The Scream

Image by Anastacia Sholik

The Scream

The ghost of Frank’s mother appeared to Frank at 10:17 a.m. on a nondescript Tuesday a year, to the minute, after she died. The ghost appeared in the upper corner of the partition that separated Frank’s desk from the wall, creating a walkway for coworkers to pass to the bathroom without being seen. The ghost was about the size of the jellyfish that floated in the waters off St. Michael’s island in eastern Maryland, a place his family had vacationed at most summers when he was a child. All of the ghost’s aspects were of an insubstantial whitish haze except the face, which was shockingly defined with lined cheeks, black, lidless eyes, and a fang-filled mouth open in a scream of complete horror. Frank could hear the scream, as well, a sound which spoke of unending torture, echoing throughout his mind, filling his ears and eyes and every part of him with madness. When the scream appeared in his mind, he peeked over the top of the cubicle beside his, but the woman who worked there (whose name Frank had never bothered to learn) appeared completely oblivious. So he sat back down.

A ravening terror rose inside Frank and he tried to fight it down. He scanned the article he’d been proofing for the civil engineering trade journal he worked for, trying to make the words stay on the page, but they danced as though with fear. It was frustrating. The article really needed to be done by lunch.

He peeked over the top of his cubicle towards the window, but it wasn’t raining. He thought maybe ghosts had something to do with rain, but he wasn’t sure. It was hard to think with the screaming, and whenever he let himself become frustrated, his terror flooded to the surface of his psyche and threatened to overwhelm him.

A coworker passed behind him and said something Frank couldn’t make out, but he laughed loudly anyway, just in case.

The amazing thing about the ghost was the way it never had to stop screaming for air, which made sense, but was still pretty impressive. He glanced at it and saw that its black eyes were fixed on him as it screamed, so it was definitely meant for him. He also noted that the ethereal mass of its body buoyed as though it floated on some sort of current, and after a moment’s study he realized it was caused by the air flow coming from the air-conditioner.

He glanced at his computer screen and realized that twenty minutes had already gone by, so he decided to ignore the apparition and concentrate on his work, which absolutely had to be finished by noon. It couldn’t be any more difficult than ignoring the stench of perfume that drifted through the office, looking for an unsuspecting set of nostrils to enflame.

When Frank was distracted, one thing he liked to do was parcel his work into nanobites. So, instead of having to read the entire article, he focused on reading a sentence, rereading it, and moving on to search for errors in the next one. He tapped out a steady beat of seconds with his thumb while he read, to keep him moving. He didn’t know if this actually made him read more quickly, but it definitely helped him focus on the task at hand.

He tapped and read, tapped and read. The woman in the next cubicle cleared her throat warningly and he tapped a quick staccato and stopped just as she cleared her throat again. He put his head in his hands.

“Please go away,” he said.

“What, Frank?” the woman called out.

“Nothing, sorry, talking to myself.”

“‘S’okay, Frank,” she said. “It’s just when you start talking back that you have a problem.”

Frank laughed loudly and violently at this, which was met with stunned silence.

“Please,” he whispered again. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not that bad, is it, Frank?” The voice was Teresa, Frank’s boss. He hadn’t noticed her approach. Frank laughed again.

“How’s Tendlebaum coming?”

“Almost finished,” Frank said.

“Good,” she said, “Then I’m going to need you to go through the 3A’s so we can get this puppy rolling before 5.”

“Will do,” Frank said.

“Also,” Teresa said, leaning in close. “Have you talked to Sherry?”

Over her shoulder, Frank could see the horrible face shrieking as though it were about to devour Teresa whole.

“No,” he said, and waited until Teresa stopped speaking to nod thoughtfully at whatever she’d said. There was a mole on the ghost’s cheek just as his mother had. Its hair was white and thin as spider webs. It was moving closer, he was sure of it. Its teeth were growing and in another second it would devour Teresa whole. Then him.

“I’ll try,” he said, “if I finish the 3 A’s.”

“Good,” Teresa said and left. Frank hoped she hadn’t said anything important.

He struggled through till lunch time and though he couldn’t finish proofing the article, he turned it in anyway. Most of his coworkers had left for lunch already when he did so, so he wandered out alone.

His greatest fear was that the ghost would follow him, but it didn’t; it stayed exactly where it had been, hovering in the corner, and the farther he moved from it, the quieter the scream became, until, as he exited the elevator in the parking garage below, it had disappeared entirely. He felt as though relieved of a great pain, and straightened his back and made his way joyfully over to a sub shop across the street, where he decided to eat because the food was so bad the place was usually deserted, and he didn’t feel up to a crowd.

He ate his greasy sub in relative silence, savoring every dog food reminiscent bite. He watched the bored and angry wait staff lean against things and felt redeemed, as though he were a favorite son of the universe.

When he finished, he dawdled as long as he dared and returned to work almost fifteen minutes late. He hoped that the ghost would be gone just as mysteriously as it had appeared, but when he stepped off the elevator, the scream erupted into his mind, doubling him over.

“Hey, Frank, what’s up? You all right?” a coworker whose name Frank had failed to learn asked, patting him on the back.

“Yeah, I just had a sub from Taquitoes,” he said.

The man tsked. “You’re lucky you can still stand, you know they dress stray cats up as chicken,” he said. “Are you going to make it?”

Frank straightened, nodding. After a moment, he laughed loudly at his coworker’s joke and marched back to his desk. The 3A’s were stacked neatly beside another stack with a note. The scream was deafening. He couldn’t read the note. He pulled each individual sheet of paper from each stack and stared at them, unable to read or concentrate. He set his timer on his watch for sixty seconds, and when it went off, he moved to the next sheet. He made occasional changes he discovered out of pure luck, and at the end of the day, he returned everything to Teresa and went home.

That night, he lay awake, thinking about the ghost. It hadn’t been his fault that she died; he knew that. Not in any rational sense. But they had seemed shared an essence, as any child and its mother. The day that he was born, she got sick. She recovered, and the day he went to school, she got sick again. Worse this time. There was a time when she took an art class and he got the mumps, another when she dated a man for several months and he developed asthma. But when he graduated high school, she went to her bed. When he graduated college, he found her, that afternoon, already stiff. Gone. He’d won the tug of war. He’d never asked for that, though.

He drifted into a troubled sleep and woke angry and scattered with his alarm. As he stepped from the elevator into the office, the scream returned. His spirits sank as though tied to stones, and he plopped into his chair.

Later, Teresa came by to compliment him on his efficiency the day before. He’d expected a scolding, maybe even something more severe, but she was impressed. He continued his routine from the day before, setting his watch alarm for sixty seconds, and when he spoke with writers or clients on the phone, he tapped out two second beats after every pause they made before either agreeing or disagreeing with whatever they’d just said, which he hadn’t heard or paid attention to.

After lunch, he decided that he’d been moving too fast, and pretended to dawdle, setting his watch for an excruciating fifteen minutes, which he sat through with clenched teeth, staring straight ahead and focusing on the beads of sweat that rolled down his cheeks.

He continued like that for days, weeks, until Teresa finally called him into her office. He knew this was it; he’d been found out. But instead, she gave him a raise. Then, a few months after that, a promotion.

“Will I be moving offices?” he asked.

A pained look crossed Teresa’s face. “I’m afraid not, there’s no room,” she said.

He lost weight which his coworkers took as a good thing. Women began to be friendly with him, but he took no notice. Men, also, began showing interest, but he had no energy for that, either.

For thirty years he worked like that until he became old and worn and was forced into retirement. As he left the building, all of his things, a lifetime, really, packed in a cardboard box, he heard the scream fading that last time as he rode down the elevator to his car, pulled out of the parking deck into the silence of the sun, and wept, frozen, unable to pull out, until the attendant slapped the back of his car.

All the way home he wept as he drove, seeing nothing, simply following the lines of traffic until they thinned and he parked and wept in his car. That evening he lay on his couch long into the night, bathed in the flickering glow of television, seeing nothing.

He drifted through the house as a ghost until, a few days later, he received a phone call from the office. They’d made a plaque for him to hang on the wall alongside a few others including Teresa, now long dead. As he rode the elevator up, an excitement he didn’t know the name for bubbled inside him. The doors opened to applause and he smiled reflexively but was troubled because he couldn’t hear the scream. He thought it might be the noise of the applause, so he made his way over to his desk on a pretense, but the noise failed to manifest. The ghost was gone, a young man sat at the desk, now, one Frank had never seen. The man turned and twitched a mechanical smile at Frank and they both knew, then, everything they needed. Frank nodded and excused himself and went into the bathroom. He had no tears nor anything else. He sat on a toilet and stared at the clean stall door, trying to coax his heart to stop. They found him like that a half hour later and led him out, everyone smiling with nothing in their eyes. They gave him a picture of his plaque and sent him home.

“It never stops,” the new boss said.

“Yes,” Frank said, “it will. Someday. It will stop.”

His tone chilled the entire room and long after he’d left, they sat quietly working, listening to their own thoughts and whatever was occupying them.


C.L. Bledsoe

Posted over on Blip Magazine
BLIP: An immense murmuration of starlings.