Thieving Fear by Ramsey Campbell Read Free Book Online Page A

floor of Frugo when his supervisor beckoned him with a pudgy indolent finger towards the beds. 'Is it all right if I leave you now?' Hugh said.
    The older woman mopped her brow with a handkerchief, and her daughter gave her a sympathetic glance. 'Thanks for the tour.'
    As Justin folded his arms above his prominent stomach, his expensive pale-blue shirt from Frugo Dude puffed out a spicy scent of Conqueror deodorant. His even paler eyes peered at Hugh from beneath a black fringe combed low on his wide smooth forehead. Their earnestness seemed designed to contradict his other features – nose snub enough to be accused of cuteness, inadvertently pouting mouth, face rounded by at least one additional chin. 'What was that supposed to be about,' he said, 'the scenic route?'
    'The more they see the more they might buy,' Hugh thought and less distinctly said.
    'I don't remember that in our mission manual.'
    'Maybe I should put it in the suggestion box.'
    'It'll have to wait. You've done enough wandering all over the show when you're meant to be stacking your shelves.' As Hugh felt his face grow patchy with resentment Justin said 'If there's any problem I should know about, I'm here.'
    'It's you. It's how you take breaks whenever you think nobody's looking and suck up to management while other people are getting on with their work. And half the time you never finished a job so I had to finish it for you, and then you took all the credit and got the promotion I should have got.' Even if he found the nerve to say any of this, what would it achieve beyond losing him his job? 'I don't know my way around the new floor yet,' he said.
    'Then you should have paid attention when we all walked through.' Justin expelled a breath that twitched a spider's leg of hair in its nasal burrow and said 'Better skedaddle back to your wine.'
    For a moment Hugh forgot where the escalator was, and then he saw the restless rubber banister between two wardrobes at the far side of the maze of beds. As the lower floor spread into view, he was borne towards a customer leaning on a trolley and a stick in front of the poster for the month's wine promotion. The man wore a short-sleeved shirt, white except for the armpits, and trousers even more generously proportioned than himself. 'Where's this?' he greeted Hugh by asking.
    'Happy to show you,' Hugh said by the book.
    He could have imagined that excessively thin footsteps were accompanying the customer behind him, but of course the stick was. When he halted in front of the wine shelves at the far end of the widest aisle, the last rap sounded vigorous enough to be knocking on a trapdoor. 'What's your best deal?' the man said.
    'Frugo's Own Extra Special White and Red Peruvian Sauvignon is half price this month, and there's an extra five per cent off six or more.'
    'Give us a dozen. Make it red.'
    Hugh planted six in the trolley, only to expose the empty shelf behind them. There were none among the cases he'd loaded onto his float in the stockroom. 'Let me see if we've got more,' he said and slapped his forehead harder than he meant to, having turned the wrong way along the aisle of soft drinks.
    The door to the delivery lobby was beyond the bottled waters. The staff lift was empty except for a crumpled left-hand rubber glove resting on its wrist as if the shrivelled brown fingers were groping up through the stained floor. Nevertheless the windowless grey cage had scarcely begun its descent with a creak that sounded older than the building when someone muttered Hugh's name.
    He twisted around so fast that his feet nearly tripped him. Of course he was alone, and the nearest thing to a speaker – the emergency phone embedded in the metal wall – was beside the controls to the right of the door. The voice had sounded less muffled than buried, and oddly directionless. It must have been on the public address system, calling him in the basement as well as through the store. He was still trying to identify it when the