So this is an old story, at least in my family. It’s the kind of story that gets told ‘when you’re old enough’, at christmases and birthdays. I’ll admit it feels pretty good to be told it, once you reach the right age; it’s like you’ve been let into some kind of big secret the rest of the family share in hushed tones.
I won’t claim it to be particularly scarier than anything you’ve heard before. There aren’t any ghosts or demons or cosmic entities. But it frightened me to death the first time I was told it, and it has had the same effect on anyone I’ve ever seen it told to since.
I suppose I should get to the point. My uncle - who isn’t my uncle-uncle, more my
mom’s dad’s friend, I think - he used to work in the 60’s in one of those massive depot warehouses. The ones where they store boxes and random things before they can be shipped off to where they’re actually meant to be.
He was broke at the time, and down on his luck, and he worked as the night security at this place. The depot was a couple of miles or so from his town, just off the freeway, and surrounded by dense woods. The site was huge; a compound of individual warehouses and storage rooms, with a central car park.
My uncle’s office was tucked away in the corner of one of these warehouses, and he always made a point to emphasise just how cavernous this place was. The way he put it, when you walked through the warehouse at night, you couldn’t even see the roof; just shelves and shelves of boxes, stretching up into darkness.
So every night my uncle had to arrive at a quarter to midnight, walk up and down every aisle of shelves in every warehouse, and then go to his office and wait out the rest of the shift. Keep his eyes and ears peeled for any disturbances. Simple job, easy money. Mind you, he wouldn’t spend much time actually patrolling the place; he said he used to play himself at poker for most of the night.
So on this particular night, my uncle pulls up in his truck to the car park, right on time, as always. He says it was a pretty clear night, with a big bright full moon. He remembers actually taking a moment and leaning on the side of the truck, staring up at the star-speckled sky. Out here, away from the city, you could actually see the stars properly. The air was crisp and clear.
At the door to the warehouse he sees the guy he’s meant to take over from, a guy called Vinny. Now, the way my uncle described Vinny, basically he was a nice enough guy, but not everything was working properly upstairs, if you catch my meaning. He was an older guy, had been working security there almost all his life, and was always coming out with these little oddities and sayings. Like, for instance when it rained he used to say ‘fish’ll come a’walking’, in some grumbling, muttering sort of way. And he used to say that the government was putting zinc into cornflakes. Anyway, just keep in mind that my uncle didn’t really take much Vinny would say too seriously, ok?
So my uncle walks up to Vinny, and he just says ‘Hey, Vinny, good night?’ or whatever. And straight away he can see something’s weird with Vinny, even more so than usual. Vinny’s barely registered him, he’s staring real intently at something far off, past the fence of the depot, near the treeline.
‘Everything alright, man?’ asks my uncle.
Vinny turns slowly and quietly says ‘There’s someone behind that tree out there. You see him? Peeking.’
My uncle turns to where Vinny’s looking, but it’s dark and the moonlight doesn’t reach that far.
‘Look. Hes’s peeking. Peeking at us.’
Vinny’s words gave my uncle some serious heeby jeebies, so that he actually gets pissed off, like, he’s annoyed at the guy for scaring him right at the start of his night shift. He tells Vinny to knock it off, and Vinny’s off anyway, shuffling over to his car.
My uncle peers again at the trees, and still sees nothing, and he brushes Vinny off as either paranoid or senile, or both.
He walks inside, through that cavernous warehouse, and he starts his patrol. There were six warehouses, and each warehouse had aisles A through to Z. I’m not going to do the math for you, but that’s quite a lot of aisles to cover. My uncle goes through all of them, only his torch to light the way; but by now he’s used to it. There’s nothing amiss.
He goes back to his little office, and he switches on the radio and he starts playing cards with himself. He spends a few uneventful hours like this.
At about three in the morning, there’s suddenly a deafening clang in the distance. My uncle jumps about a foot in the air, and he can tell the sound’s come from the other side of the warehouse. It sounded like a heavy box, or even an entire shelf, had fallen over.
‘Or been pushed’ is the thought he ignores.
My uncle says he can remember the exact song which came on the radio at that moment: ‘Tiptoe through the tulips’, by Tiny Tim. Now if you know that song, then you know how fucking unbelievably creepy it is. My uncle probably would have chosen just about any other song in the world to play, at that second, in that lonely night.
Despite, absolutely, categorically not wanting to step out of his safe little office, my uncle knows it is his job to go and check that sound out. As he steps out of the office, into the warehouse, he can hear that song trailing after him.
‘Tiptoe, through the tulips,
With meeeeee…’
The words follow him as he reluctantly makes his way down aisle A, where he finds nothing wrong. He moves left and turns up aisle B, where again nothing is out of place. He repeats this process, making his way up and down the aisles by flashlight light, looking for what caused that clanging noise.
It’s about this moment that Vinny’s words from earlier in the night come back to him. Again, horrendous timing for my uncle. I’m guessing he was just about ready to shit a diamond.
He gets to aisle T, and he points his flashlight down the end, and at first he thinks everything’s fine in this aisle as well.
Just as he’s about to continue off, he sees something, way down at the other end of the aisle.
There’s a shape sticking out from behind the other end of the shelf. It’s small, and sticking out from a few metres up in the air. He’s not scared at first, just confused, because he can’t tell what it is. His body recoils instinctively when it starts to move; but still, he can’t tell what it is, only that it’s moving subtly.
He stares and stares at the shape, and then something clicks in his mind, like a jigsaw coming into place, and now he sees the full picture, and he doesn’t like it, not one bit.
It’s an arm.
It’s an arm, and it’s waving at him.
He can’t see the owner of this arm, he can just see it sticking horizontally from the end of the aisle; the rest of the body is obscured by the shelf. It’s waving very slowly, moving up and down, in an exaggerated, almost cartoonish fashion.
My uncle, in a moment which shocks himself too, calls out:
‘Hey! Hey! Who’s there?’
His voice cracks on the ‘there’, and he hopes that whoever this is hasn’t heard the fear in him.
The person doesn’t reveal themselves, just slowly pulls their arm back behind the shelf, out of sight.
My uncle immediately half walks, half runs down the aisle, to where the arm just was. But there’s no sign of anyone there now. He hurries down past all of the aisles in that direction, past parcels and packages, but he can’t find this intruder anywhere.
Now, the whole time as he’s searching the aisles, he can hear noises from the aisles perpendicular to him; like, whatever aisle he’s in, he can make out noises just past the shelves next to him, but he can’t see what’s making the noises, because it’s obscured by the boxes and the darkness. He hears light, frantic footsteps, pitterpattering on the floorboards adjacent to him, always just out of sight. At this point he’s probably trying to pinch himself and wake up from this entire situation, because it sounds like there’s somebody sprinting barefoot through this empty warehouse in the middle of the night.
He gets back to aisle A, outside his office, and he can’t hear any footsteps anymore, and he’s starting to really freak out now, thinking he’s let an intruder in and lost them. He turns to start searching the aisles again, and his flashlight beam hits something down the end of aisle A now.
It’s not an arm; it’s a head.
The face is peeking around the shelf, half obscured, to the extent he has to squint to make sure he’s really seeing it.
In the dark, and with the distance between them, he can only make out three features.
The hair is too wild and matted for him to decide if it’s a man or a woman. The skin is disgustingly pale. And he has a horrible suspicion that, as best he can see, this face is grinning at him.
According to my uncle, he actually said the word ‘Nope.’ under his breath, before leaping into his office and locking the door.
He pushed up his desk against the locked door, and rushed over to the small landline phone in the corner of the office.
He rang his boss, who wasn’t too pleased to be awoken at 3am, and then, on the instruction of his boss, called the police.
My uncle says that while he’s making these calls he begins to hear a light tapping and scratching on the office door, faint, coming in small bouts every so often. He described as not like someone trying to get in, just someone letting him know that they were there.
The cops arrived, and searched the depot, and found nobody.
Then more police were called. And more. The place was shut down for weeks.
That’s because of what they found in one of the large boxes, one which had fallen out of place into the middle of aisle Z.
There was a small note, which read in neat cursive handwriting:
‘I have no mouth, yet still I bite I have no nose, but I can smell I’ll frolic when the moon is bright You’ll frolic with me, down in Hell.’
Nestled alongside was a decomposing arm, and a decapitated head.
My uncle quit.