Since I have to work today I shall make you work as well loyal readers. I shall keep a little diary of my hours here, like a guide to my afternoon and how I spend it during a holiday. You see everyone is gone today and except for a few dedicated souls in another building I am the only soul here. My duty is to inspect and keep secure every one of the five unoccupied buildings, walking their perimeters and inspecting their various closets and chambers. Naturally this can get both maddeningly boring and slightly unnerving as there has been a history of 'unusual' events here. But why waste your time with explanations of what is plainly obvious, I am alone at a large complex of buildings for eight hours, and I am here to tell you what happens in each of those as I wait for the clock to wind down.
15:00 hours, 3:00 PM: I entered the building with a book, which is strictly prohibited, you can't be seen inspecting or reading a book otherwise the illusion of professionalism will be wiped away. This however doesn't extend to using the Internet, as it's use is accepted and ignored, seemingly for no other reason than you can't prop the computer screen on your lap and lean back to view it. I brought the book along because I have developed a strategy to mete out my activities to fill the four hours at the end of my eight hour day. the first four hours of work is spent dealing with events around the office, after seven however the buildings are empty, thus the Internet is my only friend. To keep from exhausting my Internet however I opted to bring a book along to fill the time up more evenly.
My first order of business was to relieve the officer that was here during the day, and receive any additional instructions from him. There were none, save a notice that a laptop had been left out, a notice I was well aware of because I had reported it last night, and since this was a holiday there was no way the fellow had dropped by to fix his unknown mistake. With a few pleasantries I hurried my coworker out and seated myself behind the counter in the front office. Cracking my knuckles and raising my office chair to its maximum height I tapped away at the keyboard. Once i had checked my in office email for any events or important memos i was free to indulge in studying up on a topic or two before getting down to brass tacks. My area of study for roughly fifteen minutes was Haida art, the Haida being a tribe from the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately for me, either the Internet had no information about their art, or the strict search parameters set by the company were blocking all relevant searches. This has proven to be troublesome in the past as well, often when searching for information about painters or historic events I will find that everything is blocked or unreachable, generally accidentally. "The battle of Waterloo wasn't a video game, this isn't a video game website, it's a damned historical website you idiot box!" I would say. The attempt made by the company being one of saying "please don't look at video games or pornography while at work." Which is perfectly acceptable if the sites they blocked were actually related to either one, but more often than not they are accidentally blacklisted, whilst sites that really do need to be aren't. A search for Haida art yielded no results for actual Haida art, the few that were listed were then blocked by the companies own parser, and the one that wasn't turned out to be a woman's portfolio of self shot nudes, of which none of them had anything to do with the Haida.
Exacerbated I got up and went inside the building, I had to make sure the laptop was still sitting, untethered to its dock, sitting where it was left yesterday, sitting where no one would think to go for it, on an employees desk. We need to maintain a constant surveillance of such equipment in case corporate saboteurs sneak onto the premises and start making off with company secrets. My very presence here is a symptom of massive corporate paranoia.
I walked through the darkened aisles, between the cubicles of building E. You are probably wondering why it's so dark at three in the afternoon. Well, the short answer is that it's cheaper to keep the lights off when no one but me is here, this also goes for air conditioning and food. So proceeding up a darkened aisle, eyeing the distant double doors that lead to the lit hallway I catch a sound from behind me. I stop, look over my shoulder and casually lean over the sides of the cubicles closest to me, listening for any other signs of activity. Odd sounds tend to crop up at odd times here, and it's best for the guard on duty to ignore them, unless they want the painful surprise that there is never an answer as to what was making the sounds they heard. Of course I double my speed for the door, eager to leave the building, building E being one of 'haunted' buildings, wherein phantom typing can be heard from the far wing of the office, well away from the route I would take. Pushing open the door I turned to regard the vending machines, I was thirsty for something akin to a sierra mist or sprite and had a dollar in my pocket, saved from a pair of pants I was discarding the night before. I peeked to my right and gave a little bob of the head to see if anything was happening inside the atrium. Between buildings C and E is a strange tropical atrium, it's plexiglass windows old and scratched into a filmy grayish haze, the temperature perpetually ten degrees warmer than anywhere else in the building. At night golden lights would turn on at about knee level and illuminate the ferns and tropical leaves. This area too was haunted, the atrium was said to be the home of a very angry man, whispering can be heard inside it at night, and at times the feeling of being watched and followed is overpowering.
Turning from the atrium i made good time towards building D, where the laptop resides. i push my hands into my pockets, feeling the money in my left hand, the vending machine didn't offer any acceptable substitutions. i glance to my left, there is a pair of double doors that lead down a long hallway, flanked on both sides by more large doors. This hallway is usually pitch black, the doors often left open, leading into even more shadowy rooms. i rarely use this hallway, it always feels like there's something there waiting for me, that it creeps along behind me till I'm about to exit and because I quickly change my speed it is thrown off and returns to whatever corner it crawled out of. This time however there is something extremely unsettling about the hallway, the lights are on, bright white lights running the length of the corridor, banishing the shadows, even the rooms, with their yawning doors are lit up. I keep walking, it's obviously a trick, there is no reason for the lights to be on, there is no one there, ahead of me the lights are off, somewhere just ahead of where I'm going. high on the wall there i can see a mirror reflecting the hallway around the corner, the shadows are dark, but in the middle of the concave surface is more white lights, the hallway leaving the building is still illuminated. Before I'm forced to go into the shadows I turn to my left at another double door, this one leading into building D. I glance one more time down the hallway, leading into the shadows, and now it seems just a little bit further away than i remember, I click my card and push open the door.
I am pinned in place. The office lights are on directly around me, but past that the darkness extends to the far wall, where low lighting shows the exit rows more clearly. I am frozen because on the far side of the building, resting on a cubicle frame is something looking at me. At five foot nine I am too short to look over a cubicle wall without standing on my tip toes. Whatever stares at me rests an arm languidly over the partition between two, leaning forward, a large head tilts a little to the side, it is easily seven feet tall. I collect myself, my job is to ensure that there are neither intruders nor wendigos prowling my halls, so i begin walking with anxious fear towards the shape. I can remember the other times I went into building D when no one was working, the shuffling running sounds, moving up and won the aisles parallel to me, the sound of someone hurrying to head me off at the intersections, then when the moment of attack came silence. the lights detected my movement and kicked on, the figure was cast out in an instant, now not much more than an odd shaped balloon and streamers piled about a cubicle wall. This however was still unsettling, i hurried towards the opposite door from where I came in, the lights turning off again abruptly, everywhere I looked I could see balloons, and all of them seemed to be looking at me. I could almost feel it, when my back finally turned to them they would begin moving slowly forward, one aisle at a time, when I turn they seemed maybe a little closer, one would bob in an non existent current of air. I hurried down a short flight of stairs grabbed the handle and glanced over my shoulder to pin any that might be hurrying faster than the more patient terrors that sleep under the raised floorboards of the building.
Free, in the hallway closest to the bathroom, by the cafeteria I was free. No odd feelings, no unusual sounds, merely a hallway. I grabbed a sprite from the coke machine and made good time back to building E, entering from the opposing door, far from the one i had exited from earlier. This side of the office was darkest, and the hardest to get the motion sensors to trip on. I moved quickly surveying the surroundings watching for odd shapes or movement, I was on the home stretch and that's always when the floor falls out from underneath you. i looked to my left down an aisle of cubicles, all of it reassuringly black, nothing out of place, merely dark, at which point a shaft of light spilled out of a cubicle. It danced against the wall closest to it and i made sure to keep moving, there was no reason to go looking for trouble now. As I passed the break area I heard the sound of a door open and close and a muffled shout. I stopped and whipped around looking behind me for the culprit, an employee working on the holiday perhaps wanting to know if they could get back in after hours. No, it was no one, the door was closed, no one was there, just the absence of light. I rushed as quickly as I could back to the front desk, bursting through the door into the humid front office I sat down and began writing.
It was somewhere after the first paragraph that I heard the THUD beside me. In the office beside me, every so often you'll hear odd sounds, sometimes they even come into my area, except they're overhead, in the ceiling. Scrapping, wheezing thumps, shouts and bangs, much bigger than the ones a rat would make. That was the sound i heard when i started typing the second paragraph, a bang against the wall, and a muffled scream, like a woman yelping. I stopped typing and rushed into the building, i needed to make sure that everything was secure, that there was someone in the office. But when I got there, to the massive glass windows, looking into the pitch black meeting room all I could see was shadows and my reflection off the glass. I watched both, looking behind me int he reflection then changing my eyes focus to look into the abyssal room. Nothing, there was nothing there that could have made the sound, even now I hear it, the thump, no more screams or yelps, merely a thump, moving further from me, sometimes frighteningly close. I backed away from the glass, I backed away from the shadows, my spine against a filing cabinet, I moved with cautious steps back towards my lobbies door. When i needed to remove my back from the cabinet I turned, keeping as much of me away from the office as I could, keeping my eyes on the room on the other side of the wall from me. I crept back to the door and eased it open while looking out into the growing gloom of the office building. I sit typing now, the bangs and thuds are still there, squealing sounds come from outside and by the time I reach the door to see what could be causing them there is nothing. I remember having the doors locked, shut on a moonless quiet night, when abruptly they both pulled on their hinges, straining against their locks, shaking. Something was trying to open them violently and nothing was there. I watched as they heaved away to the night air and relaxed, after that the locks worked funny, they wouldn't bolt right, and the doors had to be replaced. So I sit here typing, waiting for the sun to set, waiting for whatever lives here, under the building, in the shadows and the vents, to come out and try to catch me again.
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