The first rule of liminal spaces is that you don’t find them; they find you.

It started with a mall in Ohio, the kind of place that used to smell like Sbarro pizza and Bath & Body Works cucumber melon lotion in 1999. Now, in 2024, it smelled like dust and failure.

My name is Mark. I’m an “urban explorer,” which is just a fancy way of saying I break into places people forgot to lock so I can take photos for Instagram clout. I had heard rumors about the “Dead Mall” in Columbus—a sprawling labyrinth of retail that closed its doors in 2012 but never fully died. The power was still on, humming like a headache.

I parked my car behind the overgrown loading docks, checking my JVC camcorder. I liked the vintage grain. It felt authentic. It felt safe.

I slipped through a pried-open service door.

The air inside was stale, recycled since the Obama administration. The silence was heavy, physical. It pressed against my eardrums. I walked past the shuttered grate of a Gamestop, seeing the faded poster for Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

“Hello?” I called out.

My voice didn’t echo. It just fell flat, absorbed by the acoustic tiles and the empty space.

I walked toward the center atrium. A giant, inflatable snowman hung from the ceiling, deflated and sagging, looking like a melted puddle of vinyl misery. It swayed slightly, though there was no breeze.

Creepy, I thought, zooming in.

Then, the elevator chimed.

Ding.

I spun around. The elevator doors slid open. Inside, the lights flickered. I stepped in, intending to go to the second floor food court. I pressed the ‘2’ button.

The doors closed. The box lurched.

When they opened again, I wasn’t on the second floor.

I stepped out onto beige carpet. The walls were yellow, the wallpaper peeling in strips that looked like dead skin. The ceiling was low, oppressively so, lined with fluorescent lights that buzzed like a hive of angry hornets.

I turned back to the elevator. The doors were gone. Just a solid wall of drywall.

“Okay,” I whispered, my heart doing a somersault in my chest. “Okay. Very funny.”

I walked forward. The mall was gone. No stores. No atrium. Just hallways. Endless, twisting hallways.

I checked the camera viewfinder. The image was grainy, distorting at the edges.

I walked for what felt like ten minutes, then twenty. I found a corner, turned it, and found… darkness.

Not just a shadow. A void. A perfect, rectangular cutout in reality where the light just stopped. I zoomed in. It looked like someone had taken an eraser to the world.

I backed away. “Nope. Nope, nope, nope.”

I turned and ran. I ran until my lungs burned. I found a door marked EXIT.

I burst through it.

The Sewers of Memory

I didn’t burst outside. I burst into water.

Filthy, cold, foul-smelling water.

I splashed, gasping, my camcorder held high above my head like a lifeline. The smell hit me instantly—rotten eggs, sulfur, and decay.

I waded to a concrete ledge and pulled myself up. I was in a tunnel. A sewer tunnel. But it was massive, cylindrical, stretching on into infinity in both directions.

“Where the hell am I?” I screamed.

The echo mocked me. Am I… Am I… Am I…

I checked the camera. It was still recording. The battery light blinked red.

I started walking. The only way was forward. The water sloshed against the concrete, a rhythmic shhh-clunk, shhh-clunk.

After a while, I heard it. A splash. Behind me.

I froze.

Shhh-clunk.

I spun around, pointing the camera into the gloom. The night vision mode turned everything a sickly green.

Nothing. Just the black water rippling.

“Is someone there?”

Then I saw them.

Hands.

Dozens of them. Pale, bloated, fingers splayed like starfish, rising silently from the water. They weren’t waving. They were reaching.

I stumbled back, my boots slipping on slime. One of the hands grabbed the ledge. Then another. Something was pulling itself out of the soup.

I ran.

The tunnel curved, twisting like a snake. I saw a ladder ahead, rusted iron rungs disappearing into a shaft of light.

“Yes!” I gasped.

I grabbed the ladder. The metal was cold and slick. I climbed, my muscles screaming. Below me, I heard a wet, guttural growl. I didn’t look down.

I climbed toward the light. It got brighter, whiter, blinding.

I pulled myself over the lip of the shaft.

The Infinite Office

I rolled onto a linoleum floor, panting, smelling of sewage and fear.

I stood up.

I was in an office. But not a normal office. It was a cavernous, open-plan nightmare. Desks stretched out in perfect rows as far as the eye could see. Computers from the early 2000s sat dormant, their screens dark.

But outside…

I walked to the nearest window.

Outside, there was no sky. No city.

There was the PlayStation 2 startup screen.

I blinked. I rubbed my eyes.

The sky was a swirling nebula of blue cubes and mist, drifting through a void. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

“This isn’t real,” I muttered. “I’m dreaming. I fell in the mall and hit my head.”

I turned back to the room. I saw a door labeled Manager.

I opened it.

Inside was a glass cage. And inside the cage was a tree. A gnarled, twisted oak tree growing out of a mound of dirt that looked… pixelated. Like a low-res texture in a video game.

I flipped a switch on the wall. A generator hummed to life. The lights in the cage flared.

The tree moved.

It didn’t sway in the wind. It twitched. Its branches jerked like broken limbs.

I slammed the door and backed away.

I needed an exit. I needed to leave.

I saw a sign hanging from the ceiling, way off in the distance. EXIT.

I started walking toward it.

The office was silent except for the hum of the overhead lights and the squishing of my wet boots.

I walked for ten minutes. The sign didn’t get any closer.

I walked faster.

Still the same distance.

I started jogging.

Nothing.

I stopped. I looked behind me.

The room was glowing red.

Not a light. The air itself was turning crimson. The hum of the lights deepened into a low, throbbing bass note.

I turned back to the exit sign. I started sprinting.

“Come on!” I yelled. “Move!”

I ran until my legs gave out. The sign remained tauntingly out of reach, a beacon of false hope.

I collapsed against a desk, sobbing. I looked at the camera.

“If anyone finds this,” I whispered to the lens, “don’t go to the mall. Don’t go to the Dead Mall.”

I set the camera down on the desk, pointing it at the exit sign. I sat in the chair, spinning it slowly.

That’s when I saw the shadow.

On the wall. My shadow.

But I wasn’t moving.

The shadow was.

It detached itself from my feet. It elongated, stretching up the wall, growing taller, thinner. Arms like spider legs unfolded from its sides.

I grabbed the camera.

The shadow lunged.

The Loop

I woke up in the elevator.

Ding.

The doors opened.

I was back in the mall. The Dead Mall.

But something was different.

The snowman was gone.

In its place hung a giant, rotating PlayStation 2 cube.

And the music playing over the intercom wasn’t Spongebob.

It was my own voice.

“If anyone finds this… don’t go to the mall…”

It was looping. Over and over.

I stepped out of the elevator. The floor wasn’t tile anymore. It was water. Sewer water.

Hands reached up from the floor tiles, grabbing my ankles.

I screamed, but no sound came out.

I looked at the camera in my hand. The screen showed me running. Running down a hallway that never ended. Running toward a red light.

I was the movie now.

And the movie never ends.

I closed my eyes and waited for the tape to rewind.

Epilogue: The Found Footage

“Dude, check this out.”

Tyler handed the JVC camcorder to his friend, Leo. They were standing in the parking lot of the abandoned Columbus mall. They had found the camera sitting on a concrete bollard near the loading dock.

“Does it work?” Leo asked.

“Yeah. But the footage is weird. It’s like… corrupted.”

Leo flipped the viewfinder open. He pressed play.

Static. Then, a shot of a snowman. Then, static again. Then, a shot of a tree twitching in a glass cage. Then, a shot of the PlayStation 2 sky.

“What is this?” Leo laughed nervously. “Some film school project?”

“Keep watching,” Tyler said. “The end.”

The footage cut to a shot of a guy—Mark—sitting at a desk, crying. He was talking to the camera, but the audio was distorted.

Then, the camera fell.

It landed on its side. The lens was pointing at the floor.

For ten minutes, nothing happened.

Then, a hand reached into the frame.

It wasn’t Mark’s hand.

It was gray. Translucent. And it had too many fingers.

The hand picked up the camera. It turned it around.

The face that filled the screen wasn’t human. It was a smooth, blank surface, like a mannequin, with no eyes, no nose, just a mouth that was stitched shut with black wire.

The creature tilted its head.

Then, it spoke.

“Be sure to hit all those neat buttons down below…”

The voice was Mark’s. But it was wrong. It was skipping.

“…as it really helps… support… the channel…”

The creature smiled. The stitches tore.

The screen went black.

Leo dropped the camera. It shattered on the asphalt.

“Let’s go,” Leo said, his voice trembling. “Let’s get out of here.”

They ran back to their car. They drove away, tires screeching.

Behind them, the mall loomed silent and grey.

Inside, the elevator chimed.

Ding.

Going down.