The After-Hours Tour

Georgina typed the last line of the sales summary, read it back, and deleted it. She typed it again, almost the same way, and left it.

It was a little past eight on a Thursday night, and she was the only one left on the floor. The cubicles around hers sat dark under the motion-sensor lights, and the heating had gone into its nighttime mode, so she had her cardigan buttoned to the top. On her desk sat a cold cup of coffee she had microwaved twice.

The quarterly report was due Friday at nine. Her numbers were not actually low. That was the part that stung. They were middle of the pack, solid, the same numbers she had turned in for three years running. But in the meeting that afternoon, Earl had stood at the front of the conference room with a printout in his hand and made a joke about it.

"Some of our reps seem to think the year ends in December," he had said, looking straight at her while the others laughed into their sleeves. "Maybe if somebody spent less time sorting out her personal life, her numbers would sort themselves out."

Nobody had said anything. Delia, her manager, had stared at the table. Georgina had smiled the way you smile at a dentist, and inside something had gone tight and hot, the same feeling she got whenever anyone mentioned her personal life at all.

She was thirty-four. She had been married for ten years, to a man named Rick who sold insurance and had come home one evening the spring before last and said, very calmly, that he didn't think he wanted to be married anymore. Not to anyone, he'd added, as if that were a comfort. The divorce had gone through in February. Almost a year ago. She still caught herself reaching for her phone to tell him things, and then remembering.

She was fine. She told people she was fine, and mostly she believed it, and that was as much as she could ask for on a Thursday night in an empty office.

The report saved, she leaned back and rubbed her eyes. Somewhere down the hall a door clicked. She knew that sound by now. Byron was making his rounds.

He was the night security guard, thirty-nine years old, big and quiet, with a shaved head and a way of walking that made no noise at all for a man his size. She had been saying hello to him for three years, mostly at the elevator on her way out. Tonight, for no reason she could name except that she was tired and a little bit angry and tired of being angry, she wanted more than hello.

"Georgina," he said when he came around the corner. He always said her name like he was glad to have it. "You're here late again."

"Quarterly report." She gestured at her screen. "Earl's personal favorite."

Byron's face did a small thing, not quite a smile. "I heard about the meeting."

"You heard about the meeting." She turned her chair toward him. "Of course you did. Word travels fast in a two-story building."

"Word travels fast everywhere," he said. "You okay?"

"I'm wonderful." She heard how it came out and winced a little. "Sorry. I'm fine. I'm just, you know. Fine."

He nodded, and to his credit he did not press. He glanced at the dark cubicles instead, at the motion lights going out one by one in the far corner, and she understood that he would move on soon, because that was his job, and he took his job seriously. Fifteen years of it, Luce had told her once. He had never once been late on a round.

"Can I offer you a coffee?" she heard herself ask. "From the kitchen. I make a terrible cup but I make it with great sincerity."

He looked surprised. "It's past eight," he said. "If I drink coffee now I'll be up until Sunday."

"Tea? We have tea. Some of it might predate my divorce."

He did smile then, a real one, and stayed where he was instead of moving down the hall. "No, thank you. But I'll take the company for a minute, if you don't mind."

"I don't mind," she said, maybe too quickly.

She was out of practice at this. Ten years with one man, and now thirty-four and flirting with a security guard in an empty office park, and her stomach doing the same nervous thing it had done at nineteen. She asked him about the building, because it was the only subject she could find. He told her which elevator stuck on the second floor, and which fire door alarmed if you breathed on it, and how the parking lot lights had a dead spot by the dumpster that corporate kept promising to fix.

"You know this place better than I do," she said.

"I should. I've been here longer than most of the furniture."

"How long?"

"Fifteen years, come June." He checked his watch. "I should finish the floor. But it was good to talk to you, Georgina."

"You too," she said, and watched him walk off toward the kitchen end of the building, and felt absurdly, childishly pleased with herself. Take that, Earl. Whatever that was worth.

* * *

She was maybe ten minutes back into the report when the elevator dinged.

Luce Kruger came around the corner with her purse over her shoulder and her coat half on, a small, quick woman of thirty-one who worked late more often than anyone and apologized for it more often too.

"Oh good, you're still here," Luce said. "I forgot my keys. I got all the way to the car. Don't tell anyone."

"Your secret dies with me."

Luce dug under her desk, came up with the keys, and made a small triumphant noise. On her way back toward the elevator she paused.

"You doing okay? I heard about today."

"Everybody heard about today," Georgina said. "It's fine. It's almost kind of funny, if you give it a week."

"It's not funny." Luce adjusted her coat. "He's been like that since his divorce too, if that helps. Misery and company and all."

"It doesn't help, but thank you."

Luce nodded toward the back of the floor. "Hey, is the storage room supposed to be open? It looks a little ajar."

Georgina turned and looked.

The storage room sat at the back corner of the floor, past the kitchen and the copy room, and it stayed locked. Everybody knew that. Supplies, archived files, the old server nobody had unplugged. Georgina had never once seen the door open, and had never once wanted to.

It was ajar. Just slightly. A finger's width of darkness between the door and the frame, down at the hinge side, like it hadn't quite been pulled shut.

"Huh," Georgina said.

"Is that weird?" Luce asked. "That's weird, right? Byron keeps that thing locked like it owes him money."

"Maybe he was checking it."

"He doesn't check it. I asked him about it once and he said corporate keeps the key, and even he doesn't go in there more than he has to." Luce laughed, but it came out thinner than she probably meant it to. "Which is a dumb thing for a grown man to say about a supply closet."

"He probably just forgot to latch it," Georgina said. "Doors do that."

Luce looked at the door, then at Georgina, then at the door again. The overhead lights in that corner of the floor had gone to sleep, and the strip of dark under the door looked darker than a closet had any right to look this late at night.

"Well," Luce said. "I'm going to go home and not think about it. You want me to tell Byron it's open?"

"No, I'll mention it when I leave," Georgina said. "Go on. It's late."

"Okay. Goodnight. Good luck with the report." Luce headed for the elevator, and Georgina heard the doors close and the car go down, and then she was alone again.

She turned back to her screen. She read the same paragraph three times without absorbing a word of it, and each time her eyes drifted back to the back corner, to that thin dark line where the door didn't meet the frame.

It was ajar. She was almost sure it had not been ajar an hour ago, when she had walked back from the kitchen with her second microwaved coffee. She had passed right by it. She was almost sure.

Almost was not a very comfortable word to be alone with, on a Thursday night, in an empty building.

She saved the report, stood up, and pulled her cardigan tighter.

She told herself she was just going to walk past it. That was the plan. Finish the report, mention the door to Byron on her way out, go home to an empty condo and a bottle of wine she'd been saving for a better occasion. She got about four steps before her feet turned on their own and carried her toward the back corner.

The lights were off back there, so she flipped the switch by the copy room. Half the strip fluorescents came on, buzzing, and the other half didn't. The storage door sat in the half-dark, still ajar, that finger's width of black along the hinge side.

"Hello?" she said, feeling stupid the moment it left her mouth. "Byron?"

Nothing. The vending machine in the kitchen hummed. The old server behind the storage door, whatever it was, hummed too, a low note she'd never noticed in three years of walking past this corner every day.

She put her hand on the door and pushed.

It swung open without a sound, which was its own kind of wrong. Every door in this building had a voice. The supply room doors in the front squeaked, the fire doors thumped, the elevator dinged like it wanted applause. This one moved on its hinges like it had been oiled that afternoon.

The air inside hit her before her eyes adjusted. Thick. That was the only word she had for it. Warm and thick, like the air in the condo the week Rick moved out, when the heat had run for days and neither of them opened a window. (She remembered standing in the hallway with a box of dishes and thinking the air itself was tired of them. But that was a different story and she wasn't going into it.)

"Hello?" she said again, and her voice dropped into the dark like a stone into water.

She found the light switch inside, a bare plate by the frame. One bulb overhead, caged in wire, came on slow and yellow. The room was smaller than she'd imagined. Metal shelving along two walls, stacked with printer paper and boxes of pens nobody had ordered since 2019. The old server sat in the far corner on a pallet, blinking to itself. And against the back wall, out of place among the office junk, stood a cabinet.

It was old. That was the first thing. Old the way the building wasn't, old the way a thing gets when nobody remembers who bought it. Painted steel, green once, faded to a sickly yellow-brown, with two doors and a rusted handle and a white enamel top cracked down one side. A medical cabinet, obviously. The kind that used to live in school nurse's offices and small-town clinics, back when a sprained wrist got an ice pack and a stiff drink.

Somebody had put it in here and forgotten it. That made sense. That was the normal explanation, and she held onto it like a railing.

She should have turned around then. She knew that later, going over it at two in the morning with the wine. But the room had gone quiet in a way that made the kitchen hum sound far away, and the air had that thick warm weight, and her legs just carried her across the floor.

The cabinet doors were shut. She touched the handle. Cold, colder than the room, cold like a car door in January, and it startled her enough that she laughed out loud, one short note that the room swallowed whole.

The right door opened easy. Inside were dusty shelves, empty except for a dead spider and a roll of gauze gone yellow with age. She was already turning away, already composing the joke for Byron, found your spooky closet, when she saw the symbol.

It was etched into the inside of the door she'd just opened. Scratched, more like, into the paint and the metal beneath it, deep and even, not the work of a bored employee with a keychain. A circle, and inside the circle a shape she could only describe as a mouth seen from the front, drawn in long lines, with marks above it that might have been letters in no alphabet she knew. The edges of the scratches were dark, stained almost, and her hand rose toward it without asking her permission.

"Don't."

The word came from the doorway and she jumped so hard she cracked her elbow on the shelf. Byron stood in the door, flashlight in one hand, looking like he had run the last fifty feet and didn't want to admit it.

"God, you scared me."

"Sorry." He didn't come in. He stood in the frame with the flashlight off, and his face in the yellow light had a look she hadn't seen on it in three years of hellos. "Step away from it. Please."

"It's just an old cabinet."

"I know what it looks like." He came in then, fast, took her wrist, and pulled her hand back from the door, and closed it with his free hand before her fingers had settled. The click of the latch was very loud.

His hand stayed on her wrist a beat longer than the situation called for. She felt it through her whole arm. Not his warmth, exactly, though he was warm. Something under that, a low hum of it, like standing too close to a substation fence. Her skin prickled from her wrist to her shoulder and she actually swayed on her feet, and his grip tightened like he felt it too.

"Okay," she said, mostly to herself. "That was. Huh."

"Are you all right?"