1

Harold Rothman had been working the night shift at MorningStar Storage Co. for three weeks before he heard footsteps in the hallway. It sat mostly unused, connecting the climate-controlled units A and F. He had been hired for under the table cash to run the counter for the odd-ball late-night customer that might never show. Most nights they didn’t and that was just fine with Harold; he preferred the solitude the nights afforded him, giving him time to read while making enough cash to rent out the trashy little apartment he had found two blocks down the road. 

Harold had moved from Brunswick, Georgia down to the small city of Mt. Dorman, Florida in the Summer of ‘07. It had been less to find a new start and more to forget where he had come from. Mt. Dorman was a deceptively large portion of Lake County as far as mileage went, but its most metropolitan area was a section of highway four lanes wide that held a Starbucks, a liquor store, and a Planet Smoothie. For the most part, it was made up of pockets of orange groves, a downtown area full of boutique stores for the elderly to wander around in, and “55 and Up” neighborhoods to house said elderly. There were a number of small neighborhoods if one wandered off of the highway into the backroads and a smattering of fixed income housing units. The latter was where Harold found his new place of residence in June of 2007.

The online ad promised cheap and it delivered. What it had failed to include was the cracked windows, the leaking window ac unit, and the exposed wiring from the light bulb illuminating one of the three rooms (four if you included the closet of a bathroom). Harold didn’t mind, though. He was not one for entertaining guests. 

That had been Sally’s thing and she didn’t have any of those anymore, and he had very little furniture to fill the rooms with. A frameless bed shoved into the corner, a single dresser to hold his clothes, and a small bookshelf for the only thing he had to pass the time with; poetry. Sally had been more of a prose kind of gal, but Harold loved it. From the mediocre to the great, the individual phrases of words moving to a rhythm and rhyme that sometimes would shift or subvert expectations reminded him of life. Things go along like they’re supposed to and suddenly you have an A B C scheme instead of A B A staring you in the face and you have to adjust your mindset to it, he had told Sally. He couldn’t help but think that it was a cosmic joke that it had been one such shift that had sent him far from everyone he knew and loved.

2

“Now it’s not a hard job, but it is gonna take some common sense.” Jerry Steinman, the owner of MorningStar, dabbed at the sweat beading on his forehead. He wore his thinning hair down to his shoulders as well as a tightly trimmed goatee, both of which were dyed black in a painfully obvious fashion. His plump figure seemed uncomfortably tight in both the slacks he was wearing and the chair in which he now sat on the other side of his desk.

Harold nodded respectfully. “Oh, of course, sir, absolutely.”

He dabbed at his forehead again. “And it’s no offense meant; it’s just…you know. Younger people seem to come short-handed with that nowadays.”

“I know what you mean.” Harold really didn’t, and was mildly surprised that even now at 26 he was still being referred to as “younger”.

“Alex said you’re from up there, right? Georgia?” Jerry rifled through a small stack of papers which included the single sheet application he had filled out two weeks before moving down.

“Yeah, he said you were looking for some part-time help and I just happened to be moving to the area, so…” Harold trailed off and shrugged.

“Look, son,” Jerry put the folder aside and laced his fingers in front of him on the desk, “anyone younger than 50 doesn’t just move here. Kids around here grow up and then leave once they graduate.”

Harold slowly shook his head, not quite following.

“I just want to make sure you’re not running from something that’s gonna follow you down here.” Jerry eyed him.

“Oh god, no. I’m not into drugs or anything like that.” Harold gave a warm chuckle to lighten the mood. 

Jerry remained silent. 

Afraid that he might inquire further Harold slapped his knees and smiled. “So how bout that tour?”

After another moment of consideration, Jerry nodded and fished out a set of keys. “Yep. We’ll take the golf cart around the exterior units first, and then we’ll take a walk through the two climate-controlled sets of storage.”

3

Harold was thankful he had gotten the night shift after taking the trip through twelve or so rows of the facility in the blazing heat beating off of the asphalt. 

The two interior units were far more comfortable, though, as soothing AC pumped in from the vents overhead with a dull hum. Jerry grabbed a padlock hanging off of the latch on one of the shutter doors. “This is aisle F, so they can use their own personal locks here. Obviously if they miss three consecutive payments or five total in a year, we hold the right to cut the locks ourselves and haul everything out, same as the outside units. That hasn’t happened in two years now, but if it does that’ll be your job. I don’t like to parade throwing out people’s crap in the dumpster in front of the other tenants.” He let the lock fall back against the door, sending an unpleasant clang echoing through the building. “Now on the other side,” he motioned through the windows on the double doors on their left, which led into the hallway, “they have to use our locks. Kind of a mid-tier level.”

Harold looked through into the hallway. It had no windows to the outside and the only doors were the two at either end and one halfway down that served as a direct exit. One of the fluorescent fixtures at the other end flickered.

4

Harold fell into a comfortable routine of working through uneventful nights as he sat at the counter and read until Jerry came to relieve him at 7:00 AM. He would then walk home as the sun had not had enough time to scorch the ground and cook the sidewalks yet. He would sleep until 5 or 6 in the evening and then walk the fifteen minutes back to MorningStar. Somewhere during the day (Harold didn’t know or particularly care), Jerry switched out with a woman named Theresa. She was the poster child for Florida retirees with her hair cut short and colored a deep auburn that rarely went with the loud clothing she wore.

In the short amount of time he had taken up working at MorningStar, the only regular visitor he had begun to recognize was Janette. Yet another Florida stereotype who had moved from South Dakota to be around her kids in her twilight years. Though a bit loud, she was nice enough and rarely bothered him on the early morning of every Tuesday and Thursday when she came to idly shuffle the countless boxes around in her unit in block A.

A month into the job, Harold was becoming restless in his lonely shift at MorningStar. He had read most of the poetry in his small collection, leaving the few books he had kept of Sally’s, and he had no plans of reading those. He held little interest for the admittedly schlocky horror she had preoccupied her free time with. Plus, the nights were lonesome, and the last thing he needed was to begin seeing ghouls in places where they ought not to be.

At 11:36 PM of July 3, Harold decided to take his Friday night walk around the facility. He found that Friday nights were dead as apparently even the retired of Florida found things to do with themselves on the weekends other than pine over their barely remembered belongings. There was very little chance he would happen upon anyone with nefarious intent, he was sure, but he was also sure the universe worked in cosmically funny ways. And it was always best to be sure, that’s what she would say sometimes.

After placing the “BE BACK IN” placard hanging from the door to 15 minutes he took the golf cart cruising past several aisles of storage, letting the warm summer night breeze through his hair. People were already setting off fireworks in the small neighborhoods off the back roads a couple of miles away. 

Harold came to the entrance of aisle A and parked the cart. He didn’t care to linger too long in the enclosed hallways at night. They were plain and had little for shadows to hide within, but they unnerved him just the same with their stark fluorescent lighting that seemed unnatural to be on at this hour. He opened the door, the handle clicking loudly and echoing against the concrete floor and metal shutters of the units running along the wall. He walked halfway down to the set of double doors that led into the hallway, checking locks with no real sense of conviction. He would walk halfway down the connecting hallway, emerge through the exit and get on his cart back to the office. Perhaps tonight he would set the “BE RIGHT BACK” sign ahead a few more minutes and catch a quick nap. He entered the hallway. 

He was a quarter of the way down when the lights went out. “Shit,” he whispered in the dark. He felt a cold that betrayed the summer warmth steel over him and goosebumps rose on his neck. He was not one for fantasies of horrid things that went bump in the night, but one cannot fully divest themselves of imaginative flights of creeping things when alone in a dark building. The only illumination was the three exit signs in the hallway; one behind him, one halfway down, and the last at the end leading into building F. He hurried his way towards the door at the halfway point, eager to get out of the chilling and echoing silence engulfing him. That’s when he heard it. Two steps that were not his own. A dull and slow clip-clop, and then it was gone. 

He froze in place, an act that, in retrospect, he felt was extraordinarily stupid. He held his breath, sure that his ears were deceiving him. He strained to hear something and prayed that he would not. His pulse thundered in his ears. Whomp-whomp…whomp-whomp. There was nothing and he whispered a small prayer of thanks. He hurriedly shuffled towards the exit in front of him leading back outside. His mind conjured hands reaching for him in the dark behind him, their countless fingertips only inches from nabbing his shirt and dragging him back into the insanity of night and the void of madness. He attacked the crash bar of the door and stumbled clumsily back out into the humidity of the night. 

He turned as the door lazily closed behind him to see the lights flicker back on, and he laughed aloud to himself. A pair of fireworks sounded off above him. He began to feel foolish. The sound he had heard was just the clap of harmless festivities erupting, muffled by the concrete ceiling. This thought comforted him as he walked to the golf cart sitting where he had left it at the entrance of building A, but he still turned all of the lights on in the office for the rest of the night. He didn’t wind up taking that nap either.