"Haven't you heard?" Gena, the nice HR lady with whom Abby was gossiping with, asked.
Abby was a new hire for the company, and before she had even completed her second week she was swamped with more work than she could handle. When she was onboarded they had let her know that she could take as much paid overtime as she needed to complete her work, but she quickly realized that none of her coworkers ever took that offer. Trying to fit in, she was reluctant to stay after and risk looking like she was too eager. But she was getting close to her breaking point so she went to ask HR if there was some kind of catch to their overtime policy. "Heard what?" She answered.
"About the ghost! A few years back everyone worked overtime like crazy. It was the only way anything got done around here. One night one employee died from exhaustion. They found out that he had not eaten in days and the only thing in his system was dangerous amounts of coffee. Since then, anyone who stays after tells the same story. About 'something or someone' either scaring them off or distracting them. Making it impossible to get any work done. They say it's the ghost of the employee taking revenge on the company for encouraging a dangerously bad work/life balance." Gena explained.
"So it's just a ghost story?" Abby asked.
"Oh I wouldn't be so sure. It's got everyone well spooked." Gena answered.
"It's just a story. I need to get this work done, hell I need to work overtime." Abby complained.
Gena looked worried, "I can't stop ya, but you'll find out soon enough."
Abby dismissed the warning, she wasn't one to believe in ghosts. Her work was piling up and that was the long and the short of it. She went back to work and made up her mind to stay late tonight clearing this backlog so she wouldn't have it looming over her. Hours went by before the end of the day, and as goodbyes were being said and coworkers left the building, they all took notice of Abby staying behind. A few tried to warn her or ask her to reconsider, but she firmly explained that there was no way she was getting through her backlog during regular hours. They wished her good luck and gave each other worried glances as they left her behind.
Abby still didn't believe in ghosts, but she was unnerved by how many people blatantly believed the ghost story. She prepared her desk for a long night of work. Eyeing up the stack of documents in front of her that needed processing and a long list of emails to sort through, she decided she would go grab a coffee before she got started. The break room had a machine that would vend endless amounts of free coffee, but it tasted like dirt. But an endless fountain of free caffeine was still an effective tool for the modern office worker.
On her walk back to her desk she noticed that the air was cooler. She checked the thermostat, it was set to 65. She decided to crank it up to 69, though she had no idea what it was set at before. She took a sip of her coffee to try and warm up while she waited for the room to heat up. Once she got back to her desk, she noticed that the stack of papers seemed to have fell? Or were blown off? They were all over the floor of her cubicle. She set down her coffee and sighed in frustration.
She organized her desk once again and started filling out the forms. Halfway through her second page, her pen ran out of ink. She threw it in the bin and grabbed a new one from the utensil cup on her desk. She got through a few more pages before that pen ran out of ink too. She had thought this was odd, but she never really used the same pen two days in a row, so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility for her. When her third pen seemed to run out of ink she decided she was fed up with the paperwork for now.
She shifted her attention to her emails and on the top of the list was a message from a random do-not-reply address. The subject read: "Urgent. Highest Priority". Abby decided that was a good place to start. She clicked on it and it opened up a message written in a bright red ink on a black background. It read "go home" over and over a seemingly infinite amount of times. She blinked at it a few times trying to make sense of it, and then deleted the message.
Returning to her inbox, she saw the same email populating over and over again. Abby was quick to send all the messages to spam and block the sender. She spoke aloud "very funny! You can come out now, I know someone's here!"
There was no answer from the empty office. She shook her thoughts away and started sorting through the emails. Worried about the obstacles of the prankster, she decided to save the important ones for later and figure out which emails she can delete. This was a task that she could make a lot of progress in very quickly. She started deleting spam, old requests, and anything redundant. Her inbox was shrinking rapidly. After she had deleted the last useless email her monitor went black. All the lights started flickering. She sighed, "you can stop now!"
Just then a cold breeze ran behind her neck and a voice whispered in her ear. The breath was cold and damp. "Get out," the voice was raspy and deep.
She whipped her head around to see that no one was there. She just felt exhausted, she complained to no one, "alrighty, I believe in you. Is that what you wanna hear?"
Her tone was dismissive and sarcastic. She picked up a new pen and started filling out forms again, "I don't care what you do, I'm getting my work back on track!"
A cold invisible hand grabbed her hand and dragged it around the document she was working on. She reflexively flexed and held her arm steady by force to fill it out properly. "Fucking stop!" She yelled, aggravated.
Suddenly, everything stopped. It all went back to normal. The room wasn't even cold anymore. "Thank you!" She said, moving to get back to her work... then she felt something.
