The Beast Under The Building (2024)

Disclaimer:

This is my story. It is based on true events but names and details have been altered to protect myself from further legal action.

                  “The building was always intended to be temporary. No one ever felt too hard-pressed to tear it down, though. Not in my lifetime at least. They start talkin’ ‘bout it but one thing or another always seems to come up and they get sidetracked, or someone quits suddenly. Strangest thing. People here one day, gone the next. I ain’t ever seen that level of disgruntled before comin’ here. Chalk it up to post-pandemic office culture. People just don’t wanna’ work anymore I s’pose”.

                  The old man smiled a toothy grin at me. Charming to be sure but his years were starting to show in the crows’ feet that settled around his sunken eyes, like he had seen too much for one lifetime.

“You’ll catch people whisperin’, sayin’ it’s the Beast keeps this old building alive. Doesn’t like change, lives in the shadows, creeps in around the edges, just outta’ sight. Ya’ never see ‘em, minda ya’. Ya’ just sorta’ feel ‘em. The shadows cast by the Beast, I mean”. His voice trailed off as he stared around the main office where we stood. Too large for the solitary desk that sat alone in the middle of the cavernous space. Doorways that lead to empty offices lined the room, their darkness like open mouths waiting to lure in new occupants.

“Sorry, don’t mind me,” he laughed, “Just the ramblings of an old man. Nothin’ to be scared of here. Just water cooler gossip. Then again, I was never one to put much stock in ghost stories”.

Strange way to end a tour, I thought to myself but after seeing the empty state of the building I figured this man was just lonely and had a flair for the dramatic. He probably got a kick out of scaring new employees. Every office I worked always had one eccentric and this place seemed no different. Other than the feeling of emptiness that seemed to fill the building and cling to you with ominous desperation there was nothing too out of the ordinary here.  There were outdated computers, a stale coffee smell that seemed to have seeped into the walls and stained carpets and the dull hum of fluorescent lighting that seemed both oppressive and not effective at properly illuminating anything at the same time. Something about the way he talked about the shadows stuck with me, though. Like the idea of it got under my skin and clung to me.

I peered into one of the empty offices, the fluorescent glow of the main office lights cast an eerie pool of light on the furniture inside. It looked recently vacated, like someone just decided to leave one day and never come back, like the room had just gone to sleep and could be awakened any day by the return of its former occupant. I flicked the light switch to get a better look but nothing happened. After a couple more tries I gave up. The room remained dark.

That’s odd, I thought to myself, but figured it was just faulty wiring that someone in corporate wasn’t willing to pay to fix. Another result of that post-pandemic office culture no doubt, I thought as I turned around to ask the old man about it but he was gone. I scanned the empty room and poked my head into the other vacant offices that looked the same as the first one but he was nowhere to be found. I called out for him but the only response was my own voice echoing around the large office mingling with the rattle of an air conditioning system that sounded like it was on its last leg. Like a dying beast’s death rattle, I thought to myself, a little shocked because I had no idea where that stray thought had come from.

A chill ran up my spine and out across my nerves, like hundreds of spiders were skittering across my nervous system and I suddenly had the impression that I was being watched. The fluorescent lights seemed oppressive and I figured they were just getting to me. Just a migraine, I thought to myself as I gave up on looking for the old man and walked out of the main office into the entryway. The morning sun spilled its light through the glass doors that lead to outside. On the other side of the room was a door, leading to more offices and just to the side of it was the elevator. The old man may have seemed off but the way he talked about the elevator was enough to cause me to give it a wide berth. As I stared at it, I could see what he meant. Its cold, metallic exterior appeared ancient, like a stiff breeze would send it collapsing in on itself. I couldn’t see any good reason why anyone would subject themselves to it, especially after the story he told me. The last employee who used it got stuck in there for two days before the fire department finally got them out. They never came back to work after that. Employees used words like “gone mad” and “possessed”, said they wouldn’t stop mumbling about the shadows clinging to them. “They couldn’t shake the shadows” was all they could say.

The elevator looked plenty creepy but I didn’t put much stock in the story. Just bored office workers messing with new employees, I thought as I veered away from the elevator to the door that lead to the stairwell. Despite my skepticism, I couldn’t help but feel like something was watching me when I turned my back to the elevator. I turned, half expecting the old man to be standing there, laughing at his little prank, but there was no one. The chill along my spine returned and I took the stairs two at a time back to the second floor where my desk was located. If I could just keep my head down, get my work done, I would be okay, safe from the strange office culture that seemed to fuel this place.

I thought about asking my boss about the empty offices downstairs but never seemed to manage it. I would always get distracted or something would come up. Not that I talked with my boss much anyway. He was never very talkative, keeping to himself mostly, never leaving his office. I could hear him mumbling under his breath throughout the day, a low-level, white-noise soundtrack to my work. It was always something about a report or cursing co-workers in hushed whispers for their incompetence. His negativity filled the air. I could feel it cling to me like a spider spinning a web. I would brush it off but always found myself unable to completely remove the residue. I just thought he had worked there too long and needed to find a new job. I was right in a way. The building had a way of working its way under your skin, micro cuts on the surface. Just enough for it to squirm its way in. I never thought much of it. I’d had bad jobs before. I thought about it a little more the day my boss disappeared, though.

They called it a leave of absence. No one told me why he left or when he would return. Any time I brought it up I was always referred to someone else. Everything always seemed to be someone else’s job. No one had the full story and I was left with broken pieces, a shattered whole that never made any sense. After a while I gave up. Strangest thing, I thought. An entire office where no one seemed to know anything. If I thought about it too hard, I would just get irritated. Then the skittering, spiderweb feeling would creep back in and the shadows in the corners would lengthen just out of sight. Just anxiety, I would say to myself but I couldn’t shake the sense of dread. It felt like my boss left behind a web of negativity that the building could feed off of and I was getting wrapped up tighter in it with each passing day.

I lost track of time after that. The days swam together. Wake up, drive to work, climb the stairs, never look at the elevator, sit at my desk alone under the fluorescent glow of the office lights, drive home, repeat. The monotony of it lured me into a haze that was only broken when someone in corporate hired a temporary manager. The faceless, bland and HR-approved email they sent clarified that they would be temporary. My boss could return any day. There were still no details pertaining to his disappearance, but they remained confident he would return. My skin crawled as I closed the email. I looked over my shoulder positive I had seen something move out of the corner of my eye but there was nothing. Just empty desks and filing cabinets lining the walls like tombstones, full of long forgotten employees and business dealings.

My temporary manager was kind enough. He came from another department in another building. I never remembered to ask him about it but I didn’t see him much. He flitted in and out of the office always distracted by something or another. I could tell the building unnerved him. He never quite settled when he would meet with me. Always fidgeting or making excuses to leave, staring into the corners with panicked, fleeting glances. I never got to ask him what he was looking at or if something was happening to cause his hair to gray and eyes to appear more sunken with each passing day. The last time I heard from him was an email that appeared in my inbox suddenly. He had been reassigned again but he told me if I ever needed a reference to not hesitate to ask. Then he ended it with something I will never forget and wish I had listened to. “If I were you, I’d start looking for a new job before it’s too late”.

After the first temporary manager, there were a few others, but I honestly never paid much attention to them. They would arrive one day and be gone shortly after. All would look at me with pity, like I was a fly caught in a spider’s web just waiting for the inevitable. I started to resent them. I wanted them to leave. They made me uncomfortable with their cheery smiles and warm light from the outside world that seemed to fill them. Anything outside of the building felt unreal. These temporary managers and anyone else from that outside world didn’t understand how this place worked, how I felt, or the things I needed to do to keep the building standing. I took pleasure in watching their eyes darken and their postures tense and hunch the longer they stayed just before they would disappear, and I would receive the obligatory email about their reassignment. I came to enjoy my solitude. The shadows enveloping me in a warm blanket. They clung to me, keeping me safe from that outside world.

My only friend during that time was a woman that worked down the hall. She, too, was left alone in the office. We would call to each other, our voices echoing down the hall with jokes about how awful things were. “We laugh to keep from crying,” we would always say. I didn’t realize how much I had come to depend on her presence at the end of the hallway until it was too late. I had become so distracted in the cocoon I had created for myself I didn’t realize that she had disappeared too.

I never knew when she left. There was no email or formal goodbye. For all I knew I had been talking to no one this whole time, just me and the echoes of my own voice reverberating back at me from down the hall. I had stopped paying attention. Lost in the haze of days and months that came and went. The shadows that always seemed to creep in around the edges of my vision were the only constant in my life. That and the feeling that something was watching me, waiting. I brushed it off as anxiety, but the feeling was always there, lurking under the surface, clinging to me with its unshakeable residue.

I still remember the first day I used the elevator. I got an email from someone in building maintenance saying a pipe had burst in the stairwell. No one was allowed in so the elevator was the only way to move between floors. I was already in my office so I did not have much choice. When I walked by the doorway to the stairwell, it was blocked off with cones. I could not hear the sounds of anyone working inside, but I figured they were on a break. No one in the building seemed to ever be working anyway. Why should the construction crew be any different?

I pressed the button for the elevator and it did not even light up. The only reason I knew it worked was I heard the groan of the cables pulling the car up to the second floor. It sounded like some creature that had long lain dormant, waiting for me to push that button, awakening and crawling its way up the elevator shaft to me. That skittering feeling shot across my nerves as the doors opened like a toothless mouth welcoming me into its darkness. I ignored the ominous vision as it sprang to my mind and I stepped inside. I pushed the button for the first floor and prayed the elevator did not break or the cables did not snap and drop me into the basement. I stood in silence as the cables groaned and lowered me down. It felt like an eternity before the elevator finally stopped but as soon as it did the lights flickered and went out.

This building is such a shithole, I laughed to myself as the elevator doors creaked open. I expected to see the entryway of the building glowing in the orange light of sunset as it always did at the end of a workday but, instead, I was met with total darkness. There were no windows near my desk so I had no concept of the time of day but surely I had not worked that late. Maybe the power to the whole building is out, I thought to myself as I stepped off the elevator, doors closing silently behind me. That was when I noticed the smell. It overpowered me. It smelled as if someone had left their lunch in the breakroom fridge for too long. Years too long. I gagged and turned back to the elevator. Stupid elevator must have missed the first floor and dropped me in the basement, I thought as I slammed the buttons but there was no response. The doors remained shut. I laughed to myself as I turned to look for the doorway to the stairwell. Burst pipe or not, that was my only option now.

As I walked down the hallway that felt far too narrow for the building, I scratched at my skin. The unshakeable feeling of the spiders returned with the uncontrollable sense they were weaving dark and unseen webs through me. The shadows that filled the hall appeared to pulse with a rhythmic life, like creatures crawling out of the corners. I brushed it all off as anxiety, another panic attack. It had been a long day. I just needed to find the stairs. I took a deep breath to calm myself and nearly retched from the smell.

With each step I took there was a soft crunch under my feet. I kept my eyes trained forward for an exit sign. It was too dark to see anything anyway. No need to look down. I placed a hand on the wall to steady myself and felt a slick dampness. Must be the leak from the burst pipe, I told myself as I made my way further down the hallway. The smell only grew worse. My eyes started to water.

That was when I saw the light. A soft red glow coming from around a corner. I picked up my pace, assuming it was an exit light. As I rounded the corner I was greeted with a heavy, metal door with no windows. The light had no discernable source, but it seemed to emanate from the edges of the hallway around the door. Staring at it caused my panic attack to intensify and I just wanted to go home. My breathing became ragged and shallow but I could not look away from the door. I felt myself being pulled toward it, as if the spiders inside me that I imagined were controlling me with their unseen webs. I reached toward the door but was stopped as a hand grabbed my shoulder. I screamed and whipped around, pulled from my trance. If I had thought about it, I would have noticed that my scream did not echo. It fell silent, like it was being absorbed by the shadows that filled the hallway.

As I stared into the eyes of the woman that had stepped behind me, she held a finger to her lips to indicate the need for silence. I complied.

“We need to take the stairs,” she whispered.

                  “I thought those were the stairs,” my response came back hollow and uncertain.

                  “You must be new here,” she said, her eyes full of sadness and maybe a hint of pity.

                  “I’ve been here awhile,” was my reply. Although I couldn’t remember just how long it had been since I started this job. I had lost track of time in the hypnotic monotony of my daily routine.

                  “Well, I’ve never seen you before,” the woman said as she guided me around a corner and to another door, “and I’ve been here far longer than most people.”

                  “And what are you doing in the basement?”

                  “This isn’t the basement, sweetie,” she said as she shoved the door open, revealing a dimly lit stairwell. “I come down here every once in awhile to make sure no one gets lost, especially when they send that email about the stairs”.

                  “Does this sort of thing happen a lot?” I asked, noticing that the stairwell seemed fine. There was no burst pipe or leak to speak of. “Because I didn’t recognize the name of the guy that sent the email.”

“When you get to the main floor, just leave. Don’t look back”.

I turned around to ask the woman what she was talking about, but she was no longer there. I listened for her footsteps but heard nothing. I was on the landing for the main floor and looked over the railing back down to where I had come from. I saw only darkness.

I opened the door and stepped into the main entryway, warm with the glow of the setting sun. Despite its warmth, I could feel a chill crawl over my skin, the spiders skittering through those micro cuts to the safety of the cold that clung to my insides like a spiderweb. I scratched at my arms but there was no relief. There’s no spiders. Just another panic attack, I thought to myself, I really need to get home.

I made for the exit but just as I put my hand to the door, I realized I had forgotten something in my office. It was a stray thought, coming from seemingly nowhere. As if the act of leaving summoned it from the depths of my brain, brought to the surface by the chills that filled me, like the building did not want me to leave just yet.

                  As I walked back to the stairwell, I remembered what the woman told me about turning back but I quickly pushed it from my mind. She must have been part of the cleaning crew, I thought as I pushed the door to the stairwell open, she must be trying to get employees out of the building so she can do her job uninterrupted. I would be quick. Nothing to worry about.

                  The first thing I noticed was that the light in the stairwell had gone out. Another electrical issue, I thought to myself, this building is going to hell, and no one wants to pay to save it. The next thing I noticed was the cold. The temperature had dropped significantly in the few minutes since I had last been in there. Far too much for such a short time. I ignored it and pushed across the threshold into the dark but immediately bumped into something. I screamed. My voice echoed around the cavernous darkness of the stairwell.

                  “Sorry ‘bout scarin’ ya’,” came the old man’s voice, “You headin’ up?”

                  I collected myself and realized it was the old man who had given me the tour of the building however long ago when I first started. I had not realized until this moment that I had not seen him since then. I assumed he had quit like everyone else. As I stepped back out of the stairwell into the light to let him pass, I noticed his eyes. They looked darker, more sunken than before. And something about his skin that I could not quite place. Maybe it was that it hung too loose and had a mottled purplish coloring spider-webbing across it. I tried to ignore it. I would listen to what he had to say and then be on my way.

                  “Can you help me with somethin’ a minute?”

                  I gave him a few excuses and tried to move up the stairs, but he turned to follow me.

                  “Won’t take but a minute. Promise”. He smiled up at me with a sheepish grin that did not quite reach his sunken eyes. I relented. I do not know if it was pity for the old man or the undying urge I always felt to help everyone, but I followed him back into the main office.

                  “It’s that box back there,” he said, pointing into the corner of the room. “You’re really doin’ me a favor,” his voice echoed behind me as I walked across the room. It never occurred to me to turn the lights on. I just assumed the power was out to the whole building so the only light was the dying sun spilling in through the entryway. With every step I could feel the shadows clinging to my body, dragging at me like they were trying to weigh me down and pull me through the floor. A strange sensation I chose to ignore. Just the effects of my panic attack.

I glanced at the doorways to the empty offices, still like open mouths screaming a warning. Begging me to stop. I looked away. I had avoided this office as much as I could. It always gave me the creeps. I set my eyes on the box and willed myself forward. I would get this over with and get home.

My skin crawled as I bent over and picked up the box. It felt too light. There was no way the man needed help with this. But when I turned back toward him, I saw it.

Ghostly silhouettes stood in all the doorways of the offices, faceless, but I could feel them looking at me. I screamed, but it did not echo. The sound was swallowed by the darkness as it devoured my fear and anxiety. I felt its strength overpower me as I dropped the box. Countless spiders spilled out, swarming across the floor, turning it black, enveloping it in something even darker than the shadows that already covered everything.

I was frozen in place by fear. The spiders crawled up my feet and across my skin. The shadows held me in place, clamping my mouth shut as I struggled to scream again. I could not close my eyes. I stared wide-eyed as the spiders melted into a black ooze that reached the offices and consumed the silhouettes as they threw their heads back and let out a collective shriek that rocked the building before falling silent and melting back into the darkness of the offices.

“Thank ya’ kindly,” the old man said as he produced a rag from his back pocket. “The building’s been hungry for a spell. Your sacrifice for our institution will not go unnoticed”.

He lifted the rag to my face and the darkness stretched over me like a cocoon. I felt warm, like thousands of tiny spiders had formed a blanket over my body.

I vaguely remember being dragged down the hallway of the “not basement”. With my face so close to the floor I realized the crunching sound had been a combination of dirt and animal bones. The skeletons of mice, rats and something that could have been human littered the floor in the glow of that red light that gave the liquid that covered the walls the appearance of blood. I never found out if it actually was or not. To be honest, I no longer cared. The nightmare of my time in this hell was over was my only thought.

I closed my eyes as the old man dragged me down the hall. He let go only for a moment. I did not attempt to move. I knew it was futile. The shadows had me. There was no escape and I was paying the price for my apathy. I let the building have me. I heard the jingle of keys and the tumble of a lock as he shoved that giant, windowless door open. It groaned on hinges like some ancient demon preparing to devour me.

The last thing I remember was the skittering of insects and thousands of glowing red eyes looking down at me from the walls and the ceiling. Everything felt damp and sticky. I let the darkness cling to me, wriggle under my skin and into my very being. I let out a scream but heard only silence. The beast under the building had me and I surrendered to its relentless oblivion.