The building cries with the madness of men. Within its veins run old spirits, meeting places, holy shrines, great mead halls where there was joy and feast in the winter months. They say now that buildings are dead things, but that is because they are dead and they want the world to be dead with them; this is the architecture of life, blood and bone and trembling sinew. Its heart beats. The men hold a feast, but now their feasts sate no hunger. They bring others, not friends of the hearth but strangers, invaders. They say there is a 64-hour sale. The building tries to protect itself, to curl up and be safe, but the men stop it; they pry it open, keep it from sleep or rest. Its joints ache, it burns from violation, the doors sucking and popping as still more men crawl inside. It does not know, as men can know, but it feels. They bloat it, make it pregnant with strange and painful sacrifice. Yule goats, they used to call them; they called them yule goats and they spilled their blood for propitiation. Now they have only men wearing names and there is no blood, and their sacrament is sick and makes the world sick. * * * * * * * * A gypsy grandmother hisses arguments through clenched teeth, pained to spend even breath. Her husband waits numbly, a trophied prisoner, a parade captive, a broken old husk that stinks like sweat and cigars and death. In a clear waking dream I see their Christmas; a cold ritual, frost and famine. Their children sit with rigid backs, straining smiles over threadbare turtlenecks all-too-eager to suckle upon their throats. The tree is not false. The old man took his dust-soaked axe to find the Yuletide totem, drifting deep into darkened woods, the frigid crush of his snowbound boots breaking their funeral sanctity, the empty chill pouring into his lungs as he hewed his victim in that watchful silence. It stands chained in their hearth, now, distant and somehow too real, shivering with a wind that isn't there, bleeding needles into the carpet. The grandchildren stretch to retrieve their gifts and then scuttle away. "They were trying to charge $30 at the store," the grandmother says proudly. "In this economy. Criminal. Some things should be sacred." The tree is still, not the stillness of mere bark but the stillness of agency. When their family leaves the old ones turn off the lights and crawl between sheets. Wind drifts through the tree, peeling the sap-gorged bark, moving the sharp pines like fingers. The air grows cooler. * * * * * * * * We huddle for warmth, rub our fingers together like futile kindling, stretch our shadows under harsh chemical lights that do nothing to relieve the chill. Wind sucks hungrily at the doors, anxious to break this hard glass shell and taste the tender meat within. Our shift supervisor looks to each of us in turn, prying inquisitions writ small; tonight he needs our focus, our understanding, more than anything the reassurance of our sanity. We give what little we have. The night manager shrugs, speaks through the phone: "Alright, shut the lights. Get them out." The dark falls. Our shadows sneer and unravel, bask in their element, slip their hard shells to encompass the world. Now we are their mirrors, their doubles, thralls of their agency; now we are yoked to their stride, reflections of their reality. Whatever banal landmarks we knew are gone from the land. This is the territory of dreams and fever, the great unmappable heart of madness. Great cages of silver bone hang racks of clothing like flayed meat in the slaughterhouse. The empty faces of our registers glow with the heat of lost souls, ethereal lanterns throwing splashes of wet light through the mist. The Employee of the Month photos all look like Hitler. For a moment, just a moment, we living men hold fast to each other, here in the realm of the damned. But the night calls to us, and there is no time for delay. We push forward into the dark continent, melting away into our fiefdoms of horror, until the shield of my allies fails and I am left alone. The shadowed mountains of Domestics loom over me. The Jonas Brothers leer down from a themed bedroom set, distant and terrible gods, lords of their domain. I show my name tag in apology and hurry on, my gesture of deference no guarantee of safe passage. Here are sheets woven from the hair of soiled virgins, pans that cooked sweet human flesh, plastic pillow cases that have drowned children in their own life's nectar. My ribs prickle with vulnerability. I am made uncomfortably aware of how close my store pin is to my nipples. A murmur around the corner. I see it now, the hidden silhouette, the shadow in this land of shadow, cast from the back of some frightful beast beyond my sight; not mere darkness but a taint, the fetid afterbirth of its hate-filled soul, spilled blood from a conscience made black with evil. The long moment narrows to a point that pricks my manly valor. Here I stand, at last, before my destiny, St. George to meet his dragon. With a last great prayer I round the barricade and face my destroyer. "The store closed thirty minutes ago," I whisper. "You'll have to come with me." She stares madly. We forget, sometimes, that there are two sides in this war, that they suffer as we do. In a different fight we are comrades, the fight inside, the war against the war, the war to keep oneself. The strain broke her long ago. I see it in her eyes. She bent her will towards the dark places of the world, in offer of her soul; and they took instead her sanity, and saved her still. Her lips peel back, reveal teeth rotted with her own frenzied blood. "I will show you fear," she hisses, "in a handful of dust." Somewhere, back in reality, the overnight crew switches the PA system to Rage Against the Machine. Time slows. She shoves the cart at me, a delay, not an attack. Helpless, I watch a clawed hand disappear within her purse. The cart bounces off my side but I'm already moving, too late, too late; the revenant brings forth its terrible artifact, a book of coupons from 1998. In the final moment the words come unbidden to my mind, the old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro retail mori. "Fuck you," she adds. "I didn't hear no announcement." -Axeface (SA Forums)