Speaker 1: Hello, I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. My memory flinches at the details
of that night, as though their surfaces slick with all
hard to grip. It was late, long after the last
customer had left Glen with moul, when I first heard
the echo that wasn't mine. My shift had begun, as
they all do alone in acres of fluorescent quiet, most
stores black as uninhabited houses, and the floors shining only
where the janitor's mops had passed. But as I made
my rounds, an uneasy static crackled along my skin, as
if the air itself was carrying a subtle harm, just
out of hearing. We're told not to wander beyond our
assigned circuits, but I walked to the central rotten anyway,
more from habit than defiance. My footsteps on the linoleum
floor bounced off skylights, blinded by dust, centered under the
fake pond trees, and old tenant directory squatted into bat
at a crioller case. Its letter is LOOSEO missing. I
swept my flashlight beam over the board, seen the usual
vacant store numbers, faded listings a few decades old clippings,
offer and shoe repair and pages. Maybe it was boredom
or that ham something made me stop there. In a
bottom corner, some one had scratched faint symbols through the
yellow plastic under decades of grime. I made out three
lines of tiny coordinates b threeminis one hundred seventeen b A,
Beefreeminess one hundred twenty one A, and his own hundred
forty three. None were on my roster or in any
shift lock. Whoever wrote them had pressed so hard the
metal of their key dug white ox into the surface,
as if wool in the numbers. To alast the directory itself,
I used the tip of my penlight to trace the code.
It resisted, subtle at first, like reading brail underneath glass,
my fingers tingled. I felt distantly as if some one
was watching from the gaping shadow beyond the empty orange
jewliss counter. I copied every character into my lob book,
half a mind on my task, half acutely aware of
that grating sense of exposure. At the same moment, a
cleaning cock gave a brittle squeak nearby. I jerked, nearly
dropping my pen. Adrian the oldest of the janitors regarded
me with rumy sideway's eyes. He looked from me to
the directory, then back, and there was never a third
basement year, he murmured, hoisting his mob. I waited for more,
a joke, some mundane explanation. The words hung in the hush,
as if warning would flowed up by itself, But his
mouth clunched shut, and instead of answering my questions, Avery
nudged his cart away over the tiles. He froze for
an instant when the lights flickered. The overheads often did this,
tensing the darkness for no reason but to night. Each
datter seemed loaded with purpose. With nothing but uncomfortable silence
behind me, I headed for the grimy door mart to
daff only in the security office, under the harsh light
of an ancient desk lamp, I dropped my lobe beside
a battered rain of keys. My hand brushed something unfamiliar
and oxidized key. It bows stamp to be three. I
rolled it between my fingers. The old stamp was nearly illegible,
black with age. I started to ask if any of
the day staff had left it behind, but the radio
was nothing but this I added the key to my
own ring, feeling rashly conspiratorial. On my way out, something
about the directory still nagged at me. I turned one
last time, shining my light into the dusty curlic box.
The glass fract of my reflection, I saw myself and
also flicker two tall, two blurred, standing half submerged where
the empty map used to hand. I shut my eyes,
willing the trick of the light to pass, then opened
them to nothing but my own pale face. But my
heart was trifomering. I left the directory without glancing again.
The weight of the B three key suddenly inexplicably leaden
in my pocket. Back in the staff lounge, I wrote
the numbers out twice, as if repetition might change them. Instead,
the uneasy feeling press saturating even the air. That was
the first wrang night. I didn't know, standing just outside
the diminished directory case, how completely it would unravel my life.
I was just another casualty of Glenwood More slow death.
For years before things sliped sideways, I'd worked those echoing
holes as mid level security grunt, officially night asset pretiction,
though that always sounded like a lie Glenwood when I
was a kid. In the nineties fell fast and permanent
satur Days brought crowds from four bus lines, foundlies clutching,
greasy carousel tokens, teenagers orbiting the arcade, and the vast
green fruit corps. Holiday banners would drop from the skylights
each November, a some burst of colosting the endless patent
tile back. Then the names above every store Gload Marshal's
True Valley g and c Herris and s Gifts. You
could always hear music clicking out of sound goodie piped
under foot from hidden all speakers. That was before Online's
Shopping e wrote the rules, before the anchor stores started
baling one by one, before talk of redevelopment began stabbing
at the conversations of every vendor. By twenty seventeen, most
wings were boarded up, and every few months another store
would fail. Only three out of the dozen food court
chains still opened every day. The only people left were
the hopeful, the nostalgic, and those with nowhere else to go.
Were tirees cling to more walker habits, teenagers there in
each other into empty service corridors, and a steady churin
of staff desperately working the day. On night shifts, my
usual routine clock in at ten p them sweeped the
low lot for trespassers, then foot patrol every floor, I
flicking from shadow to shadow. The main threats weren't organized thieves,
not really, but kids with too much time and too
little else, or the occasional homeless man curling up in
the quietest stairwell. Every shift, at least once I aroused
a sleeper behind a dumpster, or shewed off a couple
laughing high schoolers from the Frey delevator lobby. There were
maybe a dozen of us cycle through security proper and
over the same faces two months in a row. Most
guards had other jobs or were counting down weeks to retirement.
That meant responsibility often fell on me as the unofficial
lay shiftly cleaning up after half hearted patrols or filling
empty reports when the others called in more management, especially
carn Now Daisy proviser pretended everything was under control. She
wore press suits and purse lips, despatched plan emails about
adherence to protocol and affirmative customer experience. Any mention of vagrants, leaks,
Graffitia got swept under facility regularities promptly handle. When stores
complained about break ins or strange noises in the night,
we were to lock the incident as an equipment malfunction
and leave it at that. Each evening stores rolled their
grills down. They set about my endless rounds flashlight in
one hand, ancient Motorola radio clipped to my jacket. The
camera system a patchwork of nineteen nineties c archi daisy
chained to lawn or wall in the staff office always flickered.
Half the fees permistatic or greenish as scan lines. Karen
said there was no budget for upgrades. I had learned
to recognize which monitors were black out if he stared
too long on which angles never quite matched up. From
night to night, my log book became part confession, part defense.
I recorded oddities, lights that cycled on and off with
no apparent cause, deep gusts of cold airly the lowest
service axis, flickers of movement on the cam in the
dead Northern Way. Most nights it was rats, sometimes it wasn't.
There was always something uneasy in the lowest levels. The
main foe hummed with the dying embers of retail, but
the sub basements originally built a house, deliveries mechanicals and
an endless backlog of unsold inventory felt older than they
should Down there, doorway was never led, quite wary expected
my phone would drop signal during patrols near the beat elevators,
no matter my carrier. The air had a flavor of
mildew and daths threaded with something metallic. Some nights I
could have sworn the shadows arranged themselves just out of reach,
pausing until my back was turned. Still, that sense of
creeping dRIT never tangled itself into daylight hours. I kept
the oddities in my log book, taped the pages together
with reminders to double check doors, just to job. I
told myself that for months. But the first night I
saw those scratched in numbers and found the bee free key,
I couldn't pretend any longer. Something wharped on under the
routines of Glenwood Mall as surely as the dry rot
thickening behind its walls. Patterns are only obvious in hindsight.
A week after that first off night, I sat alone
in the office, poured enough to re read old incident
reports at the top of the weekly print. Up dojer crumpled.
I saw again the names I'd skimmed too often. A
silly am custodial failed to clock in item closes as
a voluntary resignation. Dave R. Courier, last seen by the
loading dock. Marvin Shaw, retired teacher, disappeared mid morning after
coffee at Javatine. There had never been any real conclusions,
no follow up, no answers, just paperwork that started, faltered,
and was quietly buried in noncommittal language. Most of these
files had nothing in common, at least in the surface,
but threeberer as they were patten began to stitch itself together.
Every missing person was last seen in the offires between
eleven at night and dawn, always within a narrowed sector
of the Grand floor, not far from a clue stof
maintenance corridor behind what used to be the video arcade.
I traced each report on a battered more plan I'd
found at the bottom of a forgotten filing cabinet. Every
location clustered around Stole one hundred forty three and the
Frey delevator mark staff no customer access. Nobody at the precinct, ever,
seemed eager to come back when I finally called the
non emergency line to check. The woman who answered said unfounder,
she likely left tamp case clothes. Only the Knight staff
would talk about the rumors, whispers that an older cleaner
claimed to have heard voices through the back walls, kids
who vanished after being dared into the service tunnels, but
everyone denied concern if he used an official tone. I
spent hours at the directory, running my fingers over the
scratch coats. I tried every key on my ring against
the locked doors on both basement levels, but unfit. Third
beatree key hung on its clip, cold and apparently useless.
The hall is near one hundred forty three ran into
blank walls, fence stuffed with insulation, and hollow, echoing nothing.
Late during a routine check a Wednesday, I think I
saw shaped slip into the shadows at the far end
of the back corridor. It paused where the corridor's lights
had all blown By the time I reached the spot,
breeding harder than I wanted to admit, nothing but a
little puddle of dry coffee ringed the tire. I backed
out and watched the security monitors again and again at
the exact time, stamp the feet turned to static, not
so much as a pixel out of place outside the window,
just blank grayscale snow standing there. The realization hit me.
These weren't just failures of maintenance or board staff playing tricks.
There were playing gaps in the coverage systematic windows were
anything any one could vanish without trace. It became a compulsion,
rifling through the old law books, stitching together a record
all my own. I pulled every print out that mentioned
missing items, lost shipments, and claimed mail names scratched off
the employee roster or in darkived in red. Each incident
overlapped the next by minutes, gaps that always orbited the
blank spot behind Store one hundred forty three in the
elevator controls. The mall I was starting to believe, had
secrets beyond even what its management ignore. What haunted me
most was the way memory bent and nose low stat
exaggerated spaces. I could recall my footsteps, but not the
cu of the door, the voices of old coworkers, but
not their faces. That ane seat beyond the bounds of
the ordinary, drawing me down into something coiled, hungry and
waiting in the dark. But I needed proof, concrete clues,
not just stores, so I started to dick. Given enough
time in caffeine, even the dead corners of Glenwood More
offered up fragments. It started with a pattern of missing footage.
Reviewing ten years worth of graveyard shift locks, I realized
that every substantial disappearance lined up with sudden, persistent gaps
in the camera feats. There was always an acceptable excuse
power surges, network errors, scheduled maintenance. I charted at the
data and found that the same blind spots repeated themselves,
sometimes moving from one end of the sub basement to another,
as if the shadows migrated with intention. A little after
midnight on a Thursday, I crept through the lower corridors,
using the full ring of keys left over from free
generations of security staff. Most doors opened into vacant rooms
painted sint of block gray, emptied of everything but crates
and dust. But one panel and a cleaning closet no
longer on the directory. Popped open behind moldering shelves, I
found a clumsy arrow gouged with a screw driver, pointing
down into the concrete, a direction that made no sense,
with no stairwell or rampant sight. Whoever marked it didn't
want to be seen or followed. Determined, I started testing
the BEE three key on every available lock. Nothing gave,
nothing turned a knot on the heavy steel doors in
the deepest corridors, not on the unsalvageable vending machines left
to rot near the staffed bathrooms. Then one night I
went deeper into the sub basement and stumbled onto an
alcove heap with old appliants, creates and battered free court stools.
At the far end was a battered gray door flush
against a wall where the blueprints said nothing should be
Their bees wreaky slid into the lock. When I turned it,
the mechanism cats scraped, stuck halfway and refused to budge.
Later headed back towards the surface, I heard the swish
of a mob down the hall. Adrian, the Knight Janitor,
waited by an oversized trasparrel, his face pinched up of
his collar. You don't want to go under, he said, quietly,
his axe and flattening out his words. The fluorescent hums
swallowed the silence. After Sometimes things come back up alone.
Place was full of gourse even before they laid the
fourth floor. When they put in the food court. People
argued too much concrete, too many hidden spots. They built
things nobody needed, left them full. He trailed off as
move into my pocket, where the keys jangled softly under
the shifting dumb lights. His hands shook in the broom handle.
He wouldn't say more, just walked away, a shoulders hunched.
I watched him disappear down the corridor, his figure growing
indistinct in the flickering light, and I wondered how much
he really knew about the layout. Most staff pretended didn't exist.
That night, I Albert moved into the staff launch. Watching ires.
Of all tapes, it was a ghost showed always that
blinked in and out of being, rooms that only appeared
on alternate mondays or after midnight. Nothing made sense. Sometimes
the camera would reveal a space full of untouched mail
and boxes one ire, then show the same spot utterly
empty the next. There were jump cuts no one could explain,
holes that terminated in blank screens, then reappeared behind another
view twenty feet away. Frustrated, I started rooting through this
drawers in file boxes in the manager's lock back office.
Karen must have missed one. A battered envelope sealed with
yellow fraying tape. The tab breathed thir two, do not remove.
Inside I found three stapled memos dated from nineteen eighty
seven to nineteen ninety eight, all stamp redacted. The letters
were directives to spend storage transfers to third tier slash
sub basement pending site reviewer and final inspection. The language
was clinical but urgent, stressing the importance of complete lockdown
of B three and direct access corridors until further notice.
There was no BEE three in any official documentation, no
mention in curative blueprints. As if to punctuate the mood,
a chime from my phone startled me in anonymous text.
It was a local number not saved in my contacts.
Don't mess with the basement. Not all doors opened the
same way. Twice. I called back twice, but each time
the line rang once and dropped. The next evening, I
found a folded note tapped under the security office store.
A location scrolled the side of time along with I
was stuck there a hole shift. It won't let you
out by the same route I weeded. No one came. Later,
a worker from a long shuttered department store tracked me
down by the back loading dock. A gaunt man with
shaking hands, hair shaved close to a scalp, warry eyes
flicking side to side, got trapped down there sometime into
two thousand and nine. Everything echoed wrong. Howd myself talking?
But he trailed off, finally muttering. Sometimes you'd hear people
up on the floors above, and then you duck under
a stairwell and walk straight for an ire in. The
voices would follow you. He wouldn't say his name, just
pressed a ragged floorpan into my hand and vanished into
the pre dawned fog. This was Brandon paranoia anymore. B
three was real, more real than anyone at management would admit.
One stormy night, Glen was power grid gave up during
a thunderclap, plunging them all into utter darkness. The only
glow came from the yellow hazard lamp above the main
freight elevator. That was when I decided it was time
to use the B three key wherever it might fit.
With the building CCTV blacked out and the power surge
making radios unreliable, I returned to the service elevator off
the main staff corridor. I'd never noticed it sparted control
panel had a blank steel button with no lettering, just
below the normallessings for G B and s U B two.
I hovered my flask light over it. A smear of
crime not one one out finger put to suggest juice,
heart racing. I slipped the B three key into the
slot below the carcin trolls. For one terrifying second, I
thought it would jam uselessly, but it turned smoothly. The
panels dead display shriment to life, casting weak go into
light over the keys. A new option blinked BE three restricted.
The elevator doors closed, with the stomach dropping clan. Every
instinct screamed to Aboart to lock this as a mistake
and come back later with back. But something in each,
some recklessness or need for certainty, press the B three button.
The car grown shuddered, then began to descend slower the normal,
past the listed levels, and then further. I counted the
floors as they fell, mouth dry. My phone signal died
before we stopped. The doors wheezed open onto a gray,
narrow landing. The air was two degrees colder enough to
raise goose. Fresh concrete tunnels branched off at angles that
defied the square grid of the mole above. Old moth
eeden display stood in piles fake Christmas trees, sun bleached
sent cutouts, when ship palets blurring with mold cardboard boxes
shaped into make sure walling boxed off a large section
of corridor. The plywood was nailed with the first security
tape marked with stricted diceealed until further notice, as if
this place had once been hurriedly abandoned and then hastily barricaded.
With every step I heard the architecture itself complain, pips
knocking overhead, ere Duck's burpncled drafts, the distant drip of
unseen leaks. Half wall along the main tunnel, my flashlight
danced over a heap of old male letters, use out
of date, and the tatoes of staff uniforms that had
never been picked up from housekeeping. In a few places,
the dust was scuffed, as though someone had dragged a
heavy bag on the eyes before there were hand prince
child's eyes and adult impressed in crime. The tunnels. Twisted
spray painted arrows and scratch rouns marred the walls, some
so old their meaning was lost, others freshly gouged. More
than once. I heard what I thought were voices, a
low thrum overlapping syllables that might have been night wage
or just machinery deeper in the walls. Every moment stretched out,
iterated with fear and curiosity. I followed a crude map
left in a break of box that matched the cost
I transcribed to the directory. Each number corresponded to a door, closet,
or darkened alc of leading further into the maze. Then
suddenly the emergency light snapped to harsh life, painting the
tunnels and stuttering red and white bands. My shadow leapt
on every side. In the flickering light, I made out
the battered signage bolt into what must once have been
a fire door taar beef re access restricted. I stared
at Paul's thundering confirmation. The cords on the tenant directories,
ratched deep into a crylic overlooked for years, were not
random paranoia. There were signposts, keys to a labyrinth that
someone very much wanted to be forgotten. I scribbled the
specifics in my notebook even as my camera battery began
its telthale blank of syanide already linger too long. The
air was dense with the scent of age and rot. Haartig.
Suddenly sure I'd pushed my lock, I retraced my steps
as far as I could. The rode up would seemed longer, harder,
each turn, less certain. I half ran the last stretch,
scuffing my knees as I clambered over broken storage rocks
and up battered concrete steps. At the top, the world
surge back in normal, ugly staff corridor, just as I'd
always known it. My cell phone chirped with the return
of a signal. Seated panting and shivering in the fluorescent
lit lunge, I found my hand shaking so badly and
nearly dropped my look book. I slammed the door and
recorded an audio entry, just and can my memory? What
the hell have they left done here? My words echoed
in the playback, toney and reel, as if some one
else spoke them A second after me. I sat for
a long time. There'd be three key clutched in my palm,
feeling a kind of cold on the old feudal livers.
But my mind was clear. Whatever was at the heart
of Tyr B three wasn't finished. It was a cavity,
a wound, tunneled into the body of the mole that
refused to close. I resolved to return with backup and
everything I could carry. I resolved to return with back
up and everything I could carry. But resolve and practice
isn't so simple. The following morning, sleep felt unreachable, even
when exhaustion collapsed my body. The images of the sub basement,
crumped tunnels, walled off chambers, the shifting stutter of red
emergency lights clung to the inside of my skull. Every
time I thought started to drift, they echo of my
own voice in that cold, echoing dock. Whod wrote me
up short, a stuttering, over lapping lag, like an old
tape reel just before some thing splices. My first instinct
was to go to management and Urgebonne, less of trust
and more of desperate hope that some one else might
take this on, relieve the sudden total responsibility from my
aching shoulders. I thought of Karen had painted unclm and
in my mind saw her face harden just past the
point of polite curiosity. She would tell me to submit
a formal maintenance request or refer to protocol ha mantra
for anything out of her comfort. The truth was in
Glenwood's twilight. Nobody wanted to know anything they might one
day be called to answer for. Instead, I rode out
everything details, time stamps, loose ends in my battered security lock,
then opened the bat had laptop in the musty staff
lounge and started looking for anyone with a reason to
know the moll's real bones. My first move was the
County Planning Office their public access I was started at
a I posed as a property management clerk. There were
enough of this cycling through our building not to raise suspicion,
and asked for archaved renovation blueprints and structural adjustment diagramed
for Glenard's West and south elevations. The clerk was obliging.
After some small talk, she brought out three rolls, one
labeled nineteen eighty four, another nineteen eighty six food court expansion,
the last nineteen eighty eight service mechanicals over flow utility.
I spread them out beneath the lazy ceiling fan of
the break room and studded the incu bloo lines, main levels,
upper service, the posted loading docks all present. The sub
basement looked more like a set of fragile paddles. Founding
out from the elevator corps. There faint beneath the layers
of hand annotated notes, I saw two shaded cavities marked
be too storage and only visible by holding the sheet
to the window. A squiggle faint partial labeled overflow slush
utility not for occupancy, no access error, no stairs or elevator,
nothing to suggest it was ever meant for people. Other
blueprints from the next year made things even stranger. East
Mezzanine edition some one had written in red pencil over
one loop corridor permanently silk sea variant set. I followed
the scrawls to a blank, shaded box. There was no
clear delineation. In fact, the further I searched, the more
I found paper trails tending and retreating from something the
planners had hidden from their own paperwork. I snapped pictures
with my phone, feeling the hollow begin to full again
in my chest. My hands were deader, now, less from
courage than from adrenaline acidifying my blood. When I got home,
a daylight interruption, with sunlight pulling beneath the faded plate cuttens.
My phone buzzed again another text local air code and
saved just a single word careful. Ten minutes later, my
doorbell rang, but when I looked out the cloudy glass,
nobody whitted on the other side through sleep deprived eyes.
Even my own street felt alien now, every passing truck
loaded with it. Still I pressed on. Next, I reached
out to Ben, a former co worker who'd gutted Atys
maintaining the mole's ancient electrical system before finally retiring eight
months prior. I found his number at the bottom of
an old group text and coal rehearsing a story about
malfunctioning lights and dead panels and beatya. Then pick up
on the fourth ring, voice raspy. I'm just trying to
figure out how these systems work. I lied, keeping it breezy,
but letting attention hangs bait, then grunt it. Then you're
talking about the lower levels. Don't mess with those circuits, friend,
Most of them are hodgebuds jobs. I patched half those
lines together from discount lots. What about access? Did they
ever let maintenance crew inside there? Out thirtier? Ben's laugh
was short, disbelieving. Then he was quite long enough that
I thought he'd hung up. They built too fast back
in eighty five eighty seven, he said. Finally there was
a rush injury and the concrete pour. Some lawsuits about
union labor never paid out. Then they sealed a couple
of areas. Nobody needed to put up new firebreaks while
the doors the plans kept changing. But listen, if you
found something, don't go alone. Some of those old dejaffs.
You go in and never come out the way you think.
I thanks him, scribbling notes. He hung up without goodbye.
I now fatigue was a second skin. But the more
details I gathered, the clearer it became. They'd be through
sub basement had been deliberately erased if it existed outside
rumor at all. It was as unfinished space. A cavity
filled him with anonymous concrete, forgotten of a decade and
marked off in bare clauses. But it was also a
note to every missing person, every off the record incident,
every patchy's story among staff, all drew me back to
the same forbidden spot. The last. Armed with what passed
for leads, I spent that even canvassing the remaining staff
on site. The day's shift was mostly new high as
teenagers and retirees, none of whom had ever ventured beyond
their designated zones. I asked Lucas, one of the part
timers on my own schedule, if he'd ever notice the
off I was around the old service elevator. He went,
glancing over his shoulder, as if reluctant even to discuss it.
Sometimes the lights go dead in there, he admitted, like
Holpont for a few seconds. You hear this weird air
rushing like duck settling. Once I felt, He hesitated, then
laughed nervously. Never mind, guess it's just bad wiring. Did
you ever see anybody's staff after iurs down there couldn't
place who. Lucas shook his head. Man, I leave as
soon as my rounds are done. If you want to
scare yourself, that's your business. He started to walk away,
then paused, lowering his voice. Just don't play around in
the gaps. That place is falling apart. The next few
days were a churn of anxious waiting and planning. I
didn't sleep. I researched the counter records day to bese
coughed up a strain of lawsuits from nineteen eighty seven
injury and documented elevator's shat a disturbed foundation were halted
for side review sediment closed, all record sealed, persistent. I
tracked down a PO box number one of the parties
in those settlements, still at a local address. Out of
other options, I wrote a letter asking simply, I believe
something was left in Glumermore lower level Tier B three.
Please call if you can help, or at least confirm.
I sent the letter and spent another night watching the
surviving cc TV feeds in a darkened office, surrounded by
static and the hum of machine far too old for
their own noise. I played back footage of the service elevator,
whare time stamped three weeks elier, the camera feedglitch showing
for three frames of black metal panel. Not a malfunction,
not quite, just absence. Two minutes later the video jumped
and the clock crew wound by seventeen seconds. Unable to
shake the sense of pursuit, I loaded up the Megamolachav
for news clippings. There were older yellowine articles about renovation
hazos and speculation on lost revenue. No mention of missing people,
no oakrey worth noting the place that always thrived on denial,
building its own little ecosystem around forgetting. It was just
past midnight four nights after my B three descent. When
I got call a number, I didn't recognize land line,
judging from the silence bookending the first few breaths he
asked about B three. The voice started older mail ware
I was made in its form, and from eighty six
until ninety six, that whole section of them all they
cut corners on blueprints seen non low bring but they
just builtline, left whole stretches boxed up. No real plan
except to move on. Boss said, after the accidents, seal
it off, let it rot. Insurance ll cover it. After
a while, you get used to thinking there's less standard
than there is. He drew in a hiss of breath.
Nobody was supposed to use it. That's all I'm going
to say. Don't call back. He disconnected as cleanly as
he begun. I leaned back, processing that mid three different
sources directly os I was confirming, were at least refusing
to deny that B three was both real and forbidden,
not just a logistical mess, but one meant to go
n see and unremembered. The missing staff, guests, drifters, and
the handful of night shift regulars were all the more
present in their absence. On my next shift, I tried
to lose myself in routine, a full sweep of every
service corridor, a double check on every door and hatch
I could find. I watched the staff clock out the
last food, caught kids truoking on his windbreak at exchanging
a knowing glance with the fry cook, who would stay
behind to close and was careful not to meet my eyes.
One by one, each surviving merchant lowered their grill, turned
their lock, and hurried away, some without even switching off
their lights. The hush that followed was so deep my
own shoe sound of gunshot loud echoing up from the
scuff dimple tile. Before dawn, I gathered supplies, two heavy flashlights,
extra batteries, a fresh mass the dust was thick enough
for a taste, back up radio, and my battered phone
with a half charged power bank. I debated texting for
backup Lucas or even Adrian the Janitor, but stubborn logic
settled in. No one would believe what I'd found in
less I could show it, record it, document first, and
thinking through possible routes in and out, I sketched the
mechanic tear by field rough lines based on the scattered
blueprints taped together staff maps and that gaundex workers cryptic
floor plan. Everywhere the lines blurred or doubled back on themselves,
I marked them as possible A GAP's locations, where be
three could connect to the world above or recede into nothing.
A zero iro approached, I sat in the break room,
glancing at the B three key. My hands at start shaking,
as though fear was just another load to carry somewhere
beneath my tire bravado. It felt less like a promise
and more like a truth about myself, whether I meant
to find answers just to vanish like so many before.
I clipped a small camera to the front of my jacket,
clamped my radio at an easy reach, tested every pocket
for spare batteries. Then I locked the staff office behind me,
and as quietly as possible, made my way to the
service elevator. The corridor was so familiar by now that
even its odd proportions. The way the ceiling seemed lower
while the four dipped in becetibly near the last vending
machine felt almost comforting. If architecture could play memories games.
Clemwood subistments were a masterclass. I pressed it down button.
The elevator rumbled to life, humming away only thirty year
old machines will I fitted to be three key, waiting
for the circuit to complete. The click was unnaturally loud.
Record stop now, I whispered, thum flicking the camera on.
The sound was small but steady. The device's green led
a kind of lifeline in itself. The ride down took longer,
this time five seconds. Certain the familiar things were ground,
then b then subbed Torren, then at last the mysterious
and marked dear. There was a stretching, as if the
car itself was resisting the journey, and I felt the
pressure of the air bill before finally the door slid open.
I stepped into a corridor that swallowed light. The cold
was different to true vault chill, not just left of
ver h vou remnants my breath chase itself in the
spa stagnant air. Moving forward, I skirted the pile of
ancient display racks, the same old stained fake ferns and
holiday in insults before, but now mapped and methodical. I
began verifying each door, each cause it against my directory
codes B three minutes one hundred seventeen B B three
minutes one hundred twenty one A is one hundred forty
three each match to battered largely featureless metal door camouflaged
by grime and dust. The keys fit some of the
fight other slick as if recently used behind each the
same end in its storage. Closets gun to rot chip
holders for signage. Nobody remembered piles of an open mail.
Some doors refused to budge, seemingly fused to their frames
by time or intention. I filmed everything narrating in short
clip bursts. Door one hundred seventeen B corresponds with first
cord in the interior empty except for stack crates. No label.
Film shows time stamp matching missing custodian Ashley m Von
last staff map. Further along another closet one hundred twenty
one aboor, the spray painted remnants of an old MOL
logo over ittum was tatted, masking tape labeled to no entry.
Inside nothing but dust, boxy foot prints and an air
heavy with ald ammonia in mold. At sown hundred forty
to weave my heart quickening, I found a pie with
panel nailed across the original frame security tape dried and flaking.
I hesitated, then pressed my ear to the wood and
caught a faint r MC thudding like a heavy a
track unit, or impossibly the echo of slow mechanical breathing.
I didn't try to force my way further. Instead, I
backed away, marking the location with a fresh mate silver
stigger from my loop book. Every so often, my flasklight
trembled across graffiti, strange repeated figures, and yellow spirals with tails,
arrows coiling back on themselves, warnings too old to decipher. Once,
I swore I heard footsteps just beyond the next tea junction,
but every time I darted forward, only silence waited. But
I was methodical. I lowered each into section, pinned each
door's location on my chart. My memory felt sharper, stripped
of destruction. Every muscle turned to the moment, but under
it all, drag kept mounting coil and tider. It was
in the deepest part of one of the storage corridors,
cold so they could stun my nose where I found
the most unstantly marckery. It etched into cracks into block
at head height, string of numbers and letters repeating down
the sea a date nineteen eighty seven eighty eight. Then
seal slash azim tia and hazardous materials against the letters
trailed off the group pressed deep enough to leave or grove.
My thumb could nestle in. I recorded a close up muttering,
same period as accident and insurance settlement. No records after
that date correspond with first shut down of expansion. Further down,
time seemed to spoil in and out. I passed closets
where the dust swelt in a wick of my own footprints,
places where distant echoing mechanical creeks set my nerve scraping.
I navigated by memory, by scraps of logic, by the
hessens of my own senses that told me inevitably, unquestionably,
not all things below wanted to see the light again.
Not all of them were gone. Finally, adrenaline depleted, sweat
cooling in the stagnant ere, I decided to return. Steps mapped,
points checked, All data are recorded back through the maze,
past the identical doors, tracked my own route up by
fresh Gouff's left and dust. As I slipped back into
the elevator, hand pressed white knuckle to the lop control.
I let myself look once, just once, back at the
main corridor. There, staring from a shadow at the hall
was a face, pale, fringed by dark, staring and blinking
at me from the edge of my own Flasklight beam
down in and I blink, perhaps my reflection, perhaps just
the swirl of dust, But in the split instant I
could swear it wore. Security had a few seasons out
of day. The elevator groaned, rolls climbed at the top.
The world returned brighter, mundane, full of the scoff and
scrape of maintenance and commerce, waiting for another day. By
the time I double checked the office and secured my bag,
the hum inside my skull had dulled to a manageable wine.
I logged every detail archive files to her thumb drive,
hid the beevery key deep in my jacket pocket. Never
again would I dismiss what flickered between the seams at
Glenwood Mall. Deep down, I knew I could not truly
leave this insolved, and that in its waiting, dark tearbe
tree was counting on people forgetting its secrets. Night Han
beyond the little office is barred window. My mind kept
were tracing each hallwayed, each door, every vanished connection. By morning,
my resolve had rennen itself, blunt, almost stubborn. I would
return to be three again, equipped and ready, and this
time I would not walk alone into the labyrinth. Even
after my decision was made, return to be three, armed
and vigilant, I found myself hesitating, and the threshold of
every action at home. Sunlight filtering through this much glass
of my kitchen window, I could almost convince myself that
everything underground had been a product of exhaustion or anxiety,
no more than the usual ghost spread by a falin building.
But as dusk descended, the certainty returned inexorable. My hands trembled,
not with doubt, but with a dissipation. I spent what
little time I had before my next shift in preparation.
Every item of flask, lights, camera, spare batteries, portable radio, notebook,
water bottle, a kroberfoots from the deserted hardware STORER was
examined and packed with careful redundancy. I charged my work
phone and wiped it free of anything personal, even though
I drafted a message to Karen and the police, complete
with four plants and directions. I hesitated to send it.
It would mean dragging others into whatever awaited in those
blocked off depths. I late afternoon anxiety cloned to me
leg sweat. I called Adrian, the senior janitor, just in
case he would pick up. He didn't answer voicemail, grinding
out his voice and grainy measured syllables. Leave your message
and hang up. I'll get to you when I can.
Night is busy, I said, nothing, hung up. As soon
as the beep sounded, part of me was relieved. When
I arrived for my shift, Glen would felt less a
retail plaza and more wounded hulk laboring toward oblivion. What
patches swelled long the base of the walls. Half the
escalators were out by now, dark, mouths open, refusing to budge.
Only the soft hummufluorescence overhead in the cline of the
occasional closing rollgate disrupted the hush. Karen was in her
office door job, but her attention fixed on the blue
haze of her monitor. She didn't look up as I
passed somewhere in the strands of failing light. I knew
the building had marked me. I could hardly finish my
first rounds, the air felt taut, a member in waiting
to be split. Each shadow in the vacant wings seemed
to promise an echo the memory of footfall's barely half
a second behind me, I stopped at the rotten up,
breathing hard. The older krill directory was undisturbed just as
I left it, but beneath the scratches, the surface looked cleaner,
as if the mall itself had been trying to erase
what remained of its secret. The B three key weighed
heavy at my side. I gripped it until the coal
pressed it dent into my palm. I would not return
from BE three empty handed. I would not let my
own absence become one more mark on. Then attended incident locks.
Just before midnight. I received a tax Lucas short and
clipped all hell with the south wing emergency panel. No lights,
Did you swap feats? Let me know if you're covering
from me? I didn't answer. I had no intention of
straying toward the normal problems of the job tonight. Instead,
I sat in the brake room, assembled my gear in
a neat row, and waited for the building's heaviness to shift.
The hush that came each night after the last staff vanished,
and the only movement was the subtle from of machinery
below my feet. When the moment came, I stood, checked
my pockets, and made for the elevator. The corridors were abandoned.
I heard a distant door close, but nothing else. Down
in the low service hall, the elevator's coal button gold Weakly.
I inserted the B three key, thumping. The panel lit
up one extra orange square marked, but waiting, I pressed it.
The descent was longer. At this time. The elevator car vibrated,
as if rolling through pockets of resistance. The red beef
re restricted light flooded the cabin, reflecting off my hands,
my jacket, the batted lop book. With a faint shutter,
the door slid open. I stepped out into freezing, breath
thick air. Proceeding now, I whispered recording. Corridors branched off,
the main trunks of old concrete, lined with storage cages
and broken racks. My flasklight's narrow beam cut through the dark.
I kept one hand in the crowbar, the other on
the camera's grip. The only sound the low and steady
thrum of old pipes and the gentle drip of a
distant leak. Every junction looked both familiar and newly disorienting.
I shouted my path using the codes from the directory
one hundred seventeen B one hundred twenty one A seven
hundred forty three matching doors conver me each blind time
against my makeshift map. Each threshold resisted, hinges long seized,
but the B three key fit reluctantly but certainly. Each time,
I whispered into the audio recorder, noting details dull one
hundred seventeen B, storage racks, torn uniforms, footprints one hundred
twenty one A logre empty crates, ear thick with ammonia,
so one hundred forty three seems barricaded hard of the
tear will assess further. As I advanced, the air grew colder,
the pressure deeper at my back. The hiss of something moving, pipes,
just pipes, followed every step. I began to think I
heard voices, a steep drop in the darkness ahead, syllables
overlapping in the white noise of the radior static. Every
time I tried to listen directly, the sound dissolved into
mechanical knocks in the deep, slow pulse of half dead ventilators.
The tea junction. The flashlight flickered briefly. I smacked and
the beamer turned, revealing a set of child size handprints
smeared into the dust. They disappeared into one of the
smallest side doors. The lock twisted open and hanging loose.
Some old part of me wanted to peer inside see
the source, but as I hestated, the air seemed to
solidify in my throat, warning me just how much further
one could go before being truly lost. The maze pressed closer,
henned him by old walls mottled with patches of water
stain and graffitia. Sequence of coilings biols were repeeded, always
near a pile of decayed mail or a block of
melted thenoleum tiles. The arrows I had marked in chock
on my last ascent helped me piece together the main loop.
A hundred feet alar, I found a half collapsed barricade.
Stacks of unused merchandise, beambooxes, box vans, CRT computer monitors
had been shoved strategically, forming a crude shiel facing the
main corridor. Behind it, I heard a faint, rhythmic screeping.
I circled around, careful to avoid sending my flashlight beam
straight ahead. At the edge of my vision, something darted,
then froze, only a tattered sleeve hanging empty a lawn
the barquet, I called out, voice, catching anyone in there. Silence,
then a breath of human breath, ragged and trembling. Another
scraping sound, frantic, an animal, as if someone was dragging
themselves away from the door. I'm with security, I try
projecting com I'm not here to hurt you. Are you trapped?
A shuffling pause, then a whisper from behind the barricade,
words more moaned than spoken. Don't let it close, don't
let it close behind you. The voice wavered, brittle with thirst.
Wall's change, wall's change, and you can't get back. Gradually,
I moved closer, shining my light to the side, not
at the figure, but along the floor. Are you injured?
I asked? His silence save for the shaking intake of breath.
Not injure, the survivor finally said, their voice low and wild,
but stuck. Can't find the path out. Sometimes the same door,
samee number on both sides of the hall. Sometimes it
lets me through, Sometimes it doesn't. He coughed, the sound
tearing through the little cave. I crouched near the barriquet,
keeping a good two feet from the opening. Who are you?
I tried? He pressed forward, a gaunt, batted man, cheeks
hollow as fever, bright up of a ride of tangled hair,
his security badge filthy and cracked, listed and name I
recognize from the oldest low book, jacochore I employee who'd
vanished a previous spring after a string of absences blamed
on Berna. I gave him water, half a granol bar
from my pack. He devoured both with trembling hands, all
the while keeping his gaze flickering from me to the
darkness behind. They sealed us in, he whispered, more to
himself than to me. Cold drill, then welded the balls.
Do you hear peer on the other side? Sometimes not always?
The living kind place grows a new angle each month.
Or maybe I just lose count. His voice broke into
a nervous, dry laugh. It never got daylight down here,
lights burned out years ago, always so down cold, Jake,
I said, do you remember the layout. Do you know
how to reach the other side? Act to the elevator.
I have a map, but it changes sometimes. I want
to get us out together. He shook his head, palms
pressed flat to the grimy slab beneath us. It only
let one out easy, Otherwise you end up in the loops.
You double back, but nothing lines up. Voices overlap. Sometimes
you are on talking to you through the next wall.
Sometimes his eyes widen fix a point just past my shoulder.
I followed his gaze for a heartbeat. The hole behind
me seemed to contract, the air sharpest steel, just stuccos.
I told myself, just nerves Jake. We're leaving to I
send more for myself than him. Stay close. If you
start to feel lost, tell me. He nodded, but hesitated.
Don't touch the locked room. I frowned. What room. Jade's
breath hitched. Name the door, all the ones like me,
Ye'll know. I holsted the flask light and drew out
a hand radio. The screen was still alive, but only
stat a crasp through. I show Jake the other radio,
told him to keep it close. We skirted the edge
of the barricade together. Jake's movements were animal quick. Every
gesture weighed as if gaging whether the walls would allow it.
We lost the thread of my map almost immediately. I
left where there should have been a right, a passage
way that doubled onto itsself, forcing us between rusting wrecks
and heaps of mildewed staff uniforms. The air grew close again,
dust and stagnant shawl, choking each gasp. We backtracked, each
time facing a subtly changed landscape. Vain girl swapped wiring
that was frayed and cut off where it should have
fed into break a boxes. My heart pounded, sweat freezing
along the back of my neck. Jake, for his part,
seemed to listen intently at each intersection, humming a hollow
single note under his breath. Keeps the echoes clear, he
whispered when I asked. As we passed Room one hundred
forty three plywoud still nailed high and crooked across the
door frame. I paused, This is the room, isn't it,
I asked Jake. Hence what showing in the corners of
his eyes. It's where they put the lost ones, he whispered,
after the proudest after the alarms name still thou scratched
deep enough to outlast the paint. Below the survivingt tape
and brittle masking, I saw the doorway had once been
labeled supplies, but now under grime. Three dozen names arched
in a jagged ring across the wood. Some I recognized
from missing Curson's files. Some were feeded beyond legibility. Below them,
reason scratches spelled fresh editions Jake's. Others surmounted by different hands,
some by the same. In monotonous script. Who did this?
I murmured, shining my light across the scroll. Jake stared
at his feet the ones who left that the end
management sent the order locked down temporary. Nobody was supposed
to be here, but they sealed us in any way.
His voice fractured, each syllable tinged with scorn and resignation.
I tried the handle, The lock blistered with old rost.
There be three key refused to fit. The door would
not budge inside. Something shifted, a scrape of metal too
deliberate for rudents of settling debris. There was no visible window,
but I felt as sure as a kick nail that
some one or something waited within. We're not going in,
I said, stepping back. But we need to keep moving.
I heard voices last time, Jake muttered last night, maybe
two nights ago. Sometimes you hear yourself inside. Don't answer,
never answer, or the room takes you. We edged away,
my skin, crawling at each inter section. The Angulo spirals
on the walls multiplied, looping back toward the heart of
B three. I counted steps, were citing them softly, trying
to hold the geometry bat into fixed forms. We turned
another blind corner, and suddenly I found myself staring at
an open staff locker room, not on my nap. Faded
locks gaped, doors bent, and half a spowl of sleeping
mats and garbage bags lined one wall. Some one had
lived here and not long ago. Bagged cereal bottled water,
and a stack of yellowed newspapers from the last calendar
ear on one wall. Spiral and black resemarked another junction point.
The maysumry behind it bowled slightly, as if something pressed
outward just below the surface. Jake lingered by a Bassett
staff bulletin, or brushing his finger tips over the remains
of a half tor memmo. I snapped a picture for
my records. He looked up at me, then back to
the rip in the wall. Sometimes there is a door
behind the lockers, he said quietly. Sometimes it's walled. Sometimes
he licked his lips. We used to call at the
maze tooth nasty way out, but better than the echoes.
Let's check, as said, and together we slid several lockers aside.
Behind them was a gash in the plaster, a space
wide enough for a grown man to squeeze through a
thicker of their shoulders. Beyond a snarl of piper cage
backed ducks, bundled and humming, whilese trailing, broken light fixtures,
condensation beating a long cracked insulation. The rush of cold
force goosebumps alarmed my arms. We climbed in together, and
for long minutes we were forced to call Jake ahead,
me dragging my bag behind the corridor warped duck's narrowing
the path until I was certain our shoulders would be
caught for good. Half Way through, my radio chripped his
shop spike of static, frantically oscillating between dead air and
the faint The laid echo of my own voice proceed
with care care, proceeding recording recordingly looping, lagged, as if
my words had been stored and spit out by the
dock itself. Jake flinched. It has us, he muttered, has
our voices too. That's what you'll leave behind if you
don't move faster. I bid down on my fear and
shove forward. The coal space handled sharply, then open, suddenly
into another broad corridor, widened with higher ceilings on sheets
of plastic sheeting, hung in when lushrouds along the walls,
behind the translucent veils, stacks upon stacks of an open merchandise,
as if the world had changed seasons but forgotten. This
place entirely sun faded labels unreadable through the muddy yellowing.
Jake led me through a sequence of tidessk curves, pausing
only to shake splinters from his cuffs. The heartbeat of
the place quickened as of B three, sensing our movement
was rousing itself for attention. We emerged at the edge
of another intersection, the very heart of the sub basement.
What stood before us was an engine room, a jumble
of ancient attract towers, sputtering and trembling as the cycled
musty air, fluorescent bulbs. Some still burning, castwarp shadows over
the machinery, broken safety railings blocked half the footbath overhead,
a catwalk creaked, every sound amplified in a coal mirk.
On the far wall, one last sealed door painted on
it in pain sticking block letters every name from the
missing person's reports at Glenwood, forming a rough rain at
the center a new addition Jake's name, but also space
for mind. The pain still wet. As I drew closer,
mouscana picked up a persistant tone high the normal machinery
nerve tightening. This is where management sealed them. I asked
Jake for shaking. He nodded. They thought it would stop
the protest, stop the investigation, But the ones left behind
they started kmocking the doors too, so they could try
to get out again. Never work, The radio barked another echo.
Door door, door, never close again again again. The machinery sputtered, hummed,
and somewhere inside the engine room I heard the desperate
rattle of a lock and dun from the other side.
Jake pressed his face to the metal. They used to
give us food through the vent, then they forgot. Then
nobody came back. I shined my light under the door's crack.
The darkness trembled, as if breathing. Let's go, I whispered.
We can't help them, We can only leap proof. Jake nodded,
but took a step back. But it knows us, he muttered,
turning to me. Every one who sees it leaves something
behind your name, your echo. That's the deal behind us.
The machinery cycled again, a deep vibration, the hum of
all that buried energy threatening to overflow. Suddenly, every bulb
in the place flickered. My radio howl cacophonic, spitting static
and broken syllables. The alarms throughout the molidysan wavering sand shrieked,
as if cold by whatever had finally noticed us below.
Jake and I lunged away from the seiled doors. The
floors began to tremble, the sub basement circulation finally breaking
its old lines. I grabbed Jake by the arm, hauling
him around the machinery through curdiors that no longer followed
the map. At every turn, the arrows in the wallster stood,
pointing us in impossible loops. The radio chattered, the air
collapse in invisible fists. Despite the maelstrom, a sort of
magnetic pressure that threatened to drive us deeper. Some stubborn,
desperate grace let me retrace part of our path, guided
by shouted numbers half invented in monarchs. We backtracked by
memory Jake's side names and room counts. Me reading the
chalk marks I had scraped along the way, A Sadden
spegetate ball left through the engine room at duftright, forced
to make a choice as the concrete strained with the
low rising grinding knives, the air thick and heavy as blood.
At last, ahead of me, a staggered shaft of light
the elevator. Its door blink uselessly, stuck partly a jar,
but enough for a desperate wedge of my crowber Jake,
I shouted, voice lost in the chaos. He appeared wild eyed,
breath torn in choking gasps, hands pressed white over his
ears against the shrieking alarms. I lifted him bodily by
the sleeve, dragging us both into the elevator car. The
door shuddered, though up button flickered spastically, refusing to select
come on, A come on, I'm martyred, but the control
panel was cut. Warring with itself as the cord for
a B three died, then revived with a new red blink, panicked,
reretned to undue me. I slammed the base of the
cover into the d ground button once twice, praying for
the ancient mechanism to resolve decades of tension in this
one moment. Behind us, the corridor filled with shadows, stress, multiplying,
flickering in the guttering emergency light. Within them, the sawets
looked agonized, only familiar and out of date security cap
a sweater with chevrons from the old Bowley alley, the
curve of a barge I had seen in the missing
person's wall, a grip Jake's hand. With the strength of
the truly terrified, he began whispering a mantra, his name
and mine, over and over, as if to call the
elevator up through forces of memory alone. At last, the
elevator grown, jerked and ascended slope so slow, each floor
marked by a new shriek from the alarms below. The
scarlet beavery restricted blinked off. We blinked into the light
of the stuff corridor, Jay collapsing to the floor, sobbing,
breath hitching in spasms. I knot beside him, closing my eyes,
clutching the lawbrooks so hard to cover snapped more. Management
was not yet on sight, and only the hum of
the still sounding alarms filtered up through the vents. Jake
and I sat in a days for account of heartbeats
I could no longer name. When my phone returned to service,
I hit sin on everything locks audio diagrams. Before doubt
could catch up. I paced the corridor, waiting for the
world above to acknowledge the wound open below. Within moment
since the mole's mane, alarms brought the first responders, police, fire,
and eventually Karen, who caught my sleeve with ice coal fingers,
demanding explanations I could barely provide. Jacobs silent, his gaze
fixed firmly on the floor, refusing to answer any question.
Authorities in locked the elevator, and drawn by the pressure
of their own procedures, pried open the doors to be
three for ires. They searched and found only the relics
of lawn, abandoned rooms, palliat of Maya, ragged uniforms, and
the endless spray of spiral graffiti. Eventually they forced open
the door I remembered, the one inscribed with names, records,
scratched over and over by desperate hands. Inside was nothing,
nothing but dust, the stale earthakest cement, and the faintest
echo of footsteps receding as if a cross miles of
dead corridors. Later that day, Karen and the police captain
led me to her office. Each avoided my eyes. Both
took turns, explaining that their investigation had led only to
hazard as building violations, nothing more. The missing person's log
was updated, cases marked as inconclusive. Only Jake and I claim,
to our frutured memory knew the truth behind where the
building had tried and failed to keep hidden. In the
immediate stunned hush more rumors flourished newspapers mentioned they head
and tear, though officials denied it with a muted fury.
The Glenwood developers arrived and delivered new demolition orders and
quietly sack half of management. Jake was delivered to a
local hospital, charted as a missing person, then vanished from
public record. I never saw him again, though my phone
pinged with a single anonymous recording a week later, static
laced with a faint lupom whisper, my own voice delayed
other unidentified voices layered within. The Glenwood Mall was fenced off,
no public notice, no formal closure, just a squad car
eiding outside the main entrance in a convey of trucks
arriving each dawn. As the demolition drew slowly near by night,
I prowled the edge of the property, restless. No one
challenged me. Nothing left inside argued for its own survival.
Eventually I returned to the staff lounge a final time
to collect what I'd left. A few notebooks, my batted
oak books, and the B three key. Now stripped of
all meaning or authority, I turned over the last of
my fine to the city, echoing the whords scrolled into
the deepest tier, no entry, no rescue, seal and forget.
The world spun on, gleanward, more faded from the news,
as all ugly secrets do. And yet the final image
did one lass and quiet return the memory of standing
years later by the ruins, as dust shifted on the wind,
catching the shimmer of a directory newly wrapped in plastic,
already cracked with numbers I did not recognize, crouched deep
into the surface in a distance beyond the ruins, I
caught the fleck of movement, a pale reflection against shattered glass.
Someone in my old security uniform, standing sentinel in the gloom,
half turned away. Some doors never close, not down here.
Some doors never close, not down here. After that night,
I couldn't shake the impression that the building was aware
of me, watching from beneath its own debris insistence. Although
the mole was officially sealed, city crews wrecked a chain
link fencing and mounted a danger and save a stretch
of plucards at every entrance, their lamination already bowed by rain.
My Passcoud was dead. No more laid night walks beneath
the humming overheads. Still, I took a circle into perimeter,
often without realizing I'd started the demolition schedule, crept forward
and fits and starts, first to plan we can, then
a delay because of union disputes, then another inspection. Every
setback felt like be threes doing. The mall wanted to
be left in the sturb lost in its own dark
ritual of being forgotten. The press ran with the Urban Explorer, angles,
brave trespassers, spooky footage on YouTube, speculation about seeker tunnels
and underground rail police wouldn't confirm any discoveries. A management
issued careful platitude about structural risk and importance of control
environmental recovery. Even the city, usually eager to court outrage
or nostalgia, presented a blank face statements filtered through lawyers, engineers,
or just as often the void. At first, Karen kept
her space, but a week after the rescue, she tracked
me down at my apartment unannounced, the same day the
survivor Jake vanished from his hospital ward. She stood outside
my door, heavycot zipped up to her chin, fell folder
press flat against her chest. Her gaze flicked once at
my batted briefly is full of look books, then back
up to meet my tith stair there closing the investigation,
she set without introduction, the tapes of city property. You
should turn everything over for liability. I didn't let her in,
but I didn't close the door either. I already did,
I replied, everything worth sharing. She pressed her lips together.
They won't say what was down there, you know, Health
department redacted most of it. Legal says not to worry.
We both knew that was a lie. I waited for
her to go, but she lingered, footscraping patterns in the hall, regret. Finally,
she left the file on the threshold, eyes darting everywhere
but at me, and disappeared before I could think of
one more challenge. Inside the folder, a glossy axes and
photo caught my attention, an aerial shot of Glenwood in
nineteen eighty eight. Shadows cut sharp over the parking lots,
A handful of cars stunted odd little rectangles. But the
thing that stood out, nearly lost among the sun bleach
grid was a darkish devot in the southeast corner, a
hint of excavation or rough black veil, just where the
third tier would have run, Invisible and deep. Some construction accident,
some correction soon buried. I slipped the picture into my
old lot book, not sure if it was meant as
a warning or an apology. Jake's hospital bed emptied the
next morning, stirred all the over roomers. Officially he'd slipped
away during a shift change, possibly fleeing media attention. The
police shrugged another vanishing act charked up to the unstable. Privately,
I doubted even he knew the way at once. The
system let him back in, or, more precisely, I wondered
whether any one's absence from Blenwood was entirely voluntary. In
a days I followed, I listened to my recordings on
lupaudio riddled with interference, cellular noise, echoes of words not
my own, what conversation should have been? There would appear
the thought of ancient machinery, reverberant and wrong slavers of
overlapping dialog. I cataloged everything, keeping careful notes on timestamps
and audible anomalies, but each session left me more afraid.
On some nights, I'd hear my own voice doutter in
the static, answering itself, proceeding now, recording, don't let the
door close. Sometimes in the quietest tres, some one else's
name would slip, uninvited, through the hiss, barely louder than
my breath. The authorities squashed any further inquiry. Cols to
city planners went unanswered, and a few staff who'd once
spoken frankly about the moles oddities routse Fearful emails bounced,
funds rang without response. When I tried to reconnect with Bent,
the retired maintenance man. An unfamiliar voice answered Curt and
clipped and told me never to call again. Glamour's last
days passed in a peculiar hush town, gossip ebbing, ch
chronic throb but never igniting for every utrageous story. Explorers
trapped in brick corridors, Psychics overwhelmed by memory residue, locksmith's
hired for a job I never seen again. There was
a polite, empty denial. I tried to care, but my
focus refused to leave the pattern of scratched numbers, the
overlay between real and hidden architecture. Demolition began at dawn
on a Tuesday, quiet, unannounced, heavy machinery rolling in behind
blank security vans. I watched from a row of dead
hedges as the backo took its first roaring cut through
the south wall, sending a plume of duskywood. Three days later,
the roof collapsed into itsself, spraying plumes of insulation that
drifted along the wheed shirked parking lanes like so much
cheap snow. All the while, I trailed the edge, ghosting
the fence line, looking for something. At first, I thought
I wanted to proof assigned the world above truly acknowledged
what had fest had been eath, But really I was
searching for closure, the final quiet confirmation that Glennwoods secretiar
was gone for good. During the final sweep, technicians from
an environmental firm IMMERSI at dusk faces pale. Even the
demolition crew spoke little. Their supervisor, a heavy set man
in a high vis vest, refused interviews, snapping no comment
when someone approached with the camera. A rumor circulated a
sin Squash that workers had found a sailed corridor with
an elevator stuck between floors. Nobody officially said what was inside.
By the second week, security controls double signed a peer
warning off trespassers. My lovebook might have been an artifact
from another ear. My keys just a pocket full of
iron ghosts. I spent my evenings by the old staff entrance,
sucking in the carbon tan of dust, listening to the
hollow cyclical groan as beams and joys gave up to gravity.
If Jake was out there, he didn't return to the fence.
If the other missing Ashley, the teenage runner, the elderly
woman from the arcade, ever returned, it would happen far
from human eyes. Once on a late round. I heard
voices in the wind between trucks, not English, not exactly,
just overlapping syllables, shed some frantic message work by the wreckage.
I pressed my ear a cold whyamesh but could find
only the row music of failing structure. After the demolition,
the new cycled away, dropping lambward two and afterthought develop
as posted plans for condos. The city's remaining files disappeared
from the registry. Even the old blue prints failed to
trace on any office computer. The mall at last was
as erased as its builders once intended. But the burden
of memory is hard to kill. In the dark, I'd
hear the radio scrawl of statkicking in the space behind
my eyes, voices delayed, shuffling steps on bare concrete, the
shuddering hush before the elevated or slid open. Sometimes, as
I drifted in and out of restless sleep, my mind
would return to the sealed room, the names on the
door growing by one more, again and again. Closure became
an act, not a feeling. I took my battered look books,
though bezery key with its worn grooves, the handful of
photos and handed them over to the local library's archive
under a nondescript accession number. At least there some one
might stumble across a fragment and wonder, at least there
I could stop carrying it. On my last visit to
the site, the chain link finch rattled in a winter gust,
staccatto and bleak, whether rotten that had stood a pidiono foundation,
partly flooded, plastic sheeting snagged amrabar. The earth itself had
rejected Glenood Hidden Heart, as if the mole's final sentence
was not closure, but dispersal, all its secrets. Drifting on
ground water out to the tangled edge of town, the
silence settled. Glenwood Mole was no more retail, replaced with
blank property signs, its history scrubbed and safely forgotten for most.
Not for me. I still recognized the shape of something unresolved,
their necho not of terror, but a profound absence. Last week,
as spring scraped its pale knuckles across the lots, I
made a pointless pilgrimage to the ruins, stepping carefully over
broken glass and swinted studs. The only structure left standing
was a slat that had anchored the tenant directory plastic
wrapped remarkably and vandalized, gleaming in the waning light. I
brushed us aside and studded the pritted surface, tracing new numbers,
yet nearly through the polymer. They mapped in Noah one
hundred twenty three R nine feet x B three, multiplied
in a pattern that shifted beneath my finger tips Elijah
to any logic but its own. A breath of wind
caught the edge of the plastic, making the directory pulse
alive for half a second, lighting up my own blowd reflection.
Beside a second paler figure in an old security jacket,
shoulders slumped as indistinct turned watchfully away. I straightened, gathering
my coat more tightly, realizing at last that glemment wind
was not the buried rooms of vanished people, but the
space left in the world after seek us rot away.
I walked toward the chain link, colcrid in my tea,
feeling the moles hush cling to me like a second skin.
At the fence, I stopped, looked once over my shoulder
at the shadow lingering by the plastic wrap. Kiosk. Some
doors never close, not down here, and that is the end.
Thank you. For listening, and I will see you in
the next one.