The Night the Server Room Hummed

The first night I moved to the graveyard shift at Meridian Data Solutions, I felt like I’d won a lottery. No more buzzing open-plan office, no more micromanaging supervisors, no more commuter crawl. The building, a stark glass-and-steel monolith on the edge of an industrial park, was a ghost town after midnight. I parked in the front spot, a privilege reserved for the CEO during the day, and keyed in through the rear entrance, which was closer to my new office in the basement.

I took the service elevator down to the basement, which was a labyrinth of humming servers, cold air, and the faint smell of ozone. My workstation was in a corner, near the backup tape library. The shift was quiet, peaceful. I made my rounds, checked the environmental alarms, read a novel on my tablet, and felt a smug satisfaction when the clock hit 6:00 AM. I didn’t need to step foot on the administrative floors.

That novelty lasted a week. Then, on a Tuesday, I had to run a report for the day shift that required a folder from the second-floor records room. The second floor housed the billing and corporate operations offices, a place I avoided. The atmosphere shifted as I stepped off the elevator. The air was stale, the lights dimmed to a flickering half-power, and the silence was oppressive, broken only by the distant whir of a malfunctioning AC unit.

I walked past the long row of cubicles, their fabric walls muted and gray. At the end of the corridor was the records room. As I reached for the door handle, a sound made me freeze: the rhythmic click-clack of a keyboard. Someone was typing. I looked to my right, into a glass-walled office that belonged to a woman named Patricia, the head of accounts receivable. Patricia was notorious for never missing a day, never delegating, and her desk was a fortress of neatly stacked binders.

There, sitting in Patricia’s high-backed chair, was a figure. A woman. I couldn’t see her face, as she had her back to me and her head tilted down at the screen, but her posture was elegant, almost statuesque. She wore a bright crimson blazer, a stark contrast to the gray cubicles. Her fingers moved over the keyboard with inhuman speed, a blur of motion. The screen cast a soft glow on the back of her neck, which was smooth and pale.

My first thought was that Patricia must have loaned her office to an overnight temp. But no, Patricia never let anyone touch her equipment. She was obsessive about it. I remember her once yelling at a janitor for bumping her chair. My curiosity curdled into unease. Who was this? Why was she here at one in the morning?

I decided to get a closer look. I walked toward the open doorway, my footsteps muffled by the carpet. The typing continued, not missing a beat. I cleared my throat. No response. I stepped into the office, and the air grew cold, goosebumps prickling my arms. I was now three feet behind her. The scent of rosewater perfume, faint and cloying, hung in the air. I saw the back of her head, hair the color of deep auburn, pulled into a perfect chignon.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, my voice trembling slightly. The typing stopped abruptly. The silence that followed was worse. She slowly turned her head, but only a fraction, not enough to reveal her face. I caught a glimpse of a sharp chin and red lips, parted slightly as if about to speak. But no words came. Instead, she raised one hand, and in a gesture that was both graceful and unnerving, she pointed directly at the computer screen.

The screen was not displaying a spreadsheet or an email. It was black, but there was a single line of text in a stark white font: ‘GET OUT OF THE BASEMENT.’

I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, the chair was empty. The blazer was gone. The room was still cold. I bolted. I didn’t wait for the elevator; I ran down the stairs, my heart pounding, my mind racing. When I burst into the basement, my workstation was exactly as I had left it, but the lights above my desk were flickering. And then, from the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow move in the server room, just a sliver, but enough to make me turn. The door to the server room was ajar, and through the gap I saw the woman again, now much closer, her face still hidden, but she was standing amid the racks of blinking lights, her blazer a splash of red against the green LED matrix.

She raised her hand again, and this time she pointed at me.

I ran. I did not stop until I was out of the building, standing in the cold, empty parking lot, my breath fogging in the night air. I looked back at the building. All the windows on the second floor were dark, but on the top floor, in the corner office of the CEO, a light was on. And in that window, I saw a silhouette. It was the woman in the red blazer. She was typing, staring down at the building, and I could swear that she was smiling.

I never worked a graveyard shift again. I quit the next morning. But sometimes, when I pass by that building at night, I see the light in the CEO’s corner office. And I wonder if she’s still there, typing away, waiting for the next person brave or foolish enough to wander into the silence.