Chapter Text
People don’t buy doughnuts at three o’clock in the morning.
That’s one of the main things that Shayne learns about this job, standing behind a fluorescent-lit display case of slick glazed and frosted pastries, the outside world dark enough that it sometimes looked like the little building was floating somewhere in a starless void. The light on the little paved parking lot only worked sometimes—seemingly whenever it felt like it, although Shayne’s only companion, Damien, tried to spend a month timing it out with an honest-to-god spreadsheet, looking for patterns. It wound up being a fruitless effort for it was quite truly random no matter how many times Damien protested that it was impossible. Shayne had taped the spreadsheet up on the cork-board in the little back room where they stored their stuff.
(And how ridiculous was it, really, the have the two of them here. Not that he’d prefer to be here completely alone but also Shayne spent more time than he’d have wanted, especially in the beginning, trying to sort through the reasoning in hiring two guys to babysit a doughnut shop at a rest stop nobody uses in the middle-of-nowhere.)
It’s stupid really. This was supposed to be temporary, just a month or two until Shayne could figure out what the hell his next step was supposed to be. He’d had a good job, a great one actually, and then it had all gone to shit like that movie cliché of a dude at the top of his game, walking into the street and getting hit by a bus mid-phone conversation. That had sent him into a spiral, an endlessly spinning face of a cartoon character mid-scene transition until one of his closest friends, Courtney, had sat him down and begged him to just do something. Structured. Chill. Maybe it’ll kick your ass in gear and you can start writing again. That had felt like a pointed punch, the reminder that he’d been buried under a block sixty-feet deep in all directions but also she was right. As she tended to be.
So here he was, four months into a night shift job working the cash register at somewhere called Donut Galaxy. He got out of bed 8:30pm, got to work at 9. Sat around doing nothing for the most part unless someone wandered in until 3am when the baker and owner showed up to make more doughnuts and Shayne was sent home. He laid awake some mid-afternoons, too wired to sleep, and went over and over in his head about where exactly all the doughnuts the guy made were going—there were so many left by the morning and yet he was always making more. Shayne had checked the dumpster out back a couple times, thinking that maybe they were just getting thrown away but it was just ordinary garbage, if there really was such a thing. He’d mentioned it to Damien the second week they’d started working together and he promptly got out a piece of paper from a notebook in his backpack, scrawled ‘Where do the doughnuts go?’ on it and tacked it up on the cork. A mystery , he had said, for us to solve.
He’d go to the gym after work, have breakfast and then zone out for awhile before going to bed and doing it all over again. The days he had off went by in a sludgy blur which wasn’t the worst of things.
Damien had showed up about a month into the job, declaring that he worked there now too when he’d seen the shocked and confused expression on Shayne’s face while he watched this guy with purple hair walk behind the counter to put on a dark maroon vest. The owner hadn’t said anything to Shayne about it and apparently only told Damien that he “needed someone else in the place” which sent Shayne’s anxiety spiking like ants under his skin. Was he doing badly? Was there something he was supposed to be doing that he wasn’t? Was it some secret test he wasn’t passing?
“Dude, it’s okay,” Damien had said, seeming to notice the naked panic melting onto Shayne. “The guy is very strange. Maybe he just didn’t want you to be by yourself or something, I don’t know. You’re getting paid to hang out and now you don’t have to do that all on your lonely.” That had helped a bit.
Damien was, as it turned out, probably the only good part of this whole situation. The guy was a little weird and it had taken Shayne a bit of time to acclimate to it but once they started actually talking instead of just hanging around each other it was as if they’d been friends long ago, drifted apart for a few years and were simply just reconnecting. Courtney had accused Shayne of staying at Galaxy just because he doesn’t want to separate from Damien to which Shayne had said that that was dumb because they could just as easily hang out outside of work (well why don’t you, Courtney had interrupted to ask) and also: shut up.
They spent most of their time not doing much of anything but doing it around each other instead of on their own (there’s a term for that, Damien had said but hadn’t expanded on it, distracted by a stray ant that had found its way inside and was currently doing its best to carry a single sprinkle across the floor), occasionally chatting about what shows they’d been watching or what games they were currently into. The deep and personal life sort of stuff had only recently started to come up but it it still wasn’t anything that could be seen as ‘too much’, whatever that meant.
One night just before their shifts ended, Damien had handed Shayne a slip of paper with a number written on it, heavily implying it to be his own. Old school.
“For work stuff,” he’d said and then hesitated. “Or other stuff.” He did not clarify what that might be.
Shayne had used it sparingly since then, mostly only sent memes, unsure of what else to do but Damien hadn’t complained—at least, not to his face—so he’d kept it up.
And that was it. That was his entire life at the moment. Some nights he truly felt like bawling, squeezing himself dry but he never did. Things could, he’d remind himself, be so much worse.
But they certainly could be a heck of a lot better, too. At the very least a lot more exciting.
__________________________________________
“Hey, dude. What’d’ya think is down there?”
Shayne looks up from the beat up old novel he’d been reading, seated at one of the three small tables bolted to the tile floor in here, set up just in case someone wanted to sit and enjoy their cream-filled grease circle right then and there (they never did). Damien’s behind the counter, a cup of coffee no longer steaming by his shoulder, chin resting on his hands as his arms are stretched out across the display case. Once he notices Shayne is looking at him, he gestures to somewhere behind himself. It’s a vague movement but Shayne knows what he’s referring to: the trap door in the back of the kitchen.
It’s a small opening, just the right size for a single person to go down through it and likely wouldn’t have even been something anyone could notice if not for the giant, clunky lock that was keeping it shut. It’d been sealed like that since Shayne first got here and no amount of snooping that either of them have done since then has revealed a key. Damien had half-jokingly offered to try and pick it but Shayne had stopped the conversation in it’s tracks and that was that so he settled instead into making it a game: every now and then he would ask and the two of them would have to each conjure up a wild answer. The best and most insane ones went on a list that had also somehow made its way onto the break room cork board. (Either the owner or other employees never went in there or none of them cared enough because Shayne kept waiting for all the papers it’s been accumulating to be taken down or get reprimanded for it but nothing had happened.)
“Dog man,” Shayne says. “Mom had a dog top half and people legs, dad was the reverse. Kid got dog top and bottom, still insists he’s part man.”
“All dog, massive human dong,” Damien says and if Shayne had been drinking something it’d have gone right through his nose. He lets out a hearty laugh instead, putting a hand over his face and when he looks back, Damien seems fairly proud of himself. He usually does whenever he’s managed to coax that reaction out of him and he refuses to read into that. “I think he’s uh… what’s the weirdest animal you could want to breed? Hmm. Oh! A star-nosed mole breeder. The basement is full of them and he sells them for thousands.”
“A what?”
“Oh man, you haven’t seen—? Just a minute.” While Damien pulls out his phone, Shayne takes the decades’ old receipt he’d found somewhere in the store that he’d been using as a bookmark and tucks it into where he’d left off. He walks out from behind the case, feet sticking to the floor that no matter how much Shayne tried to scrub and mop never seemed to get clean and shoves his display into Shayne’s face.
“Christ,” he says, grabbing Damien’s wrist to steady his arm, uses his finger to scroll through the images. “It’s terrible but I can’t stop looking at it. You’d think it’d be the nose that’s the worst part but I submit to you: those hands.” He lets go, allows Damien to take his phone back and he stays there, starts looking through it, already distracted and he waits, staring up at him, just watching. His expression is serious, eyebrows furrowed. There’s a piece of hair that isn’t as purple as the rest, as if he’d missed it when he’d likely dyed it himself. A thought suddenly kicks to the front of his head, starts rattling the cage of his skull, begging to be let out and he can’t help it this time, opens his mouth only to be interrupted by both Damien asking if Shayne wanted to see a penis snake and someone actually walking in, the bell on the door ringing.
By the time the interaction is over and they’re down four doughnuts, Shayne had forgotten about what he’d wanted to say.
__________________________________________
Waking up feeling like he’s been hit by a truck hadn’t been part of the plan. Not that you could plan for something like that except maybe on nights where you drink too much and know a hangover is coming. Shayne isn’t much of a drinker but he imagines it feels a lot like this; his head is heavy ( mom’s spaghetti, an internal voice utters and even through his misery he manages to laugh at himself), body sore. He hasn’t called out sick since he started and hasn’t wanted to, somehow the thought makes him feel even worse.
What sort of work ethic does that show, that same spaghetti voice admonishes him. That’s not fair. It’s supposed to be a funny guy.
He’s still in bed with half-and-hour to go before his shift starts, paralyzed by indecision with no one home to talk it through with. Shayne has friends, sure. Of course he does. It’s just that none of them are here and with his fucked up schedule texting anyone now ran the high risk of not getting the immediate response that he desperately needs and, besides, suddenly dropping a ‘hey, I feel like garbage, should I go to work anyway?’ on someone out of nowhere might be weird, especially with someone he didn’t have an everyday back-and-forth with.
Always overthinking.
Damien would be around probably, likely already halfway to Donut Galaxy by now. He was going to work.
He should go. He should. Maybe once he was up with some toast and a glass of water with a Tylenol chaser he’d get better. With how quiet the place always is, he’d probably be able to get away with putting his head down on a table or crashing in the back room for awhile if he really needed to. As long as he didn’t pull a fever at any point he’d be fine. He just overworked himself at the gym yesterday, that’s all it was.
Picking up his phone, the display nearly blinds him and he curses, tosses out a few more when he sees that even if he does leave right this second he’ll be late.
__________________________________________
The drive, Shayne also has to concede, is another not-so-terrible part of his position. The moment he leaves the town border and hits the empty roads, dark trees and empty, open sky surrounding him is always a bit of a quiet thrill. The environment is nothing like the one he’d left behind at home and yet at the same time, there was a sort of aching familiarity to it. That feeling of being the only one and yet also not knowing if there could be anyone or anything lurking but by the time he’d allow his mind to dwell on it he’s already long driven past. Cruising, the woosh and fwhip of air streaming past his vehicle.
It wasn’t quite good enough tonight to make him completely forget how miserable he was feeling but it was enough to put it at a simmer for a little bit.
He’d never stopped being utterly baffled by the location choice of the business: a little spare patch of dirt and cement, a building not much bigger than a couple apartments in his building put together just seemingly dropped like a mini figurine on the side of the road. It’s possible the place got more traffic during the day but at night it seemed world’s beyond pointless. The people who did show up on rare occasions seemed to be grateful for it but it didn’t seem worth the effort of keeping the place running. Damien was convinced there was something more sinister going on, that it was a front for something but other than the locked trapdoor, neither of them could pinpoint anything else particularly suspicious. Odd? Yes. But everywhere has their own quirks and maybe the decision to be out there went hand-in-hand with whatever low, low price the owner had bought it for.
(Cheap enough to pay bottom dollar for a store front and never get it fixed but stays open 24/7 and hires two night shift workers? Nuh-uh my little friend, Damien had said and Shayne had frowned at that, more so the ‘little’ part than the rest of it.)
Shayne’s moment of getting lost in his own head is interrupted by a noisy ping from his phone, currently propped up in a cup holder. He considers doing the right thing and ignoring it until he pulled to a stop in what passed for the store lot but when he spared a glance at the notification before the screen went dark, he saw it was from Damien and he was too curious and nervous about why he’d be sending a message to him right now considering how infrequently they communicated this way. (It had been ramping up more since they’d gotten a better feel for each other and how they each texted but it was still not often enough to be unremarkable.)
He slows down enough that he can pretend he’s being safe about it and then picks up his device, unlocking it and flipping to recent messages. The first one asks him where he is which sends a twinge of guilt to ignite in his stomach and then goes on to say that it’s cool if he’s not coming in but that he hopes he’s doing alright and if he quit unexpectedly he deserves at least to know that. To some others they might believe this sort of thing is all performative but really, Shayne is learning that’s just how this guy really is. Not, he has gleaned just from their conversations, from considerable lack of effort.
The next one is only three words: There’s been a revelation
He can’t respond to it without looking away from the road for too long so the best he can do is put the phone back where it was, increase his speed just a bit and let his mind conjure up what in the world that could possibly mean.
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“You look like shit, buddy.” Those are the very first words out of Damien’s mouth once he and Shayne are face-to-face. He’d been right by the door when Shayne had pulled up to his usual spot as if he had been waiting for him like an anxious dog wondering when his person was going to come home. Shayne hesitates at that, contemplates covering it up somehow, blame it on the bad lighting, or give a half-truth and just say that he didn’t sleep well but Damien’s staring at him in some sort of way that gives him the inkling that he wouldn’t believe any of that for a second. Or he’d allow him to say it and make him think it was believed but really, they’d both know.
“Funny you say that,” Shayne says from the doorway, waiting for Damien to step aside and let him enter. “Because I do, in fact, feel like shit.” He observes the inside with as much scrutiny as he can manage but from first looks, nothing seems particularly out of the ordinary. The light outside was even working tonight which was pretty special, especially since the last time it was out Shayne had left work that evening with a shiny new dent in his bumper.
“Why’d you come in then?” The question is asked with what sounds like genuine concern under the teasing and Shayne heaves out a sigh. It’s an amazing question. He pulls a hand through his light hair and realizes he’d forgotten to shower. No wonder it was easy to clock how he was actually feeling tonight.
“There’s been a revelation,” Shayne says as both a way to change the subject and, perhaps, make it seem like he’s answering the query. There’s a very brief moment where it appears like Damien is going to remark on it but then he brightens instead, his hands doing as much talking as his mouth.
“Dude. Yes. Right. Come on.” He starts moving, climbs behind the counter and Shayne follows as directed for lack of an argument against it. He’s taken into the kitchen, doesn’t bother making a detour to drop off his stuff even though he considers it, and they keep going until Damien stops them in the very back of the store. “Tah-dah.” He gestures like a magician who’s just pulled off an incredible trick and was waiting for the applause.
Later on, Shayne would laugh at himself for taking as long as he did to notice. For now it takes him an embarrassingly long time, searching with a frown and furrowed brow.
“My guy,” Damien says, deflating a bit. He gestures again, slightly more aggressively and that’s when Shayne sees it:
The trap door is wide open, the lock discarded, the pitch black maw of whatever was underneath ready and waiting.