I said, “There, that time I know I heard it.” But once, without hearing anything, something made me turn my head and I saw the fringe on the bedspread swaying as if it had just been touched.

  After that I lay there absolutely frozen for several minutes, but nothing more happened and the soft sounds seemed to have gone away. I was just beginning to tell myself that it had all been caused by the strain of waiting and that I had to pull myself together and crawl out, when suddenly very close to me a soft but very distinct voice said, “Hello.”

  I jumped so hard that my head bounced off a metal mattress support and my face ricocheted off the floor. For a minute I was blinded by the pain in my nose and the dust in my eyes, but I could hear all right and what I heard was the same soft voice saying, “Oh, did you hurt yourself? Are you all right?”