Creepypasta #1044: Spencer's Last Prank
My coworkers liked stupid pranks.
I worked in a shitty clothing store in the local mall. It’s the kind of place that hires high schoolers and, over the summer, college kids. It’s minimum wage, so our employers didn’t expect much. Honestly, they just hoped we didn’t come in drunk. Hell, if our eyes were a little red, they’d look the other way, if you know what I mean.
Which is why the pranks continued for so long. It started out small. Jumping out from behind doors. Hiding in clothing racks. Prank calling the store on days off. It was funny and petty and stupid.
That’s the key word again – stupid.
It was my coworker, Spencer. He’s the reason the pranking eventually came to an end about six months ago. And the reason that I eventually quit my job.
See, none of us were exactly rocket scientists. Most of us were a little dumb for the sole fact that we were teenagers. But Spencer was dumber than the rest of us. I mean, that kid was a few eggs short of a dozen. Not college material and probably would never move away from our hometown. But we liked him just the same. He was good for a laugh.
But, God… he took it too far.
It happened on Tuesday. I was working from three to nine, which meant I was on closing duty. I mopped the storefront, cleaned the windows, took out the trash and threw the cardboard boxes from inventory into the cardboard compactor. I locked up and did a quick inventory check. Most importantly, I did it all by myself.
See, Spencer was supposed to be working with me. He was supposed to come in at noon and leave at eight. It’s not uncommon for someone to close alone, but usually there’s another person there for part of the evening. It makes finishing closing duties easier. I can’t take out the trash while I’m helping customers, you know.
He’d been there when I came in at two, but at some point he’d left without letting me know and without clocking out. I was pretty irritated – I wondered if maybe he was playing some kind of joke on me. Spencer wasn’t the type to think things through – he might very well have thought that abandoning me on the night shift would be hilarious.
I called Spencer but didn’t get an answer. I called my manager and let her know that Spencer had ducked out on me. I expected Spencer to return my call or at least text, but he didn’t. The next time I worked – two days later – I asked my manager, but she hadn’t heard from Spencer either.
Now, Spencer might not be the brightest bulb in the box, and yes, sometimes he forgets his schedule or messes up and doesn’t come in for a shift. But he isn’t the kind to just shirk his responsibilities. If he misses work, he accepts the blame for it and makes it up to his coworkers. He doesn’t make excuses and it doesn’t happen often. That’s why none of us employees really have a problem with him. So the fact that he was completely MIA left me a bit confused. If he’d left me there as a joke, he would have confessed to it by now. He wouldn’t have stopped coming in to work entirely.
I didn’t get worried until the next week when Spencer’s mother officially filed a Missing Persons report.
She came into the store to talk to the manager. I saw them disappear into the office – which is really just a cramped closet in the back room with a dusty old desktop computer – and could barely make myself focus until they came back out. Mrs. Damson – that is to say, Spencer’s mom – had tears in her eyes. I heard my manager, Kelly, assure her that they’d check the security footage. Then, Kelly asked me to come to the back office. She’d never done that before.
It turns out that I was the last person to see Spencer before he went missing.
At least, the last known person. His mother had seen him at the house before he went to work that Tuesday. He’d never come home. Spencer had been working with me and only me – Tuesdays are slow and Kelly had been busy along with the rest of the managers, so there’d been no manager present. The last time I remembered seeing Spencer was around four-thirty when he’d gone to use the employee restroom in the back. That’s the last anyone had heard of him.
I told Kelly what I remembered and she told me she was going to try to get her hands on the security footage. Most likely, Spencer had just high-tailed it with some of his buddies. Impromptu road trip or something, hell if I know. Kelly assured me over and over that the most likely scenario was that Spencer was completely fine and had just done something unexpected… unexpected and stupid, but then again, this was Spencer we were talking about. Stupid was implied.
I let that placate me for the most part, although I was still nervous the rest of the night. I managed to distract myself for most of the next day, playing video games with a few buddies. It wasn’t until mid-evening when I got a call from Kelly.
“Hey, Conner, can you come to my apartment? There’s… something I want to talk to you about.”
