Jimmy checked the light levels while Alice set up the fishing line.
“Let’s try and get away from the windows,” he said. “Make the place feel more closed in.”
This would be their hundredth video. Almost two years of ghost-hunting. They’d meant it as a dumb joke. Alice had wanted to finally do something with her MFA. He’d wanted to rekindle the spark that had him doing stand-up in his twenties.
But people had loved it. And then they’d loved the second video. And the third. The fourth. Even though they did basically the same thing over and over. And now, here he was, making a living off ad revenue and merch.
“This place is perfect,” Alice said.
They’d scouted it a few weeks back. An old corporate campus sitting abandoned off the New Jersey turnpike. Floor after floor after floor of moldering cubicles. Conference rooms on top of conference rooms all gone to rot. Parking lots splattered with weeds and pigeon shit.
Jimmy never thought of it as a scam. Because who actually believed in ghost-hunting? It was like watching a magic trick. You were either there to be willingly fooled or to work out how you were being fooled. The people who bought ghost wards and the holy water from them were doing it with their tongues firmly in their cheeks.
Jimmy pulled a desk in, and another. Alice set up a stapler to shuffle across the desk with the fishing line, and another. They did a whip-pan gag where Jimmy pretended to look away from the door and then turn back to find it covered with a web of tape. They got a shot of a white board. Alice would add a marker writing obscenities and horror in post.
Occasionally someone really did fall for it. Jimmy never felt like that was his fault, though. He was just the particular rock that person had chosen to shipwreck their life upon. They’d inevitably end up blowing ten grand on something dumb. Why not him?
It had only gotten nasty once. Just recently. Some woman who couldn’t let it go. He kept telling her “no refunds.” She kept coming back. An infinite repeat of yelling and screaming. He’d had to threaten to call the cops.
“You think that’s you’re way out?” she’d yelled at him as she’d finally got back into her car. “There’s no escape for people like you. You’ll always trapped in your own shitty skin.” She’d even made the evil eye at him. Some people.
They wrapped up at about 3:00 pm. They had enough to pull an edit together. Alice turned to him as they left the conference room. “Which way to the stairs? These places are mazes.”
But he remembered it well enough and took them back down corridor after corridor after corridor.
Except the corridors didn’t lead to the stairs. He looked around puzzled. “Shouldn’t the window…?” he said, pointing.
“I knew you turned the wrong way.”
So, they retraced their steps, stepping over the carcasses of old printers, pushing past a creeping vine that drooped from a dulled Emergency Exit sign.
And they didn’t encounter the conference room.
“Did we turn…?” Alice asked him.
But they both knew they hadn’t.
“We must have missed it,” he said. “If we just keep going, we’ll hit a wall. We can figure it out from there.”
Five minutes. Corridors and cubicles and conference rooms. Ten minutes. Cracks and crap and scraps of graffiti. Signs of animal life. But no windows. No far wall. They had traveled beyond the limits of believability.
“Was there a bridge to another building?” Alice’s eyes flicked to corners, as if tracing flashes of movement invisible to Jimmy.
“We must have,” Jimmy said. They hadn’t. They knew there was no bridge. But there had to have been.
“This is getting weird,” Alice said.
“We just got turned around.”
“When?” Alice asked. “We’re moving in a straight line.”
“Maybe it curves.” It didn’t curve. “We’ve got to keep going,” he said. “We’ll find the way.”
Fifteen minutes. Ceiling tiles overhead repeating. Stained. Broken. Missing. Twenty minutes. Carpet tiles beneath them repeating . Stained. Broken. Missing. Thirty minutes. The infinite repeat of cubicles. Of trash. Of strip lighting. Of cubicles. Of trash. Of strip lighting.
“I’ve seen this before.” Alice pointed at a broken printer on the floor.
“We’ve seen a bunch of them.”
“No,” Alice said. “This exact one.”
“That’s impossible.”
Alice started laughing. Except not quite laughing. Not quite screaming either. The same sound trapped between two definitions repeating over and over. Jimmy was tempted to join her.
“We’ve got to keep going,” he said. “We’ll find the way.”
An hour. Soulless sameness that even decay couldn’t erode. The world on repeat. Copy and paste architecture. Two hours. Copy and paste architecture. Three hours.
“I’ve seen this before.” Alice pointed at a broken printer on the floor.
“We’ve seen a bunch of them.”
“No,” Alice said. “This exact one.”
The world on repeat.
“Is that the conference room?” Jimmy’s plea to an uncaring universe. To an uncaring wall. To Alice. She didn’t answer. He turned around, and somewhere along the way he’d lost her.
He didn’t dare turn back. What if he was almost at the far wall?
The world on repeat: uncaring door, uncaring wall, uncaring door, uncaring wall. Rinse. Repeat. Remix. Reshuffle. Wall, door, door, wall, wall, kitchenette, wall, wall, door, kitchenette, wall, door, wall, wall, wall. Rinse. Repeat. Remix. Reshuffle.
Jimmy shuffling. One day. Two days. Time just hours on a clock repeating. The same second over and over and over.
It’s not a scam. It’s a magic trick. You just have to work out how you’re being fooled.
Wall, door, door, wall, wall, kitchenette, wall, wall, door, kitchenette, wall, door, wall, wall, wall.
A printer he’s seen before.
He’s seen hundreds of them. He’s seen this exact one.
The world on repeat.
And there is no way out.
Feels like I've been there before. And before that.
Gotta love a bit of corporate horror!