Last Call at Northgate Mall

Dead malls are their own kind of haunted. Not the horror-movie kind, just the sad kind -- all that hope for the future frozen mid-sentence. Northgate closed in 2009, and it has sat since then behind plywood and chain link, a whole indoor town gone quiet. I do urbex mostly for the photography, and a friend who knew a way in through an unsecured loading dock offered to take me. We went on a full-moon night so the skylights would give us light without flashlights giving us away.

Inside it was extraordinary. The main concourse ran off into the dark in both directions, storefronts gaping, mannequins toppled, a fountain full of black leaves. Escalators frozen like sculpture. The moon came down through the big skylights in cold blue columns, and dust hung in them, and it was so beautiful I almost forgot to be nervous.

We worked our way toward the food court, which sits under the biggest skylight. That is where the light was best and where I most wanted to shoot. We came around the corner past a shuttered pretzel stand, and I raised my camera, and then I lowered it, because there was a woman standing at one of the registers.

She was in a uniform. One of those polo-and-visor setups that fast food places used to make people wear, faded, a color I could not name in the moonlight. She was behind the counter of a stand that had no sign left, standing at the register with her hands resting on it, facing out toward the empty seating like she was waiting for the lunch rush. She was very still. My friend saw her the same second I did and grabbed my arm.

I want to be fair about what I actually saw. It was dark. It was a mall that had been sealed for over a decade. A person could, in theory, have gotten in the same way we did. But she was not lit by the moon the way we were. That is the detail I keep circling. We cast blue light and hard shadows. She did not. She was evenly gray, all over, like an old photograph standing up, and the register in front of her had a small green glow to it, the glow of a machine that is on, in a building with no power.

Neither of us said anything. I did the stupid thing you are not supposed to do -- I lifted my camera again and I took one photo. The flash did not fire; I had it off. But the shutter clicked, loud in all that silence, and at the sound she turned her head toward us. Slowly. And she smiled, and it was a customer-service smile, the professional kind, and she said, in a voice that came from farther away than she was standing, that the food court closed at nine.

We left. I am not going to pretend we did anything but leave, fast, back the way we came, banging our shins on fallen fixtures the whole way. Out on the loading dock we stood in the real moonlight breathing hard and not looking at each other.

The photo came out. That is the thing that keeps me up. There is a figure behind the counter, gray and even and wrong, and the register in front of her is lit. Every expert I have shown it to gives me the same shrug and the same wrong theories. Northgate got torn down last year. I drove past on demolition day and watched the food court skylight come down in a cloud of dust, and I will admit I felt a small mean relief, and then I felt ashamed of it, because wherever she was going now, I was the one who had bothered her at closing time.