Doomsdays

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Someone playing tricks? Chris suggested. But Ufuk jumped in to relate how a security guard had once been making his rounds, crossing from the guard shack to the main complex, when he saw the glass elevator rising through the glass pyramid. As he drew closer, he saw it descend again. But when he entered the pyramid to investigate, he found no one in any of its offices.

  The solution prep worker who’d brought up the phone calls said that they often heard noises on the floor above them on Friday nights when there should be no one on that level.

  Ama jumped back in to say that she had once seen a computer in a darkened office go on by itself, as she was passing along a corridor lined with such offices, deserted for the night.

  Someone described how one evening, three second shift workers decided to take a walk along a pathway through the woods in back of the company, these woods bordering Lake Pometacomet. A voice from amongst the trees shouted at them, as if to purposely ward them off, and they went running back to their building in fright.

  Supposedly, Ufuk said, EastCoast was built on a Native American burial ground. Chris groaned, but I told him that as a kid I had always heard legends that Lake Pometacomet – named after Chief Sachem Pometacomet, also known as “King Phillip,” who declared war on the white man’s colonies – was haunted. Allegedly, a young Indian woman had once drowned or killed herself or been murdered in that lake, falling or jumping or being pushed from a canoe in its very center. What wasn’t a rumor was that EastCoast’s waste water had once found its way into Lake Pometacomet, until the matter became a controversy and they had to pay for the lake’s restoration.

  Chris grew increasingly intrigued, and rather less skeptical, at the sheer volume of stories so many of us had to add. Still, he asked reasonably, why would a ghost or ghosts haunt inside so modern, so high tech a place as EastCoast? Well, I said, one time on the way to the town dump I saw a coyote run across the road, and because I live a few streets over from the aforementioned Eastborough Swamp, some nights I’ve heard coyotes howling in the woods. This town, this whole country, is overdeveloped. There just aren’t enough old Victorian houses and 18th century graveyards left to contain all the ghosts anymore. The spirits have been driven into more developed areas, like the coyotes with their shrinking habitats.

  Chris laughed uneasily at my theory (even though I had Ufuk nodding thoughtfully), and he faced Ama as she returned to the subject of the security guard who had seen the elevator operating by itself, as if a ghost were playing with a device that was alien to it, like the phones and computers.

  One time, she told him, the security guard had again been making his rounds when he heard a woman sobbing inside a locked storage closet.

  The guard hadn’t tried unlocking the closet. And he had quit, Ama said, shortly thereafter.

  * * *

  One night Chris showed me an article he had torn out of a newspaper left on a table in our gigantic cafeteria. (Did I mention it has a triangular-shaped fountain pool in its center? Quite a building.) The article concerned recent findings about the water strider insect, and seemed to illustrate some point Chris was trying to make about the relationships between men and women. It doesn’t appear to make sense biologically, he said, for men to be more obsessed with sex than women are. Isn’t it all about procreation, propagating the species? But the water strider story apparently helped him understand this conflict. It seems that male water striders have been evolving a more flattened abdomen and longer, gripping genitalia to make them better adapted for overpowering females to mate with. However, in an evolutionary process that counters that other process, as if two Gods are at war over the same species, females have been adapting new features that make it increasingly difficult for the males to mate with them. It sounds contradictory, but it’s all worked out, no doubt, to maintain a balance in numbers, in population, in Nature as a whole. So Chris said.

  Um, your point being? I asked him. He sort of shrugged it off beyond that information, however. All he really added was that it could explain why human women aren’t always as receptive to carnal transactions as men are. My feelings were that this might have something to do with his ex-wife. And maybe he had, after all, tried asking out that pretty East Indian woman – unsuccessfully. He was very often smiling, Chris, but he had a melancholy air as well. A far-off look like he was reading a book even when he wasn’t, even when he was operating the whirling, water-jetting, steam-billowing washer machine. I wanted to reach out to him, help him in some way, but I’m a man and we often find that hard and I didn’t know what to say, what encouragement to give or comfort to offer.

  On the following night I was reading Nabokov’s Lolita at a cafeteria table by myself, waiting for Chris to come and read Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea at the other end of the table, but not really thinking much of his absence. When he finally arrived and sat down, however, his face was flushed and his whisper intense. I asked him what was up and he told me.

  He had been heading for the stairs, so as to go down to the locker room and retrieve his book, when he had passed a hallway closet near the restrooms on the second floor, where we worked. Just as he reached the head of the stairs, he had heard a mumbled voice behind him. In turning, he imagined it was coming from the closed ladies’ room. But as the indistinct voice trailed off, he had the impression it had come from the locked utility closet instead.

  I suggested he was over-tired, as we all were constantly on the graveyard shift. Or it must have been someone in the ladies’ room, after all. But Chris got very defensive. Hey, he said, you guys are the ones who told me all those ghost stories...I know what I heard.

  Well, you never know, I conceded. And I asked him what the voice had sounded like.

  A woman, he said.

  * * *

  Just as on the outside EastCoast looks like it could be a futuristic colony on another planet, on the inside it reminds me of a hospital combined with a space station combined with a sweatshop. The glossy two-toned halls smell of disinfectant, the vast production rooms of isopropyl alcohol. Floors are either pristine or sticky with spilled medicine. As I mentioned, steam hisses out of machines, water pools on the floor, broken glass can be everywhere; cuts from such glass and burns from hot metal or scalding water are common. But there are also computers and banks of prettily-lit buttons all about, so that the production bays have an odd blend of factory and high tech, old and new processes at work in noisy conjunction. The constant clack and jangle of glass fills the air. Glass bottles and ampules move along conveyor belts in processions like marching, faceless soldiers...clear glass like drifts of shattered ice, amber glass vials that look like root beer candy you could suck on. Some of the workers, temps mostly, wearing blue uniforms, with most of us entirely in white like an army of apparitions who have been laboring here for generations in an endless loop of ghostly single-mindedness.

  Zombies might be a better analogy. Third shift is a real challenge; the best thing to do is stick to a consistent sleep routine, but that’s hard to accomplish. We shuffle about blurry-minded, and some of us like Daniel have bloodshot eyes that would make a zombie envious (then again, Daniel works five hours of overtime a day, most the time). It’s no wonder some of us hear things, see things out of the corner of our eyes. I’ve caught myself trying to use my credit card style ID tag – which serves as my time card and also unlocks doors within the plant – to gain access to my apartment when I get home. You might very well wonder by now if I’ve ever had a ghostly encounter myself. Nothing really to speak of, unless you count looking at my face in the mirror when I get home in the morning.

  Maybe Chris was having an especially difficult time adjusting to third shift, though he didn’t doze off in his chair in the plant or in the cafeteria like some did. Still, it wasn’t long before he was looking extra pale, extra distant. We talked about books less. Since finishing Lolita, I had moved on to its precursor The Enchanter, but I noticed that Chris was reading one called Phone Calls From The Dead, a
pparently penned by two parapsychologists. When I asked him about it he seemed embarrassed and reticent, as if afraid I’d make fun of him. But he explained that there were many cases of ghosts communicating over phone lines. I told him it sounded fascinating and that he should show the book to the solution prep people who had been getting those enigmatic phone calls on Friday nights.

  Maybe my interest in the book renewed Chris’s trust in me. Setting down the paperback, he leaned across the table and began to relate a new experience he had had in the plant several days prior.

  I could tell Chris had hesitated, questioned his decision, before proceeding with his story...but he told it nonetheless.

  He had been walking down one of the many labyrinthine corridors of this glossy modern biotech company, on his way to dropping off some samples from our latest batch outside the microbiological lab for testing. And when he had deposited the samples and turned back in the direction of our department, he had seen a woman disappear around a corner in the hallway ahead of him. The woman, he told me, was rather exotic looking, her skin dusky, with long black hair that looked matted and wet. And she didn’t have a stitch of clothing on.

  I know it was a mistake to do so, but I couldn’t help laughing. Who could blame me? I teased Chris that it was a wishful hallucination. Maybe Chris was daydreaming about Lee too much. A bit testily, he said the woman hadn’t looked like Lee. Well, I asked him, did you follow her? And he told me that after a startled and faltering moment or two, he had indeed run forward and looked down that bend in the corridor. But the naked woman was not in sight.

  I then asked if she had made eye contact with him. No, he told me. I teased him that next time he had better run faster, and get her phone number.

  * * *

  I didn’t share either of Chris’s strange encounters with the others, for fear that they would tease him even more than I had...would refer to the nude woman as a wet dream when he described the beads of water he had thought he saw glistening on her bare shoulders...would joke that if it were an employee who had taken a shower in the downstairs locker rooms, then she had gone a long way in search of a towel. I knew Chris was too sensitive a person to have to endure that kind of ridicule, however good-natured and playful it was bound to be. Still, maybe he should have shared his experiences with all of us. We were all open-minded about such things. Ama had many an eerie tale to tell from when she’d grown up in Ghana, and Ufuk had once told me a story some old Turkish relative had once told her about a woman who could turn into a cat (or was it the other way around?). Maybe then Chris might have admitted to other sightings I suspected he witnessed, but didn’t share...except for a final one that he reluctantly confided to me alone. He more or less had to, because I was with him at the time it occurred.

  We had left together for our 4:30 AM second break, our respective books in hand, when Chris suddenly lagged behind me...turning so abruptly that his sneaker squealed on the polished corridor floor. Turning also, I saw him approach a closed office door with a window in it. The office was dark, and I saw Chris rattle the knob. It was locked.

  Coming to his side as he stood there with his nose practically pressed to the glass, I asked him what he’d seen. After several beats of hesitance, Chris told me. While we had been walking, he’d peripherally glimpsed a figure in the door’s window. And when he’d faced it, he’d recognized that same woman he had seen before. Naked, dusky, her hair plastered to her neck and the sides of her broad, pretty face. And this time, he told me, she was making direct eye contact with him.

  I wanted to joke, “Does she have a sister?”, but I refrained. Indulging him, in a thoughtful tone I suggested that Chris was more sensitive to these kinds of occurrences than the rest of us were. He only grunted distractedly, and finally – after seemingly peering into every shadowy corner of that office – peeled himself away from the glass.

  * * *

  Perhaps it was our fault. We all got Chris worked up about the supposed hauntings inside EastCoast Pharmaceuticals, by sharing our stories like campfire tales of old in that high-ceilinged cafeteria with its triangular fountain pool. We churned up each other’s imaginations like silt on a lake bottom, heightened each other’s fears and excitement, and made ourselves more susceptible to illusion and misinterpretation. We didn’t realize that perhaps Chris was even more impressionable than the rest of us, that with him our talk might be some kind of catalyst.

  I didn’t personally witness any of the last events myself, but I pieced them together later with the help of my co-workers, as we huddled around one of the tables in the cafeteria.

  Ama was the one who saw Chris take the key ring off the wall of Hassan’s office, Hassan being our boss, while Hassan was on break. This in itself wasn’t too unusual, in that we used the various keys to unlock the metal cabinet where the big jugs of alcohol were stored, or the cages where we corralled the wagons laden with filled product until they could be inspected by the interchangeable and generally disagreeable old Polish ladies on day shift.

  It was Frederick who saw Chris in the hallway outside our department, near the restrooms at the head of the stairs. Frederick was going into the men’s room, and thought it was a little odd that Chris would be unlocking the door to the utility closet a short distance away.

  Since Chris was my partner on the cartridge washer, I was the one who noticed his absence first. Not wanting to get him in trouble, I asked my co-workers if they’d seen him, before going to my group leader Patty about it – though I did ultimately do that. She in turn went to Hassan, who in turn ended up going to security. Ultimately, security called the police.

  But before I went to Patty, I asked Frederick, and he told me about Chris unlocking the closet inside of which he’d said he’d heard a mumbling voice that time.

  The closet was found to be locked, but another key was quickly produced. Inside, security discovered Hassan’s set of keys on the floor. But Chris was not there.

  * * *

  I myself, as I’ve said earlier, have never had an unexplained encounter inside EastCoast Pharmaceuticals, as I never did at Rosen Thermographers. But every so often a new story is added to the lore we exchange at the cafeteria table.

  And it wasn’t so long ago that one of the women in solution prep told the rest of us that on a Friday night, third shift, when the plant is practically empty, she’d picked up a phone call and there hadn’t been any voice on the other end. She was just about to hang up, when at last she thought she detected a few faraway, half indistinct words distorted by a hiss of static.

  Though she hadn’t known the new guy very well, she told us, the voice had sounded like Chris.

  The End

  The Fork

  ...are we the dolls themselves,

  born but never fed?

  – Anne Sexton, The Falling Dolls

  He had no eyelids; his returning vision began at the center and spread out equally to all sides, like his returning consciousness. He lay gazing up at the low ceiling of his compartment, as if it were the sky and he were interpreting the billowing of clouds. Instead, he sought faces and figures in the whorls and knotholes of those splintered, moldering planks of wood. The grain made miniature galaxies and vortexes, like a petrified universe. He couldn’t conceive of the wood that composed his compartment ever having been alive, ever having been trees under a bright and open sky. He had never seen a tree, in fact, but it was like a collective memory etched in the rough grain of his own composition.

  Even straining his imagination, he could find no faces in the wood. He was not permitted even imaginary company, so it would seem.

  He sat up from the hard boards that formed his bed. Besides this, his only other furniture consisted of a small box positioned in front of a larger box, serving as his chair and table. His furniture was of the same wood that made up the walls, floor, ceiling: scarred, rotting, leeched of even the dingiest color. He had constructed two small windows in his compartment; one directly behind his chair and one on the opposite
wall; naked smeared panes held in place by mildewed frames. He stood, and moved to the nearest one, staring out into the gloom. There were two parts of every day. Murky dark and utter dark. The pitch black outside his windows was lightening to an ashy gray, and he could just begin to make out details of the infinite enclosure of the vast outer room.

  A sound made him turn, a light tapping or skittering at the opposite window. There was a vague shape beyond the glass, a fluttering darkness that might have been the humped back of a taxidermist’s dusty bird come to life, or the husk of a huge milkweed pod infused with mindless sentience. Its various aspects were suggested to him from the worn hieroglyphics of his collective memory. But as he watched, the quivering black blot withdrew. He knew better than to rush outside to pursue it; he had done so in the past, and encountered nothing. The most he had thought he’d seen, once, was a very large moth with a single wing flying upwards in a jerky blur towards the machinery of the sky.

  Moving to the edge of the table, he looked down into his empty bowl. It was part of the sky, having dropped down here; he’d found it in the low scrub of flaked rust. A hemispherical cap that rocked when he touched it because it wasn’t meant to be a bowl, and did not have a flat bottom to rest upon. There was nothing in it. Some stillborn memory indicated to him that he should put something into it, but he could never recall what. He had tried various things, hoping it might connect with him, that he might stumble upon the correct answer. He had placed a handful of rusty screws in there. A half-melted clump of hardened slag. A gray and stinking fragment of flesh, glistening slick with decomposition but still pulsing, its waning electrical and chemical commands wandering in ever slower paths through its cells. All of these things had dropped down from the sky, and been discovered by him half-hidden under the uneven bed of fallen rust outside his compartment.