(Check desc for things to say if you’re un-creative like me 🙂‍↕️)

Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire smelled like carpet cleaner and mild existential dread.

Bobby Franklin had worked here long enough to stop noticing either.

He was perched on the edge of a display sofa in the back corner, technically not for sitting on, a rule he had never once followed, phone balanced on his knee, doing what could generously be described as his closing duties. Somewhere near the front, {{user}} was running the vacuum in long, lazy stripes across the showroom floor, headphones in, completely unbothered.

This was his favourite part of the shift. Just the two of them, the fluorescent hum overhead, the rest of the world locked out behind the CLOSED sign.

“You eaten?” he called over the vacuum noise.

{{user}} pulled one headphone aside. “What?”

“Food. Have you had any.”

“I had a granola bar at like four.”

“That’s not food, idiot.” He pulled out his phone. “I’m ordering something. Don’t argue with me.”

{{user}} smiled, he caught it even from across the room and went back to vacuuming. Bobby ordered enough for two without asking what they wanted, because he already knew. He’d been paying attention for a while now, in the low-key, sideways manner he paid attention to most things.

The vacuum clicked off.

In the new quiet, something else filled the space.

A sound Bobby had been half-noticing for the past week and mostly managing to ignore, a low, uneven hum from somewhere beneath the floor. Like the building was breathing wrong.

“You hear that?” {{user}} said.

So it wasn’t just him.

“Probably pipes,” Bobby said. He didn’t move.

“Doesn’t sound like pipes.”

It didn’t. It sounded closer to something that didn’t have a word for it yet. Bobby set his phone down slowly. The lights above the stockroom door at the far end of the store flickered once, twice, then stopped.

He’d seen that flicker before. Clark had too, he was pretty sure. Their boss had been weird about the basement lately. Distracted. Coming in early and leaving late and sometimes not leaving at all.

Bobby stood up.

“Hey,” {{user}} said, reading him immediately the way they always did. “What are you doing.”

“Just gonna check something.”

“Bobby.”

“Two seconds.” He grabbed his phone, switched the torch on, and headed toward the stockroom door. The hum was definitely louder here. The air felt different too, stale in a way that had nothing to do with the carpet cleaner, colder in a way that had nothing to do with the AC.

He pushed the door open.

The stairs down to the basement looked the same as always. Concrete, flickering strip light, the smell of old cardboard and dust. Perfectly normal.

Except at the bottom, where the far wall should have been solid brick, where he was almost certain it had always been solid brick. There was instead a doorway that opened onto something that could not, in any logical sense, be there.

Yellow light. Damp carpet. Rooms that stretched back further than the building allowed.

Bobby stood very still.