The Fitting Room at Midnight

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The story

A night clerk at a big city department store notices a red velvet suit hanging in fitting room seven that was not there when he locked up. He tries it on because the customer ahead of him vanished, and the mirror shows the store empty behind him.

How it begins

Nobody who works the night shift at Haverford and Quill's department store on Fifth Avenue will tell you the building is quiet after closing. It is never quiet. The escalators hum to themselves. The air vents sigh like tired shoppers. And somewhere on the fourth floor, a music box plays the first four notes of a carol and then forgets the rest. Dennis Varga had worked the night desk for six winters, and he had learned to stop listening to the building the way you stop hearing a neighbor's radio through the wall. It was a quarter to midnight on the twenty-third of December, and the store had been shut…