Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in The Marlowe Building ·
The Rearranger in the Marlowe Building
An office cleaner on the night shift at the Marlowe Building finds every desk on the fourth floor moved a few centimetres each night into a new arrangement, and the furniture in the directors' room has been shifted toward a window that does not exist.
The Marlowe Building on the Meridian Road has eleven floors of identical open-plan offices, a lift that stops at every landing whether anyone is waiting or not, and a night cleaning crew of four. Hannah Price had worked the fourth floor for six years, and in that time the desks had never moved. The carpet tiles were laid in a grid, the fire doors were propped at the same angle, the filing cabinets stood in their rows along the east wall like patient soldiers. She knew the floor the way she knew her own kitchen.
In October she came in at ten and found the fourth desk from the lift had been shifted to the left by about a hand's width. The chair had been pushed in, neatly, and the bin moved under the drawers. She thought the day crew had been rearranging things and did not bother to tell anyone.
The next night the row of desks by the window had moved. Each one was a little closer to the glass, the monitors angled toward the sky, the keyboards squared up as if someone had been planning a view. She stood in the middle of the floor with her trolley and felt the building's silence press in around her like a held breath.
The third night, she came in and found the whole floor rearranged. Every desk had been turned, so that the chairs faced the lift. The filing cabinets had been stacked two high. The directors' room, which had a long glass table and a single door, had its table pushed against the far wall, and the chairs arranged round it in a careful circle, with a space left at the head for someone who was not yet there.
Hannah stood in the doorway of the directors' room and looked at the empty chair at the head of the table. It was a good chair, leather, with brass studs along the arms. It faced the wall where the window ought to be. There was no window there. It was a plain grey partition, with a fire-exit sign above it, and nothing behind it but the lift shaft.
She went to the lift and pressed the call button. The doors opened at once, and the car was empty and lit, and when she stepped inside the panel showed that she had already been to the fourth floor, twice, and was going up again.
The next morning the facilities manager came in and found the fourth floor transformed. He stood in the lift lobby with his hands on his hips and said it looked like a set for a film about a clever man who had lost his mind. He asked Hannah whether she had moved the furniture. She said no. He asked her to find out who had. She said she had been looking for a week.
She did find out, in the end. She stayed late on the Friday, hidden behind the filing cabinets with her torch off and her heart thumping. At midnight the lift doors opened and a figure stepped out into the lobby. It was tall and thin and moved with a careful, deliberate grace, and it was not carrying anything, but as it walked toward the desks it touched each surface lightly with two fingers, adjusting a monitor here, squaring a stapler there, turning a chair a few degrees toward the lift. It did not look at Hannah. It seemed to be studying the layout of the whole floor, the way a planner studies a site before construction begins.
When it reached the directors' room, it stopped at the empty chair at the head of the table, and bent down, and set something on the leather seat. Then it turned, very slowly, and looked straight at her hiding place.
Its face was blank and smooth, like a drawing that had not yet been finished. It lifted one hand, and beckoned her out, with the same courteous gesture a hotel porter uses to show a guest to a room.
Hannah did not go. She ran. She got down the stairs to the ground floor and out of the building and stood on the pavement until dawn, shaking, watching the windows of the fourth floor glow faintly in the dark.
When the day crew came in on Monday, the fourth floor had been put back exactly as it had been on the first day Hannah worked there, every desk in its place, every cabinet square. But on the seat of the chair at the head of the directors' table there was a folded note, in careful, slanting handwriting. It said: *Thank you for the room. I will be needing the window soon.*