Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (21 page)

When they talk of ghosts of the dead who wander in the night with things still undone in life, they approximate my subjective experience of this life.

—
Jack Henry Abbott

Martin was a chunk of flotsam in a maelstrom of foul sentiments, head on his desk, trying to collect himself, when an angel touched his shoulder lightly and calmed the cyclone. He wasn’t startled. It was as though he had been informed the contact was coming just before he felt it. He took a deep breath and swiveled his uncomfortably ergonomic chair around to face the angel.

Alice stood back in the walkway outside his cube. Her hands clasped under her chin, peering over her reading glasses, a concerned look on her face. Such a dramatic response from a simple touch was beyond his experience. His first coherent thought was that perhaps it hadn’t been a simple touch. He didn’t know what that notion was based on. Unsure of what to say, he stared at her lamely and said nothing. The corners of her lips curled upward slightly, and her worried brow softened. Sitting in his chair and looking at her standing out in the hall seemed awkwardly detached considering what had just happened. Martin was not the huggy sort, but it seemed to him one was in order, if he could bring himself to it. He rose and joined her in the hall. Still unsure of what to say and hesitant to wrap his arms around her without a cue from her, he took a breath to begin telling her about his day to end the silence. Before he started she tilted her head and said, “You’re not the only one, Martin.”

The ramifications of that filtered down into his brain. But before he constructed a careful line of questioning to confirm that she meant what he thought she did, the fire alarm sounded. Martin cast his eyes up at the drop ceiling above him and said, “Oh for Pete’s sake. Didn’t we just have a fire drill?” When he looked down again, Alice’s eyes were focused on something over his shoulder and down the hall toward the exit. Her face had lost all color and her mouth hung slack. Martin turned to see the cause of her distress.

Don of the name plaque memorial, who Wesley had said would not be back to work, was striding toward them, scowling. What appeared to be a stainless coffee mug hung from this right hand down by his leg. Maybe Don was back in for an exit interview and needed a cup of coffee to get him through it. Martin raised a hand to wave and said, “Hey, Don.” As Don raised what Martin thought was an insulated travel mug, perhaps to plead for some java juice, he saw that it was actually a handgun. While Martin was thinking how odd that was, that Don’s mug became a pistol, the gun fired.

The flash of the barrel, the crack of sound, and the feeling of getting hit in the chest with a line drive assaulted his senses simultaneously. Martin no longer had control of his body. He had become a passive observer aboard a malfunctioning thrill ride. Time dilated; his brain processes neared light speed while everything else slowed to a waiting-for-five-o’clock pace. The checkerboard grid of fluorescents and acoustic tiles overhead wheeled into view like a horribly lagging video game as Martin fell back into his cubicle opening on the way to the floor, narrowly missing E6 and therefore averting a global calamity. Sometime during the journey, he heard a second crack or maybe just an echo.

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word


Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,


Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,


Thy knotted and combined locks to part


And each particular hair to stand on end,


Like quills upon the fretful porpentine

—
From
Hamlet
by William Shakespeare

Alice touched Martin’s shoulder and soothed the emotional trauma inflicted by the beast. This was something new. Millie reran the event from her memory in slow motion. As Alice’s hand made contact, a small river of energy flowed from her and counteracted the beast’s effect on him. Was this an innate human ability, the comfort of a human touch? Or did Alice know exactly what she was doing, willing her body’s energy to ease his distress? Perhaps both. That was another mystery to explore if she got the chance.

The demon reappeared between her current point of view and Martin, angry that she had not tagged along so it could torment her with more depraved deeds. Or perhaps hoping that she had thought it gone and left the safety of her Millie Field to give comfort. Martin’s anti-creature antibodies were still powered up, and it didn’t seem interested in Alice’s placid aura. Unsure of how long Martin’s protection would last and eager for it to move on, she followed the specter with her Millie-Vision as the beast moved down through the floor, her point-of-presence still safely in the center of her Millie-Field. Fortunately visually following the thing seemed to satisfy it.

Gushing great gouts of psychic steam, it passed through dense concrete and steel. It seemed indifferent to the expenditure, not making the slightest detour to reduce consumption. The monster’s hoard was visibly shrinking. Drawing from living souls here and there was not enough to counterbalance the obscene output. How long could it keep up this offensive? Millie hoped not much longer. She would follow until it left the building. Maybe even track it back to its lair. She didn’t know how to use that information to her advantage at the moment, but some day it would come down to the beast or her. If she knew where the thing (for lack of a better term) lived, she could take the fight to it. That was the logical argument anyway, but she wasn’t sure she had the nerve.

She followed the wasteful wraith back down to the hallway that led past the guard’s booth and to the main doors. Complete chaos had erupted. People ran, pushing and shoving each other through the choke point of the doors designed to allow one at a time to pass as they swiped their badge. The air was full of sound waves Millie figured were shouts and screams based on the state of their auras. There were two people on the floor that the mob mostly flowed around on their mad scramble to the doors. At first glance she thought them to be victims of the horde’s free-for-all stampede. But as the beast paused above one of them she saw they were suffering from trauma more serious than being pushed to the floor. The supine body lost its bond to the soul and the soul drifted from the body, away from the forming Millie Field. The predatory phantom enveloped the newly separated soul and sucked it down. The foul thing’s aura flared with triumph and twisted satisfaction. Its energy reserves were completely replenished, so much for a lack of power forcing it to leave soon.

It positioned itself in the center of the door opening, kept an eye on the second wounded man and savored her revulsion. Everyone who jammed through the door passed through its point of presence. Without moving or expanding its aura beyond the size of a tennis ball, it indiscriminately violated them all as they exited. Already beside themselves before its touch, panic escalated to hysteria outside the building. Millie wanted to run back to her chair, to close her eyes to the havoc she couldn’t do anything about. Before she acted on that desire or decided not to, the thread that connected her to Martin gave a yank and thrummed with alarm.

The revenant remained in the doorframe, so it wasn’t the cause of Martin’s distress. She knew it would be pissed off, but she had to find out what was going on. Within a fraction of a second of the tug, she shifted her view to Martin’s cube. He stood in the aisle with Alice, turning from her and raising his hand as if to wave. Alice’s aura was a supernova of terror. Millie wheeled her perspective around to see what they were looking at.

A man in the hall coming toward them swung something up to point at them. She instantly tuned her perception of time to as slow as possible as she realized with a shock it was a handgun. The hammer was already on its way to igniting the primer, too late to stop him from pulling the trigger. Dammit, she didn’t have the energy to stop the hammer. She swung her view around to see if it would strike Martin or Alice. Maybe he had missed, and she could stop him from getting off another shot. The path down the barrel pointed at the right side of Martin’s chest. She couldn’t deflect the bullet enough to make it miss from this range, but she had to do something.

The monster reappeared, found her viewpoint and placed itself directly in front of it, daring her to make a move. To do anything but watch in horror, she would have to get close enough for the beast to pounce and devour her before she accomplished anything. The bullet began its trek down the gun’s bore, gathering kinetic energy as the charge behind it expanded. Horrified, she studied the projectile that spiraled out of the muzzle. The slug was pointy and not a single material; the core and the jacket were different. She didn’t know why that was, but it didn’t appear to be one of those awful hollow points. She measured its momentum. No way she had the energy to change its course enough even if she somehow avoided the beast long enough to try. The bullet crept along, and Millie tried furiously to think of an action to take that was not pointless. Wild ideas of breaking all the atomic bonds in the bullet and creating a force field in front of Martin were conceived and discarded. The creature placed itself as near to the spot the slug would strike Martin’s chest as was possible without touching his aura. Its gaze locked on her sitting in her chair, prepared to intercept her if she moved.

She couldn’t bear to watch. She couldn’t bear not to. Millie screamed in frustration, the air around her shimmering. The beast gloated. She would sacrifice herself, but only if it accomplished something. She didn’t believe in futile gestures. Hopefully that was reason and not cowardice talking. The projectile passed through the zero point that represented where the monstrosity’s personal pocket universe touched the world and began its destructive passage through Martin’s body.

The bullet entered between the fourth and fifth rib just outside the costal cartilage. Millie knew the names of all the major bones from a useful but boring
Anatomy for Artists
class. She was tempted to speed through this part, but her new goal was to somehow keep Martin alive. Seeing in excruciating detail the devastation in process might be helpful. The slug didn’t break up on impact or begin to tumble. Cells exploded and connective matrices were torn apart as it passed through his lung before taking a chunk off his scapula on the way out of his body. Martin also began his voyage backwards and to the floor, so her point of view had to be continuously adjusted. Fixed in her mind was a perfect image of the bullet’s path before and during the transit.

Now she watched his body’s response. How long would he survive such an injury without medical attention? She had no idea, but she did know that blood loss and shock were the immediate threat since the bullet missed his heart. She considered strategies to address those, but the beast was still there waiting to pounce if she tried. If only she had a way to lure him off. If she could somehow get to Martin, his body’s immunity would protect her as long as it lasted. She sensed the field fading slowly, the body’s natural processes reusing the energy bit by bit for other things, but time remained.

She felt the wraith’s gaze leave her back at her cubicle. Was it bored or convinced she would not do anything? As she swung her view around to see if it had moved, something occurred to her. Perhaps it wasn’t comfortable leaving its point of view so far from its actual self. Even powerful as the thing was, maybe it was somehow vulnerable if caught unaware. She found it moving to a point above Alice’s left eye.

Damn it! In her fixation on the bullet assaulting Martin she overlooked the fact that there might be more shots. Swinging her view around, she spotted the slug on final approach to a crash landing through Alice’s brain. Dear God, there was nothing to be done. It was all her fault, the people downstairs, Martin, and now Alice, and all to torment her. Normally she would be sickened and paralyzed with guilt from even being associated with such a calamity, much less the cause, but she was only enraged. She refused to futilely watch the carnage. She fixed her gaze on the demon, ready to make an insane attempt to consume the foul phantom if it gave her an opening, with no idea if that was possible. The thing moved so that her view encompassed both the slug and itself. She rotated her view to keep the horrific process out of her view. The dance continued until the projectile completed its transit, something in the neighborhood of a millisecond real-time but an eternity to Millie.

Alice’s spirit separated from her body before it finished the slo-mo sojourn to the camel-colored commercial carpet. Millie never took her Millie Vision off of the monster. It began expanding from a point to an ectoplasmic mass large enough to encircle Alice’s discorporeal aura, a long slow process at this perception rate. Millie flushed with excitement. The beast wasn’t watching her. She could move unobserved. How long would the procedure take? Was it enough time to make it to Martin at the speed of light? She had seen it devour a soul twice now. Her perfect memory of those incidents told her she had plenty of time if it didn’t speed up the process. Alice’s death had not been in vain. At the moment, the gluttonous ghost had its eye fixed firmly on the prize, so hopefully it wouldn’t even know she was moving until after it finished dining.