Despite the brightly coloured disco lights that shine about the shop's unusually high ceiling,doing very little to illuminate the deep grey paint and managing to cast bizarre shadows about the rest of the place. As an example, it sometimes looked as though there were huge spiders crawling all over the air conditioner vents and heading for the walls, stopping just before they hit the white walls of the shop's ground area and dissipating gradually.
It became a known quirk to the staff there - their little ghost bugs, as they were affectionately dubbed. Nobody thought they were real except fresh recruits who always swore the spiders looked 3-Dimensional and had countless eyes all over their furry bodies. They always reported the same kind of spider, same appearance and same strange iridescence but of course they were always dismissed, especially if they'd been working the late shift.
Weird things happen around the late shift, they all knew that. There were never any customers (despite the talks of shortening the shop's hours which had been "ongoing" for almost five years) and whatever work needed to be done took far to little time. It left hours until the shift's end with nothing to do but watch the totally-not-real creatures test the boundaries between the comforting dark and harsh white of the upper walls.
In those hours nobody mentioned that the ghost bugs weren't real, not when they were so obviously alive and determined to reach the people below. They were the reason the shop had a "lights on" policy that was officially there to deter thieves, not at all to keep the ghost bugs up and away from people. Not in the slightest. At all.
Still when a power cut happened, as it was eventually bound to just to spite them all, they evacuated the shop "for public safety" and "to protect merchandise loss". Again, nothing to do with the improbable but very real spiders that had been there for as long as anyone could remember.
Not their little ghost bugs that they had seen rushing towards the ground as the last few people exited their shop. Certainly not the unusual shadows that were so much larger when they were on the ground, legs poking at the sunlit path outside, testing this new boundary like they did with the last. They knew night would come eventually, they could wait.
It became a known quirk to the staff there - their little ghost bugs, as they were affectionately dubbed. Nobody thought they were real except fresh recruits who always swore the spiders looked 3-Dimensional and had countless eyes all over their furry bodies. They always reported the same kind of spider, same appearance and same strange iridescence but of course they were always dismissed, especially if they'd been working the late shift.
Weird things happen around the late shift, they all knew that. There were never any customers (despite the talks of shortening the shop's hours which had been "ongoing" for almost five years) and whatever work needed to be done took far to little time. It left hours until the shift's end with nothing to do but watch the totally-not-real creatures test the boundaries between the comforting dark and harsh white of the upper walls.
In those hours nobody mentioned that the ghost bugs weren't real, not when they were so obviously alive and determined to reach the people below. They were the reason the shop had a "lights on" policy that was officially there to deter thieves, not at all to keep the ghost bugs up and away from people. Not in the slightest. At all.
Still when a power cut happened, as it was eventually bound to just to spite them all, they evacuated the shop "for public safety" and "to protect merchandise loss". Again, nothing to do with the improbable but very real spiders that had been there for as long as anyone could remember.
Not their little ghost bugs that they had seen rushing towards the ground as the last few people exited their shop. Certainly not the unusual shadows that were so much larger when they were on the ground, legs poking at the sunlit path outside, testing this new boundary like they did with the last. They knew night would come eventually, they could wait.
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