The Floor That Ate the Light

Before the call centers colonized the old textile mill, it had been a place of humming looms and dust-filled sunbeams. Now, the mill’s vast floors were carved into cubicle warrens, and the air smelled of stale coffee and ozone. I’d worked the night shift for two years, long enough to learn the building’s moods, its groans and settling sighs. But the fifth floor was different. The fifth floor was where the light always seemed a little dimmer, where the fluorescent tubes flickered in a syncopated rhythm that made your eyes ache.

One Tuesday, I came in early, as I often did, to snag a workstation near the window—a luxury in that sea of gray partitions. I settled in, booting up my computer, the glow of the screen casting pale shapes on my face. My colleagues trickled in, their usual chatter a low murmur. I was adjusting my headset when I saw her: a young girl in a faded yellow dress, skipping from the elevator bank toward the back of my bay. She was too small to be an employee, too bright to be real. Her hair was a tangle of black curls, and she left no footprints on the dusty carpet. She vanished behind a pillar, and I felt a cold draft wash over my ankles.

I shook my head, convincing myself it was a trick of the light. But my hands trembled as I typed. Throughout the shift, I kept glancing to the back, half-expecting to see her again. During my break, I mentioned it to Marco, a grizzled team lead who’d been there since the call center opened. He went pale, his coffee cup frozen halfway to his lips. ‘You saw the girl in yellow?’ he whispered. ‘Don’t go back there. That’s where the floor ends.’

The floor was a myth among the night crew—a tale of a story that didn’t exist, a space between the fourth and sixth floors that appeared in the building’s blueprints but not in the elevator’s buttons. Rumor had it that a girl had died when the mill was still running, caught in a loom’s gears, and her ghost now wandered the hidden floor, seeking an exit. I’d always dismissed it as a ghost story, but now I wasn’t so sure.

The next night, I brought a flashlight. I intended to explore the stairwell, to prove to myself that there was no fifth-and-a-half floor. The stairwell was dim, the concrete walls covered in peeling paint and old graffiti. I climbed past the fourth floor landing, and the steps continued. I’d never noticed that before—the fifth floor should have been reached after one flight. But I climbed two flights, and still no exit. At the top, I found a door with a rusted push bar. It opened onto a corridor that stretched into darkness, the air thick with the smell of rot and damp wool.

I stepped inside, my flashlight beam sweeping across empty cubicles—older models, clunky with CRT monitors, their screens glowing with a static that seemed to pulse like a heartbeat. On the desks, there were personal effects: coffee mugs, family photos, a child’s drawing of a sun. It was as if the workers had just stepped away, but a layer of dust coated everything, undisturbed for decades. I walked deeper, my footsteps echoing too loudly. I passed a whiteboard with a half-erased message: ‘SHE WANDERS PAST MIDNIGHT.’ And then I heard it—a giggle, light and playful, coming from behind me.

I spun around, my heart hammering. The girl from the night before stood at the end of the aisle, her yellow dress now stained with dark blotches. Her face was obscured in shadow, but I could see her smile, too wide, too white. ‘You came,’ she said, her voice a whisper that seemed to come from all around. ‘I’ve been waiting for someone to see me.’ I backed away, but the floor beneath me gave way, and I fell into a void of blackness. When I came to, I was lying on the cold tile of the main floor, my flashlight gone, my clothes damp with sweat. My colleagues were staring at me, their faces pale. ‘You were missing for three days,’ Marco said. ‘We thought you were dead.’

But I wasn’t dead. I was marked. Ever since that night, I see the girl everywhere—in the reflection of my monitor, in my peripheral vision, at the edge of my desk. She’s not malicious, just hungry. She wants me to stay on the floor that doesn’t exist, to join the other silhouettes I now see shuffling among the cubicles. I’ve told no one, but I’ve started writing a note, a warning to the next new hire who gets assigned to the back bay. Maybe they’ll believe me. Maybe they’ll avoid the door in the stairwell. But I doubt it. The light never reaches that part of the building, and the girl’s smile waits for every lost soul who wanders too close to the edge.