The Lantern Logic

The night shift at the TeleData Center had a rhythm all its own, a low hum of electronics punctuated by the occasional cricket chirp from the field beyond the parking lot. I knew the place was old, had been a textile mill in a previous life, and the brick walls held a history that sometimes seeped through the paint. I’d worked there for two years, but it was my friend Karla who told me what happened to her on a night not unlike any other.

It was a slow Tuesday, the calls trickling in like a leaky faucet. Management offered VTO around 3 AM, and most of us took it, either heading home to our beds or collapsing onto the worn couches in the break room. Karla usually chose the break room, but that night, something pulled her toward the exit. She said she was just tired of the flickering fluorescent lights and the stale coffee smell. She wanted her own pillow.

The walk to the parking lot was a trek across the main floor, through the labyrinth of cubicles, and past a row of heavy metal doors that led to the old boiler room. She’d always found that part of the building unnerving, the way the air grew cooler and the floor felt slick underfoot. As she reached the last door, she heard a sound that made her stop— a soft, rhythmic tapping, like a fingernail on a glass pane. She turned, expecting to see a security guard or perhaps a late-night janitor, but the corridor was empty.

She chided herself for being jumpy and pushed through the exit door. That’s when she saw him. A man in a dark, old-fashioned suit standing at the edge of the light cast by the single lamp above the door. He wasn’t looking at her; he was staring at the ground, and his lips were moving as if in silent conversation. Karla froze, her heart thumping against her ribs. Then, as if sensing her presence, the man slowly lifted his head. His eyes were not eyes but deep black voids, and his mouth stretched into a smile that was too wide, showing teeth that were too sharp.

She ran. She didn’t look back, didn’t stop until she was in her car, doors locked, engine roaring. She sped home, her hands shaking, and didn’t sleep that night. The next day, she mentioned the encounter to a colleague, expecting to be laughed at. Instead, the colleague’s face went pale. She told Karla about the night guard who had been found dead in that same corridor back in the 1990s, a heart attack they said, but the old-timers whispered about something else. They said he’d been seeing a ghost for weeks, a man in an old suit who would stand in the shadows, muttering about a lantern he’d lost. The guard had apparently tried to talk to him, to help him find it.

Karla never took VTO again. She switched to day shifts and always left before the sun went down. But the story didn’t end there. A few weeks later, a new temp worker named Drew, who didn’t know the history, took VTO on his first week. He was found the next morning asleep at his desk, his computer screen flickering with static. When he woke, he told a wild tale about a man in an old suit who had led him to a hidden room behind the boiler, where a rusty lantern sat on a shelf. Drew had picked it up, and the man had smiled, his black eyes filling with something like relief. Then the man vanished, and Drew was alone.

We tried to find the room, but the boiler room was locked and dusty, and no amount of pushing could open the door more than a crack. The lantern was never found, but Drew swore it was real. He quit a week later, saying he couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was still watching, waiting for someone else to find his lantern. To this day, I sometimes catch myself glancing at that corridor from the safety of my cubicle, half-expecting to see a shadowy figure, half-expecting to hear that rhythmic tapping. And I’ve learned to accept the VTO, to stay in the break room, to never walk to my car alone. Some things are best left unlit.