Chương 37: 15-2.When the Stars and Stripes Fall

I stood at the entrance of the shop and didn't go in immediately. The torchlight reached only a few feet past the doorframe. Beyond that, the darkness had texture—layered and dense, as though the shadows themselves had slowly grown into shapes over centuries. The shop was packed with stuffed animals: bears, rabbits, dogs, and bizarre little creatures I couldn't identify even with generous imagination.

They slumped across shelves, draped over display stands, or simply collapsed into formless heaps, half-buried under the weight of years. Most had lost their color entirely. The fabric had gone moldy, the stitching split open, revealing stuffing the color of old teeth and decay. The wrongness of it settled into my stomach like cold water. Because these things had been made to make children laugh.

Here, in this lightless tomb beneath a thousand years of silence, they looked like nothing so much as small, improperly dead things—waiting quietly for someone to stumble in and remember that they had once been held close. I reached out and touched the nearest stuffed bear. My fingertip had barely grazed it when the thing simply gave way. Not crumbling or breaking apart—more like it had been holding itself together through sheer stubbornness, and my touch had been the final permission it needed.

Without a sound, it collapsed inward and became a small heap of gray ash, sliding slowly off the counter's edge. I stared at the remains for two seconds, then pulled my hand back.

"Are you sure the sound came from in here?"

"I—I think so..." Jessi's voice came from behind me. I turned around and nearly laughed despite the circumstances. She had retreated considerably further than I'd expected, practically plastering herself behind one of the pillars outside the shop. Only half her face was visible around the edge, clinging to that stone column like it was her long-lost mother. She looked less like someone afraid of what might be lurking inside the shop and more like someone genuinely concerned the pillar itself might bite her.

"Aren't you standing a bit far back?"

"I call it strategic positioning," she whispered back, wrinkling her nose with complete conviction.

"The most dangerous things in places like this are always the ones that look the most harmless. Haven't you noticed? Things children love—once they die—always become specifically disgusting."

"Pretty sure you just described yourself."

"Excuse me, young master, what exactly about me resembles a child?"

"Your mental age. I can't speak to the rest." She glared at me from behind her beloved pillar, clearly torn between wanting to march over and kick me versus refusing to abandon her self-proclaimed safe zone. Honestly, the sight was almost comical, but I couldn't bring myself to laugh right now. Because that sound had been wrong. Not a rat. Not wind. Not something falling off a shelf.

It had been something else—something that had no business moving anymore, nudged gently in the dark by something that had no business touching it. I raised the torch and moved deeper into the shop. No fresh footprints between the aisles. The dust lay thick and undisturbed except for our own boot marks. Display cases, cash registers, exhibition stands—all preserved in that particular completeness of things that died neatly.

So complete it made you paranoid, half-expecting to round the next shelf and find a clerk looking up to ask if you needed help. When the torchlight swept across the innermost row of shelving, I stopped. A doll was seated there. Unlike the deteriorated wreckage surrounding it, this one had survived in disturbingly good condition. Human-shaped, with a smile that looked less painted on and more like someone had grabbed the corners of its mouth and pulled. Two spots of unnatural red stained its cheeks.

Its eyes were round and bright—too bright, with a quality that had nothing to do with light and everything to do with something that refused to stop watching. Behind it, a rigid backing board displayed alternating red and white stripes in perfect vertical rows. Red like blood that had dried far too long ago. White like snow that hadn't touched the ground yet. Something about it made my skin crawl. Not dirty on the surface. A deeper contamination—the kind you couldn't point to or wash away.

As if this thing knew perfectly well it was just a toy, and knew equally well exactly where it was sitting, and had decided to watch you anyway.

"Cedric." Jessi's voice had changed completely. That habitual tone of treating everything as entertainment had vanished, replaced by something with a genuine edge to it.

"Don't touch that. It looks... really wrong." I didn't argue. Because I agreed completely. Alvira stepped forward, looked at the doll once, and spoke.

"Pull-string doll."

"Pull-string?"

"There's a ring on the back." She angled the torch lower, illuminating the space behind the doll.

"An Old Civilization toy. Pull the ring, and it talks or sings. The sound you heard was most likely this mechanism coming loose—disturbed by a draft, or by something." She said it evenly, but I heard the three worst words in that sentence clearly enough. Or by something. I looked down. Sure enough, a small pull-ring hung from the doll's back, half-buried in ash. The metal had gone completely black, frayed cord clinging to it like rotted spider silk. One reach was all it would take. I didn't reach.

When you want to stay alive, you have to know when to resist the instinct toward stupidity. In a place like this, being handsy is just volunteering to help Death with the paperwork.

"Move out," Matthews' voice called from outside. I gave the doll one last look and turned for the exit. As the torchlight pulled away, that stretched smile slid back into the dark. The doll hadn't moved—I knew it hadn't moved. Yet I had the distinct impression that if I turned around, it would be sitting at a slightly different angle. I didn't turn around. Back in the main concourse, the oppressive weight was heavier than before.

The darkness inside the shop had been close-range darkness—the kind you could push back inch by inch with a torch. The concourse was different. This underground mall's central atrium was simply too vast, its ceiling spiraling upward through multiple levels into blackness no light could reach. Broken railings, dead escalators, collapsed storefronts and shattered signage all hung suspended in the unreachable dark above.

Our torches looked pathetic here—dying sparks tossed into the abdominal cavity of something enormous and long dead. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. And there, hanging in the lightless heights above it all, was a flag. Massive. Unreasonably so—not the size of something meant to identify, but the size of something meant to be witnessed by the entire cyclopean space beneath it.

The fabric had been ravaged by time, chewed through with countless gaps, its edges hanging in rotted fringes like wounds that had been torn open again and again. But the colors had survived with an intensity that defied centuries of decay. Deep crimson and stark white alternated in straight, parallel bands—precise as a cold oath, or like flesh and bone stripped away and hung out to dry. In the upper left corner: a field of deep blue, the lifeless hue of night sky drained of all warmth, and across that blue— Stars.

Dozens of them. Scores. White, perfectly shaped, arranged in rigid rows. There were too many of them. And they were too orderly. Each one placed with mathematical precision, not scattered like honest stars but ranked like eyes that had all opened at once.

Somewhere in the unseen heights, a draft found its way through ancient cracks—and the flag shifted, and those white stars shifted with it, and for one deeply unpleasant moment it looked exactly like something crouched in the darkness above us, staring down without ever needing to blink. I had never seen a flag like this. Not the Kingdom's. Not the Church's. Not any border lord's banner.

This thing was alien in a way that went beyond simple unfamiliarity—it carried a wrongness that had nothing to do with its design and everything to do with the fact that it was intact. This entire mall had died, decayed, and collapsed, yet this flag alone had apparently decided to remember what it was.

"What country's cursed thing is that...?" I muttered. No one answered. Because in the next second, something above us made a sound. Click. Soft. Mechanical. The sound of a connection being made after centuries of silence. Then—a thin, high electrical whine. Zzzt— My shoulders locked up before I'd consciously registered why. That sound was not organic. Not an animal, not a creature grinding its teeth in the dark.

It was too artificial, too cold—the sound of something that should have been dead for millennia suddenly remembering how to breathe. Zzt... krrk... More sounds began rising around us, scattered and overlapping. The dark circular openings embedded in the columns. The metal boxes beneath cracked ceiling panels. Half-buried devices of indeterminate purpose mounted high on the walls—all of it stirred at once, as though the same signal had reached every corner of the concourse simultaneously.

The noise spread through the hall like invisible threads being pulled taut from somewhere impossibly far away.

"What's happening?" I heard my own voice come out wrong. Alvira's head snapped upward. In the torchlight, her expression went through a change I'd never seen from her—not her usual composed assessment of danger, but something rawer. The look of someone who had just recognized something that had absolutely no business existing.

"... Who," she said very quietly. I blinked.

"What do you mean, who?" She didn't look at me. Her eyes stayed fixed on the devices overhead, her voice pressed almost flat.

"Who activated the broadcast system."

"Broadcast system?" Lucas repeated faintly, the color draining from his face at a medically interesting rate. I didn't have time to ask what that meant. The noise across the entire concourse spiked at once—like someone dragging a rusted nail, slowly and deliberately, down the inside of an iron sheet. Sharp. Dry. The kind of sound that gets into your back teeth and stays there. Jessi stepped back half a pace on pure instinct, her shoulder finding my arm. This time she didn't say anything clever.

No deflection, no teasing remark to fill the space. She just drew a short, quiet breath and tightened her grip on her short sword. I shifted toward her without thinking about it. I didn't notice how natural that movement had become until after I'd already done it. Matthews had already raised his shield, torch held high. His gaze swept the darkness above and around the concourse in methodical arcs, never settling on us.

In the flickering light, the veteran's face looked carved from stone—steady and implacable—yet I could still see the telltale tension locking his jaw. Then, cutting through that scalp-prickling screech of static— A voice descended from somewhere in the dead air above the mall. Broken, fractured, barely qualifying as human speech.

"O say can you see, by the dawn's early light..." Every hair on the back of my neck stood up. That wasn't Kingdom tongue. Wasn't Northern dialect. Wasn't any language I had ever heard spoken by the living. And that was exactly what made it so wrong. It didn't sound like someone singing to us. It sounded like this place—this tomb that had been dead for a thousand years—was suddenly coughing up a half-rotted memory from the deepest part of its throat. None of us spoke immediately.

Our torches crackled softly while that warped, disintegrating song kept crawling out of the distant speakers, syllable by syllable. Every note felt coated in dust and rust, bouncing through unseen pipes and ancient horns until the entire concourse was saturated with its wrongness. Jessi broke the silence first, her voice pressed almost flat.

"... Young master."

"What."

"I suddenly feel like that doll back there wasn't actually that bad."

"Bit late to recalibrate your threat assessment, don't you think?"

"I'm updating my terror rankings. Establishing proper hierarchy."

"Congratulations. The competition for first place here is extremely fierce." My mouth could still keep up the banter, but my palms were already slick with sweat. The underground cold of the Northern Reaches made it worse—sweat in this temperature didn't stay warm, just sat there against my skin like pressing your hand against something that used to be alive. Alvira suddenly raised her hand.

"Douse one torch." We all looked at her. Her eyes never left the darkness above as she added quietly, "Too much light. We need to see the reflections first. Find the movement." Matthews complied without question, snuffing the spare torch in his left hand. The concourse dimmed at once. The surrounding black surged forward like it had been waiting for exactly that opening.

Up in the heights, metal frames and shattered glass caught the remaining firelight in brief, weak glints—like something hiding in the dark had carelessly shown its teeth. The singing continued. Broken and halting, like some ancient machine that had to gasp between every line. Alvira issued orders rapidly.

"Nobody separates. Five-person formation holds."

"But the sound is coming from everywhere up there," Lucas said, voice tight.

"We can't even tell which direction—""Which is exactly why nobody runs," Alvira cut him off coldly.

"Whatever activated the broadcast system doesn't necessarily limit itself to singing." That landed with zero comfort and considerable additional dread. Matthews pressed his shield slightly forward.

"Find the control point first?" Alvira nodded.

"Nearest equipment box, management office, security station, or any distribution panel still drawing power. Places like this don't just wake up on their own." Lucas swallowed hard but finally demonstrated his value as a bankrupt mage and rabid Old Civilization enthusiast.

"In a mall atrium like this, there should be..." He squinted up at the shattered directory boards, rapidly parsing half-destroyed text and symbols.

"A central service desk, security office, or some kind of broadcast management room. That arrow there—only half of it's left, but the direction should still be readable."

"Lead," Alvira said.

"Me?"

"Unless you'd prefer I ask the doll." Lucas shut his mouth immediately and moved forward with his lantern, resigned to his fate. Our formation tightened. Matthews took point, shield angled forward, each step deliberate and measured. Jessi and I flanked him to the rear, eyes tracking the storefronts, the pillars, every pocket of darkness large enough to hide something with teeth. Lucas held the lantern ahead, muttering half-coherent interpretations under his breath.

Alvira brought up the rear—yet somehow, despite walking last, I had the persistent sense that the formation's true center of gravity was wherever she happened to be looking. We advanced slowly toward the center of the concourse. The song circled overhead and refused to dissipate. With every step, it seemed to shift with us—never louder, never softer, just maintaining that infuriating distance where you could hear every syllable clearly but never pin down the source.

As we passed a shop with shattered glass doors, I glanced inside without thinking. Rows of mannequins stood in the dark. Faceless, silent, draped in Old Civilization garments that had long since decayed into hanging rags. As the lantern light swept across them, those pale forms emerged one by one from the black, then retreated back into it—like bloodless figures standing at patient attention, waiting politely for us to pass. I dragged my gaze away immediately. Beside me, Jessi murmured, "You saw it too?"

"Saw what."

"That shop." Her color wasn't great, but she managed to pull up one corner of her mouth.

"If anything in there rushes us, I'm throwing you forward first."

"Funny. That's exactly my plan too."

"We really are in sync."

"That's called mutually assured destruction." She let out a low, brief laugh, but her hand still drifted slightly closer to mine. Not touching—just close. Very close. Close enough that if something actually lunged from the dark, we'd probably collide on pure instinct before either of us had time to think. And that was exactly the problem. Because I didn't mind. Not even a little. Up ahead, Lucas suddenly stopped. Everyone froze. The singing continued—fractured, distant, yet somehow pressed right against our ears.

Lucas raised the lantern higher, illuminating the ruins of a semicircular service counter at the center of the concourse. Behind it stood a narrow door leading into some interior corridor. The nameplate had mostly fallen away, leaving only a few crooked Old Civilization letters clinging to the wall at angles I couldn't parse. Alvira didn't order us forward immediately.

She looked up at the dark mouths of the broadcast speakers overhead, then at the lightless corridor beyond the door, before dropping her voice to almost nothing.

"The source... is close now." I tightened my grip on the sword hilt. My throat had gone dry enough to scrape. And somewhere deeper in the dark, that broken voice continued crawling toward its next line, unhurried, as though it had all the time that had ever existed. O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave ….