Room 6

I was going through a period of stress at work, everything I did seemed to be wrong in the eyes of my manager, and a few others in her cabal. I was never one for histrionics, and kept my cool most of the time, which may or may not have irked the said manager, but to be honest I was past caring.

My ‘happy place,’ at the time, if I can describe it as that, was relaxing and reading ghost stories in my spare time and trying to forget about work. I reveled in the works of M.R. James, Robert Aickman, E.F. Benson, and Ramsey Campbell, you name it, I read it. I was beginning to write some stories of my own in that style, which were good, even though I said so myself.

One of my colleagues at the time, let us call her ‘Aisling’ for the sake of discretion. Aisling was in her mind, an expert on all matters relating to the supernatural. She had read books from the library on the subject by the likes of Colin Wilson, Arthur C. Clarke, and others, and was always rabbiting on about a room on the top floor of our work building that was haunted.

Who would have thought a room in the place we had dubbed ‘The Factory would be haunted?

 ‘Room 6’, it was called. I was not sure why it was given a number as the remaining rooms were not, what is more is that it was always locked, for storage, maybe because of damp, something like that, or a more sinister reason?

Aisling was an expert on ‘orbs,’ poltergeists,’ and ‘apports,’ the whole gamut of supernatural phenomena, but she had never, as far as I knew, witnessed an actual haunting, until now.

Here we were in the last year of the 20^th Century, the year everyone had said would be ‘All Change’  in the world, come the Millennium, everything was going to change in the Factory, everything would be ‘computerized’, folk had said that for years, and to use a well- worn phrase, that story had been over the hills and back again on crutches. Of course, you could say that in 1999, without fear of being ‘cancelled’, losing your job or whatever, but times change, as do people, but do ghosts?

Anyway, I took to working in Room 6, having obtained a key from the concierge, which I agreed to return once I was finished. The janitor, an older guy, bald with a grey goatee beard, about the age I am now, told me to be careful, ‘you’ll have heard the room is haunted,’ he told me, in all seriousness.

‘Aye, ok, mate ‘I thought as I brushed aside the comment. I read stories where stuff and phenomena occurred, but as my folks told me as a child, they were just stories, not real.

Then the whispering started in Room 6, the first day I was there.

 It was the stress acting up, or I was just beginning to crack up.

The only thing was that the voices were coming from the room, not from inside my head.

I would get through all this work, signing and checking documents I had little or no interest in, without the challenge of listening to my manager’s constant criticism , or my colleagues’ constant chatter of weekend escapades and office politics, then I would phone in sick the following day, it was tempting.

However, on the second day, I decided to go in early before anyone was in the Factory, and go back up to Room 6 ,  maybe the whispering was just my imagination running away with me, like the words of a song I recalled from my Saturday job years before, some American soul singer from the 1960s.

In Room 6, silence was golden, as cliché would have it.

I carried my paperwork upstairs sat at the makeshift desk I had set up in the room and started writing up the previous day’s documentation. I had to finish this, and then I had planned, all going well, to make a start to my staff reports. That was something I actually liked doing, it was never ending, this work thing in ‘The Factory.’

Then I heard the whispering again, there was nothing coherent, nothing I could discern, just a noise, like a hubbub of crowd noise or something like that, then a figure appeared before me, clad in a uniform, a military man, from when , I would have said  the First World War by the looks of him, and his garb.

The figure said nothing, he was there one minute and gone next.

 When I realized that the soldier had gone, I felt a tapping on my shoulder, turned around to find nobody behind me.

I felt a chill down my spine, and goosebumps, wow, Room 6 was really haunted, I did not just imagine that my body would not just respond to my imagining something like that.

My hands were shaking a bit too, which was not like me, and I do not think it was the stress.

I grabbed the pile of paperwork and put in a box which was lying around in the room, pushed the makeshift desk and chair against the wall, fished the key from my pocket, banged the door shut, and locked it. There was no reaction, or noise from whatever had been in the room with me.

I never returned to my usual room in the Factory that morning, I went to see Aisling in her office at the back of the Factory. She worked in a different section, moving files into boxes, day in day out, repetitive mundane work that nobody liked doing.

I told her about my experience in Room 6, and she confirmed that she had seen the ‘soldier’, and he had spoken to her, saying that he had died on the site that the Factory was built upon.

That afternoon, my manager asked me to see her in her office as a matter of urgency.

I was guessing this was not going to be the point where she empathized with my stressful workload, she must have found out about my brief trip upstairs to Room 6.

I entered the room, to her berating comments, about how someone of my seniority should have known better than to enter a room that entrance was forbidden to because of health and safety reasons.

 Loose floorboards, and general maintenance issues were her ‘health and safety reasons,’ which was clearly nonsensical.

I laughed aloud, ‘you haven’t heard about the ghost soldier then.’

She looked at me as if I were mad, what ghost soldier, what rubbish are you on about now?

‘Aisling O’Hare will tell you, she knows all about it,’ I said, I knew what I had experienced.

Without further ado, my manager left the room, and made her way to the janitor’s office, demanded the key to Room 6.

He made little protest to her demanding demeanour, but warned her, ‘you don’t want to be going up there, don’t you know about the ghost?’

He stood at his office door, as she stormed upstairs towards Room 6.

All I heard from outside Room 6 was a blood curdling scream, and some banging noises, and then Mrs. McIvor, which was my manager’s name, came scuttling out and down the stairs without a sound, a look of extreme fear on her paled face.

Mrs. McIvor went home that day, unable to speak, and we later discovered that she was suffering from a voice disorder, in that she could no longer speak. One of our colleagues said that an ‘awful fright’ could cause such things like that.

I was also lost for words, but in a good way!

(Tales from the Factory : Room 6 - by Grant Wilson)