The Night Shift at St. Aldric’s

The move had been a blur of cardboard boxes and borrowed pickup trucks. My apartment lease had ended in March, and I was halfway through spring semester when I found myself bunking in my brother’s cramped studio above a laundromat. The hospital job, a dishwashing gig in the basement kitchen, was meant to be a stopgap, but the graveyard shift had a way of bleeding into everything. Most nights, after my shift, I’d meet up with the same group of friends at The Rusty Anchor, and we’d drown the hours in cheap beer and pool. I’d stumble home around one, too exhausted to dream, and crash until noon.

But this particular night, I decided to take it easy. Four beers over two hours, still sharp as a tack when my buddy dropped me off at the apartment at midnight. The laundromat’s fluorescent hum was the only sound as I climbed the stairs. My brother was on a night shift at the 24-hour pharmacy, so the place was empty. I wasn’t tired, so I fired up my laptop and started scrolling through job listings. After forty minutes, my eyes grew heavy, and I clicked the ‘X’ on the browser. Just as I reached for the lamp, something caught my eye in the window.

The window faced the brick wall of the adjacent building, a narrow alleyway below. But in the reflection, I saw something else: a figure standing in the doorway of my room, a dark silhouette against the dim hallway light. The shape was too tall, shoulders too broad, but the head was bent at an unnatural angle, like a broken doll. My heart hammered as I spun around, the chair scraping harsh against the floor. The doorway was empty. I heard a low chuckle, not from the room, but from inside my own skull, a sound that felt like a cold finger tracing down my spine.

I told myself it was the cheap beers, the shadows playing tricks. But when I finally drifted off, the nightmare began. I was in the hospital kitchen, but the familiar stainless steel counters were gone, replaced with rusted racks and peeling paint. The air reeked of sour milk and copper. On each rack lay a stainless steel basin filled with a viscous, grey sludge that pulsed like a heart. My job was to scrub them clean, but every time I touched the water, it rippled with no reflection, and the face in the water was not mine—it was the same broken-necked figure, grinning with a mouth full of needle-teeth.

I woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat, my brother shaking my shoulder. He was off early, his eyes wide with concern. ‘You were screaming for hours, man. I got home at six and you were thrashing so hard I thought you’d break the bed.’ I tried to laugh it off, but my throat was raw. I didn’t tell him about the figure. He went to take a shower, and I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the window. The reflection was normal now, just my pale face.

But when I walked into the bathroom, I saw it again. In the mirror, behind my brother’s back as he shaved, the figure loomed, its hands hovering near his neck. I blinked, and it was gone. My brother turned, noticing my gaze. ‘You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’ I shook my head, forcing a smile, but the image burned in my mind.

That evening, I went to work. The kitchen was quiet, the usual din of pots and clattering trays replaced by a hollow silence. The other pot washer, an older guy named Leo, was out sick, so I was alone. I started on the pile of trays, the warm water soothing my frayed nerves. Then I noticed the buckets of ‘special soak’ in the corner. Every Friday, the kitchen manager, a wiry man named Mr. Dalloway, would lock himself in the walk-in and emerge with a bucket of greyish liquid, telling me to dump it down the drain after the shift. I never thought much of it, but tonight, as I went to pour it, the liquid in the bucket shifted, and I saw a face form in its surface—a woman’s face, pale and open-mouthed, as if trying to scream.

I dropped the bucket, the liquid splashing across the floor. The face vanished, leaving nothing but a greasy stain. My hands trembled as I cleaned up. When I went to the break room, I found a copy of the hospital’s old newsletter. The front page showed a group of employees from 1978, standing in front of the kitchen’s original steel doors. In the back row, a man stood with his head tilted at an impossible angle, his eyes dark voids. The caption listed his name as ‘Thomas Vane, Janitor.’ A chill ran through me. I remembered hearing from older staff that a janitor had died in the basement decades ago, suffocated in a forgotten freezer, his body discovered weeks later, his neck snapped.

I tried to dismiss it as coincidence, but that night, as I lay in bed, the same dream returned. This time, I was in the basement, walking past rows of freezers. One freezer door was slightly ajar, blue light spilling out. I approached, my heart pounding. Inside, instead of frozen food, there was a figure, curled up, its back to me. It began to turn, and I saw Thomas Vane’s face, grey and peeling, his mouth opening to speak. But no sound came out. Instead, a rush of cold air hit me, and I woke to find my brother’s apartment bathed in an unnatural silence.

I checked on my brother. He was in his room, asleep, but his computer was on, showing a file manager. There, in a folder labeled ‘Lore,’ was a text file I’d never seen. It contained a single line: ‘They come when you’re ready.’ The room grew colder. I felt a presence behind me, the same heavy presence from the window. Slowly, I turned. In the corner, where the shadow should have been, stood the figure, now solid, its head still bent, but its eyeless gaze fixed on me. It took a step forward, and the floorboards creaked.

I did the only thing I could think of: I grabbed my brother by the shoulder, shaking him awake. His eyes flew open, and he saw it too. We both bolted for the door, down the stairs, and into the cold night air. We didn’t stop until we reached the all-night diner on the corner. Between sips of coffee, I told him everything, the dreams, the face in the water, the newsletter. He listened, his face pale. ‘That’s messed up,’ he whispered. ‘I think we need to see someone.’

But the figure didn’t follow us that night. And when we returned to the apartment, it was just a normal place, the shadows harmless, the window clear. For the next week, I was on edge, but nothing happened. I went back to work, avoiding the break room and the buckets in the corner. Yet the fear clung to me like a second skin.

A month later, I moved into my own place across town. I kept the job at the hospital, but I switched to day shifts. And I never told anyone about what I’d seen. But sometimes, late at night, when I’m looking into a mirror or a dark window, I catch a glimpse of that figure in the corner of my eye, and I know it’s still waiting, patient, for the moment when I’m ready to look again.