The Customer After Midnight

Magdalena Nowak took the night shift at the old-town pharmacy in Kraków once a month, a rotating duty that had never particularly bothered her — until a man in his early forties began appearing, once a month, on the exact same night, just past midnight, always requesting the same thing: a medication called "Nembutol forte," which, as Magdalena politely explained the first time, existed in no database, under no name, in no country.

He didn't react with irritation. He simply nodded, thanked her, and left. She assumed that was the end of it. But the following month, at the exact same hour, he was back, asking for the same medication, in the same wording, word for word, as though the first encounter had never happened for him.

By the third time, Magdalena noticed something she didn't admit to herself at first: despite another month having passed, he didn't look any older. Or younger. Exactly the same — the same faint redness on his left cheek, the same slightly uneven stubble, the same watch on his wrist which, as she saw up close the fourth time, had stopped, at 00:12 — though it seemed to be exactly 00:12 every time he came, no matter what her own watch said.

She noticed something else, something she tried longer to explain away: the automatic door, which announced every other customer with a chime, never registered him. He was simply there, suddenly, in the aisle between the shelves, without her ever seeing him arrive, and the security mirror above the register, which showed every corner of the room, showed only the empty shelves behind him whenever he stood in its corner. The temperature in the room dropped, every time he was there, by several degrees — enough that she reached for a cardigan in the height of summer without asking herself why.

She began searching the compounding room, a space the pharmacy had operated continuously since the 1920s, through old inventory ledgers, to see whether "Nembutol forte" had ever existed. She found nothing under that name. But she found, in a book from 1943, an entry about a customer described in almost exactly the words she herself would have used: faint redness on the left cheek, uneven beard, asks for a nonexistent preparation, "Nembutal," appears monthly, always after midnight. The entry ended with a note from the pharmacist of the time, in handwriting growing increasingly unsteady: "I believe he is looking for a remedy for something he does not permit himself to name. Next time I will give him something that helps, even if it is not what he asks for."

The following entry, a month later, contained only a single sentence: "He did not come."

Magdalena, forced to choose between caution and compassion, did something the next time the man appeared that violated every regulation: she gave him no medication, only a glass of water and a question no one had perhaps asked him since 1943: "What exactly are you looking for, when you say 'Nembutol forte'?"

The man looked at her, truly, for the first time — not through her. Up close, truly close, for the first time, Magdalena saw that his eyes had no pupils that adjusted when the light changed — they stayed fixed, painted-on, as he spoke: "Something that will let stop what has already stopped." His voice arrived a fraction of a second out of sync with the movement of his mouth, like a badly dubbed film. She heard herself ask, against her own will: "What exactly, in you, has already stopped?" He didn't answer again. He simply turned, and for the split second before he vanished behind the shelf, seen from behind, he cast no shadow on the floor, though the fluorescent tube burned directly above him.

That morning, Magdalena locked the pharmacy from the inside for the first time in five years before her relief arrived, and waited, lights on, until it was fully light outside. When she later took the old ledger from the drawer to photocopy the 1943 entry, beneath the previous pharmacist's final line — "He did not come." — there was now another line, in blue ink, in handwriting almost indistinguishable from her own, though she was certain the book had held no such line the day before: "He came to me. I gave him water. He looked at me without blinking, the whole time." Her hands shook as she made the copy. Every morning since, before she even opens the till, the first thing she does is check the book — not afraid, anymore, that a new line might appear there, but afraid that one day she won't be able to tell the handwriting apart from her own.

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