The Smiling Man

My name is Patrick Mendez.

On December 11th, 1994, at precisely 11:49pm, my friend Lee suggested we go to Burger Castle. We both knew it shut at midnight and if we were going to go, we had to go right then, he insisted. I knew better than to try to change Lee’s mind when he had a plan. Besides, the rumblings in my stomach were on his side.  “Let’s go,” I said decisively, pushing my chair back and grabbing my car keys.  

Arriving at the restaurant, we opted for the drive through. I drove up to the speaker and lowered my car window. The air was warm and sticky.  I’ll get a large coke, I thought. The motor hummed while we waited to be greeted. About thirty seconds or so passed.

Lee and I looked at each other with the same perplexed expression on our faces. He squinted at the speaker and then looked forward toward the service windows. I checked my watch: 11:54pm.

“We’re not late,” I said quietly . . . My watch ticked over to 11:55pm.

Finally.  “Hello?” A voice came through the speaker. It was a male voice, with little expression in it.

“Yeah, Hi. I’d like two Castle Burger meals, one with a large Coke.”

“I’ll take a Coke, too,” Lee whispered.

“Sorry, both meals with a large Coke,” I corrected myself.

Again, silence followed. 

“Do you think he died?” Lee joked. 

I smiled. A few seconds later, our meal orders were repeated back to us and we were told to drive through to the next window. I felt Lee relax in the seat beside me. 

“Thanks,” I said to the disembodied voice behind the speaker. I gently moved forward leaving my window down. There were two service windows ahead of us. The first had a sign on it. A wet, stained piece of paper with scribbled handwriting: “Please do not make payments through this window.” I was about to make a comment to Lee about the sign not making sense when I was interrupted by the window sliding open. A man in his mid-50’s with a wide smile announced, “That’ll be $9.85.” I handed him a $5 of mine and a $5 from Lee, received the change and was wished a good night as the window slid shut. We drove up to the next window and hungrily waited for our meals to arrive. A minute passed. Two minutes. We could see no movement inside. In fact, the interior of the restaurant looked dark and lifeless.

“What is going on?” Lee asked, leaning over me to get a better look through the window.

“Maybe they had already shut shop for the night?” I said. “Could be they’re getting everything out again to prepare our food.”

Lee, fed up, unbuckled his seatbelt. “Look,” he said, “I’ll just go in and see what’s up.”
I called out to him to wait, saying we could go in together, but he was already gone. I sighed at his typical impatience and pulled the car into the waiting bay. After a couple of minutes of waiting I unbuckled and followed after him. 

Arriving at the side entrance of the restaurant, I found the handle of the door wouldn’t budge. Locked. But I could have sworn Lee went through this door. I hurried around to the front. The doors there were also locked. Going around to the other side of the building, I was relieved to find the last entrance was open. I pulled it, stepped inside, and called Lee’s name. No response. I moved further into the building. The only visible light came from behind the counter. I couldn’t see anyone, not even the man who had given me my change. The place was dark, empty, and silent.

You may be wondering why I didn’t just turn around and leave. The truth is that I wasn’t really afraid at this point. I knew Lee well. He was the type of guy who would do all this just to play a prank. He had been so eager to get to Burger Castle. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had called ahead and got the employees in on it. So, I headed right into the heart of the place. The large menu above the counter was the only light guiding me. I walked to the end of the counter and through the small opening that led into the kitchen. There was a soft hum coming from the lights and machines, yet there was still no sign of anyone.

“Lee, come on, I’m hungry, let’s go!” I said.

Nothing.

I felt . . . puzzled. I knew at least one man was working tonight. I had seen and spoken with him. And Lee … I had seen him walk in. Where were they now? I walked swiftly through the rows of cooking appliances, a sense of urgency growing within me. A basket was sunk into one of the fryers, its contents floating in the bubbling oil. I saw what looked like a huge fried mozzarella ball bobbing up and down . . . but a ball of cheese that large was too big for anyone to eat. Weird.   

I moved onward toward a door with a sign that read “Staff Only.” Ignoring the sign, I pushed the door open into a dimly lit room and went inside. In front of me stood a long meeting table with eight chairs around it. Lockers lined a wall on one side, and a small kitchenette was on the other. Suddenly I realized someone was sitting at the end of the table. He looked to me like the man from the drive thru window. He was facing me as I entered. 

“Oh, sorry,” I said, surprised to see him sitting there. “I’m looking for my friend. He came in here to get the food we ordered.”

The man sat calmly, hands folded on the table, smiling at me, as if he were attentively listening—though I had stopped talking.

“Hello?” I asked, walking towards him. As I approached, the man’s gaze did not follow me. It stayed fixed on the door through which I had entered. He wasn’t moving a muscle. 

“Hellooooo,” I waved to him from the side and then moved my hand in front of his face. He didn’t blink, move, or speak. 

“What the…” I looked around the room, expecting to see Lee jump out at me or something. But there was no one else here. I was alone in a room with a man who was not moving. A rush of cold fear came over me.

“Look,” I said through dry lips, “I’m sorry to disturb you . . .” I walked slowly, backwards towards the door, feeling for it with my hands behind me, keeping my eyes on the man. “I’m just looking for my friend . . .  and then we’ll be out of here.” Arriving at the door, I felt for the handle and eased it open. I slid through the small opening and stepped back into the kitchen area. I felt a crowd of goosebumps pop up around my neck when I realized the man was once again, looking at me. I could see him through the small square window in the door. And he was smiling still, with his head turned slightly to one side, his hands folded in front of him.  My heart pounded in my chest. He’s watching me.

And here. Here is when I started to feel genuinely afraid. Whatever Lee was doing, it was working, he was definitely overplaying his hand. But I didn’t care. The joke had gone far enough. I was going home. 

“Lee, you can come out now,” I shouted into the empty kitchen, “You win.” I tried to show some bravado as I moved quickly towards the door where I had first entered. I wasn’t going to give him—or anyone else—the satisfaction of seeing me run. I was going to walk calmly outside, get in my car, and get the hell out of there, with or without Lee. My true state showed itself when I walked into the door. It didn’t open. Frantically, I tried to move the handle back and forth. “No, no, no!”

I spun around to survey the dark interior of the restaurant. Booths . . . tables . . . all empty. Nothing out of order. A clear path towards another exist lay before me. This time I picked up my pace into a jog, but when I reached the door, I found it locked as well. One more exit remained. I turned toward it and then gasped at the sight of the man with the smile. I could see him just behind the counter by that fryer of bubbling oil. There he stood, his hands folded together over his stomach as if he were a butler in some fancy hotel. His body wasn’t facing the frier. It was facing me. He stood grinning. Absolutely terrifying.

“What do you want?” I yelled at him. A cold bead of sweat traveled down the back of my neck.

He said nothing and just continued to stare . . . and smile.

I decided to make a break for it. To my right was the only other door I hadn’t tried—the door closest to my car in the waiting bay. I ran up to the door and jiggled the handle. Useless. This door was locked, too. I was trapped. 

My head darted round towards the fryer, expecting to see the man still watching me. No one was there. Where was he? What did he want? Was he moving to some other point from which he could get at me?

And then a thought struck me: I could call Lee. Frantically, I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and dialed. After a few seconds, success. I could hear his ring tone, just barely. A muffled chorus of default beeps pierced through the hum of the cooking equipment. His phone was back past the kitchen, Back towards the staff room.

I tried swallowing in a dry throat. If this was some prank by Lee, I was going to kill him. A trash can nearby held a stack of blue plastic trays. I grabbed one and held it up like a baseball bat. Slowly, I made my way back around the counter, past the fryer and into the staff area. I noticed this time that there was an opening to the right of the staff room, a hallway. Could it be a back exit to the building? I kept looking behind me, always making sure my back was up against something, holding the serving tray high.

And then things turned truly horrifying.

The sound of humming in the kitchen ground slowly to a halt as the machine powered down. Then, the staff room light coming through door window went out, followed immediately by the light from the above counter menu. I found myself in pitch black silence. I became aware of the sound of my own breathing—too loud! I felt my heart thumping in my chest. I tried to tip-toe but it seemed to me that every step I took crashed against the tiled floor.

As I got to the staff room door, I looked through the window. Nothing but blackness within that room. No way I was going in there. 

Instead, I turned down the hallway that had to lead me to a back exit. I froze. At the end of the hallway, in the glow of a green exit light I could see the outline of a man’s body—a dark profile of that man. I couldn’t see his eyes, but his lips reflected green from the exit light directly above him. His smile…

“What the hell do you want!?” I yelled. I threw the meal tray at him, but it fell a few feet short. I started calling Lee’s name. From the corner of my eye, I saw the man move forward. I expected him to come at me quickly, but instead he took one giant step, always keeping the same posture, though now, away from the green light, he was just an amorphous mass of black.

I don’t know how to explain what I did next. I have no reason for it. I was completely terrified - unhinged. Yet, I found myself crossing my hands and resting them in front of me. I forced a wide smile onto my face. From some strange, inner compulsion, I tried . . . to imitate the man’s body language. Perhaps it was an attempt to answer threat with threat or throw him into a confusion that would at least buy me some time to make an exit. I was in a state of panic, my lips quivering. It took everything I had to assume this posture. Again, the man took a big step towards me. And another. I was paralyzed. There was nowhere to go. A minute passed. It felt like thirty. With one final step he came within an inch of me. He smelled like burger, bad breath, and . . . something I can only describe as hot metal. I couldn’t move. My only defense seemed to be in copying his posture. But my forced smile was cracking. My hands were starting to come apart. My entire body shook. He licked his lips, and I felt the tip of his lip—or was it his tongue?—graze my nose. 

And then he spoke . . . in a voice much deeper than I expected. “Very gooooooooood,” he said, drawing out the word good for what seemed to be a minute or more. Doing this, he moved his hands up in front of him and fish-hooked the corners of my mouth with his thumbs, stretching my false smile to the ends of my face. I screamed in fear and pain. His fingers tasted like the hot metal smell he had on him. I started screaming, locked in place by his thumbs, and kept screaming as he endlessly pronounced the word “good.” From within this nightmare, I finally passed out.

Three days later, I woke up in the hospital. I was confused and suffering huge gaps in my memory. The police told me Lee . . . was dead. The only part of him they found was his head. Burger Castle had officially shut down.  Processing all of this, I vomited into the lap of one of the officers. 

How could this be happening?

When I was well enough, the police showed me surveillance footage from that night inside the Burger Castle. Except . . . what the camera had captured was not as I remembered it. Not at all. The footage showed Lee and me entering the restaurant together. How could this be? I knew for certain Lee went in first without me. It showed a man at the counter giving us our food. His face unidentifiable. It showed . . . Lee going back into the staff area on his own, and me waiting at the counter, gazing at the menu, stiff as a pole for about two minutes, like I was in some sort of trance, though I couldn’t see my face. Looking at that image of myself doing something I didn’t remember doing was so, so awful. I felt betrayed and exposed as if I had been lying when I knew that I had told them the truth. Eventually the footage cut out . . . must have been when the power was cut.

My testimony was credible enough not to have me arrested. Besides, the footage didn’t show me doing any harm to Lee. They never recovered the rest of his body, though. Nor did they ever find the smiling man. But I never forgot him. He left me a souvenir of our meeting. I felt it for the first time when I woke up in the hospital bed: two one-inch cuts with stitches over them, sticking out from the corners of my lips. I live with the scars all the time now – and when I forget them, I remember as soon as I start to smile.