It started with a faint sense of unease, a niggling discomfort that Adrian couldn’t quite put his finger on. At first, he chalked it up to the mundanity of office life—endless paperwork, the low hum of fluorescent lights, the tapping of keyboards. The days blurred together, each as forgettable as the last. But then there was him.
The man who was always there.
Adrian first noticed the figure in the corner of his vision at a Monday morning meeting. A pale, thin man sat at the far end of the conference table, head down, expressionless. Adrian didn’t know his name, but that wasn’t strange—his office had over a hundred employees, and he only knew a fraction of them personally. What was strange, though, was how still the man was. While everyone else in the room fidgeted, whispered, or shuffled papers, this man sat frozen, staring down at his hands as though trapped in a trance.
Adrian found himself staring at the man more often. At the break room, near the elevator, even at his own cubicle—always there, always silent. The man never interacted with anyone. Never spoke. Never acknowledged anyone’s presence. And no one seemed to acknowledge him, either. 
It wasn’t until that Wednesday when Adrian asked his colleague, Lisa, that the real oddness began.
“Who’s that guy?” Adrian nodded toward the man who sat a few desks away, his back to them.
Lisa frowned, not bothering to look up from her screen. “Who?”
“That guy over there. The one sitting at David’s old desk.” Adrian gestured more overtly, but Lisa didn’t react. She didn’t even glance over.
“What are you talking about? There’s no one there.”
Adrian’s brow furrowed. The man was right there, in plain view. “Come on, you see him. He’s been here all week.”
Lisa finally looked up, staring directly at the empty desk, and shrugged. “There’s no one sitting at David’s desk. No one’s been assigned to that space since he left.”
Adrian felt his mouth dry up, the words catching in his throat. He glanced back, certain he would see the man, but the seat was now conspicuously empty. A small part of him wondered if he had imagined it—perhaps a trick of the light, or fatigue from the long hours. He didn’t push it.
But the man returned.
Over the next few days, Adrian saw him more and more. The quiet, motionless figure lurking at the edges of the office, seated at different desks, always keeping his head down. Sometimes Adrian caught him just out of the corner of his eye, but every time he tried to bring it up with someone—anyone—they would either dismiss him or look at him with vague concern.
His co-workers began to whisper when they thought he wasn’t listening. He caught phrases like “working too hard” and “needs a break.” There was a tightening in his chest whenever someone brushed off his questions. No one saw the man. No one.
The sense of unreality grew heavier each day. Adrian began skipping lunch, avoiding water cooler conversations, and pouring himself into his work just to distract himself from the figure who was always there. His apartment became a place of refuge, where he could lock the door and sit in the silence, trying to convince himself that everything was fine.
But the man started to appear there, too.
Adrian would catch fleeting glimpses of him in reflections—standing in the hallway outside his apartment, watching him from across the street. He tried to dismiss it as paranoia, exhaustion, or a product of his own stress. He was probably just overworked. But deep down, the fear gnawed at him. The figure wasn’t just some random hallucination; he felt it. There was something deeper. Darker.
Then came the night when everything unraveled.
Adrian lay in bed, half-asleep, his mind drifting in that strange, liminal space between dream and wakefulness. A creaking noise jerked him awake—a soft, insistent creak, like a footstep on an old wooden floor. His heart pounded as he blinked into the darkness of his bedroom. The room was silent, empty.
But then he saw him—standing at the foot of the bed.
The man from the office. Pale, gaunt, his eyes hollow and dark. He didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stood there, staring at Adrian with an unnerving intensity. His presence was suffocating, pressing in on Adrian like a physical weight. Adrian’s breath caught in his throat, and he scrambled to turn on the bedside lamp.
The room lit up, empty. No one there.
Adrian sat up, his body shaking, trying to steady his breathing. It was just a nightmare. It had to be. But as he sat there, his eyes fell on the floor—right where the man had been standing moments before.
There were footprints. Dark, wet footprints leading from the doorway to the edge of his bed.
The next day, Adrian didn’t go to work. He couldn’t. The thought of walking into that office, of seeing that thing again, made his skin crawl. He stayed home, pacing his apartment, his mind racing through every possibility. Who was the man? Why could no one else see him? And why was he following Adrian?
In desperation, Adrian began to dig deeper, researching the history of the building, even asking HR about past employees. No one remembered anyone like the man he described. His search led nowhere—until he found something buried deep in his own memory, something that clawed its way up from the depths of his mind like a festering wound.
Years ago, in the early days of his career, there had been a co-worker—David. The man at the desk. Adrian had forgotten all about him. They hadn’t been close, but there was something there, something unsettling that Adrian couldn’t quite grasp. He pushed harder, trying to remember details, trying to recall why David had left so suddenly.
Then it hit him, like a punch to the gut.
David hadn’t left. David had died.
The memory came flooding back with horrifying clarity. Adrian had been drinking heavily one night after work, a confrontation had spiraled out of control, and in a fit of rage, he had… he had—
Adrian’s knees gave out, and he collapsed to the floor. The man—the one he had been seeing all along—wasn’t just a hallucination.
He was a memory. A manifestation of the guilt Adrian had buried so deeply that he had convinced himself it wasn’t real. His mind had created the illusion of the co-worker to protect him from the awful truth: He had killed David.
The next time Adrian saw the man, he didn’t run.
He stared into those hollow eyes, now understanding what they represented—his guilt, his shame, his fear. The man’s lips twitched as if to speak, but no words came. Instead, he simply turned and walked away, dissolving into the shadows, leaving Adrian alone with the crushing weight of the truth.
Adrian knew then that no one would ever believe him. How could they? To the world, David had been forgotten. But for Adrian, the ghost would remain—a silent, ever-present reminder of the darkness lurking in the blind spots of his own mind.
He could never escape.
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