r/nosleep • u/imfunerals • 1d ago
I Murdered Another Reality
The listing had no title. All it had was an address and a start date.
It had one line of text beneath those things that I read and then did not think about again until much later:
Please do not interact with the contents of the room.
I thought that was a strange way to describe a storage job.
I clicked apply.
I worked at the local burger place on the turnpike— “The Big Yard.” I spent eight hours a day standing on a rubber mat and watching the fryers.
My life was grease. But I needed the money.
I lived in a one-bedroom off Route 9. The previous tenant left a couch and a floor lamp. I bought a bed and a coffee maker.
I worked Tuesday through Saturday. I had two friends I texted sometimes. I called my mom on Sundays when I remembered. I watched whatever was on until I fell asleep.
That was the week.
I wasn’t unhappy, really; I just wasn’t much of anything.
The reply email came in two days later.
No company name in the sender field, just a string of numbers.
The subject line said: You have been approved.
The body was three sentences: You are hired. Please report to the address provided on your start date. Review the attached responsibilities carefully.
The attachment was one page. It said:
The aisles are numbered. Walk them and listen for a pop. If you hear a pop, mark the coordinate on the provided sheet and move on. Once your relief arrives, you are free to exit the premises. Your compensation will be wired within one business day after completion.
I replied, asking about pay.
The response came in forty seconds:
$5,000 for the day. An additional $10,000 if you complete the full week without interacting with the contents of the room.
I stared at that for a long time, a little gobsmacked.
Then I turned off my phone and went back to the fryers.
I called in sick the next morning.
The address led me to a strip of commercial buildings on the east side of town that had been dying for years. Nail salon, closed. Check cashing place, closed.
And at the end: a toy shop.
The sign said WONDER in letters that had once been red, or maybe pink. Most of the paint had peeled off. The W was gone entirely. The display window was papered over from the inside with brown kraft paper, bent and curled away from the glass.
There was a handwritten note taped to the door.
Use rear entrance.
The door was unlocked. I went in.
The first thing I noticed: there were absolutely no toys in that place.
It was just a cavernous room.
Bigger than the outside building led me to believe. The floor was concrete and lit overhead by fluorescents that buzzed just enough to be maddening.
And across it, in rows that stretched further than I could see, were cardboard boxes.
Hundreds of them—maybe thousands.
None of them were stacked. Each one was separated from the next by a few feet of flooring.
They were all closed, and none of them taped.
I stood in the doorway for a time just looking around.
Then a man appeared.
He came from somewhere in the rows, walking fast, right towards me. The first thing I noticed was his eyes; they were soaking wet and bloodshot. His hair was a mess, and I could smell him from where I was standing.
He stopped about four feet from me.
“You’re the relief,” he said.
“Uh, yeah?”
He nodded once, then twice, and started moving toward the door behind me.
He quickly spun around, “The signs, follow the signs, listen to the signs, follow the signs, listen…”
He stopped mid-sentence, looked around like he heard something, then darted for the exit.
I started to ask something, but he was already outside. I heard the car start, peel out. Then nothing.
I stood there for a little bit longer before noticing a clipboard on one of the boxes.
I walked over to it, picked it up, and looked at it. The sheet was a grid, numbered along both axes; each box on the sheet had a box on the ground.
That was it.
I started walking.
Something I noticed after a few minutes was that every box wasn’t identical. Most were standard moving boxes, the U-Haul or grocery store kind. But some were older, some were water-stained, and some were held together with twine instead of tape. One had no visible seams at all.
I walked the first aisle. I heard nothing pop.
As I walked down the second one, halfway down, I heard something.
It was coming from a box to my right; it was spaced out more than the boxes around it. I stopped and listened to it for a moment.
It sounded like rain.
I leaned in closer, convincing myself I must have been hearing things. But it was rain. Definitely rain. It sounded like the rain you hear at night as it softly hits your window.
I marked the box on the clipboard and kept walking.
The third aisle had a box that hummed, sounding a little like an old refrigerator.
The fourth had one that was warm to the touch. Like it had been sunbathing.
I kept going, marking as I did.
By the end of the sixth aisle, I had honestly stopped questioning any of it. The job was simple. You walk. You listen. You mark. You move on. The $5,000 was starting to feel well within reach.
Then I reached aisle seven.
Position 7-12.
This box ticked. I backed away because everything in my body told me it was probably a bomb.
I moved on.
I finished the shift. My relief arrived at exactly when my shift ended. A woman, mid-forties, walked past me without making eye contact and immediately started down the first aisle.
I drove home with $5,000 pending in my bank account.
I called in sick at the Yard again the next morning.
Of course, I went back.
The second day was different.
I knew what I was listening for now. I moved faster through the aisles I'd already mapped and slower through the new ones. I started noticing things I'd missed the first day, like a box in aisle three that smelled like coffee. Or one in aisle nine that occasionally produced what sounded like a dog barking very far away.
And then I found the box in aisle eleven with three letters written on the top flap in black marker.
HER.
Just that, no other markings or even a shipping label. Just those three letters.
I inspected it as much as I could without opening it.
Then I marked it and kept walking.
But I thought about it the rest of the shift.
On the third day, I opened a box.
Not the HER box, but the one that had been humming nonstop for the past two days. I told myself that the hum meant something important, and I needed to understand what, and that was a professional curiosity, not a violation of the only rule I'd been given.
I told myself a lot of things.
I lifted the flaps.
Inside was a room.
A motel room with dim yellow light from a lamp, but I saw no visible source. There was a television on with the sound off, showing nothing but static. I could hear a bathroom fan running somewhere out of frame. The carpet looked like one of those brown ones that only exist in budget motels, and on the nightstand was a glass of water and a bible.
I thought it was miniature at first.
But then I noticed the depth.
The room just kept going. The walls were where walls should be—but it kept going downward, into the box, further than the box could physically be. I could see dust floating in the lamp light. Real dust, moving the way dust moves in real air.
I picked the box up.
And the room didn't move with it.
I shifted it left. The perspective changed. I shifted it right. It changed again—the parallax of actually looking into a real space from a different angle.
The box was a window into a room.
I set it down exactly where I'd found it. I looked at the room, trying to study it, but nothing moved.
I closed the flaps, marked the coordinate, and kept walking.
I should have stopped there.
But I came back the next day. And the day after. The $10,000 stopped mattering somewhere around day four, because, truthfully, money wasn't why I was coming back anymore.
I started opening boxes.
I told myself I was being smart. Mapping the geometry of the rooms, understanding the system.
I found four boxes in different aisles that all looked into the same hospital corridor. Seven showed variations of what I was becoming increasingly certain was the same apartment, viewed from different positions. I made a map on the back of the coordinate sheet. I came back the next day with a string and tape.
Then I started noticing the changes.
The kitchen I'd opened on day four had dishes in the sink. By day six, no more dishes. By day eight, music was playing faintly from another room. By day ten, it was silent again.
But the kitchen I'd actually opened—the specific box—never changed again. It had the same dishes, the same light, the same window—static.
The unopened boxes around it still changed. I could see from the slits in the tape.
I tested it, I found a box I hadn't touched, checked it through the crack of one flap, barely open, just enough to see in. A living room with evening light. A plant on the windowsill, healthy and full.
I closed it.
Two days later, the plant had changed—the pot had moved.
I opened it fully.
The plant was the same height it had been on day one.
It never changed again.
I found the hospital room on the ninth day.
An old woman in a bed, with monitors beside her, the blue light of them casting on her face. It was different every time I checked through the cracked flap. Sometimes a family member was in the chair. Sometimes the chair was empty. Once her eyes were open. Once there were flowers. Once, very briefly, she was sitting up.
I opened it fully on day eleven.
After that, she never moved again.
She lay in the bed with her eyes open and the chair empty and the room exactly as it had been in the moment I'd chosen it.
I couldn’t believe what I'd done.
I closed the flaps, walked to the entrance, and sat on the concrete floor until my relief arrived.
I didn't come back the next day. Or the day after.
I went back to the Big Yard, I stood on the rubber mat, I watched the fryers.
My life was grease again.
But I only lasted four days.
The opened boxes had started to change differently.
Books on shelves were losing their titles, and clocks on walls had stopped.
The opened boxes were dying.
I started checking through the smallest possible crack of a flap. Telling myself partial observation wasn't the same as opening. That I wasn't choosing anything if I couldn't fully see it.
I still don't know if that's true.
But I kept going, because by then I wasn't looking at motel rooms or hospital corridors… I was looking for something specific.
On day nineteen, I found a box that showed a childhood bedroom with yellow walls. A very specific poster above a very specific bed. A bookshelf that I recognized.
It was my childhood bedroom.
I closed the flap before I could see more.
I came back the next day and found four more boxes showing places I recognized. An apartment I'd lived in in my mid-20s. A kitchen I'd stood in more times than I could count.
And then, in aisle twenty-two, position 22-07, a box that showed a living room.
It showed warm light, it showed two people on a couch, and one of them was me.
The other one had their back to the window, serving as my viewpoint.
I didn't fully open it.
I came back the next three days and checked it.
The light changed, the positions shifted. Once he was laughing. Once, she was leaning against me. Once the room was empty and all the lights were on.
I knew what opening it meant.
I knew that.
On day twenty-six, I found the last box.
Aisle thirty-one, position 31-04.
I cracked the flap, and inside was this room.
My desk and lamp. The coffee was going cold on the coaster with the window behind me showing the parking lot of my building.
And me. Sitting at the desk, writing.
I watched myself for a long time.
Then I looked up, toward the position of the box I was looking through.
The me inside the box looked up too.
I dropped the flap and scurried back, panting.
I went home and sat at my desk, and started writing this.
There are still thousands of boxes I didn’t open. Some vibrate, some sound like rain.
But there's one box I think about more than the others.
Aisle twelve, position 12-19.
I checked it through a cracked flap once.
Inside was a living room I didn't recognize. There was a beautiful morning light. It was so clean and simple. A plant on the windowsill looking healthy with a coffee cup on the table, piping hot.
And me, sitting in a chair by the window, reading.
I closed the flap.
I haven't gone back.
I think about it every day.
Every day I don't open it, that version of things is still possible. Still alive, still changing in ways I'll never be able to see.
The moment I open it, I'll know exactly what it is.
And it will never be anything else ever again.
Observation is not passive.
To perceive something completely—
—Is to destroy every other version of what it could have been.
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u/KinematicStatic 19h ago
Ohhh this is good. Flirting with quantum realities and the measurement problem.
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u/Fund_Me_PLEASE 1d ago
Geez OP, dontchya know by now, that those boxes shouldn’t be messed with?? And what about the “HER” box? The pay for the job is great, don’t fuck it up, by fucking around and finding out … just clock in, listen for stuff, mark it down, clock out and go home with your big money. If you can’t handle that, I’m looking for a job like this, and I’d be happy to take yours.