Thread by @JessZafarris

My office is based in a Manhattan location of a certain shared workspace company (you know, the alliterative one that’s been in the news a lot lately).

I stayed late last night, and things got… strange. (thread)

#ScaryStories @gothamghosts

You’ve probably heard how this company operates.

They buy out a few floors of an office building, gut them, and revamp them with a compact maze of glass-walled, glass-doored rooms furnished with industrial chic office paraphernalia, …

then rent each one out to small businesses and agencies for a lower price than leasing a full-sized space (which can get especially pricey here in Manhattan).

With one small business and up to ten people per glass box, privacy is hardly a reasonable expectation.

Anyone walking through the narrow corridors among the rows of offices are free to admire each tableau in the micro-capitalist aquarium.

Still, the swanky coworking spaces, the trendy tunes in the bathrooms, the weekly community snacks and activities, and the nitro cold brew on tap in the common room kitchen make the overall vibe pleasant and fun.

Until last night.

Like I said, I stayed later than usual, promising our administrative assistant that I’d close up the office so she could make it to a 4:30pm dentist appointment.

I was so focused on assembling the weekly newsletter, humming along to a Halloween playlist, that it was nearly 7:00 by the time I came up for air, two hours past the time I was aiming to leave.

I closed out of @Spotify and shut down my laptop. The offices around me had emptied, leaving me with only the usual faint groan from the air ducts. Even the workspace staff seemed to have gone home for the night.

I shuddered involuntarily, not fully understanding why.

My commute home averages about 90 minutes, so I decided it would be wise to make a pit stop before gathering my things and heading out.

I grabbed my phone, crossed the square office space, slid open the glass door, and stepped out, turning right down the hall.

While I made my way to the end and rounded the corner toward the bathrooms, I thumbed through my unread emails.

Because I was looking down at my phone, I almost didn’t notice the wiry man standing in the middle of the corridor ahead of me.

I halted with a start when the toes of his long dress shoes entered by field of vision. I started to apologize as I dragged my gaze up to his face, but the words tangled in my throat.

The man was tall—unnaturally so. His almost comically long tweed suit jacket hung baggy on his towering, rail-thin frame.

His hands were long-fingered and skeletal, wrapped in sallow, papery skin.

He wore a hat, a light brown trilby, pulled low over his eyes.

His posture was oddly limp, as if he were suspended by marionette strings, his head lolling forward and to one side so that his hat completely concealed his face.

I don’t know the other office occupants well, but I recognize most everyone on our floor.

I had never seen this guy before.

“My, you’re here late,” he said, head still sagging forward.

He had a brittle, high-pitched voice like iron nails raking glass.

The sound of it sent a flash of panic through every nerve in my body. I gaped at him stupidly, unable to respond.

The corridors on our floor are so narrow that two mid-sized people passing by one another have to shuffle sideways to avoid shoulder-checking one another.

He was standing in the middle of the hallway, and I was deeply uninterested in being any closer to him than I already was, so I elected to skip the bathroom and head back to my office.

I took a half-step back, my eyes locked onto him as he began to lift his head.

“What’s the matter, miss?” His words sent a fresh wave chills down my spine.

The brim of the hat rose slowly, revealing the lower half of his face.

His sickly-pale skin was stretched tight over a pointed chin and sunken cheeks. His cracked purple lips pulled taut, peeling apart to bare a terrible grin that was much too full of inch-long, yellow teeth.

Dread washed over me, but somehow I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

My heart suddenly punched against my ribcage as woman burst from the office door beside me to seize my wrist and wrest me away from the man.

Joining me in the hallway, she hurried down the hall away from the tall man, towing me along with her.

“Don’t look him in the eye,” she whispered urgently. “Just keep walking, and keep your eyes on the floor.”

“Miss?” the tall man called from behind me.

“Don’t listen,” my companion muttered. “Just keep going.”

I obeyed numbly, but when he spoke again, louder this time—“MISS, can’t you hear me?”—I had the sudden urge to look back.
“Don’t,” the woman said sharply. I suppressed the impulse with difficulty.

We rounded the corner, and I was startled to see that the lights over the stretch of hallway ahead of us had been turned off. An exit sign glowed faintly at the other end. My office was near that end, deep in the darkness.

“Turn around, miss!” The tall man’s furious, high-pitched command challenged us from around the corner, chilling my blood.

I couldn’t help myself—I looked back. Through several transparent office walls I glimpsed him lurching after us in erratic, jerking strides. Terror gripped me, my breath coming quickly, and the woman dragged me on.

The tall man was running around the corner. Even as I looked away, I could hear his long leather shoes slapping sharply on the hardwood floor as he charged toward us with his puppet-like gait. “LOOK AT ME!” he screamed. “LOOK AT ME, YOU STUPID LITTLE BI—”

We crossed into the dark part of the hallway, and found ourselves instantly plunged into a velvet silence. The man’s screeching voice stopped as if someone had pressed mute.

“No,” the woman said as I made to look back again. She gripped my wrist so hard that her nails dug into my skin and my hand started to go numb. “Just keep walking, and don’t look into any of the offices but your own. Keep your eyes on the ground.”

We proceeded, the strange thick darkness pressing in around us. Even the constant hum of the air ducts was muffled. It seemed to have weight, to brush against me like a cat, to whisper words just beyond my hearing.

The air around me had the musty smell of a damp cellar, far from the heart of NYC. I struggled to quell my trembling and steady my breath.

Abruptly, in the office to my left, something wet splattered onto the glass from the inside. I flinched away.

I couldn’t stop myself from looking at it. The interior of the office was obscured by a spray of dark liquid that rolled down the glass in thick rivulets.

My mind resisted considering what I knew it was, or even accepting that this was real. But the woman’s hand around my wrist, the floor beneath my feet—it all *felt* real.

Even as the woman dragged me past the office, something thudded into the other side of the glass near the floor—a man.

I heard his muted cry of terror, and gaped as his hands scrabbled desperately against the glass, fingers leaving trails in the slick coating before he was dragged away.

My blood ran cold, but it was only the first of the horrors waiting in the oppressive darkness. And now that I had seen one, I couldn’t stop myself from peering into every office.

In an office to the right I made out the unmistakable shapes of human bodies suspended from the rafters, nooses around their necks. They hung limp, turning slowly and eerily.

As we passed a different one, something with long amphibian fingers clambered after us across the glass. It chittered at us, revealing horrifying rows of sharp, pointed teeth as it peered at us through pale, reflective eyes.

In another room, the desktop monitors displayed faces frozen in silent screams of terror and agony.

From the opposite office I heard terrible crunching noises as something heavy and meaty jerked violently in a dark corner, a vague shadow curled over it.

A few doors down, wracking, hitching sobs pulsed from an otherwise vacant office, mingling with quiet, sadistic chuckling.

After what seemed like miles of these grisly scenes, we reached my office, and I darted in. “Be quick,” my companion urged me, turning her back to me to keep watch at the door as I collected my laptop and pens.

I reached under the desk to grab my backpack, then immediately snatched my hand away.

In the shadows beneath it, a little girl in a ragged dress crouched, deathly pale, horribly emaciated, her smooth, empty eye sockets turned up toward me as she grasped my backpack with bone-thin fingers.

The child-thing opened her empty mouth wide and uttered a low, inhuman whine, the cry of a despairing, tortured animal.

Snatching up my wallet, phone, and keys, I decided to leave the rest where it was and backpedaled to the door.

My companion didn’t need to lead me anymore. We bolted out of the office and headed for the exit sign, adrenaline spurring me across the stylish hardwood. This time I didn’t look at what was making the ghastly sounds that came from the other offices.

I halted at the exit, hands shaking uncontrollably as I fumbled to swipe my keycard. After an agonizing moment, the light on the reader turned from red to green, and I wrenched the door open.

The other woman and I burst into the common area. The larger room was dim, but evening light from the street-facing windows eased that awful, palpable darkness. The thudding of my heart eased as I steadied my breathing and called the elevator.

“Thanks,” I managed as the doors slid open and we stepped inside. “What the hell was—”

I froze, the words dying on my lips while the doors slid closed behind us. Above waist-level, the back wall of the elevator is mirrored. Which means I finally got a good look at the woman who had guided me through the hallway of horrors.

She was *me*.

Or, something like me—and yet, not me at all.

She had my body, my clothes, my face. But in that face, her eyes were solid black.

As the doors closed behind us, the skin of her face began to sag, to drip and bubble like hot wax.

Stark white fear surged through me yet again, my insides turning to ice. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

Her distorted face twisted into a horrible, mocking grin.

“WE WORK HERE TOO!” she shrieked in my own voice, then threw her head back and laughed, a shrill, chilling sound that multiplied and echoed around me.

The elevator lights flickered out, bathing us in bloody emergency lighting as her laughter rang out louder and louder, her mouth stretching impossibly wide, her eyes rolling madly. Waves of wild, howling mirth guttered out of her, surrounded me, deafening me.

Finally, blessedly, the elevator doors opened. Her horrible laughter still reverberating in my ears, I staggered out into the lobby.

I tripped and fell painfully to my hands and knees on the marble tile, lurched to my feet and bolted through the revolving glass doors without daring to look directly at the spidery thing leering at me from behind the security desk. (/thread)

Follow #ScaryStories this month to see more thrilling and chilling tales by:

@horrolivia
@Gabrielle_Faust
@AlanBaxter
@johnfdtaff
@richardgthomas3
@jbernoff
@grady_hendrix