Short horror: Cubicle Three Is Always Locked

When you're a night guard, there's always a place you should never look.

Photo by Daniel Maraventano on Unsplash

Hiya! It’s time to patrol the midnight halls again. I’m Mata, and write weekly horror posts, where each story is short enough to read in your spare minutes.

A special hello to the new readers - I’ve had little bump in subscribers recently, so welcome on board!

This time, we’re squarely back into dread-filled territory, with a tale of a night guard’s first shift…

Cubicle Three Is Always Locked

Back in 1993, on my first day in this job, the guy who was retiring—the guy who I was replacing—said, “You get two pieces of advice: wear comfortable shoes ’cos you’ll be doing a lot of walking, and cubicle three is always locked.” I asked what he meant, and he repeated in his smokers’ rasp, “Cubicle three is always locked.”

I got a radio, a flashlight, a bunch of keys as big as my fist, a site map, and a rota for when I was supposed to walk the premises, checking everything was locked tight. After that, I was left alone and it would be that way until 7am when the janitorial team turned up for their early rounds.

Every key was tagged with a tiny label, with neat little letters saying ‘boiler room’, ‘gas storage’, ‘stationary cupboard’, and more. There was no ‘cubicle three’ among them.

I proceeded on my first patrol at 23 hundred hours, the flashlight’s blaze thinning as it stretched thin down the office’s long corridors, flooding meeting rooms, and shimmering over chromed industrial presses. Each space had a different smell: floor polish, sweat, ink, oil, rubber belts. These days, I could tell you where I am with my eyes closed.

On the fifth floor, I checked the washrooms. Back then we only had gents’ and ladies’ rooms, no all-gender spaces. The gents’ had three stalls and three urinals, stinking of piss and chemicals. As I’d done on all the other floors, I poked the doors open with the tip of my flashlight, each swinging open to reveal toilet bowls in varying states and an occasional dropped sheet of blessedly-unused paper.

The ladies’ washroom had four stalls. The first and the second swung open, but the third only moved a fraction when I nudged it. It was bolted on the inside. Cubicle three.

I pushed door four, and it swung open, no-one inside.

My flashlight painted a shining circle on the door of cubicle three. There was no sign saying it was ‘out of order’, it just didn’t open. Each cubicle’s door ran from the ceiling to floor, giving no easy way to peek inside. My light strayed to the lock. It was standard: a little patch of red showing the bolt was engaged, and a big flat-head-screw style notch was there, meaning it would be easy to use a coin to untwist the lock from the outside and open the door with no damage.

I rolled my lower lip under my teeth. A feeling in my stomach told me to leave, or but that could have been the lingering scent of bleach.

The floor looked clean. I went onto my hands and knees and aimed the flashlight at the crack beneath cubicle three’s door. I lowered my head until it was almost against the tiles, my lower eye open, the top eye shut to focus on anything I might see.

Spilling along the floor, my flashlight’s beam ran clearly to the door, and then simply stopped. Beyond, there was no shine of floor tiles, no porcelain base, no plastic brush holder or sanitary product bin, there was nothing, like looking into space. And then it seemed, in that shadow, there was movement, like something stirred in stinking lake-bed mud, called up by a ray of light, something awakened from sleep that should have been left alone.

Sweat pooled under my palms, making them slip on the floor. My arms shook, trying to hold me steady. I was knelt down on all fours, head low, straining to see the thing moving beyond that sliver-crack beneath the door. Bile rose in my throat, gravity helping it up, but I swallowed it down. A stench like I’ve never smelled came from that crack, a hundred times worse than the mens’ washroom human stink, this was sulphur and hot meat and melting wires and unpicked orchards in October, sweet and sticky and stuffing my head with rot and flies.

My panting breath bounced from the floor. I wanted to get up, leave, pull myself away from staring at whatever was stirring beyond the door, whatever was coming for me.

And some sounds you just know. You understand them in your gut.

Behind my head, I heard two bare, wet, adult feet land on the concrete, as if their owner had leapt down from the ceiling.

My hands slid as I scrabbled to move, my sneakers squeaked on the floor, I stumbled and slammed my shoulder into the bathroom door, knocking the breath from me, shutting myself inside the toilet with whatever had jumped from the darkness. I fell back, yanking the door open, and ran and ran into the hallway beyond, going forty yards before I turned to send my flashlight zooming back over the floor, walls, and everything behind me.

The ladies’ bathroom door slowly swung shut, then softly clunked into place.

Nothing had followed me.

I must’ve stood there until dawn, but the washroom door didn’t move.

The next night, up on the fifth floor, I checked the ladies’ washroom. Cubicle three was still locked. I didn’t look under it. I didn’t tap it, scared that it would swing open. I didn’t smell that rot of death and hell, and nothing stepped down from the darkness.

In all the years since, I ain’t never touched cubicle three’s door again, and here I am now, the one who’s retiring.

It’s your shift now, and I’m gonna give you three pieces of advice: get yourself those comfortable shoes, cubicle three is always locked, and never, ever look under the door.

The end

Hope you enjoyed that! If you like short horror, don’t forget to subscribe. Please remember that clicking the ‘like’ heart, restacking, sharing, or leaving a comment are all great ways to let me know you’re out there reading this, and to help my stories find new readers.

If you enjoyed this story, also check out:

• Thorn Cathedral (short cursed-land horror)

• I Could Just Gobble You Up (horror in 400 words!)

• Chalk and Blood (supernatural revenge)

Or, for something lighter:

• Shayna’s Charming Farmhouse (a horror told in a comments section)

• Stinky Brother (comedy epistolary horror)

… Or just stick around to see whatever I come up with next week!

I hope you’re thriving in these odd times.

Have the best week you can, go be kind and spooky,

Mata

xxx

You're still here?

Want to read more? Then here’s a glimpse…

Behind the scenes

I keep a little text file checklist on my phone. During the week, if something sparks my interest, I add it to the list. This would be a phase, an image, or a full idea. Usually it’s a fragment of a scene, or a small disruption in what’s normal. I try not to attach any particular story to these notes, when I write them down, I just put the note there and let it brew for a while….

The note for this week’s story became the title ‘Cubicle 3 is always locked’. In writing, we typically write out the full number below ten and use digits for higher numbers. I’m still not sure if I like that… eight, nine, ten, 11, 12, 13… It works well enough, and avoids long numbers in text form, but the inconsistency bugs me! But anyway, that’s why the ‘3’ from the note became ‘three’ in the final title.

I made this idea-note in the toilet at work. The middle of three cubicles has been locked for about a month. When I’ve seen that elsewhere on campus, there’s always been an ‘out of order’ sign on the door, but this middle cubicle was just always locked. I assumed for several weeks that, coincidentally, the middle cubicle was always taken when I went in there, but came to suspect it’s not occupied, it’s just… locked.

Dun dun daaah!

The campus is quiet now, while students are post-exams and lecturers are grading, so often the timed motion-sensor in the bathroom has clicked off before I entered, turning off the lights to save energy, and yet that middle cubicle was still locked. Either there’s an unlucky person sitting in the dark inside there, or it’s always locked. But why? What’s inside?

It’s probably a broken flush… But what if it were something else? What if it were something best left alone and ignored forever?

I like this kind of inspiration. I find everyday places much more inspiring for horror than medieval castles or drippy caves. Those are fun too (and I will probably write stories in both of them if the right idea comes along), but I really like finding something normal and making it just a little bit dreadful.

If a reader finds themselves alone by a locked toilet door, I’d like a tiny shiver of silly dread to tickle them, before they chuckle and move on with the day.

It might sound weird that I enjoy that idea — that I can add a bit of lingering fear to a fear-filled world — but it’s not really about that. I think what I truly enjoy is helping people imagine something irrational and slightly magical, just to add a bit of weirdness and thrill to the hum-drum daily things we all have to do. I don’t expect (or even want) to add true dread and terror to the everyday lives of people, because we’ve got enough of that just from the news, instead I want to spark a sense of living folklore inside the clinical rational world we walk through.

Regular readers might also notice an unusual feature in this story: I used a few Americanisms, e.g. ‘flashlight’ rather than my usual UK English ‘torch’, and “washroom” rather than '“toilet”. As I wrote, the voice came through with an American accent. I didn’t want to lay this on too thickly in the text, but it adjusted a few of the word choices and some of the directness. I had some more flowery descriptions, but they didn’t fit the character’s narrative voice, so my edit replaced them into more direct imagery.

I originally had more Americans in the grammar: “My breath were loud” rather than the more common and formal UK English “My breath was loud”. The tricky thing about using grammar to reflect voice, is that if you take it too far it becomes distracting. Getting the balance right is hard: you want enough that the voice speaks in readers’ heads, but not so much it becomes hard to parse what’s going on. The latter can become an issue if the reader doesn’t hear that voice, but instead reads only in their own voice, and the language choices don’t work for them. That can be very jarring. The only part that remained truly American was “I ain’t never touched cubicle three’s door again”. This double-negative irks me, but it’s typical for an American and fitted the voice without being too heavy, so it stayed.

Speaking of voice, I decided my guard-narrator might have police and/or military in their history, so that’s why they say “I proceeded on my first patrol at 23 hundred hours”. If I were to say this in my own voice, it would be “I did the first walk of the grounds at 11pm”. Word choices are powerful tools to subtly convey a character’s history.

There was one other thing the Americanisms brought up for me: this is a guard, so should they carry a gun? Well… Nah. F**k guns. I don’t think they should be part of a healthy civil society, and it’s my story so I’ll leave them out if they’re really not necessary. I’ll almost certainly put guns in stories where they are both needed and make sense, but here it wasn’t needed so I’d rather not normalise their presence. Let’s work towards a world where guns aren’t typical. Would my story have been better if the guard had a gun? Nope. So it’s not useful to include it.

Anyway, that’s it from me. Hope you enjoyed this extra peek behind the writing.

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