The Hollow Aisle of August

On the last Friday of August in 1997, I walked into the cavernous superstore on the outskirts of a town called Millbrook, a place that seemed to exist only for the benefit of the strip malls and their parking lots. I had moved back from a short, disastrous stint in Ohio, and my mother, in her usual way, had let me crash in her spare room while I sorted out my life. The retail job I’d landed was supposed to be a temporary stopgap, a way to earn back the money I’d lost when I quit my previous position to follow a man who turned out to be more ghost than boyfriend. My regional manager, a woman with eyes like chips of ice, had assigned me to the store in Millbrook, claiming it was a ‘high-volume’ location and she needed someone with my ‘resilience.’ I should have been flattered. Instead, I felt like I was being sent to a distant outpost, a place where the fluorescent lights buzzed with a frequency that made my teeth ache.

The store itself was a monstrous box of concrete and glass, its vast interior a labyrinth of tall shelves stocked with every conceivable product. The back-to-school rush was in full swing, and the aisles were clogged with frantic parents and sullen teenagers, their carts overflowing with binders, notebooks, and the latest sneakers. From the moment I stepped onto the sales floor, I felt a wrongness in the air, a heaviness that pressed down on my shoulders. The intercom crackled with static, and the overhead lights flickered in a rhythm that seemed almost intentional, as if the building itself was breathing. My staff was a skeleton crew of part-timers, most of them high schoolers who looked like they’d rather be anywhere else, and they moved with a sluggishness that bordered on defiance. The store manager, a man named Gerald, had also come from Ohio, but he was a different breed. He had the hollow look of a man who had been drained of something essential, and he rarely spoke, preferring to wander the aisles with a clipboard, muttering to himself. I tried to engage him, to ask where the extra stock was, but he just stared at me with a vacant smile that never reached his eyes.

The first sign of trouble came that evening, after the last customers had been herded out and the entrance doors were locked with a clang that echoed through the empty halls. I was in the back office, trying to reconcile the day’s numbers, which were inexplicably short by nearly two hundred dollars. The drawer had been counted three times, but the total remained the same, a stubborn gap that made no sense. A chill ran down my spine, and I looked up to see Gerald standing in the doorway, his silhouette blocking the light from the hallway. He didn’t say a word, just pointed a long finger toward the floor, toward the aisles that were now dark and silent. I followed his gesture, and for a moment I thought I saw a figure moving between the shelves, a shadow that was too tall, too thin, to be one of my employees. I blinked, and it was gone. Gerald turned and walked away, leaving me with a cold knot in my stomach.

Over the next few days, the store began to work against me in small, insidious ways. Prices on the shelf tags would be altered overnight, showing incorrect amounts that led to angry confrontations at the registers. Products would be found in the wrong departments, displaced in a pattern that seemed arbitrary but was too deliberate to be random. My staff started calling in sick, their voices shaky and apologetic, giving explanations that were too vague. A young cashier named Maya confided in me that she had seen a woman in a long coat standing by the dairy case, but when she approached to ask if she needed help, the woman had vanished, leaving only a faint scent of mildew. I tried to rationalize it, told myself that we was just under stress, that the store was too big and we was all on edge. But then, late one night, after I had sent everyone home, I decided to do a walkthrough of the store, to make sure everything was in order. The silence was absolute, broken only by the hum of the freezers. I found a single aisle, the one with the office supplies, that was colder than the rest. The air seemed to crystallize around me, and I saw my breath plume out in a white cloud. At the end of the aisle, near the back wall, there was a shelf that had been cleared of its merchandise, leaving a gap that looked like a doorway. On the floor, someone had arranged a row of empty boxes, each one labeled with a date, all past, all before the store had even been built.

The atmosphere grew thicker, and I began to feel a presence, a pressure against my skin, as if something was pressing in on me from all sides. I heard a whisper, so faint it was barely a hiss, and I could have sworn it was calling my name. But I was alone. I spun around, and for a split second, I saw her again—the figure I had glimpsed earlier. This time she was closer, her face obscured by a veil of dark hair, her form shimmering like heat rising off asphalt. She reached out a hand, fingers unnaturally long, and gestured toward the back of the aisle, toward a stack of boxes that had appeared as if from nowhere. I knew, with a certainty that made my blood run cold, that those boxes contained something I did not want to see. I backed away, my heart pounding, and when I reached the end of the aisle, I looked back, and she was gone.

I wanted to quit. I wanted to run out and never return. But my mother’s bills were due, and I had nowhere else to go. So I stayed, and I tried to become invisible, to do my job and ignore the creeping wrongness. But the store seemed to feed on my fear. The hours I spent there stretched, and the lines between the day and night blurred. I began to see her everywhere—in the reflection of a TV screen, in the corner of my eye, in the face of every customer that walked through the door. And then, one afternoon, I found a note tucked into the cash register, written on a scrap of receipt paper. The handwriting was shaky and old, and it read: ‘She wants the back stock. She wants what we took.’ I recognized the handwriting as Gerald’s, but when I confronted him, he denied writing it. And that night, Gerald disappeared. I found his clipboard abandoned in the stockroom, his car still in the parking lot, but he was gone without a trace.

The police searched, but they found nothing. The store was closed for a week, and I was questioned, but they chalked it up to an employee walking off the job. I should have left then, but I was too shaken, too scared to be alone with my thoughts. I think a part of me felt guilty, like I had somehow caused all of this. When the store reopened, I was back, because I had no other choice. The staff was even thinner now, and the customers seemed to sense something wrong, avoiding eye contact, their footsteps quick and nervous. The last straw came on a Saturday, the busiest day of the week. A mother came to the customer service desk, her face pale, holding a toy that she said her daughter had found in the toy aisle. It was a small plastic doll, but its head had been twisted around, and glued to the bottom was a piece of paper with my name written in red ink. I looked at the doll, and I felt a scream building in my throat. I fled to the back room, and I locked the door behind me. I sat on the floor, breathing in the cold air, and I knew I couldn’t stay another minute.

But as I sat there, the lights flickered, and the air grew colder still. I heard a sound, faint and rhythmic, like footsteps on concrete. I looked up, and she was there, standing in the doorway, her head tilted at an impossible angle. The fluorescent light above her buzzed, and I saw that her eyes were not eyes but empty sockets, black as pitch. She opened her mouth, and a sound came out that was not a voice, but a low, keening wail that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. I scrambled to my feet, but my legs wouldn’t move. She pointed a hand toward the shelf behind me, and I turned to see a row of cardboard boxes, each one sealed with tape that had my name written on it. I knew that if I opened those boxes, I would find things I had lost—the photos of my father who I had never known, the letters my ex-boyfriend had sent, the childhood dreams I had abandoned. I also knew that she wanted them, that she fed on loss, and that she had been waiting here ever since the store was built on a ground that had been contaminated with something old and hungry.

I closed my eyes, and I made a decision. I would not open the boxes. I would not give her what she wanted. I felt a shift in the air, a change in pressure, and when I opened my eyes, she was gone. The boxes were gone too, and the lights were back to their normal hum. I slowly stood up, my legs shaky, and I walked out of the store into the blinding sunlight. I never went back. I quit over the phone, leaving a message that I wouldn’t be returning. The strange thing is, a few months later, I read in the news that the Millbrook store had burned to the ground, a fire that started in the back stockroom. The cause was never determined. They found Gerald’s body in the ruins, but they said he had died of a heart attack long before the flames reached him. I sometimes think of that store, of the woman in the long coat, and I wonder if she is still there, waiting for someone else to claim what she left behind. And I wonder if I will ever stop hearing that wail in the quiet moments, a reminder that some doors, once opened, can never be truly shut.