The Hargrove Textile Mill had been abandoned for eleven years. Its windows were shattered eyes. Its walls were stained with rust and rain. The chain-link fence surrounding it had long since collapsed in sections, and weeds grew through the cracks in the loading dock.
Jake Calloway stood at the entrance with his phone on a selfie stick, grinning at the camera.
"What is up, NightCrawlers! It's your boy Jake, and tonight we're doing something absolutely insane."
Behind him, Mia Torres adjusted her own camera, panning across the building's facade. Her purple-streaked hair caught the last light of dusk.
"We're spending the entire night inside the old Hargrove Mill," Mia said. "Legend says this place is cursed. Workers disappeared in 2013. Nobody ever found them."
Jake turned back to his stream. "Three thousand likes and I'll go to the third floor. Five thousand and I'll spend the whole night in the basement."
The comment section exploded with fire emojis and skull emojis and a user named DarkLord99 typing "DO IT" forty-seven times in a row.
Jake laughed. "You heard the people. Let's get this content."
They ducked through the gap in the fence and crossed the overgrown parking lot. The front door hung open on one hinge. Jake pushed it with his palm. It groaned inward, revealing a darkness that seemed to swallow the remaining daylight.
Mia clicked on her flashlight. The beam cut through dust motes that hung in the air like suspended snow.
"Okay, that's creepy," she whispered.
Jake stepped inside first, his sneakers crunching on broken glass. The lobby was vast and empty. Old reception desk covered in pigeon droppings. Chairs overturned. A calendar on the wall still showing June 2013.
"Welcome to the Hargrove Mill, ladies and gentlemen," Jake said, spreading his arms. "Population: two idiots with cameras."
Mia snorted. "And their combined brain cells. Singular."
They set up camp on the second floor in what used to be a break room. The tables were still there, bolted to the floor, and someone had left a coffee mug with the corporate logo half-scrubbed away. Mia laid out their sleeping bags while Jake positioned the cameras on tripods, angling them to capture the doorway and the hallway beyond.
"This is actually kind of sad," Mia said, looking at the abandoned lockers along one wall. "People just left everything."
Jake opened one of the lockers. Inside was a jacket still on a hanger.
"Don't think about it too hard. We're here for content, not therapy."
They ate granola bars and reviewed their stream setup. Jake's channel had forty thousand viewers already, the chat scrolling so fast it was just a blur of emojis and inside jokes. Mia's was smaller but loyal, twelve hundred people who followed her urban exploration series.
At nine o'clock, the last traces of daylight vanished from the windows. The building settled into a silence that felt heavy, like a blanket pressed over their ears.
"You hear that?" Mia asked.
"Hear what?"
"Exactly. No cars. No nothing."
Jake waved it off. "That's the point. Total isolation. This is what we came for."
They streamed for another hour, exploring the second floor, reading graffiti on the walls, speculating about the missing workers. Jake found a foreman's office with papers still scattered across the desk. Mia found a child's drawing tucked inside a locker, a stick figure family holding hands under a yellow sun.
She put it back without mentioning it.
By eleven, they were back in the break room, winding down. The chat was begging them to go to the third floor. Jake looked at Mia.
"What do you think?"
"I think we should stay right here."
"Three thousand likes, Mia."
She rolled her eyes. "Fine. But if I die, I'm haunting you first."
They made it halfway up the third-floor stairs before Jake's flashlight died.
"Batteries were fresh," he muttered, smacking the side of the light. It flickered once, twice, then came back weak and yellow.
The third floor was different. The hallway stretched longer than it should have, doors on either side all closed. The carpet was damp in places, and the walls had water damage that looked almost like handprints.
Mia's stream chat was going insane. She kept her voice low.
"Okay, something feels off up here."
"It's just an old building," Jake said, but his voice had lost its earlier bravado.
They reached the end of the hall. The last door was slightly ajar. Cold air seeped through the gap, carrying a smell like wet earth and something older.
Jake pushed the door open.
The room beyond was a storage area. Metal shelves lined the walls, empty except for dust. But in the center of the floor, someone had arranged a circle of chairs. Twelve of them, all facing inward.
"What the hell," Mia breathed.
Jake stepped inside. His flashlight swept across the circle and caught something on the floor between the chairs. Small objects. He crouched down.
Children's teeth. Dozens of them, arranged in a pattern he didn't want to understand.
"Jake. Jake, we should go."
"Yeah. Yeah, okay."
They backed out of the room. Jake pulled the door shut. The handle was ice cold under his palm.
When they turned around, the hallway was different. The door they'd come from was gone. Just wall. Smooth, unbroken wall where the entrance had been.
Mia grabbed his arm. "That's not funny."
"I didn't do anything."
"Jake, the door was RIGHT THERE."
They walked down the hall, running their hands along the wall. No seam. No handle. Just damp plaster under their fingers.
Mia's breathing was getting faster. "This isn't part of the bit. Tell me this isn't part of the bit."
"There is no bit. I swear."
They found a different stairwell and hurried down to the second floor. The break room looked exactly as they'd left it. Sleeping bags. Cameras. The coffee mug still sitting on the table.
Except the chairs had been moved. They'd left them scattered. Now they were arranged in a neat circle, all facing the center of the room.
Jake's phone slipped from his hand and clattered on the floor.
They didn't run. Running meant admitting something was wrong, and admitting something was wrong meant accepting they were not alone in this building.
They sat back-to-back on the sleeping bags, flashlights pointed at the door. The streams were still live. Chat was telling them to leave. Chat was telling them to call the police. Chat was telling them this was the best content they'd ever made.
At two in the morning, the temperature dropped. Their breath came out in white clouds.
At two-fifteen, the chairs scraped across the floor. One by one, sliding back into scattered positions. No one was touching them.
At two-thirty, Mia's camera turned itself off and would not turn back on.
At two-forty, they heard footsteps above them. Slow, deliberate footsteps crossing the third floor. Back and forth. Back and forth. For twenty minutes without stopping.
At three in the morning, Jake whispered, "Did you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"Crying."
They sat in silence. There was no crying. But there was something. A vibration in the floor. A hum in the walls. Like the building itself was breathing.
Mia's flashlight flickered. In the half-second of darkness, she felt something brush against her ankle. Soft. Cold. Gone before the light returned.
She didn't tell Jake. She couldn't make her mouth form the words.
At three-thirty, the coffee mug slid off the table and shattered on the floor.
Jake screamed. A short, sharp sound that echoed through the empty building and came back to them changed, distorted, like it had bounced off walls that weren't there.
They grabbed their phones and ran. Down the stairs. Through the lobby. Out the front door into the parking lot where the night air hit them like warm water.
They didn't stop running until they reached the fence.
Jake collapsed against the chain-link, gasping. Mia was shaking so hard she couldn't hold her phone steady.
Behind them, the Hargrove Mill stood dark and silent. Every window was black.
Except one. Third floor, last window on the left. A pale light flickered there, steady as a heartbeat.
Then it went out.
Jake's stream was still live. The chat had stopped scrolling. Twelve thousand viewers sat in silence, watching two streamers cry in a parking lot.
Mia's camera had turned itself back on. The last frame before she passed out showed the break room chairs, once again arranged in a perfect circle.
In the morning, the police would find them curled together by the fence, unconscious, unable to explain what had happened. The building would be searched. Nothing would be found. No chairs in circles. No teeth on the floor. No doors that disappeared.
But the officers would mention, off the record, that the third floor felt wrong. That their radios cut out up there. That one of them heard a child laughing and no one else did.
And in the storage room at the end of the hall, if anyone had looked closely at the dust on the floor, they would have seen small footprints. Dozens of them. Bare feet, no larger than a toddler's, circling and circling and circling.
***
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