Speaker 1: I'd been working night security on the lot long enough
to know that the job only worked if nothing happened.
That was the point of it. Repetition. You walk the
same routes, checked the same doors, locked the same confirmations
until the motions stopped requiring thought. The nights where you
started thinking with the knights, you missed something. The sight
itself was massive warehouses, office blocks, loading bays, service corridors,
stitched together with access roads and fencing. During the day,
it was loud and chaotic. At night, it emptied out
so completely it felt abandoned. Most shifts were automated senses
reporting back to a central system, cameras, cycling logs filling
themselves in. I was pretty much paid to watch Netflix
all year because nothing ever went wrong. Christmas Eve was
the exception. Early closures meant that all the building's operations
had to be shut down. Temporary overrides had to be
applied and removed manually. Systems that normally talk to each
other got staggered or isolated. For one night a year,
the site stopped being able to rely on automation alone,
So on this one day of the year the job changed.
Instead of monitoring, I had to be present, physically verified locks,
reset zones by hand, confirm lighting, power routing, access points,
all of it untight specific timings. It wasn't dangerous, just
precise work, where being five minutes late mattered more than
being absent. There was a failsafe for nights like that,
full sight reset unit locked away in the central security hub.
I'd been shown it during training years ago, back when
I still had a supervisor walking me through procedures designed
for what the manual called full sight instability. I'd never
seen it used, no one I knew had it existed,
like a fire extinguisher behind class, something you registered and
moved on from. This year, staffing was thin. People wanted
the holiday off. Management floated the idea of splitting the
lot between two guards. I told them I'd handle it.
I knew the site better than anyone still in the roster.
I'd done this shift many times before these and the
bonus pay was enormous. The checklist they sent over was
longer than usual, but still familiar. I skimmed it, logged
in and started my first round. The shift followed the
same cycle patrol, lock, reset, confirm and log Precision was key.
Speed only mattered when it protected timing. I was always
told the timing mattered because the systems talked to each other.
I only worked security. The tech was above my pay grade,
so I never fully understood what that meant. I carried
a handheld unit clipped to my belt, scoffed from years
of use. It was a scheduler task windows, confirmation prompts,
and time stamps. It didn't tell me what to do
so much as when I was supposed to do it.
If I stayed inside those windows, the site behaved. Everything
went quiet in the way they were supposed to. Language mattered, too.
Confirmations weren't check boxes. They were short entries with exact phrasing.
Deviate and the system would accept it, but not always
interpret it the way you intended. The lot felt right
when everything landed on time. The first problem came from
a loading bay on the east side. A delivery cage
had been left unsecured by a day crew rushing out early.
Nothing dramatic, just the rolling barrier half a meter out
of place, enough to block a censor sweep. Fixing it
cost me minutes. I didn't have to spare. I liked
the correction tied to my pace and watch the hand
held roll forward to the next task. I felt irritated.
Christmas Eve had no slack, but I'd managed tighter runs before.
I lengthened my stride, recalculated the route in my head,
and told myself the same thing I always did when
the margins thinned, I'd make the time back. The first
real squeeze came just after eight. My hand held chined
again before I'd finished clearing the last confirmation. The screen
stacking tasks closer together than I liked. They weren't emergencies.
That's the worst part, just presents required checks landing within
the same narrow window. I swore under my breath and
picked up the pace. Jogging wasn't part of the job.
Had it never been this bad. The whole point was consistency,
the same steps, the same timing, But that one early
setback compressed everything. I caught across a loading bay instead
of taking the long corridor badge already out, eyes flicking
between doors, and the countdown ticking on my device in
my hand, I made it barely the last confirmation accepted
with seconds despair. The handheld gave its soft acknowledgment tone,
and the lot seemed to exhale with me. The low
mechanical hum of the buildings evened out again, like a
machine settling back into its preferred rhythm. Relief came sharp
and fast. It made my hands feel light. I leaned
against the concrete pillar for a moment, catching my breath.
Annoyed with myself and needing to I locked the tasks,
forced my writing to stay neat, and told myself this
was still well within what I'd handled before Christmas. Eve
always pushed that was the job, Just one tight shift
and it'd be back to the easy life. That was
when the radio clipped to my shoulder crackled, just the
quick burst, dry electrical, cutting through the air like a
tear in fabric, and then silence. The channel cleared on
its own, the idle hiss returning as if nothing had happened.
I frowned at it, thumb hovering near the volume knob,
then let my hand fall away, old building, cold, night interference.
I pushed off the pillar and started walking again, already
mentally rearranging the rest of the shift to stay ahead
of the clock. The pace eased, the lot settled into
the kind of quiet I'd been expecting all night. The
stretch where your body stays tight even though nothing is
actively demanding attention. I moved through one of the smaller
office blocks, running the same checks I'd done hundreds of
times before. The doors were still locked, but one of
them resisted when I tested it, like the latch hesitated
before remembering its stroke. The overhead lights took an extra
beat to come up, humming softly before stabilizing. Little things.
I blamed the hour. Christmas Eve always did strange things
to the buildings. Partial shut downs, half powered systems, spaces
core between open and closed annoyances you only notice when
you're in a rush. I logged the checks and started
down the corridor toward the exit. When the hand held
chimed a motion sensor, single trigger, same floor and wing
the room I just come from. I stopped listening. The
air felt thick, as if the building were holding onto
sound rather than letting it travel. I waited for the
follow up ping that would mean an actual problem. It
never came. I stood longer than I meant to, scanning doorways,
watching the light panels, listening to my own breathing echo
back a little louder than it should have. Eventually I
moved on, standing still never fixed anything, but as I walked,
the lot no longer felt empty, occupied in a way
I couldn't pin, like something had arrived early and was
waiting for the rest of the night to catch up.
By the time the next cluster of notifications hit, I
could feel it in my shoulders before I saw it
on the device. Two critical tasks, different buildings, overlapping windows.
Not impossible, but tight enough that I had to choose
an order and commit to it without second guessing. I
checked the distances pictured the roots and went the one
that would bottle neck faster. If I missed it, I
broke into a jug again, boots slapping harder than I
liked against concrete. The air felt colder, now sharp in
my lungs. I keyed in the first reset with seconds despare,
waited for the confirmation tone, then turned and ran. The
second task was on the far side of the lot,
past loading bays that echoed my footsteps back at me
at odd intervals. My hand held vibrated as the tolerance
window narrowed. I vaulted a low barrier I usually walked around,
felt something twinge in my calf and ignored it. I
made it barely the indicator flipped from pending to green.
Just as the timer expired. I leaned against the wall
for a moment, hands braced on my knees, swept cooling
under my jacket. My pulls took its time settling. This
was the part of the job. No one talked about,
the quiet aftermath, when your body realized how close you'd
cut it. I locked both tasks, fingers moving faster than
my breathing. When the timestamps populated, I frowned. Both were
off by a minute, early on one, late on the other.
I checked my watch, then the hand held. I corrected
the times, manually, added a brief note, and watched the
system except the edit without comment, green across the board
clean again. I told myself it would be fine. Both
were complete, just off. It was my fault, Christmas Eve
doing what it always did, compressing everything until even small
errors felt loud. I moved on. A few minutes later,
during a slower stretch, I pulled the log back up
to reassure myself the original incorrect times were there again,
sitting where my corrections should have been. Then the alert stopped,
just ended mid cycle, like someone had cut me from
the system. My hand held stayed lit in my palm screen,
ready waiting for the next instruction that didn't come. I
kept walking anyway, Standing still on a sight this size
felt worse than moving. The lot had changed its feel.
The buildings were where they'd always been, but the air
pressed closer, sound behaved differently. My boots still struck concrete,
but the noise didn't travel the way it should have.
It fell short, absorbed, as if the space around me
had decided it didn't need to carry anything any more.
This had never happened before, on a normal shift or
a Christmas Eve one. The only difference this time was
mistiming a few tasks, a drastic change for something so small.
I slowed without meaning to. The emptiness I relied on
was gone. In its place was something fuller, the sense
you get in a crowded room when everyone goes quiet
at once, no movement, just the awareness that you weren't
alone in the way you were supposed to be. I
told myself it was stress, a long shift, compressing my perception.
Still I stopped behind me. Something else stopped too, a
pressure change, subtle but exact, like a breath being held
the same time as mine. I didn't turn around. I
stood there, listening to my own pulse, suddenly conscious of
how much space my body took up. Whatever was moving
wasn't wondering. It had matched my pace, and now he
was waiting. Lights dipped across the lot like someone had
put a thumb over the lens of the night, but
not evenly. One warehouse went dusky, while the office block
stayed bright. The loading bay fluorescence thin to a weak,
sickly glow. It didn't look like a power cut. It
looked like the lot had started making decisions about where
the light was worth spending. I checked my hand held
out of habit, expecting a cascade of tasks to explain it.
The screen stayed calm, no faults or prompts. That was
when I heard the sound, a slow drag through the
corridor outside the nearest offices, coming from an especially darkened hallway,
heavy enough to raise the hairs in my arms, steady
enough to feel deliberate. It wasn't the staccato clatter of
a loose trolley wheel or the skitter of windblown debris.
It had weight, It had rhythm, like something moving with authority.
Despite the fact that I should be alone, I held
still and listened, trying to place it. The drag continued,
then it paused. The corridor's glass panel gave me a
slice of reflection, and for a second it offered me
a shape tall, folded forward, too much height, packed into
a hunched frame. Something rose from its head in branching silhouettes,
antler like, catching the weak light and brushing near the
ceiling tiles. As it passed. The joints didn't swing like
a man's. They hinged. They clicked into the next position,
as if the body had rules different from mine. My
mouth went dry so fast it hurt. I backed into
the closest office, without taking my eyes off that pain,
turned the thumb latch and slowly drew the dead bolt.
The locks sounded tiny in the quiet, and I prayed
that the sound didn't travel to that thing. The dragging
resumed closer. Now the sound didn't hurry or search. It
traveled straight, like it didn't have to search and would
find me. Eventually, I braced my hand against the desk
to steady myself. My radio sat on my vest, silent
like it had been all night. Then it woke up.
A clean, mechanical phrase played to the speaker, flat official
old enough that I recognized it before I understood it
fail safe access available. I hadn't heard that line before.
When I was brief on the fail safe, it was
assumed among staff that it was some sort of hardware
reset in case shut downs went wrong and bugged the system.
But seeing glimpses of that thing stalking the hallways, I
prayed to God it would deal with that. The problem was,
the fail safe wasn't in this office. It was in
the central security hub, in its seal case, where it
sat untouched for as long as I'd worn the uniform.
The dragging stopped right outside the door, and then the
door took on a new weight. The handle didn't twitch,
nor was it being bashed in. The pressure arrived the
way someone leans their shoulder into a wall to listen
through it, casual yet intimate, certain you're staying put. I
stood there with my hand hovering over my radio, my
other hand still on the desk. The pressure and the
door stayed steady like it had all the time in
the world, and it was just the matter of time
before it got in, So I stayed as still as possible.
I figured it must have picked up the small vibrations
when the radio sounded, but I didn't turn it off.
I didn't risk an ounce of sound, knowing it was
just outside the door. My face was tense from only
breathing in short, shallow gulps, hard to do with my
heart rates spiking. I waited until the pressure in the
office door e the stress and the door relieved, as
if it too was taking a breath of relief. When
I heard it lumber away, I moved. I didn't think
in words. I followed habit left, turned past the break room,
down the service stairs, two at a time. Bad swipe
I'd done a thousand times without locking. The central hub
was three buildings over, and I took the shortest internal route,
cutting through corridors meant for carts and maintenance crews. I
kept my pace steady, running burned oxygen and made noise
and noise carried, so I was brisk, but still careful.
The handheld stayed quiet in my grip, its screen glowing uselessly.
Still no tasks that scared me more than if it
had been screaming. A task would give me hope that
I had some agency in what was going on, But
I was at the mercy of the unknown. I caught
sight of it on the way at the far end
of the loading corridor, where the emergency lights cast long shadows.
Something tall cross between them, its outline breaking into angles
where joints shouldn't bend. It moved with weight, each step,
deliberate hoofs striking concrete with a sound I felt through
my boots. I dodged between doorways, making sure not to
stay too long and linear lines of sight. However, from
all my docking and crouch walking, my phone slipped out
of my pocket, landing with a sharp clatter. Before I
had chanced to pick it up. The sound staggered toward me.
I was forced to flee as quietly as possible to
a hiding spot. From there, I heard what I didn't
want to hear, a glassy crunch. My phone was its
first victim, and I was terrified i'd be the next.
Another glimpse of it came in a reflection chron trim
on a fork left polished smooth by years of hands,
A silhouette behind me, crowned with branching shapes that scraped
pipes along the ceiling. When I turned, the space was empty,
but the smell lingered cold air, old hay. Something burned.
The sentral hob door came into view, and my chest
tightened with relief so hard it almost slowed me down.
I slipped inside, locked it, and crossed straight to the
wall mounted case. The veil safe gray metal, unlabeled a
red seal I'd only ever seen intact. Training videos were
never specific on what it did, treated it like a
theoretical something for storms, riots and blackouts that never came.
My hands shook as I broke the seal and pulled
the handle, but my heart sank. Nothing happened, The lights
didn't change, The creature still wondered. My radio stayed quiet.
There was no feedback that it had done anything. The
impact came a second later. The outer office wall blowed
inward with a deep, wet thud that rattled the fixtures
and sent dust raining from the ceiling tiles. Glass flixed
but held. Something dragged across it, slowly testing learning the boundary.
I backed into the inner office and locked myself in
just as the wall shuddered again, harder this time. I
had just enough time to think that I'd made it
worse when a sound ripped through the night above us.
It wasn't an alarm or anything I could identify from
years of working this job. The sound from above grew fast,
close enough that my teeth rattled Before I could make
sense of it. It sounded vast, tearing through the air
at impossible speed, followed by a concussive impact that shook
the building to its bones. The building shuddered, as if
something immense had struck the roof and transferred its weight
straight through the structure. The pressure against the walls stopped.
Whatever was haunting me made a sound I hadn't heard yet.
The pressure against the wall vurnished. Whatever had been leaning there,
pulled back with sudden urgency, and a sound tore out
of it, high and sharp, stripped of patience, panic, unmistakable,
and raw. Then came footsteps, each one landed with deliberate force,
heavy enough to throw through the walls, too slow to
be chasing, too confident to be cautious. The hallway should
not have been able to hold that much weight, but
it did, groaning under the approach, and then stranger still laughter, low,
full and unafraid. If this was some sort of military intervention,
I imagined, i'd hear the chirps of radios, the clicks
of rapid boots on the ground in perfect unison to
meet the creature with structure. The laughter didn't make sense.
It rolled through the corridor like a presence rather than
a sound, and the thing I'd been running from answered
it with another shriek. Closer. Now desperate, I heard it
searched forward. There was one impact, a single catastrophic collision
that slammed through the building and left the lights swinging
on their mounts. I braced for another, holding my breath,
waiting for whatever survived to finish the job. Nothing followed.
The footsteps moved away, unhurried, fading with the weight of
something that knew it had already won. Was that all
it took? A creature that curled to move through tall
hallways enough strength the bore a wall just by leaning
beaten in one motion. I waited longer than I needed to,
long enough for my hands to stopped shaking, for the
silence to settle into something that felt final. When I
finally opened the door, the corridor had changed. A blackened
smear streaked across the wall and floor, as if something
had been burned down to residue in a single motion.
At its center sat a small, dark lump brittle and uneven,
like a piece of coal. Beside it rested a box,
bright paper, clean edges, a ribbon tied carefully at the top.
A tag hung from it. Hand written on it was
my name, in neat cursive. I stood there, staring, my
pulse loud in my ears, unable to reconcile the violence
with the care placed beside it, and against every instinct
I had left, I moved toward the nearest window. I
braced for the worst, and finally looked outside. As I did,
I heard the rumbling from on top of the building,
as whatever landed prepared to leave. As I looked up,
it was already pulling away into the clouds, just leaving.
It moved with no need for urgency, confident it had
finished this task, without needing to double check. What I
saw went beyond anything I was expecting. It wasn't a chinook,
a fighter jet, or anything remotely military. It was abroad,
colorful shape sliding across the night, trailing faint sparkles that
drifted and faded before they reached the ground. Whatever pulled
it flew in formation, silhouettes, rising and falling together with
a childlike familiarity that made my chest tighten helming. The
vessel was a portly figure dressed in all red. The
same laugh he chortled in the hallway, echoing in the sky.
I stood there longer than I should have, trying to
understand what I was looking at, before it disappeared entirely.
The sights settled around me, lights evened out, the low
mechanical hum returned to its normal register. Censers stopped tripping.
The lap felt empty again, properly empty, the way it
always did when things were working. I went back and
saw the box still sitting where it had been left,
ribbon unwrinkled, my name written neatly on the tag in
ink that hadn't bled or smudged. I poked it. At first,
With everything that had happened, I was dubious of strange surprises,
but when I saw that it was docile, I gently
opened it up. What I saw inside surprised me. It
was a brand new phone, same make as the one
I'd just lost, but a newer model. I flipped it
over a few times, and everything checked out, just an
ordinary new device. Nothing eldered about it, no devil's deal catch.
I put it in my pack, and ready to leave,
I logged out early, noted nothing unusual in the report,
and went home with my hands still shaking on the
steering wheel. Over the next few days, I heard small
things through the usual channels, late shipman's minor timing errors,
conflicting access logs that couldn't be reconciled, nothing anyone wanted
to dig into during the holidays, nothing that justified a
call back. I told no one what happened. I didn't
try to explain it to myself out loud either. Every
version I came up with collapsed under its own weight,
the chart being secret container procedures, some kind of elaborate
fel safe test I hadn't been cleared to know about,
and what I could only perceive as the universal vision
of Santa Claus rescuing me from some eldre's crampus. To
call it unbelievable would be an understatement, a fraction of
the story, enough to get me sent away from mental help.
When I came in for my next shift, everything normal.
The checklist was unchanged, the site map was the same,
the central hub was quiet. I was ready to settle
down for another year of an easy job, but out
of curiosity, I checked the fail safe, which last I
saw was used up. Seal broken, it sat in its case.
A new seal intact stayed uslike green. It had been reset,
ready to be used in another emergency. There was no
note or message from management, no acknowledgment that Christmas Eve
had been anything other than another shift. However, the fact
that it had been reset meant that someone knew how
the system worked, someone knew when it failed and knew
how to correct it. I still don't know what the
job was really for. I own. Let me know that
I did it, that something went wrong, and that something
else showed up to fix it,