CHAPTER 2: Old Pipes

She started working for the Weiser security firm after leaving the sheriff’s office, where Ellen had spent almost nine years running intake at the local jail. Recent politics had led to an overhaul in the jail’s management and she’d decided to leave as well. The new higher-ups had been making a lot of cutbacks to the number of officers per shift and the irony was that Ellen quit because she no longer felt safe doing her job.

So she took a position with Weiser and her first assignment had been overnight guard duty at a local medical testing facility. It was pretty routine stuff. Ellen spent most of her time seated at a desk, watching camera monitors and listening to the radio. Every two hours, either she or the other guard on duty would walk the facility’s three floors and make sure there weren’t any animal rights activists trying to break in to free all the lab rats or whatever.

One night the other guard, Rodney, came back from walking his rounds looking a bit flustered. He told Ellen that he kept hearing this weird knocking sound up on the third floor, which was mostly off-limits even to security unless they had proper authorization. Otherwise, they were just supposed to do a quick sweep of the circular hallway leading from the elevators to the secure access door and then back.

“You want me to call Jerry and request clearance to check it out?” Ellen asked, reaching for a phone on the security desk.

Rodney shook his head and said, “No. It’s probably nothing. Maybe old pipes; I don’t know. It was weird, though… It sounded like it was following me.”

Ellen scoffed, “WHAT?”

“I shit you not. I’d just gotten up there and I was about to start my sweep. I stopped to grab a soda from the machines by the elevator and then there was this THUMP…” He knocked once on the desk for emphasis. “On the wall like right beside me. I didn’t really think much of it and I started my walkthrough and when I get halfway down the hall, I realize my shoe was untied so I bent down to tie it and that’s when I heard the sound again…”

Rodney knocked on the desk, slightly louder this time. “…From the wall RIGHT next to where I was standing.”

“That is weird.”

“I thought the same thing. So I finished my sweep and at this point I was feeling a bit creeped out, you know? But I’m trying to shake it off. As a joke or whatever, I knock on the wall as I go to leave. And as soon as I pull my hand away…”

Rodney suddenly wrapped his fist on the desk three times in quick succession, startling Ellen as he said, “From the exact same spot where I had knocked and everything. I was so freaked out I booked it all the way back down here. Seriously? I think this place is haunted.”

“Or it IS old pipes and you knocking on the wall MADE them do that.”

Rodney shook his head and held out a hand as he asked, “Then how come the other two knocks I heard each happened right where I was standing?”

Ellen thought about it for a moment. “Maybe because those were the only knocks you were close enough to hear.”

Rodney looked away as he considered this and then shrugged. “Whatever. I’m emailing Ghost Hunters. I mean how cool would it be if they came here?”

He took his seat beside her at the large security desk and opened up a browser window as Ellen rolled her eyes. Two hours later, it was her turn to do the walkthrough and before long Ellen found herself on the third floor as Rodney’s asinine ghost story came back to her in vivid detail.