Hellfire Crossroads: Horror With A Heart: Volume 6 by Trevor Denyer

Author:Trevor Denyer [Denyer, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Midnight Street Press
Published: 2017-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Amy arrived at the new department store. Scaffolding still encased one of its corners and a slave who was crouching on the scaffold-boards with an electrical polishing tool, adding a finish to the granite, paused and stared down at her. He wasn’t aware of a foreman prowling along the level behind him. Seeing the slave not working, the foreman poked him in the back with a rubber-handled rod that, like the polisher, was electrified.

The slave cried out and fell forward onto the boards. Then the foreman looked down at the street and noticed Amy. The sight of her was enough to make him freeze too.

A moment later, the stricken slave vomited and the gruel he’d been fed at the start of the day splattered down the scaffolding. It almost hit an old lady who’d emerged from the store clutching a shopping bag. She squawked and sprang back and dropped her bag, which landed on the pavement amid the slave’s vomit.

As the old lady tried to compose herself, her eyes also fell on Amy. The lady’s face was a mask of green, black and red, of malachite, kohl and ochre, but despite it being caked in make-up a look of wizened disgust appeared on it. Her kohl-ringed eyes seemed to shoot out a furious message: “The state of you! That was your fault!”

The lady’s painted, disgusted face reminded her of another painted and disgusted face. One whose owner had once stood before a house-door and tried to stop her from leaving. “You mean to go out like that?” the face croaked. “Practically naked? What do you want people to think of us?”

Amy had raised a hand to her own face and touched its bare skin. “This is what I really am. What I really look like. I don’t see why I should cover myself with that crap like you do.”

The face-paint almost cracked thanks to the contortions underneath. “You’re insane, girl! Why do I put up with you? I should stick you in a hospital!”

Now Amy snatched up the shopping sleeve from the vomit-stained pavement, wiped it with her sleeve and hooked its handles around one of the lady’s hands. She didn’t wait for a response – she hurried on to the store-entrance. Above, the new building’s façade tapered into the sky. She found it depressing that despite all the architects, designers and ideas-people the store’s corporate owners had on their payroll, they couldn’t think of anything more original than making it a pyramid.

Ironically, the area just inside the entrance sold cosmetics. Lowering her head, and keeping her arm folded around her handbag so that the sick-stained sleeve was out-of-sight, she passed between rows of little boutiques. There, female staff-members mixed colours on palettes with ivory sticks and, leaning over the counters, dabbed the colours from the stick-ends onto the faces of seated customers. The air smelt of frankincense, cinnamon and perfumed oil. Meanwhile, the store’s PA system played a meandering tune that consisted of lyres and reed pipes and was punctuated by rattles and bell-chimes.

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