Dodge Her and Head Upstairs

"Ghosts?" I asked the woman, a 30-something brunette that wasn't too hard on the eyes.

"Sir,” Flustered now. Very. And she’s cute, to boot. “As I said, we're having an incident and I need this area evacuated as soon as--"

"Let me help," I said. "I used to work security at concerts." It was a lie, but at 6'4" and nearly 230 lbs, it was a believable one. She sighed.

"To be honest, I'm scared shitless," she said. "I don't know what's going on up there, but I heard some weird things on the radio, and I just need you to--"

"Help you," I said. "You could use my help. I'm volunteering." She shook her head. "Listen, you're not going to **** me to leave. If you have to officially keep saying 'no', that's fine, but I'm going upstairs." She rubbed her temples and looked back up at me with renewed intensity.

"I've warned you four times," she said, "but you're right--I can't **** you out." She stood in front of the up escalator, her arms out to her sides. "But you also don't look like the kind of guy who wants to be in the blotter for ****." She was stubborn, but she was right. I wasn't going to touch her for any reason. Throwing caution to the wind, I leapt up on the barrier between the two escalators and ran up a few steps, jumping back onto the 'up' track as soon as I was beyond her. "Sir, stop!"

I pounded up the shifting stairs in record time, wondering what it was I was going to see. A robbery? A crazed maniac?

Uh uh.

This time, my morbid sense of curiosity and adrenaline-seeking foolishness had dropped my rational mind into a vat of sticky surreality. On the second floor I saw clothes.

Yes, clothes--but not on displays and racks and mannequins where they should be. Rather, they were dancing around, running, sailing over the departments...some of them even seemed to have a couple store patrons trapped like frightened animals.

I swallowed hard, turning around to see the determined staff-member right behind me. Her angry stare dissolved into dumbfounded glances all around her, and I watched as she let her radio drop straight to the tiled floor, breaking its battery clip on impact.

"What the fuck is..." She pointed at something behind me, and before I could react, I felt someone squeeze me into a tight bear-hug. Trying to break the grip, I looked down to see delicate satin sleeves wrapped around me, and a second later, my mind registered the empty ends of the sleeves and the feeling of pillowy fabric balloons pushing against my back, just beneath my shoulder blades. When I tried to run instead of simply breaking away from the sleeves, the butterflies in my stomach and the lack of pressure beneath my feet told me that I was being lifted off the ground, albeit just slightly.

The staff member darted back to the up escalator, but she was greeted by an enormous pair of stretch pants which leapt up and wrapped their legs around her mid-torso. Now she was screaming, lifted into the air like myself, kicking at empty space and pounding on the empty hips of the stretch pants with her fists.