An Office Haunting
cover art created by me, inspired by angela deane
When I entered the address on my phone, I was met with the words “Permanently Closed,” bright red and unchallengeable in the 7 a.m. dark. I stared back for a moment, then re-read the address to ensure I had typed it correctly. Glancing over at my fading, leather messenger bag and the lunch box I used in high school, I put the car into drive anyway.
With a thankful sigh, I found the potholed side street populated and not abandoned, littered primarily with vans in much better condition than my own rusting car. I grabbed all my belongings, realizing my jangling bags and gargantuan water bottle were quite obnoxious as I struggled to squeeze out of the driver’s seat.
I haunted the doorstep for a minute before being buzzed in and officially welcomed to my new second home, the branch’s other location in the city. Of course, after mandatory introductions, I had to be given a tour, which wasn’t that interesting—just milk-white walls and black screens—until my manager and I slipped past all the modern, monochrome cubicles and exited through a metal side door. The air plummeted ten degrees, and the gummy, superficial sweetness of the office atmosphere vanished. He opened yet another door tucked shyly into the corner, which unveiled an undeniably seventies staircase with emerald walls and tangerine panels of wood that had begun to peel like orange rinds. I felt the urge to peel those panels further back.
The slim staircase curled up into a useless second floor with rotting walls and broken windows. Extra desks and stools sat scattered about the unused, unlit space, and filmy pieces of art laid in the corner in an askew stack. Both long and stout lamps punctuated random surfaces, their bulbs likely dead. As we stood amongst the hushed shadows and dust, he told me that the place might be haunted. At least, that was what some people said. I didn’t doubt it.
If you ignored the comically archaic safe with its big, iron handle and opened the correct door, you’d step out onto a quavering platform aching to break beneath you, to catch you distracted by the facility below and all the ant-like men in safety goggles bouncing around their invisible chalk circle. Because they kept their eyes on their gloves and metal vats, they missed the two parallel rows of even more cracked windows hovering near the ceiling. These windows were much more elaborate than the others, less rectangular and more piercing, though some stood fully glass-less. Their proximity to each other, their arched tops and array of sliced panes, their concealed height—the building seemed to have been quite an old set of apartments once. Though the lower level must have been remodeled at least three times over, these decaying, secret windows nestled atop a labyrinth of fresh, criss-crossed beams seemed to whisper to each other about lives past.
Not to mention the cemetery right across the street, its headstones nearly always visible, peeking over the untrimmed grass.
Yes, I can see how it might be haunted.
I didn’t experience any supernatural behavior for the first handful of weeks, so my manager’s quip faded from memory. I still thought about the deserted upstairs and what else all those windows might signal if not dilapidated studio apartments from half a century ago, but I never noticed any disembodied silhouettes in the corner of my eye nor did I hear any inexplicable voices whirling behind me.
I’d had a couple of run-ins with ghosts (or spirits, if you prefer) in the past, so I felt prepared to witness something strange, unearthly. It’d been a few years since I last experienced anything worth retelling (the ghost of my late dog manifesting at my feet hours after having buried him), which meant I wanted something to happen. I wanted my midday slump to be rudely interrupted by a paralyzing chill down my body. I wanted more fodder for the next inevitable argument with my uncle about the existence of such things. I wanted to be reminded that dead ends aren’t always all that dead.
This one seemed to be. Until last week.
In the last hour of my shift, when my coworkers in the cubicles connected to mine have both left, I am alone in my corner, squinting my eyes at two monitors, willing the words to stop blurring. I’ve got my lopsided headset on, the singular speaker laid over my right ear, a playlist coming through at volume two, and my eyeliner has certainly smudged onto my already-dark under-eyes. There’s usually a dull throbbing in my lower back at this point, and I’m either aching to eat or lay down in my bed, but something, someone, has decided to make things just a tad bit more interesting for me in those final sixty minutes.
To put it plainly, there are ghosts in the cubicles.
They wait politely until the humans have freed up their cushioned rolling chairs, and they clock in right on time. They fumble with the blinds, ensuring minimal glare on their screens, but they never tangle the tassels. They scoot around as they settle in, the little wheels scraping against the carpet’s plastic covering, and they slide their plastic mouses softly against the wooden desks. They even adjust the trinkets on the shelves, and though the figurines don’t belong to them, I bet it’s nice to pretend.
They do trick me sometimes into thinking my fleshier coworkers have returned, especially when they roll the chairs around, but they’re surprisingly considerate, never loud enough to alert anyone else beyond my corner.
They don’t scare me. They’re just working.
As I listen to their sparse tapping, I wonder if anyone takes my place when I leave. I wonder if they work as hard as I do.
I wonder if they used to live upstairs, if they parked on this same street, if they drank black coffee while smoking cigarettes out of one of those crumbling windows above.
I wonder if they reside instead in that cemetery with the wild grass, their bodies reduced to its beams, stained not with oil and pigment but with mud. I wonder if their names are still visible on their stones, if anyone visits them with white flowers, or if there’s no loved ones left to haunt.
And I wonder, even in death, if this means the bones do not wish to rest, if the pattern cannot be broken.
Do they remember the endless work?
Do their alarm clocks still ring?
