When two of my overnight employees came barreling onto the work floor with worried expressions on their incompetent faces, I knew my quiet shift at SmartMart 24-hour Branch #225 wouldn’t go as planned.
As a franchise owner for over ten years, since summer of 1976, I’d seen dozens of idiot kids cause easy disasters. When the two young men, Adrian and Kyle, led me into the store’s warehouse and pointed me to a piece of long, corded rope hanging innocently between the store’s steel beams, the situation became serious.
Strange symbols and shapes were written around the dangling rope in bright red paint. The cord looked like it had spontaneously grown from the ceiling, like a vine from the middle of a rune-petalled flower.
I decided right away that someone was trying to scare us, recreating the Satanic bullcrap they’d seen on the news to get a rise out of us. I sighed loudly, shrugged. “Let’s cut it down.”
“That’s the thing,” Kyle blurted, with tired eyes and dirty clothes, “we’ve already cut it once. We got on the forklift and chopped it off at the ceiling. When we got on the ground, it already grew back.”
I rolled my eyes. “That doesn’t make sense. Get back to work. I’ll cut it myself.”
The men exchanged quick, unreadable glances, and went across the warehouse without another word. At least it was a slow night in the 24-hour store. No one would miss me if I spent ten minutes getting rid of the twelve-foot rope causing a safety hazard in the middle of my warehouse.
Before I did anything, I tried to pull the rope down with my bare hands. As I yanked, I found that I could put my entire body weight into the braided material with no give. What’s more, I could see where the metal met the rope, that there was no obvious point of fusion between the two materials.
The longer I stared, the more frustrated I became. I should’ve installed the CCTV system when the company offered it to me. A camera would’ve helped me catch whichever demented employee was responsible for the ugly prank with a simple rewind.
MacGyver-like, I secured a box cutter blade onto the handle of a long broom. I extended the contraption over my head and attempted to cut. Evidently, the knife could’ve been more securely connected to the handle. As I attempted to saw through the thick rope, the teeth of the blade grabbed hold of the frayed fibers and came away from the handle with a small pop.
I jumped away from the flying metal, shielding my face with a swatting arm as the rope wrapped around my upper shoulders. From the corner of my eye, I noticed that the red letters scrawled across the ceiling were beginning to glow.
Reaching down blindly, I felt the rope tighten. I pressed on regardless, stretching until my fingers grazed the blade. Before I could grab the instrument, my feet slipped out from beneath me.
The rope instantly constricted around my neck. I tried gasping in a breath and was greeted with burning, spasming lungs. Pain shot through my throat as I clawed at the rope frantically. When I tried to stand and relieve the tension on my airway, I felt myself suddenly lifted, my feet leaving the concrete as I was hung. Trapped in the impromptu noose, my legs flailed as I looked desperately around the warehouse.
From the shadows, Adrian and Kyle crept towards me, their grins let me know that they hadn’t arrived to help. Kyle held a large, leather-bound book opened in his hands as Adrian stifled a laugh at my despair.
“Not feeling so hot are we, boss?” Adrian said. “Looks like we’re not as stupid as you thought.”
I wished I’d fired those idiot bums when I had the chance; I knew they were too friendly to each other for anything good to come of it. I should’ve sent them packing before they sprung their act of Satanic revenge on a hardworking, good old boy like myself.
Kyle began to recite passages from his book in a language I couldn’t recognize as I fought to stay awake. My eyes spun upwards only long enough to see that the pentagram was pulsing red with the beat of Kyle’s chant. I kept thrashing as long as I could before my arms and legs grew numb and blackness circled my vision.
The last thing I heard, over the singing din of Kyle’s chant and the numbing pain running through my veins, were Adrian’s half-laughed words. “Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That’s why he dies on company time.”
xx
Cheyanne Brabo (she/her) is a queer fiction writer from Northern California. Her work appears in Scissor Sisters Sapphic Villain’s Anthology, Broken Olive Branches, Sinister Society’s Nautical Nightmares, Warning Lines Lit, and Moth Eaten Mag. She is the winner of Alien Buddha Press’ 2024 Horror Showdown and has been Pushcart Nominated. When she’s not writing, she enjoys taking her cat on leash walks. Find her on socials @cheysectoplasm
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This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.
No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
ON COMPANY TIME © 2025 Cheyanne Brabo