My first job was in a delicatessen.
It was a tiny shop, lit with sterile halogen lights, decorated with awful white and green tile, and containing absolutely no eat-in facilities. I hated that job for many reasons, but the only one that was bad enough to make me quit was that I found it fucking terrifying.
First, the deli was freezing. It didn't matter how hot it was outside or how many portable heaters the other employees brought in, the deli was always bone-achingly cold. In fact, about six months after I began working there, all the other workers and I threatened to quit if the boss, Scott, didn't put some heating in. We'd asked him to come in, all of us assembling in the deli, to talk to him. Jenny, a woman about my Mum's age and the oldest in our workforce, had an entire speech planned out, but she never got a chance.
As soon as Scott walked through the door, he stopped and said. "God, it's cold in here. Why did you guys turn the heater off?"
This stopped us in our tracks.
"Turn it off?" Someone managed to say. "We were going to ask you to put some heating in." Scott gave us a strange look. "I got a heater put in years ago, see the vents?" He gestured to the ceiling, where what we thought were ventilation shafts were fitted. "I personally come in and turn it on every morning." "We've never heard of it." Jenny said.
"That's because I’m here before the shop opens every day, and a timer turns it off every night." Scott strode through our group to the back of the shop and opened a utility closet. "If no-one turned it off, then there must be something wrong with it." He flicked on a light. The next few minutes consisted of us standing around impatiently as he prodded at a control panel we idiots had never noticed before. By this point I was pretty pissed off: I wasn't even supposed to be working that day, and I'd come in only to find out that my co-workers were staging an intervention about something they'd evidently screwed up themselves.
Eventually, Scott emerged from the utility closet shaking his head. "It doesn't look like anything is wrong with it from this end." He said.
I don't remember who suggested it, but I ended up standing on a chair trying to gauge whether there was any hot air coming from the vents in the ceiling. The ceiling was high and I was the tallest (after Scott, who conveniently had a sore leg and didn't want to risk climbing onto the chair) so there was no chance of me getting out of it. I've got to be honest, I don't like dark spaces. Ever since I was a kid, even the smallest crevices - key holes, vents, gaps behind the furniture - terrified me. I'd always imagine a hand extending from the shadows, or an eye suddenly appearing on the other side, and it would be enough to shake me for days. So when they told me I had to put my face close to an array of dark holes in the ceiling I was less than thrilled. But I was fifteen and an idiot so I thought that if I refused I'd be fired, and I really did need that job.
Now here's the weird part: the vents were on. Hot air rushed from the ceiling at a speed and strength that should have reached the floor below, but instead it stopped about an inch from the vent. I slowly extended my hand parallel to the ceiling. It was like there was just a bubble of cold from an inch downward and the heat just pooled above along the ceiling, unable to penetrate it. This creeped me out a little, but I was still too distracted by the vent above me to be bothered much. I just figured that either the cold storage room or the refrigerated display cases were leaking too much cold air. I told Scott as much, and he decided to get a refrigerator specialist to check. We all went home satisfied.
A week later my shift was cancelled so the refrigeration guy could seal up the display cases and the cold room. Scott left a note on the wall afterwards telling us that the heat should be able to work and detailing how to check if the cases and the cold room are working properly.
Now I have to explain this because it's kind of important. For the very few of you who don't know what a cold storage room is, it's basically just a huge walk in fridge. Our cold room was outdated and had an older temperature control system in it. Basically, on the back wall of the room was a dial with the numbers one to 5 on it, a wall-mounted chart and a temperature gauge. To set the temperature you wanted, you turned the dial to a number that corresponded with that particular temperature, using the chart for reference. What Scott wanted us to do was check that the temperature according to the gauge matched the temperature it should be according to the chart. If the dial was set to a number that should've corresponded with ten degrees Celsius, but the gauge read fifteen degrees, we would have known that the cold air was escaping somewhere.
For the next few weeks, everything was fine. We'd check the cold room and the cases (which had a much easier digital system) each shift and there was no temperature loss anywhere. The shop was warm, well as much as a shop that's dedicated to keeping sandwich meats cold could be.
One day, though, my friend Amy called me from the deli phone. She'd only been working there for a week or two (on my recommendation) and it was her first shift alone at work. Amy's a pretty superstitious person, so when she begged me over the phone to come in and take over her shift because of 'a weird feeling', I told her to grow up. "It's so cold here," She said, "And I'm too scared to check in the cool room to see if it's broken." This was what made me get off my arse: she'd said it with so much fear, something I'd never heard in her voice to that extent before, and the thought of the very irresponsible Amy being forced to pay up because her refusal to check the cool room led to its breaking was worrying.
I got to the deli and Amy was freaking out. She'd closed the front doors and was sitting on the curb outside, visibly shaking. When she saw me, Amy hugged me so tight that it hurt.
"I felt something!" She kept saying. "I was trying to leave and I felt it pulling me back."
Apart from my small dark spaces panics, I was generally not easy to scare, and up until then nothing had ever made me believe in the supernatural. I took the keys from Amy's hands and unlocked the shop.
It was cold. Colder than it'd been even before Scott got the fridges fixed. Amy had left all the light on when she'd left and everything looked calm and normal. Amy grasped my shirt and followed as I walked in towards the cold room. "It's freezing." I said. The closer I got to the cold room, the colder it got. Eventually I reached the heavy silver door and, pausing to take a deep breath, pulled it open.
Normally when you opened the cold room door, a light in the ceiling would automatically flick on. This time, the room stayed shrouded in darkness. I have no idea why I was so determined (if I'd had any sense I would've just gone home) but I propped the door open to give it some light and, despite the fear that was screaming in my veins, went in.
Everything looked normal at first.
On either side of me, shiny metal shelves held wrapped meats that were waiting to be cut and salami hung from some of the many hooks above. It was so much colder than it should have been: my fingers were numb in moments, and most of the meats had frost on them. The cold took the breath from my lungs, but I pushed past to check the temperature gauge anyway.
I had just enough time to notice the needle was in the red before the door slammed behind me. I heard Amy scream, the sound muffled through the door, as I fumbled in my pocket for my phone. The screen flickered to life.
I wish to God I’d just left it off.
Bodies. All around me where bodies. They hung from the hooks on the ceiling, twitching, moaning, and swinging slightly from side to side. The metal shelves were gone, and on the walls hung shining silver knives. I stepped backwards towards the door and bumped into something. The thing I turned to see nearly killed me with its sight alone. Barring my way out stood a being of flesh and muscle and bone. Glistening white eyeballs glared at me from their sunken places in a face with no nose and no skin, just red strips of muscle and flesh wrapped like papier-mache over a misshapen skull. It stepped forward, the squelching sound of its skinless, bloodless flesh roaring in my ears as I stepped backwards. Even without lips I knew it was smiling.
I felt my back touch the back wall, the dial pressing against my spine. The Skinless Man was still pressing closer to me. Behind him, the hanging bodies all stared with glazed, pleading eyes. I felt its flesh touch my skin and I fainted.
I don’t know why he spared me, but he did. I learned later that Amy had been trying to open the door the whole time. She says she could hear me screaming from the other side, but I don’t remember doing it. I don’t remember anything past that awful face. When the door finally opened I was hanging from the ceiling, my hands pierced through by a hook. The Skinless Man was gone.
Those bodies had disappeared when he did. I pray for their souls. The official story is that I had a psychotic episode, as surmised by the sterling medical professionals that attended the scene. I think they all knew it wasn’t true, even if they could never even guess at the real truth. It’s been three years since then, and life has almost returned to normal. Every now and then a cool breeze will touch me and I’ll freeze: it’s a reminder that he’s out there somewhere, probably gathering more skins to replace his own.
The scars in my hands still ache from time to time, but the scarred skin is no longer painful and tight.
But then again, none of my skin is tight anymore.
Submitted December 07, 2015 at 06:53PM by willyshakeyspear http://ift.tt/1jJRcf9 nosleep
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