by Becca Fischer
Three weeks. Three weeks had passed since Kevin left the company. One week since Linda handed in her two-week notice. But Barbara, she was different. Barbara quit right on the spot.
Barbara had worked at the Company for 25 years. But as she marched out of the office on that fateful Thursday afternoon, she brought only her purse and her beloved spider plant, which sat beside her computer screen for as long as I could remember. I stood at the coffee machine by the door, watching her, frozen in shock.
Barbara and I weren’t great friends. We didn’t even work for the same team. But as she stormed towards the door, she stopped in front of me, grabbing at my shoulders, her sharp acrylic nails poking through my thin sweater. Her eyes bore into mine, wide with emotion. Crazed, some would say.
“Get out,” she hissed.
Perhaps I should’ve heeded her warning.
It’s not easy to tell time at the Company. Our building has no clocks, and there are no windows on our floors. The fluorescent lights above us shine just as bright at every hour, never do they flicker, nor do they fade. Six in the morning or six at night, our beige-gray cubicles look exactly the same.
As my workload piled up, I lost track of time. I found myself staying at my desk later and later into the evening. Seven o’clock, then eight, then nine. I didn’t notice. There was always more work to be done.
It didn’t bother me, though. My boss, Todd, was working hard to find replacements for my absent coworkers. But the recruitment process takes time, he said. And our clients, they don’t have time to waste. They need us. They need me. So I stay, and I work.
“I know you can handle it, Jess,” Todd told me in our weekly 1:1. He asked me to take on half of Linda’s old clients, and a third of Kevin’s as well. “You’re the best we have.”
Todd was right. I could handle it. I was good at my job. And it made me feel good to help our clients. It made me feel good to help Todd, too. He was a good man. A good boss. He looked out for us. He treated us like family.
That night, I stayed until the report was done. By then, my eyes had glazed over, and my skin had almost melded into the plastic keys beneath my fingertips. One more proofread, and I could send it off to the client.
That’s when I heard the noise.
What a strange, strange noise. Deep and low, like the hum of a baritone. It gnawed through the chilled office air, growling, groaning, as if it were an animal in pain. And it grated into me, tearing at my eardrums, drilling into my brain.
“Is anyone here?” I called out. Jeremy, our newest hire, had a penchant for playing pranks. Last April first, he glued our coffee mugs to our desks, and it caused quite a stir. Maybe this was his latest attempt to make us laugh.
But there was no response. Nothing. No clacking of keyboards, no hum of printers, no whir from the coffee machine. Nothing, aside from the growl.
“Come on,” I tried again. “I know it’s you.”
I’d had enough. Standing up on the tips of my toes, I strained to see across the expanse of cubicles. The Company owned the entire floor of the building, and it seemed to stretch on for miles. Each team occupied their own section, with their own conference rooms and break areas. Rarely did we intermingle.
The noise appeared to emanate from the end of the building I visited the least. The west end. The place where no one sat anymore. At least, not since the layoffs.
I couldn’t deny my curiosity. I started down the aisle, expecting Jeremy to leap out from behind a cubicle at any moment. One foot, then the next. The growl grew louder with every step.
A buzz. I jumped into the air.
But it was my phone. And I laughed and I laughed, pulling the device from my pocket to find a text from my wife: when are you coming home? It was ten o’clock. I didn’t realize it was so late.
I laughed some more. Oh, Jess, I thought to myself. Don’t be ridiculous. The hour was late, and I was tired, stressed, hungry. My brain was playing tricks on me, it seemed. I needed to go home. Get some rest. Eat some dinner. It was nothing. Nothing at all.
The next day, Jeremy handed in his two-week notice. I tried not to let the disappointment show on my face when he broke the news to me in the break room.
“I’ll miss working with you, Jess,” he sighed, hands deep in his pockets. “I hope my departure doesn’t add too much to your plate.”
“Hey, don’t even think about it. No worries, Jeremy.”
As we waited for our coffee to percolate, I went to deposit my lunch in the fridge. I brought an extra serving just in case I needed to stay late again.
“Say, Jeremy,” I teased. “You haven’t noticed any weird noises lately, have you?”
But my coworker wasn’t in on the joke. His face paled as he stammered his response. “I, uh–” he stammered. “I shouldn’t talk about the Company with you. They had me sign an NDA, you know.”
“Sure,” I said. “No worries at all.”
There was one upside to the mass departures. With everyone leaving, at least, I had plenty of room for my food in the fridge.
The afternoon. Another report due, and two more clients to contact before the end of the day. I worked and I worked, determined to make it home at a reasonable hour. But it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t stop thinking about the growling.
I couldn’t hear it during the day, at least not over the usual office din. But my imagination had the best of me. I was tired from my long night, wired from my fourth cup of coffee. Was it a prank? Or was it something else? Something more sinister?
I decided to ask Todd about it in our 1:1. He took the call virtually, from his cabin out in Aspen. As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them.
Todd chuckled. “Oh, Jess!” He exclaimed. “Don’t tell me you’re scared of ghosts!”
I forced a laugh. But I didn’t do a very good job, I guess. Todd’s expression softened, and his voice took a more serious tone. “Hey,” he said. “Let me put in a request to maintenance. It’s probably something to do with the heater, okay? They always act up at this time of year.”
I nodded. The stress seemed to melt out of my bones. Boy, I was lucky. So lucky to work at such a great company. So lucky to have managers who cared.
My managers asked me to fill in for a contract renewal with one of our top-paying clients. Since they were based out of Los Angeles, it wasn’t much of a surprise that I needed to stay late. I took conference calls after hours, and I led meetings late into the night. The emails, the Slacks, they never stopped coming. Ringing, shaking, screaming from my computer screen, like a banshee in the night.
It was unusual for someone as young as me to take on such an important client. But I didn’t complain. The Company didn’t have many senior employees left, especially after that hedge fund bought us out a few months back. Our new owners laid off half the staff to ensure greater efficiency. When next quarter’s earnings were reported, we would learn if their methods had worked.
In my desperation to please the client, I made remarkable progress that week. I filed most of my reports on time, and my clients were delighted with my work. I turned my phone off, too, to avoid any distractions from the outside world. But the growling continued late into the night. Day after day, I heard it. Silent during the day, but so, so loud at night.
As the days passed, the growls shifted. They huffed and they heaved, they whistled and they whined. I had never heard such noises before in my life. And they started to sound like my name. “Jess,” they called out. “Jess!”
I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t get any work done with my imagination running wild. Todd was right– it was obviously a mechanical issue. If I could identify the source, I could put an end to the noises, once and for all.
I stormed down to the west end of the building, my feet slamming and stomping against the carpeted floor beneath, not a care in the world. “Alright,” I hissed. “What’s going on?”
As soon as I turned the corner, I knew there was no going back.
Becca Fischer (she/her) is a queer writer based in Montreal, Canada. Her work has been featured in publications such as Fifth Wheel Press and Queer Toronto Literary Magazine.
