The Hollow Aisles of Redmond’s

I’d worked the evening shift at Redmond’s Grocery for three months, long enough to know that the store had its own peculiar rhythm—the hum of freezers, the flicker of a dying fluorescent, the occasional hiss of a soda fountain. But the night of the harvest moon, everything felt off. The air in the produce section was too still, the smell of spoiled lettuce hung like a blanket, and the back room, where we kept the pallets, had a chill that bit through my jacket.

My task was to rotate stock in the freezer aisle, a job I’d done a hundred times. I remember stacking boxes of frozen peas, my breath fogging, when I saw him—a tall, thin man in a dirty red apron, standing at the end of the aisle. He was facing away from me, but his posture was wrong, his shoulders too high, his neck too long. I called out, ‘Hey, we’re closed,’ but he didn’t move. I took a step closer, and he turned his head—not his body—just his head, rotating a full 180 degrees. His face was pale, with hollows where his eyes should be, and his mouth stretched into a smile that was too wide. I stumbled back, and when I blinked, he was gone.

I ran to the front, heart pounding, and found my manager, old Pete, mopping the floor. I told him what I’d seen, but he just laughed, saying it was the ‘cold-air mirages’ they warned about in training. ‘You’ll see all sorts of things in the freezer,’ he said, ‘but they’re just tricks of the light.’ I wanted to believe him, but as I passed the deli counter, I noticed the meat slicer was running, the blade spinning in a lazy circle, and there was a wet, red smear on the cutting board. I checked the time—it was 11:47 PM. Nobody was scheduled to be back there.

I decided to finish my rounds quickly, sticking to the well-lit aisles. But the lights began to flicker, one by one, down the main corridor, as if something was walking toward me, switching them off. I stood still, gripping a shelf, and when the darkness reached me, I heard a whisper—dry, like dead leaves—saying, ‘They don’t see us, do they?’ I turned to run, but my feet wouldn’t move. I looked down and saw a thin, pale hand wrapped around my ankle, rising from the floor tiles. It was cold, so cold, and it began to pull me down, through the cracks in the linoleum.

I screamed, and as if that broke the spell, the lights came back on. The hand was gone. I was standing in a puddle of melting ice cream, my legs shaking. I made it to the employee break room and locked the door, checking the corner camera feed on the small monitor. The feed showed the freezer aisle, and there he was—the man in the red apron—standing right where I had seen him. But the timestamp said 11:44, three minutes before I saw him. And as I watched, he turned his head toward the camera, and his mouth moved, forming a silent word: ‘Soon.’

I didn’t care about being fired. I ran out the back exit, the loading dock, and into the parking lot, and I drove home without looking back. I never returned to Redmond’s, and I never told anyone the full story. But sometimes, late at night, when the house is dark, I’ll catch a whiff of stale lettuce and freezer burn, and I’ll look at my reflection in the window—and for a split second, my head turns all the way around before snapping forward again.