Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Oil Smudges
    Oil Smudges
    Oil Smudges
    Ebook47 pages41 minutes

    Oil Smudges

    By Daniel R. Robichaud

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This is no time for pranks . . .

    George Wishing is the middle manager for an oil and gas service company's technology department. He has a proven track record of delivering the projects under his supervision with a minimum of trouble. However, an increase in tech burps during field trials as well as outright failures in jobs that rely on his department's creations are now leaving marks on his record and smears on his credibility.

    Upper management wants someone's head . . .

    When smudged fingerprints begin to appear on his office door, his monitor, and his desk, George suspects a malicious prank. Fastidious attention to detail comes with a price: George Wishing has an obsessive intolerance for blotches on either his record or his world. Who is responsible? The disrespectful clown on his team? Is it one or more members of the cleaning staff who smile at George without any real friendliness in their eyes? This is not play time. Upper management is looking for a sacrificial lamb, and George finds himself in the unenviable position of delivering one to them.

    Is something else happening here?

    As prints appear in increasingly unlikely places, George fears something unnatural is at work. When the faces of dead contractors appear in his periphery, he suspects the supernatural. Is George Wishing being haunted or are all these strange details merely figments of an unraveling mind stressed to the breaking point?

    Oil Smudges is a 10,000 word novella of ghostly terror set in the high stakes corporate world of the oil and gas industry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTwice Told Tales II
    Release dateJun 11, 2018
    ISBN9780463616710
    Oil Smudges
    Author

    Daniel R. Robichaud

    Daniel R. Robichaud has lived in southeastern Michigan, central Massachusetts and southern Texas. He is a Rhysling Award nominated poet and the author of over one hundred stories, articles and poems, which have appeared in such markets as Shroud Magazine, Rogue Worlds, Goblin Fruit, Rage of the Behemoth, Green Prints, and WritersWeekly. Daniel holds degrees in both Physics and English, and his career path has reflected these passions. In addition to his numerous writing opportunities, he has been an Igor For Hire (aka a freelance research engineer), a substitute teacher, an automation engineer, and a neurophysiology lab manager. Daniel enjoys entertaining people with his words and stories. If you enjoy a good read, why not try one of his works? You might just love them.

    Read more from Daniel R. Robichaud

    Related to Oil Smudges

    Related ebooks

    Fantasy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Great Chip Race

      Jun 25, 2021

      The Great Chip Race
      12 min read

    • Article

      The Great Chip Race

      Jun 25, 2021

      The Great Chip Race
      12 min read

    • Article

      Wall St wolves

      Sep 28, 2023

      AT THE BEGINNING of 2021, a grim period of lockdown and Zoom calls, a small scandal ripped through American capitalism. It concerned shares in a computer game retailer, Gamestop. Hedge funds, believing that this was a doomed business in an age of dow

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Apocalypse That Never Was

      Aug 13, 2019

      The Apocalypse That Never Was
      2 min read

    • Article

      “This Was Weaponised Technobabble. And They Were Bringing Out The Big Guns”

      Dec 7, 2023

      I’m not claiming that I manifested the glitch in the Air Traffic Control system at the end of the summer because I’m so deeply attuned to the natural and digital world that my worries actualised as a blip on the radar. But I might have done. Fortune,

      6 min read

    • Article

      Turning Off The Tap

      Dec 29, 2022

      Turning Off The Tap
      2 min read

    • Article

      Of Tweeds And Texts

      Dec 19, 2019

      Of Tweeds And Texts
      3 min read

    • Article

      Now Is the Time to Overreact

      Mar 16, 2020

      If the measures we're taking to fight the coronavirus work, they'll look excessive later on. But the alternative is worse.

      9 min read

    • Article

      Techdaddy Doesn’t Know Best

      Jul 29, 2018

      Techdaddy Doesn’t Know Best
      12 min read

    • Article

      Why Is There Still No Pandemic Plan?

      Nov 30, 2023

      ‘‘FOR WANT OF A NAIL, THE SHOE WASlost,” the proverb begins. “For want of a plan, the pandemic was lost” should be where Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry turns its gaze. Deeply enjoyable to the media though it is, with its spectacle of repeated “gotcha”

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Science of Your Sex Toy

      Feb 3, 2020

      The Science of Your Sex Toy
      2 min read

    • Article

      All For NOTHING

      Jan 18, 2021

      All For NOTHING
      3 min read

    • Article

      Believing In Ghosts

      Jan 10, 2021

      The politician stood on the podium and addressed the nation. Dressed in a dark suit and red tie, he answered all the questions the reporter asked him. “The people are tired of the same old faces in charge of policy. Policy that has been a disaster, p

      21 min read

    • Article

      Spinning Off

      Oct 4, 2019

      Communication has always had its pitfalls, dependent as it is on noises accepted as ways of passing on thoughts to others, plus the miracle of squiggly lines that crystallise them on stone, parchment, paper or screen. Just ponder how those squiggles

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Oil Smudges

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Oil Smudges - Daniel R. Robichaud

      Oil Smudges

      A Novella of Ghostly Terror

      By: Daniel R. Robichaud

      Oil Smudges

      The small smear on the transparent protective plastic cover atop George Wishing’s desk caused the middle manager no end of irritation. That mark was narrower than a dime, oval shaped, and yet it held a world of partial whorls and broken loops. A fingerprint that made no sense. The outer perimeter was perfect, unbroken. It could not have been made any cleaner by a grubby little cop rocking a suspect’s pinky left to right on one of those cards, and yet the interior was baffling in its incompleteness. Someone equipped with a three horsehair thread brush had eradicated whole pieces of the interior. Had the impression come from a burned finger? An acid scarred one? What bothered George was the question of origins. Open door policies only applied during daylight hours, but this had materialized overnight, when his sliding glass door was shut and locked. The position suggested someone sitting in his chair, maybe playing with his mouse or leafing through his documents.

      The round-bellied evening janitor with the pleasant smile and trim hair had an armload of ink, glorifying the cartels or Christ or who could say. He seemed the sort to play with acids, toxic chemicals. Would an inspection of his fingers reveal this kind of damage? George had always suspected those people to be up to anything, especially when their actions weren’t scrutinized. Code of Business Conduct prevented his saying anything, but struck dumb did not also mean blind.

      The round-bellied evening janitor had keys, but then again all those people did. The squinty eyed woman responsible for the break areas, a leathery skinned, sixty-year-old woman with dead, blank eyes whose lips spread and so did her jaws when she smiled and said "Hola, Good morning sir." Hungry sharks did not open their mouths that wide.

      The smear had no gender tags associated, at least nothing George could see. They were all small, those people. Any one of them could have done it. So many had opportunity, but why?

      He did not have long to investigate. The first of the morning’s meetings was coming up. A notification from Outlook, accompanied by that program’s tinny rendition of clarion trumpets told him he could fetch a coffee or drain the morning commute’s hydration, but not both.

      Returning with a sloshing mug of brew born from the coffee dispenser's button labeled Strong-Caffeinated, flavored with two blue sweetener packets and a teaspoon dollop of powdered creamer, he dragged the sliding door shut behind him and found both the Meeting Starting notification as well as a second smear. This other impression rested four inches to the left of the first. Just far enough to bring George a momentary thought of having missed it the first time around. Could it have been there, unseen?

      No. He was meticulous. His attention was meticulous. A storied career engineering for NASA and Big Red’s Sporty Downhole tools PSL before assuming the leadership of Big Red’s BNC Technology PSL had given him an appreciation for seemingly minor details. Minor details were like those people, they could stack and breed, becoming major infestations in less time than you'd expect. Minor details were the root causes of so many operations disasters. So. Many.

      He dialed into the meeting, arriving second to last in a chain

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1