Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (5 page)

Knowing that navigating the corporate travel website mess could take a while and might be impossible if enough people tried to use it at once, he decided to check the new message to see if it deserved a higher priority. The latest email came from corporate finance canceling any corporate travel for employees below Vice President. Typical. Martin wondered which of these two urgent requests would be victorious.
Let the games begin!

After a couple of minutes his email client issued a machinegun barrage of urgent tones. Countless otherwise intelligent individuals were hitting the “Reply All” button and sending their respective “What am I supposed to do?” messages to both the sources and to everyone else on the distribution list. Martin laughed as they scrolled in faster than he could delete them. Then they stopped. Either they had overwhelmed the email server and caused it to crash, or the administrator had shut it down.

Martin knew it would be a few minutes before it came back up, so he went to the travel site for grins. The website had a big banner across the home page, “No travel until further notice,” and the login was disabled. Game over. The guys who control the money always win.

He didn’t bother waiting for the email to recover and deliver the official “clarification.” He shut his computer down and prepared to go home. While he went through the routine, he wondered if this was a harbinger of a major upheaval. Budget cuts were precursors to unpleasant things such as layoffs.
Maybe there’ll be a lot more name plaques in Don’s flower box before the week is out.

There's a tappin in the floor

There's a creak behind the door

There's a rocking in the chair

But nobody's sitting there

—
From “Ghosts” by Michael Jackson

Millie waited for Martin, anxious to see if he got the message and to see his reaction. It would take more messages of course, but now she didn’t have to use so much energy to get to his cubicle. Martin came down the aisle, swung past the file cabinet without a pause and plopped into his chair. Disappointed, she pondered her next move as she watched.

Wesley came and stopped in the entrance to Martin’s Cube. After standing there a moment, he tapped Martin on the shoulder. Martin’s aura flared with what she believed was surprise and Wesley’s rippled with amusement. Wesley pointed at the message and Martin stood to look at it. The heart she no longer had skipped a beat. Martin’s aura indicated confusion and mild annoyance. But he saw it!

She didn’t want to wait days until she charged up again. It was going to take a lot more messages to explain everything, if she ever could. Days between messages would take too long. It occurred to her, randomly staring at her keyboard, that if her objects sustained her, maybe they could recharge her as well. She willed the energy in the keyboard to become hers.

It felt (looked? tasted?) as if she had been hit in the face with a baseball bat. Not that she knew how that felt. Tennis racket, yes. Bat no. She saw stars. But,
Huzzah!
Her storehouse was full. But the keyboard was dead, another lifeless object. A brief terror vibrated through her, but the sustaining field generated by the items in her cubicle, while less powerful than it had been, was still powerful enough.
Damn, better be careful.

The high of exploration and discovery slipped out the back door and a big, fat feeling of foreboding waddled in the front. She went over what she had learned about her capabilities and limitations. She tried to find a new angle to come at it. There were no epiphanies. She could make the choice or continue to exist as long as possible. Getting the box moved was ultimately a pointless goal, but at the moment it was what she had. She needed a project. Something to work on until something better came along. She considered casting her net wider and trying to contact other people, but for whatever reason, she knew that Martin was her best chance.

She brooded until the sun set and the auras made their way out to the elevator and then past the guard’s desk and through the entrance into the parking lot. It was time for the next message. She flashed over to Martin’s. The dust was gone. Apparently Martin had decided to clean. She considered gathering dust to build up a message but discarded that as too time and energy consuming.
Let’s not get too creative.
She had also moved chads from her hole punch. She recognized a large heavy-duty one on Martin’s desk. There were chads in the shallow tray on the bottom of the punch she could nudge out and a few around it that had escaped on their own. She set to work moving the chads into a message.

It was harder than she thought. There weren’t as many things to move, but they were so much heavier, and she had to move them so much farther. Again, the message needed to be brief, but she had so much to say. She wrote, “Can’t sit. Millie.” There was not enough juice to move any more dots. As she wrote the words, she willed them to convey a deep sense of her need. The idea that willing such a thing could make it happen might just be magical thinking, but this seemed to be a magical place where only will and energy mattered. Then she flashed back to her oasis of life sustaining Millie essence.

An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.

—
Charles Dickens

The next morning, as he made his way to his cubicle, Martin wondered for the umpteenth time if the next layoff had his name on it and if it might be better if it did. He also imagined himself lobbing a grenade down a row of cubicles and taking cover behind the fire door. He was not sure if such wondering was the result of repressed hostility or from playing too much
Call of Duty
.

When he reached his cubicle, he found a new message on his desk in neatly arranged chads from his three-hole punch: “Can’t sit. Millie.” If there was a joke there, he didn’t get it. He looked around to see if any of the office practical jokers were watching and snickering, but he saw none. He took a picture of it with his phone and swept the bits into the trashcan. The thought of filling up a trashcan with holes amused him. He sat and fired up his computer. While it was starting up, he sent the picture to Wesley with the text message: “Another msg. Plot thickens.”

Wesley responded with, “Do u no a Millie?”

Martin thought a moment and then replied, “No.”

When his computer finished booting up, he searched the corporate directory for a Millie or Millicent in the building. There were none. It occurred to him that he should search for former employees as well. Martin deselected “Active employees only” and searched again. There was one result, Millicent Able. She had worked in the Design Department until last month. He didn’t know her or anyone in the Design Department for that matter. Why anyone put her name on the cryptic message was beyond him. He decided that it had nothing to do with her and began combing his email for the latest crisis.

☼

Martin went to the food court as usual for lunch. He was half-heartedly eating his burger and idly wondering how terrifying it must be living somewhere there might be a bomb in the baby carriage at the next table, when Wesley arrived.

Wesley said, “Dude, I can’t wait to see if you get another message tomorrow,” as he sat opposite Martin. “What do you think the next one might be? Something like: ‘Need Milk, Mom!’” He laughed and began unwrapping his lunch.

Martin eyed him with suspicion, “You’re not doing this are you? Because if you are, I wish you’d let me in on the joke. I don’t get it.”

“
Why, you know practical jokes are not my style,” Wesley replied in a genteel southern drawl. Imitating some cartoon character or other, he added, “You should report this to secur-i-tie.” Then, with the intensity of an action movie promo, “Millie might be dangerous.”

Martin considered that and then replied, “No, I don’t want to bother with that. Not yet anyway. I’m sure that would cause an avalanche of red tape.” Martin believed red tape had caused the mass extinction at the end of Cretaceous period and not meteorites. “So far, the messages are mysterious but harmless. So, unless it turns into something more menacing, I’ll try not to react and maybe whoever is doing it will get bored and move on.”

Wesley just grunted because he had a face full of falafel.

After pulling a pickle off his sandwich that had somehow escaped his earlier inspection, Martin said, “I looked to see if any Millies worked in the office.”

Wesley swallowed and asked, “Did you find any?”

“
Just one, Millicent Able.”

Wesley choked on his strawberry and banana smoothie. “Millicent Able?”

“
Yeah, but she doesn't work for the company any more. If you know her, why didn't you say something before?” Martin asked.

In an uncharacteristically sober tone, Wesley said, “Because she’s dead.”

Martin fixed a stare on Wesley. “That's not funny,” he said.

“
I'm not kidding. Millicent Able was the girl that they found dead in her cubicle last month,” he replied. “The story goes that she was working the weekend alone to meet a pointless deadline and choked to death on a chunk of cheese. You're really tuned out if you didn't hear that one.”

“
Well I did take a week off last month, but damn, that's tragic,” Martin said as he finished off the last of his french fries. “Why would anyone want me to think I was getting messages from a dead girl?”

“
Beats me, dude,” said Wesley as he went back to devouring his falafel.

Martin snorkeled the last of the Diet Coke off the bottom of his cup. “Maybe if I find out more about her, it will help me figure out who might be doing this.”

“
Blimey, if it ain't Sherlock Holmes?” smirked Wesley, in a cockney brogue. “Alice used to work with her in Design. Maybe she knew her.”

“
When you're done, let's go see if we can find Alice,” said Martin, beginning to feel the thrill of the chase.

“
Come Watson, the game is afoot!” Wesley added in his best British accent.

Alice reminded Martin of his High School American Lit teacher. She always wore a sweater around her shoulders. Her reading glasses hung from her neck on a delicate silver chain when they weren't propped on the end of her nose. Every time he saw her, he felt a twinge of guilt over never having finished
Moby Dick
. Martin and Wesley stood at the entrance of her cubicle like they were awaiting an audience with the Queen Mum.

Eventually, Alice looked up from her computer and asked, “And what can I do for you young gentleman?” Martin’s American Lit teacher never began a sentence with “and.”

“
Ma'am uh,” Martin couldn’t help himself. He always called her ma’am. “Do you know um, did you know Millicent Able?”