She sat poised over the keyboard, the index finger of her right hand brushing the K key gently, like a caress. The screen flickered, the box that was supposed to be her word processing program blinking black and the text she had slaved over disappeared.
She waited, willing herself calm.
The black box turned white, and a band of pale blue appeared where the menu should have been. The word “File” blinked into existence, followed by “Home,” then one by one the menu items began reappearing.
Karen’s attention was on the blank whiteness beneath.
Seconds ticked by like decades.
Black text appeared, then just as swiftly disappeared.
Karen almost screamed, she bit her bottom lip and for a moment wondered if she had drawn blood. Around her people hunched over their keyboards as oblivious to her pain as she was to theirs.
Then rows of text appeared, and Karen had to stifle a cheer, settling for a sigh.
She moved her mouse and opened the File menu, saved, and then released the mouse as if contact with it was a life shortening process. Moments later she had the phone to her ear and had punched in IT supports extension from memory. The phone rang, then it rang some more, then – perhaps just to show that it could – it rang longer still.
Karen Samuel slammed down the phone and stalked down the long narrow room towards the elevator with eyes that promised death and torture for anyone who got in her way; not that anyone did.
The main workhorse of the business was the third floor, on which Karen worked, and it consisted of three rows of twelve tables, or thirty-six workers each of which rarely raised their heads over the foot and a half high partition that separated the desks.
Karen hit the button to call the elevator and waited.
The workers all had their heads down and she thought it likely no one had even noticed her stomping her way through them to the other end of the room. She listened to the clacking of keys and the occasional impersonal beep as the computer in question rejected their input.
Behind her the elevator pinged, the door slid open, and she stepped inside.
She hit the button to take her to the basement and the doors slid closed, the almost mirror finish of the stainless steel revealing her reflection like a stage magician might in a particularly shoddy stage act. Her reflection looked angrier than she actually felt, and she tried lowering her gaze slightly to maximise her glare, pleased with the results. She considered whether she should unbutton her pale blue blouse a button or two and go for the sultry look to get the new IT guy onside or whether just going in like a mad woman would have the desired effect. She hadn’t seen the new guy, perhaps she should just play it by-ear and see how things turned out.
Karen wasn’t above playing the weak-and-feeble-female if it got her what she wanted, as she was equally not above kicking someone in the balls if that worked, she was the type of girl that her mother always told her brother not to bring home. She would actually point to Karen and say, “don’t bring back another one of those.” For a long time, she thought that her mother was trying to encourage her little brother to be gay; but then she realised. Ultimately this didn’t bother Karen, she knew that the apple didn’t fall far from tree and her mother was definitely a pot calling a kettle black.
The elevator took twenty-two seconds to get from the third floor to the ground floor, so she counted as she felt the car begin to move. She knew it was twenty-two to travel to the third because she had counted it many times. She knew this the same way she knew that the ceiling to the meeting room consisted of one-hundred and twenty-eight tiles, or there were sixteen steps to each floor; she knew all this because she had counted it. Not out of a love of numbers or an obsessive-compulsive need; she knew this because counting alleviated the boredom, and anything that alleviated the boredom would quickly become her best friend within these walls.
The elevator doors opened onto the narrow corridor that led through to the IT room, the floor beneath her shallow heeled shoes stained brown from the drippings of many a wheelie bin; Karen tried not to look. She walked to the end of the corridor and turned left. Ten feet further were the frosted glass door that led to the IT room; she paused, considered her approach, knocked, and opened the door.
Immediately she stopped in her tracks.
“Oh, hi!” Karen said.
Charlie Ralston was small, dark haired and walked with a slight limp that came from a bike accident in her youth. She was pleased about the limp; the alternative was far harsher, and the limp reminded her how close she came and how much life was worth living.
Besides, it was the least of her worries.
When the door first opened her first thought was the value of a life was something the newcomer needed to learn. The woman’s shoulders were hunched, and her brow lowered in a scowl that would have probably intimidated someone with less experience with life, death, and everything in-between; but that person wasn’t Charlie Ralston.
Then the woman’s face changed, and inwardly Charlie smiled.
“Oh, hi!” The woman said.
“Hiya.” Charlie replied.
A few moments ticked by the woman’s hand was still on the door handle.
“Do you have something you want to say?” Charlie asked and for the briefest of moments it seemed that the woman had no idea what she was doing at her door, then something in her brightened.
“Ah,” The woman said, “um,” she continued.
Patiently Charlie waited, she knew what the problem was, this happened sometimes, and Charlie always felt it best to smile and let the moment pass.
“Hi, I’m Karen Samuel from the third floor.” The woman said. It was as if someone had quietly rebooted her. “I’m having these weird glitches.”
“I hope you’re talking about your PC here; I’m not trained in therapy.”
“Yeah, the thing keeps freezing and my word processors keeps blanking out.”
“You tried another machine?”
“Yeah, it follows me.”
Charlie turned to her computer, an old desktop probably ten years into its obsolescence, and brought up her administration software. She asked for Karen’s staff number and typed it in, accessing her roaming profile. Her fingers moved over the keys in a blur, opened the coding consoles and adjusting parameters before hitting “Accept” on three confirmation pop-ups in quick succession.
“That should do it,” she said, and half turned in her seat to catch Karen quickly looked away, pretending she had a sudden interest in a dog-eared poster about the now defunct company bowling team. “That should do it,” Charlie repeated a little more loudly and the other woman shifted from foot to foot like a dog waiting at the door for a walk.
A few moments ticked by.
Charlie was patient, so she just watched.
Karen was getting more uncomfortable.
“If you want to ask you can.” Charlie said and a fleeting look of horror passed over Karen’s face.
Predictably there was no response.
“There was an accident,” Charlie said, feeling the tightness around her lips the remembrance always brought to the front of her mind. The discomfort across her cheek and jaw was always there, but it became the background noise of the average day, until her attention was drawn to it. “A bike accident,” she repeated, “a stretch of black ice and a meeting of face and tarmac followed by a long time in a hospital bed.”
“Does it hurt?” Karen asked.
“The memory hurts all the time,” Charlie replied, “but the face; the face is fine.” She turned so her right side of her face was presented to her visitor. “From this angle you wouldn’t think I’d even seen harsh sunlight.”
Charlie smiled and unblemished by the scar the smile was radiant.
When Karen returned to the third floor her computer seemed to be back to normal but whether this was a positive result or not was lost on her. It did mean the glitches would no longer make her think of the destruction of business property, but it also meant she had to actually get on with some work.
She tried but found herself clicking through her emails with her work all but forgotten.
The crash must have been a bad one, she thought of the howls of police cars and the shouts of orders being thrown back and forth and a woman’s screams.
She shook her head as if a loose connection inside needed re-seating and grabbed a pile of papers from the desk beside her, carrying them up the room. Either side of her people hunched over their computers, and she thought of battery hens. She had an urge to begin clucking at them as she passed, and the urge did not pass; instead, it began to grow, and her feet moved faster over the grey tracks in the carpet.
When she slipped through the door into the corridor, she felt a weight lift from her. Her body seemed made of something insubstantial, her feet felt barely connected to the floor beneath her and she considered just taking the elevator to the ground floor and walking out of the building for good. Instead, she wandered into the filing room and deposited the papers she held into their respective homes. The little room was dark even with the lights turned on and she thought that someone should probably raise it as a health and safety concern.
Instantly this thought horrified her.
You’re becoming institutionalised, she thought, next it’ll be meetings about paper reduction across the office and designing tacky inspirational posters; then you’re gone girl!
She looked through the glass running down the right of the door to the office and could barely make out the people in there from the desks at which they sat. Monitors bathed everything in a similar sickly blue glow and the lights above did little to drive away the room’s shadows. She turned to the elevator and hit the button for the basement.
It looked like an Oscilloscope but why she should be messing with an Oscilloscope was a bit of a mystery, instead of asking Karen just watched.
High thin windows allowed in a sliver of daylight that cut across the room at a diagonal, like a knife cutting through cake, and the woman at the desk was caught picture perfectly in its light. Across one wall were shelves of half cannibalised computers spilling cable like gutted cats and as Karen’s eyes moved across it, she saw the red light of a camera sat on a tripod, its unblinking eye of glass trained at the door.
“Is that on?” She heard herself say. She hadn’t intended to speak, and her words were little more than a whisper, but she was unprepared for the reaction from the woman at the desk.
Charlie managed to contain the scream that wanted to rip from her into a high pitched “eek!” the sound a mouse might make if someone stepped on its tail. She looked around with eyes as round and wide as dinner plates and it seemed to take a moment for her to pinpoint Karen as the source of the words; and even then, there was a moment of blank terror that ebbed and waned until settling into something more agreeable.
“Hmm.” Karen said.
“Yeah, hmm.” Charlie replied apologetically.
“So,” Karen pointed to the camera, “is that on?”
“Yeah, it is but it won’t see you.”
“Why not? Am I a ghost?” Karen replied incredulously.
Charlie paused, looked at her and shook her head slowly.
“We’re all ghosts in this place.” She said and turned back to the desk in front of her and the mass of circuit boards and wires facing her on it. Karen moved closer and spotted a chair half buried in magazines, she lifted them off and sat. The title of the top magazine read “The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time” and Karen flicked through it.
“These yours?” She asked and Charlie nodded, a spiral of smoke rising from what Karen assumed was a soldering iron beside her. Karen discovered an article about the Loch Ness Monster and read through it, unaware that Charlie had stopped what she was doing and was now watching her.
Charlie sat back in her chair and appraised her visitor.
Karen was dark skinned and slightly taller than average, probably mixed-race but that was as close as Charlie could decide on her lineage. Her hair was longer than Charlies, cut just long enough to spill over her shoulders and her face was pixie perfect.
No scars on this one, Charlie thought; and then pushed the thought away.
The moment stretched out and no one spoke, for the time being Karen was caught up in the article and Charlie was content in just watching the woman’s face and it moved through the micro-expressions her preoccupied mind was laying on display. A slight smile was followed by a slight frown, then she would shift in her seat and the smile would touch her eyes and then retreat again.
Charlie watched it and saw life and her heart swelled.
Finally, Karen looked up and her large brown eyes met Charlies green ones.
“I took a trip to Loch Ness when I was a kid,” Karen said and the smile returned, “I remember the lake’s water was a black as soot. They had a little Nessie Museum there and there were pictures and models, and I asked my mother if Nessie was really real.”
“What did she say?” Charlie hadn’t taken her eyes off the other woman, but Karen’s eyes were far-away.
“She said that if it were real, she would never have taken me out on the water.” She smiled wanly and placed the magazine back on the pile. “I guess that’s when I stopped believing in all this stuff.”
Charlie though she saw sadness in Karen’s eyes but kept silent.
“Not that I’m not entertained by it.” Karen smiled but the smile didn’t touch her eyes and for a moment it seemed she wanted to say more on the subject; but then she did smile, a real smile, and said, “I gotta get back, I guess. What time do you take lunch?”
“In about an hour.” Charlie replied.
“You want to talk about Nessie over lunch?”
“I’m always up for talking about Nessie,” Charlie said, “over lunch doubly so.”
“See you in an hour then.” Karen said and waved goodbye as she made her way back upstairs; neither woman knowing that this meeting would never happen.
Karen woke and saw that through the offices windows the sky was beginning to turn a rusty dark blue and the buildings around them had begun to dip into black. From above the glare of the florescent light spilled in a pool around her as one by one the lights around her blinked out. It was like a lamp-lit Victorian street amid fog, or a lonesome beam emitted from an offshore lighthouse; it was dreamlike and eerie, comforting and somehow romantic.
Had the boredom finally drove her to sleep, she thought, had she made her way back to her cubicle of files and spreadsheets only to drift off without anyone noticing?
She peered over the foot-high partition that surrounded her on three side and saw a head bobbing here and indistinct movement there. Then someone stood and pulled on a jacket, and it wasn’t long before Karen found herself alone, staff filtering out around her without even so much as a nod in her direction. Some in tandem, car sharing, while others decked themselves out in hat and gloves against the cold walk home. The last turned out the lights and Karen considered picking her way to the wall in the dark to turn them back on but couldn’t be bothered.
She wanted to care, but she couldn’t bring herself to, perhaps her ambivalence towards the situation was a symptom of her institutionalised nature; or perhaps it was terminal apathy, either way she found she didn’t even care if she cared.
The monitor in front of her blinked and broke into blocks of colour before returning to the spreadsheet she must have been working on. She tapped at the keys without result, the spreadsheet staring at her as if daring her to do anything about its tardiness. Karen ignored it, it was just trying to get a rise out of her, so instead she crossed her arms on the desk and rested her head on them and stared out across the darkened room to the windows that framed the swirls of cloud over the starlit sky.
The wall clock read five-thirty, but the dark silence said later. Somewhere she could hear a radiator clicking as it cooled. She pushed to her feet and found herself feeling bone weary, there was no pain or discomfort just a profound lack of energy that seemed to reach down into her soul.
As she walked out of the office she took in the room around her, something seemed different about it, tables appeared subtly rearranged and instead of an unbroken row of filing cabinets near the door several had been removed and a large potted plant had taken their place. Through the doorway and into the hall she stopped in her tracks, the elevator had a sign taped to it with yellow and black hazard tape; Out of Order, it stated.
She took the stairs, sixteen steps a floor until she hit the basement, she took the left and saw that the light to the IT room was on, so Charlie was still there, so she walked in.
The room was not how Karen remembered it, even though she had last visited it only a few hours or so earlier it seemed to have changed significantly; the shelves of computer components had been tidied into frosted plastic containers, each labelled in neat script and the desk had been pushed to one side and another desk had been added that was being used as an examination table of sorts, a computer autopsy table on which a corpse of metal and electrodes was being dissected.
Charlies unmistakable form was leaning over it, her back to the door and Karen considered playing some kind of practical joke on her new friend. She reconsidered, she didn’t remember keeping her dinner appointment and she didn’t want to push her luck so instead she called out a cheery, “Hi!”
Charlie stared back at her for a full ten seconds before she started to scream, her eyes wide and mouth stretched in a horrified “O.” The scar across the left-hand side of her face looked slick under the florescent lights and added a frightful surrealism and sent Karen cold.
There was nothing quite like being screamed at in such a way. Having your very presence illicit such fear that someone’s humanity was replaced with guttural unthinking terror.
Karen felt herself shudder, then shake, as the scream stretched out to a wail of internal agony, the eyes squeezing as tears began to fall.
It lasted forever, terror giving way to amazement, and then a fearful hope, and then – finally – to a confused combination of horror and joy.
It seemed that no one else could see her, but that was nothing new. All-in-all being a ghost changed little in Karen’s average day. The days were still brain numbing and soul destroying and her nights, well; the nights were still lonely, but she would listen to the people who staffed the office and sometimes visit her friend down in the building basement where they would test out the various contraptions Charlie would build to speak with people like herself.
Sometimes she would sit in the window late into the night and watch the world around her as the stars burned and the earth slept. In windows that should have been empty she saw faces looking back at her and sometimes a figure in the street below would stare up at her in amazement; and she could not tell which faces belonged to the living and which belonged to the dead.
The elevator was never fixed, and Karen liked to think of it as a shrine to her passing but realistically she knew it was just incompetence; the same incompetence that allowed an elevator to break and fall. There would be times she would be drawn to the basement and the closed elevators doors there, one door buckled slightly and the lights to its buttons permanently off.
She would stare at those doors and try to remember and then she would think of her friend and the accidents she had endured and survived, and she was thankful.
Perhaps she should envy the living, perhaps she should be angry at the waste of life she witnessed around the office, but she found that she loved them, and finally she began to think of herself as life and soul of the office.