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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/parasitic_inflection on 2025-12-06 21:44:24+00:00.
Working at an ice cream shop, all things considered, should not be difficult. It should not be scary and you should most certainly NOT feel like your life is at risk half the time. Unfortunately for me, the ice cream shop I work at checks all of those boxes.
It’s difficult, scary at times, and I’d be lying to you if I said that I felt safe 100% of the time. However, we do get paid above minimum wage, so it isn’t completely terrible.
Anyways, the shop is weird. I won’t go ahead and say that I don’t like working here, but if I could choose, I’d definitely go somewhere else. That’s due in part to where the building is located. I live in Beachham, Maine. So, naturally, the shop is called Beachham Ice Cream. It’s the only one you can feasibly find some good ice cream at in our run-down dump of a town. It’s coastal, and you can probably guess why it’s named Beachham… yeah.
Aside from the obvious, our town is known for some other things. Strange things. You might be thinking, “oh, well, every town is unique!” And I’d agree with you—if mine wasn’t the way it was.
Just about anything you can think of—be it walking gargoyles or little goblins who are unbelievably good at carpentry—has walked into the shop.
I know I haven’t provided a great number of examples, but I think you get the idea. The town I live in is not normal. There’s a reason for that, though.
None of the events that have happened from the town’s founding in 1978 to New Year’s Eve 1998 were all that notable. Just businesses opening, all that stuff. December 31st, 1998 changed the town forever.
Townsfolk reported that—through the month of December—there had been strange individuals lurking in the shadows. A couple people noted that these individuals were wearing white robes, a rather strange clothing choice given the weather.
Some lucky townsfolk who were able to get close enough to the strange individuals to hear them talking reported conversations about the prophesied end of the world. That, and talks about Hell opening up on Earth, but that didn’t really matter.
The cultists—as we’d call them now—turned out to actually be quite incompetent. So much so that the ritual they predicted would tear the Earth asunder and allow the inhabitants of Hell to ravage it. The ritual they conducted worked, partially. They did open up portals to hell, but they weren’t complete.
Instead, they were more like small fissures in the Earth. That and they must’ve summoned from the reject section of Hell, because our town was soon filled up with creatures that did not match the descriptions of the ones they said would come.
Everything around the fissures still isn’t completely known, but we do know a few things. Seven of them opened up throughout different parts of town. One near our pizza shop, high school, movie theater, beach, car dealership, apartment complex, and lastly—one right under our ice cream parlor.
As a result of having a fiery hell fissure directly under the store, some weird things happen. Even weirder is the fact that, unlike the other fissures in town, ours seems to attract the weirdos that came out of them. For better or worse, I as well as my co-workers have had to deal with it for the past few months.
They’ve been here a lot longer than me; I only started here back in September. Still, I’ve seen my fair share of weird shit in this place.
The actual building itself isn’t too big. If I had to give an estimate, I’d say it’s around 700 square feet. Layout is pretty simple too. You just walk in and the whole place is there. If you go to the left, you’ll find the place where you can order your desired flavor of ice cream. To the right of that spot, there’s an entire area dedicated to said flavors. I won’t be listing all of them off here, but just know that if you want it, we probably got it.
In the right-hand corner of the building, just past the ice cream, we have a set of bathrooms. Everywhere else? Booths and tables for eating ice cream. That’s about all there is to the layout of the store regarding important stuff. Oh, right, I almost forgot. Just behind the checkout area and all the ice cream flavors is a door. Behind that door is three things. One, the freezer where we keep all of our ice cream—to get to there, you just open up the door, turn left, and open up the leftmost door. Two, when you enter the back room, it’s sort of a cooler area. That’s where we keep our syrups, sprinkles and all that good stuff. Lastly, to the right is a simple storage area where we also happen to keep our cones and cups for ice cream.
Okay, I think that’s just about everything. Basic little description of my workplace. We can’t take breaks inside for some reason. I don’t know what it is or why, but for some reason, we cannot take breaks. Customers can sit and eat ice cream, but we can’t take breaks. I found that I when I tried to do just that and a demon came into the dry storage area. Completely random, but he told me that I was fine for now, but that it was strike one.
I haven’t gotten any since. I take my breaks in my car now.
I can remember a lot of what’s happened to me, seeing as how I’ve only been here for about three months or so. I remember the first real weird thing that happened to me—I believe it was actually a few days after I started here, so September fifth? Yeah, September fifth.
I have the luck of being able to work here full time, as I just graduated high school back in June. Taking some time off before deciding what I want to do for college. Adult stuff. It sucks.
Anyways, I walked into the parlor not expecting all that much action for the day. The jingling bell we have attached to the door rang as I walked through it, signaling my long-awaited entry into the ice cream parlor.
I wasn’t planning on doing too much talking that morning, but the world had other plans for me.
“Hey, little man!” Spike said from behind the counter. “You clocked in yet?”
Spike—besides the other employees, of course—was the closest thing to a friend I could call in the shop. He wasn’t too much older than me—three years my senior. He’s a community college graduate working here until he can get a proper job. Probably somewhere that isn’t here, if I had to guess.
Anyways, he’s super cool. I like him a lot. He’s tall, too. Looks like a member of a 2000s nu-metal band. Think Hybrid Theory-era Mike Shinoda. That ought to fill in the rest of the blanks. Black hair too. Cool guy. I just wasn’t really in the mood to talk that day, but I did anyways because it was the polite thing to do.
“Not quite yet,” I replied. “I did just get here. Any activity yet?”
He put a hand on his chin and it looked like he was thinking really hard. I was about to say something when he finally replied.
“Nah, nothing notable,” Spike removed his hand from his chin. “Surprisingly.”
I used the small folding shelf near where the rows of ice cream flavors ended and went into the back. We use an app to clock in as opposed to a traditional time clock. I don’t think it’s nearly as cool as the latter, but goodness is it convenient.
The main color scheme for the parlor was white and blue, so naturally, we wore a blue shirt and white pants for our uniform. We also wear a white apron for some reason. I guess because it looks better? I’m not sure, I didn’t make this place.
We also need to wear something that covers our hair. Safety stuff. I just opt to wear a hat. Spike does the same. Everyone else either ties their hair back or—like us—wears a hat. Lastly, we wear gloves, but that’s kind of obvious.
All we really had to do was wait for customers and clean off the ice cream serving apparatus when the customers left. Other than that, we could shoot the shit and just have a generally good time while getting paid for it.
That day’s set of customers wouldn’t be like the normal ones, though. I’d just finished cleaning off the scoop after serving a customer some pistachio ice cream—which is such an old person flavor, my god—when I heard the tell-tale noise of our entrance bell jingling.
Excited, but not really, I looked up to greet our newest customers. What met me was… interesting.
My greeting was caught in my throat as I got a good look at just what was in front of me. When I determined that what I was seeing was, in fact, real, I immediately went to the back where I found Spike looking for our vanilla ice cream.
“Dude,” I said, pointing to where I’d just come from. “I need you to come out and see this. It’s crazy.” I grabbed him by the arm and dragged him out the best I could. It’s hard when they’re bigger than you.
I yanked him out front and did a “see?” gesture to the customers in just on the other side of the counter. Spike took a good, hard look at them and determined that they were pretty weird. What stood in front of us wasn’t a group of humans, no. What we saw was more similar to those gargoyles you’d see perched atop a cathedral somewhere in Europe.
“Mmm. Yeah. Pretty weird,” Spike said. “You wanna take care of them for me? Still gotta find that ‘nilla.”
“You sure they aren’t gonna hurt me?” I asked, pointing at them.
“Hey,” One of them said. “Just because we aren’t human… doesn’t mean we can’t hear you. No… we won’t hurt you.”
That surprised me, but all it seemed to do for Spike was give him the okay he wanted to go back into the freezer. Dammit, I was on my own here.
I shook the feeling and steadied myself. There were only three of the gargoyles. I...
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