"Salaam, effendi." Al said, bobbing his turbaned head in greeting, as I entered my family's convenience store for my early shift, about an hour before dawn. I glanced around, and saw that Al had, as always, faithfully done the cleaning the breakfast food prep, and our pristine 7-11 was ready for me to take over for the morning shift.

Al's a really good employee.

"Dawn approaches." Al reminded me, as I came around behind the counter and stashed my coat behind it.

I smiled. "Not a problem, go ahead and clock out." I had no worries about zeroing out his till, Al was never off by so much as a cent. Like I said, he's really good.

Al gave me a sober nod, and then, without saying another word or breaking eye contact, he glided away backwards, through the swinging "Employees Only" door into the back room. I gave an involuntary shudder.

Well, he's good at doing his job. When it comes to pretending to not be a vampire...he tries. To be fair, back when my grandpa opened the franchise in the 1970s, no one in our small town off the Interstate had ever met a Muslim. So, when Al claimed that his religion forbade him to go out in the daytime, it didn't occur to anyone to call him on it. Its symbol was a crescent moon, after all. Besides, as Al explained, it's much too hot to go out during the day, in his homeland of "South Arabia".

And, without Google to instantly confirm their suspicions, most people would probably have simply passed over the oddity of an ostensibly Muslim man wearing a Sikh-style turban, and being named "Al Abdul". (No, I don't mean his last name is "Al-Abdul" -- first name "Al", last name "Abdul".)

A few minutes later, the safe unlocked automatically, and I placed the money from Al's till inside, before counting out the appropriate amount of change for my own till and closing it again. After opening my till, I glanced at the donation box behind the counter. Another shudder ran down my spine, as I saw the set of neatly folded clothes and a pair of shoes in the box.

The clothes, assuming they weren't particularly distinctive, would go to Salvation Army, but we've never found out what Al does with the rest of his "leftovers". It's probably better that way. When I first found out about Al, my dad had assured me that everyone who "donated to charity" while Al was on shift was someone the world was better off without, and I had personally seen hand-me-downs from some people I knew to be particularly despicable end up in that old cardboard box. It was still unsettling, though.

For the first hour of my shift, I had only a few customers stop in for some coffee or doughnuts, as well as the usual steady stream of people paying at the pump for gas. The man who walked in to the store around 6 AM didn't look much different than most of my customers -- he was unshaven and a little bleary-eyed, but that was to be expected at this time of day.

So imagine my surprise, when he responded to my cheerful "Good Morning!" by shoving a gun in my face.

"Money!" he hissed. "Now!"

I was scared, obviously, but there was a procedure for this, that applied to every employee except Al, who by now, would be asleep inside his "prayer box" in the old storeroom in back.

I followed that procedure to the letter, holding one hand up and gingerly opening the register with the other. He was, predictably, unsatisfied with the handful of bills, and let me know with a string of profanity, and several sharp jabs of his gun in my direction. I shakily pointed to the customary sign on the wall that was designed to prevent just such an awkward situation:

NOTICE: LESS THAN $100 IN REGISTER AT ALL TIMES. EMPLOYEES CANNOT OPEN SAFE.

He expressed his opinion of the sign's veracity by striking me across the face with his gun, sending me staggering back into the shelves of cigarettes behind me, and then vaulting the counter and screaming at me to open the safe. I scrambled back away from the irate -- and, I noticed, clearly tweaking -- robber, while pleading my case vociferously.

Looming over me, he advanced forward, his threats becoming increasingly graphic as he came forward. He didn't fire, because I was just backing up, cowering -- I wasn't trying to run. That, too, was part of the "procedure" I mentioned.

Predictably, as I stopped before the door to the backroom, the angry thief shoved me through the swinging door, and followed me inside, warning me of the consequences of failing to produce any more than the paltry amount I'd given him.

And with that, I had successfully completed the standard emergency procedure that my dad and grandpa had drilled into me, in case of a robbery. We passed into the pale fluorescent light of the backroom, and the door swung shut behind my assailant, shutting out the sunlight.

My assailant stopped pointing his gun at me -- he had little choice, as his gun arm suddenly bent the wrong way. He screamed in pain and horror as a slender, too-tall shape that seemed to be made of pure darkness melted out of the shadows among the shelves, and hauled him off his feet and into the air.

"Al, don't--" I began, my eyes widening in shock, but I didn't finish the sentence before another snap echoed through the backroom. The robbers head lolled to the side, his neck stretched and bent at a sickening angle. I forced my breakfast back down into my stomach.

"I have apprehended the criminal, effendi." Al said, in a hollow, unnatural voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once. "I will...turn him over to the proper authorities."

Swallowing hard, I gave him a mute nod, and watched him melt back into the shadows. I suppose I'd always known that Al's thin human visage wasn't actually meant to fool us -- he didn't think we were stupid. It wasn't so much an actual disguise or deception, as it was a polite fiction. A lie mutually agreed to, that allows otherwise inimical beings to coexist in relative peace, protected by a thin veneer of not-so-plausible deniability.

Once I heard the lid of his box close again, I fled the room through the swinging door as fast as I could.