The Third Floor Light

The fluorescent hum of the office was a constant companion, a low-frequency drone that settled into the bones after a few hours of the night shift. I worked for a client-services firm in the sprawling business district of Gurugram, just outside Delhi. Our office occupied the entire fourth floor of a glass-and-steel tower, a beacon of activity in a sea of darkened buildings. The clients were in New York and London, so the office was a 24/7 operation. My team handled the overnight ‘tech watch’ – keeping the servers running, the databases synced, and the automated reports flowing. The shift ended at 3:00 AM, but my duties, especially on hectic nights, often stretched past that.

On that particular Tuesday, the network had been acting up, and I found myself alone in the server room, tracing a fault in the fiber-optic backbone. The rest of my team had already left, their cabs ferrying them to their homes in the city’s sprawling suburbs. The clock on the wall showed 4:15 AM when the issue was finally resolved. I stretched, my joints cracking in the silence, and decided to call it a night. I wasn’t scheduled to return until the evening, but the thought of the drive back to my apartment in Dwarka was draining. As I packed my bag, I realized I had left my phone charger in the conference room on the third floor – a floor that was supposed to be empty, used by a different client team.

I took the fire exit stairs, not wanting to wait for the elevator that seemed to take an eternity at this hour. The stairwell was cold, the concrete walls amplifying the sound of my footsteps. The door to the third floor was heavy, and it swung open with a groan that startled me. The floor was pitch dark, the only light coming from the emergency exit signs casting a dim red glow along the corridor. I fumbled for the light switch, but it was a sensor-based system, and it didn’t respond. Probably on a timer, I thought. I pulled out my phone and used its flashlight, the beam cutting through the darkness.

I found the conference room, retrieved my charger, and was about to head back when I noticed something odd. At the far end of the corridor, near the stairwell exit, there was a faint flicker of light – a soft, bluish glow, like from a computer monitor. Curiosity got the better of me. As I walked closer, I realized it was coming from a small, windowless room that I had never noticed before. It was marked ‘Storage’ on a faded plaque, but the door was slightly ajar. Beyond it, I could see the silhouette of a workstation, the monitor displaying a login screen with a single username: ‘A. Mehta’.

I pushed the door open, the hinges creaking. The room was small, cluttered with old CRT monitors, tangled cables, and dusty boxes. The workstation was ancient, a relic from the early 2000s. The screen flickered, and then the login prompt changed. It now read: ‘ENTER PASSWORD’. I backed away, my heart starting to race. This was absurd. The floor was supposed to be vacant; the company had moved out its tech department years ago to a newer building. I told myself it was a leftover machine, perhaps a test server that had been forgotten. But why was it on? And why did the username feel familiar?

I leaned in, and as I did, the screen flickered again, and a new message appeared: ‘HELLO, ROHAN.’ My blood turned to ice. My name was not Rohan – it was Karan. But the message persisted, and then the screen went black. A moment later, a series of numbers appeared on the screen, like a timestamp, but it was from a date that hadn’t occurred yet – 10/25/2027. I told myself it was a glitch, a hallucination from exhaustion. I turned to leave, and that’s when I heard the sound – a low, throaty chuckle coming from the dark corridor outside the room. I froze, my eyes straining to see. The emergency exit light flickered, and in the brief illumination, I saw a figure standing at the far end – a man in a white shirt and dark trousers, his face obscured. He was just standing there, perfectly still, as if waiting for me.

Fear gripped me. I slammed the storage room door shut and bolted for the stairs. I didn’t stop until I was in the lobby, my breath ragged, sweat dripping down my face. The security guard looked up from his desk, concerned. ‘You okay, sir?’ he asked. I nodded, unable to speak. I walked to my car, my hands trembling, and drove home in a daze. I tried to rationalize it – a prank by a coworker, a security guard playing a joke, a malfunctioning light. But deep down, I knew what I had seen.

The next evening, when I returned for my shift, I asked a colleague about the third floor. She looked at me strangely. ‘We don’t use that floor,’ she said. ‘It’s been sealed off since 2007.’ I pressed her for details, and she hesitated before telling me a story. No, not a story – a warning. She said there had been an incident back in 2007, when the office was still in a different building. An employee named Arjun Mehta had worked on a project for a client, but he had a breakdown, claiming that a malevolent presence in the server room was trying to communicate with him. He started sending bizarre messages to the client, was fired, and later took his own life. The server room was on the third floor of that old building. Our current office was built on the site of the old building, and the third floor was rumored to be his favorite haunt.

I didn’t sleep that night. I couldn’t shake the image of that login screen, and the name ‘A. Mehta’ now haunted me. Arjun Mehta. And then I remembered – my late-night project, the one that had kept me late: I was working on a data migration from the old servers. And in the logs, I had seen a reference to a file named ‘MEGAN’ – a project codename. I pulled up the file, and it was a series of encrypted messages, all signed ‘A.M.’ I felt a chill as I realized the date I had seen on the monitor – 10/25/2027 – was exactly ten years after I had started working at this firm, and exactly ten years since Arjun’s death.

The next night, I found myself ascending to the third floor again, driven by an irrational compulsion. The door was open, the corridor lit by the dim red glow. The storage room door was ajar. The monitor was on, and the login screen greeted me. This time, the prompt was blank, but beneath it, a line of text: ‘YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WILL FINISH THIS.’ I typed ‘NO’ and hit enter, but the screen just flickered. Then, the monitor went black, and a reflection appeared on the glass – not mine, but the haggard face of a man, dark circles under his eyes. I spun around, but no one was there. A whisper swept past my ear, barely audible: ‘They need to know.’

The next day, I resigned. I couldn’t explain it to my manager, but I said I had to relocate. I moved back to Mumbai, far from Gurugram. But the nightmares persisted. Every night, I saw that login screen, and the name ‘A. Mehta’ burning in my mind. I researched him online, found an old news clipping about his suicide, but also found a forum post from someone claiming to have worked with him. They wrote that Arjun was developing a program that could predict market crashes, and a client had stolen his algorithm, driving him to madness. The post urged anyone who found his files to ‘finish what he started’.

I never did finish it. But sometimes, late at night, my computer screen flickers, and for a split second, I see a login prompt. And a username. And a soft, ghostly laughter that tells me the server is still waiting.