The Lifers: A Ghost Story

By Edgar Million

There are different rules in the darkness. When she first starts her new job, working the night shift in a nocturnal call centre Elizabeth immediately knows something is wrong, a coldness in the atmosphere and her creepy colleagues watch her every move.

There are different rules in the night.

A dark secret lies at the heart of this community and Elizabeth doesn’t know if she wants to find out.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edgar Million
• Release date: Dec 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310824777

Edgar Million

Edgar Millions books are mostly sci-fi, with a dash of fantasy, horror and contemporary fiction thrown in.I have numerous stories available on Smashwords all free of charge and one short novel, A Button To Save the World (available for a miniscule fee - or for free to anyone who follows me on Twitter and asks for it).I grew up in London and studied Art and Animation at Central St Martins and Surrey Institute of Art and Design, and thanks to Smashwords have finally found something to do with all the short stories I write to distract me from the novel I'm now attempting to edit.The novel, my first full length book, is going to be called “Ordinary” and would have published already if I didn't keep being interrupted by regularly having to attend a day job to earn money.

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The Lifers

Edgar Million

The Lifers

Published by Edgar Million at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Edgar Million

The Lifers – A Ghost Story

There are different rules for night-time tribes.

Night work pays well but messes with my body clock no end, so even on days when not on shift I find myself up and alert at all hours, staring into walls, drinking disgusting cups of frothy Ovaltine. Mum offers me one of her sleeping pills sometimes, but I don’t like the deathly sleep which accompanies them. Like being sealed in concrete.

I settle for restlessness.

Each summer and winter when I’ve come home from school I have taken on some sort of night shift, as it allows me to write in peace in my spare moments, and this was maybe the fourth or fifth time I’ve signed up.

This Summer will be the last time.

After what she told me, I don’t know if I feel safe anymore.

The shifting hours always shuffle my sense of reality, but the camaraderie of my previous postings usually made up for it. The nights were fun, peppered with enjoyable incident. Like the time it started to snow outside the window and Jake, the night shift manager, a human Labrador of a man, had the idea to open a window, grab handfuls of snow which were heaped on the window sill, and to start throwing snowballs inside the office, launching an all-out indoor snow fight, trying to hit each other but miss the computers.

Or heading off at 6am to an all-night bar to drink shots until noon, blearily watching the rest of the world outside the window, greyly making their way into their working days.

There was none of that in my new posting.

From the first night at GrewTech the climate was different.

The room where the small call centre sat could have employed a hundred telephone operatives, did so during the day I was told in my interview, although I never saw this, exiled as I was to the darkness.

Our four desks sat in a brightly lit pod at