Cat-and-Mouse Game
Not everyone is suited to running his or her own business. Not only is the income uncertain, but the schedule is often too demanding. Norine Carlton, who owned a bookstore in Newark, Delaware's Christiana Mall, was willing to make the necessary sacrifices to be her own boss.
When she first decided to open a business, Norine chose to locate her bookshop in the mall for two reasons: the larger department stores drew crowds of shoppers and the mall had its own security force to deter shoplifters and burglars. What she didn't care for was having to leave the mall late at night, often after eleven o'clock, when most mall employees were already gone. While the customer parking areas were reasonably well-lit, owners and managers of the stores on the bookstore's side of the mall parked in the dimly lit rear lot where there were back doors with direct access to their shops.
It was in this foreboding world of shadows that vagrants often slept after having dined on the refuse thrown in the trash dumpsters outside The Cheesecake Factory. Other than occasionally asking for a handout, these derelicts posed no threat or nuisance to those entering or leaving the mall. On Friday and Saturday nights, however, there were usually groups of teenagers lurking in the darkness. Few of them ever spent money, except to buy a soda or snack at the mall's food court. Mostly, they just talked and performed the usual adolescent mating rituals. There was a name for this new species of Homo sapiens: mall rats.
Normally, these teens didn't bother Norine. They were, after all, just neighborhood kids, the same ones she saw waiting for school buses in the morning, the ones she hired to mow her lawn or the ones who worked part-time in the bookstore. But with their features obscured by darkness and only the glowing embers of their cigarettes attesting to their presence, these young men and women frightened the shopkeeper.
* * *
Norine's problems began in earnest in the middle of January, during the lull following the end of the busy holiday season. It was a cold month, and there was more snowfall than usual that year. On bitter nights the homeless people who slept near the dumpsters were reluctant to stay outdoors and sought refuge at the Salvation Army shelter. Even the number of teenagers who hung out at the mall dropped drastically. Apparently, few mothers wanted to risk crashing their minivans on icy roads to taxi their offspring to and from the shopping center.
One snowy Saturday night, when Norine was leaving her bookstore, she opened the outer door and noticed at once that one of the three small lights in the rear parking lot was out, making the area even darker than usual. A bitter gust of wind blew, and she pulled her collar up around her neck. Shivering, she headed through the darkness toward her car.
As the shop owner neared the dumpsters, she saw a group of youngsters huddled together in the cold and smelled the sour odor of cheap wine. At first, she assumed the teenagers were drinking, but then she saw two feet, clad in dirty, ripped sneakers, protruding from behind one of the dumpsters. It was a derelict. Hopefully, the alcohol would keep him or her from freezing to death.
Not far from her Subaru Forester, Norine spied a bottle of wine lying on the ground, its contents spilling out onto the pavement. When she stooped to pick it up, she got a good look at the derelict. Beneath the layers of filthy, foul-smelling rags, the vagrant appeared feminine. As she drew closer, she was horrified to see several abnormally large rats gnawing on the woman's face.
Terrified by the grisly sight, she let out a loud, piercing scream. The rats scurried off under the dumpster, and moments later the group of teenagers scrambled toward the wooded area that bordered the rear parking lot. Norine herself ran toward the safety of her car and quickly drove away. When she got to the well-lit customer parking area on the opposite side of the mall, she stopped the car, and with shaking hands took her cell phone out of her handbag and called the police.
Ten minutes later, a Newark Police Department patrol car pulled into the lot.
"Where's the body, ma'am?" Officer Marcus Horwood asked.
"Alongside one of the garbage dumpsters in the rear parking lot."
Not wanting to see the hideous sight again, Norine stayed in her car while the officer went to investigate. Several minutes later he returned.
"There doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary back there."
Norine repeated what she'd told him earlier.
"I searched the area, ma'am. There's no body and no blood. Would you mind coming to the back with me and showing me exactly where you saw the dead woman?"
As much as the thought of seeing those sightless, staring eyes repulsed her, Norine agreed to accompany Officer Horwood to the rear parking lot. She got within a few yards of the spot where she had seen the body and stopped.
"It was right there," she said, pointing with her finger, "just behind that dumpster."
"There's nothing there, ma'am."
The doubt in the police officer's eyes annoyed Norine and gave her the courage to face the gruesome sight again. Thankfully, she was spared that horror, for Horwood was right: there was no body, nor was there any sign that one had ever been there.
"But she was right here! There was a spilled bottle of wine next to her, and rats were crawling over her—huge rats, at least half a dozen of them, possibly more."
"Maybe she wasn't dead," the officer suggested, respectfully. "She might have been sleeping, and the rats woke her up and she left."
"The rats were eating her dead flesh," the shop owner persisted, her voice inadvertently rising.
Norine could clearly see that the officer doubted her story, but she couldn't blame him. She, too, would be skeptical had the positions been reversed.
* * *
The bizarre events plagued Norine's sleep that night. Several times she woke up, feeling that something was crawling on her. At about three in the morning, she sat up in bed, her heart pounding. Her mind had been so focused on the dead woman that she had all but forgotten about the teenagers who had been smoking behind the building.
They must have seen the body, she thought.
Even if they didn't want to notify the police, they would almost certainly tell their friends. Word would spread through the small community, and Norine would be proved right.
Several days passed, yet Norine heard no rumor of a homeless woman being found dead either at the mall or anywhere else in Newark.
"I know what I saw!" Norine emphatically declared to herself. "That woman was dead, but how could her body have disappeared in so short a period of time?"
There were only a few scenarios to consider. The rats certainly hadn't dragged the body off, nor could they have devoured the corpse, bones and all, without leaving a trace. Could the teenagers have come back, picked up the body and put it in the dumpster? Or—the most likely but nonetheless bizarre explanation—had they taken the remains somewhere else? Norine estimated that there had been a dozen or so bystanders in the shadows that night, more than enough to carry off the body of an old woman.
The following day Norine went up to a group of teenagers who were standing at their usual post near the mall food court.
"Excuse me," she said, not addressing anyone in particular. "Were any of you out in back of the mall late Saturday night?"
The teenagers stared at Norine, their silence complete and somehow frightening.
"Were you?" she repeated.
"I was out back for a little while," one waif of a girl admitted.
"Did you by any chance see an old homeless woman near the dumpsters?"
Norine purposely didn't use the word dead to describe the bag lady. She didn't want to scare off any potential witnesses that might come forward.
"I didn't see nobody," the sad-eyed waif replied, but the sardonic grin on the girl's face belied the innocence of her large eyes.
"Are you sure?"
"Like I just said: I didn't see nobody."
Norine wondered if the double negative was intentional. By saying she hadn't seen nobody, was the girl admitting that she had seen somebody?
I'm no doubt crediting the girl with too much intelligence, Norine thought.
More likely than not, grammar was not her strong point.
"What about the rest of you? Did any of you see her?"
One tall young man with pointed features and small, beady eyes stared insolently at Norine from beneath the hood of his dark, oversized sweatshirt.
"None of us saw that old woman, got that?" he declared, leaning toward the bookstore owner in a menacing manner.
Several other teenagers also took a step toward her. Norine's eyes quickly scanned the food court for a mall security guard, and she was relieved to see one standing in front of Mrs. Field’s Cookies only a few yards away.
"I'm s-sorry to have b-bothered you," she stammered, taking a few steps backward.
As she walked back to the bookstore, she could feel the eyes of the teenagers on her. She turned once and saw on their faces an expression of smugness and deceit.
* * *
After the strange and frightening encounter with the young mall rats at the food court, Norine was convinced that they had taken the old woman's body. But why? There was only one logical conclusion: they wanted to hide the corpse because one or more of them had been responsible for her death. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, Norine assumed it might have been an accident. Perhaps one of them had struck her with a car and panicked. On the other hand—and Norine hated to believe it was the case—it was not unheard of for young people to deliberately kill someone in cold blood. Sadly, acts of random violence were not limited to large cities like New York and Chicago.
From that point on, Norine no longer saw the youngsters who hung out at the Christiana Mall as just harmless kids from around the neighborhood. She could no longer bear to look them in the eye or stand to walk past the areas where they congregated. Loath to encounter them in the rear parking lot alone on a dark night, she started carrying a high-powered flashlight in her hand and a can of mace in her coat pocket.
It was only when she began to feel somewhat safe again that the teenagers made the first move in what was to become a terrifying cat-and-mouse game. In doing so, they encroached on Norine's personal territory. Their migration from the mall's food court to the bookstore began one Friday evening in late February. Norine was behind the counter and looked up from the cash register to see the group of teenagers hanging out in front of her store window. For the remainder of the evening, every time she looked out—which was quite often—she saw one or two of them staring in at her, always with the same smug smiles on their faces.
This intrusion on her privacy made Norine feel extremely ill at ease, as though she were working in a goldfish bowl. The following day when the teenagers once again gathered in front of the bookstore window, the shopkeeper went to the stockroom, found some large cardboard cutouts meant for promoting various children's books and placed them in the window, effectively obscuring the view of the interior of the shop.
The teenagers countered her move, however. In a fairly reliable rotation, they came into the bookstore, one at a time, at a rate of roughly once every ten minutes. Each would come in, walk past the display of bestsellers and leave without buying anything. Norine kept a keen eye on the intruders, alert for any signs of shoplifting, but the teenagers never even picked up a book to read the back cover or look at the price. It was all too clear that their sole purpose was to harass the shop's owner. Norine didn't want to be intimidated on her own turf, so she eventually confronted her invaders.
"May I help you?" she would ask in a voice not nearly as polite or as friendly as the one she usually reserved for her customers.
"No," each teenager would invariably say. "I'm just looking."
Their nearly constant presence began to grate on Norine's nerves. She spoke to mall security, but there was little that could be done since the teenagers hadn't broken any mall regulations.
One night the tall, beady-eyed teen in the hooded sweatshirt actually picked up one of Martha Stewart's cookbooks and began thumbing through the pages. Norine nearly pounced on him.
"May I help you?"
"No. I was just looking."
"Well, this isn't a library. If you want to look at a book, you should buy it first."
The young man didn't reply. Instead, he looked silently down at Norine, his black, beady eyes twinkling with amusement. Then he handed her the cookbook, turned and left the store.
The next day Norine was delighted to see that the teenagers had abandoned their post in front of her bookshop and returned to the food court. Her joy was short-lived, though, for later that evening while she was unpacking a carton of romance novels in the stockroom, something small and furry scurried past her ankle. She looked down, saw a large rat near her foot and screamed. Two other rats stared at her from behind the cardboard box.
Several minutes later, a security guard raced into the stockroom.
"Are you all right, miss?"
"I saw some rats, three of them, maybe more. They ran behind those cartons."
The guard moved the boxes.
"There's nothing here," he said. "Are you sure you saw rats?"
"Of course, I'm sure. I didn't imagine them."
"Maybe they ran out the door then."
As the security guard looked once more around the stockroom, Norine walked into the store, fearful that the rodents had fled there. Once again, she saw the group of teenagers peering through the bookstore window, smiling malevolently. She then realized that the rats were just another move in the cat-and-mouse game, that they had deliberately been placed in the stockroom to frighten her.
"You did it!" she cried, running out into the mall and up to the insolent teens. "You put the rats in there."
The security guard cautioned her not to make a scene or to falsely accuse innocent mall patrons.
"Innocent! These kids are nothing but juvenile delinquents."
The guard took her by the arm and steered her back into the shop.
"Why don't you continue with what you were doing and leave those kids alone? I don't want to have to call the police in on this."
Norine sullenly went back to the stockroom, vowing that the troublesome teens would not get the better of her.
* * *
As she pulled out of the mall parking lot later that night, Norine noticed a black car driving closely behind her. When she turned right, so did the black car; when she turned left, it did likewise. And when she drove up her driveway, the car stopped in front of her house. She couldn't see the driver or passengers, if there were any, because the windows were all darkly tinted, but instinctively she knew who was behind the wheel: one of the teenagers from the mall, most likely the tall, beady-eyed one with the dark, hooded sweatshirt.
Norine stayed in her Forester, waiting for the black car to leave, but the driver didn't seem to be in any hurry. He simply remained in front of her house, occasionally revving his engine.
"I won't put up with this nonsense any longer," Norine said, reaching into her pocketbook for her cell phone.
No sooner had she pressed 911 than the black car suddenly sped away, squealing its tires as it disappeared into the night.
"It was those damned mall rats again!" Norine cried when she got out of her car and ran across the lawn to her front door.
In the safety of her own home, her fear gave way to anger. She was determined to end the cat-and-mouse game once and for all.
The next day she bravely confronted the teenagers in the food court.
"One or more of you followed me home from the mall last night. These childish pranks of yours have gone on long enough, and they better stop right now! No more going into the bookstore or loitering outside it to harass me. And I don't want to see any more rats in the shop either. Do you hear me?"
"We don't know what you're talking about, lady," the tall, beady-eyed one said.
"I think you do. It all goes back to the night I found the dead woman behind the dumpster, the one whose body you took."
Norine played her trump card at last, expecting to intimidate the guilty party or parties by doing so, but the teenagers reacted with amused insolence rather than fear.
"Word around the mall is that you've completely lost it," one sluttish-looking girl said with a sinister laugh. "We hear you're seeing all kinds of things that aren't really there: dead bodies, rats. What's next, Big Foot?"
The girl's young companions roared with unrestrained laughter.
"I'm glad you children think that's so funny," Norine screamed angrily, hoping her words and tone would remind them that she was the adult and therefore had the upper hand. "But I've got a good description of the car and the license plate number, too," she bluffed. "If I have any more trouble from any of you, I'll go to the police and take out a restraining order."
* * *
It had been a trying day. After the unpleasant confrontation with the teenagers in front of the food court that morning, things had gone from bad to worse. A quick change artist tricked her cashier out of close to two hundred and fifty dollars, a six-year-old child vomited over several stacks of new magazines and the store computer crashed, requiring an expensive service call.
At ten o'clock, despite a veritable mountain of unfinished paperwork, Norine decided to call it a night. No sooner did she step outside the building, though, than two of the lights in the rear parking area blinked out, leaving only a single lamp lit, one that did more to cast shadows than to illuminate the area. She quickly turned on her flashlight, but although the batteries were fairly new, the beam flickered and went out.
A strange noise made the hairs on Norine's neck rise. She breathed a sigh of relief when she realized it was only the snoring of a wino who had fallen asleep on the other side of the dumpsters. But beneath the loud snoring, she then heard another, fainter sound: the hushed whispers of teenagers.
Norine crouched down behind the dumpsters, hiding from her tormentors. Although she couldn't see either the sleeping derelict or the teens, she could clearly observe the shadows they cast on the rear wall of the mall. She huddled, motionless and silent, staring as the shadows shrunk in height when the teenagers kneeled over the wino. Then, as Norine watched in horrified disbelief, the shapes of the shadows changed. Human noses lengthened into snouts, and arms shortened into forepaws. The teenagers were turning into rats!
The terrified woman had to put her fist in her mouth to keep from crying out as she watched the hideous events enacted in silhouette on the concrete wall. The rats swarmed over the snoring wino. The poor creature woke up and screamed in agony as the rats feasted on his flesh. Mercifully, the little monsters ate quickly.
When they finished eating, the rodents returned to human form and left the scene of the crime. Norine remained hidden behind the dumpsters until she heard the teenagers' footsteps fade into the night. Trembling and in tears, she slowly walked around the front of the dumpsters, expecting the worst. But once again there was no body! The wererats—for want of a better word—had devoured it all: flesh, hair, bones, blood and clothing. They didn't leave a single thread of evidence behind.
Norine knew that a modern forensics technician could detect blood not readily visible to the naked eye, but would the police take her seriously if she again reported a dead vagrant without a body to back up her claim?
What would I tell them? she wondered. That a pack of wererats has devoured at least two homeless people behind the mall before disappearing into the shadows or perhaps even another dimension?
The Newark police would never believe such an incredible story. It sounded too much like a tale by H.P. Lovecraft.
As Norine turned toward her car, she saw a single figure lurking in the shadows, the tip of its cigarette glowing in the dark. Instinctively, she knew the death of the wino had been more than a simple late-night feeding. It was also meant as a warning to her. Just that morning she foolishly threatened the teenagers with a restraining order. By revealing their true nature to her, the wererats had made it clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that they—not Norine—had the upper hand.
* * *
When the initial shock of that night's events diminished, it occurred to Norine that there were often ways to ward off evil—at least according to the old Hollywood horror films there were. If one could use crucifixes, holy water and garlic against vampires, there might be a talisman to use against wererats. She was sure if there was, one would be found at the Enchanted Moon New Age shop in nearby Wilmington.
Leaving her cashier temporarily in charge of the store, Norine drove to North King Street. When she entered the shop, the overpowering scent of incense made her sinuses tickle.
"How can I help you?" asked the elderly woman behind the counter.
"I'm interested in folklore. In particular, wererats, assuming that's what you would call monsters that can change shape from human to rat and back again."
The old woman tilted her gray-haired head to the side and, recognizing the customer, remarked, "I know you. You own the bookstore at the Christiana Mall. Business must be slow this time of year, I'll bet. I don't go there that often myself. Too many kids loitering about. They make me feel even older than I really am."
"About those wererats," Norine said, tactfully reminding the old woman of her mission. "Do you have a book on them?"
"Unfortunately, I don't. What exactly did you want to know?"
"General information," the owner of the bookstore said, feigning an air of nonchalance. "How they are created, where they can be found, how someone can get rid of them."
The old lady raised her eyebrows, and a smile came to her face.
"It seems to me there's only one way to get rid of any kind of rat, and that's ...."
The shopkeeper abruptly stopped speaking when she heard Norine's sharp intake of breath. She turned her head and saw, staring menacingly at Norine through the front window of the Enchanted Moon, a tall, beady-eyed, rat-faced teenager, wearing a dark, hooded sweatshirt.
* * *
Later that night, shortly before closing time, Norine was straightening the stacks of newspapers. As she took down the old editions and replaced them with current ones, she gave serious consideration to moving her business from the Christiana Mall to a storefront on Kennett Pike in Wilmington. Her sales would undoubtedly drop, but it would be a small price to pay for peace of mind and a good night's sleep.
Norine was about to close the store when a customer entered. It was the elderly woman who worked at the Enchanted Moon.
"Hello, again," Norine said. "I thought you didn't like to come to the mall."
"Sometimes it's necessary. I'm looking for a book, a gift for my niece in New Jersey."
The two women chatted for a few minutes, and then the elderly woman purchased an Ann Rice novel, wished Norine good night and left the store.
Shortly thereafter, Norine locked the doors of the shop, took the money from the cash register drawer and placed it in the safe in the rear of the store. At quarter after ten, she grabbed her coat and handbag and walked out the back door.
Immediately, the street lamps winked out, and once again her flashlight failed her. If it hadn't been a clear night with a full moon, the parking lot would have been black as pitch.
In the moonlight, Norine saw a large rat scurry across her feet. She screamed and jumped back. From behind the dumpster came muffled laughter. As on the night they'd murdered the sleeping wino, the wererats began their strange transformation from human to rodent. This time, though, they would not prey on some homeless derelict; they were ready to make the final move in their cat-and-mouse game with Norine.
The bookstore owner frantically tried to unlock the shop's rear door to return to the comparative safety of the mall, but her shaking hands kept fumbling with the keys. Then she clumsily dropped her key ring on the ground. When she stooped to pick it up, she heard the sound of tiny claws scratching the pavement as the rats advanced toward her. The deadly wererodents were almost upon her when suddenly a high-pitched screech stopped them in their tracks.
From underneath Norine's Subaru crawled a large gray cat. The feline slowly sauntered toward the rats. Its green eyes narrowed in concentration, and the hair on its back rose. A low growl warned the rodents not to move. The teenagers, as brazen in rat form as they were as humans, refused to heed the cat's warning, and they continued to advance on their intended victim.
The cat pounced, swiftly overtaking the nearest rat. As the cat dug its claws and teeth into the trapped rodent, the other wererats ran for their lives. With the path clear, Norine quickly made her way to her car.
* * *
Norine gave up the idea of moving her business to Kennett Pike, for since the night the wererats had failed in their attempt to kill her, there were fewer teenagers hanging out in the mall food court. Those that remained were innocuous. They were the same kids Norine often saw walking home from school, working behind the counter at Cinnabon or Starbucks and babysitting her neighbors' children.
The tall, beady-eyed teenager with the dark, hooded sweatshirt seemed to have disappeared, along with his entire pack of rat-like friends. The frightening cat-and-mouse game that had begun in mid-January had finally come to an end, and Norine was the apparent winner. As the old woman in the Enchanted Moon New Age shop had jokingly told her, there was only one way to ward off a wererat, and that was with a werecat.
Fortunately for Norine Carlton, such a creature appeared in employee parking lot of the Christiana Mall at the time when it was needed most.
I've been to the Christiana Mall in Delaware, and I thought it was one of the nicest malls I've ever been to. The Barnes & Noble is spread out over two floors. And as far as I know, there were no wererats in the parking lot!
When playing with Salem, the mouse definitely has the upper hand!
