The Inventory of Unseen Things

It had been nearly a year since I last posted anything on this forum. Not because nothing happened, but because nothing happened for a long time. I’d turned twenty, moved into a cramped studio above a closed bakery in the old mill district of Havenport, and taken a job at a secondhand electronics store called Current Surplus. The place smelled of ozone and dust, and the fluorescent lights hummed a perpetual B-flat. The owner, Mr. Kellerman, was a wiry man in his sixties who rarely spoke, preferring to write notes on a yellow legal pad. He hired me on the spot when I told him I could rewire a vintage amp. For nine months, my life was a loop of inventory spreadsheets, faulty toasters, and the occasional customer who wanted to sell their dead relative’s stereo. I thought I’d left the hauntings behind. I was wrong.

The first hint came on a Thursday, September 14th, my one-year anniversary with the shop. I was in the back room, surrounded by shelves of dusty VCRs and tangled cables. Mr. Kellerman had gone to the bank, and I was sorting a box of donated cassettes. That’s when I noticed a faint odor, like burnt sugar and old pennies. It was familiar, the same smell that had preceded every encounter back at my father’s house. I froze, cassette in hand. The humming lights flickered. A single cassette, labeled only with a date—08/14/1997—slid off the top of the pile and landed at my feet. I picked it up. The plastic was warm. I knew better than to play it, but I did anyway, because I was alone and the silence was worse. The tape was blank for the first few seconds, then a voice—not mine, not Mr. Kellerman’s—spoke in a whisper: ‘The phantom presses are waiting.’ I snapped the tape in half. The smell vanished.

I told no one. I convinced myself it was a prank, maybe a bad batch of tapes from a storage unit. But over the next week, the inventory began to change. Items would shift positions when I wasn’t looking. A vintage clock radio moved from the display window to the back door. A stack of vinyl records rearranged alphabetical order. I started keeping a log, noting every anomaly. On September 20th, I came in to find a Polaroid on the counter. It showed a blurry figure standing in the middle of the shop, but the figure was transparent, and the background was not our store. It looked like an old warehouse, with pallets of boxes and a single hanging bulb. On the back, in pencil, was written: ‘You took the tape. Return it.’ I had discarded the tape in the dumpster behind the shop. That night, I fished it out, but it was gone.

The next morning, Mr. Kellerman called me into his office. For the first time, he spoke aloud. His voice was thin, like paper. ‘There’s a system,’ he said. ‘The shop is a nexus. You must not engage. You must not touch what is not for sale.’ He handed me a key to a metal cabinet in the back that I’d never noticed before. ‘When you are ready, open this. But you will not like what you find.’ Then he went back to his ledger. That afternoon, a customer came in. He was tall, gaunt, wearing a long coat despite the heat. He asked if we had any blank cassettes. I said we were out. He smiled, and his teeth were too many. ‘The phantom presses,’ he said, ‘are always hungry.’ He left without buying anything. I didn’t sleep that night.

I opened the cabinet on the 22nd. Inside were dozens of tape boxes, each labeled with a date and a location. One was labeled ‘Havenport—My Apartment—09/13/2017.’ That was the day I had moved in. I opened that box. Inside was a single cassette, unlabeled. I felt a cold breeze come from nowhere, and the overhead light dimmed. The cassette in my hand began to vibrate, and I heard a sound like a thousand whispers rising. I placed it in an old player on the shelf, and hit play. Static, then a voice that was unmistakably mine, but older, harsher: ‘You thought you were free. But the inventory never ends. Every item you sell, every discarded thing, it all feeds the press. You are the new caretaker.’ The player clicked off. The smell of burnt sugar filled the room.

The store has been closed for three days. Mr. Kellerman vanished. His ledger is missing. I have not been able to leave the building. The front door opens onto a street that is not the one I came from—a street of abandoned storefronts, each with a glowing sign that reads ‘Closed.’ The back room now leads to a vast warehouse, identical to the one in the Polaroid, filled with shelves of tapes, all labeled with dates from the future. I hear footsteps on the corrugated metal roof. A man in a long coat stands at the far end, watching me. He gestures to a shelf labeled ‘Incoming.’ I see a tape with my name on it. The date is next week.

I am writing this from the break room, using the shop’s laptop, because the internet still works, somehow. I have bricked myself in. If you find this post, do not come looking for me. Do not buy old electronics at surplus stores. And if you ever see a cassette with no label, leave it. Burn the building. Let the phantom presses starve.