Speaker 1: There is a strange comfort to the echo of your
own footsteps in a silent museum at four in the morning.
Maybe comfort isn't the word. It's just that, with so
many nights behind me, months spent weaving alone among artifacts
older than memory, my ears of grown sensitive to the
cadence of security rounds soft squeak, and the marble rubber
souls brushing against lines of Victorian tile, the way each
particular gallery absorbs and returns of prisons. This was my
final week, and I was counting rounds like the notches
carved inside a cell wall. Each pass meant one step
closer to dawn, to freedom from this job and the
tangle of warriors that had pushed me into taking it.
Most of my shift was ritual, keys tapping softly as
I checkedlocks in sequent flashlight being cutting eat circles along
door frames, and the ever present hum of the buildings
to humidifiers, a low electric lulluor by beneath wavering spotlights.
At night, the museum takes on a subtle menacel of
its owner, placed designed for hushed reverence in daylight, feels
predatory with the doors locked in the world outside gum
dark that Tuesday. Nothing seemed off As I made my
chewy m circuit the main exhibition whollway quiet, turning the
corner into the east wing, passed the bleep bronze lions
and the faded benefer last month's Egyptology simpos him. I
found myself drawn toward a secondary corridor seldom explored by visitors.
My flask white beam shouted along the display glass. This
was the stretch given over to milling, art vaxxing, the ceramics,
a few odd paintings, nothing that drew much public attention.
I'd grown used to the rhythm of these displays, so
the interruption came swift and sharp, a glass case that
hadn't been there the night before. At first I hesitated.
The object itself was unremarkable, a dusky elliptical artifact slightly
chit the sword of thing that would vanish Among the
more dazzling pieces, Several thin bronze bands crisscrussed around it,
set on a felt mount that seemed just a touch
too precise for any casual hand. But the case was new.
The labels are fixed by hand. The polished latches, incongruously shiny,
wore a dust layer settled thick on neighboring displays. This
one gleamed cold under the security lights. I drew closer,
pressure building at my temples, the air thickening. In the
crook of the corridor, A label caught the edge of
my torch beam. I recognized the writing instantly. It was
a mess Vegas in the same neat hand I'd seen
countless times on requisition notes. How vedas sharp and unmistakable,
though he rendered with a frantic tilt, only a mess.
Viga had been missing for nearly a week. A slow
kind of panic began behind my eyes. I placed my
palm against the glass, as if proximity would fill gaps.
The mind refuses, cool to the touch, no sign of
tampering or finger prints. I tried to latch locked predictably enough,
though the silver keyhole seemed factory fresh, adjuring contrast beside
battered alt hinges further along the wall. I paged through
the possibilities in my head. Had the collections team installed
this during day shift? Had I missed a memo? I
flit through my pocket note but of my master checklist
as Trusty a companion as my ID badge. No mention
of this artifact. Anywhere I turned the corners of my mind,
sifting for plausible excuses, there were none. Shadows leaned on
across the flagstones as I stared deeper into the display. Thus,
motes jittered in the thin beam of my flask light.
My own face a pale reflection walked by imperfect pains.
There was something uncanny in the arrangement and impression that
went beyond the mere presence of a new object. It
was as if I'd stumbled on a tableau not meant
for my eyes, or richell complete in its secrecy. A
catalog number one unfamiliar to me had been hurried linked
below the object's label, And for a second, the thought
occurred to me, half formed, did it want to be seen?
A sudden, ineffable conviction took root. I was not alone
in that corridor. I backed away, pulse heavy in my throat. Museums,
especially old ones, have a way of playing tricks with acoustics.
But as I reached the main hallway, the safety of
open space and predictable camera site lines, one thought knacked
at me like a three dycuant's nip. Had I walked
past this case all week and never noticed or had
something placed it precisely for me to find tonight. I
completed my shift, running the rest of my protocols with
an unshakable sense of eyes at my back. That glass case,
gleaming in the dark, hummed in my peripheral vision, as
if the museum itself had birtht it. When the doors
were bolted in the moon set low, I scribbled the
case and its cryptic label into my notepad, half expecting
it to vanish by sunrise. Only later, walking slowly through
the stuff entrance to punch my tank carud, did I
realize how completely the case and the artifact within it
quietly a more of my sense of reality. The three
eyes until dawn stretched interminably, and the questions borne in
the side corrid door multiply behind my eyes attained an
insistent You never really understand what night does to a
museum until you've walked it alone. You watched the wall
trink to the size of your flasklight. You'll learn to
trust your own breeding over the hush of thousands of
silent objects until the unexpected arrive. Then your left teetering
between explanations that don't reassurance, silences that don't comfort wishing
for the dawn to bring everything back into place. Of
all those sleepless nights before my final shift, that was
the one that changed everything. In the days before the anomaly,
my routine was as tightly wound as any clockwork thus
could close and I'd inherit the Kingdom of glass and shaddow,
passing from one exhibit cluster to the next, keys ready,
badge pressed under my coat, the scanner clipped to my
hip like a talisman. Each night started the same down
the side stairs to check the main entrance, a glance
through the boulted iron grow wuk onto the empty street outside.
I would pass the bust of the museum's founders. Her
lionel Fretwall must asued and properly severe in his marble glare,
and descend into my loop, pausing at certain familiar stale
landings where the ancient pipes always rattled in the walls.
By my third month had mapped every short cut, ever
drafty archway ducked under each city air vent. I divided
the large spaces up in my mind East Wing ceramics,
Central Gallery, oil paintings, West Hall, the natural history displays,
and developed private names for lesser known knlkoves in side
out gallery, catacomb stairs that no one else in day
shift cared to learn. The building itself was a relic
Victorian lines and faded brick, fast and lumbering. There were
rumors among the older staff that parts of the museum
were added piecemeal without master plans, missing blip prints, always
leading nowhere, doors built over old windows. The staff break
room had a wall tapped with dull eared news clippings, hauntings,
half jerking claims of footstep tickoing when the place was
supposed to be empty. In true, I enjoyed the isolation.
I took the job of the IROs, but I stayed
because the quiet suited me. Some nights I catch a
glimpse of my own reflection. I shadowed, jaw tense, a haunted,
hushed to my edges that match the exhibit manequins. There
was solace in the museum's midnight order, an absence of expectation.
I was recovering, or at least trying to patching myself
after a friendship siren, needing a break from daylight, not
ready to deal with faces that ask questions. As a
night god, it could let day's slip without answering to
anyone except for cut supervisor and quarterly performance reviews. The
rest of the staff by enlarged let me be mess done.
The night supervisor kept conversations perfunctory ticking boxes on pay
per forms when she did her rounds. Daytime admin hovered
in pairs Poe walking through the holes and smot blazers,
always with mugs in hand, their polite nods never meaning much.
Then there was August Maintenance, rumpled Cheery, an expert in
the life cycle of museum light bulbs and the only
one who ever called me chief. He spoke in a
jumble of stories, some about the museum, some probably invented,
all delivered with a crooked smile. Among us, none was
better known than a mess Vega, a narrow woman with
bitten down nails, than a ppittul apologetic Yankee Low. She
had a deliberate warmth to speech, and always remembered to
ask about your weekend, even if she worked through half
the calendar herself. She was archivist, inventory wrangler, and informal
oracle of lost paperwork. Now and again she would leave
me note slips of corrections for cattalog discrepancies, barring the
odd exclamation mark from the space crates. Her hand was
so precisely looped, and her attention to orders so practiced,
that the chaos of her sudden disappearance nodded the staff
into anxious speculation. First she was homesick, then her office
stood silent, mail piling on her desk. In a weeks
before the incident, I had caught shots of workplace rumor,
muffle voices by the tank clock admind glancing away when
I walked in August. Once whispered while fixing a glitchy
exit alarm, archives Stone Stay lawn with a sidelong glance
at store and filled with out of dead office chairs.
I laughed it off, but the echo lingered. I think
everyone tried to hide their concern, not wanting to admit
that such an indispensable piece of the museum could simply vanish.
Our interactions, mostly routine, had accumulated a rhythm, nods, a
shift change, the occasional shear coffee, a chat about paint
scuffs by the north stairs cleaners would offer up left
of a biscuits or jerks and polish and tag aloggos.
We all ducked into the supply closet before closing time.
To most I was the reliable when invisible in prison,
a habit of presents, rather than a participant in the
day staff's games. Some nights I allowed myself to drift
lingering by exhibits. I grown fond of aniolithic spindle attacked
fromid fox that grinned with its glass teeth. They gave
the impression that objects could have lost their labels, could
persist even a staff turned over in the smelt of dust.
Ghost stores circulated on slow weeks. Some one moved the
manequin's folds or linel roams the whole schecking locks. I
claim to disbelief, Yet I catch a glimpse of movement
in an empty gallery and feel a cold bloom of doubt.
Whether it was the hush or the old stones breathing
around me, something in the dark always seemed ready to
become more than just a story. I suppose That's why
when the case appeared, I was prone to look for explanations,
but none of the usual ones fit. I had grown
too careful, too practiced in the ways the museum could
cheat its own history. For benig nancs to satisfy me
for long the morning After finding the new art of fact,
I returned to the east corridor as soon as the
next shift started. The case sat precisely where I found
it and disturbed olda mess forbes. One of the cleaners
bustled past, and, seeing my furrowed brow grinned with tobacco
yellow teeth collection grummonds again. She asked, nodding toward the
newly gleaming display. Something always up and shifts round here,
I muttered an uncertain response, continuing my check. My hand
ran along the note bath. The label was undoubtedly m
mess Vega's hand, but on closer inspection it differed from
her usual style, crooked, hurried, as if her hand had
been forced, so she scriveled it in a trembling hurry.
The catalog number references no sheet I recognized, and my
attempt to cross reference it on the office desktop just
led to not found messages in the central database. I
checked the nightly log book, ignoring the coffee rings and
smear initials from daytime guards. Every case in display was
listed with the last inspected date and initials beside it.
Yet the corridor where the new case appeared simply didn't
reference this artifact. I paged backward and forward, growing irritable
with frustration, no mention, no entry, as if it had
never existed. My next round, I scrutinized every display. Two
cases looked slightly off, a Victorian commode in the adjacent
gallery was angled differently, casting a new shadow on the wall,
and a porcelain teapot usually perched twin to a neighboring saucer,
was nowhere to be seen. I assumed it had been
removed for cleaning, but when I circled back later, it
had reappeared perfectly arranged, as if time had reversed by
some invisible hand. The notion had settled me and gnawing
suspicion that I was either missing some detail or witnessing
a sequence of subtle intrusions into the museum's night and quiet,
I replayed in my mind how I'd always trusted a
kind of order in the way exhibit greeted me each round.
Yet now that order scene suspect malleable, as if some
one or something was deliberately time with the arrangement. The
museum meant to be frozen in time felt as if
it was shifting beneath my feet, resisting any understanding I
tried to pin down. That night, my sleep was fredful,
and then I kept replaying the image of Ms. Vegus,
labeled hand but not quite ordinary, yet pressed into crisis.
I rode it all down, details swirling around the edges
of my mind, and he's growing sharper than ever before.
I wonder, not for the first time, whether the museum's
stores held something real beneath the pattern of gossip and routine,
or whether, in trying not to care, had left myself
open to something I could no longer ignore. A sense
of being watched followed me now for out all of
my rands, even in the comfort of the main hall,
even among the glare of the emergency ex at life lights.
It was as if the museum itself had decided to whisper,
to pull strings just beyond the limits of certainty. Am
I just anchers? I asked myself, or does Displace keep
a secret to shade too well? The next night, my
resolve overtook my hesitation. There comes a point when the
serve in nervousness becomes motivation. You want, if nothing else,
to prove yourself For on I returned to the glass
case to look from undane explanation, security, tax stickers, anything
that would place it in the procedural framework. Anderstote. I
brought the list of weekly inventories and backle of incident reports,
holding them against the display with the bureaucrut's desperation. Nothing matched,
no additions, no authorizations, no requisition slips from the collections manager.
I typed the label's catalog number into the old desktop terminals.
Error not found. Check again. My hands began to sweat.
I wept them on my trousers. Feeling the light a shudder,
I convinced myself to recheck other displays. That's when inconsistencies
bled through the edges of my perception. Ornamental objects that
should have stood in regimented order along the glass all
felt subtly off, a degree out of alignment, a photo
frame fractionally close to the edge, and a small Brasky
in a medieval lockcase now missing, and then within the
ayre reappearing just slightly bent. Scrutiny sometimes breeds obsession. My
colleagues will little help. August plugging in a rattling portable
heat in nearby mother down gremlins. Ye watch, I'll lock
the twill closet and still lose my wrench by sunrise.
He didn't even glance up, as if such oddity barely
merited comment. At this point. Laid into that shift, I
caught myself shivering with upcalls, biting down on suspicions I
could not voice, Not yet. I hurried back to the
new case, fully intending to dismiss it as paranoia. But
as I stood before, something had changed. His position on
the floor was subtly different, two feet to the left
of where I'd first seen it, or had it always
been there? The unservanty curdled inside me, dread growing dense
and inescapable. I stared, willing myself to reason, had someone
moved it in the course of cleaning, some mundane rotation?
And yet the impression that something intended me to find
this object, to puzzle over it and see myself reflected
in its case grew stronger with every rotation of the
museum's clock. Was I missing what really mattered? While chasing
patterns in glass and brass? The growing sense of unreality
whispered that this mystery chose me well before I chose it.
Still habit and protocol sharp in my instincts, I decided
to take a tangible approach records, cameras facts if the
truth was hiding in the patterns, and tended to catch
it in the act. I started by pulling the last
weak security tapes blow and in a crump suboficer of
the cataloging lounge, a hunched of a flickering monitors. The
screens cast blue halos in the musty dark. I sit
bitter coffee and let my eyes go slack, training them
to pick out the menu ate details that mean everything.
An odd flecker askit timestamp, unexplained movement. The recording should
have run in continuous loops, covering every corner of the halls,
but in playback I stared at moment long stretches of
static exactly around three thirteen a m. Each night. At first,
the blackouts could be dismissed as failing hard work, maybe
a maintenance had missed a server update. But the blackouts
were always the same length, sixty seconds of nothing, and
always in the aftermath something was off place. I compared
tapes from two consecutive nights before three thirteen. An elaborate
triptish on the main stairs lean left three plaques precisely
aligned afterward, in the exact next frame, the plaques were
ever so slightly re arranged, the angles not matching, and
no shadow of any human present in that span of time.
I ripid the corridor section. The camera picked out the
array of glass cases, but the new case, the one
that had drawn me, and wasn't present until after the
next block out on a later tape. Something even stranger.
The case was gone again for a night, to replace
with nothing but clean carpet, as if it had ceased
to exist. For the duration of those moments, something or
some one was acting on the meseum while I was
meant to be the only observer. The dissolution of confidence
in my own perception of what had changed and what
had not began to bide with us its certainty. At
three thirteen, the museum became truly other, and I was
blind to her secrets. I spread out Lobuck's cross checking
sign ins and door axis records unnervingly. Several after iris
storage entries were recorded in the past week. Each line
bore a mess vegus initials written in her precise hand,
but every one was dated after the morning she had
last been seen by staff. My mind reule knowing. I
checked the storage rooms myself on each of those nights
and found them undisturbed. I tried to shake the feeling,
often decided to seek out answers from the only person
with keys to the basement. Hortiest, always around under some
predixt or another. I found him swapping out sealing bowls
by the north stair. He wiped oil from his fingers
onto his uniform. Men turned, blinking behind scratched lenses. You
see a glass display moved about. I asked two direct
to be saddle. He shook his head. Not since the
exhibition swapped last month? Which room I described it? Resisting
the urge to give away how deeply and settle me
who never saw it before, he said, scratching the stubble
on his jaw. Unless someone's playing musical chairs with inventory again.
Wouldn't be the first. Last year they lost money foot
for ten days, he laughed, a false sound that didn't
reach his eyes. I pressed him about the case being locked,
about who might have keys, hoping to force something more
conclusive from his nonchalants, But he just shook his head,
distracted and a little wary, as if afraid of learning more.
All cases keyed the same, but new ones don't turn
up out of nowhere unless they officer. She's new locks,
though they never bothered to tell me. He shrugged, return
into his bulbs, talk to Ms done. When I finally
caught up with a mess done near closing, she was
heard and brisk for feet, never quite stopping case. INVENTORIU
is atman's job, she said, tightly, glancing sidelong as she
jabbed at her security tablet. We don't track every detail
in real time. If you have issues, send me an email.
I started to mention Ms Vegua's hand in the labels,
but she cut me off. She'll be back soon. Just
took some leave. Don't go stirring up rumors. Her eyes
lingered on mine longer than called for, evaluating if anything.
The more questions I asked, the more those around me
circled their wagons. The staff convened in quieter corners, their
language shifting around me from rumor to caution. There was
a new formality to the gaze, as if I do
overstep summon spoken boundary. Later, emboldened by gnawing frustration, A
snuck into Ms Vegas's office and a cover of early
dawn the door hung barely closed, a bad sign. Her
desk usually immaculate boor chaos drawers pull half open, fold
was appended a moub crousted with rings. No sign of
a small black journal, the one she carried for cross
referencing collection notes. Her spare cardigan slumped on the back
of the chair, sleeves twisted as if removed in a hurry.
The room smelled faintly of old paper and lemon sanitiz her,
but no presents remained. Sometimes on tired nights, legends woul
bubble up among the cleaning staff. Archivists vanish collections move
on without them. The whisper was nervous, tinged with historical resignation.
All this nodded me relentlessly. At night, with questions surging
and checked. I slept as if balanced over a pit,
dreams thick with images of the unknown artifact or shaped
sleurthering and aerial view through the galleries, arranging and re
arranging displays in fractal like patterns. In sleep, the glass
cases gleamed under a natural light, each with a hastily
scold label, a mass vegus frantic script lost under glass.
Morning brought no relief, only a dull exhaustion, a certainty
that the ANSWER's demanded action. I decided, with fatalistic certainty
to abandon protecolumn pursuit of what I hoped would be
my lass aberrant. Midnight, I told myself I was only
following a hunch, But truthfully it was obsession, a compulsion
that could no longer be silenced by policy or reason.
There had to be a connection. Amez beag As abrupt disappearance,
the impossible inventory adjustments, the mysterious glass case. It was
in the back of my mind. At a mess, Figa
not long before she left, had mentioned an unused storage
area below the old East Wing, a place on no
official map but one reference with the knowing arch of
her iber. It supposed to be for the overflow, she
had said, But they had half their mistakes down there
at the time it sounded like a bitter joke. That afternoon,
armed with directions from a half remembered maintenance diagram and
the last shreds of my nerve, I resolved to find it.
Waiting for the museum to settle was torture. I lingered
past the staff departure, faking a maintenance coln near the
loading dock, then doubled back inside night again took dominion.
The gray halls pressed him with all their silent judgment.
Underneath it all, the faint trembling of my hands nearly
broke my resolve. Only momentum, only anger at the evasions,
pushed me onward. I traced the outline of the old
east wing in torchlight, finding the axis hatch hidden behind
a battered boiler or rust flaked in the cold air.
The creak of iron revealed a short downward word to
flight to stairs. My chest tightened with fear, not of
what at sea, but of being caught. I shimmed side
was through an ill fitting door, fighting the urge to
run the hidden storm was bigger than I expected. Shadows
pressed into coroners, rows of battered inventory crates forming canyons
of shadow, rubble, and outdated boxes, some bursting open lined
the walls. Peeling inventory forms littered the floor, and drifts.
I strained, peering into the dark. A stack of journals
tumbled from a crate nearby, rooting through as stilled as
my hand. Mechaul tixtured leather the missing black notebook. My
throat tightened. I sat torch trembling and thumb through pages
crowded with frantic looping notes, item numbers corresponding to nothing
in narrow system, desperate maps of the gallery floors, closterus
of simples, and lines drawing frontic paths. There were pages
of erratic columns, notes reading a move case next to
interspersed with half legible phrases like a correction's mate, but
not enough, not save for the final pages. Tailed off
with a trembling hand. Almost there, I know you're watching.
The room's silence was total. My heart hammered there beneath
the static hush. I heard it. A sound behind the
stack crates, shufflings low, as if heavy hands moved objects
in the far side of shadow. Instinct flattened me against
a cabinet torch swished off, breath shallow enough to vanish.
I pressed my back deeper, preying for darkness to cloak me.
Another sound, softer, closer, shape or present, shifting beyond the
dim light. Minutes pass may be ires, the steps retreated, silence,
wrapping the clutter in a shroud. I daren't move. I
fixed my gaze and the only exit, too afraid even
to blink. Eventually forced by numb legs and terror, I
slid from my hiding place and cricked back up the
nearrow stair every cent strained, convinced that any moment I
would feel a hand on my shoulder or see a
face emerged from darkness. When at last I surfaced in
the staff corridor again, body trembling and mine at blaze
with what had found. One certainty scraped at my already
raw nerves. The museum, or some part of it, did
not want me to learn its secrets. Some one or
something else was moving in towandom with me, rearranging not
just artifacts but the facts themselves. This was no ordinary
inventory mistake. It was a message of mess Vegas maybe,
or some higher authority. Either way, I had already been noticed,
and I was no longer sure that even if the
dawn came, anything would be as it was before. The
hours after I surface felt like existence in negative, a
state of hyper awareness, marked by the muffled thud of
my own pulse and the unfamiliar weight of a mess
Vegus journal pressed under my arm. I got myself to
the guard's office on autopilot, barely trussing my legs, but
desperate for any centiary with a lock and a window
to morning. I sat behind the bat at metal desk,
hands trembling as I flipped open her journal again, struggling
to decipher her looping notations. Just beyond the security class,
the sky was starting to tint navy, a bruce promise
that the day staff would soon rouse the building from
its nocturnal secrets. I forced myself to focus on the facts,
not the chill twining its way through mindsides. Mess vegus
maps were rough sketches, but meticulous in their coats, Galleries
marked with triangles and looping arrows. Certain cases circled for
five times, with thick pencil lines, margin notes multiplying, as
if the act of writing my order the chaos she'd encountered.
Some numbers match forgotten corners of the collection, while others
pointed to exhibits that, as far as I knew, didn't
exist any more. Three thirteen corrid door shift out of
app rotation nor admin present. A case appears, disappears, reappears.
The density of her desperation bled through the paper, growing
feverish at the end, slipping the journal and a blank
file folded, the better to disguise that I have found
myself catching my own reflection in the glass of a
display case. There was a new totness around my eyes
and mouth, a sense of movement in my face, suspicion
taking root, maybe even fear, but also in anger I
hadn't expected to find. I wanted answers, yes, but I
was angry now at the unspoken rules being twisted around me,
the staff's evasions, the inventory I had learned to trust
as gospel now proven unreliable, The way everyone seemed willing
to let him ass Vega's absence fate and remarked just
to keep the Knight's piece. I held off calling any
one its staff management was involved or even just complicit
through neglect. I needed something more than speculation and scold notes.
I found back through my own locks entrance as routine
as brushing my teeth, now cracks in a crumbling foundation.
I compared shifts, camera time stamps, even the pattern of
missing signatures. The more I lined up my wreckers against
to mess figus, the more I saw the GAP's multiply,
not shrink. Whole handfuls of items with unclear status. Entire
weeks were her handwriting already hurried crew jagged and spose.
A knock jolted me. I nearly dropped the journal mess
and stood just outside backlit square in the early glow.
Her hand raised to the frosted glass. Just the morning
check in, she said, as I forced the desk drawers shut,
covering the folder with the loak book. Her eyes flickered
from me to the clutter on my desk, then over
my shoulder to the bank of monitors, still rolling security
footage from the night before. Haven't seen you at the
main door, she said, problems with your rounds last night?
I shook my head, fishing for calm, all quiet. I
was surprised, how normal my voice unded, how utally plausible
I must have appeared. Don looked and convinced. She stepped inside,
glancing at the untouched coffee in my mouth, scanning for disorder.
You look like helt walker. Get some mess. This talk
of extra rounds, this weak piece of advice. Don't let
your imagination work overtime, specially not now. Her tone was soft,
pushing the edge between concern and mourning. I offered an
uncommittal nod. She lingered another moment, assessing whether I might
confess something, but turn away When I reached for the
night lock, she left without another word. My hands tingled
as I watched her go. The subtext in her words
a quiet threat, or just the reflex of someone who'd
seen too many gods fall prey to sleeplessness and tall tales.
Either way, she was watching me. I waited until I
heard her footsteps fade before I powered on the old
desktop again. I connected to the camas ever and carefully
queed footage from the previous seven nights, an act that
used to seem like due diligence now more like a
personal stake out of reality. I started to mark the
exact position of every display in the problem corridor, before
and after each three thirteen a a blackout, A scato
of post it notes on schematic scraps piled up, each
more downing than the last. Objects did not simply shift
by chance. Sometimes they disappeared entirely during the blackout, replaced
with older catalog numbers in the morning, only to revert
again a night later. The museum's illusion of stasis was
exactly that, an illusion maintained by inces means and newtel
crawled through me. Was I the first to truly notice
we're just the only one foolish enough to force the issue.
I needed perspective, so I sought out August at the
loading bay, where he repaired to jamb Barrollgate, humming to himself.
He ever get the sense to place moves when we're
not looking? I asked him, hiding the urgency I felt.
He glanced up Brofer away, how Olbrook's chief. If that's
all that haunted us, we'd be lucky. He lowered his wrench,
growing serious for the first time. Some things you can
fix people running off lights, flickering inventory, skipping numbers for
no good reason. He looked away, as if searching for
a plateway to word more than he wanted to say?
Did ye know Viigawell? I press softer now, He inhaled,
loading tention into silence. She kept her own counsel, but
she was sharp, never lost track of anything until the
last few weeks. Then she was different. On edge or restrain.
Something back behind his eyes. If you're poking at her business,
watch yourself. Some folks don't like questions. Good people get
tired and wander off. Bad ones just fade into the walls.
He turned back to his tools, switching on the battered
radio signal to end a conversation. His warning lived in
the space between his words. There were boundaries here, invisible
but deadly sharp. That warning echoed as I returned to
the now, one more sleeplessly obsessed presence among the nocturnal
landscape of the museum. With M. S Vegus Frantic General
in my hands and the evidence blooming from security footage,
I realized I was no longer just a night guard
on his way out. I was willing on not becoming
exactly the kind of problem this place worked silently to
a race, but I also fell. For the first time
since long before the first glass case turned up, A
distinct sense of purpose cut through the background dread. If
the invisible pattern's animate in the museum's nights were designed
to pass unnoticed, then I would force them into the
harshest possible daylight. If I failed, I would at least
leave behind a record that could not be quietly shelved,
no matter who or what was arranging the pieces from
the shadows. I resolved to keep my investigation out of
the logs, but paranoia made me document each detail in
a battered notebook that never left my pocket. In the
minutes before sunrise, I come to mess Vegus maps against
the master inventory crew. Notations matched room numbers, but her
arrows ran through false walls and dead ends, as if
she had been drawing a city. Beneath the city a
hunch snake mere loop she had sketched around the east
wind and track with the public facing gallery layout. I
compared it to the vague maintenance schematics had salvas from
a forgotten off as filing draw weeks before. There behind
a thick black line denoting the oldest part of the
structure was a rectangle and labeled except for the faintest
penciled initials r BE. The Vegus real initials were in
a Vegan, not her usual tidy signature. A sense of
tress was crept in that hidden room, done near the
boiler's hum. How often had I passed by, feeling only
the wory heat and the sire industrial reek. Now I realized,
aid mister Sliver, of the building's true design, something Vegan
had half puzzled out before her disappearance. Pis Mall Overlook
Store informed the true horror of this mystery. I checked
my watch half past six. The world outside had begun
to glimmer with the deluted light of morning, and the
first streak I rumbled past. Day shift would soon arrive.
In the hush, I tiptoed down to the loading bayed
hot hammering. I stood across from the maintenance door, waiting
for August to finish up before he disappeared into the
warren of pipes and storage. He looked up grunt and acknowledgment,
and handed off a set of keys for the break
of room without whole word, his gaze lingering just to
be too long. Beneath the coal fluorescence of the basement,
the air collected in poles of shadow between crates and
seal cabinets. My footfall sounded doubled near the boiler of
a battered oak door. Walked at the edges. The lock resisted, reluctant,
but yielded with a low pop. My palm went clammy
on the keeypout. As I noticed the door open. The
smell hit first old paper, iron dust wrought A single
swaying bulb cast tight ellens of his ability and beyond
bins and crates pressed close as teeth, I started searching,
pulse throbbing in my ears, tins of Victorian paint. A
stack of unframed canvases, all tagged out of circulation decades ago.
In one lopsided crate, bundled inventory forms lay sodden and
huffey in by silverfish dates scribbled back to the nineteen seventies.
A crouch thumbing the brittle paper and found another of
a mess vegus desperate annotations as this is where they
lose things that shouldn't be missed. It was written hurriedly
at some mad hour of the night, the pencil nearly
tyring the page. In a pile of unremarkable cardboard I
found as the black leather journal. Its bine was notched
at anxious stumpence. Pages were crammed with cross hatch case numbers,
frantic sketches of the four plants coarsed next to angry arrows,
and half coat of warnings. Pattern repeats her transition, one
read another every three thirteen space flux on the last leaf.
The trimmer in the line they saw me, I muster,
and the writing jerked off the page. Somewhere in the labyrinth,
beyond the nearest stack of crates, metal clang faintly, a
muffled scrape, as if something was being carefully dragged. My
mouth went dry. I fumbled the journal into my jacket,
killed my flashlight, and flattened myself against the wall. The
air thickened. I heard the softest footstep. I ached with
the urge to bolt, to announce myself, but every muscle
rebelled against the sound. The movement came closer, then stopped
for a long moment, nothing until a faint exhulation, deeper
than any animal, and the sense I'd brushed the edge
of something vast and unseeen never treated only when I
did not chase it. My teas chatted as I crept
back up to the main corridor, closing the maintenance door
as gently as I could behind me. Only then did
I allow myself to breathe in relief, groping the stolen
journal tight. The truth was larger than any one person's will.
Whatever had displaced a mess vigotever watched, re arranged, or erased,
had always counted on its keeper's silence and its own
deep roots. My position, here, I began to understand, was
never as peripheral as I believed. Now I carried a bird,
and I could neither explain nor return without consequence, and
the long teeth of dawn felt no safer than the
smother shadows of the night. I sat in the supervisor's office,
stirring at the battered folder in my lap, feeling the
cold stick in print of the store and lock on
my palm. Above the desk, weak light gathered at the
edges of the glass, painting out lines of a city
that would shortly yawn into consciousness. My shirt clung to me,
was sweat in the dust of hidden rooms, and my
heart jutted in a rhythm that refused to settle. The
black journal ms the eagers impossibly retrieved. Probably the only
real evidence either of us had left behind in his
place was jammed beside it, safer more ordinary paperwork were,
I hoped no one would spot it. A background drawne
from the aging fan filled the silence, as if the
machinery of the building itself was digesting secrets too dense
to utter. In the amber security monitor glow, the endless
corridors and vaults seemed unchange, locked in the same artificial
night time I had known for Monciet, I saw nothing
as I had seen it before. All acquaintance slid sideways,
cases became trapped shadows, a quiet weight, every surf as
suddenly possible camouflage for intention. I could not see when
a mess dunshoe sounded sharply in the hall way her
ship was ending. It must have been after six. I
was sure, for an irrational second that she come for me,
her freshly printed incident reports coiled like charges. But she
strode past without a word, fiddling with her fallen brown house,
swinging with irritation. I made myself breathe if there was
a pattern to this place, one, even Bega had only
started to entangle. Those who said it in motion preferred
to be invisible, to seem part of the bland drift
of mourning. That was how they survived the years, blending
with insignificance. I kept to the routine. I signed my
name on the shift ledger with my dry shaking hand,
put my radio and badge in their slots. Then, after
what felt like a hollow ridge, I made for the
locker room, changing into jeans and a patched windbreaker, my
keyring too familiar, dabbed at Matthai. Everything in those moments
felt like stalling, waiting for some afishacunou reprisal that still
hadn't arrived. I watched my own face in the pockmarked mirror,
over the sink stubble and reverend eyes, and decided I
looked like someone halfway out of the world were halfway
in the City's morning was a gray, hush, thick with
the idle noise of buses and delivery vans. I emerged
into it, clutching Vegas Journal like a life prosover. Part
of me ache to run, to disappear, to throw the
notebook in the river, and script the last week from memory.
But more of me, the new part that had staggered
through it, hid an archive and found proof of something indefensible,
insisted I finish what the museum had accidentally allowed me
to see. A block away, I ducked into a cramped cafe,
rain seeping through my sneakers. At the back table, I
ran out my nose with burnt coffee while flipping through
the journal, maps, numbers, panic, and resolve. It was a frantic,
desperate language, but increasingly comprehensible. It was also all I had.
I needed to place her notes a sequence with what
I'd seen, the security tape path terns, the brown edge forms,
the artifacts that rotated and disappeared, as if by clockwork.
The unease that had set in days before first or
whisper now a shove, had not faded with sunlight. My
faith in facts and routine was eroded. If the museum
could make objects vanish and relabel time itself, it could
unravel a person's history, just as easily I saw when
Vega's lust enters a blueprint of fear. Document every movement.
If found, evidence must at last me someone always watching.
Correction comes for us all. My thumb skated across this
final line, knuckled, whitening. This was a paranoia any more.
I was carrying the next link in a chain, and
someone with something expected no link to last long. Already
the building felt like a living thing, cycling through keepers,
discarding those who got too close, ingesting them into the
polite silence of the archives. Determined, I left the cafe
and walked the city until my fatigue outpaced my dread.
New resolve honed itself in the friction. Keep my head down,
gather more, not just for Viga, but for anyone who
worked unnoticed beneath the gaze of marble busts and glass cases,
the subtleties of the museum's night or life. I have
once convinced myself was harmless, now demanded confrontation with its
bent rules and manufactured dunesia. That night, when I arrived
from my penultimate shift, the difference was visible only to me,
A subtle wire of tension running beneath every action, A
balance of fig shotting against discussion. Every routine clance felt loaded,
every locked cupboard and administrative shrug, a confirmation that leaks,
once noticed, were to be patched unpunished. The stakes, I
realized had changed. If I didn't push forward, I'd become
another ghost story, or was another quiet line crossed out
on the roster. There would be no rescue from outside,
not unless I found the way to force the truth
into the brittle daylight. Before the next three thirteen a
m wereset. I cycled through my first rounds of the
night with careful orchestrated neutrality, greeted staff as usual, tried
to sound neither rush nor hesitaned. It was an effort
that gnawed through my remaining nerves. August nodded at me
in the courtyard, hands dirty from some half finished repair,
a mess done by contrast, watched me from behind her
computer and did not offer her usual clipped evening. The
other admined a pair of junior curators spoke to each
other in code ies, darting to me then away. I
returned to the security room and set about cross referencing
Vegus Feverish last sketches with the real time displays. I
began a ritual before my first nightly round. I jotted
down precise measurements of each case's position, inventory number and
label wording. Then on the monitors and marked every camera's angle.
My phone's a long chimed at three ten, three minutes
ahead of a pattern. I forced myself to scan these
corridor in person, then switched to the feast just before
the blackout once again at exactly three thirteen. Static swallowed
the monitors sixty seconds. When the image returned, something new.
The glass case Vegas artifact was gone in its plays,
a battered porcel and figurine I had last seen in
an unrelated exhibit. Labelsmeared almost illegible. I checked the east
wing in person, heart pounding. The display matched the monitor.
No sign of the new case, No sign of the
artifact I had been obsessed with for days. Only a
faint sware of dust on the floor, marking where something
heavy had once stood. I ran hal to holland disbelief. Elsewhere,
a collateral changes a missing book from the medieval history wall,
the angle of a Renaissance relief adjusted left a Roman
country swapped out for a different arrangement. Altogether, patterns weren't
just artifacts. They were rolls arrangements, the museum's ferry order
asserted itself, with or without approval from the human staff.
Back at my post, it hit me as far as
the security feeds and logs were concerned, their problem artifact
and not to mention its case had never existed. But
a mess Vegas journal now carried an added PostScript at
the page sedge, and a script and mistakably housed dated
that same night, not loss cycled back next subjects selected.
Must finish the pattern, or it finishes you. I nearly
flung the journal away in shock. Had this writing always
been there? Or had the pattern bled across the pages
as it erode the whole? It felt as if the
very act of obtivation, of chasing the pattern was drawing
me deeper into its design. I locked the journal in
my pocket insteadied myself swet icee down my spine? Was
the building alive? Was there a will behind these forced corrections?
If so, what did it want in return for secrecy?
For the remainder of that shift, the museum felt hostile, watchful.
When August Cat came around for a late night coffee,
as guarded friendliness, scene strained. You're right, chief, He looked
like he saw ghosts with teeth. I tried to shrug
it off, bin rough, I said, making an effort not
to reveal the shakes in my hands. You ever see
anything move that shouldn't? He gave me a side long
look old pipe's creak, airflaw. But you're not talking about
leeks or you. I took a gambol say you had
to find a way under the building, old storage, some
place not on any map. Where would you start? August
hesitated his shoulders rolling forward. If I were you, I'd
steer clear. Some rooms are best forgotten. You stop pulling
it thread, you wake the spiders. The night's staff, myself included,
Learn to let things be. He watched me, waiting for
any sign. Night'd heed the warning. But it wasn't a threat.
People ever go missing, I pressed. He set down his
mug looking away. They don't show up on the clock.
That's all anyone's allowed to say. He picked up his
mug with a trembling hand. Whatever he knew he'd chosen
years ago not to dig too deep. After midnight, I
woke the length of the museum's low hals reapling all
all I'd gathered mess Vegus journal mapped out something like
a great influence tracked against years archives, tied to archivist
names on the last and most recent staff roster I
had snatted from a forgotten file draw out. The names
of at least three prior archivists were carefully crossed out
red bullpring pressed almost clear through the paper. Each cross
up matched a mess Vegus marginal notes and Pender nineteen
eighty seven replaced status unknown see Ishiguro two thousand three
nights sign Out Missing r Vega twenty twenty two. I
realized with dread what those names and those cycles implied.
This went beyond simple neglect, beyond accident on natural attrition.
A series of archivist keepers of the Passing scrub from
history as soon as they chased a thread too far.
At two forty five a m I returned to the
security room and made a decision. I gathered almost all
the pieces, but the final answer waited somewhere below ground.
I packed vegus notebook, a phone, flashlight, and two sets
of keys. With trembling certainty, I resolved to descend once
more to hit an arca of this time, prepared for
whatever I might have to face, whether staff conspiracy, structural
threat with the enscene hand that rewrote every record. First,
I needed coer. I missaged a mess don feigning a
minu security breach potential after Iro's access near maintenance that
would keep her busy. Let me slip down and detected
hard in my throat. I ducked into the staff, stillwell,
careful to avoid the main cameras the boiler hissed his
familiar song of decay. I unlocked the battered side door,
feeling the uncanny weight of generations pressing down. Shoving aside
the junk had already memorized. I found the bat of
crap Viga, mapped months before. As I shifted it, I
found the irregularity, a squared seamal on the check of
board tile, scratched by hands and boots. I wedged my
fingers in the hatch gave heavy with decades of abandonment,
and revealed a pitch black shaft with the spiral staircase
descending out of sight. I hesitated only long enough to
note my time to fifty eight. If the cycle repeated
at three thirteen, I had less than fifteen minutes to
descend and discover what I could before the path and
clamped shut for another night. I started down slow, each
iron run by breeding with the movement of my body.
As I dropped below the level of the pipes and brickwork,
the world narrow to echo in the metallic scent of
old water logged earth. Each step compressed the air thick
with dust in the faint reek of sire paper my
on neat Illumination came from the led beam clutched in
my hand, which trembled enough to send in certain shadows
swinging faintly. As I turned the spiral, the hum of
machinery gave way to the drip of unseam water. The
stone corridor at the foot of the stairs was tight,
The ceiling arched and rib in the fashion of all vaults.
Edges slick were condensation mapped. The hidden damp. The very
air changed character. Museum polish above silence and brought below.
I press on steps muffled by thick dust, the walls
lined with century old wooden, shoving collapsed cardboard, the undersides
plastered with out moded filing tags, cobwebs as thick as
insulation ropes hum in spirals across the aisle. The air
was called on, now enough to chill the breath. Treasures
in trash and disturbed by cleaning staff, sat staring with
the dignity of things, intended never to see light again.
Further on, the holes opened into Accov's, packed with curiosity,
stacked great marked with numbers I recognized from Vegas lists,
a medieval chest at padlocks snapped, ancient watering can label
faded but indexed number matching a line from her journal
moved once too off and correction apply Beside it, a
newer tack written in a hand eerily similar to Vegas,
except at boreslant like my own. The pattern sharpened. Not
only a dark Evis before me mapped the cycles beneath
the surface, but the pattern replied, rewriting each keeper in turn,
blending handwriting notes, arrangements, perhaps even memory. I felt impossibly
exposed if this was an infection I had already inhaled
its spores. Farther into the dock, the passage opened onto
a larger room, relium immense storage pit. It shows bowed
three stores high. The far wall held a tableau of
museum otifacts arranged in familiar formations, coin displays, class cases,
file boxes threaded through the stacks. Handritten locks were nailed
one after another, matching vegas frantic sketches. A portable floodlight
jury rigged. An ancient sat angled toward the floor, illuminating
a jumble heap at a base half buried under topple
crates lay Vega security badge slick with a fresh brand
stained across the plastic. I knelt breath call. There was
no body, only her badge, clots of dark and a
broken floor, and a scatter of spend note as each
torn open and scrolled with corrections and warnings. I was
in the heart of the pattern. The cycles were as
physical as any display of old museum ledgers adjusted to
staff rosters, exhaustive records of terminations disguised as retirements or burnouts.
In one open crate, I found a thick ledged document
in absolutely everything artifacts alleged thefts maintenance schedules, alongside list
of staff dismissed or reassigned under ambiguous circumstances. A final
column so feinned it was a llegible, seemed to be
crouched out, as if someone feared it might be read
atop another open box, A folded cheap bore my own name,
candidate for reassignment. Three thirteen of valuation pending were all
continuity required? Some one or something had written this within
the aire. My hand shook as I returned it to
the stack. Had I already slipped into the cycle, my
replacement insured, my fate sealed? What was it? A threat?
Daring me to break the leap? The sense of being
watched increased with each second. Footstepsichoed from the stairwell above,
a rhythm not my own, pressing myself into the deepest shadows,
as stead of my breath, knowing it might be staff,
or worse, something not quite human. Voices filtered down. I
counted at least three. The speech muffle, but the cadence,
tense and urgent. We can't let this breach become public.
Too many eyes and the collections right now, that was
unmistakably a mess. Dunn's voice brittle with authority. She didn't
need to announce. Another older voice answered, rosette is non negotiable.
It's always been this way. That pattern protects the museum.
The museum protects itself. I could not place the speaker.
Two more, a murmur too quiet, a muffle for clarity.
Lights swept past my hiding place, somewhere with a lantern,
others flicking on small head lumps. As they gathered near
the ledger pile. They pulled crates inward, forming a tight
box around an open space in the center, a sort
of improvised theater. The oldest man laid out a cloth
rolled tight with ceremonial precision, and from it produced a
battered bundle that looked impossibly like Vega's original artifact case,
the one I thought had vanished. I watched, frozen as
they moved with the ease of repeated choreography. The woman
I thought I'd recognized as the chief curator began setting
objects in tidy rings coins Bowen's class, calling out catalog
numbers which matched lines in vigus general ritual procedure, administrative
wrought dresses order. They spoke softly, each word a link
in a threadbare incantation. Preserve the correct arrangement, Do not
let the pattern break. The object is not the artifact,
but the watcher. Each member recited a variation of this,
then signed their initials in a ledger with shaking hands.
At the conclusion, the oldest man produced yet another label,
blank but for an initial, my own initial. He affixed
it to a fresh card, then drew a penknife and
scored the word reassigned into the wood beneath. The intention
was clear. The cycle was being advanced the pattern rosette,
just as it had been with ever name before. Their
vigilance was not for security, It was for containment. Archievist's
snite guards keepers one and the same, each hand of
hidden under dosal routine, each transgression erased and folded backward
into silence. As the group began to disperse, updating one
another on urgent administrative tedium, as if nothing had happened.
I remained rude at dread, threatening to swallow me whole.
I pressed deeper into the shadows as the light receded.
Only when silence stretched long and the last ecofaded, did
I dare to exhale. When I stepped forward by the
relic case, I saw what I had most feared. The
artifact back in his class shall no longer labeled a vega.
But now with my own name written in that chillingly
familiar script, I could hardly breathe. It fit perfectly. The
pattern was self perpetuating, feeding on the quiet, the secrecy,
the terror of being erased. I was not just investigating,
I was being documented, collected. My very presence in cyclones
cried ready for the next keeper to pursue. A jolt
ran through me like ice water. There was no possibility
of fixing or exposingness from inside every system, Every excuse
was home to minimize and redirect, to bury the evidence
between walls of plausible deniability. The museum had always been
its own best alibi. I staggered backward, heel, catching on
an uneven flagstone, and dropped to a knee beside Figus
open journal, which some one had deliberately left there. The
final words, hastily scold were not hers alone. Now they changed,
the writing, growing eerily like my own preserved for correction,
missing is misaligned, FULFILLI roll correct s cons at three thirteen.
I read those words, hands numb by exhaustion and horror,
and understood finally that unless I did something, something reversible,
I would become the story, not the teller. The whole
machinery stuttered in my mind. Ocavists, replace cases, unexplained, vanished names.
The museum was a living mechanism, every cycle maintained by
the correction of each interfering witness. This is not about
objects or provements, not even about bodies. It was about
the arrangement of memory, a custody of time, and the
vigilant exclusion of anyone who threatened to stir its order
too deeply. It was almost three twelve. I checked my watch.
Paul's furious movements echoed above staff returning to the upper corridors,
the confidence absolute. All I needed to do was freeze,
to wait for the repetition to blank me from the
ledges and cycle the next guardian into place. But I
could not let it go and challenge, not yet, not
at this terminal second. Back among the crates and metal
cabinet was padlocked sect tax faded but intact. With the
edge of a case keysleck and tremblane, A pop the
clasp inside rows of old ledgers, boxes labeled incident un resolved,
each with a sheet torn from a roster, archevis, names,
correction dates, a log of events, just like to night,
years long in rhythm. My own name was already penciled
on a fresh form, awaiting a signature under cycle, complete
pattern maintained. I swung the box open, snatched every loose sheet,
and stuffed them into my jacket alongside Vegas journal I
would go to the police, the press, anyone who'd listen,
even if they shut me down, which felt inevitable, I
would leave a trail longer than the hush that came
each correction. After a last sweep of the chamber for
anything with my name or vegus, I limped for the
stairwell and began the agonizing ascent. Every muscle shivering would
tear that at any second the pattern would catch me
in a mind the thread of my small rebellion into
routine again above dawn was already smearing gray on the walls.
I had only minutes before another day demanded it impossible calm.
The claim was worse than any nightmare. My mind raised
ahead to what I would say, had to convince anyone
that the greatest danger in the building was not theft
or a decay, but obedience, not congive ghosts, but the
enforcement of silence around those who knew too much. I
burst out through the maintenance hatch and ran the final
steps to the main corridor. Every exhibit, every case felt radioactive,
routines now visible, its methods of erasure. When I eyed
the security monitors, my image flickered there for a moment
before the feet cut to black. Another blackout, another was
se take over in some remotes over. I made as
far as the God's office before I had to collapse.
Fighting the urge to shoffer, shatter something, I fumbled open
a locker, the evidence vegus book, copper sheets, the log
of vanished ochivists spread in trembling hands. I started to
dial the police, but even as I recounted the facts,
the museum's hand reached out. Dunn's name flash across my
phone incoming call. Seconds later, the museum's legal council was
the outer gate. Uniformed officers arrived, led by a pair
of blank faced administrators. I tried to lay out what
I found. Staff rosters were written arquev cycles, odd patterns,
repeating at exactly three thirteen. I showed them the blooded
badged the log book of files. They listened, polite but dismissive,
then left with the items for a review by building security.
Dunn took the evidence off my desk with a flourish
expression unreadable. You're tired, she said, and clearly overworked. Will
process these, I saw, an the postulous surety of the pattern.
The police closed their reports without questions. The abmen brushed
me with legal warnings about confidentiality, about deformation. You lucky,
we're letting you walk away to une hissed as I
was escorted to the door for your own goo. Within days,
staff shout away, emails went unanswered, My entry badge declined.
Friends among the cleaner stopped meeting my eyes. August caught
me outside the building a week later and handed me
a battered envelope with no return address. But don't come back,
he said, quietly, cigarette glinting in the half light. Some
silences keep the place running. It was over as suddenly
as it began. Ohnesse Vegus disappearance closed as a voluntary leave.
The glass case with my name quietly vanished from the
east wing. Weeks later, the space shone empty beneath the
spotlight as if no anomally had ever existed on the
other side of this, the world felt different. I struggled
to sleep, plagued by the sense of unseen surveillance, by
dreams of corridors rearranging behind my steps, even in crowds.
I flinched at the sun in hush, as if somewhere
a hidden ledger was being updated, not with artifacts, but
with my history. A few months part enough time to
dull the day to day panic, but not the conviction
that somewhere free the tea. Each morning a lock would
click and a new sucle would quietly commence behind museum glass.
I found work elsewhere, kept my head down, tried not
to think about old staff rosters for missing badges. One rain,
heavy evening, just as I began to believe in the
resilience of my old, irritable caution, a package landed at
my door, no sender, no markings, flat and brown, wrapped,
too neatly to be mundane mail. Heart stuttering, appealed it
open and found a mass of Viva's missing journal, now
nearly annotated. Its margins, held a fresh spidery hand, a
script so close to my own I recoil. Some dates
were weeks after my exit, and each entry lude back
to Patten's cycles exhibit arrangements that I had only half
glimpsed during my time underground. On the last page, a
blunt drawing of the glass case I had found munts
Aga beneath the label, space was left empty for a moment.
The lights flock coat overhead. The city outside could have
been a million miles away. On the wall. The outline
of the artifacts, peculiar in case shape, settled like a shadow, quiet,
patient and impossibly out of place, waiting for the next entry.
The next signature for the arrangement to begin to new
truth is I never wanted to believe it. It's not
just the objects being cataloged, it's us. Truth is I
never wanted to believe it. It's not just the objects
being cataloged, it's us. I stood in my small rendered kitchen.
The pack is paper culling at my feet. The journal's
edge is rough under my thumb where the addressed label
should have been. I ran my hand down the page
trace in the new notes, identification numbers, rotation, entry times,
the odd short hand vigat half invented, and that I
now saw in my own half formed dreams. My name
never appeared, but references to her latest guard iteration, a
roll and fill and continuity, breech, risk pattern, irregular scull
through the margins like a warning. Fresh pages had been
slept in since I'd last seen the book. None were
in my own handwriting. Yet the pressure, a trembling, mirrored
mind so closely it was impossible to ignore. A police
iron cut the night in the distance through the window,
yellow sodium lamps glimmered on slick concrete. I flipped backward,
heart beating too quickly. The final page was Zuru Stark.
The glass case etched in pen white space beneath the
label box was blank, waiting for a name not yet written,
the residure of tape mark where an old tag had
been removed. There it was the message, the order, the intent.
The artifact needed a keeper at the museum or whatever
powered its endless rearrangements would not allow a gap to persist.
That night, I did not sleep. At three thirteen, the
alarm while my phone flashed a reminder unbidden, I slipped
from bed drawn half against my will, to the window,
as though expecting to see the marble bulk of the
museum shimmering at the edge of my city vision. There
was nothing I withdrew, but my shadow, caught in the
halo of the street light, looked doubled myself and something
older watching. A week passed, and I forced myself to
bury the journal in the back of my closet, to
leave him read the sickly cul of new annotations that
crept into the margins every time I stole another glance.
I busied myself with practical tasks, new job, on boarding, paperwork,
routine phone calls, anything mundane, But the artifact's form haunted.
Every silvery surface is proportions and coated. Now in my thinking,
I kept catching the label space in the corners of
my eye, like a reminder sent only to me. Then
first email from museum HR forwarded from collections Operations, cold greetings,
legal language, something about laptop left behind, an item signed
for but not return during my ofuthboarding, I replied, instilted,
careful sentences, using words that meant nothing, setting boundaries a
hope would hold. The next day, another envelope photographs from
an intenal audit. I never attended. My name signed at
the bottom of a ledger. I did not recall touching.
It was the same tight scrolll' see multiply Corosvega's notebook.
I looked at my own handwriting. I could not now
be sure it hadn't been me. Friends I had distanced
myself from began to reach out to word voicemails, notes
of concerns slipped under my door. August message lingered longest
stegon be nobody. They need a keep up, but not
a person, not ever again. I erased the call, but
the weight in his tone clung to every action the job.
I found inventory, ironically for logistics firm in a different quarter,
brought me into contact without the facts of a news
or barcote palates. This as rate rows of items no
one cared for, cataloged only for liability's sake. Still at night,
when fluorescent lights flickered in the warehouse, I kept expecting
the case to pyramid boxes of tuna or Schenkraff coffee cups.
At three thirteen a m. I found excuses to be
outside pacing, watching my own outline stretch under security floodlights.
When my supervisor at the new place quietly asked if
I had left under any tension with my previous employer.
The question coded and forced disinterest. I lied quickly, with
all available conviction just ires. I said no more. I
urged silently with each reply, but the signs did not relent.
My mail began to carry the same blocking museum type
his press releases, such criber events. An invitation to view
a new exhibit opening in the east wind that used
my surname as the collection's promotional code. I phoned the
licid number. No answer, only a cold, looping, holed music
punctuated by recorded voice patterns. Persist Continuity is the mandate.
The world narrowed, every routine slip of paper, every administrative request,
every forum signed at work or the pharmacy surface, the
muscle memory of the label, the case, the artifact, the watcher.
I tried to burn Vegas Journal twice. The lighter's flame flickered,
the edges curling, but never quite catching. I tossed it
in a dumpster blocks from my flat. The next morning,
it rested on my kitchen table, opened to a fresh page.
My own notes, unremembered, sprawled across the margant three thirteen
complete cycle roll, unoccupied correction pending on a rain heavy morning.
So many summarizes from those museum nights, I realized the
deeper cost more than vigilance, more than anxiety. It was
the slow re arrangement of self, my routines, my memories
being slided into the invisible channels that kept the cycle intact.
I avoided mirrors, avoided giving my proper name a cafes,
shunned the administrative tedium I used to bank on to
keep life steady. It became clear what the museum acquired
was not exposure, but forget from this misdirection, misalignment, so
the pattern could wind and unwind itself had infinitum. I
resolved not to fight it directly, but to disrupt the
pattern in any way it could, to lose myself in
an attention to let names slip and logs missle. That
worked for a while. My sleep grew more regular at
Tremor's lawn when my arms stalled, the General's presence less immediate,
until the day I returned from work to find the
case itself, a perfect glass sided rectangle lone on my
bat of kitchen table, as pristine as the first impossible appearance.
In the east wing, there was no artifaf within, only
a folded slip where the label shive rested in my
own hand, rating raw filled correction achieved. I stared at
the box, the cold reflection of my face hovering where
an artifact would be. The fridge motor thrummed its endless
cycle for a long time. I did not move. I
slid the case into the back of the pantry, shoving
it behind cereal boxes and flier cans. I waited, counting
the seconds, minutes, IROs until dawn. Nothing occurred. The next
night it reappeared beside my bed. A thin film of
condensation had gathered inside, as if it had passed through
some colder, deeper archive than the intervening ires. The label
was blank again. I no longer heard from museum staff.
E mails stopped, calls went unanswered. The hrbureaucracy's appatat stated,
Yet every time I slept, I would near three thirteen breathless.
I was fixed on the shifting shadow the case made
on my wall. I began to suspect that erasure was
not total, that the museum deprived of a more official
Keretiker sent its cycle out into the world, seeking a
shape to fit at any cost. I met with August,
once tumbling into him by chance on a city bus.
He studded my face with a weather calm, said, without preamble,
you look back too often, you become what you're chasing.
Don't write it down any more, don't arrange things, don't
keep the books. That's how it starts. He did not
say good bye. Knights fell into patternwake clump's case, check label, high, journal, repeat.
My world contracted to the territory of not being seen,
not being counted, not being named. But every morning the
case revived me perfectly cataloged, waiting for its next entry.
I do not know any longer who truly records the names,
if it is museum bureaucracy, or a pattern that has
outgrown human agency. My memory of what I found under
the east Wing dims and sharpens by turns, sometimes as
if I dreamed it, sometimes as immediate as a shiver
down my spine. But I keep the case now because
to abandon it would be to vanish for myself. I
clean its glass, watch for the flicker of movement inside,
never breathe my true name near it. I do not sign,
do not correct, do not arrange. Even so the cycle persists.
I know that one night, perhaps sooner than I expect
some one else will find the empty case with the
blank label and believe they are investigating cracks in some
institutional order. They will see their own name color across
the page, handwrite, and growing ever more familiar, until inevitably
the pattern resumes that there is no pattern to break,
only the arrangement to be maintained. The city stretches on
beyond my window, traffic pulsing beneath the yellowed street lights,
never suspecting that somewhere in some locked room or lost archive,
our stories are being shuffled, catalogged, and erased, not as punishment,
but by the slow nurse of things left and guarded
for too long. A final night arrives unremarkable calm. At
three thirteen. The microwave clock blinks in the pradawned hush.
I sit at the table, The case waits, the label
space ready, all quiet save for faint harm, like a
decument of ive spinning up long after the museum has
closed its doors. I pick up the slip of paper
and for the first time, do not write anything at all.