The Eighth Work Order

I never thought I’d miss the quiet hum of a dead engine. My name is Marcus, and I’ve been a mechanic at Ironhorse Cycles, a custom motorcycle shop nestled in the outskirts of Denver, for the past three years. It’s a busy place, always roaring with the sound of bikes and the clang of tools, but never in a million years did I expect to find something supernatural lurking among the grease and grime. The shop itself is an old warehouse, repurposed and expanded, with a main garage floor, a spray booth for paint jobs, and a cramped office in the back. We’re a team of six, plus our boss, Frank, who rarely leaves his office. It’s tight quarters, and a typical day is a frantic blur of rebuilds and custom work, but we all love it.

Last Tuesday was particularly chaotic. We had a rush of summer riders wanting their bikes tuned for the season, and the garage was a symphony of wrenching and grinding until late in the evening. At around 6 PM, as I was wiping down a freshly painted fender, I noticed a stack of pink sticky notes on the workbench. Now, Frank is a stickler for paperwork, but these were different. Scrawled in messy handwriting, each note had a different order number and a few cryptic words like ‘check the fuel line’ or ‘clutch needs attention.’ I thought it was just a prank, one of the guys trying to mess with my head after a long day. I crumpled the notes and tossed them in the trash, thinking nothing of it.

The next morning, however, the notes were back, neatly arranged in a line on the same workbench. ‘Someone’s got too much time on their hands,’ I muttered, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that they weren’t a joke. The handwriting was sloppy, almost frantic, and the orders seemed to correspond to bikes that were already completed and waiting for pickup. I asked my coworker, Lena, if she had seen who placed them, but she just shrugged and said she assumed it was me. That day, I decided to ignore the notes, but as I walked by the customer pickup area, I noticed a new bike that wasn’t there before, a shiny black custom chopper with a note stuck to its seat: ‘Check the throttle body.’ The bike wasn’t in the system; it had no work order. When I ran my hand over the seat, I felt a cold spot, like the bike had been sitting in a freezer.

Later that night, as I was closing up, I saw a faint outline of a man in the reflection of the showroom window. He was tall, wearing a dark hoodie, and he just stood there, pointing at the bike. I spun around, but the showroom was empty. The bike’s engine coughed to life on its own, idling roughly, then the lights flickered. I killed the ignition, but the bike revved, and the revving turned into a ghostly wail that echoed through the garage. The door to the office slammed shut, and I heard a whispered phrase, barely audible: ‘Fix it, and it will stop.’ I sprinted out of there, not even bothering to lock up.

The next day, I confronted Frank about the phantom bike. He laughed it off, saying I was overworked. But when I showed him the notes, he turned pale and dropped his coffee. ‘Where did you find those?’ he stammered. ‘On the bench,’ I said. He glanced at the pickup area, then back at the notes. ‘We need to sell that bike,’ he said under his breath. I pressed him, but he refused to explain, just told me to finish the scheduled work and leave it alone.

But the pranks escalated. On Thursday, I found a toolbox with a rusty chain wrapped around it, cold to the touch. Inside, instead of sockets, there were old photographs of a mechanic I’d never met, all covered in grease and cracked. The same day, I received a phone call from the front desk, but the line was dead, and when I looked at the caller ID, it read ‘Unknown’ and the number was a string of zeros.

By Friday, I was on edge, and the rest of the guys were getting spooked too. The black bike remained in the corner, untouched, but its engine would occasionally turn over on its own, filling the garage with a low growl. I decided to take a closer look, ignoring the warning in my gut. The throttle body was indeed gummed up with a thick, black sludge that smelled like burnt honey. As I cleaned it, I felt a cold breath on my neck, and a heavy pressure on my shoulders, as if someone was watching me. I glanced in the side mirror of the bike and saw a faint, gaunt face staring back at me.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I did some digging in the shop’s old records and found a name: a mechanic named Hector who had worked here in the ’90s. He was hired after the original owner, but one day he just vanished. The notes in the logbook said he was ‘relieved of duty,’ but there was no further explanation. The date of his last day was exactly twenty years to the day before the notes first appeared.

On Saturday, I came in early, determined to solve this. As I walked into the shop, I found the black bike with its engine torn apart on the workbench, as if someone had started a repair and vanished mid-task. The parts were arranged in a perfect circle, and in the center was an old, yellowed note that read: ‘The last job never ends.’ I felt a chill as I realized the bike was the one Hector had been working on before he disappeared. The shop’s previous owner had sold it as scrap, but here it was, back again.

I know I should have walked away, but I couldn’t. I gathered every piece of the engine and, with trembling hands, I began to reassemble it. As I turned the final bolt, the overhead lights flickered and a deep voice whispered, ‘Thank you.’ I turned around, and there he was, a translucent figure covered in grease, his eyes hollow. He pointed at a dusty shelf in the back, where I saw a set of unused work orders dated twenty years ago. ‘My last job,’ he said, ‘is finished. You’re free.’ And with that, he faded, leaving only the scent of oil and a cold emptiness.

I quit that job the following Monday. I never told my fiancé or my little brother the real reason; I just said I needed a change. But sometimes, when I’m driving at night, I see a black bike in my rearview mirror, and I hear that whisper: ‘Every shop has an eighth mechanic.’ I’ve learned to live with it, but I never touch a motorcycle without checking the work orders.