Young Writers Society

It was around 3 AM on a Saturday night and I was working late at the office. The office building has 5 floors and on a normal workday, houses around 1000 people. But on a weekend the only thing that occupies the office floors is the sound of the air flowing through the air conditioning vents and the whirling sound of the fan coming from the computers that were not turned off when an employee left it that way when leaving for the day the previous day. And tonight they had one extra guest which was me trying to earn some extra cash by working extra hours.

So it is 3 AM and I am sitting in a bathroom stall on the third floor trying to take a leak as I hear the water starting to run in the washbasin outside. The first thought that comes to mind is that it must be one of the guards who came up to use the bathroom. Then after a couple of minutes, I hear the water starting to run again and splash around, which was followed by the rustling of feet across the bathroom, moving from one end to another. Then the person starts to mutter something which I could not understand even though I try really hard to listen in. After around five minutes of splashing and moving all around the bathroom muttering to himself, the person leaves the bathroom.

All this time, my heart was beating in my throat and the sweat from my forehead was rolling down to my nose and dripping on the floor forming a tiny puddle. I sat there in the bathroom stall for more than 10 minutes after the person had left the bathroom. Finally, I managed to muster enough courage to get out of the stall. I bust out of the stall and I see that the washbasin is as dry as it was when I went inside the stall and there isn’t a single drop of water anywhere, neither the basin nor on the floor or the bathroom counter and everything was dry as if no one had ever used the bathroom before me. A sudden chill ran down my spine, I could feel the hair rise on my back. I could not comprehend what had just happened. I started questioning reality whether any of the events I had experienced had actually happened or did I just imagine all of it. Whether I was going mad or there was something happening which was impossible for my brain to experience. My hands were trembling and I could not move, I was frozen as I stood there trying to understand.

I somehow leave the bathroom and walk towards my cubicle as slowly as possible. Looking around every corner. As there was no one in the office, the whole floor’s light was turned off except for the light over my desk so my desk could be seen from far away. This part of the floor could seat around a couple of hundred people and I sat right in the middle of the floor so it was hard to see my desk from the entrance of the floor. But as now only my desk was illuminated you could see my desk right from the other end of the floor as if there was a spotlight right on top of it waiting for a performer to give the performance of their lifetime.

The moment I enter the floor, I see someone sitting at my desk. There was an eerie feeling to everything around me. I could not hear any sound on the entire floor as if every sound had been muted around me. The piercing silence was hurting the inside of my ear and then I hear the keys being pressed on a keyboard. The sound, increasing with every keypress to the point it became so loud that it was too much to handle and it started to hurt every part of my body as if it was penetrating my skin to reach my bones. And all of a sudden everything fell silent again leaving my ears ringing.

I hesitantly approached my desk. To give a background on myself, I am not someone you might consider very brave. I do not confront people, I hardly talk to them. So in this situation, I am shitting bricks, I want to just turn around and run out and leave and never look back. But here I am walking towards my desk to confront someone in the middle of the night in an empty office space. I most probably should end up dead at the end of all of it in an ideal situation.

As I get close to my desk I see a figure sitting on my chair and going on typing on the keyboard but the computer was not turned on. The person or thing was just going on typing like a mindless creature. Typing and mumbling to itself. The figure was around 7 feet long slouching on my chair, it's spine almost forming a semi-circle the way it was sitting. It was so skinny that it looked like there was no flesh left in its body and that it was just a layer of skin on top of bones. Unusually long fingers with pointy fingers randomly pressing keys on the keyboard. The most haunting part was the face. It had a round face with a pointy chin but it did not have any facial features. No eyes, no nose, no lips. Just a bunch of scribbly black lines moving around the whole face randomly from one end to another, as if a toddler was constantly drawing on the face with a pencil.

I just stood there watching this thing going at it on my keyboard muttering things which I could not understand. I tried to call for it but it was as if it could not understand me. It looked at me in a way that I was speaking a language that it could not understand. It stared at me for a while and then again went back to pressing the keyboard. I stood there as the hours passed and I could not manage to move even an inch from where I was standing.

Finally, it stopped. It stood up from the chair, moved towards where I was standing and arched over me as if it would blanket me and said something to me and just left. It said, “Do not oil the machine. Let it rust”.