The Hollow Shift

I’d taken the night watch at the old Meridian Freight Depot, a sprawling complex of loading docks and rusted rail lines on the outskirts of Tucson. The job was simple: monitor the security feeds, patrol the grounds, and log any anomalies. My predecessor, a wiry man named Cal, had trained me for two weeks before moving to a day shift at a cleaner facility. He’d been cagey about the night hours, muttering something about ‘dead zones’ and ‘the cold that creeps.’ I chalked it up to superstition, the kind of talk you get from men who’ve spent too many years in empty buildings.

But after a month, I started to notice things. The first was a cold spot near the western loading bay, a pocket of air that felt like stepping into a walk-in freezer, even in the hundred-degree summer nights. The temperature would drop twenty degrees in a step, and the feeling lingered, like an invisible presence watching. Then came the lights: brief, flickering glows in the far corners of the warehouse, always when the main switches were off. They moved too fast to be flashlights, darting between shelves like fireflies possessed.

I told myself it was refractions from passing cars or faulty wiring. But then the mirrors in my truck started betraying me. Reflections that lagged a beat behind my movements, or showed shapes that weren’t there when I turned to look. Once, I caught a glimpse of a tall, thin figure standing behind me in the rearview, but when I spun around, the lot was empty. The porta-potty door—the one by the rail spur—would swing open and shut on its own, creaking in the desert wind, but there was no wind that night. I began to log everything, half-convinced I was losing my mind.

One night, Cal showed up to relieve me, even though it wasn’t my shift change. He had that look—the one you get when you’ve been chewing on something for too long. He sat in the passenger seat of my truck, and without preamble, he asked, ‘You seen the lights yet? The cold spots? The stuff in the mirrors?’ I froze. He recited my log back to me, every detail, as if he’d written it himself. ‘It’s the depot,’ he said, his voice low. ‘It’s hungry. It’s been here longer than the concrete. You get close to the hollow places, and it starts to see you.’

We walked the yard together, him pointing out dead zones where the cold pooled, and the spots where lights had no business being. He told me about the history: the depot was built on an old burial ground, and the rail line had been the site of a forgotten massacre in the 1880s. ‘This place doesn’t just store freight,’ he said. ‘It stores something else. Something that wants to be let out.’ As he spoke, the lights grew brighter, more insistent, and the cold intensified until I could see my breath. Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. Cal looked at me, his face pale, and said, ‘It knows you now. It’ll follow you home.’ He left without another word, and I never saw him again.

The next night, I came back for my shift, but something was different. The warehouse felt alive, humming with a low vibration I could feel in my teeth. The security monitors flickered with static, and in the fuzz, I saw shapes—too many limbs, eyes that weren’t eyes. I walked the perimeter, and every step I took, I felt watched. The cold spots had multiplied, scattered like drop of ice across the concrete. The lights were no longer fleeting; they formed patterns, almost like writing, but in a language I didn’t know. I tried to leave, but my truck wouldn’t start. The mirrors showed me not my own reflection, but a hundred versions of myself, all smiling. I was trapped.

I’ve been here for what feels like days, but my watch says only an hour has passed. The phones are dead, the radio gives only static. Cal was right: I got too close to the hollow places. Now the depot has me, and it’s slowly pulling me in. I can feel it in the way the floorboards shift, in the way the shadows stretch toward me. It’s not malevolent, I realize, it’s just lonely—a hungry emptiness that’s been waiting for company. And I’m the only one who sees it. So I keep walking the docks, logging the weirdness, because the moment I stop, it’ll find a way in. And I’m afraid that when it does, I’ll become one of those shadows, darting too fast to be human, and the next night watchman will see me in the corner of his eye, always just out of reach.