Synergeist: The Haunted Cubicle (20 page)

Martin would move her things to a place the beast didn’t know, so at least for a while she would be safe from it. Her stuff wouldn’t get thrown in a dumpster or divvied up among other employees. With fear subsiding she felt something new. Millie was pissed. Such an aggressive emotion was rare for her.

Why should she have to hide? Why should she live (heh) in fear? She spent her life avoiding contentious people and situations. Maybe it was time for a change. But what could she do? The thing was so much more powerful than she. How does one get rid of a ghost? She couldn’t talk it into leaving her alone. If ghosts could speak to one another, she hadn’t figured out how. Could she trick it somehow into making the choice to join the Blazing Star or the Black Hole? The depth of its aura indicated it had experienced eons. The songs themselves, whose chorus swelled and enticed her at the mere thought of them, hadn’t coaxed it into making a choice over the ages. It was doubtless too clever to be conned.

She would have Googled it if she had enough juice. It was unlikely she would find anything there that would work, and if she did, could she tell it from the fantastical garbage? But she thought it possible the ancient traditions of dealing with ghosts might have a grain of truth to them, since, as it turned out, ghosts were real.

She Googled her eidetic memory instead, recalling every bit of supernatural lore she had encountered in literature, movies and television in her life. Evaluating them in the light of what she knew, she discarded each as either ridiculous or as something she had no way to assess. Burning sage might smell nice, but she didn’t think it would bother a ghost. It seemed to her that spoken rituals were likely for the benefit of the living since ghosts couldn’t hear them; at least she couldn’t. That was something she could work on later.

She was inclined to dismiss all the religion based ghost extermination methods since she hadn’t seen any signs of gods or angels or of anything that closely tied her current world to a particular faith. But even those could contain core principles that were true. She didn’t have faith that sprinkling Holy Water would chase the beast away, but maybe a large enough body of salt water could ground out its power supply. It seemed unlikely that drawing wards on the wall or floor would somehow affect a ghost. But was there something to the notion of an angelic language or a language of the gods, which was in the tradition of many ancient religions? Since she couldn’t learn a language on her own even if there were one, she would have to leave that until later.

Salting and burning bones was likely nonsense created by TV writers. How could potions, charms and hexes scare off a ghost? She hadn’t yet noticed that any matter affected her differently than any other. She couldn’t see how different combinations of stuff in a pot or the construction of a thing out of bones and feathers would do anything.

After going through everything she found in her memories without finding anything useful, she approached it as a science problem, using what she knew of the physical laws of her existence. She lived in a realm of energy and will power. She would need a means to communicate in order to affect the monster’s choices, which she didn’t have. So she focused on the energy. Energy could be absorbed or contained. The stone and steel of the building blocked the portion of the sun’s rays that refilled her energy, but the windows did not. Millie Force energy shared that property with light, so perhaps they had other similarities. Waves could be canceled out like sounds were with noise canceling headphones. Light could be reflected or refracted. Maybe there was something to the magic mirror business. She would have to test that out sometime, but she wasn’t sure how she would use that at the moment.

Passing through materials required considerable energy. Passing through heavier matter might use more. That was something else she would have to test when she had the power to spare. Enough earth or a heavier material like the lead shielding of a reactor might take more energy than the beast carried to get through. Did the men in black have a secret salt mine somewhere in Utah that contained dangerous ghosts like the Ghost Busters? She didn’t come up with anything immediately useful. She grew tired of thinking about it and cranked her perceived passage of time up to maximum until the sun came up and the office showed signs of life.

She resumed her people watching, waiting for Martin to come in. Jill, the administrative assistant who sat outside the director’s office, was always one of the first to arrive in the morning. She saw Jill boot up her computer and check her email. Millie wasn’t learning anything about the computer she didn’t already know. She was about to search for something more interesting when the administrative assistant logged onto the banner board maintenance web page and changed the message from “Congratulations, Sales Sharks!!! Your skit takes the prize!!!” to “Quarterly earnings up 7 cents per share. To be powerful is to fly easily over the biggest obstacle.” Millie now had the URL and the password burned into her brain.

She waited until Jill closed the banner board manager and the sun’s morning rays had provided her with enough energy. Using her computer, she logged onto the web page and added a playful message to the banner board for Martin—one that only he might get and that everyone else would only think was a prank. She waited until Martin came through the doors to send her flirtatious note to the large board, replacing the one Jill had programmed. Just in case he missed it, she also left an instant message for him: “Morning! M.”

Martin stopped just inside the fire doors and read her banner board message, his dour mood lifted until he got to his desk. He had left his computer on the day before, so he only had to unlock it. As he scanned the screen, his mood became grim once more. Without reading or handling anything, he stood and headed out into the hall and up the stairs. Millie didn’t follow him from there. She had seen before that he used the restroom up there.

She lost track of Martin for a time after that. If she searched the building she could have found him, but she saw little point in watching him attend meetings she couldn’t hear. Instead she watched Kim of the Endless Personal Phone Calls, in the cubicle next to hers using Photoshop to touch up a photo for a brochure while holding her cell phone against her ear with her shoulder. She had been so focused on learning to use the computer to communicate with Martin that she hadn’t thought about all the programs on the computer she had used to create artwork. With the meager amount of energy she was able to store, she couldn’t hope to carve stone, but she could make digital art as long as she had access to a computer. 3D printers were becoming readily available and inexpensive, so with help it was possible she could even design sculptures! She excitedly considered the possibilities of this while sitting in her chair with the sun trickle-charging her batteries, and she waited for Martin to come back to his desk to share her revelation with him.

He was furious, his aura sparking with angry shades. He went past his cubicle. At first she hoped maybe he was coming to visit her. But that hope was short lived as he continued in a line to the IT director’s office. Again, Millie did not care to see what would surely be an unpleasant exchange. She went back to people watching while waiting for Martin to return to his desk to communicate with him and to try to make him feel better.

Kim was no longer working on the computer, but she was still on the phone. Whatever personal drama she was currently embroiled in had her very agitated. She gathered her purse and headed toward the doors, switching hands and ears without hesitation in her monologue. Millie glanced around and saw others heading for the door. Must be lunchtime. Just for grins, she watched Kim and an elevator full of people descend to the ground floor. Kim’s conversation ended there only because of the lack of signal in the elevator. There were many upset and angry auras in the bunch. They joined the flow of other living souls funneling out through the doors by the guard station. While Millie’s actual presence sat sunning itself, her visual perspective moved along with them, a flawless follow shot above Kim’s left shoulder as she initiated another call. There was a disturbance ahead. Alarming flares blossomed in auras out beyond the doors at the edge of the parking lot, and then she saw it.

The rapacious wraith from the hospital meandered through the flow of auras fanning out from the doors toward their vehicles. The horror had expanded from the other-dimensional point that contained its essence and energy to a roughly human form. Great gouts of power were funneled from its supply into holding the form and simply existing outside of its own protective field. It formed and reached out tendrils approximating arms to siphon energy from unlucky souls that crossed its path. Millie was stunned by the vile intent and enormous energy stockpile she saw within the point. The beast sensed Millie’s gaze and moved at the speed of light to within inches and directly in front of her vantage point. Millie jerked her perspective straight up to a spot 20 feet in the air. The beast could have followed her. While she observed it, it knew her viewpoint. But the foul demon only wanted her to know it was aware of her. It returned to feeding on the souls flowing out of the building. Was the thing trying to taunt her into taking action, or was this show meant to torture her?

She watched with a sinking feeling of horror and helplessness as it leached energy out of people as they made their way to their cars. Kim was the next victim. Perhaps because Millie had been following her. She stopped and shuddered, held her phone out in front of her face shouting at it, and then smashed the device on the pavement. The phantasm drifted around, amplifying emotions and pulling power from seemingly random people. But the choices were not random. It selected those auras that displayed the most intense negative emotions, bypassing ones displaying simple hunger or boredom. The soul-sucking specter was trying to inflict as much misery as possible, and it was for her benefit.

Anger and frustration mounted in Millie, but there was nothing she could do about it. At least they weren’t permanently injured. The vaguely human-shaped, ethereal form floated away from the doors, its growing static charge beginning to accumulate enough dust for it become visible to the corporeal eye. It moved out into the parking lot. A lone figure sat in a pickup truck. It looked as though this man had already felt the creature’s caress since his aura boiled with anger, hatred, and frustration. But the thing’s touch caused an explosion of even more ugly, violent colors. It disappeared from the current field of her Millie-Vision, flashing off to who-knows where. Reflexively, she withdrew her visual perspective to her actual position at the center of her Millie Field. At the same time, her observation detection alarm began blaring. She swung her view around until she found the ravening revenant hovering just outside her cubicle, staring at her voraciously.

It circled her like a big cat sizing up its prey, passing through furniture, the floor, and the walls, indifferent to the extraordinary energy required. Satisfied with its survey, the monster threw itself at the weakest spot in her Millie Field. She placed herself at the strongest point in her field and prepared to make the choice rather than be consumed, the twin songs swelled, tempting her. The beast threw humongous amounts of power into warping her field. The expenditure acted as a type of negative energy in the physical world, dropping the temperature of everything within a spherical area around her cubicle. It came close, but it could not reach her. The surrounding air flickered and flashed in what she interpreted as a scream of frustration.

The angry apparition latched onto the connection between her and Martin and followed it. Millie could only sit and watch in horror. Martin came out of the director’s office, his aspect colored with a range of powerful emotions. The wraith expanded from a point to the shape of a hideous beast out of Stephen King’s worst nightmare. It reached out two ghastly, clawed members, encircled Martin’s throat and drew life force from him until his psychic immune system kicked in. More Kabuki theater just for her, no one else could see it.

Martin staggered and almost fell, his aura blazed with complex emotions. He kept his feet and made his way to his chair. She wanted to go to him, but that was what it wanted. He wasn’t permanently injured, and the life force field generated by his body would keep the thing from assaulting him, hopefully for a while. She wasn’t sure whether the immune field would dissipate as quickly as it built up, fade slowly over time, or stay in place forever like Chicken Pox antibodies. Still, she would like to make him feel better. If he checked his computer, she would send him a message to come to her.

He laid his head on the desk without even glancing at the computer. Horribly sad and betrayed feelings crashed through him like the surf in a Cape Hatteras Nor'Easter. The malevolent monster waited there between Martin and her current point of view, staring at her, its emotions a twisted mix of savage fury, joy, derision, contempt, and greedy hunger. It both hated her and loved a challenging hunt. Of course it could read her as well and understood that she wasn’t coming out to play.

It flashed away, either to its home or back to ravaging souls to rebuild its power supply. Millie could have followed with her Millie Vision using the disturbance it created as it moved, like a wake in the web of everything, but she didn’t. She maintained her viewpoint watching Martin and hoping he would look at his computer or decide on his own to visit her. Another soul she recognized came to his cubicle. Alice paused at the entrance; her aura flush with maternal feelings. She reached out and touched Martin’s shoulder. His emotional hurricane subsided.