Of Spectres and Sandwiches
Chattering, chittering and general wittering surrounded Ella. No matter which way she turned her head there would be a murmuring voice behind her, sometimes laughing, sometimes complaining. Other times they simply described the banal events of a mundane day as if they were something worth of conversation, simply because they were all that was left of which to speak. It was often the way when she entered the staff canteen; people who had spent upwards of twenty years eating lunch with one another had long since run dry of their interesting stories to tell, and so they had worked through the mildly diverting stories, the tales of events which were woeful, recollections of days which were boring, and even the days of which there was nothing to tell at all. These days their conversation didn't hinge on having something worth saying, but on simply communicating a piece of information that the speaker knew and the listener didn't, even if it could have been inferred or would have been better left unspoken. If it was true that friendships stretched out to the point that there was nothing left to say, then workplace associations picked up where friendships left off and ended when there were absolutely no words left to speak.
The distinction was not lost on Ella and her acute over-analysis of the situation. When one had spent upwards of ten years avoiding falling into the pitfalls of speaking to the same people for upwards of twenty years, lunchtimes were much more on the quiet side. She'd successfully dodged having to hear the more tedious aspects of her co-workers' lives by side-stepping even their interesting yarns. If one of them managed to slip a 'hello' in while she was passing them in the corridor she considered it to be a major failure on her part; that was largely the reason why she'd invented the short-lived workplace blinkers to isolate herself from eye-contact. Of course, that had backfired terribly when she'd been called in by the health and safety crew for 'literally walking around blind without reason' and then had to suffer a whole hour with the head of human resources as to why she'd felt it to be necessarily in the first place. It had been one of the more difficult abject silences of her life to sustain, and dodging eye-contact for a whole hour when her chair faced her interrogator's was a never-ending game of cat and mouse, but Ella had proven to be more committed to the cause in the end.
Every day was the same in that canteen. Bright white light from the humming fluorescent strips overhead was belched and spewed into the room so that no matter what time of day or of year it was in the outside world, the canteen showed no variance. Puddles of water on the polyurethane flooring always reflected up at her, and the white wipe-clean tables always seemed just bright enough to make it challenging to maintain an appetite. Opposite the door, at the far end of the canteen, was the long metal counter behind which lurked dubiously heated beans, potatoes with more ancestry and heritage than she had, and a selection of sausage rolls which were, according to the tedious discussions she couldn’t help but frequently overhear 'surprisingly good, considering the colour and shape of them'. To choose food from that aluminium torture chamber was to play Russian roulette with one's gastrointestinal integrity; she wasn't sure that what lurked behind those sneeze guards was digestible, let alone edible, and the longer she'd been visiting the more she'd begun to question whether the sneeze guard was to protect the food from the staff or the staff from the food. Given how many layers of plastic gloves, hairnets, aprons and, in some cases, full gas masks were worn by the servers, the answer wouldn't be a comforting one. Quite aside from the medical disasters that would await if she ever became so weak or foolish as to eat the canteen food, however, there would be the trap of small-talk with the server, something they might insist upon while they performed whatever arcane rituals it must have taken to exorcise the potatoes from their demonic nests and place them onto Styrofoam plates. Although preferable to hearing people who did exactly the same job as her talk about their day as if it was new or exciting to any of them, Ella still couldn't face the prospect of plastering a smile across her face while discussing how, yes, the rain was still falling downwards rather than up, and no, it wasn’t very fair that everyone's left hand had to be emblazoned with an odd company logo in reddy-grey ink. Even thinking about it bored her to the point of yawning.
For those reasons, and many more that Ella would give if anyone could pin her down for conversation on the matter, she would never visit that far end of the canteen. The close end wasn't much better, however; this was where table density was highest, and habitual cliques of jaw-waggling thralls to the whims of the organisation would gather there to make inane noises at one another. To the left of the door was always a sea of blue over-jackets, stained with oil or resin or varnish or embalming fluid or some other liquid that could, in a better life, have carried some notion of curiosity with it. One-by-one they all went round and pretended to listen to one other, while secretly waiting for their chance to show that they’d had the most difficult job that day and that their experience & knowledge was greatest. None of them were right, Ella had concluded.
On the right hand side, however, were legions of white shirts who worked hard and played harder if their claims were anything to go by. Ella had never felt that playing two rounds of golf or drinking a small amount of liquor constituted playing particularly hard at all, nor did their talk of how other businesses had adopted eldritch processing in a much more 'agile' or 'tactical' or 'utterly charming and lovely' way make her feel like their work was anything but huggably soft. Huggably; she'd been indoctrinated by Big Nappy into saying that word. Squashy, pudgy, yielding or perhaps spineless would have been better descriptors for these white-shirted workers.
Being near either clique was unacceptable, for although she'd never be pulled into their feeble attempts at 'conversation' the mere act of overhearing it would wear her mind down to the point of uselessness.
Deeper into the canteen, then, it was always necessary to trudge, along her usual path to the broken table that sat hard against one of the floor to ceiling windows that offered spectacular views over the central loading area, the processing plant, and the sanctifying pools; each one offered a slightly different shade of grey, with the occasional flash of abyssal red or infernal purple from a chimney or vent. On one side the metal arm that connected seat to table had rotted through, probably thanks to the corrosive ichor that passed for tea in the canteen's urns. That the urns themselves hadn't dissolved was presumably only thanks to some powerful sorcery on the part of the maintenance team; certainly the glowing yellow runes around the top of each one spoke of protective wards and a complete disregard for flavour or being potable. Regardless of the lamentable hot drink provisions, however, and whatever the true cause of the seat-arm being so thoroughly hewn from the table, it meant that only a single seat remained; the perfect spot for Ella. That the other half of the table was also shattered was an added bonus to ward away any particularly determined guests. It was almost as if the table had been designed and placed there exactly for her as a result of some divine providence, but Ella dared not think too much about that just in case it led to communication with some kind of deity; even the divine would run out of things to say eventually, and it was a wholly unacceptable concept to become disinterested in their sacred stories.
No person was an island, she’d heard it said. Most often it was being said in reference to her isolationist tendencies, but she was never paying enough attention to really take the message on board. It also held true for her lunch table, and although she would have welcomed the addition of a moat, system of rivers or inland sea, it was only in a metaphorical capacity. Around her were further clusters of unwelcome others. The polychromatic order of youths, who had never had anything to say and talked about nothing instead, were probably the best of the bunch. Appealing to her they may not have been, but at least they’d never given into stagnation; in that regard they were the starkest opposites of the grey pair that any mind, poisoned, divine or otherwise, could hope to contrive.
There was no small-talk with the grey pair. No talk of the past or speculation on what the night might hold, and not a shred of discussion about the morning’s work or debate over whether deadlines would be met or failed. There were barely even words; their interactions had degraded and dissolved down to a series of grunts and nods. The odd flicker of a facial expression formed some limited communication, but there was no heavy lifting being done by anything except the subtext. They wandered in together in their drabness, made a few acknowledging noises as each of them pulled out a grey meal to eat, and then they sat there in almost complete silence. They were further gone than anyone else, but somehow never left one another’s side. Every now and again Ella would catch one touching the hand of the other and it would set her mind to ticking, but those thoughts were soon washed away by disdain for the reds.
While the blue coats might have seen their conversation as competition, the white shirts as an opportunity to demonstrate how far beneath them work was, the polychromes a vector for waste and the greys a strange ballet of apathy, they were obviously all together by choice. When the reds sat down, Ella couldn’t help but question whether even that was true. They were less uniform that the others; maybe it would be a red tie on one of them, red socks on another, a dress or shirt or a bold crucifix on a crimson chain wrapped around one bicep, but the red was always there somewhere. That was the start and end of what united them, for although they lacked many of the flaws that beset the other cliques, at least those cliques seemed to like one another just a little bit. It might not have been an in-your-face affection from the greys, nor a commonality that transcended their employment from the blue coats, but they liked and respected something about one another. The reds were, apparently, too important for that. They knew that they had to be seen as a united front, but no matter how broadly they smiled, or how they nodded along and praised ‘positive forward thinking intentions that certainly don’t not meet with the principles along which we should be thinking’, there was no way to fool oneself into believing that they really liked one another. They were prisoners of one another’s company, and the walls were the eyes of all those around them.
Still, Ella didn’t much care. They were quieter and less repetitive than the blue coats and white shirts so they were better ‘company’ for the plains around her haven. Their position within the organisation also made their chosen location unassailable by the other cliques, and therefore it was at least a reliable buffer against anyone else moving over and disrupting the peace. A necessary evil, she sometimes thought of it. Other times, an evil necessity. Whichever way round it went, she sat behind it as her bulwark of bull and ate her lunch in peace. There was no risk that anyone would try to engage her in conversation, and therefore no way that those relationships could descend into dull, grey tedium.
In her bastion of blessed isolation Ella sat down, pulled out her small green Tupperware from the bag she wore across her back, and set a cup of hot chocolate down in front of herself. Next to emerge from the backpack was an increasingly ragged paperback book. It was a curious story of nothing much in particular that somehow still managed to hold her attention, despite the fact that she could barely describe to anyone what had happened so far. Or, more to the point, she could barely have described it to anyone if she’d managed to make the mistake of engaging in a chat with them. It was hardly a risk at this stage.
Although the harsh strip lights above weren’t much for creating a relaxed or comfortable atmosphere, they were at least good for reading faded text on old, yellowed pages. Carefully Ella opened up the aged novel and placed her bookmark in its habitual spot to the side. The protagonist had been busily trying to reorganise their shoe cupboard when she’d left off the previous lunch time, and for reasons that Ella couldn’t justify to herself, let alone to anyone else, she felt deeply invested in seeing it through the conclusion. Would the loafers occupy higher shelves while high heels took the ironically low ground? Would they be loaded up and ordered by frequency of use, or would their general application and styling hold the secret to how they were arranged? There were so many options available that her mind couldn’t help expanding into the many fractals of possibility. This was better than agreeing with her colleagues that the weather could have easily been better or worse any day.
As her eyes ran across a description of the shelving unit underneath the protagonist’s staircase, one of Ella’s hands moved over to the Tupperware. It felt oddly cold to the touch, more so than normal, but maybe the air conditioning had been playing up in the office and directing an arctic blast towards the backpack. It had happened before, generally in the winter when it shouldn’t have been running in the first place, and usually could be traced to a misplaced runestone on one of the compressor units. It didn’t concern Ella either way; all it had done was bring her backpack closer to being a fridge and that could only work in the favour of her lunch. As a focal point for people to gather and use communally, the refrigerator was an obvious spot to be avoided and Ella had never once even considered putting her lunch inside it. Crafting sandwiches that didn’t rely on low temperatures to avoid spoiling over a four hour period had been the simpler solution. Besides, the fridge was opened and closed so often that, in all likelihood, it functioned more like a tepid white cupboard than an actual means of preserving comestibles.
With a practised deftness that she herself couldn’t comprehend, because she’d never really watched herself do it, Ella popped the Tupperware lid cleanly off with one hand. Normally this didn’t cause much of a change in the local environment in and of itself, unless the sandwiches had been prepared with a particularly pungent filling like salmon puree or bleach jam, and that was what first tipped Ella off that something was awry. Even with stinky sandwiches the initial effect was limited to a nasal assault, and only later did any audible impact occur in the form of the nearby cliques making ‘urgh’ sounds, or asking who’d brought the toilet cleaner in for lunch again. When the lid was flung away this time, however, a gurgling, echoing, wet wail immediately erupted from Ella’s sandwiches. Pink and green light streamed and strobed from within the plastic tub, casting deep shadows on the walls and colouring the whole room with their eldritch vibrancy.
“What in the blazes?!” Yelped one of the reds. All was not as they had declared it should be, and therefore their oar needed to be thrown into the mix. “What’s that light?”
“It doesn’t align with our four-point three-tier strategic deployment initiative decision as determined in the gold-team’s pow-wow.” Replied another. The density of utter rot made Ella feel sick, but she resisted the urge to look over. It was far more urgent that she kept a watch on her unusually luminous meal. She leaned in closer as one of the reds complained about this not being the proper escalation route for raising concerns about intra-organisational luminance emergence, and peered at the contents of the tub. Just as she remembered, it was wholemeal bread with a filling of salad leaves, pickled vegetables and Anderson’s Number 36 Non-Arcane Spread™. Completely contrary to her recollection, however, the sandwich had taken on a strangely coruscating aura of the colours that had started to flow from the tub. This revelation had solved the mystery of the light source, which was good, but introduced the mystery of the glowing lunch, which was less good. All-in-all, there was more left to learn.
“Ella! What have you got in there?” Demanded one of the reds. This one was red of tie and of face, which she presumed was an attempt to establish dominance over the single-source reds.
“My lunch.” She replied.
The polychromatics apparently found this, or maybe the red’s descent into deeper redness, to be tremendously amusing and started to record it on their elaborately runed phones; the glow of arcane sigils between their fingers only added to their rainbow aesthetic, and Ella was forced to admit to herself that they knew how to stick to a theme well.
“I am free.” Whispered the sandwiches. Ella frowned down at them. This was yet another unexpected first from something she’d prepared in the kitchen, and on top of that it seemed quite inaccurate; they were still inside the Tupperware. Most worryingly of all though, she’d never heard a ghost speak before, at least not knowingly, and certainly a ghost had never directly addressed a comment in her direction. This development implied that they might try to hold a conversation with her. Betrayal by her own food was not a welcome prospect.
“They talked!” Gasped one of the blues, whose powers of observation were apparently limitless. She’d wandered over to see what the fuss was about, as had many of her other blue and white colleagues.
“I don’t need an audience for my lunch, thank you.” Ella snapped. “And nor do I need you drawing people over like this.” She hissed down at the tub. The colours continued to swell and sway but the sandwiches offered no comment.
Overhead a red flashing light began to flare rapidly, accompanied by siren. The ghost alarm.
“Oh for goodness…”
“Everybody stay away from the lunch. Ella, are you alright?” Asked one of the white shirts. He was rushing over from the direction of the ghost alarm trigger and pulling on a fluorescent vest that marked him as a ghost warden. He had no real power or knowledge to deal with these things, just an inflated sense of self-importance to throw around until the real experts arrived.
"Ghost detected! Ghost detected! Lockdown of the haunted region in progress." Blared the distorted voice over the internal speaker system, as if everyone didn't already know. Ella rolled her eyes.
"Remain where you are, Ella. We'll get this expunged as quickly as we can." The ghost warden shouted to her. He was close enough that a normal speaking voice would have done the job, but apparently the urgency of the situation required a commensurate increase in volume; just one more reason why conversation with them was to be avoided.
"Right." She said, giving a lazy thumbs up and returning to her book. Whatever was going on with her sandwiches it clearly didn't mean to harm her in the short term, and there was a larger, more present threat of other people trying to engage with her. With almost theatrical nonchalance she turned the page and rested a pensive hand upon her chin, striving not to give the ghost warden the satisfaction of any deference. Immediately he turned to his colleagues.
"There’s definitely going to be a way we can make this emergency response more agile. I mean, I took two strokes off my 14th hole personal best the other day so I reckon I could get this leaner by... oh a good 30% over the next two quarters."
"The next half then?" One of the blue jackets corrected.
"Half? Ha! That's not quite how it works, pal. No, quarters aren't combinable in that way, much like the wheels on my street racer just aren't compatible with the frame of my off-roader. Yep,” he continued, with a pompous sucking of air through the teeth “you need to have the best tools for the job in work and in life; I only settle for the best because I aim for the moon and hit the sun." He made finger-guns and pointed them to an arbitrary location on the ceiling. It was nowhere near where the Sun would be.
"So you miss. Maybe it's because you don't combine your fractions properly."
"It's not missing if you aim for a target and get something better.” Snapped the ghost warden. “You learn that when you overachieve as much as I do; metrics of success become wider and less well-defined. They're more dynamic and agile." He said. "Synergy." He added for good measure.
"If you aim for something and don’t hit it then that's the textbook definition of missing, mate. Do you want me to look it up for you and show you?" Offered the blue jacket ‘helpfully’.
"No... no it's not a miss because I don't miss. I hit better and hit differently. Every time a new face arrives at the club they're blown away with my performance; I get rounds of applause from complete strangers because of how great my posture and form are. And then I drink them under the table too!"
"Alright, shut up now." Growled a rough-tough rag-tag no-nonsense compound-adjective tank of a human. Even through the full body haz-spirit suit he wore it was obvious that his arms could have pulled the canteen itself in two if he was distracted whilst trying to open a packet of crisps. "Ghosts like it quiet and free of empty boasting."
Between his attitude to the white shirt and his calls for all speaking to stop, Ella took an immediate liking to the ghost-responder. In both hands he carried hard-cases bearing the typical warning labels for heavy objects, lids that might pinch fingers, and arcane materials that could, if improperly used, lead to one banishing their house keys to a dimension of infinite sound from whence return is impossible. That one had been added after a consultation with a local locksmith.
There were gasps and muttered conversations between the polychromatics as the ghost-responder walked towards Ella's table. Many of them were continuing to record, while others had turned to impromptu commentators despite the occasional shushing from a white shirt.
"Are you alright there, miss?" The responder asked Ella. She looked up at him from the corner of her eye.
"Yes, thank you." Was her polite but clipped reply, before turning her head down again.
"No feelings of possession or urges to break free from your eldritch shackles to wreak terrible carnage on those who wronged you in life?"
"No."
He peered at her closely, taking appraising looks at every aspect of her bearing as she tried to concentrate on the contents of her book. The protagonist was trying to decide how best to remove the shoes from the cupboard in preparation for re-stocking, and it was unnervingly compelling stuff.
"No gnashing of teeth, no sign of ethereal aura or spectral chains around the body. Subject looks clean for now." The ghost-responder spoke into a dictaphone. "Proceeding with cordon."
"Do you need us to clear out the area?" One of the reds asked directly. "It aligns with our major lifecycle process for the re-distribution of mortal resources in calamitous circumstances to send the immortality deficient to work stations that reduce their chance of possession or death to below the acceptable threshold of 50%."
"Chance is already below 50%. If madam in there isn't a thrall then no-one else is in much direct danger for now. Don't go rolling your face around inside the cordon and you'll be tickety boo."
"Hm." The red huffed, looking affronted. "Well surely it must be safer to send the plebs back to work instead of finishing their lunch."
"No. If they all leave in a hurry now then whatever spectral element is here with us will suspect that something is up and could become enraged."
"Urgh fine. Well if you think of any reason why we might be able to at least dock everyone’s pay then tell us immediately. That's an order."
"I don't report to you."
"But I know who you do report to."
"I need silence, please."
The red huffily sulked away, leaving the ghost-responder to his work, and Ella tried to watch surreptitiously over the top of her book. Both of the responder’s hard cases were now open, and from them he was producing chalky stones with coloured glyphs etched onto the surface. Working quickly but methodically the responder laid them out in a circle around the table, muttering to himself and making fine adjustments to the alignment of each one as he went. It was closer than Ella liked anyone to get to her while eating, in case they should accidentally catch her eye and feel the need to acknowledge that fact vocally, but this chap seemed to be concentrating hard enough to render that risk low. Couple it to the way he was actively resisting sound production from anyone else and he had a free to pass to get as close as he pleased. Within reason, that is; there was no way that she'd tolerate him dragging a separate chair over and joining her at the broken table.
"Rub-a-dub-dub, sling a barrier up!" Incanted the responder, his voice echoing unnaturally with the eldritch power of his ancient words of magic. Immediately the stones sparked and flared with blue and pink energy, linking from one to another with cords of glowing lightning and forming a domed barrier over Ella's table. Through the faint colour and distortion of the barrier she could still see the gawping onlookers, but what little sound they had been making was now muffled and soft.
For the first time, looking back at her sandwich's forceful eruption of light and power, Ella began to appreciate the reality that she was trapped with an otherworldly force in a small bubble. Sure, the ghost responder said that the chance of possession or death was less than 50% but that hardly filled her with a lot of confidence.
"Miss? Can you hear me alright?" The ghost-responder called through the barrier.
"Yes." She replied.
"Good. It seems to me that your sandwich is haunted. Very haunted, judging from the amount of glow it's chucking out." He explained. Ella had surmised as much, but hearing it confirmed by an expert was somewhere between comforting and intimidating. "Did you notice anything strange about it this morning?"
"No. Nothing that caught my attention."
"Loaf of bread not screaming about unfinished business? No ghostly figures floating around the cutlery drawer or taking an interest in your larder?"
"Nothing like that."
"What's in it?" He persisted. Ella was starting to go off the chap; his "no conversation" position was rapidly morphing into "bother Ella about the haunted sandwich" and that move was not popular with her demographic.
"Salad, pickled veg and Anderson's 36. Is this interrogation done now?"
"Salad eh? Yep, that might do it. Lettuce quite often moves to the other side with unfinished business; a grudge against slugs perhaps or the need to make amends for root cluster domination of another plant. Messy stuff. There's lettuce in there, I assume?"
"Yes, there's some Romain."
"Romain? Oh you couldn’t have got a more haunting-prone variant. There should be a warning on the stuff, there really should."
Ella thought back to the early morning when she'd been making the offending lunch item. Nothing had leapt out at her as overtly cursed or spectrally touched.
"It could have been a ghost that entered my lunch after I got here." She speculated; it would spare her the embarrassment of having not noticed a salad with ulterior motives.
"We'd have noticed a spectre leak or roving spirit, miss. There's been no alerts on the runic barriers and no-one's mentioned any occult goings-on around the bins. Besides, they can't get through tubs like that."
"Wait, what?"
"They can't get through tubs like your one. One of the best ghost-blockers on the market that, for exactly this purpose. No-one wants to make a lovely lasagne for themselves and suddenly find it to be absolutely crawling with the restless souls of the lost do they?"
"No, I suppose not."
"But if it's Romain we're dealing with then I'll need to get the right extraction equipment. You'll have to hang on in there on your own, I'm afraid. No-one can come in or talk to you in case they upset the ghost; lettuce in general is on a hair-trigger at the best of times when it comes to temper. Will you be alright? I don't know why I'm asking because there's nothing I can or will do about it if you won't."
"Sit quietly on my own whilst physically separated from everyone else in the building?" Ella asked.
"Yes."
"I'll do my best."
Ella leaned back in her chair and couldn't believe her luck. What had started out as a relatively tawdry day of tedious busywork, and the usual gauntlet of sin more commonly known as her colleagues, she'd now been provided with private quarters thanks to the machinations of an undead leafy green. It was a good job she'd not gone for a brassica instead, otherwise her lunch might have been rendered perfectly inert and benign.
"Thank you, sandwich. You've bought me some extra lunch time today." She said to the Tupperware. The irradiance bursting out of it seemed to effervesce in a manner that Ella's brain and eyes struggled to reconcile, by way of response. She could see eyes peering in from beyond the barrier, apparently concerned about the changing conditions within, but they were of no consequence. Right now she had an ethereal wall between herself and the tedium that was other humans, and a good book in front of her. She turned her eyes down to the page and smiled.
Eldritch barriers of all kinds, in Ella’s experience, muffled sound in about the same way that a fogged up window muffles light. They also converted some of that sound into light, which wasn’t something that Ella had observed by analogue in fogged windows; if she’d ever been able to hear light after taking a shower without turning on the extractor fan then she’d have had major questions in need of an answer. As it was, the occasional flare of crackling pink light caught the periphery of Ella’s vision while she read, and a strange bed of unfocused and indistinguishable sound sat at the bottom of her hearing from the ongoing discussions outside the dome.
She turned the page. Events were unfolding whereby only one shoe out of a pair was immediately obvious to the protagonist, and Ella couldn’t help worrying that it might never be found. It reminded her of similar traumas in her own life, most often when she was already late in leaving for work, and that very real fear of having to not only wear something less appropriate to work, but also go shoe shopping afterwards, came flooding back. A coruscating wave of brighter light rippled up along the beams that emanated from the sandwich.
“Are you concerned?” Whispered a voice like salad and Anderson’s 36 between two slices of wholemeal. Ella would never have thought it possible to distinguish that about a voice but, in the moment, it just seemed obvious. Also, even more than obvious, it seemed enormously shocking to hear it in the first place. She evidenced it with a yelp, as follows.
“Augh!”
“That’s the sort of sound someone might make when they are concerned about something.” Assessed the voice of what could only logically be the sandwich ghost. Ella stared at the Tupperware for a moment while her heart played the song of a thousand bongos. The ghostly light flickered.
“I… no. I’m alright. You just surprised me.” She said.
“You can’t hide it from me, and you don’t need to try. It feels like something has made you worry, and that was even before you made the noise.” Wailed the sandwich ghost. In her heart of hearts Ella knew that the speech came out more like a calm and measured statement than a wail, but it just felt wrong to categorise any vocalisation from a spectre as something other than wailing. “If I am the source of your concern then you needn’t worry; I’ll do no harm to you.”
“I wasn’t worried about you.” Ella clarified, grateful for the confirmation that her sandwiches didn’t intend to bring pain down upon her. “I was sitting here quite calmly and happily reading my book, but then when you spoke it made me jump and that’s why I… you can feel that I’m worrying?”
“Yes, I can. Did you worry about something you read? Or about the dome?” Speculated the ethereal voice. “No… you felt happy about the dome, if anything.”
“The book reminded me of a time when I couldn’t find my shoe for half a minute.”
“Half a minute?”
“Yes.”
“Hardly seems like a huge length of time to be without a shoe.”
“Yes, well, I was in a hurry wasn’t I?” Ella snapped back.
“Alright, fair enough. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s difficult when you can sense the essence and emotions of mortals around you, though. You know?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ella said. “Actually, no. I don’t really know what that’s like but I think it’s clear enough from the context and general empathy.”
The ghost’s light pulsed appreciatively.
“As long as you aren’t really feeling deep panic over the fate of a shoe then everything is OK.”
“Yep. Thank you though.”
The sandwich gave a glow of acknowledgement through its aura, and then there was silence. After a moment Ella looked cautiously down at her book again and managed to make it through a whole sentence before being interrupted again.
“My name is Wendy.” Said the haunting voice. After a calm chat about whether or not Ella was worried about lost shoes it was hard to keep thinking of the mode of speech as wailing.
“Hello Wendy. Nice to meet you.” Ella replied without looking up. Malevolent or benign, her tablemate was starting to feel a bit chatty and eye-contact was therefore too risky.
“Likewise.” There was another short silence, roughly half a line of inner shoe-arrangement monologue long. “What’s your name?”
“Ella.” Replied the eponymous.
“Ah. Lovely. I like that name.”
Ella wasn’t sure of how to respond to that. She could say thanks but really the choice had been made by her parents so it wasn’t much of a compliment. In fact, as a statement, it wasn’t much of anything. It was just a filler noise to acknowledge something that needed very little response, and exactly why she’d been trying to eat alone.
“I see that I’m forming part of your lunch. Do you plan to eat me?” This got Ella to look up again. It was the kind of question that at least warranted eye-contact in an answer. “I wouldn’t hold it against you.”
“Technically you’re part of my lunch, yes. The bulk of it, really. But, er, no I don’t think I’ll be eating my sandwich anymore. Seems…” Ella pondered. What did it seem? Dangerous, probably. Eating a ghost could scarcely be considered a sage action. She’d heard many stories about ghosts making their way into mortal hosts and they all carried dire warnings of possession and consumption, with associated ghoulish hijinks. Ella wasn’t one to worry unduly about ghosts, and Wendy didn’t seem much like the vengeful type, but even so there was no need to tempt fate. Besides, eating someone with whom you’ve shared a table and exchanged names would just come across as plain rude. That’d do it. “… impolite and unnecessary.” She finally said.
“I suppose, in a sense, yes. I’m grateful nonetheless; I wasn’t much looking forward to the prospect of being eaten or having to inhabit an unfamiliar body.” Wendy replied, quite understandably.
“You’re welcome.”
“I apologise for stealing away your lunch and making you go hungry though. Not very neighbourly of me.”
“Oh. That’s alright. Sorry for making you into a sandwich in the first place.”
“No bother.” Dismissed Wendy, with the glowing-aura equivalent of an affable hand wave. “These things are bound to happen sooner or later when you’re a haunted piece of lettuce.”
“Yeah, true enough.” Ella mumbled. There was another pause, and the mortal eyes drifted down towards paper once more. This time, however, they couldn’t quite manage to take anything in, on account of the mortal brain feeling a trifle preoccupied by the ghostly guest. Frustratingly she was a distraction even without talking.
“Are you actually the ghost of some lettuce?” Ella found herself asking. Hearing the words out loud immediately made her realise how much it sounded like an insult. “I mean, that’s what the ghost responder said you were, and you just described yourself as a haunted piece of lettuce. I don’t mean to imply that you have the intelligence or conversational skills of a lunch vegetable.” She quickly added. Wendy’s aura went through a range of colours and visual effects that Ella couldn’t easily get a read on. It was surprising to her how little cross-over there was between body language and light shows.
“I do have the form of one.” The ghost finally answered. “So it’s not an unreasonable query, but it is a strange notion to have had in your head that lettuce ghosts roam the earth." She assessed. "It would presuppose that lettuce has a soul, and that Romain in particular has enough of a soul to leave an imprint on the world when it was picked."
"So you're not the ghost of a Romain lettuce then. No, of course you aren't. It would be preposterous to think that you were."
"Exactly. I'm the ghost of an iceberg lettuce."
"Wait – what?"
"I'm the ghost of an iceberg lettuce which has inhabited the physical form of the Romain lettuce that you layered so casually into your sandwich this morning."
Ella flapped her mouth silently. She didn't know whether to be more apologetic for mis-lettucing Wendy or offended at being accused of being casual about adding salad. It hadn't been meticulous culinary artistry by any means, but there had been a definite and undeniable amount of care that she would have thanked Wendy to credit.
"I... I see." Ella finally said. "So what you said about it being a strange notion to presuppose that lettuce had a soul, and Romain having a stronger one in particular; that was about right?"
"Except that it’s iceberg which has the strong soul instead, yes."
"Oh, right. Yes."
"Because icebergs have hidden depths!" Cried Wendy, before the dome was filled with distorted ethereal laughter. Sounds are not water as a general rule, but this particular sound had ripples and waves as if it had been extracted from a glacial lake, and it left Ella feeling just as cold. Something about rapturous joy coming from a lettuce ghost didn't sit right with the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Oh don't feel like that! It was just a joke." Wendy said once she’d calmed down a little.
"A joke?” Ella replied, pushing her hair back with one hand. “Then you are or are not the ghost of an iceberg lettuce?"
"Correct." Wendy said. The ethereal glow smirked. Ella gave it a flat look.
"Oh buck up. I'm the one who's dead. I am not the ghost of an iceberg lettuce. I'm the ghost of a person who made their way into your lunch. But I really am inhabiting your Romain lettuce; it's by far the most accommodating of your fillings."
In the gently glowing dome, sitting across from her haunted lunch and hearing the muffled babble of the ghost responders outside, Ella rubbed at her face and wished she'd never asked Wendy anything at all.
"Right. Well it's been lovely talking to you Wendy, but I won't keep you any longer. I'll just get on with reading this and you can get on with, er, whatever it is ghosts do when they're between bread."
Her eyes fell to the page once more as the glow brightened a little.
"I can feel your emotions, remember? Ghosts normally use that stuff for general malevolence, recognising when someone has let their guard down before giving them a real good fright, but it's also useful to know when conversation has made someone feel uncomfortable."
Ella, a veteran of pretending not to hear someone when it was patently obvious that she could, gave no response.
"I can feel that too. Clearly I upset you with the lettuce thing; it's just gallows humour, and that sort of thing plays well in the undead community. Maybe not so much in present company. I remember how precious my lunch breaks were to me though, so if you want to read in peace then that’s fine. You can have your very own R.I.P.” Wendy said, somehow managing to wink via the medium of otherworldly glows.
“Thank you.” Ella replied with a newfound reticence. “That’s very understanding of you.” There was a sympathetic burst of light and then they were back to the normal eldritch glow.
It seemed that the book’s protagonist had finally settled on using a heel-volume ranking system to organise their sub-stair collection. On one extreme were the thin-soled ballet shows with no heel at all of which to speak, and at the other were the industrially clompy platform boots from a bygone era. Ella found herself wondering whether Wendy had ever owned such a mighty article of footwear, or if she would try to organise her own shoes by volume under any circumstances. Despite it being incapable of impacting Ella’s life in any way, she nonetheless felt a compulsion to know the answer. The next sentence in her book had been read three times before she finally accepted how little attention she was now paying. When the passage in question was so thrilling in its own right, a consideration of whether or not hollow soles should come before or after solid soles, that was quite a shock. She could take it no more.
“Would you ever organise your shoe collection by the volume of the heel?” Ella asked.
“By what?”
“The volume of the heel. How much space the heel occupies.”
“I don’t think that I would have ever done that in life, no. I didn’t have enough of a huge volumetric range among my heels to make that an intuitive means of organisation.” Assessed the ghost in the sandwich.
“Hm. Me either, really.”
“Who would ever choose that system? And why? Nobody ever selects their footwear on that basis. Nor do I think about heels in enough detail to be able to think ‘yep, those shoes will be about 60% along the line’.”
Ella laughed. It turned out to be quite nice to laugh with someone, rather than laughing at their heartbreakingly tedious canteen interactions.
“I hadn’t thought about it in that much detail. It’s just what the person in this book is doing.”
“Does it say why?”
“The details get a bit glossed over and it just says they… ‘decided upon the heel volume system as the obvious and only logical choice’. No other explanation, but I guess what they’ve said is enough. They chose it because it was obviously the best.” Shrugged Ella.
“And that’s an exciting read is it? A vicarious account of shoe collection administration?”
Ella tightened a little in defense.
“I don’t know about exciting, but I’m having a good time with it. Nothing much is happening but it’s a good ride nonetheless.”
Softly billowing ribbons of light ran up and down the general illumination cast by Wendy.
“I guess I can see what you mean. I always liked reading when I was mortal but never tried the footwear logistics genre. Maybe I should be haunting a library instead of your sandwich.”
Ella’s deprived stomach rumbled and gargled with gastric agreement.
“How did you come to be in there? Was it a conscious decision, if that’s not too personal of a question, I mean?” For the first time Ella noticed Wendy’s glow make contact with the inside of the come. It crackled and fizzed against the barrier like a wet cabbage leaf thrown against a telegraph wire by a rogue grocer.
“I don’t recall clearly.” She answered. “Memory gets fuzzy without a corporeal form in which to store it. You’d be surprised how much this lettuce can remember though.”
“If the answer is anything above ‘none’ then yeah, I am very surprised.”
“It doesn’t have any memories of its own, in case you’re wondering; it’s just very good at holding mine for a while.”
The unnecessary concept of lettuce memory now irreversibly occupied a space in Ella’s brain. Quietly, in the distant background of her mind, the safe storage location of her spare front door key dissolved away.
“And what happens if the lettuce starts to decay? Will you start to get sloppier with it?” She asked, immediately regretting her choice of adjective.
“I’ll just leave it, if you’ll pardon the pun. Actually, I’ll leave it even if you don’t pardon the pun. Take myself into something new. Could try being a haunted waistcoat this time, or a possessed shrew with unfinished business among the undergrowth.”
There was a deep, concussive bang that rang through the dome and put a hard stop to Wendy’s pontification. Through the distortion of the barrier Ella recognised the ghost responder and some heavy equipment. Exorcism gear bedecked in coloured runes sat around her table.
“You’re worrying again. Thinking about the misplaced shoe?”
“No, no. Although now that you’ve raised the possibility of a possessed shoe incident, such as might enable one to walk away of its own accord, I am starting to worry about how I’ll mitigate against it in future. No, the cause of my concern is that they’re stepping things up outside; getting ready for an exorcism by the looks of it. I don’t think I would like for that to happen to you.”
“Exorcised?!” Gasped Wendy, insofar as anything could gasp in the absence of lungs. “But what happens then? Will they keep me in a trap and experiment on me? Have me somehow destroyed?” Her colourful glow had turned a deep, blood red and pulsed like an emergency alert bulb.
“I don’t know, they don’t tell us that sort of thing! I… I can try to smuggle you out in my book. I’ll take you to a library . You can haunt the Dewey decimal system and ready everything.” Ella panic-planned out of sympathy.”
“They’ll see that I’m not in the Tupperware and detect me in the book. I’m a fairly obvious presence; it’s useless trying to hide me.”
“We can put the book in the Tupperware and leave the sandwich on the table! They couldn’t detect you in the Tupperware before because it’s ghost-proof, they said, so they’ll assume you’re hiding between slices of bread.”
“And when the sandwich isn’t emitting my glorious light show? These people are professional ghost trappers; they won’t be fooled that easily.” Insisted Wendy.
“It’s the only chance we have. You’re trapped in this dome so you won’t be getting out unless you let either me or them carry you out. Get in the book.”
“No, I have a better idea.” Wendy said, suddenly calm. Her light returned immediately to its gentle pulsating glow of colours. Slowly the sandwich rose from its plastic container, dropping crumbs and small pieces of salad coated in Anderson’s 36. It rotated gently in the air for a few seconds, giving Ella a great view of the reason why she’d be hungry all afternoon, and then dropped limp to the table with a wet thud. Left hovering was an amorphous irradiance. “I’ll just make my way out of here now, like this.”
As casually as a heavy goods vehicle crushing an abandoned lime, with Ella looking on in similarly confused disbelief, Wendy drifted forwards and phased easily through the dome. It crackled and sparked against her as she went but, apparently, caused her to experience no difficulty at all.
“What?!” Ella cried. Wendy’s form came floating back in, cackling the spectral equivalent of her head off.
“Oh that was good! That was funny!” She laughed. “You should have seen their faces out there when I emerged!” She paused upon seeing Ella’s exasperation. “Yes, it was a lot like that!”
Dumbly Ella pointed from sandwich to barrier to Wendy to Tupperware. It wasn’t clear to Wendy or even herself what she meant to communicate.
“Oh come on now. You didn’t think that all these wards would work, right? As if a Tupperware could block ghostly movement somehow when it’s made for storing food.”
“But… but…”
“I was hiding myself in the lettuce just to see what it was like being a leaf, and then I thought I’d pop out for a chat because you were on your own.”
“So the barrier means nothing?”
“Nope. Don’t recall claiming that it did mean anything to me, either. Nor does their threat of ‘exorcism’.” She laughed again. “Oh we have a good giggle among ourselves when they try it normally, Ella. Sometimes we go along with it just to make them feel good and drift away when they’re not paying attention.”
Every ghost-safety measure on the site, and every warning they’d been given about malevolent spirits and the importance of keeping eldritch equipment in good order flashed through Ella’s mind.
“It’s all nonsense. None of it works…”
“Pretty much.” Wendy said. “Look, we don’t mean any harm, and even if we did mean harm there’s not much we can do to hurt you. If it makes your ghost responders feel important to wear their high vis jacket then more power to them, but they’re just playthings.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier? What was the all ‘I am free’ business about?” Demanded Ella. Just when she’d been starting to like Wendy, and had even offered to rescue her, it turned out that she’d been lying all along. Her determination to only ever eat alone was redoubled.
“Oh don’t be mad. I thought you’d appreciate a bit of peace and quiet from the outside, and maybe you’d want some company on the inside who isn’t always jabbering on about the same old nonsense. I’ve been haunting this cafeteria ever since I died here, so I know all too well what it’s like. The dome was a real gift. And I talked because I knew it’d spook everyone else into panicking and that’s just too much fun to ignore.”
“Wait- you died in here?! Surely I’d know you?”
“Nope. Night shift. And they covered it up; bad press to have your jacket potatoes confirmed as lethal, and it was kind of my fault anyway for sprinkling the top of mine with fine shards of steel. I was having one of those days when I got everything mixed up.” Wendy replied matter-of-factly. “Oh, and do be aware that a lot of that food is just dreadfully cursed right now. I wouldn’t go near it.”
“I never do, but now I have even more reason.” Ella replied numbly, still trying to process the news of an unknown colleague’s covered-up demise. She knew that communication was poor around the workplace but the loss of a human life and the presence of a ghost was something that usually needed to be discussed. “But if you died here then you can’t have been in my lettuce when I made my sandwich this morning!”
“Oh, yeah. No, that was a bit of a… joke as well. I was hoping to string this along for a good few hours but then I got carried away with the whole exorcism thing; couldn’t pass up that chance.”
“Then you did everything here just to mess with me. And with them?”
“It was a good part of my motivation, yes, but I honestly did also want to give you the gift of a little peace. I feel sorry for you when I see you trying to have some isolation and the best you can do is a broken table nestled between collections of loudmouths.”
Ella frowned up at the levitating glow for a few moments, trying to wrap her head around what was and wasn’t reliable information. She didn’t much appreciate being taken for a fool, or made to panic unnecessarily over the consequences of an exorcism, but equally she had to respect someone making the best of their lot after a negligent cover-up of their death. And, if nothing else, it had been nice to have a break from the babble of the canteen. As much as her colleagues might have questions about this whole haunted sandwich incident, it was nothing she couldn’t determinedly ignore.
“Thank you, then. I appreciate what you’ve tried to do, even if I’m still a bit annoyed about all the lettuce lies.”
“I’d love to say I’m sorry but it was funny, and I know I’d do it again.” Smirked Wendy. “If you find yourself having a strong emotional response to misinformation about leafy greens then perhaps you need to reassess your priorities. You’re good company, Ella; whether you like it or not.”
“And you were occasionally tolerable.” Ella replied. “I suppose.”
Wendy glowed with contentment. Or perhaps it was mockery. Ella wasn’t really sure she could tell anymore.
“Anyway, I’d better leave you to it. But I’m going to take you up on the offer of a trip to the library; you’ve reminded me that there are better places to have unfinished business, and this canteen has been depressing me for long enough.” Wendy winked. As ever, there was no physical action that looked even remotely like a single closing eye, but Ella knew what the deal was, somehow, even as the light focused itself down into the pages of her book and silently faded away.
“I’m not so sure that this is a good idea.” Ella said to the pages. There was no response. “Wendy? Are you there?” Still silence and darkness. “Wendy seriously, I don’t want to get accused of ghost smuggling.”
From outside there were more sounds of motion and action. The ghost-responders were, presumably, getting closer to taking down the barrier and attempting in vain to expunge Wendy from the now inert sandwich. With a sigh she looked over at her former lunch, decided she still didn’t fancy it, and resolved to make the most of her isolation while she still had it. There was no use in sitting around bored or worried while the ghost responders finished their redundant work, especially when she could instead be enjoying the peace. With a final nudge to test for any response from Wendy, Ella returned to her reading. For the first time ever, not that she could feel a thing of it, the words stared right back up at her.
The distinction was not lost on Ella and her acute over-analysis of the situation. When one had spent upwards of ten years avoiding falling into the pitfalls of speaking to the same people for upwards of twenty years, lunchtimes were much more on the quiet side. She'd successfully dodged having to hear the more tedious aspects of her co-workers' lives by side-stepping even their interesting yarns. If one of them managed to slip a 'hello' in while she was passing them in the corridor she considered it to be a major failure on her part; that was largely the reason why she'd invented the short-lived workplace blinkers to isolate herself from eye-contact. Of course, that had backfired terribly when she'd been called in by the health and safety crew for 'literally walking around blind without reason' and then had to suffer a whole hour with the head of human resources as to why she'd felt it to be necessarily in the first place. It had been one of the more difficult abject silences of her life to sustain, and dodging eye-contact for a whole hour when her chair faced her interrogator's was a never-ending game of cat and mouse, but Ella had proven to be more committed to the cause in the end.
Every day was the same in that canteen. Bright white light from the humming fluorescent strips overhead was belched and spewed into the room so that no matter what time of day or of year it was in the outside world, the canteen showed no variance. Puddles of water on the polyurethane flooring always reflected up at her, and the white wipe-clean tables always seemed just bright enough to make it challenging to maintain an appetite. Opposite the door, at the far end of the canteen, was the long metal counter behind which lurked dubiously heated beans, potatoes with more ancestry and heritage than she had, and a selection of sausage rolls which were, according to the tedious discussions she couldn’t help but frequently overhear 'surprisingly good, considering the colour and shape of them'. To choose food from that aluminium torture chamber was to play Russian roulette with one's gastrointestinal integrity; she wasn't sure that what lurked behind those sneeze guards was digestible, let alone edible, and the longer she'd been visiting the more she'd begun to question whether the sneeze guard was to protect the food from the staff or the staff from the food. Given how many layers of plastic gloves, hairnets, aprons and, in some cases, full gas masks were worn by the servers, the answer wouldn't be a comforting one. Quite aside from the medical disasters that would await if she ever became so weak or foolish as to eat the canteen food, however, there would be the trap of small-talk with the server, something they might insist upon while they performed whatever arcane rituals it must have taken to exorcise the potatoes from their demonic nests and place them onto Styrofoam plates. Although preferable to hearing people who did exactly the same job as her talk about their day as if it was new or exciting to any of them, Ella still couldn't face the prospect of plastering a smile across her face while discussing how, yes, the rain was still falling downwards rather than up, and no, it wasn’t very fair that everyone's left hand had to be emblazoned with an odd company logo in reddy-grey ink. Even thinking about it bored her to the point of yawning.
For those reasons, and many more that Ella would give if anyone could pin her down for conversation on the matter, she would never visit that far end of the canteen. The close end wasn't much better, however; this was where table density was highest, and habitual cliques of jaw-waggling thralls to the whims of the organisation would gather there to make inane noises at one another. To the left of the door was always a sea of blue over-jackets, stained with oil or resin or varnish or embalming fluid or some other liquid that could, in a better life, have carried some notion of curiosity with it. One-by-one they all went round and pretended to listen to one other, while secretly waiting for their chance to show that they’d had the most difficult job that day and that their experience & knowledge was greatest. None of them were right, Ella had concluded.
On the right hand side, however, were legions of white shirts who worked hard and played harder if their claims were anything to go by. Ella had never felt that playing two rounds of golf or drinking a small amount of liquor constituted playing particularly hard at all, nor did their talk of how other businesses had adopted eldritch processing in a much more 'agile' or 'tactical' or 'utterly charming and lovely' way make her feel like their work was anything but huggably soft. Huggably; she'd been indoctrinated by Big Nappy into saying that word. Squashy, pudgy, yielding or perhaps spineless would have been better descriptors for these white-shirted workers.
Being near either clique was unacceptable, for although she'd never be pulled into their feeble attempts at 'conversation' the mere act of overhearing it would wear her mind down to the point of uselessness.
Deeper into the canteen, then, it was always necessary to trudge, along her usual path to the broken table that sat hard against one of the floor to ceiling windows that offered spectacular views over the central loading area, the processing plant, and the sanctifying pools; each one offered a slightly different shade of grey, with the occasional flash of abyssal red or infernal purple from a chimney or vent. On one side the metal arm that connected seat to table had rotted through, probably thanks to the corrosive ichor that passed for tea in the canteen's urns. That the urns themselves hadn't dissolved was presumably only thanks to some powerful sorcery on the part of the maintenance team; certainly the glowing yellow runes around the top of each one spoke of protective wards and a complete disregard for flavour or being potable. Regardless of the lamentable hot drink provisions, however, and whatever the true cause of the seat-arm being so thoroughly hewn from the table, it meant that only a single seat remained; the perfect spot for Ella. That the other half of the table was also shattered was an added bonus to ward away any particularly determined guests. It was almost as if the table had been designed and placed there exactly for her as a result of some divine providence, but Ella dared not think too much about that just in case it led to communication with some kind of deity; even the divine would run out of things to say eventually, and it was a wholly unacceptable concept to become disinterested in their sacred stories.
No person was an island, she’d heard it said. Most often it was being said in reference to her isolationist tendencies, but she was never paying enough attention to really take the message on board. It also held true for her lunch table, and although she would have welcomed the addition of a moat, system of rivers or inland sea, it was only in a metaphorical capacity. Around her were further clusters of unwelcome others. The polychromatic order of youths, who had never had anything to say and talked about nothing instead, were probably the best of the bunch. Appealing to her they may not have been, but at least they’d never given into stagnation; in that regard they were the starkest opposites of the grey pair that any mind, poisoned, divine or otherwise, could hope to contrive.
There was no small-talk with the grey pair. No talk of the past or speculation on what the night might hold, and not a shred of discussion about the morning’s work or debate over whether deadlines would be met or failed. There were barely even words; their interactions had degraded and dissolved down to a series of grunts and nods. The odd flicker of a facial expression formed some limited communication, but there was no heavy lifting being done by anything except the subtext. They wandered in together in their drabness, made a few acknowledging noises as each of them pulled out a grey meal to eat, and then they sat there in almost complete silence. They were further gone than anyone else, but somehow never left one another’s side. Every now and again Ella would catch one touching the hand of the other and it would set her mind to ticking, but those thoughts were soon washed away by disdain for the reds.
While the blue coats might have seen their conversation as competition, the white shirts as an opportunity to demonstrate how far beneath them work was, the polychromes a vector for waste and the greys a strange ballet of apathy, they were obviously all together by choice. When the reds sat down, Ella couldn’t help but question whether even that was true. They were less uniform that the others; maybe it would be a red tie on one of them, red socks on another, a dress or shirt or a bold crucifix on a crimson chain wrapped around one bicep, but the red was always there somewhere. That was the start and end of what united them, for although they lacked many of the flaws that beset the other cliques, at least those cliques seemed to like one another just a little bit. It might not have been an in-your-face affection from the greys, nor a commonality that transcended their employment from the blue coats, but they liked and respected something about one another. The reds were, apparently, too important for that. They knew that they had to be seen as a united front, but no matter how broadly they smiled, or how they nodded along and praised ‘positive forward thinking intentions that certainly don’t not meet with the principles along which we should be thinking’, there was no way to fool oneself into believing that they really liked one another. They were prisoners of one another’s company, and the walls were the eyes of all those around them.
Still, Ella didn’t much care. They were quieter and less repetitive than the blue coats and white shirts so they were better ‘company’ for the plains around her haven. Their position within the organisation also made their chosen location unassailable by the other cliques, and therefore it was at least a reliable buffer against anyone else moving over and disrupting the peace. A necessary evil, she sometimes thought of it. Other times, an evil necessity. Whichever way round it went, she sat behind it as her bulwark of bull and ate her lunch in peace. There was no risk that anyone would try to engage her in conversation, and therefore no way that those relationships could descend into dull, grey tedium.
In her bastion of blessed isolation Ella sat down, pulled out her small green Tupperware from the bag she wore across her back, and set a cup of hot chocolate down in front of herself. Next to emerge from the backpack was an increasingly ragged paperback book. It was a curious story of nothing much in particular that somehow still managed to hold her attention, despite the fact that she could barely describe to anyone what had happened so far. Or, more to the point, she could barely have described it to anyone if she’d managed to make the mistake of engaging in a chat with them. It was hardly a risk at this stage.
Although the harsh strip lights above weren’t much for creating a relaxed or comfortable atmosphere, they were at least good for reading faded text on old, yellowed pages. Carefully Ella opened up the aged novel and placed her bookmark in its habitual spot to the side. The protagonist had been busily trying to reorganise their shoe cupboard when she’d left off the previous lunch time, and for reasons that Ella couldn’t justify to herself, let alone to anyone else, she felt deeply invested in seeing it through the conclusion. Would the loafers occupy higher shelves while high heels took the ironically low ground? Would they be loaded up and ordered by frequency of use, or would their general application and styling hold the secret to how they were arranged? There were so many options available that her mind couldn’t help expanding into the many fractals of possibility. This was better than agreeing with her colleagues that the weather could have easily been better or worse any day.
As her eyes ran across a description of the shelving unit underneath the protagonist’s staircase, one of Ella’s hands moved over to the Tupperware. It felt oddly cold to the touch, more so than normal, but maybe the air conditioning had been playing up in the office and directing an arctic blast towards the backpack. It had happened before, generally in the winter when it shouldn’t have been running in the first place, and usually could be traced to a misplaced runestone on one of the compressor units. It didn’t concern Ella either way; all it had done was bring her backpack closer to being a fridge and that could only work in the favour of her lunch. As a focal point for people to gather and use communally, the refrigerator was an obvious spot to be avoided and Ella had never once even considered putting her lunch inside it. Crafting sandwiches that didn’t rely on low temperatures to avoid spoiling over a four hour period had been the simpler solution. Besides, the fridge was opened and closed so often that, in all likelihood, it functioned more like a tepid white cupboard than an actual means of preserving comestibles.
With a practised deftness that she herself couldn’t comprehend, because she’d never really watched herself do it, Ella popped the Tupperware lid cleanly off with one hand. Normally this didn’t cause much of a change in the local environment in and of itself, unless the sandwiches had been prepared with a particularly pungent filling like salmon puree or bleach jam, and that was what first tipped Ella off that something was awry. Even with stinky sandwiches the initial effect was limited to a nasal assault, and only later did any audible impact occur in the form of the nearby cliques making ‘urgh’ sounds, or asking who’d brought the toilet cleaner in for lunch again. When the lid was flung away this time, however, a gurgling, echoing, wet wail immediately erupted from Ella’s sandwiches. Pink and green light streamed and strobed from within the plastic tub, casting deep shadows on the walls and colouring the whole room with their eldritch vibrancy.
“What in the blazes?!” Yelped one of the reds. All was not as they had declared it should be, and therefore their oar needed to be thrown into the mix. “What’s that light?”
“It doesn’t align with our four-point three-tier strategic deployment initiative decision as determined in the gold-team’s pow-wow.” Replied another. The density of utter rot made Ella feel sick, but she resisted the urge to look over. It was far more urgent that she kept a watch on her unusually luminous meal. She leaned in closer as one of the reds complained about this not being the proper escalation route for raising concerns about intra-organisational luminance emergence, and peered at the contents of the tub. Just as she remembered, it was wholemeal bread with a filling of salad leaves, pickled vegetables and Anderson’s Number 36 Non-Arcane Spread™. Completely contrary to her recollection, however, the sandwich had taken on a strangely coruscating aura of the colours that had started to flow from the tub. This revelation had solved the mystery of the light source, which was good, but introduced the mystery of the glowing lunch, which was less good. All-in-all, there was more left to learn.
“Ella! What have you got in there?” Demanded one of the reds. This one was red of tie and of face, which she presumed was an attempt to establish dominance over the single-source reds.
“My lunch.” She replied.
The polychromatics apparently found this, or maybe the red’s descent into deeper redness, to be tremendously amusing and started to record it on their elaborately runed phones; the glow of arcane sigils between their fingers only added to their rainbow aesthetic, and Ella was forced to admit to herself that they knew how to stick to a theme well.
“I am free.” Whispered the sandwiches. Ella frowned down at them. This was yet another unexpected first from something she’d prepared in the kitchen, and on top of that it seemed quite inaccurate; they were still inside the Tupperware. Most worryingly of all though, she’d never heard a ghost speak before, at least not knowingly, and certainly a ghost had never directly addressed a comment in her direction. This development implied that they might try to hold a conversation with her. Betrayal by her own food was not a welcome prospect.
“They talked!” Gasped one of the blues, whose powers of observation were apparently limitless. She’d wandered over to see what the fuss was about, as had many of her other blue and white colleagues.
“I don’t need an audience for my lunch, thank you.” Ella snapped. “And nor do I need you drawing people over like this.” She hissed down at the tub. The colours continued to swell and sway but the sandwiches offered no comment.
Overhead a red flashing light began to flare rapidly, accompanied by siren. The ghost alarm.
“Oh for goodness…”
“Everybody stay away from the lunch. Ella, are you alright?” Asked one of the white shirts. He was rushing over from the direction of the ghost alarm trigger and pulling on a fluorescent vest that marked him as a ghost warden. He had no real power or knowledge to deal with these things, just an inflated sense of self-importance to throw around until the real experts arrived.
"Ghost detected! Ghost detected! Lockdown of the haunted region in progress." Blared the distorted voice over the internal speaker system, as if everyone didn't already know. Ella rolled her eyes.
"Remain where you are, Ella. We'll get this expunged as quickly as we can." The ghost warden shouted to her. He was close enough that a normal speaking voice would have done the job, but apparently the urgency of the situation required a commensurate increase in volume; just one more reason why conversation with them was to be avoided.
"Right." She said, giving a lazy thumbs up and returning to her book. Whatever was going on with her sandwiches it clearly didn't mean to harm her in the short term, and there was a larger, more present threat of other people trying to engage with her. With almost theatrical nonchalance she turned the page and rested a pensive hand upon her chin, striving not to give the ghost warden the satisfaction of any deference. Immediately he turned to his colleagues.
"There’s definitely going to be a way we can make this emergency response more agile. I mean, I took two strokes off my 14th hole personal best the other day so I reckon I could get this leaner by... oh a good 30% over the next two quarters."
"The next half then?" One of the blue jackets corrected.
"Half? Ha! That's not quite how it works, pal. No, quarters aren't combinable in that way, much like the wheels on my street racer just aren't compatible with the frame of my off-roader. Yep,” he continued, with a pompous sucking of air through the teeth “you need to have the best tools for the job in work and in life; I only settle for the best because I aim for the moon and hit the sun." He made finger-guns and pointed them to an arbitrary location on the ceiling. It was nowhere near where the Sun would be.
"So you miss. Maybe it's because you don't combine your fractions properly."
"It's not missing if you aim for a target and get something better.” Snapped the ghost warden. “You learn that when you overachieve as much as I do; metrics of success become wider and less well-defined. They're more dynamic and agile." He said. "Synergy." He added for good measure.
"If you aim for something and don’t hit it then that's the textbook definition of missing, mate. Do you want me to look it up for you and show you?" Offered the blue jacket ‘helpfully’.
"No... no it's not a miss because I don't miss. I hit better and hit differently. Every time a new face arrives at the club they're blown away with my performance; I get rounds of applause from complete strangers because of how great my posture and form are. And then I drink them under the table too!"
"Alright, shut up now." Growled a rough-tough rag-tag no-nonsense compound-adjective tank of a human. Even through the full body haz-spirit suit he wore it was obvious that his arms could have pulled the canteen itself in two if he was distracted whilst trying to open a packet of crisps. "Ghosts like it quiet and free of empty boasting."
Between his attitude to the white shirt and his calls for all speaking to stop, Ella took an immediate liking to the ghost-responder. In both hands he carried hard-cases bearing the typical warning labels for heavy objects, lids that might pinch fingers, and arcane materials that could, if improperly used, lead to one banishing their house keys to a dimension of infinite sound from whence return is impossible. That one had been added after a consultation with a local locksmith.
There were gasps and muttered conversations between the polychromatics as the ghost-responder walked towards Ella's table. Many of them were continuing to record, while others had turned to impromptu commentators despite the occasional shushing from a white shirt.
"Are you alright there, miss?" The responder asked Ella. She looked up at him from the corner of her eye.
"Yes, thank you." Was her polite but clipped reply, before turning her head down again.
"No feelings of possession or urges to break free from your eldritch shackles to wreak terrible carnage on those who wronged you in life?"
"No."
He peered at her closely, taking appraising looks at every aspect of her bearing as she tried to concentrate on the contents of her book. The protagonist was trying to decide how best to remove the shoes from the cupboard in preparation for re-stocking, and it was unnervingly compelling stuff.
"No gnashing of teeth, no sign of ethereal aura or spectral chains around the body. Subject looks clean for now." The ghost-responder spoke into a dictaphone. "Proceeding with cordon."
"Do you need us to clear out the area?" One of the reds asked directly. "It aligns with our major lifecycle process for the re-distribution of mortal resources in calamitous circumstances to send the immortality deficient to work stations that reduce their chance of possession or death to below the acceptable threshold of 50%."
"Chance is already below 50%. If madam in there isn't a thrall then no-one else is in much direct danger for now. Don't go rolling your face around inside the cordon and you'll be tickety boo."
"Hm." The red huffed, looking affronted. "Well surely it must be safer to send the plebs back to work instead of finishing their lunch."
"No. If they all leave in a hurry now then whatever spectral element is here with us will suspect that something is up and could become enraged."
"Urgh fine. Well if you think of any reason why we might be able to at least dock everyone’s pay then tell us immediately. That's an order."
"I don't report to you."
"But I know who you do report to."
"I need silence, please."
The red huffily sulked away, leaving the ghost-responder to his work, and Ella tried to watch surreptitiously over the top of her book. Both of the responder’s hard cases were now open, and from them he was producing chalky stones with coloured glyphs etched onto the surface. Working quickly but methodically the responder laid them out in a circle around the table, muttering to himself and making fine adjustments to the alignment of each one as he went. It was closer than Ella liked anyone to get to her while eating, in case they should accidentally catch her eye and feel the need to acknowledge that fact vocally, but this chap seemed to be concentrating hard enough to render that risk low. Couple it to the way he was actively resisting sound production from anyone else and he had a free to pass to get as close as he pleased. Within reason, that is; there was no way that she'd tolerate him dragging a separate chair over and joining her at the broken table.
"Rub-a-dub-dub, sling a barrier up!" Incanted the responder, his voice echoing unnaturally with the eldritch power of his ancient words of magic. Immediately the stones sparked and flared with blue and pink energy, linking from one to another with cords of glowing lightning and forming a domed barrier over Ella's table. Through the faint colour and distortion of the barrier she could still see the gawping onlookers, but what little sound they had been making was now muffled and soft.
For the first time, looking back at her sandwich's forceful eruption of light and power, Ella began to appreciate the reality that she was trapped with an otherworldly force in a small bubble. Sure, the ghost responder said that the chance of possession or death was less than 50% but that hardly filled her with a lot of confidence.
"Miss? Can you hear me alright?" The ghost-responder called through the barrier.
"Yes." She replied.
"Good. It seems to me that your sandwich is haunted. Very haunted, judging from the amount of glow it's chucking out." He explained. Ella had surmised as much, but hearing it confirmed by an expert was somewhere between comforting and intimidating. "Did you notice anything strange about it this morning?"
"No. Nothing that caught my attention."
"Loaf of bread not screaming about unfinished business? No ghostly figures floating around the cutlery drawer or taking an interest in your larder?"
"Nothing like that."
"What's in it?" He persisted. Ella was starting to go off the chap; his "no conversation" position was rapidly morphing into "bother Ella about the haunted sandwich" and that move was not popular with her demographic.
"Salad, pickled veg and Anderson's 36. Is this interrogation done now?"
"Salad eh? Yep, that might do it. Lettuce quite often moves to the other side with unfinished business; a grudge against slugs perhaps or the need to make amends for root cluster domination of another plant. Messy stuff. There's lettuce in there, I assume?"
"Yes, there's some Romain."
"Romain? Oh you couldn’t have got a more haunting-prone variant. There should be a warning on the stuff, there really should."
Ella thought back to the early morning when she'd been making the offending lunch item. Nothing had leapt out at her as overtly cursed or spectrally touched.
"It could have been a ghost that entered my lunch after I got here." She speculated; it would spare her the embarrassment of having not noticed a salad with ulterior motives.
"We'd have noticed a spectre leak or roving spirit, miss. There's been no alerts on the runic barriers and no-one's mentioned any occult goings-on around the bins. Besides, they can't get through tubs like that."
"Wait, what?"
"They can't get through tubs like your one. One of the best ghost-blockers on the market that, for exactly this purpose. No-one wants to make a lovely lasagne for themselves and suddenly find it to be absolutely crawling with the restless souls of the lost do they?"
"No, I suppose not."
"But if it's Romain we're dealing with then I'll need to get the right extraction equipment. You'll have to hang on in there on your own, I'm afraid. No-one can come in or talk to you in case they upset the ghost; lettuce in general is on a hair-trigger at the best of times when it comes to temper. Will you be alright? I don't know why I'm asking because there's nothing I can or will do about it if you won't."
"Sit quietly on my own whilst physically separated from everyone else in the building?" Ella asked.
"Yes."
"I'll do my best."
Ella leaned back in her chair and couldn't believe her luck. What had started out as a relatively tawdry day of tedious busywork, and the usual gauntlet of sin more commonly known as her colleagues, she'd now been provided with private quarters thanks to the machinations of an undead leafy green. It was a good job she'd not gone for a brassica instead, otherwise her lunch might have been rendered perfectly inert and benign.
"Thank you, sandwich. You've bought me some extra lunch time today." She said to the Tupperware. The irradiance bursting out of it seemed to effervesce in a manner that Ella's brain and eyes struggled to reconcile, by way of response. She could see eyes peering in from beyond the barrier, apparently concerned about the changing conditions within, but they were of no consequence. Right now she had an ethereal wall between herself and the tedium that was other humans, and a good book in front of her. She turned her eyes down to the page and smiled.
Eldritch barriers of all kinds, in Ella’s experience, muffled sound in about the same way that a fogged up window muffles light. They also converted some of that sound into light, which wasn’t something that Ella had observed by analogue in fogged windows; if she’d ever been able to hear light after taking a shower without turning on the extractor fan then she’d have had major questions in need of an answer. As it was, the occasional flare of crackling pink light caught the periphery of Ella’s vision while she read, and a strange bed of unfocused and indistinguishable sound sat at the bottom of her hearing from the ongoing discussions outside the dome.
She turned the page. Events were unfolding whereby only one shoe out of a pair was immediately obvious to the protagonist, and Ella couldn’t help worrying that it might never be found. It reminded her of similar traumas in her own life, most often when she was already late in leaving for work, and that very real fear of having to not only wear something less appropriate to work, but also go shoe shopping afterwards, came flooding back. A coruscating wave of brighter light rippled up along the beams that emanated from the sandwich.
“Are you concerned?” Whispered a voice like salad and Anderson’s 36 between two slices of wholemeal. Ella would never have thought it possible to distinguish that about a voice but, in the moment, it just seemed obvious. Also, even more than obvious, it seemed enormously shocking to hear it in the first place. She evidenced it with a yelp, as follows.
“Augh!”
“That’s the sort of sound someone might make when they are concerned about something.” Assessed the voice of what could only logically be the sandwich ghost. Ella stared at the Tupperware for a moment while her heart played the song of a thousand bongos. The ghostly light flickered.
“I… no. I’m alright. You just surprised me.” She said.
“You can’t hide it from me, and you don’t need to try. It feels like something has made you worry, and that was even before you made the noise.” Wailed the sandwich ghost. In her heart of hearts Ella knew that the speech came out more like a calm and measured statement than a wail, but it just felt wrong to categorise any vocalisation from a spectre as something other than wailing. “If I am the source of your concern then you needn’t worry; I’ll do no harm to you.”
“I wasn’t worried about you.” Ella clarified, grateful for the confirmation that her sandwiches didn’t intend to bring pain down upon her. “I was sitting here quite calmly and happily reading my book, but then when you spoke it made me jump and that’s why I… you can feel that I’m worrying?”
“Yes, I can. Did you worry about something you read? Or about the dome?” Speculated the ethereal voice. “No… you felt happy about the dome, if anything.”
“The book reminded me of a time when I couldn’t find my shoe for half a minute.”
“Half a minute?”
“Yes.”
“Hardly seems like a huge length of time to be without a shoe.”
“Yes, well, I was in a hurry wasn’t I?” Ella snapped back.
“Alright, fair enough. I didn’t mean to pry. It’s difficult when you can sense the essence and emotions of mortals around you, though. You know?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ella said. “Actually, no. I don’t really know what that’s like but I think it’s clear enough from the context and general empathy.”
The ghost’s light pulsed appreciatively.
“As long as you aren’t really feeling deep panic over the fate of a shoe then everything is OK.”
“Yep. Thank you though.”
The sandwich gave a glow of acknowledgement through its aura, and then there was silence. After a moment Ella looked cautiously down at her book again and managed to make it through a whole sentence before being interrupted again.
“My name is Wendy.” Said the haunting voice. After a calm chat about whether or not Ella was worried about lost shoes it was hard to keep thinking of the mode of speech as wailing.
“Hello Wendy. Nice to meet you.” Ella replied without looking up. Malevolent or benign, her tablemate was starting to feel a bit chatty and eye-contact was therefore too risky.
“Likewise.” There was another short silence, roughly half a line of inner shoe-arrangement monologue long. “What’s your name?”
“Ella.” Replied the eponymous.
“Ah. Lovely. I like that name.”
Ella wasn’t sure of how to respond to that. She could say thanks but really the choice had been made by her parents so it wasn’t much of a compliment. In fact, as a statement, it wasn’t much of anything. It was just a filler noise to acknowledge something that needed very little response, and exactly why she’d been trying to eat alone.
“I see that I’m forming part of your lunch. Do you plan to eat me?” This got Ella to look up again. It was the kind of question that at least warranted eye-contact in an answer. “I wouldn’t hold it against you.”
“Technically you’re part of my lunch, yes. The bulk of it, really. But, er, no I don’t think I’ll be eating my sandwich anymore. Seems…” Ella pondered. What did it seem? Dangerous, probably. Eating a ghost could scarcely be considered a sage action. She’d heard many stories about ghosts making their way into mortal hosts and they all carried dire warnings of possession and consumption, with associated ghoulish hijinks. Ella wasn’t one to worry unduly about ghosts, and Wendy didn’t seem much like the vengeful type, but even so there was no need to tempt fate. Besides, eating someone with whom you’ve shared a table and exchanged names would just come across as plain rude. That’d do it. “… impolite and unnecessary.” She finally said.
“I suppose, in a sense, yes. I’m grateful nonetheless; I wasn’t much looking forward to the prospect of being eaten or having to inhabit an unfamiliar body.” Wendy replied, quite understandably.
“You’re welcome.”
“I apologise for stealing away your lunch and making you go hungry though. Not very neighbourly of me.”
“Oh. That’s alright. Sorry for making you into a sandwich in the first place.”
“No bother.” Dismissed Wendy, with the glowing-aura equivalent of an affable hand wave. “These things are bound to happen sooner or later when you’re a haunted piece of lettuce.”
“Yeah, true enough.” Ella mumbled. There was another pause, and the mortal eyes drifted down towards paper once more. This time, however, they couldn’t quite manage to take anything in, on account of the mortal brain feeling a trifle preoccupied by the ghostly guest. Frustratingly she was a distraction even without talking.
“Are you actually the ghost of some lettuce?” Ella found herself asking. Hearing the words out loud immediately made her realise how much it sounded like an insult. “I mean, that’s what the ghost responder said you were, and you just described yourself as a haunted piece of lettuce. I don’t mean to imply that you have the intelligence or conversational skills of a lunch vegetable.” She quickly added. Wendy’s aura went through a range of colours and visual effects that Ella couldn’t easily get a read on. It was surprising to her how little cross-over there was between body language and light shows.
“I do have the form of one.” The ghost finally answered. “So it’s not an unreasonable query, but it is a strange notion to have had in your head that lettuce ghosts roam the earth." She assessed. "It would presuppose that lettuce has a soul, and that Romain in particular has enough of a soul to leave an imprint on the world when it was picked."
"So you're not the ghost of a Romain lettuce then. No, of course you aren't. It would be preposterous to think that you were."
"Exactly. I'm the ghost of an iceberg lettuce."
"Wait – what?"
"I'm the ghost of an iceberg lettuce which has inhabited the physical form of the Romain lettuce that you layered so casually into your sandwich this morning."
Ella flapped her mouth silently. She didn't know whether to be more apologetic for mis-lettucing Wendy or offended at being accused of being casual about adding salad. It hadn't been meticulous culinary artistry by any means, but there had been a definite and undeniable amount of care that she would have thanked Wendy to credit.
"I... I see." Ella finally said. "So what you said about it being a strange notion to presuppose that lettuce had a soul, and Romain having a stronger one in particular; that was about right?"
"Except that it’s iceberg which has the strong soul instead, yes."
"Oh, right. Yes."
"Because icebergs have hidden depths!" Cried Wendy, before the dome was filled with distorted ethereal laughter. Sounds are not water as a general rule, but this particular sound had ripples and waves as if it had been extracted from a glacial lake, and it left Ella feeling just as cold. Something about rapturous joy coming from a lettuce ghost didn't sit right with the hairs on the back of her neck.
"Oh don't feel like that! It was just a joke." Wendy said once she’d calmed down a little.
"A joke?” Ella replied, pushing her hair back with one hand. “Then you are or are not the ghost of an iceberg lettuce?"
"Correct." Wendy said. The ethereal glow smirked. Ella gave it a flat look.
"Oh buck up. I'm the one who's dead. I am not the ghost of an iceberg lettuce. I'm the ghost of a person who made their way into your lunch. But I really am inhabiting your Romain lettuce; it's by far the most accommodating of your fillings."
In the gently glowing dome, sitting across from her haunted lunch and hearing the muffled babble of the ghost responders outside, Ella rubbed at her face and wished she'd never asked Wendy anything at all.
"Right. Well it's been lovely talking to you Wendy, but I won't keep you any longer. I'll just get on with reading this and you can get on with, er, whatever it is ghosts do when they're between bread."
Her eyes fell to the page once more as the glow brightened a little.
"I can feel your emotions, remember? Ghosts normally use that stuff for general malevolence, recognising when someone has let their guard down before giving them a real good fright, but it's also useful to know when conversation has made someone feel uncomfortable."
Ella, a veteran of pretending not to hear someone when it was patently obvious that she could, gave no response.
"I can feel that too. Clearly I upset you with the lettuce thing; it's just gallows humour, and that sort of thing plays well in the undead community. Maybe not so much in present company. I remember how precious my lunch breaks were to me though, so if you want to read in peace then that’s fine. You can have your very own R.I.P.” Wendy said, somehow managing to wink via the medium of otherworldly glows.
“Thank you.” Ella replied with a newfound reticence. “That’s very understanding of you.” There was a sympathetic burst of light and then they were back to the normal eldritch glow.
It seemed that the book’s protagonist had finally settled on using a heel-volume ranking system to organise their sub-stair collection. On one extreme were the thin-soled ballet shows with no heel at all of which to speak, and at the other were the industrially clompy platform boots from a bygone era. Ella found herself wondering whether Wendy had ever owned such a mighty article of footwear, or if she would try to organise her own shoes by volume under any circumstances. Despite it being incapable of impacting Ella’s life in any way, she nonetheless felt a compulsion to know the answer. The next sentence in her book had been read three times before she finally accepted how little attention she was now paying. When the passage in question was so thrilling in its own right, a consideration of whether or not hollow soles should come before or after solid soles, that was quite a shock. She could take it no more.
“Would you ever organise your shoe collection by the volume of the heel?” Ella asked.
“By what?”
“The volume of the heel. How much space the heel occupies.”
“I don’t think that I would have ever done that in life, no. I didn’t have enough of a huge volumetric range among my heels to make that an intuitive means of organisation.” Assessed the ghost in the sandwich.
“Hm. Me either, really.”
“Who would ever choose that system? And why? Nobody ever selects their footwear on that basis. Nor do I think about heels in enough detail to be able to think ‘yep, those shoes will be about 60% along the line’.”
Ella laughed. It turned out to be quite nice to laugh with someone, rather than laughing at their heartbreakingly tedious canteen interactions.
“I hadn’t thought about it in that much detail. It’s just what the person in this book is doing.”
“Does it say why?”
“The details get a bit glossed over and it just says they… ‘decided upon the heel volume system as the obvious and only logical choice’. No other explanation, but I guess what they’ve said is enough. They chose it because it was obviously the best.” Shrugged Ella.
“And that’s an exciting read is it? A vicarious account of shoe collection administration?”
Ella tightened a little in defense.
“I don’t know about exciting, but I’m having a good time with it. Nothing much is happening but it’s a good ride nonetheless.”
Softly billowing ribbons of light ran up and down the general illumination cast by Wendy.
“I guess I can see what you mean. I always liked reading when I was mortal but never tried the footwear logistics genre. Maybe I should be haunting a library instead of your sandwich.”
Ella’s deprived stomach rumbled and gargled with gastric agreement.
“How did you come to be in there? Was it a conscious decision, if that’s not too personal of a question, I mean?” For the first time Ella noticed Wendy’s glow make contact with the inside of the come. It crackled and fizzed against the barrier like a wet cabbage leaf thrown against a telegraph wire by a rogue grocer.
“I don’t recall clearly.” She answered. “Memory gets fuzzy without a corporeal form in which to store it. You’d be surprised how much this lettuce can remember though.”
“If the answer is anything above ‘none’ then yeah, I am very surprised.”
“It doesn’t have any memories of its own, in case you’re wondering; it’s just very good at holding mine for a while.”
The unnecessary concept of lettuce memory now irreversibly occupied a space in Ella’s brain. Quietly, in the distant background of her mind, the safe storage location of her spare front door key dissolved away.
“And what happens if the lettuce starts to decay? Will you start to get sloppier with it?” She asked, immediately regretting her choice of adjective.
“I’ll just leave it, if you’ll pardon the pun. Actually, I’ll leave it even if you don’t pardon the pun. Take myself into something new. Could try being a haunted waistcoat this time, or a possessed shrew with unfinished business among the undergrowth.”
There was a deep, concussive bang that rang through the dome and put a hard stop to Wendy’s pontification. Through the distortion of the barrier Ella recognised the ghost responder and some heavy equipment. Exorcism gear bedecked in coloured runes sat around her table.
“You’re worrying again. Thinking about the misplaced shoe?”
“No, no. Although now that you’ve raised the possibility of a possessed shoe incident, such as might enable one to walk away of its own accord, I am starting to worry about how I’ll mitigate against it in future. No, the cause of my concern is that they’re stepping things up outside; getting ready for an exorcism by the looks of it. I don’t think I would like for that to happen to you.”
“Exorcised?!” Gasped Wendy, insofar as anything could gasp in the absence of lungs. “But what happens then? Will they keep me in a trap and experiment on me? Have me somehow destroyed?” Her colourful glow had turned a deep, blood red and pulsed like an emergency alert bulb.
“I don’t know, they don’t tell us that sort of thing! I… I can try to smuggle you out in my book. I’ll take you to a library . You can haunt the Dewey decimal system and ready everything.” Ella panic-planned out of sympathy.”
“They’ll see that I’m not in the Tupperware and detect me in the book. I’m a fairly obvious presence; it’s useless trying to hide me.”
“We can put the book in the Tupperware and leave the sandwich on the table! They couldn’t detect you in the Tupperware before because it’s ghost-proof, they said, so they’ll assume you’re hiding between slices of bread.”
“And when the sandwich isn’t emitting my glorious light show? These people are professional ghost trappers; they won’t be fooled that easily.” Insisted Wendy.
“It’s the only chance we have. You’re trapped in this dome so you won’t be getting out unless you let either me or them carry you out. Get in the book.”
“No, I have a better idea.” Wendy said, suddenly calm. Her light returned immediately to its gentle pulsating glow of colours. Slowly the sandwich rose from its plastic container, dropping crumbs and small pieces of salad coated in Anderson’s 36. It rotated gently in the air for a few seconds, giving Ella a great view of the reason why she’d be hungry all afternoon, and then dropped limp to the table with a wet thud. Left hovering was an amorphous irradiance. “I’ll just make my way out of here now, like this.”
As casually as a heavy goods vehicle crushing an abandoned lime, with Ella looking on in similarly confused disbelief, Wendy drifted forwards and phased easily through the dome. It crackled and sparked against her as she went but, apparently, caused her to experience no difficulty at all.
“What?!” Ella cried. Wendy’s form came floating back in, cackling the spectral equivalent of her head off.
“Oh that was good! That was funny!” She laughed. “You should have seen their faces out there when I emerged!” She paused upon seeing Ella’s exasperation. “Yes, it was a lot like that!”
Dumbly Ella pointed from sandwich to barrier to Wendy to Tupperware. It wasn’t clear to Wendy or even herself what she meant to communicate.
“Oh come on now. You didn’t think that all these wards would work, right? As if a Tupperware could block ghostly movement somehow when it’s made for storing food.”
“But… but…”
“I was hiding myself in the lettuce just to see what it was like being a leaf, and then I thought I’d pop out for a chat because you were on your own.”
“So the barrier means nothing?”
“Nope. Don’t recall claiming that it did mean anything to me, either. Nor does their threat of ‘exorcism’.” She laughed again. “Oh we have a good giggle among ourselves when they try it normally, Ella. Sometimes we go along with it just to make them feel good and drift away when they’re not paying attention.”
Every ghost-safety measure on the site, and every warning they’d been given about malevolent spirits and the importance of keeping eldritch equipment in good order flashed through Ella’s mind.
“It’s all nonsense. None of it works…”
“Pretty much.” Wendy said. “Look, we don’t mean any harm, and even if we did mean harm there’s not much we can do to hurt you. If it makes your ghost responders feel important to wear their high vis jacket then more power to them, but they’re just playthings.”
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier? What was the all ‘I am free’ business about?” Demanded Ella. Just when she’d been starting to like Wendy, and had even offered to rescue her, it turned out that she’d been lying all along. Her determination to only ever eat alone was redoubled.
“Oh don’t be mad. I thought you’d appreciate a bit of peace and quiet from the outside, and maybe you’d want some company on the inside who isn’t always jabbering on about the same old nonsense. I’ve been haunting this cafeteria ever since I died here, so I know all too well what it’s like. The dome was a real gift. And I talked because I knew it’d spook everyone else into panicking and that’s just too much fun to ignore.”
“Wait- you died in here?! Surely I’d know you?”
“Nope. Night shift. And they covered it up; bad press to have your jacket potatoes confirmed as lethal, and it was kind of my fault anyway for sprinkling the top of mine with fine shards of steel. I was having one of those days when I got everything mixed up.” Wendy replied matter-of-factly. “Oh, and do be aware that a lot of that food is just dreadfully cursed right now. I wouldn’t go near it.”
“I never do, but now I have even more reason.” Ella replied numbly, still trying to process the news of an unknown colleague’s covered-up demise. She knew that communication was poor around the workplace but the loss of a human life and the presence of a ghost was something that usually needed to be discussed. “But if you died here then you can’t have been in my lettuce when I made my sandwich this morning!”
“Oh, yeah. No, that was a bit of a… joke as well. I was hoping to string this along for a good few hours but then I got carried away with the whole exorcism thing; couldn’t pass up that chance.”
“Then you did everything here just to mess with me. And with them?”
“It was a good part of my motivation, yes, but I honestly did also want to give you the gift of a little peace. I feel sorry for you when I see you trying to have some isolation and the best you can do is a broken table nestled between collections of loudmouths.”
Ella frowned up at the levitating glow for a few moments, trying to wrap her head around what was and wasn’t reliable information. She didn’t much appreciate being taken for a fool, or made to panic unnecessarily over the consequences of an exorcism, but equally she had to respect someone making the best of their lot after a negligent cover-up of their death. And, if nothing else, it had been nice to have a break from the babble of the canteen. As much as her colleagues might have questions about this whole haunted sandwich incident, it was nothing she couldn’t determinedly ignore.
“Thank you, then. I appreciate what you’ve tried to do, even if I’m still a bit annoyed about all the lettuce lies.”
“I’d love to say I’m sorry but it was funny, and I know I’d do it again.” Smirked Wendy. “If you find yourself having a strong emotional response to misinformation about leafy greens then perhaps you need to reassess your priorities. You’re good company, Ella; whether you like it or not.”
“And you were occasionally tolerable.” Ella replied. “I suppose.”
Wendy glowed with contentment. Or perhaps it was mockery. Ella wasn’t really sure she could tell anymore.
“Anyway, I’d better leave you to it. But I’m going to take you up on the offer of a trip to the library; you’ve reminded me that there are better places to have unfinished business, and this canteen has been depressing me for long enough.” Wendy winked. As ever, there was no physical action that looked even remotely like a single closing eye, but Ella knew what the deal was, somehow, even as the light focused itself down into the pages of her book and silently faded away.
“I’m not so sure that this is a good idea.” Ella said to the pages. There was no response. “Wendy? Are you there?” Still silence and darkness. “Wendy seriously, I don’t want to get accused of ghost smuggling.”
From outside there were more sounds of motion and action. The ghost-responders were, presumably, getting closer to taking down the barrier and attempting in vain to expunge Wendy from the now inert sandwich. With a sigh she looked over at her former lunch, decided she still didn’t fancy it, and resolved to make the most of her isolation while she still had it. There was no use in sitting around bored or worried while the ghost responders finished their redundant work, especially when she could instead be enjoying the peace. With a final nudge to test for any response from Wendy, Ella returned to her reading. For the first time ever, not that she could feel a thing of it, the words stared right back up at her.