The New Guy’s Secret Project

I walked into the conference room and saw him standing over the whiteboard, sketching furiously.
The air felt strangely still and cold, a sharp contrast to the stuffy office hallway. The acrid smell of dry-erase markers hung heavy.

His back was to me, his shoulders hunched. He was humming a low, tuneless sound that felt off-key. “Didn’t expect anyone else in here,” he muttered, his voice flat, without turning around. The constant whirring of the dormant projector fan seemed deafening in the sudden quiet.

“What… what are you working on?” I finally managed to ask, my voice feeling thin and shaky. He slowly turned then, eyes unnervingly bright under the harsh fluorescent office lights. “Something they *really* don’t want you to see,” he said, and a slow, strange smile spread across his face.

He gestured loosely at the complex, swirling lines and symbols covering the board. It looked less like a business model and more like a chaotic circuit diagram overlaid with a distorted city map. A sudden, cold prickle of fear crawled up my spine. Just as I opened my mouth to ask what any of this meant, the door handle turned sharply.

Then the security guard opened the door and pointed directly at me.

👇 Full story continued in the comments…The guard’s eyes were narrowed, fixed solely on me. “You,” he stated flatly, his voice echoing slightly in the quiet room. “We need you to come with us.”
Us? I glanced back at the doorway, expecting to see another guard, maybe a manager. There was no one else. My eyes darted to the new guy, who hadn’t moved, still smiling his unsettling smile, watching the guard and me with an unnerving calmness.
“What’s going on?” I stammered, a wave of nausea washing over me. “Is this about… about the whiteboard?”
The guard shifted his weight, his gaze never leaving mine. “The whiteboard isn’t the issue right now. We just need you to come down to security for a moment. There’s been a report.”
A report? My mind raced. Had the new guy reported me? For what? Loitering? Asking about his weird drawing?
“Reported what?” I pressed, feeling a desperate need for clarity in the rapidly unfolding strangeness.
The guard hesitated, just for a second. “A complaint,” he said finally. “From your department. About… harassment.”
My jaw dropped. Harassment?
The new guy spoke then, his voice soft but carrying clearly in the silence. “It was me,” he said. “I reported you.”
I stared at him, stunned. “You? But why? I just asked what you were drawing!”
He tilted his head, his smile widening. “You saw it,” he said simply, gesturing at the whiteboard. “That’s the harassment.”
My blood ran cold. Seeing it was harassment? This was beyond bizarre office politics. This was something else entirely. The complex lines on the board suddenly seemed less like a diagram and more like a ward, a trap, or perhaps a map to somewhere I didn’t want to go.
The guard reached out, taking my arm firmly. “Alright, that’s enough. Let’s go.”
As the guard steered me towards the door, I looked back one last time at the new guy. He was still standing there, the strange drawing behind him, watching us leave. His eyes weren’t just bright anymore; they seemed to hold a calculating intensity, and the smile on his face was no longer just strange – it was triumphant. As the door swung shut, cutting off the view, I could swear I heard him hum that same tuneless, off-key sound again from the conference room, a chilling sound that suggested the real reason for his presence, and the drawing’s existence, was far more unsettling than a simple office complaint.