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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Fabulous-Cookie-2559 on 2024-10-23 21:24:39+00:00.
Going to work is unfortunately something none of us can avoid and after everything that I’ve been remembering the past few nights…… I might just join the military to avoid it. My name is Clara, for the record, and I will never work in a mall ever again.
Going into my store everyday came with its challenges, most of them didn’t begin until the customers started to pour in from the food court. But, this day was special, this day was way different. I went, opened and closed the gate as normal, and clocked in on the main computer. I glanced over and saw that my store manager left a note for me, kind of odd but not entirely unusual considering it’s Phil. I had worked in that store for over a year and he still did not understand how to schedule. “I’m going out of town for the day for a company meeting! Kick butt today and don’t forget to go through and change out some of the displays! -Phil”
I sighed. That was his job, not mine. “Another Phil-ism for the books.” I said aloud to myself. I completed the rest of my daily opening duties before I moved onto the extra stuff that Phil was pushing off onto me. I went over and grabbed the clothes pole so I could take down everything I had put up previously. Reaching the pole up in the air, I tried to hook onto the hanger, of course it wasn’t easy, it was never easy. I finally caught one and wrangled it off the post like a bear catching a salmon. I sighed again, realizing that I had nothing to hang this stuff on until I put it away. “Small inconveniences make for big frustrations.” I said aloud to myself again, I hated going to the back room alone. I walked into the back, singing a little song to myself like a child who’s afraid of the dark, this WAS the dark and I AM the child. I’ll still admit it.
I made my way to the back corner where the rolling racks were stored and as I placed my hand on the cold metal of the bar, I realized that the lights that were normally motion sensitive, hadn’t turned on yet. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I tried to pull the rack out of its cubby quicker after the gain of this knowledge. “This would happen when I’m already scared.” The rack stuck onto the wheels of the many other racks in the corner and refused to let go from its metallic friends. “Forget it.” I let go of the rack and hustled up to the motion sensor on the light. I stood there for a moment and started to flail my arms in the air rapidly to try and get it to turn on. Nothing worked, so I had no choice but to pull my phone flashlight out to solve the problem at hand, the electrical work could wait for another day.
I walked back to the back corner of the room with the flashlight neatly tucked in the front of my jeans so that I had full use of my hands. As I bent down to grab a hold of the wheels in order to detangle the metal, I heard a small settling of something behind me. Not a metallic sound but more of a piece of wet cloth dropping to the concrete ground. An alarm set off in my head. I began singing again, that was the only thing that seemed to calm me down but, I still wouldn’t look behind me to see what it was.
With a ‘clang’ the pieces of metal finally came undone and the rack finally came loose. I rolled it out of the room, specifically pointing my back towards the sound. As I led the rack back out into the store front, I looked over to the fire exit door that led to a small courtyard outside. The door had a bright red bar across the handle to let you know the alarm will sound as soon as you walk out. That was normal, the door was closed as normal, however, there was one thing that was strange. There was no light coming through the peephole of the door.
I rushed back out into the front of the store. Panting from not only running but, also just from the quick shock that I had gotten. I check the clock, it’s 11:00 am, time to open up.
An hour or so went by and there still had not been a single customer in my store, actually there have been like no customers besides the same groups of two or three elderly people fast walking around the mall corridors. The security guards and all the other workers are there as normal, I look out into the food court just to make sure. I stood in my entryway for a moment, being sure that I wasn’t imagining things. It was, indeed, the same people over and over and over. “1,2……5,6……9,10,11…13,14…16? That’s it?” I asked. After a few more minutes of standing behind the cash register, mulling that number 16 over in my head and glancing back into the doorway of the back room, I figured I should keep myself busy with the rest of the displays Phil told me to change. I picked the pole back up, put it into position and returned to my routine. Ten minutes went by, still no customers and I found myself leaning more into the music I had been playing than before, perhaps trying to keep my mind from thinking too much. Twenty minutes went by and as I was replacing the display at the top, I heard it. The exact thing that I was subconsciously afraid of, a voice. A small, faint voice, it sounded delighted in tone and seemed to only come out in a high pitched squeal. This time, I did turn around, my whole body twisted toward the origin of the sound and, of course, nothing. Absolutely no one to be seen. I held my breath then thought for a minute and I exhaled again, thinking that maybe I was still wheezing from the cold I had prior. What do they call that? Grasping at straws?
It took me a little bit to finally gain the courage to go back to the wall and continue the display. It was 3:00 pm by the time I finally decided to finish it, we closed at 7:00 pm. I walked back over, pole in my hand, and I began putting clothes up and taking clothes down, even getting sucked into the puzzle of shelving for a little bit. Seemingly, everything weird had stopped happening and I could finally focus on this damn display. Still, no customers. I went out to the food court again, 16.
Bending down, I retrieved the last shelf from the floor and put it into place, looking underneath as I lined the pegs up with the holes in the shelf. Standing back up and taking a step back by a shirt rounder, I appreciated what I had just achieved and metaphorically and physically “pat myself on the back”. I walked back in front of the wall and grabbed the pole from the shelf I had leaned it up on. As I reached for the pole, I felt, on the back of my shirt, a reach for me. A small wave of a grasp that wasn’t entirely successful. I gasped, without thinking, and spun around for a second time. Within this motion, I heard another small voice, a laugh this time. A chuckle, it seemed, too human to be what I saw in that moment. Peeking through the gap in the shirts, a young girl smiled up at me. She seemed to be around seven years old but, with extremely aging wrinkles around the sides of her eyes and deeply dark bags beneath them. Dirt caking the teeth that were looming out from behind her dry, cracked lips. Sat in a stout crouch in the middle of the rounder, she held her arms out to me as if to give me a hug. The smell that permeated from her underarms as she raised them to me was a stench I could never forget. It still lingers in my nose. The smell of death, disease and of matter decaying with every breath she took. Tissue sloughing off her cheeks as she smiled at me. I stepped back, she smiled again, put her arms back down by her side, and ran off into the back room of my store. I called Phil.
AUGUST 28 5:30 pm Phil has done nothing but laugh at me so I’m leaving. This is the one thing I’m writing down in order to try to get everything out into the open. I’m done with the store and whatever it has to offer. I’m doing exactly what everyone in the movies doesn’t do but SHOULD. He can laugh all he wants, I am not dealing with that. I’m calling security.
Sgt. Stints came to my rescue at that moment. Stints was a small, round and slightly uptight older man. Many people in the mall hated him because of that but, I always chalked it up to it being because he was bald. I told him about the peephole and the weird sounds. I even told him about the girl-woman and how there hadn’t been more than 16 people in the food court all day, him included. I asked him to go to the other side of the mall and find out more information. I didn’t know what else to do.
I closed the store gate at 6:30 pm, which gave me some time to go around to other stores and see if they experienced anything strange, besides, of course, the lack of new customers. I walked up to all three restaurants in the food court and they all gave me the same vacant smile, blank and soulless eye contact and they all seemed to follow the same script “Thank you for coming, have a nice day.” with a closing dirt-covered smile. Before turning away, dropping the smile to an almost melancholy frown and getting back to their tasks.
I went to the stores next door to my own, hoping that there would be some sort of normalcy there. We had become pretty friendly due to being so close to each other. I walked into the first store, and at first I didn’t see anyone at all, not a single soul. I thought maybe they had closed their store as well, maybe they also thought some weird stuff was going on. But, everything else was normal, music going, cash registers still logged into ‘Katherine’. No manager would leave their store like this.
I walked around for a minute and noticed nothing else of substance and decided to go to the store on the other…
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