I was a plumbing apprentice for four years. At first, I liked it well enough; the days flew by, I was usually doing something different and interesting, and I was in the best shape of my life. Mostly, I did new construction, with the occasional dabble into commercial service during the lulls between projects. Service was actually the worst. There was one incident where I worked two days back-to-back, 19 and 21 hour shifts, to finish this sink reno before September long weekend.
The surreal thing about those long overnight hauls was that as a construction worker, you were meant to be a ghost. Nobody was to see you, nobody was to hear you, and you sure as hell weren’t allowed to leave any trace once you were done. The only people we’d speak with were building operators, or the occasional security guard to check in and out of the buildings. Our company actually had a rule where we were only allowed to look at shoppers for two seconds at a time.
There was an incident on one of those shitty service gigs that I can’t shake, that I can’t move past. I should see a therapist, but I can’t bring myself to cross that bridge, so instead I sit, mooching off my parents in their basement, after I couldn’t keep up with the rent of my apartment. I’ve been putting out resumes for nearly a year after the fact, trying in vain to get anything that wasn’t construction, but with no luck. My parents are on me about getting back into trades - the money was fantastic after all - but I can’t. Every time they push me, I tell them the same things: I’m worried about the silica dust, and I don’t want to be crippled by 60. Technically, these are both true, but not the truth.
Like I said, I’m not willing to talk about this sort of thing with a shrink, or my parents, or even my girlfriend at the time (who is now my beautiful wife); but, maybe I can manage to get this weight off my chest with the anonymity of Reddit - I have to try, anyway. Bear with me, I’ll try to keep the ranting to a minimum.
For a while, I was working at an Amazon data center. It was a decent site, apart from the fifty minute drive to work and the gung-ho drywallers. Unrelated, but interesting factoid about this data center, was that Amazon built it using a shell company based out of Quebec. They had the wildest specifications I’ve ever seen in my life; I’m talking platinum lined hot water tanks that took legitimately four months to ship. There were at least a dozen updated versions of the blueprints, and we’d have to tear out pipe that we installed months ago to adjust to the latest drawings.
It was during one of these changes that the mechanical division of the site was stripped down to a skeleton crew for a month. Me and another apprentice, a 4th year we’ll call Dave, were sent to work under a notoriously poor foreman who exclusively ran shitty jobs, no pun intended. I’d worked with Dave previously, I remember the guys hazing him about his teeth, which had a handful of silver caps, they used to call it his grill. The foreman had this job set up at the largest mall in the city. Some of the drainage in the crawl space beneath the food court had corroded to paper thinness, and they decided that they wanted to convert the entire system from cast iron pipes to longer lasting XFR.
I met Dave there on the first night, as the most senior apprentice, he’d be in charge. There was another guy with him, I’m not sure if he bothered getting indentured or not (he was on a waiting list for an aeronautics apprenticeship in the military, from what I recall), we’ll call him Seok. I’d worked with Seok before on a maintenance gig at an Amazon distribution center (they’re insane if you ever get the chance to see the inside of one).
Every night, starting at 10pm, we’d put our tools and material in an unused storefront that had been gutted, but never repurposed. It was sectioned off with construction fencing, inside one of the mall entrances, and was accessible through a similarly cordoned off exterior entrance. Security never locked this particular entrance, though I don’t know if it was to give us access to the mall, or out of sheer compliant laziness. The place we set up shop was a TD bank in another life (another life being somewhere between five to ten years earlier).
After completing our first walkaround of the bank, we were thoroughly unimpressed. The tic-tac office cubbies were still full of stacked chairs and desks, but covered in a blanket of dust. There were two rooms with shattered glass panels that had clearly been slept in. Broken needles and bundles of filthy rags plugged the corners of these rooms like filthy nests, and they stayed vacant for the entire month we were there. No idea what happened to the folks who slept there. The only saving grace was that I had the chance to take a look at the huge vault door that they’d left hanging open. So, I guess all in all the experience evens out.
Once we’d stored our tools, we headed to the security office to check in for the night, and meet with the building operator who had organized the job in question. The guy was nice enough, and checking in with security killed a good twenty minutes of the night, due to the meandering guards. Afterward, we took an elevator up to the food court on the second floor and he walked us into an employee’s only area, between a Thai Express and a KFC.
Behind the storefronts was a long, narrow corridor with doors that accessed five or six of the restaurants from the rear. Overnights, the mall shut off the main lights, and left on these auxiliary fluorescents that only gave off enough light to keep a janitor from an easy legal settlement. There were two access panels in the hallway, they were around eighteen inches square and made of this bent steel plate that we had to pry up with a flathead. On top of the two entrances in the hallway, there were also access panels in Thai Express and KFC. After the building operator was done showing us all the spots where we could get beneath the food court, he left us to our work.
We grabbed our tools and hauled the XFR pipe, fittings, and glue upstairs to the hallway that we’d be living in for the next month. When we actually pried open these hatches, we weren’t impressed, Dave in particular. What you should know about Dave is that he was a dramatic guy, prone to bouts of pessimism and grumbling. I’m embarrassed to say that we sometimes joked about me being his suicide watch on jobsites.
The hatches revealed a step down that would bring the hallway floor up to our hips, but one in particular was half obstructed by a steel beam that cut right through the center of it (I’ll include a couple pictures I took). We had to squeeze past the beam onto our knees, then crawl backward in order to actually get down onto our bellies. Between the structural beams, the space was ok, allowing you to scoot along on your hands and knees if you minded your back, but to get between these spaces, you needed to squirm beneath the beams, which we measured to be anywhere between a twelve and eight inch gap, depending on which one we tried to get under. By exhaling and wiggling my way through, I could just manage to squeeze through a ten inch gap. This was good news, because that meant we couldn’t actually access a quarter of the space, meaning we didn’t have to swap those pipes out.
Pictures of the hole: https://imgur.com/a/Vg7yP8O
The thing about these holes is, technically speaking, they qualified as a confined space, which none of us were trained to work inside. If you aren’t familiar, a confined space is an area with limited ability to move in and out. The foreman in charge got around this by calling it an interstitial space, a term which I’d never heard before. All I knew is that crawling into that dark, filthy crawl space was the last thing I ever wanted to do.
The dread I felt peering into that hole is difficult to properly explain, like, subconsciously I knew that no matter what term they used to define that hole, I wanted nothing to do with it. Dave had a habit of calling things like this ‘ignorant’, which I don’t think is quite the right term, but I agreed with the sentiment.
To make things worse, a few members of the night staff were creepy as hell. There was this one guy in particular that kept trying to climb into the hole with us, like, we physically had to stop him from diving in. I don’t know what was going on in that guy’s personal life, but someone should probably check up on him. There was another janitor who would watch us from around a corner while we worked. Occasionally, when we climbed out of the hole, something would feel off, and we’d look over and see this guy peeking around the corner at us, like something out of The Grudge.
On a particularly ‘ignorant’ day, Dave asked the guy what the hell his problem was. The janitor didn’t say a word, just kept staring, his mop clutched in his hand like a spear. I have no idea what his problem was, but the general vibe was that we were unwelcome, that this was their place, and we were somehow offending them by being there. Mostly, we tried to keep our heads down.
It took a while, but we eventually settled into a routine. I would crawl ahead and dismantle the fittings and reinstall the new stuff (I was the only one willing to do this part), Dave would be behind me, in the next space over, telephoning cut lengths from me to Seok, who would be waiting outside the hole with a sawzall to cut the XFR to size (and to make sure no custodian stepped into the hole in their nightly daze). At minimum, we needed to cut the lengths in half, as we could only jam a six foot piece down the hole at the most, and only then if we persuaded it with our feet.
This entire time we were suited up in disposable Tyvek suits and oversized plastic gloves that made it look like your hands were melting. Crawling across the floor of the crawl space would coat your belly in black, rancid grease that smelt like shit and bring you within kissing distance of several mummified mice (one was so petrified that we thought it was a lizard skeleton at first, we named it Riley), so we ended up rolling sheets of poly down the spaces to cut down on the stickage. More than once, if one of us weren’t quite on the plastic sheet, we’d have to peel an elbow or knee off the floor with this disgusting stretchy squelching sound.
We also realized that these crawl spaces were full of abandoned construction material, rusted tools, and consumables. Whoever had been in the space last hadn’t wasted any time crawling out when things were wrapped up, apparently, if they’d even finished their job. Most peculiar was this heap of rags that marinated some twenty feet away from us. It wasn’t accessible just yet, but more on that later.
The first few days passed without any real incident, past bellyaching and a sinus infection. It wasn’t even an hour into the shift in question, when things took a turn. I was deep in the hole beneath the KFC, pushing some of my tools in front of me in a painter’s tray, as my tool bag wouldn’t fit beneath the beams. I was dragging a rechargeable work-light (same one as in the pictures), using it to scout for dead mice and protruding nails in my path. The whole place smelt like burnt grease and the air tasted like dust when you made the mistake of breathing.
As I reached the P-trap I’d be cutting out, the light went out.
Now, at this point, I wasn’t really afraid so much as I was pissed off. Cursing, I shouted back to the hole for Dave to bring me his light. The strangest thing was that the battery indicator told me that the light had a full charge, but for whatever reason it wouldn’t turn back on, no matter how angrily I pressed the switch.
I laid there in the dark, like a corpse in a coffin, on my back, hands clasped on my stomach as I waited for the replacement light. I was uneasy, in an irrational way. There was an undeniable shiver creeping into my bones, the type you get when you have a fever, when you’re lying there soaked through in your own sweat, and your body feels wrong, that chill that doesn’t go away when you squirm beneath the blankets.
There was a sound. Like the muffled sigh of laundry being slowly poured from a hamper. My skin was prickling with goosebumps and my breath caught somewhere in my chest. I felt that same offness that I felt when I could sense the Peeking Janitor was nearby, but hadn’t yet been seen. The offness of being observed.
This smell had taken to the air, like decaying meat. I could hear a wet shuffling, the same sound I heard when we crawled around. And breathing. Like the panting of a dog in heat.
I don’t know what sort of yelp or shout I made, but I do remember it sticking in my throat on the way out. I felt like I’d been doused in ice cold water, the sharp twist of fear shot from my heart to my boys, who puckered so hard that for one long second I may have been an innie instead of an outie.
Light flooded the crawl space from the panel, as Dave lowered himself into the hole with a dramatic groan. As the light washed over me, I could see that apart from Dave, I was alone. When I borrowed the light from him, I remember craning my neck, trying to peer beneath the beams into the adjacent spaces. The only thing that stuck out to me was that mysterious pile of crusty rags, just a few spaces over.
There’s two things you never admit when you’re working in trades: first, you never admit that the crew left an hour early on Friday to go for drinks, second, you never admit that you’re afraid. When Dave quizzed me on the shout, I lied through my teeth. I wish I could go back and confess the truth, but we’re way past that point now. Too little, too late.
Now that I was hyperalert, I kept a wary eye on the rag-pile while I worked - and kept my hand sledge with me at all times. I became aware of this feeling in this space that I’d overlooked before, it felt like disdain, or maybe irritation. The closest feeling I can think to compare it to is when you’re walking on eggshells around someone with a temper, the feeling that one wrong move could set off the powderkeg.
A few hours after what I’m going to tentatively call my first encounter with the entity, I was beginning to try to rationalize the experience in my head. I remember sitting on a broken milkcrate in that hallway, drinking one of those Monster’s that came in that canister-looking container, trying to process what it is that happened. I was a pretty skeptical guy at the time, so I was exploring the possibility that I’d imagined the sound, or that it had belonged to something mechanical, like maybe one of the walk-in freezers that Thai Express had overhead. The only thing that was keeping me from fully embracing that theory, was that my light had started working again.
Dave had passed my light up from the hole to Seok, to have a look at, and from what I heard it had turned on the second it had left the hole. At the time, I got past this by reminding myself that they were fairly cheap lights, given to us as a peace offering by the foreman. It was certainly possible that it had just shit out on us for a few minutes, not that that is the prevailing theory in my head these days.
Around two in the morning, we sealed up the hole and went down for a smoke (I don’t smoke myself, so by smoke, I mean I stood out in the cold with Dave while he smoked). We’d usually do some people watching at this point, but it was a quiet night for the crazies. Seok came at two to two too (sorry), to join us for a few minutes of fresh air before we headed back, carrying a length of XFR pipe each up the stalled escalators to the food court.
When I crawled back into the hole, I realized our lights were missing. During breaks, we kept what tools we had sealed up in the hole, so that nobody could get at them, which until now hadn’t been a problem. Dave, as expected, was spitting mad, and ready to pack up for the night, which neither I nor Seok had any qualms with.
Not wanting to exacerbate the situation, I didn’t mention the Peeking Janitor watching us from around his corner, chin tucked against his chest and eyes twinkling in the shadow of his cap.
The next day, we had fresh lights. Dave had called up our foreman, who had begrudgingly dropped us off a few more. The foreman wasn’t thrilled with our progress, mind you his original work estimate was one week of overnight work, which wouldn’t have been possible in a million years, but nevertheless the fire had been lit and excuses would fall on deaf, self-righteous ears.
Dave was vocally suspicious of the custodians to anyone who would listen, and at the time I was willing to believe it myself. There was really nobody else in the area who had access to the holes. It could easily be the man who kept trying to climb into the hole with us, with a vacant, too-large smile plastered across his face, or the Peeking Janitor, who seemed to materialize out of nowhere to glare at us from around his corner and never seemed to do any actual janitor-ing.
Regardless, we were back in the hole, and making good headway. We had been taking our lights and tools down with us on breaks, to keep them accounted for, which seemed to do the trick. By the end of the week, we were done with what we could manage from that particular hole, and moved onto the next one, which was further down the hallway. It was also the one that contained that mysterious heap of rags.
This entrance was the worst, by far, a structural beam cut across it, nearly dividing the access by half. We had to squeeze in, feet first, and worm our way backward to get past the beam. The space also had the least overhead (overback?) space. When we’d crawl around on our hands and knees, we’d get prodded by exposed screws in the q-deck ceiling. There were racks of conduit snaking all over, which I ended up needing to wiggle my way over to get around. Some areas were so tight, I remember that I had to crawl out backwards to get free, as there was no room to turn around once I was wedged inside.
If I was feeling unwelcome in the first hole, I was feeling downright vulnerable in this one. It felt like I was in deep trouble with somebody, and they were in the middle of chewing me out. This hole was colder than the other, somehow, even though both lead to the same overall area, it was like descending into an ice bath.
That rag pile was accessible now, but looking at it gave me this jolt of anxiety, of grim anticipation - instinctually, I didn’t want to go near it. So, naturally, I put it off until the very end. I squirmed over to the furthest corner, away from the rag pile to take stock of which fittings and how much pipe we’d need to carry to get us through the remainder of the night. It was at this point I got another nasty surprise.
Our old lights were here, stuffed into the corner.
There was a jab of terrible disbelief in my gut as I laid there, breath misting faintly before my eyes. All three of the lights were still completely intact, as far as I could tell, but their surface was tacky with a transparent film. It was the consistency of cold syrup. Cradling them in my arm as best as I could, I made my way back to the entrance as quickly as I could. It was at this point, my light began to act up. The closer I squirmed to the hole, the dimmer my light became. It had begun to flicker by the time I’d reached the hole; I could hear that strange gasping again, and the shuffle of rags, not ten feet away from me; Cold adrenaline was pumping through me at this point as I hurled the lights from the hole, and began to push my way out. At waist level, I felt the hand.
I shouted as it dragged me backward sharply, ripping my suit on the edge of the hole, and twisting my foot sharply, nearly to the breaking point, my lower back seized from the sudden yank, where my body had snagged on the hole. I caught the edges of the hole with my arms, bracing by my armpits as it pulled again, sending another painful ripple shooting through my back and leg. Dave and Seok, now concerned, grabbed hold of me and wrenched me out of the hole together. It dropped me.
I scrambled back from the hole, nursing my back with the palm of my hand, gasping and recoiling in pain. The metallic tang of blood lingered in my mouth - I’d bit my tongue when I’d been yanked backward. Despite Dave’s insistence that I’d just gotten caught on something, I stormed off, grabbed my tools and limped home, leaving Seok and Dave to deal with the hole alone.
When I got home, I checked myself in the mirror as best as I could. Already, an ugly purple welt had formed on my lower back, where I’d been thrashed against the side of the hole. This particular injury ended up bothering me for months after the fact. It felt like I was constantly holding my breath, afraid to move. I’d started squatting instead of bending over to avoid the fireworks of pain that would erupt at seemingly a moment’s notice. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a lower back injury, but it’s some of the worst physical pain that you can experience. My knee, on the other hand, had swollen up and was tender to walk on, but the worst of it subsided overnight.
The next day, the foreman called me, chewing me out for walking away the night before, which Dave had faithfully ratted me out for the moment I’d left. I told him that I wasn’t going back in that hole, that he’d need to send me to a different jobsite. That prick flatout refused, distinctly telling me to suck it up, and that I’d better get back to the mall or start looking for another job. I wish I could say that I’d stood my ground and told him to go fuck himself, but I’d just moved into my first apartment ever - hell, I wasn’t even properly moved in yet, I still slept on a mattress on the floor. I knew that I didn’t have enough money in reserve for rent if I didn’t have some form of work. Caught between the threat of losing the apartment and the prospect of climbing into the hole again, I caved, on the condition that I would be the one cutting material outside of the hole.
That night, I pulled into the nearly empty parking lot, beside Seok and Dave’s vehicles, where we usually met before the shift. Truthfully, I was slightly late and wasn’t surprised to see that their vehicles were already empty. Gingerly, I carried my tools to our lockup, in the vacant bank, dropped them off, and hurried to check-in.
When I got to security, I ended up getting an earful from the on-duty guard, a severe-looking woman in her sixties, with gray hair and an impressively long philtrum. Dave and Seok had forgotten to close the panel when they’d left last night. Furthermore, they’d left material in the back hallway - a serious no-no in service. After assuring her several times that I’d left early that night, but would inform the guys, I escaped up the elevator and headed to the back hallway.
I was nervous, to say the least, not just because of whatever was happening in that hole, but because I wasn’t great with conflict in general. Already, my stomach was churning and my mind racing with excuses and ways to defuse the awkwardness of the incoming dialogue. I settled on breaking the ice with a good-natured jab about them leaving their tools out, although I’m sure Dave already had gotten an earful from our foreman after he’d gotten home. The good thing about Dave was that he cooled off quickly, Seok on the other hand didn’t care to begin with.
In the hallway, they’d resealed the panel and pushed our pipe against the side of the hallway, the bare minimum distance they needed to clear the hallways. Dave’s packout was already backed against the wall, and unlocked, but neither he, nor Seok were anywhere to be seen.
A dread crept over me, clenching my chest in its icy fist.
I pulled out my phone. Pacing, I punched Dave’s number into my phone, trying to fight the spindly goosebumps working their way up my spine. The call tone sounded twice, then I heard it.
The muffled tone was faint, and eerily chipper - and coming from the hole.
I remember staring at that hole long after the ringing stopped, holding my breath as it went to voicemail. I had to do something. Heart racing, I sidled up to Dave’s toolbox, and extracted a flathead screwdriver. I’d call emergency services - once I was certain. Summoning what courage I could, I stabbed the flathead beneath the panel, and lifted it clear.
It was too dark to make out much from outside. I called out Dave’s name, as loudly as I dared. Moments passed at a snail’s pace, and just as relief started to flood through me, I heard Dave’s blood curdling howl. I still hear it sometimes, as if it’s a part of me now.
“HELP! I’M STUCK, I’M FUCKING STUCK.” Dave’s voice was pained and frantic, as if he were fighting back tears - it scared the hell out of me.
Every instinct was screaming at me - begging me - to stay away from the hole, to run as far as I could and never look back, but I couldn’t leave him there. If it were me stuck in the hole, I’d want to get out ASAP, there was no telling how long he’d been down there - maybe since last night. At that moment, all reason flooded out of me like a glass of prune juice.
If I hadn’t made this one decision, I’d still probably be able to sleep at night. I’d be able to take my eyes off the shadows. There wouldn’t be any panic attacks. In short, I’d still be myself. But, I made the choice to go in after Dave.
I squeezed into the hole, gasping as my back protested the maneuver, holding the flathead close, like a dagger. The flashlight on my phone wasn’t great, but it was enough to work with. Swiveling it around, I scanned the crawl space, pulse pounding in my ears; That unwelcoming aura was back, and it poured over me as I searched for my Dave or Seok.
“Dave, where are you?” I called out, starting at the sputter of my own voice.
“HELP!”
I jumped, the voice felt distant, oddly distant in the crawlspace, so I made the split second decision to make my way over to the ominous pile of rags, as quickly as I could, as it was the only thing large enough to keep Dave or Seok out of my line of sight. I felt like I was army crawling across a field of molasses, the grease pulled at my clothes and clung to the skin of my wrists like oil paint on canvas.
The crawl to the pile felt like a heartbeat. Adrenaline spurred me beneath the narrow structural beams quicker than I’d ever managed before, and I was soaked in sweat and grease by the time I reached it, gagging as the smell overwhelmed my senses, fighting the overwhelming urge to vomit as the saliva thickened in my mouth like paste. Trembling, I started to claw through the pile of rags. No, at this point I knew it wasn’t a pile of rags - it was a pile of clothes, clothes that were matted down into a stiff, malignant mass, that held their shape as I peeled them off, despite being saturated with grease.
I felt my fingers brush against something hard inside the pile, pinching it, I wrenched the object free and examined it under the dim light from my phone.
It was a tooth, still tacky with blood and capped with silver. Dave’s tooth. I threw up.
My body shuddered as I vomited again and again, spilling my stomach’s contents over that pile of rags, my back curling like a cat. I could feel my stomach acid spill into my throat, burning me, choking me to the point of tears, and flooding out my and down my face.
“HELP! I’M STUCK, I’M FUCKING STUCK.”
It grabbed me roughly by the boots and yanked me hard away from the rags, helped by the wet layer of grease coating the ground. By some miracle, I got jammed beneath a structural beam that I was too big to fit beneath; it pulled me relentlessly, and as I managed a hoarse scream that’s tone soured in my throat, my chest fell and slipped me inch by inch further beneath the beam, wrenching the breath from my lungs; My head was spinning, I couldn’t draw breath and I flailed my feet frantically, kicking and pushing with everything I had, eyes cloudy with tears.
The excited breathing returned, I could hear the giddy thing, barely able to contain itself. There was a sharp croak as my feet slipped from my work boots, and the thing was thrown backward; wrapping my hands around a P-Trap, I yanked with all my might, worming myself out of the gap, kicking my knees frantically into the ground for traction. There was a snap as the pipe broke, spraying me with cold chunks of black decomposed food, but I’d gotten myself loose enough to make a break for the panel, praying to God that I had enough time to squeeze out of the hole.
I could hear the thing skittering across the floor behind me, impossibly fast, each time it lifted one of its limbs, the semi-dried grease ripped like thin cotton. It was on me as I was nearing the light, desperately, I managed to whirl onto my back, losing my phone in the whirl of motion; It’s hands were iron around my neck, and it slammed me against the ground, cackling in delight, my vision darkened and tunneled as I stared in horror at it, my dizzy brain trying to make sense of it. I saw two beaks, but where the eyes should have been. It’s limbs were spindly, impossibly long and taught with pale skin, and it’s laughing mouth was wide and filled with needle-like teeth, black like obsidian and dripping with viscous spittle, its long, filthy nails dug into my throat as it squeezed my soft neck nearly into pulp, wringing it like water from a wet towel.
I swung my arm hard at whatever it was, gripping the screwdriver for dear life, my mind screaming that they would never find my body, that my girlfriend would never know what happened to me, my family would wonder where I’d gone. On the second jab, I felt the flathead bite hard into where its ear would have been, soaking my hand in foaming blood, the howl it let out was the worst sound I’ve ever heard in my life, it made my ears ring and my stomach churn, my heart hurt like hell as it pounded away in my chest, and I thought I was going to have a literal heart attack just a few meters from salvation.
It loosened its grip enough for me to shove it free with my legs, losing Dave’s screwdriver in the process. I scrambled to the entrance and wormed my way through the opening, my back was in excruciating pain so hot I could barely keep my eyes from rolling back in my head, and my throat was wracked with a sputtering cough that made my head ache. As I clamored out, I realized I wasn’t covered in grease like I’d thought - I was covered in blood.
A hand shot out the hole, swinging, grabbing and searching for me, the thing pressing itself hard against the opening in pursuit. I was on my feet in a heartbeat, racing for the exit by the dim auxiliary lighting, listening to the thing pry itself from the hatch behind me, screaming furiously at me as I pushed my way through the swinging doors, slipping on the blood coating the bottom of my bare socks and nearly losing my footing in what would have been a fatal fall. The doors burst open again behind me, punctuated by the hyena-esque laughter as it pursued, on all fours from the sounds of it, its long nails scrabbling against the tiles of the food court like a charging wolf, skittering and sliding with its impossible gangly long limbs, its breath was ragged, seeping with fury - with hunger. As I reached the escalators, I barreled down, nearly spilling down in my haste. I heard it hesitate at the top before charging after me - I could smell its rancid scent bearing down on me.
I made for the bank, exploding through the construction fencing and throwing open the glass doors, with the thing hot on my heels, biting, scratching, and howling with laughter. Broken glass bit into my socks, into the soles of my feet, adding my own blood to the cocktail, as I pounded through the debris into the dark of the bank, a plan formulating in my mind. It was just behind me, I could practically feel its hot, stagnant breath on the back of my neck, and with one last burst of adrenaline, I charged into the empty vault and yanked in shut, but it wouldn’t close, it stuck, jammed on one of its horrible, pale hands. I could see it’s rotten nails squeezing the vault door, fresh flesh peaking out from near the cuticles, and jagged like crumpled paper; I jammed my foot against the wall and pulled hard, my back howled in pain and my vision went black, there was a deafening squeal as the door shifted, then -
Silence.
I don’t know how long I was in that vault for, waiting for that thing to get inside and throttle me to death. By all rights, I should have died in that vault, but security had found my bloody footprints on one of their walkthroughs and traced it to the vault. When they got it open, I was looking at some unimpressed police officers, and the woman from the security desk.
The next two weeks were absolute hell for me, and I don’t think I slept for more than a sporadic hour or two at night. I had a laundry list of meetings: interrogations, evaluations, interviews, and the like. By the end of it all, I was more tired than I’d ever been in my life. The cops hadn’t found anything in the crawlspace, except for the hoarded clothing and Dave’s remains, although I don’t know how long they actually looked for. They never found out what happened to Seok’s remains.
I ended up laid off, due to the murder accusations that were being flung around by the press, as well as Seok’s family. I had to meet with the property manager at the condo about my missed payment, and everyone I knew was bombarding me with questions about what had happened that night.
It was during this stretch that I was seriously questioning my mental state. I slipped into some of the worst depression I’ve ever experienced: I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t washing, and every shadow looked like it was gunning for me - and the guilt - the guilt was the worst part. I could have stopped both of them from going down into that hole, the night I stormed off. But I didn’t. The thought haunts me day in and day out, and I can’t tell another soul, except for you, hiding behind this username.
The most troubling thing for me has been the missing thing, whatever it was. No trace had ever turned up of it, that I’m aware of. The last I’d seen of it, it was in the abandoned bank. As much as I hated the thought, it could have gone anywhere from there. It could be miles away, it could have set up shop in the boiler room beneath the bank, or more irrationally, I find myself wondering if it could have my scent, somehow.
All I know, Reddit user, is that as I write this message to you, the doors are locked, the curtains drawn, and a hammer close at hand. I don’t think I’ll ever get back to where I was, but this has been nice - it’s been reassuring to picture you as a friendly ear, nodding and watching me tell my story, as unbelievable as it is.
So, in closing, thanks. You’ve helped me keep the darkness at bay for just a little bit longer, and I’ve managed to work through some of my tangled thoughts. Take care.