Do Not Open the Red Folder

When they moved me into Mara Kline's cubicle, nobody used the word missing. Human Resources said she was on personal leave. Facilities had already cleared her plants, her framed photos, and the ceramic mug with the chipped handle, but they left one thing exactly in the center of the desk.

A red folder secured with black string. A sticky note on top read: DO NOT OPEN. WAIT UNTIL IT ASKS.

I kept it there for three days because I like being employed. On the fourth, the office thinned out early ahead of a storm, and curiosity started sounding practical. If Mara had left process notes, maybe they were in the folder. Maybe everyone else had been too superstitious or lazy to look. That afternoon I noticed a little brass coin tucked under my keyboard, greened at the rim as if someone had rubbed it for luck until the luck went bad.

Inside was a single printout of the company seating chart with one desk circled in red. Mine. Beneath it, in Mara's cramped handwriting, she had written: It learns the shape of whoever sits here after 7:00 p.m.

The lights above my row clicked off then on again. Motion sensors. Normal. I told myself that twice. The brass coin under my keyboard had rolled to the edge of the desk without making a sound.

At 7:18 p.m., my desk phone rang from my own extension.

I let it ring once, twice, seven times. On the eighth I picked up because the sound had started coming from behind me as well as through the receiver.

"How long did she last?" a man asked.

"Who is this?"

"The one before you asked that too." Papers rustled close to the mouthpiece. "You shouldn't have opened the folder before it asked. Now it knows you can hear it."

Every monitor in the row woke from sleep at once. Black screens brightened into reflections, and in each reflection I was still facing the phone with one hand on the desk.

In real life, both of my hands were in my lap.

The reflected version of me smiled first. Then he reached down, picked up the red folder, and began reading over my shoulder from inside the glass. The brass coin on my desk spun once in place, as if something had finally decided the room's balance was wrong.