Heart of Darkness - A Standalone Bad Boy Romance Novel Read online

  “What does it hide?” Lilly asked him. By now, she was ready to believe anything. Anyone who could make a whirlwind bring her shoes out the door had to be plugged into something powerful.

  “It doesn’t hide a thing,” he continued. “It stands watch over the Abyss. Note what is over the top of the mall on the porch.”

  Lilly looked up and saw the fiberglass sphinx over the entrance. Everyone laughed at it the day the mall opened. They poured in to look at all the shops on display. She’d noticed the sphinx symbol all over the mall and assumed it tied in with some kind of Egyptian motif. Never did it occur to her the symbol might have something to do with the mall itself.

  “The sphinx stands watch and guards the gate,” Dion explained. “This mall is a gate of sorts, and the builder of it wants to keep the gate hidden from view. What better place to hide something than in plain sight?”

  “Are you telling me this place is dangerous?”

  “Not unless it knows you are wise to it. Even then, it won’t bother you if you don’t bother it. I know all about its secrets and so it would rather I stay out. But, if I am to rescue my parents, I need to go inside and find the elemental grandmasters. The problem is that the mall closes at nine promptly and it’s almost two in the afternoon.”

  “It’s spring break,” Lilly explained. “We can always come back tomorrow.” Whatever he wanted to do in there, she wanted to be part of it.

  “Not enough time,” he said. “It will take me long enough to find each one of them. I can’t do what I have to do in one day. Why don’t you come in there with me and see if we can find the first of them?”

  Chapter 2

  I didn’t take long for Lilly to give her answer.

  They walked into the mall, beautiful music playing on the PA system and waited for the electric doors to open. This time a few shoppers trotted out.

  It was a Monday and it meant fewer shoppers than usual. Plus, most of the buying would take place on the weekend, when there were sales. The luncheon Lilly had helped to cater was tied in with a big sales promotion several of the anchor stores were involved with as part of a national program. The TV stations were all set to run the ads through the week. When she heard about it, Lilly was pleased, as she was sick of all the Bicentennial crap they ran all week long.

  They walked into the mall and headed up the main corridor to the inside. On either side of them were small restaurants and shops. Lilly could see the waterbeds place, but never went inside, as it seemed sleazy for a mall store. Too much incense and peppermint for her taste. They continued on their way and walked past a novelty store, which sold plenty of lava lights and posters. It was another day in the mall to most of the people who strolled around it. Hard to believe they were at the gates of hell, according to Dion.

  “Looking for something special?” a tall man with a military haircut said to them.

  They stopped the moment they saw the security guard uniform. He was a tall man with a muscular build, but the look of a predator was in his eyes. Lilly knew who he was: Officer Karanzen, who was in charge of mall security. Look the wrong way at him and you’d be hauled down to a holding cell until your parents arrived.

  Officer Karanzen had a tough-as-nails attitude with a reputation to match it. He was known to personally body tackle shoplifters and kept the mall free from thieves and scam artists. He also had no love for freaky kids and could spot a bottle of cheap wine hidden inside a purse or jacket at fifty yards. More than a few of Lilly’s friends were forced to have their parents scrub their arrest records to get into the right college because of this man. He was feared and hated by half of her high school class. The other half had quit going to the mall soon after it opened.

  “Just here for the mall shopping, Officer,” Lilly said to him, doing her best sad little girl smile. She hoped it would work.

  “You, I know,” the security officer said to her. “Him, I don’t know.” He stared intently at Dion, examined his eyes and seemed to recognize something.

  “Don’t give me any trouble,” he said to Dion. “I’m here to make sure this place stays open. We don’t want to close like that mall on the other side of town.”

  The Shell Mall due north of where they stood had opened ten years ago, one of the first in the area. But it was on hard times and all the stores were about to close. Some said it was just bad luck and the new mall took away all of the business.

  Officer Karanzen was an old style security guard who didn’t appreciate smart mouthed kids in his mall. He considered it his mall because it was where he worked and lived. No one ever saw him leave the mall. Ever. He seemed to be there before anyone else in the morning and was always the last person to leave in the evening. If there was a break-in or a problem with the utilities, he was the first one on the scene. No one knew where he lived because his personnel files were accessible only to the owners of the mall. It was said he could be seen walking around at night checking out abandoned cars and people who were parked in the lot too long after closing. No one ever saw him eating or taking a bathroom break. He came with the mall and was there when the construction crews were pouring concrete.

  No one in their right mind crossed the officer or they would vanish into his holding cell until the cops, or parents, came to pick them up. There were a few kids from the high school Lilly knew who tried to mess with him. They never said what happened from the time they were placed in confinement until picked up, but none of them ever wanted to return to the mall.

  “He just stared at me while I was in there,” one former bad kid had said to Lilly. “He sat in front of the cell and grinned. He never said a word. I’ve never been so terrified in all my life.” The kid went on to become the president of the school bible club.

  One of the rumors, which circulated around the high-schoolers, had Officer Karanzen as a former marine sergeant in Korea who was dismissed for injuring too many recruits. Others said no, he was an ex-green beret from Vietnam who enjoyed his deep cover missions too much and the military had to get rid of him. The current favorite theory about Karanzen was that he was an experiment in progress. A group of scientists decided to create the perfect sentry and he was the prototype.

  Lilly didn’t believe him to be evil, as most of the kids who came under his glance. She thought he truly believed that what he did protected the mall. He seemed to have a strange sense of ownership when it came to it. She’d never run afoul of him, but noticed the officer in his daily rounds checking every little imperfection and finding the slightest thing out of commission. She’d watched him inform a store that one of their exterior light bulbs was out three seconds after it popped. She observed him take a missing toddler to his mother before the woman was aware the child was gone. He seemed to have a strange way of knowing when something was just “not right” in the mall.

  As they stood there, Officer Karanzen’s security guards emerged and slowly formed a semi-circle around him.

  He had eleven security guards working for him at the mall. All of them were young men. The oldest was only thirty years old. He’d picked them up in the first week the mall opened. Although some of them were from the area, no one recalled seeing any of the guards outside the mall once it opened. They were all rumored to live in a group house somewhere near Miamisburg. Each wore the grey pants and blue shirt with a cap. It was on the cap where the name of the security company who employed all of them was listed: Bread and Salt Services, or “BS” as everyone she knew called it. For some reason the symbol of the company was a black diamond. It was sewn into the patches on the guards’ uniforms.

  Lilly stood there and wondered when the last time was when she’d seen all of the guards together. Usually no more than three or four were on duty at any given time, including the afterhours shift. But today, they were all here at once. They stood at attention, hands to each side and backs straight. For some reason, Karanzen wanted to make a show of force, which was a little bit strange since the only two people he faced was Dion and Lilly.

&n
bsp; “Have you met my boys?” Karanzen asked them. “No, I don’t think you’ve ever had a chance to meet them all. I had them in today for a training exercise. You never know when walking dead zombies might take over a mall, heh, heh. You haven’t seen any zombies around here have you?”

  “Only the ones I’m looking at right now,” Dion responded. He folded his arms over his chest and continued to stare at Karanzen and his men.

  “Let me introduce them to you,” the older man said to them. “This is Bella; we call him ‘Toadie’, because he’s always looking for things under rocks. After him is Gamer, he has a little bit of trouble remembering things, but we’re working on that aren’t we?”

  The second young man smiled. “I try, boss.”

  “That’s a good boy. Next we have Amon.”

  A black guard with a very wolfish appearance stepped forward and grinned.

  “And we have our great hunter, Bayer; you bagged a deer last week, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sah,” another young man said as he made a small bow. “With a bow too.”

  “I thought hunting was over,” Dion noted.

  “Not for me,” Bayer grinned.

  “I’m sure he’s hunting some place where it’s legal,” Karanzen said. “I also want to introduce Zeppy; he came to us from New Mexico, by way of the army.”

  A man who had American Indian features nodded at them.

  “And after him we have Salle,” Karanzen continued his introductions. “Why don’t you tell them about your hobby?”

  “I like to put on armor,” the man said to them, “and beat my friends up with a wooden sword on the weekends. It’s cool because they wear armor too.”

  “And continuing down the line,” the officer said. “Is Izzy.” Another nod. “He may look a little crazy, but it takes a lot to make him mad, right?” The one called Izzy nodded again.

  “After him we have Lab,” Officer Karanzen went down the line. “He’s originally from Old Mexico, but came up this way after a tour in Vietnam.” A man with Latin features smiled at them.

  “And here’s Bert,” Karanzen announced as he patted another man on the shoulder. “He wants to be a fireman someday, but he’s with us for now. Lord, son, do something about your breath and chew gum.” The new guard dropped his eyes.

  The next guard he introduced was a huge man, with arms the size of tree trunks. His neck matched and the square face peered out at the world. “This is Forest, but we like to call him ‘Woody’.”

  The man never cracked a smile and continued to stare at them with two piercing grey eyes.

  “And our latest recruit is ‘Furry’ here,” Karanzen showed off the last guard. “You can guess why he has that nickname.” He was young, barely out of his teens and covered with a course rug of snow-white blond hair.

  “I wanted you to meet them all,” Officer Karanzen said to them. “Because I think we’ll need to keep a watch on you two. Especially you, Dion. I have this feeling you might be in line to cause me some trouble. I don’t like trouble. I like a safe and secure mall, son. I like places where people can shop, meet other people, and do their business in safety. That is what I like. So tell me, are we on the same page, Dion?”

  “Absolutely, Officer,” Dion smiled. “I see you want to guard your little part of the abyss in absolute security. I have no intention of messing with it.”

  Karanzen stared at Dion and mulled over his response. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear, but it would do for right now.

  “I’m glad we’re in agreement, Dion. We’ll be moving along. Just remember, if you need anything, we’re always here to help.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Officer Karanzen turned and marched back down the corridor, past the door to a restaurant and to the entrance of the main mall. They watched him leave. As he walked away, his security guards formed a column and followed behind him. Not once did they turn and look back at Dion or Lilly.

  “What did you do to get his attention?” Lilly asked Dion.

  “Show up,” Dion said. “He is the guardian of this place and sensed why I’m here. He doesn’t like anything messing with his authority and I represent an unknown quantity. He doesn’t like unknown quantities.”

  “Do you ever wonder about where malls came from?” Dion asked her as they walked down the corridor.

  “Not really. I assumed they were always there. Now that I think about it, they haven’t always been around. I remember when that one opened up on the other side of the city years ago. I was just a kid and there was some big movie premiere at it. My parents didn’t want to go see the movie, I think it had something to do with missionaries and they didn’t like the subject, but it was a big deal at the time. I remember watching the big lights out front.”

  “Shopping malls are from Austria,” Dion told her. “Believe it or not, someone wanted to duplicate the Vienna he remembered from the days before World War II. They’d been around for a long time, arcades run back over a hundred years ago. But the basic two-floor design you see everywhere came from Vienna. He wanted to transport what he remembered to the United States.”

  “He sure was successful,” Lilly said. “I see them all over the place.”

  “You do wonder how long it can all last,” Dion continued. “These places have a cycle. Everything has a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. As far as I can tell, this is the only mall in the world were you will find all three.”

  “You will find stores in this mall that don’t exist anywhere else,” he continued, “because this is no ordinary mall. It has five sections, four of which we can access. Notice this directory and map, for instance.” He pointed to it where it was situated at the inner entrance to the mall. It displayed all four divisions and a directory of the stores was below it.

  “Notice that the center section of the mall is left blank. Do you wonder why that is? Did you ever stop to wonder why the center of the mall, where the big clock tower sits, is blank on this map?”

  Lilly went up to the directory and stood on her toes to get a better look at it. “Now that you mention it,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything listed for the middle. Funny, I never thought about it before.”

  “It’s because the mall owners don’t want you to think about it. I was once told the best way to hide something is to put it in out in the open. That’s exactly what they’ve done. The mall owners have hidden something in the middle of the mall no one would ever expect. No one thinks about looking for the Holy Grail in a parking lot, they’re too busy trying to find The Chapel Perilous in a dark wood. You can hide a treasure in a candy machine and no one will be the wiser because no one will believe you. They’re too busy trying to locate it on a map they bought off a street vendor.”

  “Hey! I didn’t expect to see you here today,” a voice said behind them.

  Chapter 3

  Both Dion and Lilly turned to see who’d spoken to them.

  It was Emily, Lilly’s close friend from across the neighborhood. At one point, the two of them were so close people thought they might be sisters. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Emily and Lilly were the same height, although the resemblance ended there. Lilly was small and dark, while Emily had a certain amount of bounce on her body. Both had known each other since kindergarten and attended the same schools for years. Because of their names, Lilly Arrad found herself sitting at the assigned seat next to Emily Aaron all through the four years of high school. Likewise, both girls were first in line for whatever needed to be done. It wasn’t always that way, because sometimes the teachers would begin from the back row. The worst were students whose names began with “M” who always found themselves in the middle of the list. At some future date, a social psychologist would look into performance based on first letter of the name and discover those whose names began with the middle letters of the alphabet would end up in the middle of the grade score as well.

  Emily tended to be the less vocal of the pair, although
both of them had similar temperaments. Their families weren’t that close. Living three blocks away in their suburban neighborhood was the equivalent of living in different sides of the country, because seldom did families emerge from their houses to talk. Emily’s father would finish the workday glued to the television set and she with him. Emily had no other family members and seldom saw her mother as she’d divorced from her chemist husband when Emily was five. The courts had awarded her visitation rights, but her mother seldom exercised them. It was rare for her to spend more than a few hours at a time with her mother who lived a carefree life as an artist in Dark Springs, a small liberal town outside a liberal college of the same name.

  Lilly would spend the summers travelling with her parents, who’d managed to save and organize their money to the best way possible. It was long before the days of fast cash and loose change, but her father knew how to play the stock market and had a good sense for what would move when the time was right. Lilly’s house had every modern contraption, whereas Emily was forced to watch TV on an old black and white model until her last year of high school. Lilly had a state of the art TV antenna, which could rotate by a control on top of the set for better reception.

  It happened that both girls discovered they had the same tastes in music, movies and boys. They would double date all through high school and share information on how to tame the beast that seemed to lurk inside every high school boy. When Emily visited her mother, she would slip inside her mom’s nightstand library and report the findings to Lilly.

  They went to their first concert together, Rod Stewart, and planned to follow him around on tour one summer until both of their parents found out their plans and nipped it in the bud early. When they both received their drivers’ licenses, they would take the family cars and travel down to Scipio, the big industrial town near them, and shop at the cool record stores. They’d already used a fake ID to get into a few bars to see some bands, which their parents didn’t know about.