The Archaeology Laboratory
(2023)
Short story
The year was 2007 - the year our culture collectively made fun of Britney Spears for being a person, in case you’re struggling to place it in your memory.
I was an undergraduate student worker - whiling away the few free hours I had between my classes, two other jobs, and learning all about drinking games at night - by cataloging archaeological miscellany for a university's archeology professors.
I worked in an old, basement-level, archaeology lab. After I recorded what each item was, I had to go into this closet that I swear to god stretched on for a half mile (most of the items were actual, literal, dirt. I had to sort their dirt samples, which is very weird and tedious. But I’m not gonna lie: I was kinda into the rote muscle memory of it. I could let my mind just wander).
The closet had an obscene number of shelves, lining the walls at odd increments and disappearing into the shadows and dark towards the back.
There were weird breaks in the shelves with just sunken sections of wall with nails sticking out. The whole place was lit by one dim light bulb at the front, nearest the only door.
I hated going into that closet. I worked alone and there was this terrifying fucking vibe in there. Like something was watching me. The endless closet was full of crates and decades upon decades of archaeology detritus that they didn't know what to do with but didn't want to throw away.
Currently
published in
Wicked Shadow Press: Flashes of Nightmare Anthology
One evening, I went into The Godforsaken Closet of Doom to find some previous dirt samples and double check their cataloging tags because something in my spreadsheet wasn't adding up. I was distracted by going over the columns of data in my head, and as I entered the closet I didn't prop the door open like I usually did. I just headed straight towards the far back of the closet - where I thought the samples were - trying to get in and out as quickly as I could.
About halfway there the door slammed shut behind me as if it was suddenly made out of some terrifying new metal operating on laws of physics to some hitherto unknown nightmare realm instead of simply wood. My own fault for not propping it open, I thought in a panic. It was probably just a draft.
At that moment, the lightbulb in the closet flickered - on and then off. Then it came back on, but it was incredibly dim now. The building was ancient and the wiring was probably shit, I assured myself.
Then I froze.
Totally freaked out.
And didn't move.
Because the world had somehow shifted sideways, sliding me into a nightmare realm made of slamming doors and dimly lit bulbs…eerie darkness and too-long shadows.
Because directly to my left, there was the outline of a face…just hovering there in the darkness…almost out of sight but not quite. Like a monster in a nightmare.
I stared at it, not breathing, not blinking, not moving an inch.
I then, in horror, realized that there were at least 3 other faces, all smaller, hovering behind the larger face.
Was I dreaming? Had I fallen asleep at my desk? Surely this could not be real.
Still not breathing, or blinking, I slowly walked backwards towards the door, feeling behind me with my hands…terrified of what they might find instead of a wooden door…never taking my eyes off the outlines of the faces hovering in the dark.
I made it to the door and flung it open, gasping for air as if I'd been underwater.
The light from the lab illuminated the closet better.
Feeling like a character in a horror movie, I didn’t run, but instead peered intently into one of the sunken sections of the wall.
On it, I saw 4 large, oblong, ornamental, masks from some ancient expedition hung up on nails sticking out the wall.
Masks.
It was a display of masks set into a weird wall crevice in the dark.
I stood there, alone in the archaeology lab of a little used basement, and laughed until I cried.
It wasn’t until much later however, that I reflected on what the nightmare was in this scenario. It was not some hungry pale girl, working herself senseless and scared out of her wits, alone in a dim closet in a university basement.
It was the forgotten artifacts.
They’d been taken from their rightful place. From their rightful cultures. From the communities and peoples that gave them meaning. They’d been grave-robbed by white professors in the deep south of the U.S. They had been cataloged, put in a closet…and forgotten: just so much detritus gathering dust in the dark, away from their peoples, away from their purpose, their meaning and their power.
They just sat there in the dark. Alone. Forgotten. Held prisoner. A nightmare in the form of colonialism, covered in the thick, sloppy, whitewash of academia, and buried in a long, narrow closet by the guilty.