Enter and be damned

I stood in front of the doorway, watching the damned pour in, despair and agony etched across their wretched faces. I had no pity for them. They had brought this horror upon themselves, and I for my sins was about to join them. Tennyson came to mind: "Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred."

I threw myself in their midst and was instantly caught up in the swirling vortex. Bright lights and strange colours whirled around me as I was swept along, trying my best to resist the siren calls of the figures reaching out to entrap the unwary.

A small child nearby looked upon the seething mass of people before her and terror crept slowly across her features. She pulled her mother close and whispered something in her ear. I could not hear what. Her mother stood up and replied with forced cheer "don't be silly. It's not a scary place. It's a toy shop." Neither child nor mother nor myself were convinced by this argument.

Hamleys on a Saturday in December is one of the scariest places you're ever likely to encounter. Other shops have opulent window displays, luxuriously tempting, sensuously inviting. By contrast, one of Hamley's windows contains a vision of hell itself, as though to serve as a warning to the incautious. A colourless diorama contains two figures, their faces featureless and as distorted as the forced perspective of the scene. A mother stands by a sink in the background washing dishes, and looks back upon her child in the foreground as she opens a Christmas present. Both figures are animated, the mothers hand endlessly washing the same dish over and over, the child condemned to open the same grey present for all eternity. It's a vision of Christmas wrought from the nightmares of David Lynch.

I survived. Others didn't. Oh, they made it out of the shop in the end, but from the expressions on their faces, I wouldn't call it survival...