The Most Electric Time of the Year

Katie, the receptionist of Penter Painters and Holiday Decorating, must decipher a series of strange, eerie phone calls.

This piece is an addition to the Penter Painter’s Holiday Haunts collaborative story-verse. Please click here to learn more or add your own story!

Photo by Brandi Alexandra on Unsplash

“Penter Painters and Holiday Decorating,” Katie chirped into the office phone.

On the other end, there was only the hiss and crackle of static.

“Hello?” She waited a few moments, tapping her fingernail on the desk. “Hello?”

Katie shrugged and hung up the phone.

With Chuck, Chris, and Marco all out on a job at Arnold’s Landing Power Cooperative, the bulky power plant on the edge of town, there was a brittle quiet in the office. Not the soft, muffled quiet of the snowy town outside; the office silence was shattered every time her chair creaked, every time she sneezed. It was an empty, lonely quiet.

The phone rang again, startling Katie. “Penter Painters and Holiday Decorating.”

Static buzzed again in her ear, louder this time.

Katie suppressed her frustrated sigh, just in case there was some technologically illiterate elderly client on the other end. “Hello? Hello?”

A scratchy sound, like a poorly-received radio signal, clawed at her ear.

Katie was reaching to drop the phone back in its cradle when a garbled voice patched through the line.

She held the phone back up to her ear. “I’m sorry, would you mind repeating that?”

“Dust.” The voice was whispery, hardly distinguishable from the static.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Flash. Get them out.”

“Sir, I think you have the wrong number.”

The static rose again, drowning out the hushed voice.

“Sir?” Katie said. Then, with a small rush of relief when the static continued unabated, she hung up. Probably a prank call.

Turning to her computer, Katie skimmed through the detailed weekly schedule, which she’d taken upon herself to put together, of their various jobs. Chuck was a great decorator and a wonderful painter, but the man wouldn’t know a well-organized schedule if it walked up and slapped him in the face.

At least that’s one area in which she was indispensable. She would have preferred to be indispensable in other ways, but Chuck seemed as unaware of that as he was of timetables and spreadsheets.

She didn’t know exactly when it had happened, whether it was after a month with the company or two months or six, but there had been a day when everything changed, like a buildup of static suddenly and painfully releasing. Then the easy roles of small business owner and receptionist had dropped away and left her groping in the dark for a roadmap, for how to have basic conversations without second-guessing her every word, wondering if it came out awkwardly. Why was it that she could spend all day having blithe conversations with Marco and Chris, but the moment she had noticed that Chuck’s eyes were the same warm brown as a chestnut tree, she lost all ability to speak like a normal human?

The phone rang again.

With a groan, Katie checked the caller ID, wishing she’d had the wherewithal to do so sooner.

ARNOLD’S LANDING POWER COOPERATIVE rolled across the old analog phone display. Every year the power plant had a massive Christmas light display festooning the towering fence around their campus. From the Cooperative’s spot on the peninsula, the glow of the Christmas lights was visible to everyone in downtown, as if the power company were jumping up and down, yelling, See this? We make all this possible! Chuck, Chris, and Marco were there now, stringing up the gaudy, expensive display.

Katie grabbed the phone. “Penter Painters and Holiday Decorating.”

“Arc.” The same staticky voice assailed her ears. “Flash. Get them out.”

“Is this someone from the power company?” Katie asked, her patience fraying.

“Dust.” The scratchy voice shook, growing weaker.

“Did something happen over there? Is everyone okay?”

“Get them out,” the voice said. With a click, the line went dead.

Katie held the phone by her ear for a few moments, biting her lip. That was weird.

She set down the office phone and pulled her cell phone from her pocket. She took a deep breath before dialing.

Chuck picked up on the second ring. “What’s up?”

“Is everyone…okay over there?” Katie shook her head. She sounded paranoid, even to herself.

“Far as I know.” Chuck said. “Chris ate a bean burrito for lunch, so we’ll see how he’s doing in a little while.” She could hear distant chuckles and banter from Chris and Marco. “Why?”

“Oh. Nothing. Probably a prank call. The caller ID said it was from the power company,” Katie said.

“Huh. We’re all fine so....” Chuck trailed off. “I guess I could check with one of the managers here?”

“If you see them, I guess. It’s probably nothing.” Katie said goodbye and hung up the phone, but the unsettled, prickling feeling in her gut didn’t dissipate.

Her eyebrows furrowed in thought, Katie slid her chair up to the computer and searched arnold landing power cooperative.

Nothing much in the results – the company’s website, a few reviews.

When Katie clicked the News tab, her skin turned cold.

Amidst a slurry of articles complaining about the power company’s layoffs and price increases, a handful of stories commemorated the anniversary of the “Tragedy at Arnold’s Landing” in September of 1987. The name stirred a vague, familiar unease, as though the town’s collective memory had sunk into her bones, though she knew little about the event itself.

The articles were sanitized and factual, a soulless reporting of a horrific story.

A supervisor’s careless decision to send in workers to clear blockage from beneath a boiler –

The explosion –

The five workers’ deaths in a torrent of molten slag.

At the end of the article was a bland footnote:

William Ross, the supervisor responsible for the decision to leave the boiler on during the cleaning procedure, resigned from his position immediately following the incident.

There was a link to another article. William Ross’ obituary. Katie clicked it and skimmed through the brief biography and the list of grieved relations he left behind.

William died tragically in an automobile accident on December 28^th, 1987, at the age of 56.

December of 1987. Three months after the power plant explosion.

Katie chewed on her lower lip. The story had nothing to do with the phone call, of course – how could it? But, all the same, she shivered.

Then the phone rang again.

ARNOLD’S LANDING POWER COOPERATIVE rolled across the caller ID display.

Katie took a breath, then snatched up the phone. “Who is this?”

“Dust,” the voice said, scratching through the static. “Get them out.”

“What are you talking about? Who are you?”

With a click, the line went dead again.

Katie slammed down the receiver and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. This was ridiculous. Prank calls, they had to be. Some kind of sick joke.

Katie leaned back and stared at the office phone. Her gaze roved over the small office, made less cold and bare by the coffee machine Chuck had brought in and the twinkling lights she’d strung up around the entryway.

If something were to happen to Chuck –

Or Chris, if he fell again and wound up in the hospital, or worse.

Or Marco, if she had to call his family to say he was in an accident at work.

It would eat her up from the inside out if – just if, by some strange coincidence – anything were to happen to them out on this job.

Katie glanced at her zippered lunchbox, with her ham and cheese sandwich and carefully wrapped snacks. She usually ate at her desk, but what was the harm in stepping out for a few minutes?

Frowning first at the phone and then at her lunchbox, Katie sat for a few moments, trying to settle the roiling sensation in her gut.

Finally, Katie scrawled Back in 15 minutes on a post-it note. Then she pocketed her cell phone, grabbed her lunchbox, and swept outside, slapping the post-it note on the door and locking it behind her.

---

When Katie turned off the main coastal highway onto the peninsula that housed the Power Cooperative, a pit, cold as the biting winter air, dropped into her stomach.

On the other side of the massive fence, where the boys were stringing strands upon strands of Christmas lights, was a transformer, a huge box of a thing, rigged up like something out of a space ship. She was no electrician, but the transformer that loomed like a giant bug over the other structures was close – stupidly, perilously close – to the fence, and the ladder on which Chuck stood.

His cheeks and nose, the only parts of his body not protected from the cold, were red from the frigid wind. He was suspended multiple stories above the frozen ground, supported by nothing but a metal ladder.

And he was mere feet from who knew how many thousands of volts of electricity coursing through that transformer.

What would he think? That she was crazy enough to think prank calls were – what? The work of a ghost?

She could turn her car around right now, go back to the office, and pretend that she’d never left.

She could turn around. She could leave.

Katie rolled her car up the gravel road and pulled alongside Chuck’s old truck, loaded with lights, ladders and equipment. She hesitated, hands clutching the steering wheel.

Was she being paranoid? It wouldn’t be the first time she’d worried too much, created problems where there were none.

But what if she was wrong?

It wouldn’t be the first time she was wrong either. It wouldn’t be the first time her hesitation, her self-consciousness, her fear of looking stupid, had ended in harm.

If something happened to Chuck, if she could have stopped it but didn’t because she was afraid he might look at her funny, might think she was paranoid –

Her cell phone rang, a sudden, shrill jangle in the wintry air.

“Hey, Katie!” Marco waved from his spot by the fence, where he held Chuck’s ladder steady.

Katie gave a haphazard wave back as she pulled her phone from her purse. Words popped up on the caller ID:

Maybe: Arnold’s Landing Power Cooperative

She held the phone tentatively to her ear. “Who is this?”

“Dust,” gasped the staticky voice. “Get them out now!”

Katie stumbled from her car. “Chuck!” she hollered, her voice snatched by the wind from the ocean.

Marco cocked his head at her, and Chris stopped in his tracks, a bundle of lights in his arms, to look her way. Whether because of the whipping ocean wind or his concentration on the lights, Chuck made no sign that he heard her.

“Chuck!” Katie broke into a run. “Marco, tell him to get down!”

“What?” Marco said. “What’s going on?”

“Katie?” Chuck’s voice came from above, and Katie looked up at him, too high in the air, too close to the transformer –brown eyes squinting in the cold.

Her mouth went dry, but she raised her voice against the wind. “You need to get down!”

“Is something wrong?” Chuck moved down a couple rungs, glancing over his shoulder as he spoke.

“I don’t –” Katie hesitated. “That transformer is really close to the fence.”

Chuck looked at her for a moment. He turned toward the fence, cocking his head. Then he nodded. “Yeah, it is, isn’t it?”

A sudden warmth sprang up in Katie. And, just like that, Chuck was moving down the ladder, albeit slowly. He had listened to her, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

“Nice catch,” he said with a smile. “We can just move on to the next section –”

There was a flash. Impossibly fast, impossibly bright.

At the top of the fence line, a shower of sparks like rogue fireworks, a roar sharp as the clang of cymbals.

Then flames leaped at the fence, smoke billowed in great black pillows toward the grey sky. Chuck clung to the ladder as it jerked sideways.

Katie grabbed at the ladder, adding her weight to Marco’s to hold it still. Chris dropped the bundle of lights and darted toward them, throwing himself onto the ladder as well.

Under their combined weight, the ladder creaked and groaned and righted itself

Chuck scrambled down and jumped the last few rungs, landing with a dense thud on the frosty ground. He staggered backward, his face pale and his eyes wide.

Katie didn’t feel her feet move, but suddenly she was behind the truck with Chris and Chuck and Marco, watching the sky darken with smoke as an alarm blared from somewhere within the Power Cooperative. Ice seeped into Katie’s veins while she stared at the spot on the fence where Chuck had stood moments before, now jagged with fierce, hungry flames.

---

“Dust.” Chuck scoffed and shook his head as he hung up his phone.

“What did you say?” Katie’s face shot up from where she’d been staring at her phone’s call log. The empty call log. The call log that said her cell phone had received no calls that day from Arnold’s Landing Power Cooperative. The office, too, had no records of calls from the Power Cooperative that entire day.

“There was dust on part of the transformer. That’s what caused the arc flash. Dust.” Chuck refilled his coffee from the machine in the garage.

A rush, like electricity, rolled through Katie, and her gaze dropped back to the call log. Dust. Her thoughts churned, turning the events of the day over and under and sideways, looking for some semblance of sense.

If she had died riddled with guilt over deaths she had caused, what might she do with some portion of her eternity?

Was that what William Ross was doing, patrolling the Arnold’s Landing Power Cooperative, hunting for safety violations so he could spare other families the same losses that he inflicted in life? Preventing tragedy any way he knew how?

Or maybe she was just dizzy from hunger. She had never stopped to eat her ham-and-cheese sandwich.

Katie glanced back up at Chuck, who was sipping his third cup of coffee. “You’ll get jittery if you drink any more of that.”

Chuck didn’t say anything. There was an unusual somberness in him this afternoon, though at her mother-hen comment the faint hint of a smile lit his face.

Katie looked back at her phone, suddenly wishing Marco and Chris were still there. It was easier, the light office banter, with a buffer.

“I didn’t get a chance to thank you earlier,” Chuck said.

What was she supposed to say to that? No problem? Or maybe The ghost of what I can only assume was a guilt-ridden dead man called me and told me to check on you, and I listened to it, because I’m the kind of person who listens to phone ghosts and you should definitely know that about me if you’re going to be the father of my children?  

“Just right place, right time,” she said with a shrug.

“No,” Chuck said. “You were right about the transformer, about it being way too close to that fence. That was a good call. If you hadn’t been there, I probably still would’ve been up at the top of the ladder when it blew.”

“I’m just,” Katie paused, the words harder to form than she had expected, “glad you listened to me.”

“Of course,” Chuck said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

And something in his voice, or perhaps in the expression on his face as he nursed his coffee and smiled, or the way he lingered, as though he had nothing more pressing to do than to drink coffee in the office with her, changed the quiet room. The air was different, the late afternoon chill no longer bleak. He said nothing more, just smiled, and Katie smiled back. The silence was not brittle; it was still and peaceful within the cocooning wintry darkness, illuminated by the soft glow of Penter Painter’s Christmas lights.