She had tended bar there long enough to know the building’s ordinary misbehavior. Bottles shifted when trucks rattled past. The ice machine coughed like a dying animal. The old mirrored ball sometimes turned a quarter revolution after the motor stopped, scattering tired stars across the empty dance floor.

None of that frightened her.

What frightened her was the hand.

It pressed between her shoulder blades at 2:18 a.m., long after the last customer had left. The touch was gentle at first. Then it shoved.

Marisol caught herself against the bar. When she turned, every stool was upside down on the counter and the room was empty.

“Not tonight,” she said.

A whiskey bottle slid three feet along the shelf and stopped before an empty glass.

From the storeroom came three knocks.

Marisol called for Eddie, the closing porter. No answer. She crossed the dance floor, passing tables that smelled of spilled beer and warm perfume. The building had gone unnaturally still. Even the refrigeration units behind the bar were silent.

The storeroom door stood open six inches.

“Eddie?”

Three more knocks answered from within.

Marisol wedged a barstool beneath the handle before entering. Shelves crowded the narrow room: paper napkins, cleaning supplies, unopened bottles and decorations from forgotten promotions. At the far wall, Eddie’s flashlight lay on the floor, shining beneath a stack of boxes.

There was no Eddie.

The door slammed.

The barstool scraped uselessly across the other side. Marisol seized the knob, but it spun without catching. Something leaned against the door from outside. She heard its breath through the wood—slow, deep and pleased.

Then the music began.

It was not the club’s sound system. This music came from behind the shelves: a distant bass line, a snare drum and a woman singing through the crackle of an old record. One by one, the bottles began to tremble.

The rear wall opened like a curtain.

Beyond it lay another dance floor.

This Paradise was larger than the building could contain. Blue smoke hung beneath chandeliers. Couples in clothes from different decades danced under a mirrored ball as broad as the moon. Soldiers danced with women in narrow skirts. Men in wide lapels spun beneath colored lights. A girl with teased hair laughed into the shoulder of a boy who had no face.

None of them cast reflections.

Eddie stood among them.

His eyes were closed. A paper coat-check ticket had been pinned over his heart.

Marisol pushed through the dancers and caught his arm. He was cold enough to numb her fingers.

“Wake up.”

Eddie smiled without opening his eyes. “We don’t have to close.”

The dancers repeated the words in a whisper.

We don’t have to close.

At the edge of the floor stood a coat-check counter. Hundreds of numbered tickets hung behind it. Some were yellow with age; others looked newly printed. A black ledger lay open beside a silver bell.

Marisol found Eddie’s name on the final page. Beneath it, a line of ink was writing hers.

She slammed the book shut.

The music stopped.

Every dancer turned toward her.

A tall shape detached itself from the smoke. It wore no face, no clothes and no skin—only the darkness left behind when the lights moved elsewhere. Its long arms ended in hands that rested on the dancers’ backs.

With a hundred gentle pushes, it set them moving again.

“Paradise is full,” it said.

Its voice came through the speakers, the glasses and the silver fillings in Marisol’s teeth.

“Then let us out,” she said.

“Paradise has no exits.”

The figure placed one hand between her shoulder blades.

Music crashed over the room. Marisol was forced into the turning crowd. Each time she fought toward Eddie, another dancer swept her away. Years passed between drumbeats. Her hair lengthened, silvered and became dark again. Dresses changed around her. The chandeliers became colored bulbs, then spinning lights, then chandeliers once more.

She understood what the club collected.

Not people. Last nights.

The final dance before a wedding. The final drink before a war. The final song heard with someone still alive. Every person in the room had wished, for one careless instant, that the night would never end.

Paradise had granted them exactly that.

Marisol looked into the mirrored ball. Among its thousand reflections she saw her younger sister Isabel, laughing at a table twenty years earlier. Isabel had died before sunrise that night, and Marisol had spent half her life wishing they had never left the club.

Isabel stepped from the crowd.

“One more song,” she said.

Marisol nearly took her hand.

Then she saw the ticket pinned over Isabel’s heart. It bore no number. It bore Marisol’s name.

“You aren’t my sister.”

Isabel’s smile widened. The darkness behind her placed both hands upon Marisol’s shoulders.

Marisol reached back and seized the thing’s wrists.

They felt like door handles.

She twisted.

Somewhere beyond the impossible dance floor, the storeroom lock clicked.

Marisol pulled harder. The shadow split down the middle. Through it she saw shelves, cardboard boxes and the thin line of ordinary club light beneath an ordinary door.

She dragged Eddie through.

The dancers rushed after them. Cold hands caught Marisol’s shirt, her hair and her ankles. The music rose until every bottle on the storeroom shelves exploded.

Marisol reached the door and turned the shadow’s wrist one final time.

The storeroom opened.

She and Eddie fell onto the club floor. Behind them was only a shallow room filled with broken glass. Marisol kicked the door shut, but something struck it once from the other side.

Then twice.

Then three times.

At 2:19 a.m., the refrigerators started again.

Only one minute had passed.