"He's dead, Jim."
"Not funny, you little Trekkie," Jim said.
"I'm not joking," DeAndre said. He shuddered and glanced at his boss. Jim's face was thin and haggard, his hair beginning to go gray, where it wasn't falling out altogether. It was not a face that invited humor.
"Really, DeAndre. That's not fun... ny."
DeAndre cringed as he watched Jim jump up from his chair and stare across the piles of paper on the desk between them. On top of everything else, DeAndre had never felt all that comfortable in his boss's messy office. He kept having to fight the urge to clean the whole place.
"Out there," Jim said, pointing over DeAndre's shoulder, "in your office? He died?"
"No." DeAndre looked up. "I mean, he, uh. He was dead when he came in."
He really wished Jim would move or do something. The waiting was killing him. He winced at the poor choice of words and listened to his boss squeak back into the leather chair behind the big desk.
"What," Jim asked, "did you just say?"
"He was dead when he came in for the job interview."
"He was dead."
"Yes."
"When he came in."
"Uh huh."
"For the job interview."
"Right," DeAndre said.
"Does this not strike you as somewhat ludicrous? Even here at CurseWerks?"
DeAndre nodded his head. "I know you told me this place would be different, but this is... I don't know."
It was only then, two months after being hired, that DeAndre really understood why Jim kept asking if he were "open minded" during his own job interview. He wished he'd taken seriously Jim's lecture about the reality of the supernatural and CurseWerks' role in keeping the world more natural than super. Maybe it wasn't too late to quit.
"All right," Jim said. "Now, if he's dead, how did he show up for the interview? Is he a zombie? The undead? That kind of thing?"
DeAndre didn't even pause. "No. He looks normal."
"Then how do you know he's dead?"
"He walked through the door."
"So?
"No, you don't get it." DeAndre turned around and waved his hands toward the office door behind him. " You know, with the door closed? He walked through the door."
"Ah."
"And when he moves fast, he's a little misty around the edges. And when I tried to shake hands with him, my hand went right through him. And he gives me the creeps. And he's not breathing. And he's-"
"Okay. Got it. So," Jim said. "He's a ghost?"
"Right. Exactly. He's a ghost. Yeah --"
Jim held up his hand.
"Enough," Jim rubbed at his temple. "Okay, so we've got a ghost in the interview room. That's unusual. The Bosses are supposed to have something that keeps ghosts out. Huh. Is he still there?"
"He should be. I asked him to wait. I'd imagine ghosts are pretty good at waiting."
"Okay." Jim walked around the desk. "Let's go talk to him. Together."
DeAndre shook his head. "I don't think so."
Jim clapped his hands together and pulled DeAndre up from his seat.
"It looks like we're stuck with it and if I have to go, so do you."
DeAndre was not supposed to be involved with this kind of thing. He was more than happy to leave the supernatural to the CurseWerks field agents. DeAndre was a people person, not a zombie person, or a vampire person, or a werewolf person, or an Elder Gods person. He was in personnel, for God's sake. The person was right in the name.
He withstood his boss's brutal stare for almost thirty seconds before caving. DeAndre stood up and girded his professional armor: shot the cuffs of his stylish black suit coat and adjusted his red tie. If he had to face a ghost, he would damn well do it looking good.
#
Deep in the recesses of the transdimensional space which housed the CurseWerks offices, there was a small, unused laboratory numbered among the missing. Well, it would have been so numbered if anyone remembered it was, in fact, missing. What with all the add-ons and sometimes explosive deletions carried out on the physical facilities, it was a something of a miracle that a map for the place even existed. One did. Only it was slightly out of date, despite the efforts of a full-time mapmaker. Some of the dodgier bits of real estate had a distressing tendency to phase in and out of the building.
This small laboratory, however, had been created to go missing. Only one CurseWerks employee knew of the laboratory and he used it to carry out unapproved experiments. Dr. Fabrio Neecienza had quite a number of interesting ideas about the nature of reality and the ability of sapient beings to access different levels of said reality.
It was a bit of a shame, then, when he stepped in front of a bull elephant while visiting a logging site in India. For one thing, the elephant lived the rest of its life with a distressing tendency to try and recreate that pleasant squishing noise. It was, not unexpectedly, a rather short life. For another, nobody knew to turn off Neecienza's final experiment.
In the small, unused laboratory, a piece of equipment sensed the proper conditions and switched itself on. Red numbers appeared on an obsolete computer screen. The numbers changed. A countdown was in progress.
For more ghostly goodness, visit SDO Ghost
and look for the first issue.