Closing Time

The tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve is one that my family didn't practice. More to the point, I hadn't even heard of that particular tradition until several years ago when I read The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Like any good ghost story, James' novel avoids deciding for the reader whether the story's events should be attributed to the supernatural or to the protagonist's own state of mind, a distinction that I argue doesn't matter as much as we might think. With The Turn of the Screw began for me maybe not an obsession with, but certainly more than a passing interest in, the Victorian Christmas Eve ghost story.

Presented here then is my own attempt at a little entertainment as the long, dark, solstitial night of Christmas Eve draws near. Merry Christmas, if that's what you're celebrating. And if it's something else you're observing this time of year, Happy Holidays. To all my radio friends, 73 ES CUL.

For their help in making a reality out of this dream of contributing in some small way to Christmas Eve lore, I must mention two people who went above and beyond. My wife Carolyn Little read the very first draft, and was sufficiently scared as to give me some indication that I might be on the right track. I'd like to thank Carolyn for her stylistic observations, and offer an apology if I freaked her out. My friend Nicole Bailey, who incidentally is married to one of my real-life fishing buddies, gave a critique of a later draft. If this story is more interesting and more clear than it might otherwise have been, I have her eye for literary style and substance to thank.

Prologue: November 8, 1971

In the predawn darkness, Betty Richardson parked her Volkswagen in the employee parking lot behind the plant, walked though the back door, and navigated a series of hallways to her office. During the Cold War, just about every industrial facility in Southern California was in some way doing subcontractor work for one of the big aerospace firms. Spencer Fabrication was no exception. This was a long way from plants like Rockwell, with its helicopter landing pad and executive golf course. Here, as her boss liked to say, is where the real work got done. The work was hard and the margins were thin, but judging by the new Cadillac that pulled up in front of the office most mornings at eight, the owner wasn't doing too badly, and she had to admit the company paid pretty well.

She left the lights off, except for the ones in her office. No point in wasting electricity. She liked the hours that she'd been able to work out with Spencer Fab. She could put in an eight hour day and get out in time to take an afternoon class at the state college. At the rate she was going, she might even graduate sometime in the next six years. Betty sighed at the thought. Well, at least it's quiet at five AM. She actually liked the early mornings, when her office seemed a bubble of warmth and light against the dark of a world that was still sleeping, when the day still held the promise of limitless possibilities, when she could actually get stuff done.

She sat at her desk. A framed black-and-white photo sat at the edge; Mike and his bombardier/navigator Steve stood on the deck of the USS Midway in front of an A-6 Intruder, each smiling ear to ear. Was that three years ago already?

Betty and Mike met at Cal Poly during their sophomore year. She was studying physics; he was studying aeronautical engineering. They married secretly, and agreed that she would take an office job to fund their new life together while he finished his studies. Once he graduated, she could go back and finish. The late nights helping him prepare for exams kept her sharp. When Mike graduated, he heard that the Navy was looking for guys (it pretty much was guys in those days) with his background. Advancement might be more difficult than it was for the academy guys, but an officer's salary would come in handy for the young couple. Once he did decide it was time to get out, Betty should be just about done with graduate school and Mike would have an inside track for a defense industry job. Betty had actually stopped by the state college to pick up a course catalog the day a uniformed Navy officer showed up at her door. 

Betty turned to the stack of papers on her left. In a small office, one wore many hats. Today she was in charge of accounts payable. One invoice looked unusual. Machine screws and nuts, a quarter inch in diameter with twenty threads per inch, quarter inch flat washers, and quarter inch lock washers. Boxes of them. She set it aside.

A man with dark hair—graying at the temples—appeared at Betty's door. He was tall with an athletic frame, a frame that had once held down the hot corner for his high school baseball team, where he styled his play after that of Chicago Cubs third baseman Randy Jackson.

"Morning, gorgeous. What's cookin'?"

Gorgeous. For Pete's sake.

Back in his neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, it was said of Jim Spencer that he had a face and a charm that could let him get away with murder. Technically, this assumption was never tested. The Major League scouts gave him a look in high school, but little more. He did a hitch in the Army. Too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, he maneuvered across imaginary nuclear battlefields northwest of Las Vegas just minutes after an atomic bomb that was anything but imaginary had been set off half a mile from his foxhole. It was there in the Nevada desert that he saw the future. The United States was betting the farm on the big bomb, and they'd need big bombers to carry the big bomb. He'd worked enough weekends in his uncle's machine shop to know what the meant. Parts. Thousands of parts. Millions of parts. All machined to precise tolerances. The defense contractors that you could name off the top of your head were big-picture organizations. No way they'd have the capacity—let alone the inclination—to produce all those parts in house. They'd need an extensive network of job shops that could do the grunt work of banging out parts and putting together subassemblies. There was a river of money flowing out of the Defense Department, and James Spencer was going to find a way to dip a finger in it.

He took a job after getting out of the Army as an apprentice machinist. Within a few years, he felt like he knew his way around well enough—both on the technical side and in terms of who you had to know to sell work—to make his move. With his considerable charm and gift of gab, he secured a bank loan that took care of most of what he needed. He financed the rest by selling equity in the new company to a group of physicians who thought it sounded like an interesting investment. With his start-up money, he bought a lathe, a mill, and a cylindrical grinder, and signed a lease for ten thousand square feet in the heart of the mid twentieth century aerospace industry, Southern California.

"Oh, hi Jim," Betty said. "Early start for you too today? Well, I had an A/P question for you; now I won't have to wait."

"All righty. What can I do you for?"

"This invoice for True Value Hardware. What's it for?"

"Well, hardware, I guess."

"Very funny. It says it's for a bunch of quarter-twenty nuts and bolts. I can't think of anything around the shop that we'd need that many quarter-twenties for. Could it be a mistake?"

"No," Jim said. "It's good. Go ahead and pay it."

"What's it for?"

"Just to have enough around the shop. Never know what you'll need them for."

"We're not putting them on the line, right? Jim, please tell me we're not putting them on the line." The assembly line was currently being configured for a run of subassemblies that would go into vertical speed indicators, which measure the rate at which an aircraft is climbing or descending. The VSIs were destined, among other things, for installation in F-4 Phantom fighter jets.

Jim didn't say anything.

"Jim, they're not going on the line, are they?"

Still nothing.

"There's a reason why the spec calls for military standard fasteners. They have to be hard enough to not break if the aircraft takes a hit from a surface-to-air missile."

"Betty," Jim said reasonably. "We have an engineering staff for this. It's been looked into. Besides, those specs are arbitrary and everyone knows it. They're dreamed up by Pentagon desk jockeys who are mostly trying to justify their jobs. We're fine."

"Damn it. We're not fine. Some pilot is all strung out about the mission he's coming back from, his plane's shot to hell, maybe it's night, or bad weather. He has to bring his plane aboard the aircraft carrier and oh, by the way, his VSI is busted so maybe he's descending at four hundred feet per minute or maybe it's a thousand feet per minute. I guess he can just eyeball it."

"Look. These aren't the tacks you hang picture frames on. We're talking quarter-twenty bolts, in an isolated subassembly, installed deep in the fuselage. If there was a big enough shock to break the bolts, the whole airplane would be a smoking hole in the ground."

Betty stood, shaking, fighting back tears.

"Oh, Jesus. I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing for me to say. It's just you know how competitive this industry is. We have eighty people back in that plant who are all expecting Christmas bonuses."

"Christmas bonuses? It's only a few hundred bucks." Betty's look of annoyance turned to horror as the full meaning of what she had just said sunk in. "Oh my God. What other corners have you been cutting?"

Jim stayed silent.

"What other corners have you been cutting?" Jim turned and started to walk out of the office. Betty followed. "Answer me!"

"It's not your problem. Just do your own job for a change and stop trying to do everyone else's."

Holding the invoice in her hand, she followed him down the still dark hall, close behind, tugging at his arm, tugging at his sleeve, trying to get him to stop and face whatever it was he was doing. There wasn't a chance her physical strength could stop his determined stride. She just hoped maybe she could convince him—shame him—into. . . . Into what? Into admitting the error of his ways and vowing to make everything right? In the back of her mind, she knew how absurd that sounded, but she had to try. Had to convince him. As Jim neared the light of his office at the end of the hall, Betty tried one last desperate grasp, wrapping both arms around him.

"Please, let's just talk this out."

What happened next wasn't anything that Jim planned on. He would never be quite sure whether he was more concerned by the impertinence or by the fear of the whole thing blowing up on him. All he knew is that he saw red when he felt Betty's grasp, and he wheeled around to face her.

Apparently the story made the local news. I was pretty young then. Maybe I heard something as my folks watched Jess Marlow and Kelly Lange reading accounts of the day's event's on channel 4 in Los Angeles; maybe I didn't. It's hard to say.

*******************************************************

Present Day

I arrived on the mountain—after an obligatory stop in the high desert for lunch at the Astro Burger—at a little past two in the afternoon, and caught a fish on my fourth cast. It was a German brown, about pan size, that had hatched and spent its entire life in this very stream. I gently gripped the trout with a wetted hand while carefully working the hook out. I crimped off the barbs on my lure before starting, so working the hook out was fairly easy. I lowered the fish back into the water, keeping a hand on it so it could remain upright and run some water through its gills, while jays and chickadees flitted from one tree branch to another. The fish held almost completely motionless for a minute or two and then with one mighty sweep of the tail fin and a splash of water, disappeared into the depths. Into the depths to live out more days and nights in the eastern Sierra Nevada. Into the depths to give someone else a chance at catching a fish.

After that, nothing. Even magic hour—that time after the sun ducks behind the ridge to the west and the fish, sensing the coming of night, become more motivated to find food—hadn't been very magical. After a camp dinner of Vitello alla Milanese with red Solo cups filled to the top with Barolo, we settled around the campfire. Even in summertime, evenings in the mountains can get downright chilly. As the dark and the cold of a moonless Sierra night pressed in around us, here in the glow of the fire was a small bubble of warmth and light. We arranged our chairs as close as we dared, our boots resting on the stones that ringed the fire. Most of my fishing buddies were drinking beer. Ryan and Justin had refilled their red Solo cups with Captain Morgan and Coke. I was taking short pulls straight from a bottle of single-malt Islay. I offered Ryan the bottle. He thanked me and reminded me that if he wanted that particular flavor profile he could simply mix mud from the river's edge with ethyl alcohol.

Charlie (his last name was Parker and yes, we all called him Bird) was talking about the trips his family would take to his grandparents' cabin in Mammoth, a few hours' drive up US-395 from where we were.

"They had this painting in the den. Maybe it was a repro, or maybe they bought it original; I'm not sure. Anyway the painting was of a woman working at a spinning wheel. One day we were all up at the cabin—I was about five—and it was right around dusk. No one had turned any lights on yet so it was a little dark and the bit of light that was left was kinda gray. I wandered into the den while the adults were all hanging out in the kitchen. I looked at the painting and—I kid you not—the woman stood up from her spinning wheel, turned, and looked right at me."

"Damn, dude. What happened next?"

"I hauled ass out of that room. Didn't say anything. Not to my parents, not to my grandparents. Nothing. Ever. Actually, I haven't even mentioned it until now."

"I had something a little weird happen to me," I said, "but I was older than five. I used to work for a printing company in the industrial section of Orange, on 38th just off J street. You know how every building has its own creeks and groans? Stuff warms up during the day and expands, then cools off at night and contracts. The building I was in had way too much of that going on. If you were in there alone, like working late, it seemed like it was every few minutes there'd be some weird-ass sound that you'd never heard before. It'd totally get in your head."

"So, do you believe in ghosts?" Justin asked.

"We're social animals," I began tentatively. "We don't like being alone. We don't like being alone in the dark, especially in enclosed spaces with not a lot of exits. There's probably survival value to that. Our would-be ancestors who were perfectly comfortable being alone in dark caves must’ve gotten eaten by bears before they were old enough to make little cave loners. 

"So when you're all alone in a place that's reminiscent of that primal cave—a den with a painting, a creaky industrial building—the mind plays tricks on you. Every sound, every sight, every interplay of light and shadow becomes a potential threat. Every dark corner could be a hiding place. . . for something. Hell, it doesn't even matter what. It's just that bit of brain chemistry that spent millions of years not becoming bear food doing a really good job of convincing you that you're someplace you don't want to be.

"So yes, I believe in ghosts. I believe that when someone shares a story of something that freaked them the hell out, that they're describing an intensely real experience. The authenticity of experience doesn't have a thing to do with whether the experience originates in external stimuli or internal stimuli."

"Do you like to stimulate yourself often?"

"I think I was talking about my old office, Bird, and the answer is no, at least not at the office. That's just wrong."

That got a few scattered laughs from around the fire.

I continued, "Anyway, that office."

We ran two shifts. On those nights when I happened to be the last one to finish whatever I was working on, it fell on me to close up. That meant stuff like pulling the roller racks out of the film processors and hosing them off, powering down the vacuum frames, turning off the lights. Finally I'd set the burglar alarm and leave the building before the alarm armed sixty seconds later. It was the worst sixty seconds of the day. Really, it's way more than enough time to get out, but I knew that if I was too slow and the alarm went off, I'd be stuck trying to explain to the cops that I really do work there when all I wanted was to go home and go to bed.

But it wasn't just that. There was something else.

I'd set the alarm and turn right to walk down a hall in the front office area, and my steps would grow heavy. My chest would tighten. I'd reach the end of the hall, breath quickening, and turn right into the vast, windowless production area. A left down a narrow corridor with the store room on the right and the raised-floor computer workroom on the left through utter darkness. With each step I'd try to hasten my pace, and with each step moving forward became harder, as if some unseen force—I swear I could actually feel it around my midsection—were pulling me back. Back down the corridor from whence I had come, back into the darkness. I'd emerge from the corridor into the expanse of what once had been a camera bay, and reach for the door. I'd grope into the dark, feeling the unseen closing in on me, fumble with the knob, and finally emerge into the relative safety of an industrial park at midnight on a Tuesday.

This went on for months, and then for years, and then one day I found myself working on a Saturday to pick up some overtime. Before I knew it, everyone else had left and I was the last one in the building, working in the raised-floor computer workroom. At least it was a Saturday afternoon. Surely the light outside would make closing a little easier. Then again, maybe not.

These were the days before everyone in the printing and publishing businesses were using Macintoshes. We had dedicated graphics workstations running proprietary software on a funky proprietary-ish operating system that could do photo retouching and combine text with graphics. Even the desks were purpose-built. There was a trackpad embedded beneath the surface of the desk and a four-button puck, rather than a mouse, that you could move over the trackpad to move the cursor on the screen. There was a rudimentary screen saver—the vendor's logo bouncing around the screen—that would come on after a few minutes of inactivity and go away once you moved the puck. All three of the workstations in the room had gone into screen saver long before I finished what I was doing. 

As I neared completion of what I was working on, I looked up from my desk and saw that one of the workstations had popped out of screen saver. No problem. Whoever had been working on it probably left the puck with a little tension in the wire, and that tension finally moved the puck just enough to break the screen saver. I turned my equipment off, tidied up my area, and noticed that a second workstation had broken out of screen saver. That made me a little more uneasy. I walked back to the break room to get what was left of my sack lunch out of the refrigerator and came back to the workroom to find that the third workstation had broken out of screen saver. Fuck this, I thought, I'm outta here.

I turned off the lights and set the alarm. It was still light outside. The light streaming in through the tinted office windows was dim and somewhat gray. The diffuse, gray light did nothing to stave off the feeling of that nameless something pursuing from behind. When I reached the production area, it might has well have been the dark of midnight for the lack of windows. Again I was visited by the same chest-tightening and hurried breathing. Again I tried to quicken my steps only to feel the pull of the dark. Down the long corridor I rushed again, desperate to escape the unseen force drawing me back. Back into the dark, back to where there would be no family waiting to greet me at home. There would be no ball game on television, no beer, no Saturday-night steak dinner; only the all-encompassing darkness. I reached the old camera bay; another grope for the door, the invisible nothingness drawing ever closer, and finally I escaped into the sunshine of a perfectly lovely spring day.

Years later, I was the shift manager on the second shift. I stood up from the endless paperwork at my desk to go back to the break room and grab a soda. Two of my crew were standing in the break room, their faces drained of all color. 

"Did something bad happen in this building?" one of them asked.

"Not that I know of. I was hired not long after Denton Printing moved into the place. Before that it was an electrostatic plating business or something. I have no idea what might have been before that. The building was built in the late '60s, I think. Nothing's happened in the time I've been here, and I never heard about anything before that. What's up?"

He pointed down the hallway that led past the front offices to a point just beyond the alarm panel. "Scott and I both just saw a woman standing at the end of the hall."

I swallowed and drew a breath, consciously trying to lower my heart rate, trying to project the cool that I was in no way feeling. 

"OK, we're not supposed to have unescorted visitors, so somebody's in deep shit." They weren't laughing. "Well, what was she doing?"

Silence.

"Well come on, guys. Throw me a bone. Was she rattling chains? Was she saying, 'oo-oo-oo'? What's going on here?"

"She, uh," Scott said. "She looked kinda pissed off. One arm was raised a little bit, like she was trying to show me what she has holding in her hand, but there was nothing there. I stood there and shrugged. I tried to tell her that I didn't understand, but I couldn't speak. I couldn't even open my mouth. As I stood there struggling to say something, anything, sensing the onset of a kind of paralysis, she looked right at me took a couple steps in my direction, reaching out with her other hand. That's when Dan and I both hauled ass back into the break room, like over in this corner where you can't see down the hall. We took a peek a couple minutes later; she was gone."

I stepped across the break room to where I could get a look down that hall that I had walked in terror so many nights. There was nothing there. Whatever it was, it had gone back into the recesses of their minds and their mutual ability to each convince the other of what secrets the darkness might hold. Still, I wasn't looking forward to locking up that night.

The company moved out of that building about fifteen years ago. The owner was a tightwad who never spent any money on the place. When we bought out another printing company, letting the lease run out and moving into their building was the easiest decision we ever made. I quit and started a new job not long after that.

Interestingly enough, the owner of the old building died about the time we moved out and the new owner did spend some money on the place. Now it's one of those hipster brew pubs, the kind of place that has seventeen names for the same IPA and serves grilled chopped ribeye on a brioche roll with aioli and Belgian pommes frites with a tomato confit. 

"I haven't been back to that building," I concluded, "not even just for a quick beer, this whole time."

The hour was getting late. One by one we made excuses to avoid admitting that we were dead tired and made our way to our tents. The fishing was better the next day, and the next night's campfire conversation centered mostly around Justin's man crush on George Clooney. I chipped in that there's little about Clooney not to like, but that I was really more of a Steve McQueen guy. The following morning we broke camp, said our goodbyes, and drove down the mountain.

I got home, put my gear away in the garage, and walked into the house. Carrie was there to greet me. 

"How was fishing?"

"Not too shabby. Caught four fish: a brown, two bows, and a brookie."

"What did you guys talk about?"

"Oh, the usual."

"Junior high humor?"

"Pretty much." I stepped closer for a kiss hello. 

"You need a shower."

I took a pounding hot shower, watching with some satisfaction as three days of sunscreen, DEET, and eastern Sierra Nevada dust swirled down the drain. I toweled off, put on some clean clothes, and walked back into the kitchen a new man.

"Pot roast is in the pressure cooker."

"Oh, fantastic," I said. "You kick ass."

"Oh, say," I continued, "I can grill up some chicken or steaks or something on Tuesday, but what do you say tomorrow we go to Tappy's on Thirty-Eighth?"

"You mean where you used to work?"

"Yeah. We haven't been there since they opened, and I'd like to see what they've done with the old place."

The combination bar and dining area of Tappy's had long wooden tables with equally long wooden benches arranged in rows. I'm sure the room had a very chummy beer hall feel to it when it was at or near capacity. On this particular Monday night, it was none of those things. Carrie and I found spots on benches opposite one another at a table as far from another, similarly-arranged couple as we could get. 

Carrie looked across the table at me. "Are you sure this place is OK?"

"Well, no, not sure, but the Yelp reviews weren't bad."

"OK. It's just . . . shouldn't it be busier than this? I know it's a Monday night, but it just seems like a good tap room should have more people than this. And it's so quiet."

"You want to get out of here?" She shook her head. "Or I can ask them to put on some music. I'm sure they have an extensive playlist of snooty, pole-up-your-ass indie bands that nobody's ever heard of."

"No, " she said. "It's fine. It's just weird that it's a beer bar and there's no one here and it's dead quiet."

In the room's near silence I thought I heard a noise from deep within the building's interior. This was looking more and more like a bad idea, but neither of us wanted to be the first to admit the growing sense of unease. "I think that guy walking our way is going to take our drinks order," I said, barely above a whisper. "Let's just have a beer and a bite and if it sucks, we don't ever have to come back." 

A stocky guy, looking about twenty-seven, with a longish beard stood by our table.

"Hi, I'm Dave, and I'll be taking care of you tonight. Can I get you started with a beer?"

I took a quick look at the beer list, and was pleased to see that they offered one amber. I am, as the song says, a California man, and I like hops as much as the next guy, but the race to create the hoppiest IPA possible has gotten a bit out of hand. Sometimes I just want my beer to taste like barley.

"I'll have the amber," I said, and Carrie gave Dave her order.

"By the way," I said cheerfully, "I used to work in this building."

"Back when it was the print shop?" Dave asked.

"Yeah. That was a while ago. I like what you've done with the place."

At some point while we were eating, the other couple must have left. Carrie and I had the bar to ourselves. As I finished the last of my burger and fries, and drew the last sip of my pint, I excused myself from the table. "I'm going to make a quick stop down the hall."

As it turned out, down the hall was more than a euphemism. The restrooms were located a longish walk down what once had been the hall through the front office area. It made sense. The location of the building's plumbing connections had been optimized for an industrial office, not for a bar or restaurant. I noticed as I walked the hall that it was somewhat dimly lit, as was the inside of the men's room. This also made sense. Make it easy for customers to find the restrooms, but keep that part of the building subdued enough to not take up too much attention while enjoying a burger and beer.

I washed my hands and stepped out of the room into the hallway. I felt something familiar as I walked, the old sensation of being impeded. This is silly. One beer and I'm having this hard of a time walking down a hall? But it wasn't the beer and I knew it. I had walked this very hall too many times not to recognize the pull of the darkness behind me. My half-assed attempt at trying to laugh it off did little to quell the sense of dread that was setting in. With each step I tried to quicken my pace, reaching for the light and the familiar face that lay some seemingly interminable distance ahead, and with each step moving forward became more difficult. I emerged into the dining area noticeably breathing hard.

"You OK?" Carrie asked.

"Ducky."

"Everything still kind of the way you remember it?"

"More or less."

"Last call for alcohol," Dave said as he walked by.

"Really?" I glanced at my watch.

"We close at nine on weeknights."

"Oh, OK. So you're stuck closing tonight?"

"Yeah. I'll be the last one to lock up"

"Oh, wow. What a pain in the ass."

"Can I get you another amber?"

"No, I think I'm good. I'm gonna have to drive." It was a white lie. Carrie—God bless her—had spent the hour working on a seltzer water so I wouldn't have to worry about enjoying even just the one beer.

"I can get you an Uber. Your car won't get towed and you can come back for it in the morning. How about another beer? I'd love to hear your stories about what this old building used to be like."

This was getting uncomfortable. Servers want to sell, I get that, but ordinarily it's not nearly this difficult to convince a server that you don't want that second beer. It was almost like he didn't want us to leave. Did he somehow think we'd stick around and help him close?

"Nah, really, I'm cool. But we'll definitely be back another time." Probably another white lie, I realized. "I think we're ready for our check."

Dave walked to the back of the room and quickly returned with the check in his hand. He leaned in close as he set it down. His cheerful wait-staff expression had left his face entirely. His voice lowered.

"Look, I know you must think this is weird, but I just really hate being in here alone."

"I get it. This building makes a lot of funny noises, or at least it did when I worked here. It's not a fun place to be stuck by yourself."

"So you have noticed it."

"It? Yeah, I guess. The place can get pretty creepy."

"You mind if I ask you a question that might seem a little odd?"

Like this conversation could get any odder. 

"No. Not at all. What's up?"

"Did something bad happen in this building?" 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.