I can’t tell you the name of the place this story is about.
I signed an NDA when I joined this big company I used to work at. Which means, even after everything that’s happened, I can’t tell you the name of the company either. Just that it manufactured heavy, industrial chemicals.
I started working there about five years ago as a “facilities manager” which basically means a glorified receptionist. I sat at the main desk in the lobby of their corporate headquarters and checked in visitors, delivery people, repairmen etc. all day long.
It was also part of my job to take care of the dozen or so vice-presidents who ran the place from the 13th floor. Scheduling meetings, setting up lunches, that kind of stuff.
These vice-presidents, they were very busy. The kind of people who’d keep losing things. Watches, keys, wallets. When I found them, I kept them in a drawer in my desk until I could figure out who they belonged to. It was a small part of my job, but it was humiliating.
It was stressful work, but the pay was okay and I needed the healthcare.
I have a daughter, Sondra, and I’m raising her alone. She’s almost grown now, but when this story takes place she was only thirteen.
Being a single parent means that when your car breaks down and your kid has to get to school and you’re late for work, you don’t really have anyone to turn to. You just go to work late.
This sort of thing happens enough, you get put on probation. And when you get your third strike, you get fired. Or, in my case, you get a choice. The pink slip or the nightshift.
Not that that’s much choice.
I didn’t like the idea of leaving Sondra alone at night, but luckily my manager told me I could bring her to work with me. She just had to stay out of a sight and not make a peep. Sondra was a pretty quiet kid, so it wasn’t a problem.
Sondra mostly did her homework then slept on this little cot in the first floor storeroom. We also watched videos on my phone when no one was around. Sometimes I told her stories about the village we were from. She loved to hear those stories.
I felt guilty, but I was grateful not to be in that big old ‘70s era building by myself at night. Sure, there was less work to do than during the day. I could take my night courses online when Sondra was sleeping. I was about halfway to getting my MBA then. It took a long time, but it was worth it.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been in an old office building at night. The kind of building where the HVAC system screams like a banshee when the furnace turns on, where the halogen lights in the drop ceilings flicker like sinister fireflies for no reason, where there always seems to be someone lurking in the next cubicle…
It isn’t fun.
But after a while I got used to it.
And then one night I heard something in the elevator shaft. A rattling…which became a clanging. Sondra was doing her homework, sitting underneath my desk like she always did. She looked up and asked me what that sound was.
I didn’t know, but I smiled like everything was going to be okay. I got up and moved towards the elevator doors as the noise rose. It sounded like someone was trapped back there. Trying to bang their way out.
“Mom…be careful,” Sondra said. I told her to get back behind the desk.
Right when I got to the elevators, there was a SLAM behind them. I jumped back…and then the doors opened. The elevator had arrived. Everything had gone back to normal.
I walked back over to Sondra, who was looking at me with concern. But she didn’t seem scared at all.
Kids.
The rest of the night was normal. I took Sondra home at 6am. She got ready, then I took her to school. When I got home and crawled into bed, I got the phone call.
They had found the body of one of the vice-presidents on the 13th floor.
I rushed back to the office. No one would let me see the body, but I heard it was gruesome. The cops had reviewed the security footage, and they wanted to know about the elevator incident. When I told them what had happened, they thought it was pretty funny.
I couldn’t sleep at all when I got back home. The man who had died wasn’t a good person. Like most of the senior staff he treated me like I was disposable. But he was still a human being.
That night, I told Sondra she had to stay home at night from now on. She was old enough to be by herself. I thought she’d be delighted, but she wanted to know why. When I told her, she said she wasn’t frightened. I thought maybe she was a little excited. A mysterious death. A big adventure.
She was staying home. I put my foot down.
I thanked God later that I did.
Because that first death was only the beginning.
One by one they died. The vice-presidents. They would stick around after hours, working on some big client presentation or whatever, and they’d be found the next day splayed on their desk, curled up in the corner of the copy room, or pressed up against a boardroom window, their fists curled against the glass like they were trying to break their way out.
They’d all died of asphyxiation. At first the cops thought there was a problem with the furnace, but nobody could find anything wrong with it.
Then there was a matter of the dead men’s skin. It had reddened, sloughed off, basically peeled away…like it had been exposed to toxic gas.
I was there every night.
It was terrifying.
I would be too scared to leave my desk, so I’d put off going to the bathroom. Then I’d run quickly to the ladies’.
One night, I swore I could hear someone in the next stall, speaking low and chuckling in a really nasty way…but when I got up the courage to throw open the stall door, there was no one there.
A few nights later, the elevator wasn’t working, and I had to go up to the 13th floor to turn off some lights which had mysteriously turned on.
You can bet I didn’t want to do that.
When I was coming back down the emergency stairwell, I heard the sound of dozens of feet coming down after me. I sped up, but they started coming faster, then faster and faster. I ran like hell, never looking behind me. Not once.
When I got back downstairs, I shoved an extra chair in front of the stairwell door. Just to be sure.
The last one was the worst of all.
One night I was getting a report for a courier pickup when I saw a figure across this sea of cubicles. It was hunched over in the halogen light. It looked skinless, like it had been flayed. But it seemed to be smiling.
Then all the lights went off.
I screamed.
Went still.
Waited.
I could hear the thing coming closer to me.
Closer.
And closer.
I shut my eyes.
And then the lights came back on.
Slowly, I opened my eyes.
And saw that I was alone.
I never told anyone about the strange things I saw. They would have thought I was insane. I thought about quitting my job…but then Sondra and I would have been destitute. I was behind on the rent as it was.
I had to keep going to work.
I never told Sondra about any of this, but she could see the stress it was causing me. She did more than her share of chores, even cooked a bunch of the meals. I had never seen her act that adult before.
I felt bad about it…but also really proud.
Meanwhile, none of the authorities or the experts the company hired could find any sign of chemical spills in the building. People who worked there began to freak out. Rumors spread like wildfire.
There’s a fungus in the walls that kills people.
There are gas pockets in the vents that’ll make your skin slough off.
And, my favorite, IT’S GHOSTS.
To understand that last rumor you have to know something about the company I worked for. About twenty-five years ago there was a big chemical spill at one of our plants in a foreign country. Killed almost four hundred people who worked there or lived in the nearby town. There was a small out of court settlement, barely a hundred thousand dollars, made to survivors. The company never admitted fault.
That’s where the NDA comes in. I can’t tell you the name of the place where the chemical spill happened. I can’t even tell you the country it was in.
I can tell you it was horrible. That the inside of people’s throats melted off. That they coughed until they vomited blood. That they died, writhing and screaming and in tremendous pain, until they finally asphyxiated.
Just like the vice-presidents.
You can see why people thought it was ghosts.
The vice-presidents didn’t believe in ghosts. The four of them who were still alive got together in the big boardroom on the 13th floor late one evening. They put their heads together, trying to figure out who was targeting them.
Was it corporate espionage?
Some kind of eco-terrorist?
Maybe an employee they’d fired?
They deliberated for hours.
The next morning when their underlings came to work, they found the vice-presidents in the boardroom, their skin peeled off, their eyes exploded. Their faces had claw marks from their fingernails, as if their skin had burned so bad they’d been trying to claw it off.
That’s when the company shut down the building.
Cleaned out the corporate headquarters. Put it up for sale. The deaths stopped after that.
The facilities managers had to pack up every floor. I wasn’t there when this happened, but some of my coworkers were moving boxes out of an old storeroom on the 13th floor and found a bunch of paperwork that proved that the company had cheaped out on the construction of the plant where the chemical spill had happened. The vice-presidents had all signed off on it. They had known that there was a high probability of a chemical spill…they just didn’t care.
Somehow this paperwork found its way into the hands of a young reporter in need of a scoop. Now the company’s assets have been liquidated and divided between the survivors of the chemical spill. The company where I worked doesn’t exist anymore at all. Good thing I got my MBA.
On the day before the building’s sale was finalized, I realized that I hadn’t cleaned out my desk. I drove back over. I felt my heart rate rise as I saw the building on the horizon.
My pulse was out of control as I used my security card to open the door and walk through the empty, cavernous atrium.
Sweat clung to the back of my neck as I put all my stuff in the box I’d brought. When I finished, I was ready to run out that door for the last time. And then I realized something.
None of the vice-presidents’ things had been in the desk drawer.
I checked again, but there was no sign of them.
I drove home slowly. I already knew the truth of what had happened, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.
Sondra was still at school, so I went through her room. I found exactly what I thought I’d find.
One other thing I guess I should have mentioned.
The place where I’m from has this tradition. A lot of people my age don’t believe it, but it’s true. I know it’s true.
If you find something that belongs to someone you hate, you can curse them with a death they caused. It doesn’t have to be a special object. Watches, keys, wallets, those all work. All the things the vice-presidents lost, and that I found.
And kept in my desk drawer.
When Sondra came home, I’d made dinner. A traditional meal from the village we were from. She sat down. From the look on her face, I could tell she knew what was coming.
Before I even said anything, she gave me a sad little smile and said, “I’m sorry, mom.”
I put the food down on the table and sat. Let her speak.
“I was so angry with you when you took that job,” Sondra said. “Working for the company that killed so many of our relatives and neighbors. I knew you didn’t have a choice, but I was still angry. Then you brought me to work that first night, and while you were in the bathroom, I went through your desk. I was just looking for a pencil sharpener…but I found their things. Suddenly, I remembered what grandmother had taught me. She didn’t want you to know. Said you were too modern, too Americanized. But she taught me. Taught me how to curse them. What I would need. Just a few simple herbs…and their things. When I saw what was in that drawer, I knew what I had to do.”
Sondra turned up her face. I could see she was crying silently. I wanted nothing more than to wipe away her tears. But I knew she wasn’t done with her story.
“I called them up, mom. The ghosts. I didn’t know what they were going to do, but I knew it would be horrible. I knew if I prayed hard enough, they wouldn’t hurt you. Did they?” She looked at me, her eyes pleading.
“No,” I said. “They didn’t.”
“But you were really scared?”
“Yes. I was really scared.”
Sondra hugged me. Hard. “I’m so sorry, mommy. I wish you didn’t have to be so scared. But those men…they deserved it. Didn’t they?” She looked at me again. Waiting to see if her mother would tell her she was a horrible person.
“They did,” I said again.
And wiped my daughters’ tears away.
You might be thinking that I shouldn’t allow my daughter to get away with such a thing.
Well, those men who were killed, they got away with something far worse for years and years and years. They had plenty of people, lawyers and politicians and PR specialists, to protect them.
And Sondra has only me.
But then, of course, Sondra can take care of herself pretty well.
You might be wondering where I’m from. What kind of place has this tradition, and what you can do to ever avoid pissing off someone from there.
But unfortunately you’ll never know.
I can’t tell you the name of the place I’m from.