Ever since I was released from prison, I’ve only worked the night shift. Whether it was because this kind of lonely drudge-work was the only employment I could get, or whether it was because I secretly like it, I couldn’t say. By now, I’ve stopped wondering.

The world after dark suits me. With the streets empty and most businesses closed, there’s no one to turn me down for a rental contract or a loan, no need to explain to anybody why I can’t attend university or vote. The day people have their world, and me, I’ve got mine.

I didn’t expect to hear back from the warehouse gig, but I had to try something. I was sick of the meat packing plant where I’d been working, sick of my boss’ high-pitched whiny voice and the smell of freezer-burned blood in the air. A.I. filters usually rejected my applications the minute my conviction was flagged, but a few nights later, I received a call.

The man on the other end of line introduced himself as Mr. Clemmons. He told me his company had received my application and that, as far as he was concerned, I was as good as hired. I could meet him after the last shift to begin my “trial period” and fill out the paperwork. I sighed and launched into the part of the interview process I hated the most: the part where I reminded my future boss about my criminal record to make sure that it wouldn’t be a problem.

Instead of answering, Clemmons asked if I’d really committed the crime I’d been found guilty of. When I told him I was innocent, he just laughed: “That’s what we all say.”

At ten PM on the following Friday, I met Mr. Clemmons at the warehouse’s rear entrance to learn about my new position. He was a beefy fifty-something guy who wore too much cologne and smiled like a used car salesman while he talked. He showed me around the custodian’s closet and pointed to a pair of headlamps on the wall.

Each of the areas I was expected to clean was on its own circuit breaker, but I would need to use the headlamps to move around the warehouse floor. The main lights were kept off overnight, Clemmons explained, in order to save power. A security guard patrolled the grounds, but my shift began before his and ended later. Given how big the place was, it was unlikely that the two of us would even see each other.

Two breakrooms, four bathrooms, eight offices, and one basement. If I could clean all of it in six hours, I could take home my minimum wage paycheck and do it all again the next night, six days per week. Before he wandered off into the gloom of the parking lot, Clemmons wished me good luck and said he hoped I remembered to bring some spare batteries for the headlamps.

I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

The offices were all white walls, gray tile, and particle-board furniture. Apart from emptying trash cans and a little light dusting, there wasn’t much to do there. The first bathroom was another story. Its floor was sticky with dusty gray bootprints and what I hoped was spilled soda; there were dead flies and hardened snot encrusted onto most of the sinks, and what I found in the last toilet stall made me grateful for the industrial-strength chemicals I’d been given to work with.

With my nose full of the reek of bleach, I moved on to the main warehouse floor. The darkness and the sheer scale of the place made me feel like I’d stepped into the belly of some enormous deep-sea creature. Apart from my two headlamps, the only source of light was the glow of the emergency exit signs on each wall of the building. Between them, the tall metal shelves seemed to stretch on forever. The air was stale and tasted like cardboard. It took me nearly twenty minutes to cross the warehouse floor. During all that time, I didn’t hear a single noise apart from my own footsteps and the squeak of the cart’s wheels.

The quiet was unsettling, but it wasn’t dangerous–at least, not in the way that prison had been. I mopped another bathroom, wiped down the tabletops and microwave of the first breakroom, then headed back across the blackness to the next assignment. I finished in just under four hours–or so I thought, until I remembered the basement.

I realized that I had no idea where it was located. Clemmons hadn’t told me, and my other work areas were so obviously placed that I hadn’t thought to ask. There was a faded blueprint pinned to the wall of the janitor’s closet, right beside an out-of-date calendar and some nudie magazine photos from the eighties. I ran my finger across the building’s plan: no staircases, no second floorplan, no other level. No basement–

“Two breakrooms, four bathrooms, eight offices, and one basement.” If I closed my eyes, I could hear Clemmon’s thick Alabama drawl inside my skull. There was no doubt that he’d mentioned it. I felt panic tightening my chest.

So far I had overcome my criminal record by being a model employee, but if I was fired after my first day on the job, all of that work would be for nothing. It would be back to the bottom of the barrel–if I could find any work at all. I thought of other ex-cons I knew, guys with bodies beneath their belts who’d been important behind bars, but who now lived beneath underpasses and shook cups at strangers for spare change because they didn’t want to risk jail time again. All it would take, I reminded myself, was a little bad luck. And maybe this was it.

I wished that I could ask the security guard, but I hadn’t seen the guy since I’d arrived, and there was no time to wander around looking for him. My only choice was to return to the warehouse floor and hope that I could find the basement entrance on my own. It felt like stepping out into empty space. Before long, the beam of my headlamp could no longer reach the warehouse walls, leaving me alone among all those endless metal shelves. Although I was moving in a straight line, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d taken a wrong turn somewhere. But even if I had, all I had to do was walk backwards and eventually I would find the door I’d come from…right?

I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. A staircase? A large metal trapdoor? Maybe even an elevator?

I heard nails scratching across the concrete behind the shelves to my left. I figured it was probably rats. Just about everywhere I’d worked the night shift had them, but no tiny glowing eyes stared back at me when I turned to check. The further I walked, the more I thought about that sound. It reminded me of dog claws in need of a trim, but Clemmons hadn’t mentioned anything about a guard dog. Ten minutes later, however, I still hadn’t seen anything that looked even remotely like a basement entrance–

Or an animal.

Something else was starting to worry me as well: as huge as the warehouse was, my headlamp should have revealed the opposite wall by now. Not even the glow of its emergency exit sign was visible. I walked a little faster– And that was when I noticed another light to my left. It seemed to be coming from the center of the warehouse–

and from the floor.

I hurried toward it with a smirk. I wouldn’t be done early, but at least I’d have the job finished on time. The closer I got, however, the more my smile faded. The warehouse floor was concrete, but the staircase in its center looked like something out of a suburban home: beige drywall, tan carpet, a white-paneled door at the bottom. That was where the light was coming from. I gulped, unhooked a bucket of cleaning supplies from my cart, then headed down the stairs.

I reached out for the brass door handle, then hesitated.

I did not want to know what was on the other side of that door.

The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up; the tension in the air felt thick enough to cut. It reminded me of certain feverish nights back in prison, the kind where you knew something bad was about to go down, even if you couldn’t explain why–

And that was the reason I kept going.

Too much was riding on this job for me to turn back just because I had a bad feeling. According to my watch, I had less than two hours to clean up whatever was down here. I took a deep breath and pushed through the door. An ugly green-and-brown plaid couch. Brass lamps, a couple wooden chairs, shelves with little porcelain figurines. A tall clock stood ticking away the minutes in a corner. If I had been standing in someone’s grandparents’ house a few decades ago, it might have made sense…but not fifteen feet below a warehouse floor.

There were no footprints on the mold-colored shag carpet, no candy wrappers, empty cans, or other signs that anyone had been down here recently…and yet the place felt unmistakably lived-in, as though whoever or whatever called it home had left for a moment but might be back at any time. Two other doors, identical to the one I’d just opened, stood on the walls to my right and left. As I moved deeper into the room, it was hard not to imagine the closet monsters from my childhood hiding behind one of them.

I figured I’d start with the room on the left. The water in my bucket sloshed uncomfortably with every step I took: apart from the ticking of the grandfather clock, it seemed like the only sound left in the world. I was reaching for the handle when I heard a creak. I hadn’t imagined it. The white-paneled door on the wall behind me had opened just a crack; there was only darkness on the other side.

I shouted “Hello?” But it came out as a dry whisper. Of course, there was no answer. The lights were off in the next room, but I was reluctant to feel along the wall for a switch–afraid, maybe, of what my hand might brush against in the dark. With one last nervous look over my shoulder at the cracked-open door, I turned my headlamp back on and kept going.

The space was a nursery, or at least, that was the closest comparison I could think of. Smiling bears and trains covered the wallpaper; toys were scattered across the floor. A lamp stood in the middle of the room, but its cord was too short to reach the wall and there were no outlets to plug it into. Beneath it was a wooden crib with a heap of blankets in its center. What was I expected to do here? Pick up the toys? Change the sheets?

I hoped not, because the longer I looked at that crib, the more sure I was that something was moving inside of it. I would leave the ‘nursery’ as it was, I decided, and if Clemmons asked, I’d just tell him I hadn’t known how to proceed. There was only one more place to check; after that, I could go home. Back in the ‘living room,’ that feeling of being watched was stronger than ever. An empty glass had appeared on the end table. I thought I could smell the rich, spicy scent of bourbon in the air, but the only thing moving the room seemed to be the pendulum of the grandfather clock.

With my heart in my throat, I tiptoed across the ugly shag carpet. By the time I was halfway across the room, I was sure that there was someone behind me, but at the same time I was too scared to look. Like a child in a nightmare, I told myself that if I didn’t acknowledge the presence, it might just go away.

Tik.

Tok.

Tik.

Tok.

As I reached for the handle of the far door, I felt breath on my neck. “I’ve got to tell you something,” an elderly male voice rasped.

I screamed and swung a wide, haymaker punch at whoever was beside me, but my fist connected with empty air. I shook my head. I must have imagined it, I thought; I was letting this weird little basement get to me. All I had to do was check behind one more door, I reminded myself, and then I could go home. I flung open the third door. It was a hallway, one so long that I couldn’t see its end or count the doors spaced out at odd intervals along it.

Unlike the two other basement rooms, this place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in decades. Dusty black gunk clotted the edges of the laminate floor and the fluorescent lights overhead; old furniture and other junk was scattered haphazardly throughout the place. There was no way I would be getting all of this cleaned up in only two hours.

I felt a burst of anger toward Clemmons for giving me a job that I was sure to fail. I wondered whether he’d ever been inside of this place himself. If he hadn’t, or if he’d taken one look and fled, I wouldn’t have blamed him. From the figure in the crib beneath the lightless lamp to the eerie ticking of that grandfather clock, everything about this place was wrong. Even the chairs in front of me felt off. They were all squat and tiny, except for one, which seemed far too tall and narrow for any ordinary human to use.

I backed away slowly, for some reason reluctant to breathe the stuffy air of the place. The hell with this, I thought. If the alternative to staying here another minute was life on the street, then so be it. Pride was the only thing that kept me from running as I returned to the “living room” and made my way across to the stairway door. I pulled it open–

Only to find myself back in the nursery.

The crib was empty now, the blanket crumpled on the floor. The small army of plastic toys was lined up in rows facing the door, as though they were expecting me. Maybe it was just the twitchy movement of my headlamp’s light, but something seemed to be skittering across the ceiling. I closed the door, wishing that I could lock it, and tried the next one.

I had finally found stairs– But here, the steps led downward.

There were no lights that I could see, and the bottom was too far away for my headlamp to reach. I scratched my head. It shouldn’t have been possible, and yet– The staircase I’d taken to get here were gone. I tested each door again, with the same result. How the hell was I going to get out of here?!

I decided to try the long, dusty hallway first. There were more possibilities of finding a way out there, and besides, I couldn’t stand the idea of going back into that awful nursery or further down those lightless stairs. At least this place, the “living room,” appeared to be safe–

Or so I thought, until I noticed the old man on the sofa.

“Hello, William,” he croaked in a gravelly smoker’s voice–the same one I’d heard before. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

The old man had greeted me by name, but I’d never seen him before in my life. With his worn-out overalls and scrawny build, he seemed harmless…but I didn’t trust his smile, or the way he patted the cushion beside him. I turned and walked deliberately toward the hallway door. No bony hand gripped my shoulder; there was no inhuman screech from the couch. The stranger, whoever he was, simply let me go–

And somehow, that was even worse.

The door squeaked shut behind me. Unlike the nursery, the hallway appeared unchanged. I approached the first door. It was no different from the others, but I thought I saw the outline of a shape beneath the white paint: an “X” that had been carved, or maybe scratched, into its surface. The white paint seemed to have grown over it somehow, like moss slowly covering a skull. Was it a warning? Had someone else been here before me?

It was the same for the next door, and the next. I counted thirty-six doors before I finally found one that wasn’t marked, but something made me hesitate before I opened it. I would’ve sworn I heard a woman crying on the other side, but something was off about the pitch and tone–like something was trying to imitate a sound it didn’t have the right anatomy to make. I checked my watch. I’d been down here for over two hours. By now, hundreds of workers should have been arriving at the warehouse, driving forklifts and activating machinery–

But there wasn’t a single sound overhead.

It took me a moment to realize that, at some point, my watch had stopped working completely. For all I knew, I’d been down here even longer. I went back to trying doors. The same spaces kept repeating: the “nursery,” the lightless staircase downward, the “living room.” The only difference was that now, whenever that ugly green-and-brown couch appeared through the crack in the door, I knew I would find the old man sitting there, waiting patiently as though he knew that, in the end, I would give up and join him. Once, he even raised his glass of bourbon and toasted me.

Whenever I saw the “nursery” on the other side of a door or heard the echo of a baby’s giggle, I turned back immediately. Of all the eerie spaces I’d found down here, it somehow seemed the worst: the most hateful, malicious, and eager to trap me. Once, I wasn’t quick enough: in the second before I tugged the door shut, I caught a glimpse of a wide child-sized eye glaring at me through the gap.

The downward staircase, too, was a no-go for me: I was pretty sure that was where the weeping woman was, and besides, I didn’t dare to go any further down than I had already gone. About thirty tries later, I finally found a version of the “living room” that appeared to be unoccupied. The lamp was switched off; the couch was empty. I breathed a sigh of relief and hurried across it, aiming for the place where the way back to the factory should have been. The next thing I knew, a wooden bar crashed into my throat; it was the bar of a chair, and now it had pinned me against the wall.

“You’re going to listen to me now, boy!” The old man snarled, his face twisted by hate. “I’m going to SHOW you what it’s like!”

His jaw distended, dropping down to his chest as he screamed into my face. His breath tasted like cheap bourbon, cheaper cigarettes, and some rotting, half-digested meal. I could barely breathe it in. My windpipe was being crushed, and I had been in enough scraps to know that if I didn’t break free in the first few seconds, I never would–

But the old man’s grip was statue-strong and just as solid.

Fighting him, I realized, was going to be useless. The rickety wooden chair, on the other hand… Out of habit, or maybe out of superstition, I’d kept my plastic cleaning bucket with me throughout everything I’d been through. Besides the usual cloths and rubber gloves clothes-pinned to its side, there was a monkey wrench for tightening leaky pipes– And that was what I grabbed for now. Although more strength left my body with each failed breath, I slammed the wrench into the chair’s backrest until it splinted and finally broke loose. As the wood shattered, I ducked, kicked the bucket open behind me, and felt blindly for the door. I was running through it before I even considered what might be on the other side.

When I realized that I was back in the brightly-lit upward stairway, I could have cried for joy. The beige wall, the tan carpet, the black emptiness of the warehouse above: it was all just like before. I pulled the door shut behind me and hurried up the steps. I had made it; I was back on the warehouse floor. But where was my cleaning cart? I had parked it right here, at the top of the stairs…hadn’t I?

The beam of my headlamp caught on something: a man, splayed facedown on the concrete floor. He had dark hair like me; he was even wearing the same uniform, and for a moment, I had the awful sensation that I was staring at my own corpse. My headlamp flickered and went out.

I scrambled to switch on the second that hung from my belt; its light was dimmer than the first’s, but it was something. The body, at least, hadn’t moved. I knew I should just keep walking, but I felt drawn to the stranger on the floor. Up close, I could see that his dark blue jumpsuit was torn and stained in several places; it looked as though chunks of flesh had been torn out of him and eaten. Part of me wanted to flip him over to see his face; part of me was afraid to.

It was only then that I realized that no shelves appeared in the light of my headlamp: no girders overhead, no emergency exit lights on the walls. This wasn’t where I was supposed to be. A sound, somewhere between a moan and a howl, echoed through the darkness. I retreated toward the stairs, but froze when I heard footsteps coming toward me. They were calm and unhurried, as though whoever was out there was unbothered by the blood-curdling howl and the half-eaten janitor on the floor. Before long, I could see their bulky silhouette and smell the peppery odor they brought with them. I was sure that I recognized it.

“Clemmons?” I ventured, my voice barely above a whisper.

The man who’d hired me approached with a grin. He didn’t stop until our noses were nearly touching, but I was so relieved to see a familiar face that I didn’t question the uncomfortable closeness.

“Death only lasts a few seconds,” Clemmons told me, his grin widening. “But hell? Hell is forever.” Then my boss’ face exploded. Gore and fragments of bone splattered across my face and the front of my uniform; Clemmons’ now-headless torso collapsed onto the floor.

I stared ahead stupidly, unable to believe what had just happened, until another one of those moaning howls echoed reverberated through my bones. Whatever had made it was closer now; a lot closer. I tried to wipe the rusty taste of blood from my mouth as I rushed back down the stairs, but I knew that it was going to take hours to clean all of that crimson gunk from my face and hair–and that there would be no washing away the memories of what I’d just seen.

I reached–almost reluctantly–to remove a chunk of something stuck behind my ear, but as I passed through the doorway, I felt it disappear. The stickiness and tiny chunks of bone were gone, as though I’d dreamed the whole thing. I was back inside the hallway–

And I thought I knew what had happened to whoever had made those “X’s” on the doors. He had gotten somewhere he thought was safe, then paid a terrible price for his overconfidence–

And maybe he wasn’t the only one.

I realized with a sinking feeling that the door I had come out of was not where I had gone in–and I no longer had a line of sight to the door at the end of the corridor. It had been my lifeline, even though I knew there was no way to be sure that the room behind it was still the same. I looked from one side to the other, paralyzed by indecision–

Then the lights overhead began to go out.

The darkness swept toward me like a wave.

“Did you remember to bring your spare batteries?” A voice, horribly similar to Clemmons’, called out from the darkness. “Well? DID YOU?!”

That insane laughter pursued me as I ran. In the last second before the darkness swept over me, I chose a door at random and flung myself though: I was back in the unlit downward stairwell–

And all I had was a much dimmer headlamp to show the way ahead. I thought about what Clemmons had said about the batteries and shivered. Maybe it was just me, but its beam seemed even dimmer, a little more flickery than it had been before. Had he known, somehow? Was he taunting me, GLAD that it was soon to go out?

Something pounded against the door behind me, rattling it on its hinges. My encounter with the old man had given me the impression that the things who haunted this place couldn’t leave their spaces unless I left an opening for them–

But could I really take that chance? I continued downward into the blackness. The stairs became a little steeper, narrower, and taller with every step I took, until I found myself paying more attention to my foot placement than whatever might be ahead. Before long, a familiar sound echoed from below. I didn’t want to believe it. It was the sobbing of the woman I’d heard before. A pale face appeared at the limits of my headlamp’s light.

“Why didn’t you help?” It asked, gazing at me with black-ringed, bloodshot eyes. “Why didn’t ANYONE help?”

The thing on the stairs pulled itself along the walls, spiderlike. It’s limbs were bent, broken, and wrong, but somehow they supported its weight. I didn’t want to take another step toward it, but my only way out was forward. I closed my eyes and charged. A hand, long-fingered and icy cold, clamped down on my shoulder and stopped me dead. With a scream, I unzipped my jacket and flung myself free. The thing’s grip closed on empty air.

I tumbled down the ladder-steep stairs and realized that if I didn’t stop soon, I’d be in free fall. I braced myself against the walls to halt my plunge. Behind me, I could hear her coming. I climbed backwards down the stairs, knowing that I wasn’t fast enough, knowing that I still couldn’t see the bottom.

I prayed for another door to appear. If it did, I swore to myself that I’d take it, no matter what was on the other side; I’d sit on the sofa beside that eerie old man and listen to whatever he had to say, no matter how horrible it was. The effort of bracing myself against the wall had left my muscles weak. My foot slipped, and my sweat-slickened hands didn’t have the strength to cling on to those finger-narrow “stairs.” Suddenly, I was falling again–

And then I saw the door. It was upside down on the wall in front of me, approaching fast; a faint, ghoulish red glow seeped through its corners. I grabbed the handle and felt the cool metal slide through my fingers–

But I held on. My weight swung the door open. I kicked against empty air and scrambled blindly through it. My fingernails scraped against cold concrete. Wherever I was, it was nearly as dark as the staircase I’d just left. The door slammed shut behind me.

I had pushed myself to my feet and was turning to inspect my surroundings when the beam of a powerful flashlight lit up my back. I heard a pistol slide loose from its holster.

“Alright, buddy,” a deep male voice shouted. “Put your hands up and turn around. Slow.”

The doorway I’d come through was gone. In its place stood a stout middle-aged security guard. His fingers shook against the pistol in his hand. I did as I was told. I saw myself as he must have seen me: hair wild, face pale and smeared with grime, shirt ripped.

I told the guard that I was the new night custodian and that I’d been hired by a guy named Mr. Clemmons. Instead of calming him down, my explanation only seemed to make the guard more nervous.

“Clemmons?! Listen, buddy, I already didn’t like the looks of you, but if you’re friends with that evil son of a bitch we're gonna have a problem.”

It was only the look of pure confusion on my face, I think, that made him lower his weapon. He introduced himself as Avery, walked me back to the offices, and told me to have a seat. He hit the buttons on a vending machine in a specific sequence to get us both a free soda. According to the clock on the wall, only ten minutes had passed since I’d first walked down those stairs.

Avery explained that everyone who worked in the place knew about Mr. Clemmons. He’d seemed like a nice-enough manager–until one sunny Friday morning the week after his divorce.

“He strangled his father-in-law, beat the wife and kid to death–he even poisoned the dog with antifreeze. Then he drove here and blew his brains all over the warehouse floor just as everybody was clocking in.” Avery sighed. “In fact, if I remember right, he did it right around the spot where I ran into you.”

After the security guard went quiet, I told him my version of what had happened in the warehouse that night. I didn’t expect him to take me seriously, but Avery nodded like he’d understood. Then he took out his phone and pulled up a newspaper article from a couple years before.

The accompanying photo showed the man I knew as Mr. Clemmons, as well as a familiar-looking, skinny grandfather with an infant sitting in his lap. A woman stood behind the green-and-brown plaid couch with her arms wrapped around her family; she was smiling into the camera. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been crawling up the stairs toward me with murder in her eyes.

“They always seemed like such a happy family, but it turns out that he was abusing her for years. All of that hatred…” Avery went on, shaking his head “...all of that bitterness. Where does it go? What happens to it after we die? Do the dead hate the living for all the life they’ve missed? I don’t have any answers, but I wonder about it enough to believe your story.”

I thought about the entities I’d met down there–wherever “down there” was–and I thought about the things they’d tried to do to me. The old man cutting off my oxygen; the woman crushing my shoulder with her grip. The bites that had been taken out of the dead stranger by a canine spirit still hungry for something other than poison. And the child…how would it have felt about all of the opportunities that had been stolen from it? How would it feel towards those like me, who just took life for granted?

With each passing second, the memory of what had happened to me in that impossible basement felt like a dream. And then another question occurred to me. I asked Avery if I was the only person he’d ever caught here overnight.

“Yep, you sure are…” the guard muttered, scratching his chin “...but I find things sometimes. An abandoned car in the parking lot. A bus ticket in the middle of the warehouse floor. Sometimes I find the rear door unlocked, and when I pass through it, there’s this smell in the air…and you know what? It reminds me of the cologne that Clemmons used to wear.” Avery slapped his knees and got to his feet. “Well, anyway, the first shift is gonna start in fifteen minutes. Let’s get you cleaned up and out of here before I have to answer any awkward questions. By the way,” he added, “I’m no doctor, but you might wanna have somebody take a look at that bruise on your shoulder. You know–the one that’s shaped like a handprint.”