Speaker 1: You never really know a place until you've seen it
in the unfinished dires, when everything familiar takes on a
harder edge and there's nobody left but eter echo the
odd noises down empty holes. That's what I told myself.
My first night is a new janitor for Saintown, some
moral hospital. I arrived at ten fifty eight, two minutes
before my shift. My sneak is squeaking nervously on the
linoleum outside the service entrance. The double glass dorsis when
I pushed them, exhaling the sterrell recycled. There of long
days and long nights lived in the same rooms. I
barely had time to get my bearings before someone pressed
ring heavy hand into my nearring of keys, jingleling, not
a handshake. That was my handover from the dish of
Supervisor Marsher. She'd been almost apologetic for how little introduction
she was giving. It's the night, you get used to it,
she muttered, while handing off a battered clipboard. Her eyes
never quite met mine, instead darting up and down the
main corridor toward the distance squeak of an elevator. The
buckets in supply in the closet by nurse Adam and
marked the waiting areas. Then work your way through those wings,
she said, gesturing vaguely at the maze of corridors behind her.
You keep out of B block after midnight alarm one
shot off. Otherwise, don't bother with level three. We never
do at night. Any questions. I wanted to ask a
dozen things while stay out of Bee Block? Why the rush?
Why did everyone look so exhausted even at the start
of a shift. Instead, I just shook my head, he'll
do fine. Nobody wants to shift, but it's steady. With that,
she was gone. He square's shoulders vanished into an elevator.
When the door was slid shut, the building fell silent
in a way that was immediately oppressive. I stood under
the buzz of the main lights for a moment, but
even that shallow hum couldn't quite drown out the sense
of being iyed from just a run the next corner.
I blinked, adjusted my backpack and forced myself forward into
this muffled hive of corridors and half lit room's wholly
mine for the night. The first thing I noticed was
how close the ceilings felt. The hospital looked normal in
the day wide atriums, busy with fluorescent light. But after
IROs the hole shrank. The overhead bulbs flickered, each casting
a narrow circle that didn't quite meet the next. The
air staled quickly, and even just a few yards away,
the nurse's station blurred into shadow. Marsha had pointed out
my territory, but I needed to see it for myself.
I started with the slow, secured as walk through trash
bins lined the snake of narrow holes, most overflowing with
the debris of the day. I picked them up, set
them on my flat beit cart, tried to make mental
maps of the terns and supply closets. Anxiety sharpened my senses.
Every distant knock or elevator beat felt too crisp, too
laud My mop buckets queaked whenever I moved in more
than one place. A SoLIT corner's harbored not only dust,
but evidence of age. Few wanted to claim. A stair
will no longer use. A paint peeled in long walnot curls.
I wouldn't have noticed anything odd except at one spot,
right behind a fire hose cabinet, the chip plaster gave
way to a strange bowl of faded marker and cheap
spray paint. I moved closer, phone light in my hand.
Underneath the topmost flake, scrawled and nearly invisible black, was
a list of letters in numbers m K fourteen slash ten,
slash thirteen, I'll beat his last six slush twenty d
T four slash eleven slash twenty two. The most recent
was just last week a CE seventeen slash four slashed
twenty three. The edges of the oldest letters were smudged, waterwarped,
but that last one sharp dark, with only half the
initials visible. It was as if some one had tried
to scribe the names and failed. A tug at my
gut said it was probably nothing, old staff with a
weird sense of humor, maybe tally marks for late night dares.
But the longer I looked, the more my mind gnawed
at the strange coincidence. It looked deliberate and out of place,
and far too recent for a forgotten corner. Either way,
the graffiti was quickly eclipsed by the volume of mundane
tasks that followed. The mess of my first night left
scant room for idle reflection and bolting. Stub and trash liners,
cacked with a need and fruit mopping sticky waiting room floors,
while the late night newstrown from a TV with the
greenish warp display. Trying not to make eye contact with
the few blaue patients, he wandered in and out of
the er. Still, that sense of being absorbd slipped through
behind the ordinary, specially when I cut through the back halls.
Time stretched in a way it never had during my
old job at the high school, and I swept by
and left behind only a surf, a sheen on tile,
and the echo of my own footsteps. Each time I
passed the stairwell, I glanced at the initials, telling myself
I'd look up the last one, Essie, when I got
a minute. I didn't know who to ask, or even
if I wanted to know. I pressed on through the
small ey I was telling myself that every building had
a spirit at night, and it just took getting used to.
The Next several nights did little to ease the knowing
sense that I was part of some into half hidden mechanism,
one that worked best when no one looked too closely.
Normal routine built up, like sediment clocking in at ten
fifty five, nodding to the guard who never left the
security glass, collecting my cart from storage, and cycling through
the endless mop and bucket rischels. The holes were almost
clear of staff by one a m. On the floors,
the only recurring regulars were an orderly named Gibril, who
always looked like he was half way through a nap,
and a nurse called Dorian, who had the droop of
someone who'd given up on ever getting a proper night's sleep. Conversations,
when they happened, were perfunctory. How's the new shift, Dorian
would say, barely pausing as she wiped her hands on
a surgical green apron same as the old one. I
might joke, even though this was nothing like my life before.
She wouldn't laugh, only nod faintly in drift off, trailing
the tart smell of hand sanitizer. Gibil sometimes gave me
a brief rundown of which words to avoid. Don't go
past pediatrics to night fuse boks, wet again, or don't
leave the bin in the whole way they'll skin you.
Always quick, always a little nervous, as if lingering too
long in conversation might attract the wrong kind of attention.
Nobody ever talked much about their own shifts, while the
pass of the hospital that felt somehow off limits even
to night staff. After a week, I almost stopped thinking
anything about it. Loneliness will do that, making you simplify,
except what are told. Gord numbs that I was doubts,
brawl and tolerably long. Once in a while, though, there
was a look passed between two noses as a gurney
rolled by, or a hasty murmur when a certain door
would stick and needed a badge to open. At first,
I choked it up to gossip with the compressed secret
of hospital life. But it felt thicker than that, as
if everyone was worried about the wrong eyes being present,
the wrong earrors, overhearing the wrong words. The days blurred together,
my body acclimated to the elastic eye. As of midnight routine.
I became the background to everyone else's face until my
fifth night alone, when something finally pierced the surface calm
and the night shifted irrevocably beneath my feet. It started
in the corridor that snakes down passed the more garguably
the loneliest part of any hospital at night. The fullorescent
tubes there were always the first to flicker and the
last to be replaced. Shadows bunch behind the empty gurners
and shuddered with each cold draft that snuck in from
under rusted emergency doors. I was half way through mopping
a sticky corner, one that always took extra effort to
feel clean, though it never quite did. When the light studded,
it wasn't just a flicker. They dipped, impulsed in time
with the compressive size from the nearer by ventilator room.
I kept moving, focused on the swirling grave of dirty water,
until something tickled at my ears, a whisper thin neither
male nor female, almost a hiss. The words melted into
each other, impossible to grab hold of. I paused, listening
nothing but my own breath and the echo of water
slapping linoleum. I told myself it was a vent or
static from the calm system. Still, I found myself moving faster,
almost abandoning protocol, to make it out of that corridor
and into brighter bizo wings. Later, as I re stopped
to supply closet, something crackled from beneath a loose mob
handle a torn piece of paper, half slid under a
floor buffer blade caught my eye. I'd almost let it
be God knows. The place was full of discarded notes
and random forms, but the words ghosted across the page
in dark, frantic strokes. Don't trust them, they know when
you see. I ran my thumb along the edge, hesitated,
then folded the paper into my pocket. Rational explanations swarmed, disgruntled,
patient bored, orderly, even some good playing a prank on
apparent shift with access. Yet the warning begged me to
look at the hospital itself, at who or what that
they could be. It was easier to slip the page
and with my sandwich wrappers at the end of my shift,
and to tell any one about it. Night's following that
incident stretched out with suspicion. I started noticing more than
I wanted to praffiti. At first, invisible or ignored revealed
itself when I lingered in the empty wings, or poke
my mop behind rolling equipment, Sharp initials behind the baseboard
in an abandoned patient room, names carved sloppy, fearful on
the inside belly of a linen cat, even in a
closet where I'd found the note inside the low door,
a patch bel TYO twelve slash eighteen b D one
slash four. My skin crawled. They won't random delays or
just kid's jokes. There was a pattern. I started making
a list on my phone, matching the initials and dates
where I found them. I noticed, too, an odd correlation.
The dates kept lining up, not with silly staff rituals,
but with recent patient deaths or with the last days.
A certain worker's name was still on the duty board
in the break room. I tried bringing it up a
door enduring her break almost as a joke to hide
my nerves. Hey, you've noticed all the weird taggings around
the place at night, names and dates, I asked. She
furrows fingers tightly, gripping a coffee cup. Just board kids
from the day shift, she said, too quickly. She placed
her hand of a mind for a moment, locking the
name I've written on a napkin. Don't worry about that, Alex,
It's nothing you need to bother with her nails dug
in even through glove and tissue. Similarly, when I asked,
your bell careful, just a little too casual, he gave
me a sidelong glare. Just ignore it. Yeah, old stuff,
place got painted a dozen times. Don't start digging. Then
he busied himself with a cascade of Phile's conversation over
the tension grew heavier every night routine maintenance started to unravel.
Mop pandles bent in my grip. Once a bucket of
water I had left at the top of a stairwell
had turned up empty, bone dry just ten minutes later,
though no one had passed me in the way. Whenever
I went to mop a particular corridor that should have
been locked until morning, I'd find a door wide open.
The crass bar hanging loose equipment squealed, rolled by its
own weight into corners you couldn't quite see unless you
looked over at your shoulder. Puddles appeared that couldn't be traced,
leading to places like the sealed elevator bank near cardiac On,
under the door to the old surgical theater's ruins no
one used or spoke about. Paranoia seeped him at every shift.
I started keeping mental talers. How many times had the
supply closets lam nutter I entered had a shadow across
the nurse's pattern glass, even though the staff were all
account of forro upstairs. Once I thought I saw a reflection,
not mine, not anyone smiling from behind a closed fire door.
I refused to look back to convince myself I wasn't
inventing things. I went to the security desk. I made
up of reason. Abmin called, said the ben order was
off in d wing. Could you run footage for yesterday?
The night guard, a gruff man with a belly the
size of his desk, crunted and pulled up the night locks.
Out of boredom. For about two hours after midnight, the
screen went black. No image is loaded, The times damp vanish.
Only static shimmered and faded. That's weird, he muttered. Our
system isn't down, just sometimes the hard drive skips a
technical thing. Probably, He shrugged, but didn't look me in
the eye. I left with bile rising in my throat
and a cold certainty that what I experience wasn't a
technical glitch, but an absence. Something else ow in desires,
and no one wanted to admit it. Sometimes I'd look
at Marsha the day supervised as she came back for
morning handuff. She looked older every week, her hands trembled
when counting keys, and she always asked the same questions
as expecting a different answer, as if wanting me to
admit something strange before I left for the day. But
she never said it. None of them did. One morning,
I trailed her into the admin supply, I rem under
pretense of returning badge keys. The moment the door shut,
she stiffened. Don't ask about things you aren't pay to know,
she said, her words clipped, as if she practiced. If
anything happens after midnight, just keep working, don't wander. That's
how people end up in the wrong places. I almost
demanded more, but she left me with silence and the
echo of her warning. Everything tightened until the only thing
that could puncture it was a human voice, willing to
break the unwritten pact. That voice found me a week later,
long before my shifts started, I had arrived early nursing
a vending machine coffee at the back door ireing the
day Janitor let herself in. Her eyes, sunburned, her coveralls
too neat for genuine comfort. She was usually friendly in passing,
but not the kind to linger. This time. She stopped
her hand locking around my wrist. Don't go below level
two at night, she whispered, checking over her shoulder. Never
especially if you hear them whispered or anything. People who listen,
who follow, they disappear, not by accident. My pulse sudder.
What do you mean? I started, trying to sound incredulous
or amused, but she shook her head violently. I'm not joking, Alex.
Every year, if someone new takes the shift, most of
us do. The day was which fast. Some never come back,
Some go my ad. You look for patterns, forget them,
Just show up to your jaw. Leave, don't try to
figure it out. This place change is people. Her grope loosened.
Before I could push further, she turned and vanished down
the hall, her footsteps retreating fast and a kring in
the bare concrete. The warning stuck with me. When I
entered the hospital at night, it felt not like a
place of work, but trapped, slowly adjusting its jaws. By then,
the list of initials and dates on my phone had grown.
Others matched recently posted in the morim notices on the
staff bullet. In a quiet passing slip between lunch menus
and shift swaps, I started to cross reference online local
obituaries from the last ten years, news of missing staff,
hushush resignations, unexplained accidents. A pattern emerged. Areas like the
basement archive or the sealed off surgical wing had more initials,
more dates, and more gaps on shift for rosters immediately after.
Some initials belonged to orderly's or nurses I never met,
but whose files popped up from time to time, and
lost of found drawers or old clipboards. One night, sheepish
and shaking, I brave if the basement wreck was not
quite going below level two not at first half The
lights were out, but my phone's beam was enough. I
sifted through a pile of decades old personnel files in
a water warp filing cabinet. Paper stuck to paper at
the ink, bled into tree rings of mildy. That's where
I found it. A staff badge photo barely there, name
and date, a stin thick black marker over the plasticoditi
four slash eleven slash twenty two, the same as the
name I'd found carve into the underside of the fourth
four break crint table. No one had mentioned Deety on
any current list staff oppressed, we turn stony and sweared
they'd never heard of him. No one would say where
he'd gone. I pocketed the badge, my hands slick with
cold sweat. I could hear every pulse in my wrist,
every take of far off equipment, fear notes, something else
from the back of my mind, a memory on yidding
that I did not want to test the boundaries of
what I ain called the line. It was the next
night that everything bowled over, My rationalizations crumbled, and whatever
lived in the darkness of that hospital decided I'd paid
enough attention. I'd stayed late, hunting over patient locks in
the office supply rooms, quinting at faint hands, scrolled notes
left on top rosters. My shift was nearly over. Sun
rise not far off, but cushions chewed at me. I
woke the wholes lower than usual, keys dangling carelessly, as
though during something to notice me. When I turned the
corner to the bitten stairwell, I saw the door was unlocked.
The hinges creaked, not with age but use. To my left,
the old elevator bank's copper doors hung slightly, a jaw
long out of service. I'd been told, yet a de
morange light flickered inside like a beacon I remembered Iron's warning,
but it was adrenaline of stubbornness, or the compulsion that
comes with knowing a mystery is too close to turn
away from. Step by slow step, I descended into the underbelly.
The air changed the hospital's order of disinfect and gave
way to something damper, metallic, like work coins or old blood.
My fast light beams scattered against glass, flickered back off
warpe sanitch, theater four nought in use. The lower level
was nothing like the rest of the hospital. Floortas curled
at the corners, walls patched which eats of plywood and
strips of peeling paper. Each step echoed too loud. I
heard myself breathing, and beyond it below steady whisper, not
of voise. Hunters layered overlapping in a coal wine. At
first I convinced myself it was air movement through supplied ducts,
or the slow drip of a busted pipe. But as
I turned the last corner in the corridor, the ambience
sound resolved into something else, desperate pleading words, don't leave,
please help. Shap's blood from the shadows, tall and substantial,
almost human, but stretch on the find I could feel
them crowding my periphery. As I moved the farther I
went the louder. The hush became growing into any scream
that pressed itself behind my eyes. Then, as I reached
the center of the old surgical foy, the temperature dropped
to freezing. My flasclets being caught on something pale at
the far wall of face. Mouth opened in a silent cry,
rupling as if under water. I felt a heavy grip
clamp onto my arm, the sensation of freezing special fingers
digging into my flesh. I stabbered backward, vision blurring at
the edges. I screamed, but my voice vanished under the uproar, thunderous,
impossible flood of voices peeling through my skull. Shadows broke
and swam around me. Desperate, I yank free and ran,
stumbling upstairs. Had seemed to fold in on themselves through
doors that lacked and locked behind me. The last thing
I felt was the grasp of coldness at my back
in the whisper. You know now you've seen then darkness.
When next day opened my eyes, I was somewhere else entirely,
and nothing felt safe any more. I woke on a
hard final couch with a draw stiff patch beneath my
cheek and the two bright lights of the staff lounge
starping straight through my eyelids. For a minute, I just
lay still, the emergency blanket prickling hot on my chest
despite the chill in the air, and let the confusions
warm me. I didn't remember walking here. The last I
could recall was the echoing stairwell, the clutching hand, and
the chorus of voices. Then a hole in memory, as
abrupt and perfect as a power outage. Somebody was standing
by the vending machine, half concealed by the cheap plastic
rack of outdated magazines. Doreen. Her back was turned, but
she glanced at me in the reflection of the window,
tight leaped. I was read for more than lack of sleep.
That was some episode, she muttered, voice flat. You're lucky
you didn't break your head on anything down there. I
sat up too fast, dizziness pitching me sideways. My arm mate.
When I rolled up the sleeve, the skin was bruised
in five precise ovals, like someone with the hand the
size of a shovel, and tried to leave fingerprints I
rubbed at them, trying not to shake. Did did some
one carry me? I forced the words pass a fractured,
dry mouth. My voice didn't sound like it belonged here,
higher and thinner than I remembered. Dorin shrugged, he were
out cold in the amin corridor. Gibbil spotted you said
he heard a scream. She glanced down at her hands,
fidgeted with the wedding ring she never wore at work.
She didn't look up. You look like you've seen a ghos.
Someone else passed behind the frosted panel of the lanch door,
whispering urgently to a second shadow. There was a crackle
of static from the wall into calm, then silence. I
tried to stand, swaying as the room double before resolving.
I needed to get to the bath room, but couldn't
force myself to leave the light. Dorian's attention was fixed
in the bruises that painted my arm. You said the
stairs right, she whispered words, barely from my ears. Don't
go looking, don't ask any more. My tongue wanted to
ask what, why, how? But the air in the break
room was getting thick. I pushed past her into the
corridor and caught the eyes of Gibber. He was waiting there,
apparently on some invented errand studying me with careful suspicion.
You want me to grab anyone from Edmund, Shibbil asked,
fiddling with his ide lanyard. Nervous, No, I just I
think I fainted. I heard how hollow it sounded, even
as the light humbled are He didn't argue. Behind him,
a pair of voidallies held up a small gurney with
the plastic wrap bundle soaked with crimson. At one corner,
someone's bad night. I watched them avoid the stairwell as
if its dank, as if the dark could crawl out
and wrap around their ankles. My stomach twisted. A nurse
peered through the glass, said something clipped to Doreen, and
the two of them stepped away to conference in low voices,
I evesdropped what I could again three this year. We
need to request it before the hum of conversation slid
to a stop as I approached. No one blamed me
for collapsing, not out loud, but the looks lingered and
then spoken rule was reinforced. If you saw something past midnight,
you kept it to yourself. Anything else was asking for trouble.
I stumbled to the locker room, half to collect myself,
have to run from the scrutiny. Splashing icy water on
my face did little to clear the memories, but the
bruises pulsing on my arm broad it all back anyway.
I tried to prop my phone against the locker to
snap a photo of the marks, but my hands were unsteady.
The image blurry in wrong. I told myself it would fade,
that I'd checked the photos later, but even then, now
ready since i'd find the image corrupted or missing, alfgether.
By afternoon, I managed to grab a few eye was
an easy sleep, full of dreams I couldn't quite shake.
I wondered hospital corridors and pitch dark my stets, echoing
anonymous voices, chanting names and dates. Sometimes in the dream
the faces were close enough to touch skin, waxy miles,
moving soundlessly. One whispered my name in a voice that
whisom was mine. I worked, shivering so violently my teeth ached.
The cycle went on night after night. I returned because
routine is its own kind of armor. An absence would
only mean facing whichevern nightmare would chase me outside the
hospital's walls. Sleep became a trickle ration. Carefully I stopped
trying to engage the others. Each night shift was lonelier
assignment shifted, sticking me with trush runs out in the
tact on palllet of wing where no one else was
ever sent, or endless moll butt by the generator room
where only the old boilers made any sound. People gave
me space like I carried a disease. Emails for management
started arriving curt and formal Please restrict rooming outside of
assigned wings, report all maintenance issues to supervisor, no exceptions,
and after three nights of final warnings, spreading rumors cause
for termination. Rumors had never started, but the implication was clear.
I tried once to catch the whispers on my phone.
I left the recorder running, tucked in a scrub pocket,
hit record when the corridor went quiet, when the light
in the fast air well puddled sickly orange in the floor. Later,
when I played the file back, all I caught was
the thunder of my own heart and a stat key distortion.
Some one weeping in of was warped beyond recognition. Other
recordings came out worse, corrupted by jagged electronic shrieks, the
sound of a wind that never blew inside the buildings,
out at windows. More than once I wondered if I
was losing my mind. But then in empty cafeteria, another
note turned up, folded inside an overturned chair. It read,
is real, They're hungry. The handwriting was careful blockie below
it and old initials and disks roll be dy one
slash four that one match to missing nurse whose locker
still bore a heart shipped sticker faded and intended. I
began to keep all the notes, each one growing a
heavier weight in the pockets of my coveralls. If it
was a jerk or shad madness as persistence, ground dam
whatever hope I had of ignoring it. Desperate to understand,
I forced myself into the nearly forgott knock. I've room
on three and old section wedge between admin officers, always locked,
earth thick with dust and slow decay. I pried the
door open one afternoon after a long shif, using a
key that Marsha habitually forgot to reclaim in her morning haste.
Inside box, files and ledges towered and tilted stacks. The
walls blared with ghost out lines where framed degrees or
certificates had once hung, now long remove. There were a
list of patient names, coded diagnoses, staff rosters from decades past.
I found a thick, leather bound volume in a milk crate.
At the back, the paper was warped and sticky at
the edges Incidents nineteen eighty two, two thousand two. I
thumbed through it slower first, then faster, hands trembling. The
entries were methodical, clinical, but the content chill me nerors
I'll be missing after over night shift. Last seen in
theater corridor, no trace, orderly dity, founds oriented in subbasement,
committed suicide four days later. Dozens of entries each early
matter of fact, every name one I'd seen scolled somewhere
in graffiti worch. Inside the back cover, almost invisible against
the binding, was a memo un faded hospital let ahead
all night staff never work alone in B block or
lower theaters after midnight. Management is aware. Report incidents only
to admin, no date, no signature. My heart hammered. The
next folder, I rifled through health staff evaluations, termination paperwork
typed with the same phrases over and over, failure to just,
unable to respect boundaries, disruptive to t morrel, always dated
within days of the incidents below. It all tuck flat
between far di viders lay an envelope marked personal return
to Irene. It wasn't sealed. I hesitated, then slid out,
a batted polaroid. Young Irene twenty years younger at least,
in her blue coveralls, serious and and smiling, next to
a man whose name I didn't know except for the
scribbled initials on his badge m K fourteen slash ten
slash thirteen, one of the oldest names from the wall.
Foot tip scuffed behind me, and I nearly dropped the
lot iron herself stepped into the thin band of hallway light,
stopping at the doorway in looking for the first time,
truly haunted. She shut the door with a careful thought.
You weren't supposed to see those, she said, But she
didn't sound angry, more like she was treading a raise
of thin hope. I handed her the poor lord, Why
are the same names on everything? What happened to them?
Irene's hand shook as she tucked the photo back into
her breast pocket. It's not just accidents. You know that now,
I weeded. She gripped the edge of the battered desk, knuckled, blanched,
ghost white. This play seats people, not every one, just
the ones who start to notice. When I first took
the night's shift, I thought it was just old stores,
the way you primed the new hires. But they're true.
This building wasn't always a hospital. It was built in
the stone of an old po house, then turned into
a teebee sanatorium. Too many a marked graves, too many
who died alone the walls. Remember the kiway hunger. Her
lips twisted, searching for a word that wouldn't come. I
almost didn't make it, she said finally, vorge raw I
saw more than I should have. I only got away
because she tapped the polaroid, because someone else took my place.
They say it's random luck, but it's not. Every time
someone has taken play sleeps for a while, as long
as no one else starts digging. What can I do,
I asked, helpless, anger and fear of vining inside me.
One people leave, She shook her head grimly. Nobody listens
until it's too late. By then it's inside you. She
stepped close, her face inches from mine. Forget what you saw,
leave to night before it knows your name. Some people
get out if they run, most don't. I go now
if I were you, for a moment, I considered it.
Every animal instinct screamed to flee, but my blood thuttered
with a heavier obligation. I couldn't forget the voices, the
desperate ones in the darkness, not the ones that wanted
to consume. BUTO was begging to be remembered, every note,
every carving hitten, be hands that had tried to at
last the dark. Irene turned to go, pausing at the doorway.
Don't go back down there. The next person at once
might be you. Please. Then she was gone, a clop
of her step, swallowed by the archaveldast. I stood in
the sudden silence mind. I could quit, walk out into
the prodomed blue and promise myself nothing followed. Or I
could try to do something, anything for the invisible, pleading
rennants in the walls and deep under the tile. Instead
of leaving, I gathered everything, the file of personnel records,
the notes I'd hoarded, copied my own list of initials
and dates. I photographed the graffiti wherever I could find it,
compiling a private catalog. Then I spent three hours in
a fever of panic, emailing everything to an encrypted back up,
wrouting it through burner accounts. If I didn't make it out,
someone would have proof. I half believed nothing would transmit,
that the files would vanish into static the way my
recordings had, But the scent folder stayed blinking green. That night,
when I walked in for my final shift, the hospital
felt different, thicker, the lights already dull, my badge stuttering
when I swiped through the main door. The other staff
were shadows, their faces turned away. Marsha avoided my eyes
as she handed over the keys during deviate to night,
she said, but her voice broke at the end, as
if she feared the words might be the last she
ever said to me. I started my routine with mechanical
precision cleaning toilets and ye bin swaving fingerprints from glass doors,
but I kept my eyes open for the hidden cameras
in my pocket file zipped in my bag, I texted
the last of the evidence to the local union rep
using the break room's half dead desktop. When midnight ticked
over and the holes fell silent. I made my decision.
Whatever Irene had warned, I couldn't stop, not when the
names in the walls burned in my memory, not when
the dark places under the tile hammed with forces. I
locked up my cleaning cart in the wrong closet so
it would not be found by morning, pocketed a spare badge,
and headed for the forbidden stairwell for the last time.
The elevator bank was colder than usual. Night air pulled
round my shoes. The cold slick and oily leaking from
the stairwell like a thing alive. I pressed my palm
to the chipped wall, felt it vibrating, not with machinery,
but with something deeper, like a heartbeat. Understone. Lights overhead
blinked once twice, then stared into a sickly but soul
white nobody else in the wing. With effort, I forced
my feet down the steps. Every tread groaned with my weight.
As I passed the third landing, the air grew thick.
My own breath fogged out in front of my face,
the chill lighting straight to bone. The bottom corridor was
black as a crypt. My flasklight guttered, flickered, then failed,
leaving only the twitching glow of the knot a new sign,
illuminating nothing but the knoll doorway to theater four. That's
when the whispering started up, with new purpose, different this time,
not random, knows names, particular and hungry Alex Alex Alex.
I ran a trembling hand against my chest, feeling the
matettu of my heart. I wanted to turn, to race
back up, to pretend nothing had happened. Instead, driven by
compulsion or dem I cross the threshold into the condemned theater. Inside,
the world warped, the room's vast old dome, pressed down,
darker for being almost familiar, ghostly shaped surfaced at the
edge of the circle. Orderlies with washed out faces, Nurses
with badge four doors for eyes, patients in old hospital
gowns still clutching their chests, hands pressed to wounds that
never healed. The numbers grew crowding closer, until the air
thickened with electricity and soarer. The voices resolved to some pleading,
others bitter, some shrieking out broken bargains. Help us free
us one more, just one more, and will be allowed
to go. I crumpled knee, slamming the sticky tipe. One
hand out to fend off the darkness. Then a pressure,
physical as any hand, seize my shoulder. Ye see us
something hiss, cold breath pouring through my urn, into my skull.
You must stay, It's the way ye know. Now go
See hands prowed at my skin, pulling, insistent, My mouth
filled with ice. Behind me, footsteps reel, solid, rapid, A
figure bursten with a wild edge to her voice. Get
away from him. It was Irene. I could see the
edge of her blue cover rolls in the sickly light,
see the flush of something fierce in her eyes. She
reached don robbed my arm, Nor take me. I've seen enough,
Leave him alone. A dozen voices wailed, the coarse, shuddering
with rage. The cold tightened, then broke. Irene shoved me backward,
sending me sprawl into the doors of silent lightning lit
up the room. The last I saw before the dark
rose again was ironed, mouth set brave or terrified her
both as the shape surged over her, swallowing her in
gray light. Hand shoved me hard and a tumble through
the doors, the world tilting the corridor, swallowing me whole.
My last impression was of her standing defiant, then gone,
and the repeated echoing message pounding inside my skull. Remember us,
Remember I walked sprawled on the asphalt outside the hospital
under a sky cart, on the edge of dawn, every
muscle shaking, bruised to my core. Police lights flickered re
blue in the smoky glass. Someone talked into a radio
face ashen. I staggered, aupright, reeling as medics tried to
shepherd me toward an ambulance. My bag of files was
half open at my feet, print out spilling out under
the head lights. The hospital loomed all its windows back
as they bundled me away. I saw men in hard
hats setting up barriers, official looking people arguing with news crews,
evidence bags filled with battered folders. The world at last
had come to take a hard look at Saint Ans
some memorial. I glanced back once to the spot where
I had first entered, where the night air still shimmered,
and caught a glimpse of a pale faced frimed by
blue coverls between the blinds. It smiled, sad and proud
and resigned. I was alive outside it, but I had
left something vital behind. In those endless hundry Holsen would
have ever followed me out. I couldn't shake the ghost
of Irene's sacrifice, or the whispered names that would echo
through every silence the rest of my days. Light press
against my eyes like a cruel interrogator, sharp and hot,
in a soft flush beneath my brows. The scent of
antiseptic and melted Assholt filled my nose, first strange, then familiar,
then revolting. Somewhere voices argued in a strained tone that
seemed to buzz at the edges of my hearing, and
the were of a generators pulled out in endless, jittering drone.
There was no sense of peace in waking, no comfort
that the previous eros had been a dream, something painful
had been torn out of me and tossed into the
morning air. I sat up slowly, tentatively in the world
world and pale streaks of blue and orange, the smeared
colors of police light bouncing off the battered sign that
reed Saint ants. Some memorial visitors welcome one of the paramedics,
a young man with shell shocked eyes and a blanket
throne haphazardly over his shoulders, glanced over, startled to see
me moving. You should lie back, sir, he said, his
voice attired monotone of someone who'd forgotten how to care exactly,
but still clung to the scripts. We're doing, ah intake,
Medics'll check you in a sack. I shook my head,
feeling the ache and my joints in the weight of
everything I hadn't done. No I have to I didn't
know what I had to do. One scream flee into
the sunrise and hope nothing followed. Some response is never
fully formed. I only managed to ask, did it? Did
you find any one else? He gave me a look
as if he thought I might bowlt into traffic, then
shook his head wearily. Just your place was empty, like
nobody's worked. The graveyard in ears. But a neighver reported
seeing you come out, stumbling like he been shot, said
you collapse here on the curb. That true, I tried
to wol my voice steady. There was some one else,
a woman iron she I saw her again in memory,
standing in the grip of those shadows, brave and doomed.
She worked here with me. The Middeck's fram pulled his
face into a deeper mask of concern. He jotted a note,
if she's in there, they'll find her. Another responder, in
a yellow wed aproof jacket, was shining a flashlight into
the empty lobby through the thick glass. The entrance looked
the same as always, a sickly green glow, a potted
tree dying in silence, the rob of mat culling by
the door. But behind it, I could sense the air,
see awareness of those who had not yet learned to
shield themselves from what waited in the dark. Police moved
nervously around the press. One detective, more rumpled than the rest,
not next to my bag and began methodically removing its
battered contents, my keys, my phone, sheaves of notes, the
envelope of photos, even the half melted sand which I'd
carried all night. He pulled on evidence gloves and leafed
through them one at a time. He was at least
ten years my senior, hollow eyed and weary, but with
the air of someone determined to ring sins from the senseless.
He met my gaze. You are alex right, I nodded,
or tried to the muscles in my neck spasmd looks
like you've been TRUELL will need you to come inside
for a statement when you feel steady. But he held
up his hand before I could interrupt. A first things first,
we you involved in whatever happened in there, arsin burglary,
anything that could explain what we're dealing with, the question
surprised me. Part of me wanted to laugh. What would
they do if I told them the truth that Saint
Anson Memorial Hospital was a predator, that it chose its
prey and hunted. When the corridors emptied and no one
remembered the names on the walls, lock me up, sedate meat. Maybe.
I looked at my hands, noticing for the first time
that my fingers were bruised, and that there was blood
under my nails, not mine, but someone's, dark and sticky.
I tucked my hands under the blanket. I just worked here.
They tried to get help. The detective tilted his head quietly,
studying me, and for a moment I saw the ghost
of skepticism in his face give way to weary resignation.
He did not pursue the accusation. Look, you're obviously shaken.
We got the tip about strange things in this building, anonymous,
He melt with files attached staff desks, missing persons, or
a schiff log, even a photo of that badge. Duty
know anything about him? I swallowed hard. He worked nights
a long time ago. He he vanished an irene. I
nodded again. It was all I could manage. He picked
up the staff badge had found, scrutinizing the worn writing,
we'll run a search. If anything in your file's pans out,
we'll want to talk again. More officers trickled in. It
exloaded me on to a stretcher before I could object further,
insisting I let them check my injuries. The ordeal of
answering questions stretched friars, name job, how long I'd been
a saint, down some whether I'd taken drugs, whether I'd
seen any one else? Did I know what happened to
the missing staff? Why had I emailed? Were complaints? Weeks before?
I answered as honestly as I dared, Still steering around
the edges of the unspeakable. Eventually they'll let me go.
No hospital bed on earth felt any safer. I wrote
down everything in block capital letters as soon as I
was able. The names for messages irene, sacrifice. I tried
to describe the theater, the way, the darkness pulse, but
on paper it all read like feverish invention rather than memory.
They closed the hospital that same day, rolling out battered
fencing and plastic barriers, marking it closed for renovations. News
fans came, then left. My witness statement was taken, but
not televised. The files I sent to the media turned
up in a few sketchy blog posts before being scruped.
Two days later. An ector left me a voicemail, we
won't run this. There's nothing verifiable, no evidence of any crimes.
No one contacted me above Irene. The files didn't list
her staff, not in any official capacity for the past
ten years. As far as Peril was concerned, she designed
long ago. Every attempt I made to get follow up
from local papers, the Union, even the city's cold case
squad hit the same more plausible deny ability in sincere
regret or just empty silence. The memory of what I'd
lived through pressed at the boundaries of my mind, eroding
what little resolve I had left. I moved into a
cramped basement rental on the far edge of town. Each night,
a double and triple locked the doors and plugged my
phone and lay awake long after midnight, staring at the
swirling plaster on the ceiling and praying for dream asleep.
The dreams, when they came, were vile and recursive. Hospital corridors,
every one the same length, looping endlessly back to their
own beginnings. Doors sagged open, each one whispering my name,
hinting at ships moving just out of sight. Irene was
always there at the end, caught in the spill of
orange light from a single working bulb. Sometimes she wept,
sometimes she glared at me, as if I had betrayed her.
Always her voice ended in a chorus not her own.
Remember us. I tried to hold down a new job,
factory custodial, supermarket stockroom, But each time the pattern of
night shift returned, I found myself flinching at the sound
of soft voices on empty floors, the smell of meldew,
the sharp town of cleaner, even the hum of ancient
fluorescent tubes. All it could send me kreening into a
pas nicka could not shake. I told myself it would
pass in time. It never did. On the fear, I
whispered by the fear on me several weeks after my
release from Saint Hansem, a letter arrived at the drop
books I'd rented when paranoia was at its worst. It
was brown with age stamp with a postmark for a
town I'd never heard of, inside a single slip of
blue paper, creased at the corners. It was my old
staff badge, the one i'd lost the night Irene vanished
my name. Beneath the mortary polished plastic glimmerd and failed
sunlight from the basement window. Beneath it was a noting, careful,
leaping handwriting I recognized immediately, remember us. I sat there
for a long time, trace of rouzabetchall creeping up my arms.
I flipped the badge in my hand. On the reverse
was a set of initials I hadn't noticed before Enka
dtty ILB and written lust and lowest I AH two
slush five. My hands began to shake. I jammed the
badge into the back of a kitchen drawer and yanked
it shut so hard that silver were jangled against the wood.
The note fluttered to the floor, landing near my bare toes.
For a moment I considered burning both, purging any connect
to that place. The thought festered, never breaking the surface.
I was afraid not of the building, now boarded and empty,
but of the invitation. It still whispered in the dark,
an unfinished bargain. The ladder haunted me. The badge felt radioactive.
Every day I opened the drawer to grab a fork,
I half expected to see the initials had multiplied. I
didn't let myself look too closely or too long. I
tried to move on, to make routine my cage to
live in the bland patterns of quiet work after shift hamlets.
An old sitcomer runs, but the chill of Saint nan
Son's followed me. Then is a shadow. Twice I found
myself sleep walking, shoe scofferer from crossing the crack's eye
while in front of the old hospital gates. Neighbors stared
as I stumbled, eyes blank, toward the keep out signs,
pausing always at the threshold where electric light never quite
held the dark at bay. Both times I woke with
my wounded arm thwarbing, and the sense that voice, quiet
and coal was urging me. On those days blurred with
the kind of exhausted horror. I stopped answering my phone
friend's messages dried up. The union never called back. Even
my mother's voice mamails her jet or checking in her
distinconcern began to sound hollow, like a transmission from another world.
I wanted to run, to start fresh in a new city,
even as I knew something would only follow. It wasn't
the hospital's location that method. It was memory, or warning,
or a kind of curse had inherited by knowing too much.
What truly undid me was the sense that my part
in it could never really be over, that I hadn't escaped,
so much as been spared for now a witness and
a vessel. Sometimes in the dull crackle of bad wiring,
I hear them again, soft and distinct voices swelling out
of static as the minihan creeps past one a m
Sometimes I answer, sometimes I had. But one night, a
month or so after the badge arrived, I couldn't sleep.
I got up, pacing my tiny kitchen hands restless. There
was an old plastic radio in a corner, one of
those hand cracked models that barely picked up anything postatic
and the evangelical an channel on impulse. I twisted the
knob the antenna cracked the radio bust to life, and
there in between the hiss and pop, I heard it
a voice, not quite male, not quite female, whispering a
string of names, first softly, then louder M, gay, L, B,
D T, S C, then my own name, Alex. On
the edge of the transmission, beneath the click of the
f M, DAL won more word help. The radio went dead.
My flat shilled by at least ten degrees, as if
an old freezer door had flung open, flooding everything with
the past. I reeled, searching for meaning, but already knew
what it would be. Not the hospital, Nay, the bargain
had shifted. I was part of the chain. Now. Dispress
wept the last of the numbous aside and left me
frantic with resolve. I rifled through the drawer from my badge,
gripped it until the coroners bit deep into my flesh.
I pulled out Irene's note. I unfolded the hospital directory,
battered and faded that I'd never managed to throw away,
and I wrote. I wrote copies of every name, every date,
every warning, everything I'd seen, the email, journalists, union contacts,
old supervisors, even distant relatives who had never worked a
single night shift in their lives. I printed pages and
left them in public libraries, launder mats, supermarkets. I slept
fires under doors and interbus station benches, cryptic, desperate everywhere,
saint down some memorial, remember us, don't go alone. Sometimes
I included the initials, sometimes just blank spaces that any
one could fill. People called me crazy. People threatened me.
A man in a suit from some regulatory board threatened
to sue if I didn't stop spreading libel. My landlord
asked how long I planned to stay. The police warned
me to mind my business. But every time I heard
or read some new name in the scattered news report,
a missing nurse in another state, a janitor vanished from
a shelter, a patient on a forgotten world, initials carved
into the wood of an abandoned building. I felt less alone,
though not less afraid. The chain was nationwide. Maybe older
may be endless. I lived like that for six months,
not quite awake, not asleep, haunted by coltman, by inevitability.
Nothing supernatural seemed to happen in those months. Not in
the surface, no more bruises, no more missing time. But
sometimes on still nights, scraps of hospital smell pressed into
my nose, harsh and metallic, and my skin would call,
as if some one's hand just above my arm, the
weight of old debts. Then one final time, something came.
It was deep winter, mooinless air, brittle. I lay in bed,
roused to consciousness, not by sound, but by a darkness
that felt too thick. Hovering low above my sheets, I
reached for the lamp. The bulb exploded with the pop
of ancient class In total blackness, I listened to my
unwraket breathing until unmistakably I heard footsteps in the kitchen
and saw the faintest blue glow sifting under the door.
Heart hammering, I stumbled upright. The radio crackled, burst a
life on the counter, sat my badge next to it,
the familiar battered staffolder from the hospital. When I was
sure I'd left behind or destroyed, and rising to meet me,
the soft, unmistakable outline of Irene blew a cigarette smoke
shimmering only with the kitchen light would never reach. She
didn't smile, but her eyes, deep and old and full
of sorrow, held mine. I heard, not with my ears,
but in the decoil of my mind. Her words. It's
not finished, the names, don't forget, don't let it feed.
She pressed the badge and to my palm ice, reading
through my veins, I ran us. The kitchen window steamed
with the midst of a hundred winter nights gone wrong.
For just an instant, I tasted copper on my tongue,
the acrid metallic tan of hospital blood and ancient fear. Then,
without drama, without lighting or thunder, she faded. The radio
fell silent. My apartment returned to still an ordinary cold.
But the badge in my hand was different. The names
on its back shimmered below my own initials. Another had
appeared overnight, I are. My mouth worked, but no words came.
There was only a pulse through my fingers and a
deep sense of certainty. My task was not to end
the chain, but to hold a clothes for a while,
to fend off the forgetting that bred hunger. The next morning,
I packed a bag. I traveled to the address on
the anonymous envelope, a crematorium turned arcave outside the city border.
I left the badge and Irene's note with an envelope
full of every photocopid record had salvaged, marked with two words,
remember U S. Then I walked away, letting the light
creep over my shoulders, swallowing the fatigue, the horror, jagged
gap where blonding used to be Saint ansel memorial reopen.
They always did, a new staff, new shift, locks, new laughter,
echoing in the bright morning halls. But some things changed
to a plaque with a row of initials hidden in
a quiet cornered, a set of stuff. Instructions explicit and strange,
do not work alone, do not listen to the whispers,
And somewhere at the back of every new badge, a
faint trace, barely visible except in the half light, of
the old names, still galloping forward, waiting, pleading remember us.
In the end, I could never be free of what
I'd seen. But so long as the chain was not broken,
as long as one person, any person, kept the names
alive and the story is circulating, some part of the
hunger could be held at bay. I keep the last
four covered. No clip to my nights are now a
warning and a burden, both. Never trust the silence between
midnight and dawn. Never ignore old names, Never let the
hospital forget. Even now, when the wind rises and the
light flicker, I press my hand flat to the trembling plaster,
and whisper back every name I know, because the knight
belongs to the ones who remember, and the walls are
always listening. I kept the promises to my marrow, though
there were nights it felt like the old hosse, But
old shadow followed me through the waking world, growing tallers,
the sun ed, and the city's lights below beyond my window.
Life did not return to normal, because the notion itself
had become strange to me. But I learned the contours
of my new world, fragmented sleep, the taste of cold
metal lingering behind every cup of instant coffee, vigilance that
never quite relaxed when to loose in its grip on
my neighborhood, Yielding to a queer Maritha, I developed a ritual,
climbing the stairs to the roof just before dawn, badge
in my palm, whispering the same names, letting my breath
haze out in the pale chill. Some mornings I imagined
that I saw Irene silhouette in the pattern of fog
on the next building, never quite close enough to convince
me of anything, but always there at the edge, headed
by memory. I come to order where I could. Every
week I sent letters. Sometimes I addressed in to old janitors, unions,
to city offices, to health inspectors. Sometimes I didn't address
them at all, just drop them in a blue post
books marked only with initials and dates and the plea
to remember. I filled out online forums, submitted its to
local ghosts, her guides, posted warnings and forgotten form threads.
An old custodium from a hospital at sat even wrote
me back once as note only said I've seen things
to stay shop. It didn't help, but it didn't hurt either.
For a while it seemed this was to be my
life guardian of names, student of sleeplessness, half crazy towny
in a rental with a door rattling, full of cursed artifacts.
But every chain, however carefully tended, must be tested. It
started smaller rerun of the same old dread, simmering gently.
I caught a scrap of news online. Saint Aunt some
memorial to reopen wings for modernization, promises fresh start. There
was a photo of smiling executors cutting a ribbon. Not
a one of them local old enough to remember the
dozens who had vanished the building in the back round
looked both unchanged and wrong, the windows too bright, the
new sign glinting with the unnatural polish of denial. I
deleted the tab, but couldn't un see it. I doubled
my efforts, sent new warnings with more urgency, but there
was only so much an anonymous sender could achieve. I
stopped message boards, reading every rumor, the black mold in
the basement, lights flickering on uncondemned wings, security contractors quitting
after night shift without giving notice. Patents yes, but dismissed
his cheabourban LFE, dge, and by any one with authority.
Sometimes an ex nurse would post asking about the initials.
Their thread would vanish by morning, swallowed up by silence,
or admin edits. One morning, the Branston's buzzers startled me
out of a half dream in which the hospital's tiled
holes and furled beneath my feet. I led it buzz
twice three times. I stood at the window, watching a
delivery truck idle by the cob its hazard lies blinking,
Probably nothing, a package for wrong the dress, But I
stayed frozen, fighting a jitter that felt like a trap.
Closing another buzz, insistent I forced myself downstairs. The man
at the door was in plain clothes, but everything about
him stank of officialdom. I debadge on a lineard clipboard
in one hand, board, suspicion in the lines at the
corners of his eyes. He gave my name, my real one,
in a tone that brooked no denial. Alex, need a
minute of your time. City Health is here to follow
upon some complaints about saint and some memorial We've had
odd reports, missing persons, weighed files. Do your names come up?
My mouth was dry. You here to ask about the
pass for the present? A thin smile, both a little
about the future. He shifted his clipboard. He sent in
some pretty wild documentation, staff desks, notes, claims about patterns
in the building. Anonymous tips to media too. Then there's
the recent incident. His eyebrows dipped. You want to elaborate,
did I? I didn't know. They urged a fall to
spill everything, to beg for some official hand to close
the wound rush through me. But the deeper urge, the
one that wore my nerves row, was to protect protect
the names, the dead, even the living. He'd return to
those halls with wide eyes. I sent those, and because
I was afraid no one else would listen, I said, finally,
my voice, low, steady, out of nowhere. The place is wrong.
It doesn't forget and it doesn't forgive. Medding every name
I gave you each when I saw evidence tied to incidents, disappearances,
and explained injuries. He can brush me off as crazy,
but you'll see the pattern if you check records hard enough.
Someone always pays for looking. He flicks through his notes.
That's a lot of accusation for an old building. It's
not the building, it's the will behind it. Something wants company.
If you dig there, do it with someone else in
the room, never alone, never below two after midnight, and
do not answer if it calls. Something in my tone
must have unsettled him. The lines at his jaw tightened.
We'll take it under advisement, mister Green, Just one more question.
That badger, He gestured vaguely at the outline in my jacket.
To any chance we can take a look. With reluctance,
I pulled it out, flashing my thumb over the initials
on the back. He studied it, his eyes narrowing. Odd
place for those markings, usually only the hrcode on the
reverse in your handwriting eye are on the bottom. Was
that one of your supervisors? A cold spot opened? Not exactly,
no one you'd find im paeril records. She stayed after
she shouldn't have to, shouldn't have fasked around. If the
staff will talk, they won't, but ask anyway. He nodded,
the brisk unseen not of officials everywhere. Thank you for
your co operation. He left, shuffling away in the gray drizzle.
I tucked the badge away, feeling the faint, hastatic jolt
as it slipped into my pocket. Up Stairs, I closed
the blinds and waited, listening for the after shock I
knew would come. Outside the world did not change. Cross
the street, a grocery truck and load of crates. Che
kids argued over a scooter. Normalsy reasserted itself, loud and indifferent.
But inside, in a hollow between my heart beats, I
caught the rasp of breath in an empty stirble. That
night's leap was a lost country. I sat on the couch,
radiosophstatic blanketing the silence, half expecting Irene's presence flowing blue
beside me, But nothing appeared to just the endless, thin hum.
When the hospital officially reopened, the new snuck in on
a late segment, reportersgusting about community resources and the fine
job done on a restoration. I took the train across town.
Couldn't help myself. I watched from the low concrete wall
beside the parking lot as nurses milled in their new uniforms,
as shiny ambulances p forth the illusion that a line
had been drawn between old and you. I did not enter,
though I craved of the way an attic craze poison.
I simply watched, counting how many people went in groups
and who were sent alone to fetch the plies from
the lower levels. There was a janitor, young, uncallosed hands
the same cheap jacket I had worn just months before,
pushing a mock cut for a grand floor doorway. A
security guard called something after her. The words were muffled
by the wind, but I heard a joke or maybe
a wa. She smiled the fragile first week smile and
vanished around the corner into the old bee block. I
read it, time crawled. She returned, pale but intact. I
watched every instinct in myself. Frysgill warn her, tell her
to run task about graffiti, to pay attention to the silence.
But I stayed on my wall, a ghost, unable to intervene,
waited by my own unfinished business. Maybe I thought the
chain would break of its own accord. Maybe the warnings,
if enough of us kept muttering them, would hold back
the worst. But I knew better, memory, if left intended,
always rots from the outside. In Strange things started to
happen in the neighborhood of Spring crept into the city
two blocks from my apartment. A power out had struck
one night, plunging the street in an opaque, inky dark.
People howled and bang Dondors convinced a wind carried voice
beyond the howling of the downtown trains. The next day,
dawn't show up and paled the news reporting a missing person.
A building superintendent come without a trace, last seen below
in the god for sacn tangle of city pipes. At night,
I found a slip of paper wedge under my own entryway.
A day at two initials ridden embolb went as fierce
as a knife, Not from me, not from any one
I knew. I scared the records may calls pressed myself
into the old grooves of compulsion. The initials matched the
missing man. The date was to day. I felt the
world waver was as hel crept forward, hopping from nest
to nest in the cities under belly, finding people too
used to being in scene unremarked, I broke my own
rule and went back to Saint Anseng, this time not
as a visitor or witness, but as someone willing to
trespecific meant clarity. There were new staff at the front desk,
two security men who smelled of coffee and bored expectation.
I signed him with a fake name, using an excuse
about lost property and old paperwork from the previous era.
They handed me a visitor badge and waved me on
without a glance. Wandering the familiar halls, I felt their
shape alive under my feet, the scuffed lines on the
floor tile, the battered fire doors, the echo in the
walls like breath. Everything looked brighter. Shields wreased against the dark,
posters for staff whileness, programs cleaned with fresh plastic, but
behind every update, the old bones remained. I made my
way through the service tunnels were tracing old wraps. Whenever
I passed the stretch of wall or a corner I
had known well. I scanned for graffiti, initials fresh or faded,
peeking from behind safety posters, an under nearly lacquer trim.
It was all there, some newly washed, some covered by
layers of institutional beige, but always leaking through like old blood.
I added one of my own, a tip of a
pencarven a desperate, I are in the seam of a
door frame. A nurse spotted me in the archive corridor.
She paused, uncertain you lost, As she asked, I forced
a smile, just looking for Irene used to be on days,
hurried she might be back. Her face furros then melted
into professional skepticism. Don't know that name, sorry, but something
at the edge of her voice told me it wearing
a bell or maybe clamed in alarm. She heard off,
her footsteps echoing. After the lower levels were still technically sealed.
New padlocks on the steel doors fresh out of use,
tape stretched tight. I hovard waited for a gap in
the cameras, then slipped my hand for a loose hinge,
feeling for the cold of familiarity. The dome was just
as I remembered, breadth and weight barely contained by the
walls above. The air tasted wrong, not just stale, but eat,
as if every exhale in this place had been drawn
in a hundred times before. Something watched from the far
side of the darkness. I did not see it, but
I felt the old urgency building in the static behind
my ears. I crept forward into the chill. On the
blackboard of the old operating room, A ghostly scroll materialized,
as if conjured by my gaze. Asterisks toisks, remember U
s asterisks risk handwriting like mine, but not the tail
on the iarth swept in the style that belonged to
another air. At my feet a new patch of initials,
months fresh, the paint only just dry. A cold certainty
shivered through me. It wasn't just Saint Anson that kept
the chain alive. It was every place, hungry for forgetting,
every shadowed institution where names were erased by custom and need.
I wrote on the wall myself, in the open, each
name I remembered, stacking them like bricks against the tide.
When I finish, I left my badge tucked into a
crevice in the wall, letting it join the relics had
token for whoever came next. I said the names aloud,
voice breaking but unashamed. M k helbi dit si be
d I r al all of you. The room seemed
to hold its breath for a fraction of a second.
The pressure ebbed there grew lighter, but my time was up.
The tap of footsteps in the service stair will snap
the moment I slipped back into the daylight halls. Visitor
badge turned backward, my skin humming as if electrified. I
passed through the lobby, giving a last glance at the
front desk. Behind a glass, I caught the reflection, not
of myself, but a blow of blue, a fragment of
an old uniform, A face watching with weary sorrow. Irene,
her eyes solemn and proud, met mine in the security
mere just for a heartbeat. I walked away, not daring
to look back. The remainder of the day and weak
and month bled together, countless names flickering across newstickers, another misimpatient,
a janitor gone, and note posted online about strange voices
in a subway tunnel. My warnings proliferated, were copied, erase marked,
but sometimes they stuck. I compiled a masteril as a
constantly upbate it desperate ledger on old envelopes, Napkin's browser
book wax, a memorial for those who had gone and
those who were come. Sometimes a stranger would reach out,
our nurse from half way across the country, a custodian
from a retirement home in Florida. I've felt it too.
Their emails read, thank you, what do I do? My
advice was all I could offer. Astro Rischustraus, don't go alone,
write the names, tell some one, don't forget, asked Rischstraus.
Occasionally someone sent back news that the cycle had claimed another.
Sometimes it was just thanks for the confession of an
unameable relief that some one else believed. It was never enough,
not when the Knights were at their Thchiston's silence pressed
barbs into my dreams. Even now, I awake sometimes to
find the initials traced and fog on my window, my
own name added. Now, the chain nodding tider, the city
mouse on time cycles stubbornly toward new losses, new amnesia.
For each time I feel the coal begin to creep,
each time the radio flickers to static, and begins the
old Ludney a wick fully. I walked to the knight stand,
and I whispered the truth aloud, line by lion, name
by name. I do it not for myself, but Friarrene,
for those she saved, for every soul who carved a
warning where only the desperate would see, for the possibility
that some day the name will outnumber the hush, and
the dark hunger will go wanding. But until then I
keep the watch, I remember, because that's all the living
can do in a world. Build on forgetting, keep the
names alive, breathe meaning back into the silence, and hope,
against all laws and all endings, that the chain will
not end with us, but be carried still bright. But
it was brave enough to listen to the whispers in
the night. Some nights the chain felled, unbreakable, as if
every warning and whispered name did nothing, but by time
for the next shadow to step forward and be swallowed.
On those nights, I'd pace the apartment badge pressed into
my sweating palm, collecting breaths like border charm. It would
always begin with the draft, cold, as a hospital stairwalls
that forced its way beneath the door, rattle, the glass
in its frame, s and shivers racing up my arms.
My mouth would dry out, my nerves would drag me
to the window, where the city glimmered, indifferent and endless.
The streets taught with the tension of seekers, kept to law.
But there was a shift coming, heavier than before. I
could feel at an impatience in the silence that old
rituals didn't soften, an urgency behind every creak of the floorboards.
The final test had not yet come. That much was clear.
Three nights after my last visit to Saint Ansem, just
as the clock's re red digits blinked past one thirteen
a m. A new sound shattered the routine. A knock,
slow and purposeful at my front door. It was not
the wild pounding of a break in, but near there
was the casual tap of a neighbor come to borrow sugar.
It was measured one, two or three beats, pause, then
three more. I stood motionless in the kitchen, pulse stuttering.
The radio pop was static, and I see metallic tanks
slithered into the air. I glanced toward the nights. Then
the badge colored faint, as a captive star. The knock
came again. I crept to the people, careful, silent, heart
in my throat. Through its gas, I saw nothing but shadow.
The cheap whole wisconces outside my door, flickering like defective
heartbeat monitors. And then as I reached to double lock
the bolt, a voice, hoarse and doubled, whispered from the
other side. Alex opened up. It was my mother's voice,
and yetna flat, hollowed, as if channel through a mouthful
of dirt. Mine sides twisted. I'd spoken to her, we
coul ago her number, letting up my phone miles away,
certainty iell in her tone she wouldn't be here, She
couldn't be here, Alex, I forgot the names let me in.
Terror flared, urging me to recoil, to retreat to the
kitchen and dial for help. But something heavier kept me,
rooted the call of the chain, or may be the
part of me that was tired of running, of letting
others pay the price. I can't, I said, voice trembling
but clear. You are not her, You can't come in,
not to night. A pause, then a voice turned what
by hatred A knee you remember, but you will forget.
You keep the chain alive, but you never break it.
Let me in and name them for me, Alex, Let
me in and be forgotten with them all behind the door.
The shadow shifted, press flat and tall against the threshold.
The chill in the apartment ballooned until my breath turned visible,
curling white in the air. My teeth chattered. I gripped
my badge until my knuckles burned. Not this time, I whispered,
and felt some old piece of self fusing to steal.
I remember, I will always remember. For a moment, the
world hung suspended, one thin wall between me and oblivion.
Then with a sudden, shattering bang, the front window exploded
inard shards papped the floor with a crystal and roar,
frost biting at my bare feet. The shadow poured through
the rupture, a cold fog racing toward me. Voices carried
on its currents, hundreds of mouths, names blurring together, Irene, Daniel,
Marcia'll be as sea help us at a fled to
the center of the room, badge raised like a ward,
eyes stinging with tears and dust. The fog circled me,
the voices pulling in opposite direction, some pleading, some threatening,
all desperate to be acknowledged. Something ancient and hungry loomed
in the center of the howl, in its outline, vast
and void like, as if the hospital itself had broken
through the skin of the city and now bend over me,
insisting to drag me in. In a rush of panic,
I did the only thing left. I shouted the names aloud,
louder and harsher than ever before. Every syllable rang with memory, pain, hope.
Each name was a blow against the cold, against the silence,
against the ancient, with that's aught to erase n k
d d de sief, I'll beat I ah Marsha dorend
irene Daniel gibble. Every one remember us? I remember, ye'd
I remembered. The shadow roared, the temperature plummeted further, and
I dropped to my knees, badge burning in my grip
as if electrified. Light streamed up from my hand's blie, silver,
piercing the gloom. With each name, another pulse, like bells
tolling through falk. And then in the center of the cold,
a figure, resolved, iery, in spectral and resolute, standing between
me and the darkness arms wide, her voice at once,
everywhere and nowhere, cut through the uproar. No more, not him,
not to night. He keeps the names, He bears the chain.
The shadows shuddered, recoiled, its edges unraveling as if at
the touch of sun. For an instant a glimpse face
is in the depths, snarling with loss, weaving with relief,
calling out name after name after name, before the fog shrank, contracted,
and was suck loudly through the hole in the window,
trailing a storm of whispers.