The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

fancy to it, and opened his department store there.
    But if Wreckit & Sons sold a lot of things that people might want, it also tried to sell a lot of things that nobody could possibly want. As he grew older, Mr. Wreckit became more and more eccentric. He began calling it Wreckit & Sons for starters, which annoyed his daughters greatly, as he didn’t have any sons. His buying habits changed. For example, he bought two thousand three-dimensional Chinese-made photographs of this man:

    The man’s name was Max Schreck, and he was famous for playing the vampire in an old film called Nosferatu. Max Schreck was so strange-looking that it was whispered he might even be a real vampire. The 3-D nature of the photos bought by Mr. Wreckit meant that Max Schreck’s eyes followed you around the room, and NOBODY wanted this man’s eyes following them around the room. Mr. Wreckit sold precisely one of the pictures, and that was to himself. He kept it hidden under a blanket.
    Mr. Wreckit also bought one hundred unicycles, but it was only when they were shipped to him that he discovered they were not actual unicycles but merely bicycles that were missing one wheel. If it is hard to ride a unicycle, it is significantlyharder to ride a bicycle that is 50 percent down in the wheel department. Mr. Wreckit tried. The resulting bang on the head made him even stranger.
    He bought teapots with no spouts, sieves with no holes, and steel piggy banks with a slot for the money to go in but no way of getting it out again. He bought televisions that only picked up signals from North Korea, and radios that tuned in to frequencies only dogs could hear. He sold gloves for people with six fingers, and gloves for people with three fingers, but no gloves for people with four fingers and a thumb. His fire extinguishers started fires, and his fire lighters wouldn’t light. His fridges boiled milk, and his ovens were so cold that when a penguin escaped from Biddlecombe’s Little World of Animal Wonders, it was later found to be living in one of them, along with its entire family and a single confused chicken.
    Nobody seemed able to reason with Mr. Wreckit. He had simply gone bonkers. He was nutty as a fruitcake. Nevertheless, as he was the sole owner of Wreckit & Sons due to the absence of any real sons, and refused to talk to his daughters because they weren’t men, he was free to run the business into the ground and there wasn’t anything anyone could do to stop him.
    So Mr. Wreckit did, in the end, wreck it. The store went out of business. Mr. Wreckit, broke and crazy, retired to a cottage on the Devon coast. When asked what had possessed him to destroy his own business, he replied, strangely, “That’s a very good question. What did possess me?”
    But he had no answer. On his deathbed, he apologized to hisdaughters. His last words were: “The Voice in the Wall made me do it.”
    Nobody wanted to take over Wreckit & Sons after that, and the building stayed empty. It stood at the end of Biddlecombe’s main street, a great block of not-quite-nothing, for it always seemed as though the spirit of the old store was still present, infusing its bricks and mortar, its wood and its windows, waiting for the moment when its doors might be opened again, and people could get lost in its basement.
    But nobody came, and the spirit slept.
    • • •
    So it was that the store had been closed for what seemed like a very long time—and was, actually, a very long time. 12 Two generations of Biddlecombe children had grown up withoutany memory of  Wreckit & Sons being anything other than an empty shell, its ground-floor windows boarded and its doors locked. Eventually people just stopped noticing it, although strangers would sometimes pass through the town and gaze up at it. And when they asked who had designed such a building, the residents of Biddlecombe would shrug their shoulders and point at the statue of Hilary Mould, assuming they could find it.
    But if the