Chapter 1

I want to start this off by saying I’m a straight up, bonafide loser. I’m 37 years old and have managed nothing since barely graduating high school and the only reason I’m not a college dropout is because I didn’t bother to waste my or the professor’s time. I figured what’s the point in stressing over assignments when I can skip right to my college experience’s end result with a bit of hard earned gambling debt.

My point is, I’m in serious debt and have to make money fast.

With no degree and limited ambition to do anything that requires real labor, I’ve made quite the bed to lie in. If the money I needed was to be made sans-broken-knee-caps I was going to have to get creative. And get creative I did. A conquest across Indeed was deployed, extending nearly 50 embarrassing résumés to 50 different employers. 20 of those responded, only 4 of which said yes leaving me to pick the 3 that required the least work. This left my summer chock full of fun activities like work for 18 hours before going to my car and sleeping for the remaining 6 before starting the whole cycle over.

As you can imagine, I’ve been basically sleepwalking through life these past few months. That’s what I want to express to you the most in this intro to explain how weird it is that I even noticed this. The weird stuff is happening at my afternoon shift at a grocery store. I man a self-checkout at some local grocery chain. Something between a Kroger and a farmer’s market. Half of my job is showing elderly people how to function a touchscreen and the other half is keeping my eyes open till I can pass out for my 15. Basically, it’s not a job that requires a ton of brain power and I spend most of it with my mind on a planet miles away.

Until recently…

The shift is a 4pm-12am, the beginning kinda pops off but later into the dark hours of the night this grocery store turns into a ghost town. Only populated by myself and whichever stocker managed to make the shift leads shit list when schedules were being cooked up. Most of my time is spent pacing up and down the length of self checkout which opens to the source of the weirdness. Aisle 7. It’s a refrigerated aisle containing frozen pizzas, meal kits single dads get before looking over divorce papers, and maybe ghosts.

The first encounter happened around 10:30pm when I was in the middle of a very engaging pace session. The way the store works is similar to a warehouse. When no one is around the lights shut down, only coming back on when they detect motion. My pacing is as much to kill time as it is to provide myself an island of light in the sea of dead fluorescence. I’d march down the middle of self-checkout, my heel melting to toe into the tile floor till it reached the edge of my island of light, just below the hanging half hidden in stale blackness. The reflective 7 was the only part easily visible. I planted my toe and about-faced to March back towards the empty customer service desk. Once again one foot in front of the other. Slowly and deliberately moving until nearly crashing into the wall. My toe planted onto tile, my body spun to face…

I’d done this song and dance a hundred times and that many marches is enough to give your mind a passive expectation of what will be facing you when you turn around. When you see empty blackness a hundred times, shining blue feels like a punch in the face that’s hard enough to make you stumble. Luckily, I caught myself allowing me to get a good long look at aisle 7 lit up like a Christmas Tree, not a soul visible to have lit it up.

I looked at the front door to see if the path leading to it was alight as well. Nothing but inky blackness occasionally interrupted by the slices of passing headlights. Weird.

This wasn’t too interesting, to be fair. It’s not crazy that a place like this would have a faulty sensor that got tripped on occasion. Yet…

People use the term “piqued my interest” a lot but no one I talk to ever really know’s what that means. It’s something from France that equates to pricked, like a thorn. It was kinda like that. Or like my brain had a hair splinter on its foot and every second I didn’t investigate forced the needle deeper into my cerebrum. So, I walked forward to yank it free.

My body, covered in the stale sweat and grime of a hard day’s work left the white light of self-checkout to bathe within the sharp blue of the refrigerated aisle. The air was crisp and dragged cold, teasing fingers down my throat like a playful lover, tracing lines lower to my lungs. As I continued forward, however, the sensation felt differently. More alive and hostile. My skin rose in goosebumps, the air of the aisle slithered around me like the breath of a great esophagus. My own breathing matched it.

Something was off. Without realizing it, I had stopped in the center of the aisle for… minutes? Hours? Something there was, and it’s fucking crazy to say this, something within that aisle was exalted. Only there was there. Nothing but the breath of the aisle and myself.

The lights died.

Something was off. When the lights were on I could plainly see there was nothing there. But now, in the inky black, it was so clear. I was sharing the aisle with something. I could sense it as easily as I could sense the cool trails of sweat that ran down my spine. And I could feel its hostile intentions as easily as I could feel my own fear.

I began waving my arms wildly, my limbs popped and ached at the sudden exertion after hours of rest. Yet, no matter how hard swung, and jumped, and prayed. The lights stayed as they were. I snapped my head back around to the island of white light at the end of the aisle. It was right there, but somehow felt like it was miles away. Then, with a soft click, it too was gone.

I stood in an utter void. Not even the hum of the fridges surrounded me anymore. If not for the ground beneath my feet, I might have thought the nothing had swallowed me whole. And if not for that same ground, I would have never heard the unmistakable sound of hooves beating against the ground, closing the distance to me.

I ran. I didn’t know where. If I was even facing self-checkout anymore. I just knew it was away. Away from that noise. The distinct click of hooves coming in a rhythm that was distinctly not a horse. It galloped off rhythm. Two quick clicks followed by a scrape like metal against glass. Whatever it was didn’t gallop on four legs, but it was gaining all the same. My shoulder collided with the handle of a glass store making me stumble but instinct kept me moving forward off balance. Behind me, I heard that thing’s form crash against the same door, giving evidence of just how great this thing behind me was as the entire aisle rocked against its mass. I kept running. My lungs greedily snatched cold air from the void as I stumbled forward. Behind me I could see a glow. The dim, icy blue light illuminated the edges of my peripheral as the creature scuttled closer and closer. My forward movement was too fast for my legs to keep up. I was losing balance. The ground was rising to meet my face. I felt something sharp brush against my back.

My face collided with the white tile just as I was gilded in the buzzing white glow of the self-checkout as it snapped back to life. I slid several feet, a streak of bubbling blood leaking from my nose and mouth and leaving a streak across the tile leading into aisle seven. The hoofbeats were gone. The only sound was my rapid, desperate breath. With a mechanical click aisle 7 was alight with blue hues once more revealing something interesting halfway down the row.

One single glass door stood ajar by about half a foot, the interior bleeding fog across the reflective tile. I watched as slowly, a grey hand reach from inside the cooler, gripped the door and pulled it shut. My body remained motionless on the tile, eyes watching that door till finally the blue hue died and I was alone.

Since then, it visits me every night like clockwork. 10:30 rolls around, the lights come up, the aisle goes dark and I hear the hoofbeats pace the edge of 7’s darkness, just at the edge of what I can see.

Obviously, this terrifies me, but I can’t help but admit that often times I find myself wondering what’s on the other side of aisle 7’s cooler. If whatever that is can visit me, maybe I can visit it.