My friends always warned me about working in retail. The job is shit, the pay is shit and the people are the shittiest of them all. But, you know, as a girl with no college degree I took whatever job I could take and that is how I wound up in the telecom shop I’m working at now. The shop I work in is located in a small village in the outskirts of Antwerp, Belgium. Our customers are mainly old people since the demographic here is… well… old. A few weeks ago, on a wet and cold September day, I was the first one to arrive at the shop so I put my key into the lock that opens the steel shutters in front of our big displays and automatic door. I turned the key and nothing happens. I turned again but the heavy steel wouldn’t budge. I kicked the old rusty shutters and made my way to the back of the shop through the drizzling rain. It was cold, my hair was wet and a rather foul mood began to form between my ears. I managed to open the heavy door to our stock room and found out why the stupid shutters weren’t working: the power was out. This was not my day. My oldest colleague, Rudy, found a way to turn the power back on and the moment we heard the servers in the backroom restart, all alarms in our shop went off. They were not supposed to do that. It was mayhem. We have alarms on all the phones on display since they are live devices. This means that we do not work with dummy phones as you may see in some shops but with actual working phones on display. From that September day on we have had problems with our alarm systems. Sometimes they would go off whenever you as little as touched a phone, other times they seemed to go off even when there weren’t any people in the shop. It drove us crazy. It was weird but I did not really give it any interest since alarms are technology and technology can act out sometimes. But we noticed some other strange things happening. Things started to disappear and although most of the people working here told me that it was A) My imagination or B) My messiness that made things go AWOL, I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes I was so damn sure that I put something on that particular place that it was just borderline creepy when I found out that the article in question was lying somewhere completely random, like the fridge, or the toilet or one time even in our big vault. Another weird thing that kept happening was the air-conditioning turning on all by itself. It would grow cold as hell where I sat and when I would go and check the little white panel it would say that the air-conditioning was turned off. Sometimes the air-conditioning would be so high that I had to wear my hoody and a jacket to get warm. Ever since that freak power outage I hear voices. My boss tells me they are in my head but I SWEAR I hear people in the back room. Sometimes I just think it’s a colleague and I go to the back having a conversation with them about some fuckass customer and when I open the door to grab something… there is nobody! There’s also this unexplainable stench in the kitchen. Sometimes it’s there and other times it just smells like … what does old communal kitchen smells like? It’s like something died in there. I’ve been looking everywhere for it. I’ve opened the fridge countless times to let my sniffer decide if it’s maybe some kind of fungus in there. It wasn’t but I cleaned the refrigerator nevertheless. It also wasn’t something that had fallen behind the cabinets and there was no dead mouse lying around anywhere. Just plain weird. And then there are the pictures… The fact that our phones are live devices also means that you can take pictures with it. Like, yes, I watch ghost adventures and shit but I usually just laugh it off because obviously those guys are fake as hell but … I noticed white floating dots in the pictures people took with the phones. Every morning I have to delete the pictures customers took with the phones the day before. I have had my share of penises and selfies of just plain ugly people but this white orb-like thing that seemed to show up in almost all of the new pictures… It gave me the creeps. Sometimes it was small, just in the back, almost too transparent to see with the naked eye on a phone screen, other times it was big and full, like a moon hovering next to people’s heads or covering up their faces. The next time the tech guy came to do a check up I told him everything but he just laughed it away and told me that whenever I clean the phones I also had to clean the lens. But this was not the lens. I was pretty sure ‘ cleaning the lenses’ would not solve this problem. By that time the possibility that I might be caught up in a real life ghost buster thing started to form in the back of my head. You must think I’m crazy, I know. But listen to this : At work I usually sit at the front desk. This means that I am the first one for people to see but also that I’m at the desk closest to the phones. Two Saturdays ago I had to work with Helena, a girl that had just transferred from another shop. She is the kind of co-worker you are bound to hate. She is lazy, she is full of herself and she is extremely loud. I had about enough of her constant nagging about the job when the phone rang. I was relieved since it was the first time in what seemed like hours that that little entitled bitch shut her pie hole until I realized that this was not my phone nor hers. It also wasn’t the shop phone because it made this old school ringing sound and this one was different. It appeared to be the Nokia ring tone. Helena and I looked at each other for a moment. I had goose bumps all over my body and cold shivers down my spine. We don’t have old Nokia phones in the store, let alone brick phones. Maybe it was one of the Windows Phones? As soon as I wanted to check out the smartphones the calling stopped. The phones in our shop do not have sim cards inserted so it is virtually impossible to call or be called on these devices. Helena and I both laughed it off and went on with our work which consisted mostly of me explaining to old people how to turn on and off their phone and Helena browsing random people’s Facebook walls. It wasn’t until two o’clock that the phone rang again. It was quiet in the shop. The light drizzle had turned into a rainstorm and the few people that were fighting the weather outside had no intend whatsoever to come in. There it was again. That Nokia tune. We both froze. I may have imagined it but it turned colder and the lights flickered for a second. I swallowed my fear and walked slowly to the place where the phone was ringing. It WAS an old Nokia phone. The Nokia 3310 was hooked up at the system like all the other devices. I am pretty sure that 1) It is impossible to connect an old 3310 to our security system and 2) that we haven’t had a phone in that particular place in ages. I stopped in front of the phone and the ringing stopped. “ Who was it?” Helena asked. I could hear in her voice that she was just as scared as I was. “ Blocked Number.” “ Oh.” I looked at her over my shoulder and I saw the same raw fear in her eyes as she might now be seeing in mine. What was this? Was this a sick trick? Was this a candid camera thing? And before I could turn my back and walk back to Helena, the phone rang again. I stretched my fingers toward the phone. It was so cold! as if I reached into a fridge or a freezer. My fingers touched the freezing plastic and I pushed the button to answer the telephone. “Hallo?” I couldn’t hide my trembling voice. No answer. I only heard the static of a bad connection. “Hallo?” I tried again. I turned my head to Helena again. She just stood there, watching me, trembling. “ Hallo!” The voice of what seemed to be an old lady surprised me through the phone. I so would have shit my pants if Helena wasn’t standing behind me in the shop. “ What can I help you with?” “ Who are you? Can you help me? I do not know where I am. Can you come upstairs?”
“ I’m sorry… I have to go.” I just wanted this call to be over as soon as possible. I just wanted to get out of here. I was gonna lose it. And so I did. I mean. I got out of there and I lost it. This is not possible. Phones calling when they aren’t even supposed to call, the lights flickering, the alarms going off, the cold spots, the voices I hear in the back, the stench… I went to my doctor and he prescribed me a week of rest. This, for me, meant a week of cheap whiskey and one of my friends staying on my coach because the first night I was even too damn scared to answer my own phone. But it went better and after a week and after countless and countless talks with friends and my parents threatening to send me to a brain shrinker I just went back to work convinced this was one sick joke. The weather was good for the time of year. The wind was not too strong, the sun was shining and my mood lifted with every stride I took because, fuck it, this COULD actually be the work of some wackjob wanting to scare the shit out of us. The moment I got out of the tram I knew something was off. An ambulance and a whole lot of police were parked before our shop. Two strong first responders carried a heavy stretcher with a blanket stretched out on a lifeless big bump. “ My neighbour… “ A fat guy standing next to me was looking for some small talk gossip. “ The guy from the home delivery found her in her apartment. Turns out some nutter was calling up the pizza joint every evening, asking to come to her home. “ Hmm “ I replied, not really knowing what to answer. “ Heard she electrocuted herself some weeks ago. Has been rotting there the whole time. Weird stuff…. Weird stuff. She had her phone in hand. The bloody thing just melted into her skin! Who said Nokia 3310 were indestructible.” He laughed wholeheartedly and patted me on the back. And that is why, at the moment, I am on sick leave. Parents convinced me to go to a shrink next week. Wish me luck.
Submitted November 19, 2015 at 03:13AM by Ereandrill http://ift.tt/1S52aaV nosleep
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