There had been a bank robbery in Habitsville—an actual, real life bank robbery in my hometown—and I couldn’t have been happier.
I’m sorry, maybe that was a little insensitive. Of course, I’m not pro-crime—but as a small-town newspaper reporter whose job is too often limited to new library branches and high school sports, this is the most interesting work week I could hope for.
Besides, I might be overselling it a bit, to call them bank robberies. Yes, they took place in a bank—The Bank of Habitsville, to be specific. Yes, all three incidents happened at the same building, only a few days apart. And yes, there was breaking and entering in the dead of night, by anonymous criminals that wiped security camera footage. But this isn’t quite Ocean’s Eleven.
The ‘robbers’ always broke into vault 713, and they never took any money.
Each break-in happened at midnight, and each triggered the bank’s alarm systems, both for the building itself, and for individual vault, so it was fairly easy to find where the strangers had been, even without any sort of security tape evidence.
After the first one, the money was counted frantically—the biggest heist we’d ever seen in Habitsville was kids swiping candy from the gas station—so no one was prepared for an actual set of prepared criminals to make off with the savings of private citizens.
But, like I said, none of the money was missing. Police thought it was the most curious thing, that someone would go to all of that trouble only to leave the vault exactly how they found it. Until, after the third break-in and the third re-counting, they realized the contents of the vault weren’t how they had always been.
There, inside the vault, was something new.
At first, it was difficult for me to get any information. It’s not odd for the police to be a bit hush-hush with members of the press, but something about this felt different—nobody seemed to know anything, and the low-level officers I approached weren’t stand-offish or secretive—they just seemed as clueless as I was, insisting ‘other’ officers were involved with the case, not them.
Then, the strangest thing happened. I was invited to the bank.
Now, there are two reasons the Habitsville Police Chief would call me, Samuel Singer, to the scene of a mysterious crime. One, is to take flattering pictures of cops working hard on the case for the newspaper, so the townspeople feel like something’s being done.
The second, is because they’ve read some of my other work. My stories about strange murders, horrific sights, and all of the peculiarities I’ve found within the limits of our small town.
When I arrived at the bank the next morning and found it completely deserted, I knew which reason it was.
There was an eerie stillness in the air, like the moment rain suddenly stops after a storm. All the evidence of activity was there—police cars with headlights on, some with doors opens—but the actual people were nowhere to be found.
I walked along the perimeter of the building full of unease. Had it been some sort of prank? Was I not really supposed to be there? The voice on the phone had seemed legit, very authoritative and police-like—no, something very much unplanned had happened there.
My footsteps echoed off the marble floor, scuffed with the morning’s traffic, but still, no one seemed to be in the bank’s lobby either. The armchairs and small couches in the waiting area were empty, and no faces looked back at me from behind the teller’s plexiglass.
“Hello?” I called out, but the only answer I got was my own voice bounced back to me. I began to walk, peering around corners, and eventually, moving towards the door next to the teller’s stations, the one that read: EMPLOYEES ONLY in big black letters. The door must lead to the rest of the bank, and perhaps to the people who invited me here.
I turned the handle, and to my surprise, it gave way.
Instantly, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. All that was before me was a dimly lit hallway, with plain beige carpeting and a few hotel paintings on the walls. Nothing too out of the ordinary. And yet, I had the overwhelming feeling that something was desperately wrong within the bank. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
I crept cautiously down the stretch, my footsteps muted and careful. “Hello? I called out again, my voice breaking the steady silence. I passed a few offices, each empty, though most of them had computer monitors fired up and displaying unopened emails and half-filled spreadsheets.
I kept up my slow pace across each doorframe, until the contents of one room caught my attention. It was a well-decorated office, definitely one of the nicer ones in the building, with custom painted walls and little sculptures on a bookshelf. And there, on the cherry wood desk, was a candle, reduced entirely to liquid, the wick burning tall and smoking.
I hesitantly entered the room, and, finding it once again empty, I made my way over to the unattended flame, and blew it out.
There it was again. A bizarre feeling, a strong strangeness I couldn’t explain. And then, as the smoke curled upwards through the air, up to my nostrils, I knew what it was.
I couldn’t smell a thing.
Not in the way that happens when I’m sick, or when my allergies start acting up. Not a hint of the candle or its smoke was registering with my nose. In fact, the ambient smell of the bank, as soon as I stepped into this back hallway, was completely absent. I felt strange because for the first time in my entire existence, I was smelling the absolute lack of scent.
I left the room quickly. I couldn’t help but take deep breaths, trying to pull any semblance of aroma into my lungs—but, there was nothing. I walked faster down the hallway now, my heart hammering hard in my chest. “Hello?” I called out, but again, there was no answer.
I passed a few more offices, each uninhabited, until I reached another door, this time labeled, “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.” On any other day, in any other set of circumstances, I would probably hesitate to call myself “authorized personnel” of a bank, but I was getting truly nervous that something inexplicable and terrible was going on, so I only waited a moment before I turned the handle and went inside.
Before me was a set of stairs, dark and cold under a single fluorescent light. A small plaque on the wall told me where the descent would lead: THE VAULTS. I had been around the outside of the building, the lobby, even the offices, and hadn’t found a soul. This was last place I had to search.
The journey down was longer than I expected it to be. My footsteps echoed against the stone walls, and the air turned frigid the deeper I traveled down into the dark. As I walked, I tried a few more times to pick up any sort of scent, but it was no use. There was nothing. I considered what I would do if I didn’t find anyone down there—about how I would go about filing missing person reports for all of the bank workers, and who I would file it to, seeing as the police on the scene had disappeared as well.
I was lost in these thoughts, when suddenly my breath hitched in my throat, and that all too familiar sensation of wrongness gripped my body. It only took a moment this time to figure out what had happened.
I couldn’t hear my footsteps anymore.
I stomped my foot down hard upon the stone just to be sure, and when no sound reverberated back to me, the chilling feeling of despair sank into my chest. What was happening to me? Two of my senses were gone, and I had no idea why. The silence was eerie, a type of quiet I had never experienced before. No whistling of my own breathing, no air conditioning in the background, nothing.
I briefly considered going back up, leaving the depths of the bank and all of its strangeness behind—but when I peered down to the steps below me, I could see it: a light, white and fluorescent, shining in a line underneath another door.
I ran down quickly, still taken aback by the lacking of my own footsteps as they should have clattered down the stairs. I got to the door, and there it was again, another sign that read: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, but this time I hardly even gave it a second glance before I threw the door open.
What I found inside was bizarre.
To my right and left were the vaults, large and impressive, made of smooth steel, with security keypads and small plaques with each vault number above them. 708 was on my left, and 709 on my right—and there, halfway across the hall, right at the line between 707 and 710, I saw something I couldn’t explain.
The best way to describe it is that things started lose their thing-ness. The great vaults and their polished metal, halfway down the hall, began to lose their shine and definition. Vault 707 and 710 still had the security keypads, but instead of black numbers backlit by a green light, they were just plain rectangles. The vault door, in fact, no longer stood out from the wall, but became two-dimensional part way through, as though a mural drawn upon the wall.
I crept forward with trepidation. I passed vault 707 and 710, and reached the end of the ill-defined hall. Then, I turned the corner, and my mouth fell open into a silent scream.
There were three vaults: 711, and 712, which were closed, and 713, which was not, though I couldn’t see inside from where I was standing. I was looking at 711 and 712 in that moment, I was sure of it, though the sight of them might suggest otherwise
The numbers on their plaques were gone, the plaques themselves reduced to flat rectangles, and the vault doors were merely crudely drawn circles against the walls. The same was for vault 713, the one that was open. And though the missing numbers could have thrown me off, I was sure this was the place where the ‘robbery’ had happened.
I knew this, because that’s where the police officers were.
Only, they weren’t the police officers anymore. It was as though slowly, painstakingly, every bit of definition had been pulled from their being. They stood, frozen in place at the entrances to the vaults, their hands fleshy circles, their fingers melded together. Some had eyes sunken into their faces like paper dolls, others had been smoothed over by skin. Their uniforms had melded with their flesh, all buttons and medals of honor erased.
I tried calling to them out of instinct, though I suspected they wouldn’t be able to hear me, and I had forgotten I couldn’t hear myself.
I turned back around, tentatively peering into vault #713, the open vault.
The bank robbers hadn’t taken anything, and they certainly hadn’t left anything behind.
They had stolen everything and left nothing.
The view that greeted me from within Vault #713 was like nothing I had ever seen before—it as like a Nothing I had ever seen before. The vault was empty. Not to say the metal shelves were robbed of their paper stacks, or there were no gold bars in the center of the floor. There was no cash, no gold, or shelves, or even a floor. Instead, a great white expanse of space stretched before me, seemingly endless. The corners to the vault were gone, indistinguishable from the blankness. There was no ceiling. It was as though reality itself had been simply washed away—erased.
I dared not stick my head in. Something instinctual deep within the pit of my belly told me that this was not the place for me, not a place for anything that wished to remain living. I hesitated, unsure of how to go on.
For only a moment, I saw it.
I froze in place, as a cold trickle of dread dripped down my spine. I looked around at the detail-less, faceless figures around me. None of them seemed to have even twitched, and their chests lay still and lifeless.
And then, I saw it again.
A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye. In any other ordinary setting, it would have been unnoticeable. But in the uncanny stillness of the bank basement, it stood out enormously. It had been to my right, and as I whipped my head around, I saw a figure standing there.
It was a woman, but I only deduced this because of the long hair that was pulled back beneath her police officer’s cap. And I mean just one I said: long hair. Because what I assumed had once been long locks of a flaxen blond had fused together into a single cylinder, reduced to that basic shape against the rectangle of her torso and flat sphere of her head.
Only, her head wasn’t entirely flat.
There, on the smooth expanse of what was once her face, was half of a mouth. The other half had been reduced to flat skin, as though the whole of it was a wound only partially healed. The remaining half was moving as much as it could, each spastic manipulation of the lips tearing at the closed edge. The spittle that flew from her was tinged pink with blood.
I couldn’t tell what the half mouth was saying at first, partly because it was half a mouth, and partly because I had only been deaf for the previous few minutes, and hadn’t learned how to read lips.
Eventually, though, I could tell what she was saying. At first, I thought it was “help me”, and my heart sank because, of course, I had no idea how to do as she asked, and no real way to tell her how hopeless her—our—situation was.
As I watched her, my pulse rocketing at full speed, and the nausea and anxiety deep in the pit of my stomach, I noticed it—her mouth was closing up. Like a cruel zipper, each time her lips came together to repeat her mantra, the skin kept closed just a little bit more. And each time they reopened, they ripped just a bit, too.
Close, rip, close, rip, close, rip.
I could do nothing but watch. By the end, only a tiny hole of a mouth was left, and though most of it was concealed by the thick rosy foam of saliva and blood she had been emitting, I could see what she was saying, no matter how much I wish I couldn’t.
Kill me. Kill me. Kill me.
Then, the mouth was gone, and all was still.
Instinctively, I reached for her hand for some semblance of comfort, if not for her, then for me. It was nothing more than a fleshy cube, that was once a clenched fist. It wasn’t warm, or cold. It wasn’t anything, really.
That was when I dropped her hand.
Tentatively, I reached my finger up to my mouth, and popped it in. Then, I bit. Then, I bit harder.
I brought my finger away from my mouth, and saw that it was red. My heart sank even further. Not only could I not taste the blood I had just drawn—I hadn’t been able to feel the bite.
I stared down at my hands, completely bewildered and shocked by the lack of sensation. Then I noticed something even more terrible.
My fingerprints. They were gone.
My fingers were completely smooth, unblemished, as though there had never been any marks on them in the first place.
That was when I decided it was time to leave.
I passed by the frozen faceless police officers as I traced my steps back the way I had come, away from the three vaults that had been broken into.
I walked quickly, but it was difficult, now that the loss of feeling had crept its way into my legs. I had to consciously keep my knees from buckling, and as I walked, the worst possibility began to turn to reality.
The police officers at the end of the hallway were gone. Well, not gone, exactly. Though their featureless figures no longer took up room on the floor, their likeness was still present. They were flattened against the walls, like a terrible geometric mural of suffering. They blended into one another, tortured subjects all melded together in a single painting. Was that the final step to this terrible process? Become two dimensional, and then, eventually join that great white void that had already overtaken vault #713?
I didn’t want to stick around to find out.
I traveled faster now, and saw that more of the vaults had joined the others I had seen before—their doors no longer stood out from the walls, and the plaques that displayed their numbers no longer showed any writing. Everything was sinking into the backdrop, the hallways becoming cavernous and empty.
Then, a horrifying thought dawned on me.
I began to run with great difficulty, my numb legs and feet meeting the floor clumsily as I rounded the final corner. Then, I saw that what I feared had already begun to come true.
There, at the end of the hallway, was the door I had entered, the one that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Except, it didn’t say that anymore. In fact, the sign itself was blank, and the corners no longer stood out against the metal of the door. I knew what would happen next, and I lunged for the handle, and gripped it as tightly as I could with numb fingers. I turned and pulled.
Nothing happened.
The door didn’t budge, and it was clear why. Around the edges it had fused with the wall, the beginning signs of the same fading and conjoining that everything else beneath the bank had gone through.
My hands shook with the effort, and with the incredible amount of fear that was coursing through my veins. I looked at them pleadingly, as though willing them to find the strength to yank the door from its hinges.
That was when I noticed I didn’t have fingernails anymore.
They hadn’t fallen off, or been ripped or anything. There were no wounds. It was as though they had simply sunk into my skin, like a twin reabsorbed in the womb.
I gripped the handle again.
I braced my sensationless feet against either side of the doorframe.
I pulled with a tremendous amount of effort, unable to hear the panting sound of my breath, unable to smell the stench of sweat and fear that radiated off of my skin, unable, even, to feel my own heart beating in my chest.
And then, like the police officer’s mouth had torn her skin, the door peeled away from the wall.
The journey up the stairs would have been painful, had I been able to feel a thing. I fell a few times, once from nerves, and the others from the stair flattening itself below my feet. On the last fall, my face slammed against the metal ground, and I saw red drip onto my shirt, though I couldn’t tell if it was from my nose or my head.
Then, there it was, the letters gone but still recognizable. The door at the top of the stairs.
I burst through it, and spilled into the hallway that housed the bank offices, only this time, they seemed different. The hotel paintings on the walls were blank, just thin rectangles upon plain wallpaper. The scenes I had passed on the way in of the view of each office through the open doorframes were now just that—scenes. They were flattened into pictures against the wall, the rooms completely inaccessible.
I ran still further, turning another corner, and then I could see it: EMPLOYEES ONLY.
There, a door that still had its sign, my salvation.
I read the words as I stumbled towards the door, and then I blinked.
My left eye came open, but my right did not. It was stuck, as though with glue, the top lid to the bottom. And I knew from what I had seen of the police officers in the vault room, that this was absolutely something to be afraid of.
So, I ran.
I spilled out onto the cold marble bank floor. That was the first thing I noticed—the floor was cold. I could feel cold again. I could taste the blood in my mouth, the ache in my legs—I could feel the immense pain of having to rip my eyelids back apart where they had fused.
And, of course, I could see it, flattened against the wall. The door that read EMPLOYEES ONLY, the handle of which was now merely a picture, forever out of reach.
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