The Hollow Scoop

The old ice cream parlor had been closed for decades, its windows papered over with yellowed ads for flavors that had gone out of fashion. It sat at the end of a dead-end street, a relic of a summer that never came again. I knew it as the place where my grandmother worked before she died, and where her ghost supposedly lingered. I never believed it until I took the night shift at the museum across the street, tasked with cataloging artifacts from the town’s forgotten past.

One evening, as I was locking up, I saw a flicker of light behind the parlor’s boarded door. Curiosity got the better of me, and I jimmied the lock with a paperclip. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of stale vanilla and burnt sugar. The linoleum floor was cracked, and the counter was coated in a layer of dust that had settled like snow. I swept my flashlight across the room, and that’s when I heard it–a faint, rhythmic scraping, like a spoon against a metal dish.

I followed the sound to the walk-in freezer, its door slightly ajar, frost creeping out like a ghostly breath. The scraping grew louder as I approached, and I saw a small, childlike shadow hunched over a pile of frozen boxes in the corner. I called out, but the shadow only paused, then resumed its insistent scraping. I took a step closer, and the scraping stopped. The shadow turned, and in the beam of my flashlight, I saw a tiny, wizened hand holding a scoop–the kind used to shape ice cream balls–but it was old and rusted, and attached to a chain that disappeared into the darkness of the freezer.

I fled, but the images stayed with me. I returned the next night with a butcher’s knife, thinking I could confront whatever was there. The freezer door was wide open, and the air was colder than before. Inside, I found a child’s frozen footprint, small and bare, on the ice-encrusted floor. The footprint led to a hole in the back wall, just big enough for a child to crawl through. I squeezed in and found myself in a narrow tunnel, lined with what looked like hundreds of tiny scoops, each one chained to the wall, each one bearing a name scratched into its metal. And at the end of the tunnel, a room that smelled like burned sugar, where a freezer chest lay open, and inside it, a pile of spoons, all bent and twisted, with a single note in childlike handwriting: ‘You’re next.’

I tore out of there, and I never went back. But now, every night, I hear that same scraping sound, coming from my own kitchen, from the back of my own refrigerator. And I know that the hollow scoop is waiting, and it won’t stop until it’s full.