The Cart Keeper

Dana never thought much about the old filing cart in the corner of the archive room. It was just another piece of forgotten office furniture, its wheels rusted, its metal frame dented. But when she transferred to the night shift at the Grendel County Records Annex, she started to notice things. The cart was always in the same spot, no matter how many times she moved it to reach the back shelves. And sometimes, when she was alone in the long, fluorescent-lit aisles, she’d catch a glimpse of a dark shape perched on it, legs swinging like a child’s.

The shape never moved when she turned to look, but she felt a weight on the cart, as if something heavy was resting there. Her supervisor, Marcus, dismissed her concerns. ‘It’s just the old building settling,’ he’d say, not looking up from his inventory logs. But Dana knew better. She started leaving a small digital recorder on the cart each night, hoping to catch whatever it was that lingered there. After a week of near-silence, she began to replay the files in her car, the subtle hum of the HVAC system punctuated by soft, rhythmic thuds. It sounded like bare feet kicking against metal.

One night, she decided to try a different approach. She wrote a simple question on a sticky note and placed it on the cart: ‘Who are you?’ The next morning, the note was gone. In its place was a single sheet of carbon paper, the kind used for old duplicate forms. On it, faintly, was an imprint of the words ‘I WATCH’, but they were backward, as if pressed from inside. Dana’s hands trembled as she held it to the light. She began to research the building’s history and found that the annex was once a state hospital for mentally ill offenders, and in the 1970s, a patient named Gerald had been confined to a solitary cell not far from the archive room. He was known for his obsession with the staff’s inventory carts, and he would sit on them for hours, rocking back and forth until orderlies dragged him away.

Now, as Dana’s night shifts wore on, the presence on the cart became bolder. She could feel the cold air around it, and once, when she stood too close, she heard a low breath, almost a chuckle, right by her ear. She started to speak to it, softly, as if greeting an old friend. ‘Hello, Gerald.’ The thumping stopped for a moment, then resumed with a quicker, almost excited rhythm. Dana knew she should leave, but she felt an odd connection, a pull to the forgotten souls in that building. She began to leave him small offerings: a pencil, a button, a scrap of paper with questions. Each morning, they were gone, replaced by more carbon imprints, each one more desperate: ‘LET ME OUT’, ‘STILL HERE’, ‘DO YOU SEE ME?’

One night, as Dana was preparing to close up, she found a new imprint, but it wasn’t on carbon paper. It was on her own arm, a thin red line that spelled ‘HELP’ in blocky letters. She gasped and stumbled backward, knocking over a stack of boxes. From the cart, she heard a clatter, and then a clear, wheezing voice, barely above a whisper: ‘Thank you.’ Dana froze, her heart pounding. The voice echoed in the empty room, and the cart began to rock violently on its own, the wheels squeaking against the floor. Dana grabbed her coat and ran, but as she yanked open the door, she looked back one last time. The cart was still, but a dark figure stood beside it, featureless yet somehow smiling. ‘I’ll be here when you return,’ it said.

Dana quit the next day. She never told anyone why. But sometimes, at night, she wakes to find the imprint of a hand on her shoulder, and she knows that Gerald found a way out, and he’s no longer confined to the cart. He’s with her now. And he still watches.