I finally earned my security guard qualification—a small plastic card that felt like a lifeline after being retrenched. I needed the money, badly, and landing my first assignment at Larkspur Mall felt like a fresh start.
When I joined the night security team, they handed me a badge, a heavy radio, and a printed list of standard operating procedures.
Halfway down the page, one instruction had been printed in bold red letters: FOURTH-FLOOR PATROL PROCEDURE.
The mall closed at 10:30 p.m. After that, the job was supposed to be simple: walk each level, check dark corners, and log anything unusual.
Then came the fourth floor. Unlike every other level, it was not meant to be patrolled. It had two emergency exits, marked A and B.
“We enter the fourth floor through Exit A. You don’t patrol the level. Stand at the doorway, look down the corridor, then leave,” my supervisor said. “Do not walk toward Exit B. Do not try to check it.”
“Why?” I asked, looking at the sheet. “Is the whole floor off-limits, or just the area near Exit B? If it’s forbidden, why are we checking Exit A at all?”
He said it was meant to “save time,” but his jaw tightened. He kept his eyes on the patrol sheet instead of looking at me.
“Just stay at Exit A,” he muttered. “If you hear the door at Exit B open, don’t wait to see who comes through.”
The Second Rule
There was another rule.
After midnight, I was forbidden from watching the CCTV feed for Level 4.
While I had to monitor every other floor in detail, Level 4’s screen was to remain untouched. That channel simply wasn’t meant to be watched.
My curiosity burned.
I could almost understand skipping the physical patrol to “save time,” but avoiding the cameras? Weren’t they worried about thieves? I tried asking, but my supervisor shut down immediately.
I made a mental note to question the older guards later, but for now, I nodded and played the dutiful rookie.
Night shift paid better, and with my sister’s medical bills piling up, I couldn’t risk getting fired or demoted to the day shift.
The first week was dead quiet.
Escalators slept, store gates remained locked, and the radio stayed silent. Oddly enough, I was left entirely alone on these shifts—no senior guard was assigned to walk me through, leaving my questions unanswered.
Then came the second week.
Standing at Exit A, I noticed an exit sign near B buzzing, its casing warped.
Suddenly, a motion-activated light near Exit B flickered on, illuminating a patch of the pitch-black corridor.
A few seconds later, it went dark again.
I froze at Exit A, heart hammering, before forcing myself to turn and leave. I told myself it was just a technical glitch or leftover renovation wiring.
Back in the security room, a few minutes after midnight, I kept my eyes on the allowed monitors.
Then, out of the corner of my eye, something moved across the dim Level 4 feed.
The Forbidden Feed
The movement appeared near Exit B—just a shadowy shape brushing the edge of the frame.
My immediate thought was practical: a customer had gotten trapped after closing, or worse, a thief was wandering around.
Forget the weird rules for a second; if merchandise got stolen or a civilian got locked in on my watch, I’d be the one taking the fall.
I quickly toggled through the other Level 4 cameras.
Empty corridors. Closed metal gates. No mannequins nearby that could have tricked my eyes or triggered the motion-activated light.
I knew I should have switched the feed off right then and there. Instead, I leaned closer to the monitor, my chest tightening.
If someone was up there, leaving them wasn’t an option.
I couldn’t afford to lose this job.
Instead of taking the stairs to Exit A, I grabbed my flashlight, unhooked the heavy radio from my belt, and stepped into the service lift.
As the steel doors slid shut and the elevator began its slow, humming ascent to the fourth floor, I tried to convince myself I was just doing my job.
The lift chimed, announcing my arrival.
The doors parted, revealing the pitch-black silence of Level 4.
My breath bloomed in pale plumes against the dark; Level 4 was freezing, like stepping into an industrial meat locker.
From the service lift, the corridor stretched out empty.
The hum of the HVAC vents had died completely, leaving behind a sharp smell like scorched copper wiring. When the lift doors slid shut behind me, the heavy silence felt suffocating.
Then I heard it.
The Mannequin at Exit B
A slow, metallic scraping came from the shadows near Exit B.
Panic flared.
Every instinct screamed at me to turn back, but if I walked away and something was stolen, I would have no defence when management reviewed the cameras.
Bracing myself, I crept down the forbidden hallway.
Reaching Exit B, I found only the heavy emergency door. If someone was hiding, it had to be behind it.
Desperate for a weapon, I snatched a thick wooden coat hanger from a display rack outside the nearby clothing store and gripped it by the hook like a club.
Holding the hanger ready, I pulled the door open and raised my flashlight.
No intruder. Just a single retail mannequin leaning stiffly against the wall, head tilted at an odd angle.
I exhaled a ragged breath.
“Don’t people know a scare like that could kill someone?” I muttered.
Some idiot employee must have left it out. Grumbling, I grabbed its arm to drag it back towards the clothing store so it wouldn’t startle the morning shift.
But as my fingers brushed the torso, my skin crawled.
The plastic was warm. Not hot, but faintly radiating heat, as if it had a fever.
Shaken, I dragged the mannequin out of the stairwell and propped it beside the clothing store, then pulled the emergency door shut and hurried back to the guard room.
I scribbled an annoyed note for the shop owner, trying to shake the unnerving warmth off my fingertips as the minutes crawled past midnight.
Did You See It?
After placing the note on the desk, I glanced up at the monitors.
A black spot pulsed in the corner of the fourth-floor feed, near Exit B. Then a second appeared beside it.
The screens flickered out, plunging the control room into total darkness.
When they snapped back on, my heart lurched.
Every single monitor—across all four floors—was displaying the same impossible sight: the mannequin standing inches from each camera lens, staring directly into the frame.
Different angles. Same posture. Same tilted head.
My mind reeled.
That was impossible. I had walked that corridor just minutes ago.
There was only one mannequin on Level 4. There weren’t any on the other floors at all.
As I stared, horrified, the image on the screens wavered.
The mannequin’s face seemed to bulge on every screen, while the camera lenses slowly fogged as if something hot were breathing onto the glass.
Then, static tore through the desk radio, sharp and deafening.
A voice rasped out through the crackle—strained, wet, and suffocated, like air being forced through a crushed throat:
“Did you see it…?”
The feeds shifted. On every screen, the mannequin’s rigid fingers twitched.
“Did you see it…?”
The transmission cut out, and from the hallway right outside the security office door, I heard the faint, slow scraping of plastic dragging across the tiles.
You Saw Me
THUMP.
A heavy, deliberate knock rattled the security room door. Once. Then again.
My chest squeezed tight.
Please let it be my supervisor, I prayed silently, though I knew it couldn’t be. He never stayed past 6:00 p.m.
I was entirely alone in this building.
Panicking, I scrambled backward into the tiny space beneath the steel desk—the only hiding spot in the cramped office.
I pressed my knees to my chin and held my breath until my lungs burned.
The electronic lock clicked. The door swung open.
Footsteps dragged across the linoleum—shhhk, shhhk, shhhk—heavy and relentless.
A suffocating stench flooded the room. It wasn’t smoke, but something far worse: the sickly sweetness of molten plastic.
“Did you see it.” The voice rasped from inside the room. It was no longer a question. It was a declaration.
I clamped my eyes shut, praying to disappear. But the heavy dragging stopped right beside the desk.
I opened my eyes.
A pair of rigid legs stood inches from my face.
Crouched low, peering into the dark space beneath the desk, was a man. His skin wasn’t skin at all—it was smooth, shiny, and sickeningly folded, like a plastic doll melted over a fire.
His face had been smoothed blank except for two deep, hollow craters where his eyes should have been.
He tilted his head at an unnatural, broken angle, the melted plastic of his throat straining as he leaned into the shadow.
“Did you see me?” he whispered.
A wave of icy terror slammed into my chest.
Blood roared in my ears. My vision narrowed until the fluorescent lights became a single fading pinprick. Then the floor seemed to tilt beneath me, and darkness swallowed everything.
The Night No One Was Watching
I woke to pale morning daylight and the low, careful voices of management. They stood over me in the security office, taking turns offering sanitised explanations.
First, they claimed I’d suffered some kind of exhaustion-induced panic attack. Then, they mentioned a routine “system override” that wiped the night’s CCTV footage.
On the desk between us sat a maintenance binder, left open by mistake.
My eyes snagged on a printed incident report from years ago.
One line had been heavily blacked out, but under the harsh sunlight, I could still make out the words beneath the ink: Exit B — auto-lock engaged.
Outside in the corridor, two managers argued in hushed, broken fragments. Between their whispers and the open incident report, I began piecing together the truth.
During a major renovation, a worker had been trapped near Exit B when an electrical fire broke out. The emergency doors had auto-locked, sealing him inside.
The guard on duty that night had fallen asleep at the monitors and slept through the fire alarms until the fourth floor was completely engulfed.
By the time help arrived, the worker’s remains had fused with the molten plastic of the store mannequins beside him. There was nothing left to save.
Ever since, guards who ventured towards Exit B or watched the forbidden feed reported seeing the same thing.
The higher-ups didn’t fix the problem—they just buried it. They shortened the patrol routes, banned the CCTV feeds, and called it “efficiency.”
The thing in the hallway wasn’t just a glitch. It was still asking the question no one had answered that night—whether anyone had seen what happened to him.
Exit B Followed Me Home
I didn’t wait for management to finish its explanations.
I turned in my badge, radio, and uniform that morning and walked out of Larkspur Mall believing I had left its forgotten floor behind.
Not long afterwards, I took a security job at the hospital near my house—the very one treating my sister.
It was a blessing. The pay was steady, and being close by made taking care of her so much easier.
I thought I had finally put the nightmare behind me.
Then a plain brown envelope arrived in my mail.
Inside was my old Larkspur Mall badge and a handwritten scrap of paper: Did you see me?
My blood ran cold. The thing still remembered me.
Desperate to prove that the envelope was nothing more than a sick prank, I eventually took the badge back to the mall during public hours.
I tapped it against various card readers—nothing. It was completely dead everywhere except at the card reader beside the heavy emergency door at Exit B.
The moment I held it close, the reader beeped and flashed green. I backed away and never went near Larkspur Mall again.
Or so I thought.
Just last week, an unknown number texted my phone: Did you see me?
I deleted the message instantly, my hands shaking.
Then came tonight.
It’s just past midnight, and I’m sitting in my quiet bedroom. On the desk in front of me, the old plastic badge—a card with no battery, speaker, or power source of its own—begins to hum.
It vibrates against the wood, sliding slowly towards me, as a familiar text notification chimes on my phone.
The screen displays one new message:
You saw me.
Related Stories
Some buildings do not hide what happened on a floor.
They simply seal the doors, repaint the corridors, and wait for the noise above someone else’s ceiling to begin again.
The Hidden Thirteenth Floor That Never Empties
Other times, when a floor is meant to stay sealed…
the elevator learns to pause where the directory insists nothing exists.
