The Night Shift at Blackthorn Works

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel as I turned into the gravel staff car park at Blackthorn Components Ltd. The stones crunched beneath the tyres of my battered Vauxhall Astra, marking the end of eight months that had nearly broken me. Eight months of rejection emails, dwindling savings and the constant, gnawing fear that I would end up on the street. Desperation had become a physical thing, a weight lodged in my chest that made it difficult to breathe on some days.

But that evening was different. That evening, I had a job.

I parked between a rusting Transit van and a faded Vauxhall Vectra, then sat for a moment and tried to steady my nerves. The factory squatted ahead of me on an ageing light-industrial estate outside Coventry, and something about it made me pause.

From the outside, it looked smaller than I had expected, perhaps the size of a modest warehouse and nothing more. What really caught my attention, though, were the windows. Every single one had been painted black, and the paint seemed to absorb the fading evening light rather than reflect it. I had never seen anything quite like it.

Stop overthinking, I told myself. It is a job. That is all that matters.

I collected my folder of paperwork from the passenger seat and headed towards the main entrance. The glass doors were the only transparent surfaces in the entire building. They opened into a small reception area that felt more like a GP surgery waiting room than the entrance to a factory.

Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The air smelt of heavy-duty cleaning fluid mixed with something I could not identify, something metallic and sharp.

A thin man with prematurely grey hair emerged from a side door, checking his watch as he approached. He wore stone-coloured chinos, a pressed white shirt and a company identity badge clipped to his breast pocket.

"Daniel Mercer?" he asked, extending his hand. "I'm Martin Vale, your supervisor. Welcome to Blackthorn Components."

"Thank you," I said, shaking his hand. "I'm grateful for the opportunity."

His grip was firm but cold. His pale blue eyes studied me with an intensity that made me slightly uncomfortable.

"Of course," he said. "Shall we begin the tour?"

Martin led me through a door marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY and into a corridor that immediately confused me. It stretched ahead of us far beyond what should have been possible given the factory's exterior dimensions. I found myself counting my steps.

Twenty. Thirty. Forty.

We were still walking.

The walls were painted an institutional beige. The same fluorescent tubes that had hummed in reception continued overhead, casting everything in a harsh, clinical glare.

How could the building be this deep?

I glanced back over my shoulder. The door through which we had entered seemed impossibly far away, although we had only been walking for a minute or two. Perhaps there was an extension at the rear that I had not seen from the car park. That had to be it.

"Here is your staff safety card," Martin said. He drew a laminated card from his pocket and handed it to me without breaking stride. "Please read the company rules carefully. They are quite important."

I looked down, expecting ordinary reminders about protective clothing, manual handling and fire procedures.

Instead, I found rules that made no sense at all.

Do not cross any doorway, room, passage or boundary marked with red hazard tape.

Avoid eye contact with Operative 314.

Report any individual absent from the current shift list.

If you hear a voice calling from an empty room, do not answer.

Reflections may show individuals who are not present. This is normal.

Report any colleague who appears altered or different from when you last saw them.

I stopped walking and read the card again, certain that I had misunderstood it.

The words remained the same. They sounded less like workplace guidance than instructions for surviving a horror film.

"Is this some sort of joke?" I asked, looking up.

Martin was gone.

I spun round and checked both directions. The corridor was empty. It stretched away on either side without any sign of my supervisor, any sound of footsteps or any indication of where he could have gone.

He had been beside me seconds earlier. Now it was as though he had simply vanished.

My pulse quickened. The familiar tightness of anxiety returned to my chest. This was not normal. None of it was normal.

But the weight of eight months without an income pressed down on me, reminding me that I could not afford to be particular. I needed the job, whatever peculiarities came with it.

I studied the card again and committed the rules to memory. Then I continued in the direction we had been walking.

After another stretch that seemed impossibly long, I reached double doors marked FACTORY FLOOR - PACKING LINE 4.

The space beyond was much closer to what I had expected. There were concrete floors, metal shelving, conveyor belts and packing stations. Workers in navy boiler suits moved between them, although there seemed to be fewer staff than a facility of that size ought to require. The familiar clatter and hum of machinery provided a strangely comforting backdrop after the silence of the corridors.

I approached the nearest station, where a woman with brown hair tied in a ponytail was sealing cartons with practised efficiency. She wore safety glasses, and a pale burn mark crossed her right wrist.

"Excuse me," I said. "I'm Daniel Mercer, the new starter. I'm looking for my station."

She glanced up. Her hazel eyes showed no surprise, as if new starters arrived without their supervisors every day.

"You're on Packing Line 4. I'm Sian Fletcher." She indicated the station beside hers. "That's yours."

"Thanks. Do you know where Martin Vale went? He was giving me a tour, and then he simply disappeared."

Sian's expression did not change. She shrugged and returned to her work.

"He does that."

The casual way she said it sent a chill down my spine.

He does that. As though supervisors vanishing halfway through a conversation were perfectly ordinary.

I moved to the station she had indicated and found another worker there, a man with black hair streaked with grey and wire-rimmed spectacles. He looked up from his packing. His dark brown eyes assessed me quickly before he spoke.

"Peter Rowlands," he said in a precise, measured voice. "You must be the new starter."

"Daniel Mercer. Nice to meet you."

Peter nodded and returned to his work.

I stood there, waiting for instructions, training or any indication of what I was meant to do. Both of my new colleagues continued their tasks in near silence.

The silence itself was strange. Every other place I had worked had been filled with conversation and banter, the ordinary social noise that made a long shift bearable. Sian and Peter worked with almost mechanical efficiency, speaking only when it was absolutely necessary.

But it was not merely the lack of conversation that disturbed me. The acoustics of the factory were wrong. I could hear voices echoing from other parts of the floor, conversations that seemed to be taking place in areas which looked empty from where I stood. Whenever I turned to locate them, I saw only vacant workstations and motionless machinery.

Above us, the fluorescent lights flickered constantly. It was not the occasional faltering of ageing tubes, but a persistent, rhythmic strobing that threw shifting shadows across the factory floor.

Those shadows seemed to move independently of the people and equipment that should have cast them. The effect was so disorientating that I began to question what I was actually seeing.

I tried to concentrate on the task, watching Sian's movements to understand what I would be doing. The work seemed straightforward. Unmarked electrical relay units travelled along the conveyor belt. We wrapped them, attached labels, packed them into cartons, sealed the cartons and moved them to the outgoing stack. Nothing on the units, labels or boxes suggested what Blackthorn Components ultimately produced or where anything was going.

After observing for a few minutes, I decided to try Sian again. Perhaps a practical question would make her more forthcoming.

"The lighting in here seems rather inconsistent," I said, gesturing towards the flickering tubes. "Is there a maintenance fault?"

Sian glanced up at the lights, then back at me with the same neutral expression she had worn since my arrival. She shrugged, somehow conveying both acknowledgement and dismissal, and resumed packing without a word.

Her indifference unsettled me more than an explanation would have done. It was not simply that she did not want to discuss the lights. The question itself appeared meaningless to her, as though the ceaseless flickering, the moving shadows and the voices from empty parts of the factory were perfectly normal features of working at Blackthorn Components Ltd.

I stood there watching my new colleagues work in silence, the laminated safety card heavy in my pocket, and wondered what sort of place I had entered.

My bladder had been demanding attention for the past hour, but I had been too nervous about leaving my station to do anything about it. The conveyor belt's mechanical rhythm and the oppressive silence from Sian and Peter made every minute feel stretched thin. Shortly after midnight, I could no longer ignore it.

I glanced at Sian. She was methodically sealing another carton without looking up. Peter remained focused on his own station, his wire-rimmed spectacles reflecting the unstable fluorescent light. Neither of them had said a word to me since our brief introductions hours earlier. Working beside them felt like working beside mannequins.

"I'll be back in a minute," I said, more to fill the silence than because I expected a response.

Sian did not acknowledge me. Peter's hands never paused in their precise movements.

Right. Of course.

I stepped away from my station and headed in what I thought was the direction of the toilets. Martin had mentioned them during his abbreviated tour, before his inexplicable disappearance, but I had not paid enough attention to the route.

The factory floor extended in several directions, with corridors branching away at irregular intervals. The fluorescent lights continued their maddening flicker, making impossible shadows dance independently across the concrete.

I chose a corridor that looked familiar, although in truth they all looked the same: beige walls, industrial lighting and that persistent smell of metal and chemical cleaner.

My footsteps echoed more loudly than they should have in the empty passage. Each one seemed to return from several directions at once.

After walking for what felt like several minutes, I realised that I was completely lost. The corridor was longer than any I remembered from the tour, its walls stretching endlessly ahead. Worse, I had not seen a single sign for the toilets.

The pressure in my bladder grew more urgent. I considered turning back and asking Sian for directions, assuming she would respond this time.

Then I noticed the red tape.

A metre-wide strip of red hazard tape crossed the floor in a perfect line from one wall to the other. It looked new and heavy-duty, completely out of place in the otherwise unremarkable corridor.

My hand went instinctively to the laminated card in my pocket.

The first rule was explicit: do not cross any doorway, room, passage or boundary marked with red hazard tape.

I stopped and stared at it.

This was exactly the sort of boundary the rule described. There was no ambiguity, no reasonable excuse for crossing it. Whatever lay beyond had been marked clearly enough for anyone to understand.

I should have turned round. Every rational part of my mind told me to respect the warning and go back for directions.

But eight months without work had taught me how easily fear could be pushed aside when bills needed paying. I told myself it was merely tape across a factory corridor. I was only looking for the toilets.

How dangerous could it be?

Knowing precisely what the rule said, I stepped across the red hazard tape.

The corridor continued unchanged. The same beige walls. The same flickering lights. The same chemical smell.

Nothing happened.

I was almost disappointed by how anticlimactic it felt. Perhaps the tape was an obsolete safety marking that nobody had removed. Factories accumulated rules and warnings over the years. Some of them remained long after their original purpose had been forgotten.

I continued, promising myself that I would find the toilets and return directly to Packing Line 4. No harm done.

Roughly six metres beyond the tape, I heard a mechanical hum.

It was low and rhythmic, like industrial equipment running through a continuous cycle. The sound came from behind one of the doors along the corridor, the first door I had seen since crossing the boundary.

Unlike the other doors in the building, it stood ajar by roughly fifteen centimetres. A narrow blade of brighter light fell through the gap and across the floor.

I slowed and listened. The noise was mechanical rather than the electrical buzz of the fluorescent tubes. It had a purposeful quality, the sound of equipment designed for a particular task.

Perhaps it was a maintenance room or a machinery store. Something entirely innocent.

But curiosity proved stronger than caution. After everything I had already experienced - Martin's disappearance, the absurd rules and the unnatural silence of my colleagues - I needed to understand something about the place. I needed one answer that might help me make sense of what I had walked into.

I approached the door and put my ear close to the gap. The humming came steadily from within. There were no voices and no other sounds, only that continuous mechanical pulse. It sounded like machinery capable of running unattended for hours.

Before I could change my mind, I pushed the door wider.

The smell reached me first.

Formaldehyde mingled with something organic and putrid, burning my nose and making my eyes water. It bypassed rational thought and struck the primitive part of my mind that recognised death and decay.

Then I saw the tables.

Four stainless-steel post-mortem tables stood in a neat row beneath harsh white lights. Each bore dismembered human remains arranged with clinical precision: arms divided at shoulders and elbows, legs severed at hips and knees, torsos opened to expose dark, empty cavities. On the furthest table lay a severed head, its glassy eyes staring at the ceiling and its mouth slightly open, as though it had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence.

The humming came from a refrigeration unit along the rear wall, keeping the cold room and everything inside it preserved. From the corridor, the sound had seemed harmless. In that room, it felt obscene, like a mechanical heartbeat among the dead.

My mind struggled to absorb what I was seeing. This was not a factory engaged in anything legitimate. It was something else, something that seemed to explain the blacked-out windows, the impossible corridors, the rules and Martin's disappearance.

The red tape had not marked an ordinary restricted area. It had marked a room full of human remains.

The smell overwhelmed me. My stomach lurched violently.

I stumbled backwards, clapping a hand over my mouth as bile rose into my throat. The room spun, and I caught the doorframe to stop myself falling.

Every instinct screamed at me to get away, to run as far and as fast as I could.

I turned and fled.

My footsteps cracked through the empty corridor like gunshots. I no longer cared about stealth, workplace procedure or the unnatural quiet that seemed to govern the place. I needed to return to the factory floor. To something that resembled normality. To people who had not been dismembered and laid out on post-mortem tables.

Behind me, the door slammed with a metallic crash. The noise travelled through the building like a warning bell, bouncing from the walls and multiplying until it seemed that the whole factory was collapsing around me.

I ran back across the red tape without slowing. I passed the endless beige walls and the flickering lights, past everything that had seemed merely strange before and now felt deliberate, sinister and threatening.

I burst back onto Packing Line 4 with my chest heaving and my hands trembling from adrenaline.

The conveyor belts and packing stations should have been reassuring. Instead, I knew at once that something was wrong.

My station stood empty, exactly as I had left it. Sian and Peter were gone. Their stations had been abandoned as well.

Sian's sealing equipment sat idle, half-finished cartons scattered around it. Peter's packing materials lay untouched, as though he had vanished in the middle of a task. The conveyor belt continued its mindless rhythm, carrying gaps where the relay units should have been, but the people who had worked beside me for hours had disappeared.

I stood alone on the factory floor, listening to the machinery and wondering whether I was the only living person left in the building.

I opened my mouth to call for them, but the names felt hollow before they left my throat.

"Sian? Peter?"

My voice carried across the floor and vanished. It did not echo or fade naturally. The building seemed to swallow it whole.

The conveyor belt kept moving. Its mechanical rhythm was the same sound I had heard for hours, but now it seemed like the only evidence that anything in Blackthorn Works was still functioning normally.

Where had they gone? People did not simply evaporate from their stations.

Sian had been there, sealing cartons with the same methodical precision she had maintained all evening. Peter had been arranging his materials with his usual careful attention. Now their stations looked as if they had stood empty for hours, not for the short time I had been away.

Perhaps it had been longer than I thought. I did not know how much time I had spent wandering those corridors, looking into the cold room and running back. Time felt distorted inside the factory.

Even so, Sian and Peter had been there when I left. I was certain of it.

The fluorescent lights continued their erratic flickering. Their shifting shadows still moved without regard for the objects that ought to have cast them. Over the course of the shift I had almost grown accustomed to that particular wrongness, but alone on the factory floor, it felt ominous rather than irritating. Every flicker suggested movement at the edge of my vision.

I needed to find Martin.

He was my supervisor, and supervisors were supposed to have answers, although his habit of vanishing without warning did not inspire confidence. Perhaps this was considered normal at Blackthorn. Perhaps workers disappeared from their stations and everyone treated it as standard procedure.

Of course. Just like storing dismembered bodies in a refrigerated room was standard procedure.

"Working late, Daniel?"

I spun round so quickly that I nearly lost my balance.

Someone stood roughly three metres behind me. I recognised him as Callum Price, one of the men I had met briefly during induction. He was tall, with dark hair, and had been friendly enough during our short conversation. He had seemed normal then, one of the few people in the building who had made eye contact and spoken in complete sentences.

Something was different now.

He was smiling. It should have reassured me. Instead, every muscle in my body tightened.

"Callum," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I was looking for Sian and Peter. They were here a moment ago."

His smile widened, and I realised what was wrong with it.

The grin stretched too far across his face, dragging his features into an expression that looked painful. There were too many teeth in his mouth. Not a normal human set, but rows of sharp, pointed teeth receding further into his jaw than they possibly could, like a shark's mouth forced into a human skull.

My mind tried to explain it away. Bad lighting. A peculiar angle. A stress-induced hallucination after finding a room filled with human remains.

The longer I looked, the clearer it became that this was neither poor light nor imagination.

"Did you see something interesting tonight, Daniel?" he asked.

His voice had a quality I had not heard during induction. Other tones moved beneath his words, several voices layered together in imperfect harmony. The sound made my skin crawl.

The safety card weighed heavily in my pocket. One rule flashed through my thoughts.

Report any colleague who appears altered or different from when you last saw them.

Different was putting it mildly.

I stepped backwards, unable to tear my gaze from that impossibly broad smile.

"I was looking for Martin," I said. "Do you know where he went?"

"Martin is busy just now," Callum said, tilting his head to an angle no ordinary neck should have allowed. "But I'd be happy to help with whatever you need."

He took a step towards me.

His movements were wrong as well. They were too fluid and too controlled, each motion possessing a perfect balance that made it seem choreographed. He moved like a great cat, with the effortless grace of something built to hunt.

"That's all right," I said, taking another step back. "I'll find him myself."

I retreated again, then once more. Callum's eyes caught the fluorescent glare as he watched me, reflecting it like an animal's eyes in headlamps. The flash was brief, but unmistakable. Human eyes did not do that.

I had been desperate enough to overlook a great deal: the blacked-out windows, the ridiculous rules and the unnatural silence of my colleagues. I had even managed to tell myself that the cold room was something I could report to West Midlands Police once I was safely outside.

But whatever Callum had become, or whatever was wearing his appearance, was beyond anything I could rationalise or ignore.

My back struck something solid. I had reached the fire exit. The metal door was cold against my shoulder blades, its push bar pressing into my back. One hard shove would put me in the concrete escape stairwell, away from Callum's over-wide grin and reflective eyes.

"You seem nervous, Daniel," he said. The layered tones beneath his voice had grown more pronounced. "Is something wrong?"

I reached behind me with one hand and felt for the push bar while keeping my gaze fixed on his face. I did not want to look away while he watched me with that predatory concentration.

"Just tired," I said. "Long first shift."

"Oh, I think your shift is only just beginning."

He lunged.

He crossed the distance between us with inhuman speed, faster than anything of his size should have been able to move. I caught a glimpse of those countless pointed teeth and mirror-bright eyes before throwing myself backwards against the fire exit.

The push bar yielded. I fell through into the concrete escape stairwell and slammed the door behind me just as something heavy struck it from the other side.

My fingers shook as I fought with the locking mechanism, the metal unfamiliar and cold beneath them. Each impact sent vibrations through the frame and into my bones.

The blows were not merely loud. They carried impossible weight, as though someone were swinging a sledgehammer rather than using fists.

The door began to bend.

I watched reinforced steel bow inwards under each strike, warping as easily as kitchen foil. Whatever was hitting it possessed strength that defied everything I understood. No human being could have produced that force, not even someone built like a professional rugby prop.

Through the buckling metal came what should have been Callum's voice. The sounds were no longer words. They were clicks and chittering noises, like insects communicating in an alien language. Their rhythm suggested speech, but the noises themselves made my skin crawl.

Whatever had worn Callum's face was abandoning the pretence now that I had escaped.

Then everything fell silent.

I pressed my back against the stairwell wall, every muscle held tight. My breathing sounded deafening in the sudden quiet, harsh and ragged as it echoed from the concrete. I tried to control it, but my lungs demanded air after the surge of terror that had driven me through the door.

Minutes dragged past. I counted my heartbeats and listened for movement on the other side.

Nothing.

No footsteps. No clicking. No indication that anything remained outside.

I did not trust the silence. After what I had witnessed, quiet seemed more dangerous than noise.

The rules on the safety card made sense now. They were not eccentric company policies or an induction prank. They were survival instructions for a place where reality behaved differently, where things could wear human faces and hunt through impossible corridors.

I had thought I was desperate enough to endure anything for wages. This went beyond desperation and into madness.

Footsteps approached from the factory floor. Several sets, moving with an ordinary human cadence.

I tensed against the wall, ready to run up the stairs if the creature had returned with others.

"Daniel."

Martin's voice was calm and measured, just as it had been during the tour.

I had learnt better than to trust a familiar voice in this building.

"It is safe to come out."

Safe. The word felt like a cruel joke.

Nothing about Blackthorn Works was safe. But remaining trapped in the stairwell would solve nothing, and I needed answers about what had tried to kill me.

I reached for the lock. My hand was still trembling. The metal now felt warm from the punishment it had absorbed.

Slowly and carefully, I released the mechanism and opened the door just far enough to look through.

Martin stood roughly three metres away. It was the first time I had seen him since he vanished from the corridor hours earlier. His stone-coloured chinos and pressed white shirt looked exactly as they had before, without a wrinkle or mark despite whatever had happened.

Sian stood beside him in her navy boiler suit, wearing the same resigned expression she had worn while sealing cartons. Peter was there too, his wire-rimmed spectacles catching the fluorescent light. Several other workers from the shift stood with them.

All appeared entirely human. Their eyes did not reflect the light. Their mouths contained the proper number of teeth, and their bodies moved with natural human rhythms.

Callum was nowhere to be seen.

I opened the door further and stepped cautiously back onto the factory floor. The place where the creature had stood was empty. There was no evidence of a struggle. Even the scuff marks from my retreat had disappeared.

"We heard the disturbance," Martin said with the same professional composure he had used during the tour, as though finding a new starter barricaded behind a fire exit was a routine workplace incident. "The Callum mimic has been dealt with. It was not supposed to be here tonight."

Dealt with.

The phrase sent ice through me. I thought of the cold room and the human remains arranged beneath the white lights. I wondered whether that was connected to what happened when something appeared where it should not, but Martin's words confirmed nothing.

"I met Callum during induction," I said, watching their faces. If they intended to lie, I wanted to see how they did it.

Sian shook her head. It was the first time she had spoken since my return to the line.

"You met something using Callum's appearance. The real Callum Price left after his first week."

The face had been identical, down to the smallest detail. The creature had copied his mannerisms, his voice and his casual way of speaking, until the smile, teeth and predatory movement betrayed it.

Peter adjusted his spectacles with the same exact movement I had observed at his station.

"It happens sometimes," he said. "That is why we have the rules."

The absurd staff safety card I had dismissed as a joke was a survival manual. Every strange instruction had a purpose in a workplace where creatures could impersonate staff and hunt them through the corridors.

I took the laminated card from my pocket and looked at it with new understanding.

Report any colleague who appears altered or different from when you last saw them.

I had noticed the changes in the thing wearing Callum's face: the unnatural smile, reflective eyes, layered voice and movement too smooth for human anatomy. Yet I had tried to rationalise every sign.

My desperation for the job had nearly killed me. I had ignored the warnings and the instincts screaming that something was wrong because I needed the wages more than I trusted my own judgement. Eight months without work had made me willing to accept the unacceptable.

"How long has this been happening?" I asked, looking from Martin to the others.

They stood in a loose semicircle around me. Their faces showed the same resigned acceptance I had seen in Sian earlier, as if this were another ordinary aspect of working at Blackthorn Components, no more remarkable than clocking in or taking a break.

"Long enough for us to know how to manage it," Martin replied.

He straightened his identity badge. The small, mundane gesture made the conversation feel even more surreal. We were discussing a predatory mimic as though it were a minor workplace hazard to be controlled rather than feared.

I thought about Sian and Peter disappearing from their stations while I explored beyond the red tape. They must have left because the mimic had been detected. Perhaps the factory had a warning system. Perhaps they simply knew when its ordinary dangers had developed into something worse. Either way, Martin had returned with them and the other workers only after the creature had been contained.

"The real Callum Price," I said, testing the name. "What happened to him?"

"He had the sense to leave after his first week," said one of the other workers, a person I recognised from my induction group but whose name I could not remember. "He saw what this place was and decided his safety mattered more than the wages."

That should have been my choice as well. I should have walked away when Martin handed me the card, when he vanished in the corridor or when I found the cold room.

Instead, I had stayed because I needed money, because I was tired of being unemployed and because I believed I could tolerate whatever oddities came with the job.

Now I understood that they were not oddities. They were dangers that could kill me if I made the wrong decision or ignored the wrong warning.

The thing wearing Callum's face had been playing with me, prolonging the hunt before closing in.

"What happens now?" I asked.

The question carried implications I was not sure I wanted to examine.

Was I expected to return to my station and pretend none of this had happened? Should I follow Callum's example and resign while I still could? Or was I already too deeply entangled in Blackthorn Works to walk away?

Martin repeated, with a slight nod, that incidents like this happened from time to time and that the rules existed for precisely that reason.

I stared at him and the others, waiting for somebody to smile or break character. Someone had to admit that this was an elaborate and grotesque induction prank.

The silence lengthened while I searched their faces for a sign of ordinary humanity, some indication that we were participants in the same joke.

There was nothing.

Their expressions remained flat and matter-of-fact, as though we had discussed the weather rather than a colleague who had transformed into something with rows of pointed teeth. Sian's hazel eyes held the same weary resignation she had shown all night, as if supernatural incidents were another item on her shift checklist. Peter adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles and maintained the careful distance he had kept since our introduction.

The absurdity of it crashed over me. They were treating predatory mimics as an ordinary Thursday night occurrence. Finding dismembered human remains was apparently another hazard to be managed alongside manual-handling guidance and fire safety.

"What about the room?" I demanded, my voice sharper than I intended. "The room with the body parts."

Martin raised his eyebrows slightly and tilted his head with practised concern.

"What room?"

His eyes told a different story. They held the calculating look of someone who knew exactly what I meant and was deciding how much, if anything, to admit. It was the same look he had worn before disappearing from the corridor and leaving me alone to navigate the building.

"The cold room beyond the red hazard tape," I said through gritted teeth. "The one full of dismembered corpses on four post-mortem tables. The room that smelt of formaldehyde and rotting meat. The room that made me understand why every window in this factory is painted black."

The workers exchanged glances lasting exactly two seconds. The movement was perfectly timed and perfectly coordinated, as though they had rehearsed this conversation with other new starters who had broken the same rule.

Martin smoothed his white shirt and straightened his identity badge with deliberate care.

"Daniel, you must have been mistaken. The strain of starting a new job can sometimes cause hallucinations. First-shift nerves, you understand."

The words were measured and reasonable, delivered in the same professional tone he had used during the tour. But there was a new precision beneath them, the careful rhythm of a rehearsed script. Every syllable had been chosen to sound sympathetic while revealing nothing.

"Hallucinations," I repeated, tasting the word as though it were rotten.

The other workers nodded in perfect synchronisation. Too perfect. Their heads moved through precisely the same angle at precisely the same speed, like marionettes controlled by a single hand, yet none of them looked directly at me. Their eyes settled just above my shoulder or slightly to my left, as though meeting my gaze might break whatever spell they were trying to cast.

Peter Rowlands cleared his throat with mechanical precision. "New starters often experience disorientation during their first shift. The layout can be confusing."

Sian Fletcher joined in, her voice unnaturally flat. "Factory work takes some getting used to."

Another worker, whom I barely remembered from the induction group, added, "First nights are always difficult."

Each response came exactly three seconds after the last.

I counted the intervals without meaning to. My mind had seized upon the pattern because it was the only part of the conversation that made sense. Everything else was madness dressed up as concern for a member of staff.

I studied their faces properly. The fluorescent tubes continued their erratic flickering, throwing restless shadows across expressions that seemed to shift with the light. Beneath that changing illumination, however, I saw something else: a tightness around their eyes, as if they were working hard to keep their faces neutral. They looked like people holding their breath, waiting for me to accept the explanation and move on.

But I had seen what I had seen.

Four stainless-steel post-mortem tables. Severed limbs arranged with clinical precision. A detached head whose glassy eyes stared at nothing. The chemical stink mixed with decay, burning my nose and turning my stomach.

No amount of first-shift stress could invent details that specific or that visceral.

"This is insane," I said, barely above a whisper.

Martin Vale nodded with practised concern, like a therapist acknowledging a patient's delusion.

"You're finished for tonight, Daniel. Why don't you go home and get some rest? We'll see you tomorrow evening."

Tomorrow evening.

As though I were expected to return. As though I were meant to pretend that this performance had convinced me the cold room was a stress-induced hallucination. As though I would clock in again, take my place beside Sian and Peter, and resume wrapping, labelling and packing those unmarked electrical relay units without ever learning what Blackthorn Components Ltd actually produced.

The casual certainty in Martin's voice made my skin crawl. He was not asking whether I would come back. He was telling me that I would, with the same assurance he had used when explaining the staff safety card. My return was simply another inevitable part of the process.

My hands began to shake before I consciously decided to leave. The tremor started in my fingers and spread through my wrists, making the laminated card rustle in my pocket. I needed to get out of the building, away from people who spoke in timed responses and treated horror like routine paperwork.

"I need to leave," I managed.

Martin's smile did not waver. "Of course. Good night, Daniel."

I turned towards the fire exit through which I had escaped the thing wearing Callum Price's face. My legs felt unsteady, as though I were crossing the deck of a ferry in rough weather. Every step demanded conscious effort and balance.

The factory floor stretched around me, filled with the rhythm of belts, rollers and packing machinery beneath the continual flicker of the overhead lights. Behind me came the soft shuffle of feet as the group dispersed. There was no conversation and no discussion of what had happened. They simply returned to their stations as if a routine safety briefing had ended.

The fire-exit door opened easily beneath my palm. There was none of the resistance I had encountered before, no struggle with the bar or the mechanism. Cold night air struck my face, carrying the smell of distant rain, wet tarmac and exhaust fumes.

Real smells from a real world governed by rules I understood.

My battered Vauxhall Astra stood where I had left it in the gravel staff car park, wedged between a rusting Transit van and a faded Vauxhall Vectra. Gravel crunched beneath my work boots as I crossed the car park, each step taking me farther from the building that looked so harmless from outside.

It was only a modest factory unit on an ageing light-industrial estate outside Coventry, its windows blacked out and a restrained sign fixed above the entrance. Nothing about its exterior hinted at the labyrinth of corridors within.

I fumbled with my keys. My shaking fingers made it difficult to select the right one, but the metal felt cold and solid in my hand, a tangible reminder of ordinary reality. Some things still behaved as they ought. Doors opened when a key turned. Cars started when the ignition engaged.

The factory remained at the edge of my vision, giving no sign of the impossible spaces I had escaped. I turned the key, and the Astra's engine coughed into life with the familiar grinding noise that promised another repair bill.

The dashboard clock read 02:47.

My hands had mostly stopped trembling, although adrenaline still moved through me like a slow poison. I pulled on to the estate access road, and Blackthorn Components Ltd dwindled in my rear-view mirror until it became another dark, unremarkable building. There was no hint of what lay behind its blacked-out windows, nor any suggestion that people - or things resembling people - wandered its corridors doing God knew what.

I tried to concentrate on the drive home. The nearby A-road was almost empty. Traffic lights cycled through red, amber and green at deserted junctions. A late-night phone-in programme on the radio was discussing local legends and conspiracy theories, which felt uncomfortably appropriate. I switched it off and drove in silence while my mind worked through what had happened.

The rational part of me kept trying to regain control. First-shift nerves. Stress after eight months without work. Perhaps the factory used a chemical that caused hallucinations. Perhaps the whole thing had been an elaborate initiation that had gone too far. Employers did strange things to test new staff, didn't they? It might have been some grotesque psychological assessment disguised as an ordinary shift.

But that did not explain the cold room. It did not explain the smell of formaldehyde and decay, the clinically arranged body parts or the mechanical hum of the refrigeration system. A smell like that could not be manufactured by nerves. Nor could the violent lurch in my stomach when I saw the severed head staring into nothing.

And nothing rational explained the way Callum's likeness had moved.

It had been too fluid and too graceful, its joints obeying the wrong anatomy. Its mouth had held several rows of pointed teeth. Its eyes had reflected the light like an animal's.

I reached the tired block of rented flats where I lived and sat in my parking space for a moment. The building looked exactly as it had when I left shortly before my 18:00 start: the same cracked pavement, the same stained brickwork, the same faulty communal landing light that the letting agent had repeatedly promised to repair. Its normality felt alien, as though I were seeing it through someone else's eyes.

My mobile buzzed against my leg.

I took it out, expecting a message from my elder brother asking how the new job had gone, or perhaps another fraudulent parcel-delivery text. The number was withheld.

The message was brief.

"Welcome to Blackthorn Components Ltd. Tomorrow's shift begins at 18:00. Do not be late."

I stared until the screen went dark, then woke it and read the message again. The same words. The same withheld number. There was no option to reply. It appeared only as a notification, not as part of a conversation.

They expected me back.

I climbed the stairs to my one-bedroom flat, every step heavier than the last. Inside, everything was as I had left it: dishes in the sink, yesterday's clothes on the bedroom floor, and a stack of bills on the kitchen worktop that I had avoided for weeks.

I dropped on to the sofa and tried to consider my choices. I could resign. I could walk away and look for work somewhere else. The Universal Credit journal notifications might give me a little more time, perhaps a few weeks if I stretched what remained.

Even as I thought it, I knew it was fantasy.

Eight months of searching had brought me to Blackthorn Components Ltd. Eight months of rejection emails, automated acknowledgements and interviews that led nowhere. My savings were gone. My overdraft was at its limit. The rent was due in a fortnight, and I had about fifteen pounds left.

I took out the laminated staff safety card and read it again by the light of my mobile.

Do not cross any doorway, room, passage or boundary marked with red hazard tape.

Avoid eye contact with Operative 314.

Report anyone absent from the current shift list.

Do not answer a voice coming from an empty room.

Reflections may show people who are not present.

Report any colleague who appears altered.

Each rule made more sense now. The red tape kept workers away from places such as the cold room, where evidence of whatever the factory did lay waiting in refrigerated silence. The warning about Operative 314 suggested that some workers were not workers at all. The instruction to report altered colleagues existed because something could take a person's place.

Perhaps the real Callum Price had been clever enough to recognise the danger and leave after his first week, before it was too late. But perhaps he had savings. Perhaps he had family willing to lend him money. Perhaps he had choices I did not.

I put the card on the coffee table and tried to sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the detached head again: the glazed eyes, the mouth hanging slightly open, the clinical arrangement of the remains as if someone were studying human anatomy.

When sleep eventually came, I dreamed of corridors that continued for ever and voices calling my name from empty rooms.

I woke around midday with sunlight leaking through the blinds and the taste of formaldehyde lingering in my mouth. The bills remained on the worktop. My bank account remained nearly empty. Notifications in my Universal Credit journal warned that my support would soon be reassessed.

I made coffee and sat at the kitchen table, staring at those messages. No other job prospects. No savings. Rent approaching.

The calculation was simple and brutal.

By evening, I was driving the Astra back towards Blackthorn Components Ltd.

I told myself I would be more careful. I would obey every rule. I would stay on Packing Line 4, avoid marked boundaries, investigate nothing and ask no questions. I would do the work and wait for my fortnightly wages to arrive in my bank account.

The gravel staff car park looked different somehow, smaller than I remembered. The rusting Transit and faded Vectra were still there, but the car I had seen Callum use was gone. Its former space held only gravel and dark oil stains.

I remained behind the wheel with the engine running, telling myself I could still leave. I could drive away and find another solution.

The fuel gauge sat just above empty, and I had fifteen pounds to my name.

The main entrance opened and Martin Vale emerged. He wore the same stone-coloured chinos and pressed white shirt, with his company identification hanging from his neck. He approached the Astra with that measured smile which never quite reached his eyes.

I lowered the window.

"Ready for another night?" he asked.

I nodded. My hand found the laminated safety card in my pocket. I had memorised every instruction during the long afternoon. This time I would follow them exactly.

I climbed out of the Astra and followed Martin through the glass doors, my fingers checking once more that the card was there.

The reception area looked unchanged. Fluorescent tubes hummed above us, and the air held its mixture of heavy-duty cleaning fluid and something metallic. Martin led me through the door marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY without speaking. This time I watched every turn, every junction and every detail that might help me navigate alone.

The beige corridors stretched impossibly beneath the flickering lights, but I refused to count my steps or dwell upon distances that could not fit inside the modest building. That sort of thinking belonged to my first shift, when I had still believed the place was obliged to make sense. Now I understood that survival meant accepting what could not be explained and concentrating upon what I could control.

We reached the double doors marked FACTORY FLOOR - PACKING LINE 4, and Martin gestured for me to enter.

He did not vanish this time. Perhaps that particular trick was reserved for entirely untested new starters, people who had not yet demonstrated that they could endure what Blackthorn really was.

Sian stood at her station, brown hair tied back in the same ponytail, safety glasses reflecting the lights. A pale burn mark crossed her right wrist. She looked up as I approached, gave me a small nod and returned to sealing cartons. No conversation was necessary.

Peter was already at work, his wire-rimmed spectacles catching the light as he moved with the same methodical precision I remembered. He acknowledged me with a brief glance and nothing more.

I took my position at the neighbouring station and resumed the work I had abandoned. Unmarked relay units arrived along the belt to be wrapped, labelled and packed into cartons. The labels and destination codes meant nothing to me and offered no clue about the factory's final product.

The work itself was simple: inspect the units, wrap them, apply the labels, seal the cartons and move them down the line. My hands quickly recovered the rhythm, retaining muscle memory from that single terrible shift.

The important thing was to remain occupied. I kept my attention on the work and refused to let it drift towards the noises echoing from unused sections of the factory floor. Voices called from areas where no one stood. Footsteps sounded without corresponding movement. From somewhere beyond a boundary marked by red hazard tape came the same mechanical hum I had heard near the cold room.

I knew better than to investigate. I kept my eyes on the relay units and allowed the sounds to become background noise.

The fluorescent tubes flickered in irregular patterns, casting shadows that moved independently of the objects and people which should have produced them. I no longer tried to follow those movements. My peripheral vision detected shapes that should not have existed, but I trained myself to stare straight ahead, concentrate on the cartons and ignore anything unrelated to the work.

At about 22:30, a young male agency worker appeared on the floor. He looked perhaps twenty-three, full of nervous energy, his wide eyes taking in everything. He kept glancing around, asking questions and trying to understand what he was seeing.

I recognised his expression. It was the same confusion and gathering dread I had felt during my first shift.

Martin appeared beside him and explained something in a low voice. The agency worker nodded, but he was not really listening. His attention wandered towards the empty places from which voices echoed, the shadows that moved incorrectly and the workers who stood too still at their stations.

At 23:15, I noticed that something about him had changed.

His movements had become too fluid and too graceful. When he turned his head, his neck rotated farther than human anatomy permitted. His smile stretched wider than it had at 22:30, exposing too many pointed teeth. His eyes caught the fluorescent light and reflected it. When he muttered to himself, a faint clicking sounded beneath his voice, as if other voices were layered below it.

I did not stare. I did not attempt to discover when the replacement or transformation had occurred.

Instead, I touched the laminated card in my pocket and remembered the final rule: report any colleague who appears altered.

I caught Martin's attention with a restrained gesture and nodded towards the agency worker. Martin followed my glance and observed him for exactly three seconds. Then he approached.

Their conversation was brief and too quiet for me to hear. The thing wearing the young man's appearance followed Martin towards the fire exit I had used on my first night. Neither returned to the factory floor during that shift.

I resumed packing.

Sian and Peter continued without pause, as if nothing extraordinary had happened, because at Blackthorn Components Ltd nothing extraordinary had happened. It was simply Thursday night.

The following weeks settled into a pattern. I arrived before 18:00, worked through until 06:00 and went home. Every fortnight, my wages appeared directly in my bank account.

I learnt the route through the maze of corridors by following exactly the same path on every shift, memorising each turn until I could reach Packing Line 4 without conscious thought. I also learnt which places to avoid beyond those explicitly barred by red tape: corridors where the air grew thick and oppressive, doorways that seemed to open on to nowhere, and sections where the fluorescent tubes flickered in patterns painful to watch.

Other new starters came and went. Some endured a few nights before resigning, sensible enough to put their safety before the money. Others stayed longer and made mistakes. They investigated sounds that should have been ignored. They answered voices from empty rooms. They crossed boundaries marked with red hazard tape or studied reflections in which absent people stood behind them. A few apparently met the gaze of things that resembled colleagues but moved incorrectly.

Those workers stopped appearing. Their stations remained empty for a night or two, and then replacements arrived.

I did not know whether all of them were dead. Some might have resigned without a word. Some might have been taken, replaced or changed into something else. Martin offered no explanations, and I learnt not to ask.

The card had taught me that survival depended upon recognising the limits of what I could control. I became adept at spotting the signs of a compromised colleague: the over-wide smile, too many pointed teeth, eyes reflecting light like an animal's, and movement either too fluid or too rigid for a human body. Sometimes a voice held multiple tones at once. Sometimes there was a faint click behind each syllable.

I reported such cases quickly and quietly, then returned to work while Martin dealt with them. I never asked where he took them. When he said a situation had been dealt with, I accepted the phrase and nothing more.

I also never made eye contact with Operative 314. I occasionally saw the number on a navy boiler suit at the far edge of the floor or disappearing around a corridor corner. Whenever that happened, I lowered my gaze and concentrated upon my hands. I never tested the rule, and no one told me what would happen if I did.

My finances slowly recovered. The rent was paid on time. Repayments began steadily reducing my overdraft instead of merely preventing further charges. I could do the weekly food shop without adding every pound in my head.

The desperation that had forced me back to the factory eased, but I did not resign. Blackthorn had taught me how to adapt to circumstances that could neither be changed nor reasoned with. I learnt to coexist with the impossible, although the fear never vanished. It merely became disciplined.

When voices called my name from empty corridors, I ignored them. When shadows moved independently of their sources, I focused upon the next relay unit. When the refrigeration hum grew louder behind a doorway or passage marked with red tape, I remembered the cold room and reminded myself that some knowledge demanded too high a price.

The factory followed rules unrelated to ordinary reality, but those rules were consistent. If I obeyed them precisely, accepted rather than questioned and treated the supernatural as a series of workplace hazards instead of mysteries requiring answers, I could survive.

Sian and Peter became familiar presences. We worked in a silence that was almost comfortable, acknowledging one another without inviting unnecessary closeness. Both had been there longer than I had. Both had learnt the same bargain between safety and deliberate ignorance.

Martin remained constant, appearing whenever he was needed, handling incidents requiring his intervention and then withdrawing into whatever administrative duties occupied him. His stone-coloured chinos and white shirt never seemed to crease. His identification badge always hung at the same angle. His measured smile never altered.

I stopped trying to decide whether his ability to appear and vanish, or to navigate corridors whose geometry shifted between one journey and the next, made him something other than human. There was no safe way to answer the question, and no rule required me to do so.

I also stopped wondering what Blackthorn Components Ltd produced. The relay-like units on the belt revealed nothing. Their labels were meaningless, and the destination codes never corresponded to any place I recognised. Those questions belonged to my first shift, when I still believed everything must possess a logical explanation.

What mattered was that I had steady work, reliable wages and a clear set of instructions that kept me alive.

Some nights were quieter than others. Some brought new starters who had to learn the same lessons about obedience and survival. Over time, I established a place on Packing Line 4 and demonstrated that I could meet the true requirements of the job. I could navigate impossible corridors. I could recognise a mimic. I could report a compromised worker without investigating what had happened to the original.

Most importantly, I could ignore what needed to be ignored.

After three months of night shifts at Blackthorn Components Ltd, the rhythm of the packing work had become second nature. My hands moved without conscious direction: inspect, wrap, label, seal, stack, then reach for the next unit.

The fluorescent lights flickered in their familiar, erratic pattern. Impossible shadows danced without regard for their sources, and I knew better than to watch them.

Sian worked at the station to my left, her brown hair in its usual ponytail and her safety glasses reflecting the harsh light. The pale burn across her right wrist showed whenever her sleeve rode up. She had greeted me at the start of that Thursday night's shift with the same brief nod she had offered for weeks.

Peter stood at his packing area, his wire-rimmed spectacles glinting as he maintained his careful pace. The three of us had developed an unspoken understanding: three people who knew how to survive somewhere that contradicted every rational explanation.

Voices echoed from empty corners of the factory floor, calling names that were not ours. I had stopped trying to identify their sources weeks before. At times, footsteps clicked across the concrete without any visible person making them. The mechanical drone beyond the red-taped boundaries had become another part of the ambient noise.

My wages had arrived in my account that morning, the same dependable amount which had pulled me out of immediate financial ruin. I had paid three consecutive months of rent on time. I could buy food without mentally totalling the basket. Each repayment reduced the overdraft balance a little further.

The eight months I had spent unemployed seemed to belong to another life, one in which I had believed ordinary employment was the only kind available.

Martin appeared at the edge of my vision, making his rounds in his pressed white shirt and stone-coloured chinos. His identification badge hung at precisely the angle it had on my first night and caught the light in exactly the same way. He nodded to me and continued across the floor.

I no longer thought of Martin as merely a supervisor. He was closer to a custodian of the rules, protecting those who had learnt to follow them and containing what he could when they failed. Whether he protected the factory from us, or us from the factory, remained impossible to tell.

A new starter had arrived a fortnight earlier, a woman in her early forties who asked too many questions and followed noises she should have ignored. By the end of her first week, her movements had become unnaturally fluid. Her smile widened to expose multiplying rows of pointed teeth, and her eyes shone when the light struck them.

I had signalled Martin at once, touching the laminated card in my pocket. He had dealt with the situation with his usual efficiency. By the following night, her station was empty.

I did not know whether the woman had been killed, taken, transformed or replaced. Another worker would arrive eventually. They always did.

Blackthorn operated according to laws that had nothing to do with physics or human reason, yet those laws were consistent enough to survive. Follow the rules exactly. Accept what could not be explained. Treat unnatural events as occupational hazards rather than mysteries demanding solutions.

The building could stretch into impossible dimensions. Creatures could wear the faces of former workers. A cold room beyond a red-tape boundary could contain dismembered human remains arranged on four post-mortem tables. None of that made the memories less terrible. It merely meant that strict compliance and wilful ignorance offered a path through them.

I had memorised every safe route through the corridors. I knew which areas filled with dense air that made breathing difficult and which doors led into spaces that could not exist within the building's modest exterior. Red tape marked the clearest dangers, but there were subtler warnings: lights flickering in patterns painful to watch, corners where shadows gathered too thickly, and stretches of wall that felt wrong even through the sleeve of a boiler suit.

My body had adapted completely to the packing work. Carton after carton passed through my station while my mind processed the surrounding strangeness without becoming overwhelmed.

Sian had reached that point before I arrived. Peter had been there longer still, developing a precise, technical approach to survival that treated each supernatural encounter like an item in a documented safety procedure.

The clock on the factory wall showed 05:58. Two minutes remained before the shift ended.

I completed the final packing sequence while the other workers made small movements in preparation to leave. No one announced the end of the shift or gathered many belongings. We had all learnt to travel lightly inside Blackthorn.

At 06:00, Martin appeared beside the double doors leading into the corridor and held his position while we filed past. His measured smile conveyed something between protection and warning. He had remained the single steady presence throughout my adaptation, arriving whenever a situation exceeded what I could manage alone.

The corridor felt shorter that morning, although I knew its dimensions shifted according to rules I would never understand. My feet followed the familiar route towards reception, between beige walls and beneath fluorescent lighting that hummed with electrical regularity. Unlike the erratic tubes above Packing Line 4, those lights behaved almost normally.

The glass entrance doors ahead promised a return to the world where physics worked predictably and shadows obeyed light and obstruction.

I stepped through them into the cool morning air. Gravel crunched beneath my boots as I crossed the staff car park towards my battered Astra, still parked between the rusting Transit and the faded Vectra.

Behind me, the factory looked deceptively ordinary: one modest unit among many on an ageing industrial estate, with blacked-out windows and discreet signage that said nothing about the impossible distances within its walls.

My keys felt solid in my hand, connecting me to the rational world beyond Blackthorn's boundaries. The Astra started with its familiar grinding complaint, a reminder of repairs I could now afford to arrange.

The dashboard clock showed 06:03 as I left the gravel car park and turned on to the estate access road. Morning sunlight gave everything a warm, ordinary colour and made the night's work feel like a half-remembered dream. The weight of the laminated safety card in my pocket and the ache in my hands told me otherwise.

I had learnt to survive in a place where accepting the impossible was part of earning a wage.

At deserted junctions, the traffic lights cycled through red, amber and green as I drove along the A-road and into quiet suburban streets. The radio carried the morning news: weather, traffic and political developments belonging to a world where a serious workplace hazard might be defective machinery or poor ventilation.

I had become part of a hidden economy governed by different rules.

My block of flats came into view, the same tired building where I had spent those desperate months without work. Yet my circumstances had changed. Immediate financial panic had given way to something resembling stability, bought at a cost I tried not to examine too closely.

I parked in my usual space and climbed the stairs to my flat, already calculating the sleep I needed before the next night shift. The faulty communal landing light blinked above me. The routine had become as natural as breathing: work through the night, sleep through the day, return when darkness fell.

Inside, I placed the safety card on the kitchen worktop beside my keys. It had become a ritual marking the boundary between worlds. The sofa, television and ordinary kitchen appliances reminded me that normal reality still existed, even though I had learnt to function where its rules did not apply.

In the bathroom mirror, my reflection showed the same face I had always known. I checked it carefully nevertheless. The proportions were right. My eyes did not reflect the light. When I tested a restrained smile, it contained the correct number of teeth.

Recognising my achievement produced a sensation uncomfortably close to pride. I had found stable work in an unstable world. The wages were good, perhaps because of the extraordinary demands placed upon those who earned them. The factory consumed, changed or drove away people who could not adapt, while rewarding those prepared to comply.

I had proved capable of that compliance.

The next evening, I would return to Packing Line 4 and stand between Sian and Peter. The building would open into distances its exterior could not contain. Voices would call from empty rooms. Reflections might show absent people. Shadows would move according to no recognisable law.

I would avoid every red-taped boundary. I would never meet the eyes of Operative 314. I would check unfamiliar faces against the shift list, ignore voices from empty rooms and report anyone who returned altered. When intervention became necessary, I would signal Martin and allow him to deal with it.

Then I would resume the steady rhythm of packing, the anchor I had chosen in a reality that defied reason.

I got into bed as the morning sun shone through the windows on to the perfectly ordinary car park below. A strange sense of accomplishment settled over me, but beneath it remained the memory of the cold room, the missing workers and the things that smiled with other people's faces.

I had found stability, but it depended upon calculated blindness. Every safe shift required me to accept another disappearance, another denial and another horror left unexplained.

Even so, I knew I would return the following night.

I had learnt how to live with the darkness, and that was the most frightening change of all.