Chapter Text
Simon needed money.
It was as simple as that. College, no matter how profitable it would be in the long run, was costly, and jobs were scarce in Detroit. His sleep schedule was more of a series of naps whenever he could get them than any sort of nighttime rest. It was for these reasons that, upon seeing a HELP WANTED ad in the newspaper for a nighttime supervisor at the Home Depot on 7th, Simon immediately circled it and called the number.
There was a reason that Home Depot couldn’t get employees and Simon knew it. But he didn’t believe the stories about the ghost of Home Depot, the cryptid that supposedly roamed its aisles at night. A man that hunted whoever dared be there when the city was sleeping, or so swore a kid who had once spent the night there on a dare. A ghost rumored to rip night supervisors apart.
In Simon’s junior year of high school, a young woman was found in the appliances section, beaten to death and dismembered. Everyone blamed the mysterious entity that supposedly stalked the floors of Home Depot. Her death became a cold case two years later, after no leads were found.
There had also been an active serial killer in the area at the time. But that was a lot less interesting than blaming the Home Depot cryptid.
And Home Depot paid well, far better than the industrial jobs and coffee shops Simon had been considering.
He knew the drill. When Home Depot called back, he asked when he was going to come in for an interview. The man on the other side laughed.
“No need,” he said. “We only had five applicants, just the amount of people we need to monitor the halls at night.”
He sounded friendly, and instructed Simon to report to the Home Depot at 10:30 that night.
“You’ll be starting at 11 most nights,” he explained, “but we wanted to give you some time to get to know your coworkers, find out where the flashlights are, get your bearings, that sort of thing.”
“Coworkers?” Simon inquired.
“It’s a big store. There will be four other people working with you. I’m confident you’ll all get along great!”
The man’s voice was funny, and he spoke in a way that was odd in a manner Simon couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“All right,” Simon told him, “I’ll be there.”
Simon pulled into the Home Depot parking lot at 10:10, his silver minivan the only car there. The keys were under a hollow styrofoam rock by the door, just as the email—signed “Connor”—had detailed. Simon thought it strange that their manager wasn’t going to be there and insisted on giving all his instructions over the phone, to the point of leaving the keys to the entire store in a place better suited to some apartment keys.
He unlocked the store and entered.
There was something eerie about department stores at night. Simon felt as though he wasn’t supposed to be there. It was easy to understand the myths about this Home Depot in the dark, where every piece of display furniture became a hulking shadow and every nondescript aisle became a place for a monster to hide. And the silence—the sounds of the nighttime city seemed to halt in fear at the door to the Home Depot. Simon could hear nothing but his own breathing.
In the email, Connor had told him about a door behind the garden section cash register that led to a little room with everything they would need for the nights. That mostly meant just flashlights and nifty little radios, plus a Home Depot apron for each of them. Simon decided to get everything ready for the four others that would no doubt arrive soon. It took him a few tries to find the correct key—how many locks were there in this store?—but he finally threw the door open.
Something jumped out at him, a tall, thin, hairy specter. Simon screamed and jumped back, and the thing clattered to the ground in front of him. A mop.
“Get it together, Simon,” he muttered to himself.
As it turned out, the room was a storage closet mostly filled with cleaning supplies. The flashlights and radios were on a shelf in the corner. Simon scooped them up and laid them out on the garden section cash register. The aprons were stuffed under the cash register in a little cupboard. Simon only found them because there were so many aprons in there that the door didn’t close all the way.
The email had also included instructions to open yet another door set into the same wall. This one opened into a small room containing a desk above which were mounted twelve monitors, with a swivel chair in front of the desk. The monitors each showed the feed from a different security camera. There was no one there, not even a coffee mug or other personal item to show that anyone else used the room.
Simon outfitted himself with an apron, a radio, and a flashlight before hoisting himself up onto the register’s conveyor belt to sit and wait for his four coworkers.
Simon heard the car before he saw it, and he recognized it immediately. He had ridden in that beat-up rust-red pickup truck before. It belonged to his roommate and friend Josh. Simon vaguely recalled Josh mentioning he too was looking for a job. It would be an incredible coincidence for them to both end up working at the same Home Depot.
A knock came from the door. Simon slid off his seat and, sure enough, there was Josh, peering in through the plate glass. Josh’s eyes widened in both confusion and relief when he saw Simon.
“Hey, Josh,” Simon said, opening the door for him. “This is an incredible coincidence.”
Josh nodded.
“A happy one, though. And, I mean, who else is hiring college students?”
“‘Sup, Simon,” another voice added, striding through the doors.
“North?” Simon demanded incredulously. “You work here now too?”
“Yeah, hitched a ride with Josh. It’s a small world, I guess.”
Simon shrugged.
“Dang. Is Lucy going to show up next?”
Josh laughed.
“No, she already has a job, remember?”
Simon gestured to the aprons, flashlights, and radios.
“Set yourself up while we wait for the two others, I guess,” he instructed.
At 10:20, a young blonde woman with a stethoscope around her neck walked in and introduced herself as Doctor Thotticus, Thottie or Thot for short. She didn’t say much, clearly unsure around her new coworkers that already had a relationship with each other.
Five minutes later, the distinctive sound of a muscle car echoed over the parking lot, cutting through their idle conversation. The kind of people—men, mostly—who drove muscle cars were generally the kind of people Simon didn’t like.
When the man walked through the door, Simon was forced to change his generalization about men who drove muscle cars.
He was tall, and it said something that that was only the second thing Simon noticed about him. The first was his eyes, one green, one blue, piercing and determined. He walked like he knew where he was going, and that place happened to be the inside of a Home Depot. The way his coat billowed out behind him certainly added to the effect. Simon became aware that he was staring, and also blushing, and this made him aware that he had suddenly developed a crush.
oh no, he thought, you don’t have time for this.
The man decisively strode over to Simon and stuck his hand out.
“I’m Markus,” he announced, “with a K.”
“Nice to meet you, Karcus,” Simon mumbled, nearly swooning under his firm handshake.
Karcus shook hands with the rest of the assembled employees. Simon barely noticed what was said. He was too busy staring at the way his arm muscles were visible through even his coat, his strong stance and easy smile.
dammit Simon, he chided himself, you’re so gay.
“So, when do we get started?” Karcus asked, clipping a radio to his apron.
As if on cue, a landline attached to a nearby wall began ringing. The assembled employees glanced at each other and wordlessly nominated Karcus to answer the call.
“Hello?” Karcus answered. “Uh, yeah, I’ll put you on speaker.”
He pressed the speaker button, and Connor’s tinny voice echoed through the mostly empty store.
“Hi. My name is Connor. I’m the manager sent by Home Depot.”
“Hi, Connor,” they chorused back.
The job briefing was short and sweet. They were to walk the aisles with their flashlights, watching for wildlife (raccoons, mostly, the bastards) and teenage punks that were constantly trying to sneak in, lured by the legend of the Home Depot cryptid. One person, a different one each night, would sit in the room with the monitors and keep an eye on things.
The Home Depot was set up in two floors, with the second floor ringing the perimeter of the building in a rectangle, leaving a rectangle in the center through which those on the second floor could look down on the first. Above this cutout was a black box, which on closer observation was revealed to be a small room accessible through the roof. An impractical setup, but this Home Depot was nothing if not unique. Connor had implied that he would be watching from the roof box. but Simon suspected that this was a lie to get them to behave themselves. After all, if Connor was in the building, why would he use the phone instead of just coming down?
“All right,” Karcus, already the unspoken leader, announced, rubbing his hands together, “let’s get started.”
Karcus was on monitor duty that night, and Simon couldn’t deny the nerves he felt knowing this handsome man was watching his every move.
They started their shift with amicable chatter over their radios, occasionally accompanied by the millisecond-early echoes of replies from across the vast store. This quickly faded into silence as minutes became hours. But from this conversation Simon learned quite a bit of important information. He learned that Karcus was an art student at their university, and that his intolerable car was a gift from his father, a famous artist. His favorite food was cinnamon rolls, he was afraid of mannequins, and he loved Britney Spears.
“Don’t we all,” Simon had said with a laugh, immediately resolving to listen to her entire discography as soon as he got home that night—no, morning.
Karcus laughed, he seemed friendly, he seemed indefinable. Something fiery yet steady lurked behind his gemlike eyes, waiting to be found.
Treading the linoleum quickly became boring and tiring, bordering on scary as the dark of night and his thin flashlight beam turned the merchandise into monsters. Simon wondered why Home Depot needed five people to watch one store. And if people breaking in was that much of a problem, why hire college students who couldn’t do anything but call people more qualified to handle the situation? Didn’t night watchmen usually do this sort of thing. What kind of job was “night supervisor,” anyway? He had plenty of time to ponder these questions in the uneventful darkness.
Then he turned a corner into the carpeting section, and his flashlight shone on a figure standing just at the end of the beam’s reach.
“Hello?” Simon called, and his flashlight flickered out. He leaned into his radio. “Er, who else is in the carpeting section?”
Various responses of negation came from his coworkers. A trespasser, then. A tall one.
“Karcus?” “There’s something there,” Markus said thoughtfully, “but I can’t quite make it out. These monitors are very static. What kind of security does this place have?”
“All right,” Simon announced to the darkness, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
His flashlight flickered back into view. The figure was in the same location and the same pose.
“A mannequin,” Simon breathed in relief. The figure was perfectly static, not even breathing.
“Are you serious?” Karcus grumbled over the radio.
Simon’s flashlight flickered back out.
“Hunk of junk,” he proclaimed, whacking it against a nearby shelf. It came back to life, and Simon prepared to keep moving. He shone the flashlight at the mannequin one more time, just to be safe.
But it was different now.
The figure still stood in the same place, but now its arms were stuck out at perfect 90 degree angles to its body.
Simon sighed. Not a mannequin, then. He’d have to kick someone out of the store on his first night. Some t-posing scoundrel, no doubt, sneaking in on a dare, perhaps flocking to the light in fear of the imaginary ghost of the Home Depot.
“I see you,” he told the figure. “You’re trespassing. Leave before I call the police.”
The figure didn’t move, but a blue light in the shape of a triangle flickered to life on its chest. Simon started walking towards it. It didn’t move, and the flashlight didn’t seem to illuminate it any more the closer he got.
“I have a trespasser in the carpeting section,” he announced into his radio. “Might need some help; he doesn’t seem to want to cooperate.”
And just like that, the figure was gone. It was like deleting a letter in a word processor. One minute there, the next not. Simon knew what he had seen a second before. Whoever had been at the end of the aisle hadn’t moved; his flashlight had remained in the same place. It had just vanished.
“It’s gone,” Simon told them with some alarm. “Karcus, did you see that?” “I stopped looking as soon as you said it was a mannequin,” he responded.
“Okay,” North demanded in a tinny voice at odds with her real life personality, “who’s t-posing on top of the dryers? There are more meaningful ways to protest big corporations.”
“Are you near the paint store?” Josh asked her.
“No, why?”
“There’s a man t-posing like, right in front of me. I can’t really see him though.”
“I see him,” Karcus muttered. “He’s just a black shape. These are really shitty security cameras.”
“Wait, are we being invaded by a bunch of t-posers?” Thottie asked. “Because we should really call the—“ Static.
“What the hell? The monitors just cut out. I’m calling Connor,” Karcus told them.
“Thot?” Simon anxiously inquired over the radio. “You there?”
“Yeah,” she responded breathlessly, “just cut out for a second.”
“Good news, guys,” Karcus responded a few moments later, his voice as sweet and honey and soft as silk, “Connor’s notified the proper authorities.”
No police or security guards arrived during the rest of the shift, but Karcus assured them that Connor had assured him that it was all being taken care of. And indeed, there were no more intruders. Josh and North said that the t-posers had impossibly vanished a few moments after Karcus called Connor. This made Simon wonder if Connor was playing some sort of first-day joke on them.
The rest of the night passed without incident, and Simon remembered one of the psychology books his ex-boyfriend Vincent had encouraged him to read. One of the few good things that man had left him with. It had been about the power of suggestion, a fascinating and chilling testament to the vulnerability of the human mind. It was entirely possible Simon had imagined a t-poser that had been a mannequin the whole time. A mysterious t-poser combined with the legends of that Home Depot could have been enough to convince the others they were seeing things. They had all been living off energy drinks, ramen, and too little sleep, so hallucinations were not only possible but expected.
Or perhaps it was a prank. Josh had pulled worse; in their freshman year, to get back at Simon for covering his truck in sticky notes, he had superglued down every one of Simon’s possessions. Karcus’s fear of mannequins could have given Josh ideas, and it was clear from experience how willing North typically was to be roped into his schemes. Simon resolved to get closer to things before declaring whether or not they were a mannequin in the future.