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Speaker 1: You never really know a place until you've seen it

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in the unfinished dires, when everything familiar takes on a

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harder edge and there's nobody left but eter echo the

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odd noises down empty holes. That's what I told myself.

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My first night is a new janitor for Saintown, some

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moral hospital. I arrived at ten fifty eight, two minutes

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before my shift. My sneak is squeaking nervously on the

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linoleum outside the service entrance. The double glass dorsis when

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I pushed them, exhaling the sterrell recycled. There of long

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days and long nights lived in the same rooms. I

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barely had time to get my bearings before someone pressed

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ring heavy hand into my nearring of keys, jingleling, not

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a handshake. That was my handover from the dish of

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Supervisor Marsher. She'd been almost apologetic for how little introduction

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she was giving. It's the night, you get used to it,

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she muttered, while handing off a battered clipboard. Her eyes

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never quite met mine, instead darting up and down the

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main corridor toward the distance squeak of an elevator. The

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buckets in supply in the closet by nurse Adam and

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marked the waiting areas. Then work your way through those wings,

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she said, gesturing vaguely at the maze of corridors behind her.

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You keep out of B block after midnight alarm one

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shot off. Otherwise, don't bother with level three. We never

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do at night. Any questions. I wanted to ask a

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dozen things while stay out of Bee Block? Why the rush?

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Why did everyone look so exhausted even at the start

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of a shift. Instead, I just shook my head, he'll

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do fine. Nobody wants to shift, but it's steady. With that,

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she was gone. He square's shoulders vanished into an elevator.

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When the door was slid shut, the building fell silent

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in a way that was immediately oppressive. I stood under

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the buzz of the main lights for a moment, but

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even that shallow hum couldn't quite drown out the sense

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of being iyed from just a run the next corner.

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I blinked, adjusted my backpack and forced myself forward into

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this muffled hive of corridors and half lit room's wholly

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mine for the night. The first thing I noticed was

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how close the ceilings felt. The hospital looked normal in

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the day wide atriums, busy with fluorescent light. But after

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IROs the hole shrank. The overhead bulbs flickered, each casting

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a narrow circle that didn't quite meet the next. The

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air staled quickly, and even just a few yards away,

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the nurse's station blurred into shadow. Marsha had pointed out

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my territory, but I needed to see it for myself.

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I started with the slow, secured as walk through trash

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bins lined the snake of narrow holes, most overflowing with

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the debris of the day. I picked them up, set

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them on my flat beit cart, tried to make mental

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maps of the terns and supply closets. Anxiety sharpened my senses.

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Every distant knock or elevator beat felt too crisp, too

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laud My mop buckets queaked whenever I moved in more

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than one place. A SoLIT corner's harbored not only dust,

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but evidence of age. Few wanted to claim. A stair

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will no longer use. A paint peeled in long walnot curls.

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I wouldn't have noticed anything odd except at one spot,

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right behind a fire hose cabinet, the chip plaster gave

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way to a strange bowl of faded marker and cheap

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spray paint. I moved closer, phone light in my hand.

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Underneath the topmost flake, scrawled and nearly invisible black, was

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a list of letters in numbers m K fourteen slash ten,

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slash thirteen, I'll beat his last six slush twenty d

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T four slash eleven slash twenty two. The most recent

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was just last week a CE seventeen slash four slashed

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twenty three. The edges of the oldest letters were smudged, waterwarped,

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but that last one sharp dark, with only half the

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initials visible. It was as if some one had tried

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to scribe the names and failed. A tug at my

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gut said it was probably nothing, old staff with a

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weird sense of humor, maybe tally marks for late night dares.

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But the longer I looked, the more my mind gnawed

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at the strange coincidence. It looked deliberate and out of place,

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and far too recent for a forgotten corner. Either way,

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the graffiti was quickly eclipsed by the volume of mundane

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tasks that followed. The mess of my first night left

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scant room for idle reflection and bolting. Stub and trash liners,

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cacked with a need and fruit mopping sticky waiting room floors,

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while the late night newstrown from a TV with the

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greenish warp display. Trying not to make eye contact with

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the few blaue patients, he wandered in and out of

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the er. Still, that sense of being absorbd slipped through

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behind the ordinary, specially when I cut through the back halls.

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Time stretched in a way it never had during my

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old job at the high school, and I swept by

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and left behind only a surf, a sheen on tile,

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and the echo of my own footsteps. Each time I

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passed the stairwell, I glanced at the initials, telling myself

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I'd look up the last one, Essie, when I got

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a minute. I didn't know who to ask, or even

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if I wanted to know. I pressed on through the

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small ey I was telling myself that every building had

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a spirit at night, and it just took getting used to.

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The Next several nights did little to ease the knowing

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sense that I was part of some into half hidden mechanism,

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one that worked best when no one looked too closely.

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Normal routine built up, like sediment clocking in at ten

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fifty five, nodding to the guard who never left the

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security glass, collecting my cart from storage, and cycling through

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the endless mop and bucket rischels. The holes were almost

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clear of staff by one a m. On the floors,

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the only recurring regulars were an orderly named Gibril, who

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always looked like he was half way through a nap,

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and a nurse called Dorian, who had the droop of

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someone who'd given up on ever getting a proper night's sleep. Conversations,

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when they happened, were perfunctory. How's the new shift, Dorian

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would say, barely pausing as she wiped her hands on

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a surgical green apron same as the old one. I

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might joke, even though this was nothing like my life before.

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She wouldn't laugh, only nod faintly in drift off, trailing

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the tart smell of hand sanitizer. Gibil sometimes gave me

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a brief rundown of which words to avoid. Don't go

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past pediatrics to night fuse boks, wet again, or don't

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leave the bin in the whole way they'll skin you.

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Always quick, always a little nervous, as if lingering too

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long in conversation might attract the wrong kind of attention.

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Nobody ever talked much about their own shifts, while the

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pass of the hospital that felt somehow off limits even

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to night staff. After a week, I almost stopped thinking

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anything about it. Loneliness will do that, making you simplify,

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except what are told. Gord numbs that I was doubts,

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brawl and tolerably long. Once in a while, though, there

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was a look passed between two noses as a gurney

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rolled by, or a hasty murmur when a certain door

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would stick and needed a badge to open. At first,

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I choked it up to gossip with the compressed secret

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of hospital life. But it felt thicker than that, as

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if everyone was worried about the wrong eyes being present,

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the wrong earrors, overhearing the wrong words. The days blurred together,

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my body acclimated to the elastic eye. As of midnight routine.

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I became the background to everyone else's face until my

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fifth night alone, when something finally pierced the surface calm

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and the night shifted irrevocably beneath my feet. It started

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in the corridor that snakes down passed the more garguably

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the loneliest part of any hospital at night. The fullorescent

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tubes there were always the first to flicker and the

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last to be replaced. Shadows bunch behind the empty gurners

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and shuddered with each cold draft that snuck in from

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under rusted emergency doors. I was half way through mopping

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a sticky corner, one that always took extra effort to

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feel clean, though it never quite did. When the light studded,

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it wasn't just a flicker. They dipped, impulsed in time

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with the compressive size from the nearer by ventilator room.

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I kept moving, focused on the swirling grave of dirty water,

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until something tickled at my ears, a whisper thin neither

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male nor female, almost a hiss. The words melted into

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each other, impossible to grab hold of. I paused, listening

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nothing but my own breath and the echo of water

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slapping linoleum. I told myself it was a vent or

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static from the calm system. Still, I found myself moving faster,

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almost abandoning protocol, to make it out of that corridor

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and into brighter bizo wings. Later, as I re stopped

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to supply closet, something crackled from beneath a loose mob

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handle a torn piece of paper, half slid under a

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floor buffer blade caught my eye. I'd almost let it

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be God knows. The place was full of discarded notes

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and random forms, but the words ghosted across the page

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in dark, frantic strokes. Don't trust them, they know when

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you see. I ran my thumb along the edge, hesitated,

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then folded the paper into my pocket. Rational explanations swarmed, disgruntled,

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patient bored, orderly, even some good playing a prank on

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apparent shift with access. Yet the warning begged me to

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look at the hospital itself, at who or what that

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they could be. It was easier to slip the page

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and with my sandwich wrappers at the end of my shift,

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and to tell any one about it. Night's following that

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incident stretched out with suspicion. I started noticing more than

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I wanted to praffiti. At first, invisible or ignored revealed

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itself when I lingered in the empty wings, or poke

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my mop behind rolling equipment, Sharp initials behind the baseboard

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in an abandoned patient room, names carved sloppy, fearful on

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the inside belly of a linen cat, even in a

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closet where I'd found the note inside the low door,

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a patch bel TYO twelve slash eighteen b D one

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slash four. My skin crawled. They won't random delays or

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just kid's jokes. There was a pattern. I started making

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a list on my phone, matching the initials and dates

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where I found them. I noticed, too, an odd correlation.

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The dates kept lining up, not with silly staff rituals,

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but with recent patient deaths or with the last days.

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A certain worker's name was still on the duty board

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in the break room. I tried bringing it up a

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door enduring her break almost as a joke to hide

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my nerves. Hey, you've noticed all the weird taggings around

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the place at night, names and dates, I asked. She

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furrows fingers tightly, gripping a coffee cup. Just board kids

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from the day shift, she said, too quickly. She placed

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her hand of a mind for a moment, locking the

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name I've written on a napkin. Don't worry about that, Alex,

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It's nothing you need to bother with her nails dug

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in even through glove and tissue. Similarly, when I asked,

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your bell careful, just a little too casual, he gave

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me a sidelong glare. Just ignore it. Yeah, old stuff,

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place got painted a dozen times. Don't start digging. Then

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he busied himself with a cascade of Phile's conversation over

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the tension grew heavier every night routine maintenance started to unravel.

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Mop pandles bent in my grip. Once a bucket of

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water I had left at the top of a stairwell

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had turned up empty, bone dry just ten minutes later,

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though no one had passed me in the way. Whenever

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I went to mop a particular corridor that should have

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been locked until morning, I'd find a door wide open.

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The crass bar hanging loose equipment squealed, rolled by its

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own weight into corners you couldn't quite see unless you

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looked over at your shoulder. Puddles appeared that couldn't be traced,

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leading to places like the sealed elevator bank near cardiac On,

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under the door to the old surgical theater's ruins no

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one used or spoke about. Paranoia seeped him at every shift.

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I started keeping mental talers. How many times had the

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supply closets lam nutter I entered had a shadow across

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the nurse's pattern glass, even though the staff were all

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account of forro upstairs. Once I thought I saw a reflection,

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not mine, not anyone smiling from behind a closed fire door.

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I refused to look back to convince myself I wasn't

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inventing things. I went to the security desk. I made

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up of reason. Abmin called, said the ben order was

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off in d wing. Could you run footage for yesterday?

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The night guard, a gruff man with a belly the

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size of his desk, crunted and pulled up the night locks.

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Out of boredom. For about two hours after midnight, the

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screen went black. No image is loaded, The times damp vanish.

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Only static shimmered and faded. That's weird, he muttered. Our

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system isn't down, just sometimes the hard drive skips a

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technical thing. Probably, He shrugged, but didn't look me in

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the eye. I left with bile rising in my throat

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and a cold certainty that what I experience wasn't a

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technical glitch, but an absence. Something else ow in desires,

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and no one wanted to admit it. Sometimes I'd look

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at Marsha the day supervised as she came back for

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morning handuff. She looked older every week, her hands trembled

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when counting keys, and she always asked the same questions

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as expecting a different answer, as if wanting me to

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admit something strange before I left for the day. But

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she never said it. None of them did. One morning,

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I trailed her into the admin supply, I rem under

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pretense of returning badge keys. The moment the door shut,

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she stiffened. Don't ask about things you aren't pay to know,

236
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she said, her words clipped, as if she practiced. If

237
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anything happens after midnight, just keep working, don't wander. That's

238
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how people end up in the wrong places. I almost

239
00:11:12,639 --> 00:11:14,840
demanded more, but she left me with silence and the

240
00:11:14,840 --> 00:11:17,799
echo of her warning. Everything tightened until the only thing

241
00:11:17,799 --> 00:11:19,759
that could puncture it was a human voice, willing to

242
00:11:19,759 --> 00:11:22,799
break the unwritten pact. That voice found me a week later,

243
00:11:22,960 --> 00:11:26,279
long before my shifts started, I had arrived early nursing

244
00:11:26,279 --> 00:11:28,960
a vending machine coffee at the back door ireing the

245
00:11:29,000 --> 00:11:31,879
day Janitor let herself in. Her eyes, sunburned, her coveralls

246
00:11:31,919 --> 00:11:35,360
too neat for genuine comfort. She was usually friendly in passing,

247
00:11:35,360 --> 00:11:38,279
but not the kind to linger. This time. She stopped

248
00:11:38,279 --> 00:11:41,159
her hand locking around my wrist. Don't go below level

249
00:11:41,200 --> 00:11:44,480
two at night, she whispered, checking over her shoulder. Never

250
00:11:44,720 --> 00:11:48,039
especially if you hear them whispered or anything. People who listen,

251
00:11:48,080 --> 00:11:51,879
who follow, they disappear, not by accident. My pulse sudder.

252
00:11:52,519 --> 00:11:55,519
What do you mean? I started, trying to sound incredulous

253
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or amused, but she shook her head violently. I'm not joking, Alex.

254
00:11:59,360 --> 00:12:01,519
Every year, if someone new takes the shift, most of

255
00:12:01,600 --> 00:12:04,000
us do. The day was which fast. Some never come back,

256
00:12:04,039 --> 00:12:06,279
Some go my ad. You look for patterns, forget them,

257
00:12:06,360 --> 00:12:08,440
Just show up to your jaw. Leave, don't try to

258
00:12:08,440 --> 00:12:11,639
figure it out. This place change is people. Her grope loosened.

259
00:12:12,240 --> 00:12:14,600
Before I could push further, she turned and vanished down

260
00:12:14,600 --> 00:12:16,960
the hall, her footsteps retreating fast and a kring in

261
00:12:16,960 --> 00:12:20,279
the bare concrete. The warning stuck with me. When I

262
00:12:20,399 --> 00:12:22,240
entered the hospital at night, it felt not like a

263
00:12:22,279 --> 00:12:25,679
place of work, but trapped, slowly adjusting its jaws. By then,

264
00:12:25,759 --> 00:12:28,000
the list of initials and dates on my phone had grown.

265
00:12:28,559 --> 00:12:31,039
Others matched recently posted in the morim notices on the

266
00:12:31,039 --> 00:12:33,679
staff bullet. In a quiet passing slip between lunch menus

267
00:12:33,679 --> 00:12:37,039
and shift swaps, I started to cross reference online local

268
00:12:37,080 --> 00:12:39,840
obituaries from the last ten years, news of missing staff,

269
00:12:39,960 --> 00:12:44,440
hushush resignations, unexplained accidents. A pattern emerged. Areas like the

270
00:12:44,480 --> 00:12:47,519
basement archive or the sealed off surgical wing had more initials,

271
00:12:47,600 --> 00:12:50,320
more dates, and more gaps on shift for rosters immediately after.

272
00:12:51,080 --> 00:12:53,720
Some initials belonged to orderly's or nurses I never met,

273
00:12:53,759 --> 00:12:55,639
but whose files popped up from time to time, and

274
00:12:55,679 --> 00:12:59,080
lost of found drawers or old clipboards. One night, sheepish

275
00:12:59,120 --> 00:13:00,960
and shaking, I brave if the basement wreck was not

276
00:13:01,039 --> 00:13:04,360
quite going below level two not at first half The

277
00:13:04,440 --> 00:13:07,159
lights were out, but my phone's beam was enough. I

278
00:13:07,200 --> 00:13:09,559
sifted through a pile of decades old personnel files in

279
00:13:09,559 --> 00:13:12,559
a water warp filing cabinet. Paper stuck to paper at

280
00:13:12,559 --> 00:13:15,039
the ink, bled into tree rings of mildy. That's where

281
00:13:15,039 --> 00:13:17,759
I found it. A staff badge photo barely there, name

282
00:13:17,799 --> 00:13:20,039
and date, a stin thick black marker over the plasticoditi

283
00:13:20,080 --> 00:13:22,840
four slash eleven slash twenty two, the same as the

284
00:13:22,879 --> 00:13:24,879
name I'd found carve into the underside of the fourth

285
00:13:24,919 --> 00:13:27,759
four break crint table. No one had mentioned Deety on

286
00:13:27,840 --> 00:13:30,919
any current list staff oppressed, we turn stony and sweared

287
00:13:30,919 --> 00:13:33,279
they'd never heard of him. No one would say where

288
00:13:33,279 --> 00:13:35,960
he'd gone. I pocketed the badge, my hands slick with

289
00:13:36,039 --> 00:13:38,559
cold sweat. I could hear every pulse in my wrist,

290
00:13:38,639 --> 00:13:41,480
every take of far off equipment, fear notes, something else

291
00:13:41,480 --> 00:13:43,480
from the back of my mind, a memory on yidding

292
00:13:43,720 --> 00:13:45,519
that I did not want to test the boundaries of

293
00:13:45,519 --> 00:13:47,679
what I ain called the line. It was the next

294
00:13:47,759 --> 00:13:51,480
night that everything bowled over, My rationalizations crumbled, and whatever

295
00:13:51,559 --> 00:13:53,720
lived in the darkness of that hospital decided I'd paid

296
00:13:53,840 --> 00:13:57,039
enough attention. I'd stayed late, hunting over patient locks in

297
00:13:57,080 --> 00:13:59,440
the office supply rooms, quinting at faint hands, scrolled notes

298
00:13:59,480 --> 00:14:02,639
left on top rosters. My shift was nearly over. Sun

299
00:14:02,759 --> 00:14:04,919
rise not far off, but cushions chewed at me. I

300
00:14:04,960 --> 00:14:07,799
woke the wholes lower than usual, keys dangling carelessly, as

301
00:14:07,799 --> 00:14:10,480
though during something to notice me. When I turned the

302
00:14:10,519 --> 00:14:13,000
corner to the bitten stairwell, I saw the door was unlocked.

303
00:14:13,639 --> 00:14:16,919
The hinges creaked, not with age but use. To my left,

304
00:14:17,000 --> 00:14:19,360
the old elevator bank's copper doors hung slightly, a jaw

305
00:14:19,399 --> 00:14:22,200
long out of service. I'd been told, yet a de

306
00:14:22,279 --> 00:14:26,039
morange light flickered inside like a beacon I remembered Iron's warning,

307
00:14:26,080 --> 00:14:28,840
but it was adrenaline of stubbornness, or the compulsion that

308
00:14:28,919 --> 00:14:30,840
comes with knowing a mystery is too close to turn

309
00:14:30,879 --> 00:14:34,440
away from. Step by slow step, I descended into the underbelly.

310
00:14:35,039 --> 00:14:37,360
The air changed the hospital's order of disinfect and gave

311
00:14:37,360 --> 00:14:40,399
way to something damper, metallic, like work coins or old blood.

312
00:14:40,960 --> 00:14:43,639
My fast light beams scattered against glass, flickered back off

313
00:14:43,679 --> 00:14:46,840
warpe sanitch, theater four nought in use. The lower level

314
00:14:46,919 --> 00:14:50,000
was nothing like the rest of the hospital. Floortas curled

315
00:14:50,039 --> 00:14:52,480
at the corners, walls patched which eats of plywood and

316
00:14:52,480 --> 00:14:56,039
strips of peeling paper. Each step echoed too loud. I

317
00:14:56,080 --> 00:14:59,080
heard myself breathing, and beyond it below steady whisper, not

318
00:14:59,159 --> 00:15:03,000
of voise. Hunters layered overlapping in a coal wine. At

319
00:15:03,039 --> 00:15:06,000
first I convinced myself it was air movement through supplied ducts,

320
00:15:06,120 --> 00:15:08,440
or the slow drip of a busted pipe. But as

321
00:15:08,480 --> 00:15:10,639
I turned the last corner in the corridor, the ambience

322
00:15:10,679 --> 00:15:14,799
sound resolved into something else, desperate pleading words, don't leave,

323
00:15:14,840 --> 00:15:18,039
please help. Shap's blood from the shadows, tall and substantial,

324
00:15:18,039 --> 00:15:20,960
almost human, but stretch on the find I could feel

325
00:15:21,000 --> 00:15:23,960
them crowding my periphery. As I moved the farther I

326
00:15:24,000 --> 00:15:26,840
went the louder. The hush became growing into any scream

327
00:15:26,879 --> 00:15:29,919
that pressed itself behind my eyes. Then, as I reached

328
00:15:29,919 --> 00:15:32,279
the center of the old surgical foy, the temperature dropped

329
00:15:32,279 --> 00:15:35,039
to freezing. My flasclets being caught on something pale at

330
00:15:35,080 --> 00:15:37,480
the far wall of face. Mouth opened in a silent cry,

331
00:15:37,600 --> 00:15:40,200
rupling as if under water. I felt a heavy grip

332
00:15:40,240 --> 00:15:43,200
clamp onto my arm, the sensation of freezing special fingers

333
00:15:43,200 --> 00:15:46,600
digging into my flesh. I stabbered backward, vision blurring at

334
00:15:46,639 --> 00:15:50,320
the edges. I screamed, but my voice vanished under the uproar, thunderous,

335
00:15:50,360 --> 00:15:53,679
impossible flood of voices peeling through my skull. Shadows broke

336
00:15:53,679 --> 00:15:56,879
and swam around me. Desperate, I yank free and ran,

337
00:15:57,000 --> 00:15:59,519
stumbling upstairs. Had seemed to fold in on themselves through

338
00:15:59,519 --> 00:16:02,159
doors that lacked and locked behind me. The last thing

339
00:16:02,200 --> 00:16:03,919
I felt was the grasp of coldness at my back

340
00:16:03,960 --> 00:16:06,879
in the whisper. You know now you've seen then darkness.

341
00:16:07,600 --> 00:16:10,200
When next day opened my eyes, I was somewhere else entirely,

342
00:16:10,240 --> 00:16:12,639
and nothing felt safe any more. I woke on a

343
00:16:12,639 --> 00:16:14,759
hard final couch with a draw stiff patch beneath my

344
00:16:14,840 --> 00:16:16,720
cheek and the two bright lights of the staff lounge

345
00:16:16,720 --> 00:16:19,360
starping straight through my eyelids. For a minute, I just

346
00:16:19,440 --> 00:16:22,039
lay still, the emergency blanket prickling hot on my chest

347
00:16:22,039 --> 00:16:24,039
despite the chill in the air, and let the confusions

348
00:16:24,039 --> 00:16:26,879
warm me. I didn't remember walking here. The last I

349
00:16:26,879 --> 00:16:29,759
could recall was the echoing stairwell, the clutching hand, and

350
00:16:29,799 --> 00:16:31,679
the chorus of voices. Then a hole in memory, as

351
00:16:31,679 --> 00:16:35,080
abrupt and perfect as a power outage. Somebody was standing

352
00:16:35,080 --> 00:16:37,840
by the vending machine, half concealed by the cheap plastic

353
00:16:37,919 --> 00:16:42,120
rack of outdated magazines. Doreen. Her back was turned, but

354
00:16:42,159 --> 00:16:43,919
she glanced at me in the reflection of the window,

355
00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:45,840
tight leaped. I was read for more than lack of sleep.

356
00:16:46,399 --> 00:16:49,679
That was some episode, she muttered, voice flat. You're lucky

357
00:16:49,679 --> 00:16:52,279
you didn't break your head on anything down there. I

358
00:16:52,320 --> 00:16:55,840
sat up too fast, dizziness pitching me sideways. My arm mate.

359
00:16:55,840 --> 00:16:57,720
When I rolled up the sleeve, the skin was bruised

360
00:16:57,720 --> 00:16:59,879
in five precise ovals, like someone with the hand the

361
00:17:00,080 --> 00:17:02,600
size of a shovel, and tried to leave fingerprints I

362
00:17:02,679 --> 00:17:05,359
rubbed at them, trying not to shake. Did did some

363
00:17:05,400 --> 00:17:08,079
one carry me? I forced the words pass a fractured,

364
00:17:08,160 --> 00:17:10,960
dry mouth. My voice didn't sound like it belonged here,

365
00:17:11,039 --> 00:17:14,680
higher and thinner than I remembered. Dorin shrugged, he were

366
00:17:14,720 --> 00:17:17,359
out cold in the amin corridor. Gibbil spotted you said

367
00:17:17,400 --> 00:17:20,160
he heard a scream. She glanced down at her hands,

368
00:17:20,279 --> 00:17:22,400
fidgeted with the wedding ring she never wore at work.

369
00:17:23,079 --> 00:17:26,400
She didn't look up. You look like you've seen a ghos.

370
00:17:26,440 --> 00:17:29,000
Someone else passed behind the frosted panel of the lanch door,

371
00:17:29,039 --> 00:17:32,079
whispering urgently to a second shadow. There was a crackle

372
00:17:32,079 --> 00:17:35,039
of static from the wall into calm, then silence. I

373
00:17:35,119 --> 00:17:37,759
tried to stand, swaying as the room double before resolving.

374
00:17:38,359 --> 00:17:40,240
I needed to get to the bath room, but couldn't

375
00:17:40,240 --> 00:17:43,359
force myself to leave the light. Dorian's attention was fixed

376
00:17:43,359 --> 00:17:45,759
in the bruises that painted my arm. You said the

377
00:17:45,799 --> 00:17:49,880
stairs right, she whispered words, barely from my ears. Don't

378
00:17:49,920 --> 00:17:52,839
go looking, don't ask any more. My tongue wanted to

379
00:17:52,839 --> 00:17:54,680
ask what, why, how? But the air in the break

380
00:17:54,720 --> 00:17:57,440
room was getting thick. I pushed past her into the

381
00:17:57,440 --> 00:18:00,240
corridor and caught the eyes of Gibber. He was waiting there,

382
00:18:00,319 --> 00:18:03,400
apparently on some invented errand studying me with careful suspicion.

383
00:18:03,880 --> 00:18:06,799
You want me to grab anyone from Edmund, Shibbil asked,

384
00:18:06,799 --> 00:18:10,480
fiddling with his ide lanyard. Nervous, No, I just I

385
00:18:10,480 --> 00:18:13,160
think I fainted. I heard how hollow it sounded, even

386
00:18:13,160 --> 00:18:16,839
as the light humbled are He didn't argue. Behind him,

387
00:18:16,880 --> 00:18:18,759
a pair of voidallies held up a small gurney with

388
00:18:18,799 --> 00:18:21,279
the plastic wrap bundle soaked with crimson. At one corner,

389
00:18:21,920 --> 00:18:24,920
someone's bad night. I watched them avoid the stairwell as

390
00:18:24,920 --> 00:18:26,799
if its dank, as if the dark could crawl out

391
00:18:26,839 --> 00:18:30,799
and wrap around their ankles. My stomach twisted. A nurse

392
00:18:30,799 --> 00:18:33,400
peered through the glass, said something clipped to Doreen, and

393
00:18:33,440 --> 00:18:35,640
the two of them stepped away to conference in low voices,

394
00:18:36,319 --> 00:18:38,559
I evesdropped what I could again three this year. We

395
00:18:38,680 --> 00:18:40,920
need to request it before the hum of conversation slid

396
00:18:40,960 --> 00:18:43,599
to a stop as I approached. No one blamed me

397
00:18:43,599 --> 00:18:46,160
for collapsing, not out loud, but the looks lingered and

398
00:18:46,200 --> 00:18:49,039
then spoken rule was reinforced. If you saw something past midnight,

399
00:18:49,119 --> 00:18:52,279
you kept it to yourself. Anything else was asking for trouble.

400
00:18:52,880 --> 00:18:55,119
I stumbled to the locker room, half to collect myself,

401
00:18:55,319 --> 00:18:58,319
have to run from the scrutiny. Splashing icy water on

402
00:18:58,400 --> 00:19:00,359
my face did little to clear the memories, but the

403
00:19:00,400 --> 00:19:02,720
bruises pulsing on my arm broad it all back anyway.

404
00:19:03,359 --> 00:19:05,200
I tried to prop my phone against the locker to

405
00:19:05,240 --> 00:19:07,680
snap a photo of the marks, but my hands were unsteady.

406
00:19:07,759 --> 00:19:10,799
The image blurry in wrong. I told myself it would fade,

407
00:19:10,839 --> 00:19:13,039
that I'd checked the photos later, but even then, now

408
00:19:13,079 --> 00:19:15,440
ready since i'd find the image corrupted or missing, alfgether.

409
00:19:16,119 --> 00:19:18,440
By afternoon, I managed to grab a few eye was

410
00:19:18,440 --> 00:19:20,599
an easy sleep, full of dreams I couldn't quite shake.

411
00:19:21,200 --> 00:19:24,359
I wondered hospital corridors and pitch dark my stets, echoing

412
00:19:24,440 --> 00:19:28,440
anonymous voices, chanting names and dates. Sometimes in the dream

413
00:19:28,480 --> 00:19:31,200
the faces were close enough to touch skin, waxy miles,

414
00:19:31,240 --> 00:19:34,119
moving soundlessly. One whispered my name in a voice that

415
00:19:34,160 --> 00:19:37,759
whisom was mine. I worked, shivering so violently my teeth ached.

416
00:19:38,480 --> 00:19:41,759
The cycle went on night after night. I returned because

417
00:19:41,839 --> 00:19:44,240
routine is its own kind of armor. An absence would

418
00:19:44,279 --> 00:19:46,599
only mean facing whichevern nightmare would chase me outside the

419
00:19:46,640 --> 00:19:50,960
hospital's walls. Sleep became a trickle ration. Carefully I stopped

420
00:19:50,960 --> 00:19:54,039
trying to engage the others. Each night shift was lonelier

421
00:19:54,079 --> 00:19:56,680
assignment shifted, sticking me with trush runs out in the

422
00:19:56,720 --> 00:19:58,599
tact on palllet of wing where no one else was

423
00:19:58,599 --> 00:20:00,799
ever sent, or endless moll butt by the generator room

424
00:20:00,799 --> 00:20:03,599
where only the old boilers made any sound. People gave

425
00:20:03,640 --> 00:20:07,160
me space like I carried a disease. Emails for management

426
00:20:07,200 --> 00:20:10,200
started arriving curt and formal Please restrict rooming outside of

427
00:20:10,240 --> 00:20:14,200
assigned wings, report all maintenance issues to supervisor, no exceptions,

428
00:20:14,279 --> 00:20:17,079
and after three nights of final warnings, spreading rumors cause

429
00:20:17,119 --> 00:20:20,680
for termination. Rumors had never started, but the implication was clear.

430
00:20:21,440 --> 00:20:24,000
I tried once to catch the whispers on my phone.

431
00:20:24,400 --> 00:20:26,640
I left the recorder running, tucked in a scrub pocket,

432
00:20:26,720 --> 00:20:29,160
hit record when the corridor went quiet, when the light

433
00:20:29,200 --> 00:20:32,400
in the fast air well puddled sickly orange in the floor. Later,

434
00:20:32,559 --> 00:20:34,680
when I played the file back, all I caught was

435
00:20:34,720 --> 00:20:36,799
the thunder of my own heart and a stat key distortion.

436
00:20:36,920 --> 00:20:39,759
Some one weeping in of was warped beyond recognition. Other

437
00:20:39,759 --> 00:20:43,039
recordings came out worse, corrupted by jagged electronic shrieks, the

438
00:20:43,039 --> 00:20:45,119
sound of a wind that never blew inside the buildings,

439
00:20:45,119 --> 00:20:47,960
out at windows. More than once I wondered if I

440
00:20:48,039 --> 00:20:51,640
was losing my mind. But then in empty cafeteria, another

441
00:20:51,720 --> 00:20:54,319
note turned up, folded inside an overturned chair. It read,

442
00:20:54,599 --> 00:20:58,640
is real, They're hungry. The handwriting was careful blockie below

443
00:20:58,680 --> 00:21:01,039
it and old initials and disks roll be dy one

444
00:21:01,039 --> 00:21:03,880
slash four that one match to missing nurse whose locker

445
00:21:03,960 --> 00:21:07,160
still bore a heart shipped sticker faded and intended. I

446
00:21:07,200 --> 00:21:09,359
began to keep all the notes, each one growing a

447
00:21:09,359 --> 00:21:12,000
heavier weight in the pockets of my coveralls. If it

448
00:21:12,039 --> 00:21:14,559
was a jerk or shad madness as persistence, ground dam

449
00:21:14,599 --> 00:21:17,759
whatever hope I had of ignoring it. Desperate to understand,

450
00:21:17,880 --> 00:21:20,119
I forced myself into the nearly forgott knock. I've room

451
00:21:20,119 --> 00:21:23,039
on three and old section wedge between admin officers, always locked,

452
00:21:23,079 --> 00:21:25,640
earth thick with dust and slow decay. I pried the

453
00:21:25,640 --> 00:21:28,039
door open one afternoon after a long shif, using a

454
00:21:28,079 --> 00:21:30,960
key that Marsha habitually forgot to reclaim in her morning haste.

455
00:21:31,480 --> 00:21:35,279
Inside box, files and ledges towered and tilted stacks. The

456
00:21:35,319 --> 00:21:37,559
walls blared with ghost out lines where framed degrees or

457
00:21:37,559 --> 00:21:40,759
certificates had once hung, now long remove. There were a

458
00:21:40,759 --> 00:21:44,559
list of patient names, coded diagnoses, staff rosters from decades past.

459
00:21:45,279 --> 00:21:47,559
I found a thick, leather bound volume in a milk crate.

460
00:21:47,599 --> 00:21:50,200
At the back, the paper was warped and sticky at

461
00:21:50,240 --> 00:21:54,240
the edges Incidents nineteen eighty two, two thousand two. I

462
00:21:54,279 --> 00:21:57,880
thumbed through it slower first, then faster, hands trembling. The

463
00:21:58,039 --> 00:22:01,039
entries were methodical, clinical, but the content chill me nerors

464
00:22:01,079 --> 00:22:03,519
I'll be missing after over night shift. Last seen in

465
00:22:03,599 --> 00:22:07,240
theater corridor, no trace, orderly dity, founds oriented in subbasement,

466
00:22:07,279 --> 00:22:10,400
committed suicide four days later. Dozens of entries each early

467
00:22:10,480 --> 00:22:12,880
matter of fact, every name one I'd seen scolled somewhere

468
00:22:12,880 --> 00:22:16,319
in graffiti worch. Inside the back cover, almost invisible against

469
00:22:16,359 --> 00:22:18,920
the binding, was a memo un faded hospital let ahead

470
00:22:19,079 --> 00:22:21,319
all night staff never work alone in B block or

471
00:22:21,359 --> 00:22:24,839
lower theaters after midnight. Management is aware. Report incidents only

472
00:22:24,880 --> 00:22:29,279
to admin, no date, no signature. My heart hammered. The

473
00:22:29,319 --> 00:22:32,880
next folder, I rifled through health staff evaluations, termination paperwork

474
00:22:32,920 --> 00:22:35,640
typed with the same phrases over and over, failure to just,

475
00:22:35,799 --> 00:22:39,559
unable to respect boundaries, disruptive to t morrel, always dated

476
00:22:39,559 --> 00:22:42,480
within days of the incidents below. It all tuck flat

477
00:22:42,519 --> 00:22:45,240
between far di viders lay an envelope marked personal return

478
00:22:45,279 --> 00:22:49,279
to Irene. It wasn't sealed. I hesitated, then slid out,

479
00:22:49,279 --> 00:22:52,200
a batted polaroid. Young Irene twenty years younger at least,

480
00:22:52,279 --> 00:22:54,640
in her blue coveralls, serious and and smiling, next to

481
00:22:54,680 --> 00:22:56,359
a man whose name I didn't know except for the

482
00:22:56,400 --> 00:22:59,039
scribbled initials on his badge m K fourteen slash ten

483
00:22:59,119 --> 00:23:01,880
slash thirteen, one of the oldest names from the wall.

484
00:23:02,400 --> 00:23:04,440
Foot tip scuffed behind me, and I nearly dropped the

485
00:23:04,440 --> 00:23:07,640
lot iron herself stepped into the thin band of hallway light,

486
00:23:07,759 --> 00:23:09,920
stopping at the doorway in looking for the first time,

487
00:23:09,960 --> 00:23:13,079
truly haunted. She shut the door with a careful thought.

488
00:23:13,799 --> 00:23:16,359
You weren't supposed to see those, she said, But she

489
00:23:16,400 --> 00:23:18,599
didn't sound angry, more like she was treading a raise

490
00:23:18,599 --> 00:23:21,799
of thin hope. I handed her the poor lord, Why

491
00:23:21,839 --> 00:23:24,200
are the same names on everything? What happened to them?

492
00:23:24,759 --> 00:23:26,880
Irene's hand shook as she tucked the photo back into

493
00:23:26,880 --> 00:23:30,200
her breast pocket. It's not just accidents. You know that now,

494
00:23:30,920 --> 00:23:34,599
I weeded. She gripped the edge of the battered desk, knuckled, blanched,

495
00:23:34,599 --> 00:23:37,839
ghost white. This play seats people, not every one, just

496
00:23:37,880 --> 00:23:39,799
the ones who start to notice. When I first took

497
00:23:39,839 --> 00:23:41,759
the night's shift, I thought it was just old stores,

498
00:23:41,799 --> 00:23:43,720
the way you primed the new hires. But they're true.

499
00:23:43,799 --> 00:23:45,960
This building wasn't always a hospital. It was built in

500
00:23:46,000 --> 00:23:47,960
the stone of an old po house, then turned into

501
00:23:47,960 --> 00:23:50,559
a teebee sanatorium. Too many a marked graves, too many

502
00:23:50,599 --> 00:23:53,720
who died alone the walls. Remember the kiway hunger. Her

503
00:23:53,759 --> 00:23:57,160
lips twisted, searching for a word that wouldn't come. I

504
00:23:57,200 --> 00:24:00,160
almost didn't make it, she said finally, vorge raw I

505
00:24:00,160 --> 00:24:01,880
saw more than I should have. I only got away

506
00:24:01,920 --> 00:24:04,440
because she tapped the polaroid, because someone else took my place.

507
00:24:04,480 --> 00:24:06,839
They say it's random luck, but it's not. Every time

508
00:24:06,880 --> 00:24:09,279
someone has taken play sleeps for a while, as long

509
00:24:09,319 --> 00:24:11,720
as no one else starts digging. What can I do,

510
00:24:12,359 --> 00:24:14,640
I asked, helpless, anger and fear of vining inside me.

511
00:24:15,279 --> 00:24:19,440
One people leave, She shook her head grimly. Nobody listens

512
00:24:19,480 --> 00:24:22,160
until it's too late. By then it's inside you. She

513
00:24:22,240 --> 00:24:25,359
stepped close, her face inches from mine. Forget what you saw,

514
00:24:25,480 --> 00:24:27,680
leave to night before it knows your name. Some people

515
00:24:27,680 --> 00:24:29,720
get out if they run, most don't. I go now

516
00:24:29,839 --> 00:24:32,319
if I were you, for a moment, I considered it.

517
00:24:32,960 --> 00:24:36,039
Every animal instinct screamed to flee, but my blood thuttered

518
00:24:36,039 --> 00:24:39,079
with a heavier obligation. I couldn't forget the voices, the

519
00:24:39,160 --> 00:24:41,799
desperate ones in the darkness, not the ones that wanted

520
00:24:41,799 --> 00:24:44,640
to consume. BUTO was begging to be remembered, every note,

521
00:24:44,720 --> 00:24:46,519
every carving hitten, be hands that had tried to at

522
00:24:46,559 --> 00:24:50,279
last the dark. Irene turned to go, pausing at the doorway.

523
00:24:50,720 --> 00:24:52,960
Don't go back down there. The next person at once

524
00:24:53,039 --> 00:24:55,920
might be you. Please. Then she was gone, a clop

525
00:24:55,920 --> 00:24:58,880
of her step, swallowed by the archaveldast. I stood in

526
00:24:58,880 --> 00:25:02,559
the sudden silence mind. I could quit, walk out into

527
00:25:02,559 --> 00:25:05,400
the prodomed blue and promise myself nothing followed. Or I

528
00:25:05,400 --> 00:25:07,839
could try to do something, anything for the invisible, pleading

529
00:25:07,839 --> 00:25:10,720
rennants in the walls and deep under the tile. Instead

530
00:25:10,720 --> 00:25:13,599
of leaving, I gathered everything, the file of personnel records,

531
00:25:13,720 --> 00:25:16,039
the notes I'd hoarded, copied my own list of initials

532
00:25:16,039 --> 00:25:19,440
and dates. I photographed the graffiti wherever I could find it,

533
00:25:19,559 --> 00:25:22,799
compiling a private catalog. Then I spent three hours in

534
00:25:22,839 --> 00:25:25,480
a fever of panic, emailing everything to an encrypted back up,

535
00:25:25,480 --> 00:25:28,519
wrouting it through burner accounts. If I didn't make it out,

536
00:25:28,680 --> 00:25:31,839
someone would have proof. I half believed nothing would transmit,

537
00:25:31,960 --> 00:25:33,759
that the files would vanish into static the way my

538
00:25:33,799 --> 00:25:37,400
recordings had, But the scent folder stayed blinking green. That night,

539
00:25:37,559 --> 00:25:39,599
when I walked in for my final shift, the hospital

540
00:25:39,640 --> 00:25:42,839
felt different, thicker, the lights already dull, my badge stuttering

541
00:25:42,839 --> 00:25:45,240
when I swiped through the main door. The other staff

542
00:25:45,240 --> 00:25:48,720
were shadows, their faces turned away. Marsha avoided my eyes

543
00:25:48,759 --> 00:25:51,720
as she handed over the keys during deviate to night,

544
00:25:51,839 --> 00:25:53,680
she said, but her voice broke at the end, as

545
00:25:53,680 --> 00:25:55,200
if she feared the words might be the last she

546
00:25:55,240 --> 00:25:58,160
ever said to me. I started my routine with mechanical

547
00:25:58,160 --> 00:26:02,279
precision cleaning toilets and ye bin swaving fingerprints from glass doors,

548
00:26:02,920 --> 00:26:05,000
but I kept my eyes open for the hidden cameras

549
00:26:05,000 --> 00:26:07,839
in my pocket file zipped in my bag, I texted

550
00:26:07,880 --> 00:26:09,799
the last of the evidence to the local union rep

551
00:26:10,000 --> 00:26:13,079
using the break room's half dead desktop. When midnight ticked

552
00:26:13,079 --> 00:26:15,319
over and the holes fell silent. I made my decision.

553
00:26:15,759 --> 00:26:18,960
Whatever Irene had warned, I couldn't stop, not when the

554
00:26:19,039 --> 00:26:21,160
names in the walls burned in my memory, not when

555
00:26:21,160 --> 00:26:23,920
the dark places under the tile hammed with forces. I

556
00:26:23,960 --> 00:26:25,839
locked up my cleaning cart in the wrong closet so

557
00:26:25,880 --> 00:26:28,240
it would not be found by morning, pocketed a spare badge,

558
00:26:28,440 --> 00:26:30,599
and headed for the forbidden stairwell for the last time.

559
00:26:31,119 --> 00:26:34,160
The elevator bank was colder than usual. Night air pulled

560
00:26:34,240 --> 00:26:36,759
round my shoes. The cold slick and oily leaking from

561
00:26:36,759 --> 00:26:39,279
the stairwell like a thing alive. I pressed my palm

562
00:26:39,359 --> 00:26:41,720
to the chipped wall, felt it vibrating, not with machinery,

563
00:26:41,759 --> 00:26:45,680
but with something deeper, like a heartbeat. Understone. Lights overhead

564
00:26:45,680 --> 00:26:48,359
blinked once twice, then stared into a sickly but soul

565
00:26:48,400 --> 00:26:51,920
white nobody else in the wing. With effort, I forced

566
00:26:51,960 --> 00:26:54,960
my feet down the steps. Every tread groaned with my weight.

567
00:26:55,720 --> 00:26:57,680
As I passed the third landing, the air grew thick.

568
00:26:57,759 --> 00:26:59,559
My own breath fogged out in front of my face,

569
00:26:59,599 --> 00:27:02,319
the chill lighting straight to bone. The bottom corridor was

570
00:27:02,359 --> 00:27:05,480
black as a crypt. My flasklight guttered, flickered, then failed,

571
00:27:05,519 --> 00:27:07,559
leaving only the twitching glow of the knot a new sign,

572
00:27:07,680 --> 00:27:10,759
illuminating nothing but the knoll doorway to theater four. That's

573
00:27:10,759 --> 00:27:13,200
when the whispering started up, with new purpose, different this time,

574
00:27:13,839 --> 00:27:17,200
not random, knows names, particular and hungry Alex Alex Alex.

575
00:27:17,920 --> 00:27:20,319
I ran a trembling hand against my chest, feeling the

576
00:27:20,359 --> 00:27:22,920
matettu of my heart. I wanted to turn, to race

577
00:27:22,960 --> 00:27:26,200
back up, to pretend nothing had happened. Instead, driven by

578
00:27:26,200 --> 00:27:29,839
compulsion or dem I cross the threshold into the condemned theater. Inside,

579
00:27:29,960 --> 00:27:33,200
the world warped, the room's vast old dome, pressed down,

580
00:27:33,400 --> 00:27:36,720
darker for being almost familiar, ghostly shaped surfaced at the

581
00:27:36,799 --> 00:27:39,880
edge of the circle. Orderlies with washed out faces, Nurses

582
00:27:39,880 --> 00:27:42,440
with badge four doors for eyes, patients in old hospital

583
00:27:42,480 --> 00:27:44,960
gowns still clutching their chests, hands pressed to wounds that

584
00:27:45,039 --> 00:27:48,440
never healed. The numbers grew crowding closer, until the air

585
00:27:48,480 --> 00:27:52,160
thickened with electricity and soarer. The voices resolved to some pleading,

586
00:27:52,200 --> 00:27:55,200
others bitter, some shrieking out broken bargains. Help us free

587
00:27:55,279 --> 00:27:57,279
us one more, just one more, and will be allowed

588
00:27:57,319 --> 00:28:00,640
to go. I crumpled knee, slamming the sticky tipe. One

589
00:28:00,680 --> 00:28:03,559
hand out to fend off the darkness. Then a pressure,

590
00:28:03,640 --> 00:28:07,079
physical as any hand, seize my shoulder. Ye see us

591
00:28:07,200 --> 00:28:09,720
something hiss, cold breath pouring through my urn, into my skull.

592
00:28:10,359 --> 00:28:12,960
You must stay, It's the way ye know. Now go

593
00:28:13,119 --> 00:28:16,519
See hands prowed at my skin, pulling, insistent, My mouth

594
00:28:16,559 --> 00:28:20,559
filled with ice. Behind me, footsteps reel, solid, rapid, A

595
00:28:20,559 --> 00:28:22,599
figure bursten with a wild edge to her voice. Get

596
00:28:22,599 --> 00:28:25,519
away from him. It was Irene. I could see the

597
00:28:25,599 --> 00:28:27,319
edge of her blue cover rolls in the sickly light,

598
00:28:27,400 --> 00:28:30,119
see the flush of something fierce in her eyes. She

599
00:28:30,200 --> 00:28:33,680
reached don robbed my arm, Nor take me. I've seen enough,

600
00:28:33,759 --> 00:28:36,960
Leave him alone. A dozen voices wailed, the coarse, shuddering

601
00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:40,720
with rage. The cold tightened, then broke. Irene shoved me backward,

602
00:28:40,880 --> 00:28:43,119
sending me sprawl into the doors of silent lightning lit

603
00:28:43,160 --> 00:28:45,400
up the room. The last I saw before the dark

604
00:28:45,480 --> 00:28:48,039
rose again was ironed, mouth set brave or terrified her

605
00:28:48,039 --> 00:28:50,640
both as the shape surged over her, swallowing her in

606
00:28:50,680 --> 00:28:53,400
gray light. Hand shoved me hard and a tumble through

607
00:28:53,400 --> 00:28:56,279
the doors, the world tilting the corridor, swallowing me whole.

608
00:28:56,880 --> 00:28:59,839
My last impression was of her standing defiant, then gone,

609
00:29:00,039 --> 00:29:03,240
and the repeated echoing message pounding inside my skull. Remember us,

610
00:29:03,279 --> 00:29:06,240
Remember I walked sprawled on the asphalt outside the hospital

611
00:29:06,279 --> 00:29:08,039
under a sky cart, on the edge of dawn, every

612
00:29:08,119 --> 00:29:11,480
muscle shaking, bruised to my core. Police lights flickered re

613
00:29:11,559 --> 00:29:14,599
blue in the smoky glass. Someone talked into a radio

614
00:29:14,680 --> 00:29:18,160
face ashen. I staggered, aupright, reeling as medics tried to

615
00:29:18,200 --> 00:29:21,039
shepherd me toward an ambulance. My bag of files was

616
00:29:21,079 --> 00:29:22,960
half open at my feet, print out spilling out under

617
00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:26,240
the head lights. The hospital loomed all its windows back

618
00:29:26,839 --> 00:29:28,960
as they bundled me away. I saw men in hard

619
00:29:29,000 --> 00:29:32,119
hats setting up barriers, official looking people arguing with news crews,

620
00:29:32,160 --> 00:29:35,759
evidence bags filled with battered folders. The world at last

621
00:29:35,799 --> 00:29:37,359
had come to take a hard look at Saint Ans

622
00:29:37,359 --> 00:29:40,079
some memorial. I glanced back once to the spot where

623
00:29:40,079 --> 00:29:42,279
I had first entered, where the night air still shimmered,

624
00:29:42,279 --> 00:29:43,960
and caught a glimpse of a pale faced frimed by

625
00:29:43,960 --> 00:29:47,200
blue coverls between the blinds. It smiled, sad and proud

626
00:29:47,200 --> 00:29:50,119
and resigned. I was alive outside it, but I had

627
00:29:50,200 --> 00:29:52,880
left something vital behind. In those endless hundry Holsen would

628
00:29:52,880 --> 00:29:54,559
have ever followed me out. I couldn't shake the ghost

629
00:29:54,559 --> 00:29:57,200
of Irene's sacrifice, or the whispered names that would echo

630
00:29:57,240 --> 00:30:00,000
through every silence the rest of my days. Light press

631
00:30:00,039 --> 00:30:02,640
against my eyes like a cruel interrogator, sharp and hot,

632
00:30:02,640 --> 00:30:05,279
in a soft flush beneath my brows. The scent of

633
00:30:05,279 --> 00:30:08,559
antiseptic and melted Assholt filled my nose, first strange, then familiar,

634
00:30:08,599 --> 00:30:11,799
then revolting. Somewhere voices argued in a strained tone that

635
00:30:11,839 --> 00:30:13,480
seemed to buzz at the edges of my hearing, and

636
00:30:13,519 --> 00:30:16,519
the were of a generators pulled out in endless, jittering drone.

637
00:30:16,920 --> 00:30:19,240
There was no sense of peace in waking, no comfort

638
00:30:19,240 --> 00:30:22,119
that the previous eros had been a dream, something painful

639
00:30:22,119 --> 00:30:23,680
had been torn out of me and tossed into the

640
00:30:23,680 --> 00:30:26,920
morning air. I sat up slowly, tentatively in the world

641
00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:28,960
world and pale streaks of blue and orange, the smeared

642
00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:31,160
colors of police light bouncing off the battered sign that

643
00:30:31,200 --> 00:30:34,799
reed Saint ants. Some memorial visitors welcome one of the paramedics,

644
00:30:34,880 --> 00:30:36,880
a young man with shell shocked eyes and a blanket

645
00:30:36,960 --> 00:30:40,200
throne haphazardly over his shoulders, glanced over, startled to see

646
00:30:40,240 --> 00:30:43,079
me moving. You should lie back, sir, he said, his

647
00:30:43,160 --> 00:30:46,200
voice attired monotone of someone who'd forgotten how to care exactly,

648
00:30:46,359 --> 00:30:49,480
but still clung to the scripts. We're doing, ah intake,

649
00:30:49,680 --> 00:30:52,359
Medics'll check you in a sack. I shook my head,

650
00:30:52,599 --> 00:30:54,160
feeling the ache and my joints in the weight of

651
00:30:54,200 --> 00:30:57,799
everything I hadn't done. No I have to I didn't

652
00:30:57,799 --> 00:31:01,799
know what I had to do. One scream flee into

653
00:31:01,839 --> 00:31:05,039
the sunrise and hope nothing followed. Some response is never

654
00:31:05,079 --> 00:31:08,319
fully formed. I only managed to ask, did it? Did

655
00:31:08,359 --> 00:31:10,759
you find any one else? He gave me a look

656
00:31:10,799 --> 00:31:12,880
as if he thought I might bowlt into traffic, then

657
00:31:12,880 --> 00:31:16,079
shook his head wearily. Just your place was empty, like

658
00:31:16,160 --> 00:31:18,799
nobody's worked. The graveyard in ears. But a neighver reported

659
00:31:18,799 --> 00:31:21,039
seeing you come out, stumbling like he been shot, said

660
00:31:21,079 --> 00:31:24,079
you collapse here on the curb. That true, I tried

661
00:31:24,079 --> 00:31:26,480
to wol my voice steady. There was some one else,

662
00:31:26,519 --> 00:31:30,000
a woman iron she I saw her again in memory,

663
00:31:30,200 --> 00:31:32,519
standing in the grip of those shadows, brave and doomed.

664
00:31:33,200 --> 00:31:35,839
She worked here with me. The Middeck's fram pulled his

665
00:31:35,880 --> 00:31:39,160
face into a deeper mask of concern. He jotted a note,

666
00:31:39,680 --> 00:31:42,640
if she's in there, they'll find her. Another responder, in

667
00:31:42,680 --> 00:31:45,039
a yellow wed aproof jacket, was shining a flashlight into

668
00:31:45,039 --> 00:31:47,960
the empty lobby through the thick glass. The entrance looked

669
00:31:47,960 --> 00:31:50,079
the same as always, a sickly green glow, a potted

670
00:31:50,079 --> 00:31:52,319
tree dying in silence, the rob of mat culling by

671
00:31:52,319 --> 00:31:54,240
the door. But behind it, I could sense the air,

672
00:31:54,319 --> 00:31:56,160
see awareness of those who had not yet learned to

673
00:31:56,160 --> 00:31:59,119
shield themselves from what waited in the dark. Police moved

674
00:31:59,119 --> 00:32:02,960
nervously around the press. One detective, more rumpled than the rest,

675
00:32:03,079 --> 00:32:05,400
not next to my bag and began methodically removing its

676
00:32:05,440 --> 00:32:08,359
battered contents, my keys, my phone, sheaves of notes, the

677
00:32:08,480 --> 00:32:10,880
envelope of photos, even the half melted sand which I'd

678
00:32:10,880 --> 00:32:13,880
carried all night. He pulled on evidence gloves and leafed

679
00:32:13,880 --> 00:32:15,880
through them one at a time. He was at least

680
00:32:15,880 --> 00:32:18,359
ten years my senior, hollow eyed and weary, but with

681
00:32:18,400 --> 00:32:20,720
the air of someone determined to ring sins from the senseless.

682
00:32:21,400 --> 00:32:24,920
He met my gaze. You are alex right, I nodded,

683
00:32:25,079 --> 00:32:28,079
or tried to the muscles in my neck spasmd looks

684
00:32:28,119 --> 00:32:30,000
like you've been TRUELL will need you to come inside

685
00:32:30,039 --> 00:32:32,440
for a statement when you feel steady. But he held

686
00:32:32,519 --> 00:32:35,039
up his hand before I could interrupt. A first things first,

687
00:32:35,079 --> 00:32:37,960
we you involved in whatever happened in there, arsin burglary,

688
00:32:38,039 --> 00:32:40,720
anything that could explain what we're dealing with, the question

689
00:32:40,839 --> 00:32:43,519
surprised me. Part of me wanted to laugh. What would

690
00:32:43,519 --> 00:32:45,160
they do if I told them the truth that Saint

691
00:32:45,160 --> 00:32:47,559
Anson Memorial Hospital was a predator, that it chose its

692
00:32:47,599 --> 00:32:49,519
prey and hunted. When the corridors emptied and no one

693
00:32:49,559 --> 00:32:53,279
remembered the names on the walls, lock me up, sedate meat. Maybe.

694
00:32:53,799 --> 00:32:55,920
I looked at my hands, noticing for the first time

695
00:32:55,920 --> 00:32:57,960
that my fingers were bruised, and that there was blood

696
00:32:58,000 --> 00:33:00,799
under my nails, not mine, but someone's, dark and sticky.

697
00:33:01,440 --> 00:33:04,319
I tucked my hands under the blanket. I just worked here.

698
00:33:04,400 --> 00:33:07,680
They tried to get help. The detective tilted his head quietly,

699
00:33:07,720 --> 00:33:09,680
studying me, and for a moment I saw the ghost

700
00:33:09,720 --> 00:33:12,279
of skepticism in his face give way to weary resignation.

701
00:33:12,880 --> 00:33:16,400
He did not pursue the accusation. Look, you're obviously shaken.

702
00:33:16,480 --> 00:33:19,200
We got the tip about strange things in this building, anonymous,

703
00:33:19,200 --> 00:33:22,200
He melt with files attached staff desks, missing persons, or

704
00:33:22,240 --> 00:33:24,440
a schiff log, even a photo of that badge. Duty

705
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:28,440
know anything about him? I swallowed hard. He worked nights

706
00:33:28,480 --> 00:33:31,519
a long time ago. He he vanished an irene. I

707
00:33:31,559 --> 00:33:34,880
nodded again. It was all I could manage. He picked

708
00:33:34,920 --> 00:33:37,559
up the staff badge had found, scrutinizing the worn writing,

709
00:33:38,119 --> 00:33:40,720
we'll run a search. If anything in your file's pans out,

710
00:33:40,839 --> 00:33:44,240
we'll want to talk again. More officers trickled in. It

711
00:33:44,359 --> 00:33:46,839
exloaded me on to a stretcher before I could object further,

712
00:33:46,920 --> 00:33:50,039
insisting I let them check my injuries. The ordeal of

713
00:33:50,079 --> 00:33:53,519
answering questions stretched friars, name job, how long I'd been

714
00:33:53,519 --> 00:33:56,079
a saint, down some whether I'd taken drugs, whether I'd

715
00:33:56,079 --> 00:33:58,119
seen any one else? Did I know what happened to

716
00:33:58,160 --> 00:34:01,039
the missing staff? Why had I emailed? Were complaints? Weeks before?

717
00:34:01,599 --> 00:34:04,319
I answered as honestly as I dared, Still steering around

718
00:34:04,359 --> 00:34:07,319
the edges of the unspeakable. Eventually they'll let me go.

719
00:34:07,400 --> 00:34:10,159
No hospital bed on earth felt any safer. I wrote

720
00:34:10,199 --> 00:34:12,440
down everything in block capital letters as soon as I

721
00:34:12,519 --> 00:34:16,400
was able. The names for messages irene, sacrifice. I tried

722
00:34:16,400 --> 00:34:18,719
to describe the theater, the way, the darkness pulse, but

723
00:34:18,760 --> 00:34:21,559
on paper it all read like feverish invention rather than memory.

724
00:34:22,199 --> 00:34:24,840
They closed the hospital that same day, rolling out battered

725
00:34:24,840 --> 00:34:28,719
fencing and plastic barriers, marking it closed for renovations. News

726
00:34:28,719 --> 00:34:32,079
fans came, then left. My witness statement was taken, but

727
00:34:32,119 --> 00:34:34,920
not televised. The files I sent to the media turned

728
00:34:34,960 --> 00:34:37,159
up in a few sketchy blog posts before being scruped.

729
00:34:37,719 --> 00:34:40,079
Two days later. An ector left me a voicemail, we

730
00:34:40,119 --> 00:34:43,360
won't run this. There's nothing verifiable, no evidence of any crimes.

731
00:34:44,079 --> 00:34:47,159
No one contacted me above Irene. The files didn't list

732
00:34:47,159 --> 00:34:49,599
her staff, not in any official capacity for the past

733
00:34:49,639 --> 00:34:53,039
ten years. As far as Peril was concerned, she designed

734
00:34:53,039 --> 00:34:55,760
long ago. Every attempt I made to get follow up

735
00:34:55,800 --> 00:34:58,320
from local papers, the Union, even the city's cold case

736
00:34:58,360 --> 00:35:00,960
squad hit the same more plausible deny ability in sincere

737
00:35:01,000 --> 00:35:04,199
regret or just empty silence. The memory of what I'd

738
00:35:04,199 --> 00:35:06,559
lived through pressed at the boundaries of my mind, eroding

739
00:35:06,559 --> 00:35:09,320
what little resolve I had left. I moved into a

740
00:35:09,360 --> 00:35:12,400
cramped basement rental on the far edge of town. Each night,

741
00:35:12,440 --> 00:35:14,360
a double and triple locked the doors and plugged my

742
00:35:14,480 --> 00:35:17,119
phone and lay awake long after midnight, staring at the

743
00:35:17,119 --> 00:35:19,519
swirling plaster on the ceiling and praying for dream asleep.

744
00:35:20,039 --> 00:35:24,199
The dreams, when they came, were vile and recursive. Hospital corridors,

745
00:35:24,239 --> 00:35:26,719
every one the same length, looping endlessly back to their

746
00:35:26,719 --> 00:35:30,119
own beginnings. Doors sagged open, each one whispering my name,

747
00:35:30,199 --> 00:35:33,199
hinting at ships moving just out of sight. Irene was

748
00:35:33,239 --> 00:35:35,119
always there at the end, caught in the spill of

749
00:35:35,159 --> 00:35:38,360
orange light from a single working bulb. Sometimes she wept,

750
00:35:38,360 --> 00:35:40,360
sometimes she glared at me, as if I had betrayed her.

751
00:35:40,920 --> 00:35:43,400
Always her voice ended in a chorus not her own.

752
00:35:43,639 --> 00:35:46,559
Remember us. I tried to hold down a new job,

753
00:35:46,599 --> 00:35:49,719
factory custodial, supermarket stockroom, But each time the pattern of

754
00:35:49,800 --> 00:35:52,119
night shift returned, I found myself flinching at the sound

755
00:35:52,159 --> 00:35:55,360
of soft voices on empty floors, the smell of meldew,

756
00:35:55,400 --> 00:35:57,320
the sharp town of cleaner, even the hum of ancient

757
00:35:57,360 --> 00:35:59,760
fluorescent tubes. All it could send me kreening into a

758
00:35:59,760 --> 00:36:02,559
pas nicka could not shake. I told myself it would

759
00:36:02,559 --> 00:36:05,320
pass in time. It never did. On the fear, I

760
00:36:05,360 --> 00:36:08,480
whispered by the fear on me several weeks after my

761
00:36:08,559 --> 00:36:10,840
release from Saint Hansem, a letter arrived at the drop

762
00:36:10,880 --> 00:36:13,840
books I'd rented when paranoia was at its worst. It

763
00:36:13,920 --> 00:36:15,800
was brown with age stamp with a postmark for a

764
00:36:15,840 --> 00:36:18,880
town I'd never heard of, inside a single slip of

765
00:36:18,880 --> 00:36:21,679
blue paper, creased at the corners. It was my old

766
00:36:21,679 --> 00:36:24,199
staff badge, the one i'd lost the night Irene vanished

767
00:36:24,920 --> 00:36:27,639
my name. Beneath the mortary polished plastic glimmerd and failed

768
00:36:27,679 --> 00:36:30,880
sunlight from the basement window. Beneath it was a noting, careful,

769
00:36:31,000 --> 00:36:34,800
leaping handwriting I recognized immediately, remember us. I sat there

770
00:36:34,800 --> 00:36:37,239
for a long time, trace of rouzabetchall creeping up my arms.

771
00:36:37,880 --> 00:36:40,440
I flipped the badge in my hand. On the reverse

772
00:36:40,519 --> 00:36:42,599
was a set of initials I hadn't noticed before Enka

773
00:36:42,800 --> 00:36:45,760
dtty ILB and written lust and lowest I AH two

774
00:36:45,800 --> 00:36:49,480
slush five. My hands began to shake. I jammed the

775
00:36:49,480 --> 00:36:51,320
badge into the back of a kitchen drawer and yanked

776
00:36:51,320 --> 00:36:53,639
it shut so hard that silver were jangled against the wood.

777
00:36:54,159 --> 00:36:56,719
The note fluttered to the floor, landing near my bare toes.

778
00:36:57,440 --> 00:37:00,000
For a moment I considered burning both, purging any connect

779
00:37:00,239 --> 00:37:03,440
to that place. The thought festered, never breaking the surface.

780
00:37:04,199 --> 00:37:07,079
I was afraid not of the building, now boarded and empty,

781
00:37:07,119 --> 00:37:09,199
but of the invitation. It still whispered in the dark,

782
00:37:09,800 --> 00:37:13,760
an unfinished bargain. The ladder haunted me. The badge felt radioactive.

783
00:37:14,400 --> 00:37:16,239
Every day I opened the drawer to grab a fork,

784
00:37:16,280 --> 00:37:19,000
I half expected to see the initials had multiplied. I

785
00:37:19,000 --> 00:37:22,239
didn't let myself look too closely or too long. I

786
00:37:22,320 --> 00:37:24,199
tried to move on, to make routine my cage to

787
00:37:24,239 --> 00:37:26,960
live in the bland patterns of quiet work after shift hamlets.

788
00:37:27,039 --> 00:37:28,960
An old sitcomer runs, but the chill of Saint nan

789
00:37:29,000 --> 00:37:32,199
Son's followed me. Then is a shadow. Twice I found

790
00:37:32,199 --> 00:37:35,159
myself sleep walking, shoe scofferer from crossing the crack's eye

791
00:37:35,159 --> 00:37:38,079
while in front of the old hospital gates. Neighbors stared

792
00:37:38,079 --> 00:37:40,800
as I stumbled, eyes blank, toward the keep out signs,

793
00:37:40,840 --> 00:37:43,199
pausing always at the threshold where electric light never quite

794
00:37:43,239 --> 00:37:45,880
held the dark at bay. Both times I woke with

795
00:37:45,920 --> 00:37:48,239
my wounded arm thwarbing, and the sense that voice, quiet

796
00:37:48,280 --> 00:37:51,119
and coal was urging me. On those days blurred with

797
00:37:51,159 --> 00:37:54,239
the kind of exhausted horror. I stopped answering my phone

798
00:37:54,800 --> 00:37:58,880
friend's messages dried up. The union never called back. Even

799
00:37:58,880 --> 00:38:00,800
my mother's voice mamails her jet or checking in her

800
00:38:00,800 --> 00:38:04,039
distinconcern began to sound hollow, like a transmission from another world.

801
00:38:04,639 --> 00:38:06,840
I wanted to run, to start fresh in a new city,

802
00:38:06,920 --> 00:38:09,639
even as I knew something would only follow. It wasn't

803
00:38:09,639 --> 00:38:12,400
the hospital's location that method. It was memory, or warning,

804
00:38:12,559 --> 00:38:14,840
or a kind of curse had inherited by knowing too much.

805
00:38:15,559 --> 00:38:17,840
What truly undid me was the sense that my part

806
00:38:17,880 --> 00:38:20,559
in it could never really be over, that I hadn't escaped,

807
00:38:20,599 --> 00:38:22,480
so much as been spared for now a witness and

808
00:38:22,519 --> 00:38:25,760
a vessel. Sometimes in the dull crackle of bad wiring,

809
00:38:25,840 --> 00:38:29,000
I hear them again, soft and distinct voices swelling out

810
00:38:29,000 --> 00:38:31,280
of static as the minihan creeps past one a m

811
00:38:31,920 --> 00:38:36,119
Sometimes I answer, sometimes I had. But one night, a

812
00:38:36,159 --> 00:38:38,400
month or so after the badge arrived, I couldn't sleep.

813
00:38:38,920 --> 00:38:42,039
I got up, pacing my tiny kitchen hands restless. There

814
00:38:42,079 --> 00:38:44,079
was an old plastic radio in a corner, one of

815
00:38:44,079 --> 00:38:46,679
those hand cracked models that barely picked up anything postatic

816
00:38:46,719 --> 00:38:49,920
and the evangelical an channel on impulse. I twisted the

817
00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:52,760
knob the antenna cracked the radio bust to life, and

818
00:38:52,800 --> 00:38:54,480
there in between the hiss and pop, I heard it

819
00:38:54,559 --> 00:38:57,199
a voice, not quite male, not quite female, whispering a

820
00:38:57,199 --> 00:39:01,880
string of names, first softly, then louder M, gay, L, B,

821
00:39:02,760 --> 00:39:07,679
D T, S C, then my own name, Alex. On

822
00:39:07,760 --> 00:39:09,480
the edge of the transmission, beneath the click of the

823
00:39:09,599 --> 00:39:13,159
f M, DAL won more word help. The radio went dead.

824
00:39:13,440 --> 00:39:15,719
My flat shilled by at least ten degrees, as if

825
00:39:15,760 --> 00:39:18,199
an old freezer door had flung open, flooding everything with

826
00:39:18,239 --> 00:39:21,800
the past. I reeled, searching for meaning, but already knew

827
00:39:21,840 --> 00:39:25,840
what it would be. Not the hospital, Nay, the bargain

828
00:39:25,880 --> 00:39:29,119
had shifted. I was part of the chain. Now. Dispress

829
00:39:29,159 --> 00:39:31,039
wept the last of the numbous aside and left me

830
00:39:31,079 --> 00:39:34,119
frantic with resolve. I rifled through the drawer from my badge,

831
00:39:34,159 --> 00:39:36,679
gripped it until the coroners bit deep into my flesh.

832
00:39:37,199 --> 00:39:40,960
I pulled out Irene's note. I unfolded the hospital directory,

833
00:39:41,320 --> 00:39:43,960
battered and faded that I'd never managed to throw away,

834
00:39:44,559 --> 00:39:48,000
and I wrote. I wrote copies of every name, every date,

835
00:39:48,119 --> 00:39:52,440
every warning, everything I'd seen, the email, journalists, union contacts,

836
00:39:52,519 --> 00:39:55,239
old supervisors, even distant relatives who had never worked a

837
00:39:55,239 --> 00:39:58,199
single night shift in their lives. I printed pages and

838
00:39:58,280 --> 00:40:02,320
left them in public libraries, launder mats, supermarkets. I slept

839
00:40:02,320 --> 00:40:05,920
fires under doors and interbus station benches, cryptic, desperate everywhere,

840
00:40:06,039 --> 00:40:09,559
saint down some memorial, remember us, don't go alone. Sometimes

841
00:40:09,559 --> 00:40:13,039
I included the initials, sometimes just blank spaces that any

842
00:40:13,039 --> 00:40:16,800
one could fill. People called me crazy. People threatened me.

843
00:40:17,440 --> 00:40:19,760
A man in a suit from some regulatory board threatened

844
00:40:19,800 --> 00:40:22,639
to sue if I didn't stop spreading libel. My landlord

845
00:40:22,639 --> 00:40:25,159
asked how long I planned to stay. The police warned

846
00:40:25,199 --> 00:40:27,840
me to mind my business. But every time I heard

847
00:40:27,920 --> 00:40:29,760
or read some new name in the scattered news report,

848
00:40:29,760 --> 00:40:31,960
a missing nurse in another state, a janitor vanished from

849
00:40:31,960 --> 00:40:34,519
a shelter, a patient on a forgotten world, initials carved

850
00:40:34,559 --> 00:40:36,559
into the wood of an abandoned building. I felt less alone,

851
00:40:36,639 --> 00:40:40,400
though not less afraid. The chain was nationwide. Maybe older

852
00:40:40,559 --> 00:40:43,400
may be endless. I lived like that for six months,

853
00:40:43,559 --> 00:40:46,719
not quite awake, not asleep, haunted by coltman, by inevitability.

854
00:40:47,280 --> 00:40:49,760
Nothing supernatural seemed to happen in those months. Not in

855
00:40:49,760 --> 00:40:53,480
the surface, no more bruises, no more missing time. But

856
00:40:53,599 --> 00:40:56,679
sometimes on still nights, scraps of hospital smell pressed into

857
00:40:56,679 --> 00:40:59,079
my nose, harsh and metallic, and my skin would call,

858
00:40:59,119 --> 00:41:01,679
as if some one's hand just above my arm, the

859
00:41:01,719 --> 00:41:05,400
weight of old debts. Then one final time, something came.

860
00:41:06,079 --> 00:41:09,119
It was deep winter, mooinless air, brittle. I lay in bed,

861
00:41:09,360 --> 00:41:11,679
roused to consciousness, not by sound, but by a darkness

862
00:41:11,679 --> 00:41:14,480
that felt too thick. Hovering low above my sheets, I

863
00:41:14,519 --> 00:41:16,559
reached for the lamp. The bulb exploded with the pop

864
00:41:16,559 --> 00:41:19,760
of ancient class In total blackness, I listened to my

865
00:41:19,880 --> 00:41:22,960
unwraket breathing until unmistakably I heard footsteps in the kitchen

866
00:41:22,960 --> 00:41:25,360
and saw the faintest blue glow sifting under the door.

867
00:41:26,039 --> 00:41:29,639
Heart hammering, I stumbled upright. The radio crackled, burst a

868
00:41:29,679 --> 00:41:33,239
life on the counter, sat my badge next to it,

869
00:41:33,400 --> 00:41:36,199
the familiar battered staffolder from the hospital. When I was

870
00:41:36,239 --> 00:41:39,679
sure I'd left behind or destroyed, and rising to meet me,

871
00:41:39,880 --> 00:41:42,880
the soft, unmistakable outline of Irene blew a cigarette smoke

872
00:41:42,960 --> 00:41:46,079
shimmering only with the kitchen light would never reach. She

873
00:41:46,159 --> 00:41:48,440
didn't smile, but her eyes, deep and old and full

874
00:41:48,440 --> 00:41:51,360
of sorrow, held mine. I heard, not with my ears,

875
00:41:51,360 --> 00:41:53,519
but in the decoil of my mind. Her words. It's

876
00:41:53,559 --> 00:41:58,360
not finished, the names, don't forget, don't let it feed.

877
00:41:59,039 --> 00:42:01,039
She pressed the badge and to my palm ice, reading

878
00:42:01,039 --> 00:42:03,840
through my veins, I ran us. The kitchen window steamed

879
00:42:03,840 --> 00:42:05,599
with the midst of a hundred winter nights gone wrong.

880
00:42:06,159 --> 00:42:08,320
For just an instant, I tasted copper on my tongue,

881
00:42:08,360 --> 00:42:11,719
the acrid metallic tan of hospital blood and ancient fear. Then,

882
00:42:11,960 --> 00:42:15,639
without drama, without lighting or thunder, she faded. The radio

883
00:42:15,679 --> 00:42:19,079
fell silent. My apartment returned to still an ordinary cold.

884
00:42:19,639 --> 00:42:22,199
But the badge in my hand was different. The names

885
00:42:22,199 --> 00:42:25,159
on its back shimmered below my own initials. Another had

886
00:42:25,199 --> 00:42:28,480
appeared overnight, I are. My mouth worked, but no words came.

887
00:42:29,000 --> 00:42:30,760
There was only a pulse through my fingers and a

888
00:42:30,800 --> 00:42:33,599
deep sense of certainty. My task was not to end

889
00:42:33,599 --> 00:42:35,519
the chain, but to hold a clothes for a while,

890
00:42:35,559 --> 00:42:38,719
to fend off the forgetting that bred hunger. The next morning,

891
00:42:38,760 --> 00:42:41,320
I packed a bag. I traveled to the address on

892
00:42:41,400 --> 00:42:44,760
the anonymous envelope, a crematorium turned arcave outside the city border.

893
00:42:45,360 --> 00:42:47,679
I left the badge and Irene's note with an envelope

894
00:42:47,679 --> 00:42:50,960
full of every photocopid record had salvaged, marked with two words,

895
00:42:51,039 --> 00:42:54,039
remember U S. Then I walked away, letting the light

896
00:42:54,079 --> 00:42:57,000
creep over my shoulders, swallowing the fatigue, the horror, jagged

897
00:42:57,000 --> 00:43:00,519
gap where blonding used to be Saint ansel memorial reopen.

898
00:43:01,079 --> 00:43:03,880
They always did, a new staff, new shift, locks, new laughter,

899
00:43:03,920 --> 00:43:07,119
echoing in the bright morning halls. But some things changed

900
00:43:07,159 --> 00:43:09,159
to a plaque with a row of initials hidden in

901
00:43:09,159 --> 00:43:12,239
a quiet cornered, a set of stuff. Instructions explicit and strange,

902
00:43:12,239 --> 00:43:15,079
do not work alone, do not listen to the whispers,

903
00:43:15,719 --> 00:43:17,880
And somewhere at the back of every new badge, a

904
00:43:17,920 --> 00:43:20,159
faint trace, barely visible except in the half light, of

905
00:43:20,199 --> 00:43:23,480
the old names, still galloping forward, waiting, pleading remember us.

906
00:43:24,280 --> 00:43:25,840
In the end, I could never be free of what

907
00:43:25,880 --> 00:43:28,760
I'd seen. But so long as the chain was not broken,

908
00:43:28,880 --> 00:43:31,119
as long as one person, any person, kept the names

909
00:43:31,159 --> 00:43:33,159
alive and the story is circulating, some part of the

910
00:43:33,239 --> 00:43:35,679
hunger could be held at bay. I keep the last

911
00:43:35,760 --> 00:43:37,679
four covered. No clip to my nights are now a

912
00:43:37,760 --> 00:43:40,519
warning and a burden, both. Never trust the silence between

913
00:43:40,559 --> 00:43:44,599
midnight and dawn. Never ignore old names, Never let the

914
00:43:44,599 --> 00:43:47,719
hospital forget. Even now, when the wind rises and the

915
00:43:47,800 --> 00:43:50,280
light flicker, I press my hand flat to the trembling plaster,

916
00:43:50,400 --> 00:43:53,039
and whisper back every name I know, because the knight

917
00:43:53,119 --> 00:43:55,320
belongs to the ones who remember, and the walls are

918
00:43:55,320 --> 00:43:58,519
always listening. I kept the promises to my marrow, though

919
00:43:58,519 --> 00:44:00,079
there were nights it felt like the old hosse, But

920
00:44:00,159 --> 00:44:02,639
old shadow followed me through the waking world, growing tallers,

921
00:44:02,639 --> 00:44:04,920
the sun ed, and the city's lights below beyond my window.

922
00:44:05,480 --> 00:44:07,679
Life did not return to normal, because the notion itself

923
00:44:07,679 --> 00:44:09,760
had become strange to me. But I learned the contours

924
00:44:09,800 --> 00:44:12,159
of my new world, fragmented sleep, the taste of cold

925
00:44:12,159 --> 00:44:14,800
metal lingering behind every cup of instant coffee, vigilance that

926
00:44:14,840 --> 00:44:17,440
never quite relaxed when to loose in its grip on

927
00:44:17,480 --> 00:44:21,119
my neighborhood, Yielding to a queer Maritha, I developed a ritual,

928
00:44:21,119 --> 00:44:23,519
climbing the stairs to the roof just before dawn, badge

929
00:44:23,519 --> 00:44:26,159
in my palm, whispering the same names, letting my breath

930
00:44:26,159 --> 00:44:29,039
haze out in the pale chill. Some mornings I imagined

931
00:44:29,039 --> 00:44:31,039
that I saw Irene silhouette in the pattern of fog

932
00:44:31,079 --> 00:44:33,400
on the next building, never quite close enough to convince

933
00:44:33,440 --> 00:44:35,559
me of anything, but always there at the edge, headed

934
00:44:35,559 --> 00:44:38,960
by memory. I come to order where I could. Every

935
00:44:39,039 --> 00:44:43,239
week I sent letters. Sometimes I addressed in to old janitors, unions,

936
00:44:43,280 --> 00:44:47,039
to city offices, to health inspectors. Sometimes I didn't address

937
00:44:47,039 --> 00:44:48,519
them at all, just drop them in a blue post

938
00:44:48,519 --> 00:44:50,920
books marked only with initials and dates and the plea

939
00:44:50,960 --> 00:44:54,360
to remember. I filled out online forums, submitted its to

940
00:44:54,440 --> 00:44:57,760
local ghosts, her guides, posted warnings and forgotten form threads.

941
00:44:58,360 --> 00:45:00,440
An old custodium from a hospital at sat even wrote

942
00:45:00,480 --> 00:45:02,679
me back once as note only said I've seen things

943
00:45:02,679 --> 00:45:05,920
to stay shop. It didn't help, but it didn't hurt either.

944
00:45:06,559 --> 00:45:08,039
For a while it seemed this was to be my

945
00:45:08,119 --> 00:45:11,360
life guardian of names, student of sleeplessness, half crazy towny

946
00:45:11,360 --> 00:45:13,760
in a rental with a door rattling, full of cursed artifacts.

947
00:45:14,320 --> 00:45:17,840
But every chain, however carefully tended, must be tested. It

948
00:45:17,880 --> 00:45:20,840
started smaller rerun of the same old dread, simmering gently.

949
00:45:21,480 --> 00:45:23,599
I caught a scrap of news online. Saint Aunt some

950
00:45:23,639 --> 00:45:27,400
memorial to reopen wings for modernization, promises fresh start. There

951
00:45:27,440 --> 00:45:29,960
was a photo of smiling executors cutting a ribbon. Not

952
00:45:30,039 --> 00:45:31,960
a one of them local old enough to remember the

953
00:45:32,000 --> 00:45:34,679
dozens who had vanished the building in the back round

954
00:45:34,679 --> 00:45:37,119
looked both unchanged and wrong, the windows too bright, the

955
00:45:37,199 --> 00:45:40,280
new sign glinting with the unnatural polish of denial. I

956
00:45:40,320 --> 00:45:43,239
deleted the tab, but couldn't un see it. I doubled

957
00:45:43,239 --> 00:45:45,760
my efforts, sent new warnings with more urgency, but there

958
00:45:45,800 --> 00:45:48,559
was only so much an anonymous sender could achieve. I

959
00:45:48,559 --> 00:45:52,000
stopped message boards, reading every rumor, the black mold in

960
00:45:52,039 --> 00:45:55,440
the basement, lights flickering on uncondemned wings, security contractors quitting

961
00:45:55,480 --> 00:45:59,320
after night shift without giving notice. Patents yes, but dismissed

962
00:45:59,320 --> 00:46:01,360
his cheabourban LFE, dge, and by any one with authority.

963
00:46:02,039 --> 00:46:04,840
Sometimes an ex nurse would post asking about the initials.

964
00:46:05,039 --> 00:46:07,559
Their thread would vanish by morning, swallowed up by silence,

965
00:46:07,599 --> 00:46:11,000
or admin edits. One morning, the Branston's buzzers startled me

966
00:46:11,000 --> 00:46:12,880
out of a half dream in which the hospital's tiled

967
00:46:12,920 --> 00:46:15,400
holes and furled beneath my feet. I led it buzz

968
00:46:15,440 --> 00:46:18,519
twice three times. I stood at the window, watching a

969
00:46:18,559 --> 00:46:20,960
delivery truck idle by the cob its hazard lies blinking,

970
00:46:21,480 --> 00:46:24,519
Probably nothing, a package for wrong the dress, But I

971
00:46:24,559 --> 00:46:26,960
stayed frozen, fighting a jitter that felt like a trap.

972
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:32,320
Closing another buzz, insistent I forced myself downstairs. The man

973
00:46:32,360 --> 00:46:34,360
at the door was in plain clothes, but everything about

974
00:46:34,440 --> 00:46:37,760
him stank of officialdom. I debadge on a lineard clipboard

975
00:46:37,800 --> 00:46:39,800
in one hand, board, suspicion in the lines at the

976
00:46:39,800 --> 00:46:42,719
corners of his eyes. He gave my name, my real one,

977
00:46:42,880 --> 00:46:45,639
in a tone that brooked no denial. Alex, need a

978
00:46:45,639 --> 00:46:47,679
minute of your time. City Health is here to follow

979
00:46:47,760 --> 00:46:50,159
upon some complaints about saint and some memorial We've had

980
00:46:50,199 --> 00:46:53,400
odd reports, missing persons, weighed files. Do your names come up?

981
00:46:53,880 --> 00:46:56,360
My mouth was dry. You here to ask about the

982
00:46:56,360 --> 00:47:00,440
pass for the present? A thin smile, both a little

983
00:47:00,440 --> 00:47:04,119
about the future. He shifted his clipboard. He sent in

984
00:47:04,159 --> 00:47:08,000
some pretty wild documentation, staff desks, notes, claims about patterns

985
00:47:08,039 --> 00:47:10,559
in the building. Anonymous tips to media too. Then there's

986
00:47:10,559 --> 00:47:14,559
the recent incident. His eyebrows dipped. You want to elaborate,

987
00:47:15,280 --> 00:47:18,599
did I? I didn't know. They urged a fall to

988
00:47:18,639 --> 00:47:20,920
spill everything, to beg for some official hand to close

989
00:47:20,960 --> 00:47:23,599
the wound rush through me. But the deeper urge, the

990
00:47:23,599 --> 00:47:26,360
one that wore my nerves row, was to protect protect

991
00:47:26,400 --> 00:47:28,599
the names, the dead, even the living. He'd return to

992
00:47:28,639 --> 00:47:31,480
those halls with wide eyes. I sent those, and because

993
00:47:31,480 --> 00:47:33,960
I was afraid no one else would listen, I said, finally,

994
00:47:34,039 --> 00:47:37,239
my voice, low, steady, out of nowhere. The place is wrong.

995
00:47:37,320 --> 00:47:39,840
It doesn't forget and it doesn't forgive. Medding every name

996
00:47:39,840 --> 00:47:43,280
I gave you each when I saw evidence tied to incidents, disappearances,

997
00:47:43,360 --> 00:47:45,599
and explained injuries. He can brush me off as crazy,

998
00:47:45,639 --> 00:47:47,880
but you'll see the pattern if you check records hard enough.

999
00:47:47,960 --> 00:47:50,960
Someone always pays for looking. He flicks through his notes.

1000
00:47:51,599 --> 00:47:53,719
That's a lot of accusation for an old building. It's

1001
00:47:53,760 --> 00:47:56,239
not the building, it's the will behind it. Something wants company.

1002
00:47:56,239 --> 00:47:58,039
If you dig there, do it with someone else in

1003
00:47:58,039 --> 00:48:00,920
the room, never alone, never below two after midnight, and

1004
00:48:00,960 --> 00:48:03,639
do not answer if it calls. Something in my tone

1005
00:48:03,719 --> 00:48:05,880
must have unsettled him. The lines at his jaw tightened.

1006
00:48:06,519 --> 00:48:09,679
We'll take it under advisement, mister Green, Just one more question.

1007
00:48:09,840 --> 00:48:12,239
That badger, He gestured vaguely at the outline in my jacket.

1008
00:48:12,280 --> 00:48:15,079
To any chance we can take a look. With reluctance,

1009
00:48:15,159 --> 00:48:17,239
I pulled it out, flashing my thumb over the initials

1010
00:48:17,239 --> 00:48:20,639
on the back. He studied it, his eyes narrowing. Odd

1011
00:48:20,679 --> 00:48:23,159
place for those markings, usually only the hrcode on the

1012
00:48:23,239 --> 00:48:25,960
reverse in your handwriting eye are on the bottom. Was

1013
00:48:25,960 --> 00:48:30,400
that one of your supervisors? A cold spot opened? Not exactly,

1014
00:48:30,480 --> 00:48:32,800
no one you'd find im paeril records. She stayed after

1015
00:48:32,880 --> 00:48:35,079
she shouldn't have to, shouldn't have fasked around. If the

1016
00:48:35,079 --> 00:48:38,440
staff will talk, they won't, but ask anyway. He nodded,

1017
00:48:38,480 --> 00:48:41,719
the brisk unseen not of officials everywhere. Thank you for

1018
00:48:41,760 --> 00:48:45,440
your co operation. He left, shuffling away in the gray drizzle.

1019
00:48:45,960 --> 00:48:48,280
I tucked the badge away, feeling the faint, hastatic jolt

1020
00:48:48,280 --> 00:48:51,039
as it slipped into my pocket. Up Stairs, I closed

1021
00:48:51,039 --> 00:48:53,000
the blinds and waited, listening for the after shock I

1022
00:48:53,079 --> 00:48:56,960
knew would come. Outside the world did not change. Cross

1023
00:48:57,039 --> 00:48:59,880
the street, a grocery truck and load of crates. Che

1024
00:49:00,079 --> 00:49:04,159
kids argued over a scooter. Normalsy reasserted itself, loud and indifferent.

1025
00:49:04,760 --> 00:49:06,960
But inside, in a hollow between my heart beats, I

1026
00:49:07,000 --> 00:49:09,559
caught the rasp of breath in an empty stirble. That

1027
00:49:09,800 --> 00:49:12,719
night's leap was a lost country. I sat on the couch,

1028
00:49:13,320 --> 00:49:17,280
radiosophstatic blanketing the silence, half expecting Irene's presence flowing blue

1029
00:49:17,320 --> 00:49:20,320
beside me, But nothing appeared to just the endless, thin hum.

1030
00:49:20,880 --> 00:49:23,000
When the hospital officially reopened, the new snuck in on

1031
00:49:23,079 --> 00:49:26,199
a late segment, reportersgusting about community resources and the fine

1032
00:49:26,239 --> 00:49:28,639
job done on a restoration. I took the train across town.

1033
00:49:29,159 --> 00:49:32,239
Couldn't help myself. I watched from the low concrete wall

1034
00:49:32,239 --> 00:49:34,880
beside the parking lot as nurses milled in their new uniforms,

1035
00:49:35,000 --> 00:49:37,320
as shiny ambulances p forth the illusion that a line

1036
00:49:37,360 --> 00:49:40,239
had been drawn between old and you. I did not enter,

1037
00:49:40,360 --> 00:49:42,360
though I craved of the way an attic craze poison.

1038
00:49:42,880 --> 00:49:45,239
I simply watched, counting how many people went in groups

1039
00:49:45,239 --> 00:49:46,840
and who were sent alone to fetch the plies from

1040
00:49:46,840 --> 00:49:50,280
the lower levels. There was a janitor, young, uncallosed hands

1041
00:49:50,360 --> 00:49:52,480
the same cheap jacket I had worn just months before,

1042
00:49:52,480 --> 00:49:55,079
pushing a mock cut for a grand floor doorway. A

1043
00:49:55,159 --> 00:49:57,920
security guard called something after her. The words were muffled

1044
00:49:57,920 --> 00:49:59,760
by the wind, but I heard a joke or maybe

1045
00:49:59,800 --> 00:50:03,320
a wa. She smiled the fragile first week smile and

1046
00:50:03,440 --> 00:50:06,159
vanished around the corner into the old bee block. I

1047
00:50:06,239 --> 00:50:11,119
read it, time crawled. She returned, pale but intact. I

1048
00:50:11,159 --> 00:50:13,960
watched every instinct in myself. Frysgill warn her, tell her

1049
00:50:13,960 --> 00:50:16,480
to run task about graffiti, to pay attention to the silence.

1050
00:50:17,159 --> 00:50:19,679
But I stayed on my wall, a ghost, unable to intervene,

1051
00:50:19,840 --> 00:50:23,199
waited by my own unfinished business. Maybe I thought the

1052
00:50:23,280 --> 00:50:26,199
chain would break of its own accord. Maybe the warnings,

1053
00:50:26,239 --> 00:50:28,440
if enough of us kept muttering them, would hold back

1054
00:50:28,440 --> 00:50:32,480
the worst. But I knew better, memory, if left intended,

1055
00:50:32,559 --> 00:50:35,519
always rots from the outside. In Strange things started to

1056
00:50:35,559 --> 00:50:37,559
happen in the neighborhood of Spring crept into the city

1057
00:50:38,159 --> 00:50:40,159
two blocks from my apartment. A power out had struck

1058
00:50:40,239 --> 00:50:42,760
one night, plunging the street in an opaque, inky dark.

1059
00:50:43,480 --> 00:50:46,239
People howled and bang Dondors convinced a wind carried voice

1060
00:50:46,280 --> 00:50:49,159
beyond the howling of the downtown trains. The next day,

1061
00:50:49,199 --> 00:50:51,440
dawn't show up and paled the news reporting a missing person.

1062
00:50:51,480 --> 00:50:54,440
A building superintendent come without a trace, last seen below

1063
00:50:54,440 --> 00:50:57,400
in the god for sacn tangle of city pipes. At night,

1064
00:50:57,559 --> 00:50:59,719
I found a slip of paper wedge under my own entryway.

1065
00:50:59,719 --> 00:51:02,079
A day at two initials ridden embolb went as fierce

1066
00:51:02,119 --> 00:51:05,280
as a knife, Not from me, not from any one

1067
00:51:05,280 --> 00:51:08,760
I knew. I scared the records may calls pressed myself

1068
00:51:08,760 --> 00:51:11,480
into the old grooves of compulsion. The initials matched the

1069
00:51:11,519 --> 00:51:13,880
missing man. The date was to day. I felt the

1070
00:51:13,880 --> 00:51:16,360
world waver was as hel crept forward, hopping from nest

1071
00:51:16,360 --> 00:51:18,719
to nest in the cities under belly, finding people too

1072
00:51:18,800 --> 00:51:21,719
used to being in scene unremarked, I broke my own

1073
00:51:21,800 --> 00:51:23,800
rule and went back to Saint Anseng, this time not

1074
00:51:23,880 --> 00:51:26,000
as a visitor or witness, but as someone willing to

1075
00:51:26,000 --> 00:51:29,320
trespecific meant clarity. There were new staff at the front desk,

1076
00:51:29,400 --> 00:51:32,079
two security men who smelled of coffee and bored expectation.

1077
00:51:32,719 --> 00:51:35,000
I signed him with a fake name, using an excuse

1078
00:51:35,000 --> 00:51:37,400
about lost property and old paperwork from the previous era.

1079
00:51:37,960 --> 00:51:39,880
They handed me a visitor badge and waved me on

1080
00:51:39,960 --> 00:51:43,440
without a glance. Wandering the familiar halls, I felt their

1081
00:51:43,440 --> 00:51:45,280
shape alive under my feet, the scuffed lines on the

1082
00:51:45,280 --> 00:51:47,599
floor tile, the battered fire doors, the echo in the

1083
00:51:47,599 --> 00:51:51,239
walls like breath. Everything looked brighter. Shields wreased against the dark,

1084
00:51:51,920 --> 00:51:55,360
posters for staff whileness, programs cleaned with fresh plastic, but

1085
00:51:55,440 --> 00:51:58,599
behind every update, the old bones remained. I made my

1086
00:51:58,639 --> 00:52:02,039
way through the service tunnels were tracing old wraps. Whenever

1087
00:52:02,079 --> 00:52:03,800
I passed the stretch of wall or a corner I

1088
00:52:03,840 --> 00:52:06,960
had known well. I scanned for graffiti, initials fresh or faded,

1089
00:52:07,119 --> 00:52:10,280
peeking from behind safety posters, an under nearly lacquer trim.

1090
00:52:10,519 --> 00:52:12,840
It was all there, some newly washed, some covered by

1091
00:52:12,880 --> 00:52:16,159
layers of institutional beige, but always leaking through like old blood.

1092
00:52:16,760 --> 00:52:18,440
I added one of my own, a tip of a

1093
00:52:18,480 --> 00:52:20,719
pencarven a desperate, I are in the seam of a

1094
00:52:20,760 --> 00:52:23,559
door frame. A nurse spotted me in the archive corridor.

1095
00:52:24,239 --> 00:52:28,599
She paused, uncertain you lost, As she asked, I forced

1096
00:52:28,599 --> 00:52:31,920
a smile, just looking for Irene used to be on days,

1097
00:52:32,000 --> 00:52:34,960
hurried she might be back. Her face furros then melted

1098
00:52:34,960 --> 00:52:38,960
into professional skepticism. Don't know that name, sorry, but something

1099
00:52:39,000 --> 00:52:40,519
at the edge of her voice told me it wearing

1100
00:52:40,519 --> 00:52:43,599
a bell or maybe clamed in alarm. She heard off,

1101
00:52:43,679 --> 00:52:47,559
her footsteps echoing. After the lower levels were still technically sealed.

1102
00:52:47,639 --> 00:52:49,559
New padlocks on the steel doors fresh out of use,

1103
00:52:49,599 --> 00:52:52,400
tape stretched tight. I hovard waited for a gap in

1104
00:52:52,400 --> 00:52:54,599
the cameras, then slipped my hand for a loose hinge,

1105
00:52:54,679 --> 00:52:57,639
feeling for the cold of familiarity. The dome was just

1106
00:52:57,679 --> 00:53:00,039
as I remembered, breadth and weight barely contained by the

1107
00:53:00,159 --> 00:53:03,440
walls above. The air tasted wrong, not just stale, but eat,

1108
00:53:03,519 --> 00:53:05,360
as if every exhale in this place had been drawn

1109
00:53:05,360 --> 00:53:08,199
in a hundred times before. Something watched from the far

1110
00:53:08,280 --> 00:53:10,920
side of the darkness. I did not see it, but

1111
00:53:10,960 --> 00:53:13,079
I felt the old urgency building in the static behind

1112
00:53:13,079 --> 00:53:16,480
my ears. I crept forward into the chill. On the

1113
00:53:16,480 --> 00:53:19,559
blackboard of the old operating room, A ghostly scroll materialized,

1114
00:53:19,559 --> 00:53:22,320
as if conjured by my gaze. Asterisks toisks, remember U

1115
00:53:22,320 --> 00:53:25,719
s asterisks risk handwriting like mine, but not the tail

1116
00:53:25,760 --> 00:53:27,400
on the iarth swept in the style that belonged to

1117
00:53:27,400 --> 00:53:30,360
another air. At my feet a new patch of initials,

1118
00:53:30,480 --> 00:53:33,719
months fresh, the paint only just dry. A cold certainty

1119
00:53:33,760 --> 00:53:36,719
shivered through me. It wasn't just Saint Anson that kept

1120
00:53:36,760 --> 00:53:38,920
the chain alive. It was every place, hungry for forgetting,

1121
00:53:39,039 --> 00:53:42,039
every shadowed institution where names were erased by custom and need.

1122
00:53:42,719 --> 00:53:44,880
I wrote on the wall myself, in the open, each

1123
00:53:44,960 --> 00:53:47,920
name I remembered, stacking them like bricks against the tide.

1124
00:53:48,360 --> 00:53:50,480
When I finish, I left my badge tucked into a

1125
00:53:50,480 --> 00:53:52,440
crevice in the wall, letting it join the relics had

1126
00:53:52,440 --> 00:53:55,639
token for whoever came next. I said the names aloud,

1127
00:53:55,760 --> 00:54:00,119
voice breaking but unashamed. M k helbi dit si be

1128
00:54:00,280 --> 00:54:03,199
d I r al all of you. The room seemed

1129
00:54:03,199 --> 00:54:05,480
to hold its breath for a fraction of a second.

1130
00:54:05,519 --> 00:54:08,480
The pressure ebbed there grew lighter, but my time was up.

1131
00:54:08,519 --> 00:54:10,559
The tap of footsteps in the service stair will snap

1132
00:54:10,599 --> 00:54:13,480
the moment I slipped back into the daylight halls. Visitor

1133
00:54:13,519 --> 00:54:16,800
badge turned backward, my skin humming as if electrified. I

1134
00:54:16,880 --> 00:54:18,800
passed through the lobby, giving a last glance at the

1135
00:54:18,800 --> 00:54:22,119
front desk. Behind a glass, I caught the reflection, not

1136
00:54:22,239 --> 00:54:24,159
of myself, but a blow of blue, a fragment of

1137
00:54:24,159 --> 00:54:27,480
an old uniform, A face watching with weary sorrow. Irene,

1138
00:54:27,960 --> 00:54:30,480
her eyes solemn and proud, met mine in the security

1139
00:54:30,519 --> 00:54:33,320
mere just for a heartbeat. I walked away, not daring

1140
00:54:33,360 --> 00:54:36,000
to look back. The remainder of the day and weak

1141
00:54:36,079 --> 00:54:39,880
and month bled together, countless names flickering across newstickers, another misimpatient,

1142
00:54:39,920 --> 00:54:42,880
a janitor gone, and note posted online about strange voices

1143
00:54:42,880 --> 00:54:46,920
in a subway tunnel. My warnings proliferated, were copied, erase marked,

1144
00:54:46,920 --> 00:54:50,039
but sometimes they stuck. I compiled a masteril as a

1145
00:54:50,079 --> 00:54:53,719
constantly upbate it desperate ledger on old envelopes, Napkin's browser

1146
00:54:53,719 --> 00:54:56,719
book wax, a memorial for those who had gone and

1147
00:54:56,760 --> 00:54:59,840
those who were come. Sometimes a stranger would reach out,

1148
00:55:00,000 --> 00:55:02,159
our nurse from half way across the country, a custodian

1149
00:55:02,199 --> 00:55:04,920
from a retirement home in Florida. I've felt it too.

1150
00:55:04,960 --> 00:55:08,440
Their emails read, thank you, what do I do? My

1151
00:55:08,480 --> 00:55:11,440
advice was all I could offer. Astro Rischustraus, don't go alone,

1152
00:55:11,760 --> 00:55:16,800
write the names, tell some one, don't forget, asked Rischstraus.

1153
00:55:16,800 --> 00:55:19,760
Occasionally someone sent back news that the cycle had claimed another.

1154
00:55:20,480 --> 00:55:22,880
Sometimes it was just thanks for the confession of an

1155
00:55:22,920 --> 00:55:26,480
unameable relief that some one else believed. It was never enough,

1156
00:55:26,719 --> 00:55:28,920
not when the Knights were at their Thchiston's silence pressed

1157
00:55:28,920 --> 00:55:32,079
barbs into my dreams. Even now, I awake sometimes to

1158
00:55:32,119 --> 00:55:34,199
find the initials traced and fog on my window, my

1159
00:55:34,239 --> 00:55:37,119
own name added. Now, the chain nodding tider, the city

1160
00:55:37,159 --> 00:55:40,159
mouse on time cycles stubbornly toward new losses, new amnesia.

1161
00:55:40,800 --> 00:55:42,639
For each time I feel the coal begin to creep,

1162
00:55:42,719 --> 00:55:44,960
each time the radio flickers to static, and begins the

1163
00:55:45,000 --> 00:55:47,199
old Ludney a wick fully. I walked to the knight stand,

1164
00:55:47,320 --> 00:55:49,679
and I whispered the truth aloud, line by lion, name

1165
00:55:49,719 --> 00:55:52,880
by name. I do it not for myself, but Friarrene,

1166
00:55:53,400 --> 00:55:55,480
for those she saved, for every soul who carved a

1167
00:55:55,519 --> 00:55:58,719
warning where only the desperate would see, for the possibility

1168
00:55:58,800 --> 00:56:01,280
that some day the name will outnumber the hush, and

1169
00:56:01,320 --> 00:56:04,239
the dark hunger will go wanding. But until then I

1170
00:56:04,360 --> 00:56:07,960
keep the watch, I remember, because that's all the living

1171
00:56:08,000 --> 00:56:10,039
can do in a world. Build on forgetting, keep the

1172
00:56:10,119 --> 00:56:12,800
names alive, breathe meaning back into the silence, and hope,

1173
00:56:12,800 --> 00:56:15,039
against all laws and all endings, that the chain will

1174
00:56:15,039 --> 00:56:17,199
not end with us, but be carried still bright. But

1175
00:56:17,280 --> 00:56:19,039
it was brave enough to listen to the whispers in

1176
00:56:19,079 --> 00:56:22,199
the night. Some nights the chain felled, unbreakable, as if

1177
00:56:22,239 --> 00:56:24,679
every warning and whispered name did nothing, but by time

1178
00:56:24,679 --> 00:56:26,880
for the next shadow to step forward and be swallowed.

1179
00:56:27,519 --> 00:56:30,039
On those nights, I'd pace the apartment badge pressed into

1180
00:56:30,039 --> 00:56:33,000
my sweating palm, collecting breaths like border charm. It would

1181
00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:35,320
always begin with the draft, cold, as a hospital stairwalls

1182
00:56:35,360 --> 00:56:37,519
that forced its way beneath the door, rattle, the glass

1183
00:56:37,519 --> 00:56:39,639
in its frame, s and shivers racing up my arms.

1184
00:56:40,239 --> 00:56:43,000
My mouth would dry out, my nerves would drag me

1185
00:56:43,039 --> 00:56:45,400
to the window, where the city glimmered, indifferent and endless.

1186
00:56:45,400 --> 00:56:47,679
The streets taught with the tension of seekers, kept to law.

1187
00:56:48,280 --> 00:56:50,960
But there was a shift coming, heavier than before. I

1188
00:56:50,960 --> 00:56:53,119
could feel at an impatience in the silence that old

1189
00:56:53,199 --> 00:56:56,400
rituals didn't soften, an urgency behind every creak of the floorboards.

1190
00:56:57,039 --> 00:56:59,480
The final test had not yet come. That much was clear.

1191
00:57:00,079 --> 00:57:02,639
Three nights after my last visit to Saint Ansem, just

1192
00:57:02,679 --> 00:57:04,800
as the clock's re red digits blinked past one thirteen

1193
00:57:04,840 --> 00:57:07,039
a m. A new sound shattered the routine. A knock,

1194
00:57:07,119 --> 00:57:09,679
slow and purposeful at my front door. It was not

1195
00:57:09,760 --> 00:57:11,599
the wild pounding of a break in, but near there

1196
00:57:11,599 --> 00:57:13,679
was the casual tap of a neighbor come to borrow sugar.

1197
00:57:14,280 --> 00:57:17,760
It was measured one, two or three beats, pause, then

1198
00:57:17,840 --> 00:57:21,440
three more. I stood motionless in the kitchen, pulse stuttering.

1199
00:57:21,960 --> 00:57:25,000
The radio pop was static, and I see metallic tanks

1200
00:57:24,960 --> 00:57:27,760
slithered into the air. I glanced toward the nights. Then

1201
00:57:27,840 --> 00:57:30,639
the badge colored faint, as a captive star. The knock

1202
00:57:30,679 --> 00:57:33,679
came again. I crept to the people, careful, silent, heart

1203
00:57:33,719 --> 00:57:36,880
in my throat. Through its gas, I saw nothing but shadow.

1204
00:57:37,000 --> 00:57:39,760
The cheap whole wisconces outside my door, flickering like defective

1205
00:57:39,800 --> 00:57:43,000
heartbeat monitors. And then as I reached to double lock

1206
00:57:43,039 --> 00:57:45,519
the bolt, a voice, hoarse and doubled, whispered from the

1207
00:57:45,559 --> 00:57:49,440
other side. Alex opened up. It was my mother's voice,

1208
00:57:49,559 --> 00:57:53,079
and yetna flat, hollowed, as if channel through a mouthful

1209
00:57:53,079 --> 00:57:56,639
of dirt. Mine sides twisted. I'd spoken to her, we

1210
00:57:56,679 --> 00:57:59,079
coul ago her number, letting up my phone miles away,

1211
00:57:59,400 --> 00:58:02,880
certainty iell in her tone she wouldn't be here, She

1212
00:58:02,960 --> 00:58:06,199
couldn't be here, Alex, I forgot the names let me in.

1213
00:58:06,920 --> 00:58:09,280
Terror flared, urging me to recoil, to retreat to the

1214
00:58:09,360 --> 00:58:12,280
kitchen and dial for help. But something heavier kept me,

1215
00:58:12,400 --> 00:58:14,320
rooted the call of the chain, or may be the

1216
00:58:14,360 --> 00:58:16,239
part of me that was tired of running, of letting

1217
00:58:16,280 --> 00:58:19,440
others pay the price. I can't, I said, voice trembling

1218
00:58:19,519 --> 00:58:22,000
but clear. You are not her, You can't come in,

1219
00:58:22,199 --> 00:58:25,960
not to night. A pause, then a voice turned what

1220
00:58:26,239 --> 00:58:28,280
by hatred A knee you remember, but you will forget.

1221
00:58:28,400 --> 00:58:30,159
You keep the chain alive, but you never break it.

1222
00:58:30,280 --> 00:58:32,079
Let me in and name them for me, Alex, Let

1223
00:58:32,159 --> 00:58:34,760
me in and be forgotten with them all behind the door.

1224
00:58:34,800 --> 00:58:37,440
The shadow shifted, press flat and tall against the threshold.

1225
00:58:38,079 --> 00:58:40,760
The chill in the apartment ballooned until my breath turned visible,

1226
00:58:40,840 --> 00:58:44,480
curling white in the air. My teeth chattered. I gripped

1227
00:58:44,519 --> 00:58:47,800
my badge until my knuckles burned. Not this time, I whispered,

1228
00:58:47,920 --> 00:58:49,880
and felt some old piece of self fusing to steal.

1229
00:58:50,559 --> 00:58:53,599
I remember, I will always remember. For a moment, the

1230
00:58:53,639 --> 00:58:56,199
world hung suspended, one thin wall between me and oblivion.

1231
00:58:56,840 --> 00:58:59,800
Then with a sudden, shattering bang, the front window exploded

1232
00:58:59,800 --> 00:59:02,920
inard shards papped the floor with a crystal and roar,

1233
00:59:03,039 --> 00:59:05,840
frost biting at my bare feet. The shadow poured through

1234
00:59:05,880 --> 00:59:08,760
the rupture, a cold fog racing toward me. Voices carried

1235
00:59:08,800 --> 00:59:12,199
on its currents, hundreds of mouths, names blurring together, Irene, Daniel,

1236
00:59:12,239 --> 00:59:13,960
Marcia'll be as sea help us at a fled to

1237
00:59:14,000 --> 00:59:16,199
the center of the room, badge raised like a ward,

1238
00:59:16,360 --> 00:59:19,400
eyes stinging with tears and dust. The fog circled me,

1239
00:59:19,519 --> 00:59:22,559
the voices pulling in opposite direction, some pleading, some threatening,

1240
00:59:22,800 --> 00:59:26,280
all desperate to be acknowledged. Something ancient and hungry loomed

1241
00:59:26,280 --> 00:59:28,000
in the center of the howl, in its outline, vast

1242
00:59:28,079 --> 00:59:30,360
and void like, as if the hospital itself had broken

1243
00:59:30,400 --> 00:59:32,400
through the skin of the city and now bend over me,

1244
00:59:32,559 --> 00:59:35,320
insisting to drag me in. In a rush of panic,

1245
00:59:35,440 --> 00:59:37,800
I did the only thing left. I shouted the names aloud,

1246
00:59:37,920 --> 00:59:42,000
louder and harsher than ever before. Every syllable rang with memory, pain, hope.

1247
00:59:42,639 --> 00:59:45,039
Each name was a blow against the cold, against the silence,

1248
00:59:45,079 --> 00:59:47,679
against the ancient, with that's aught to erase n k

1249
00:59:47,880 --> 00:59:50,360
d d de sief, I'll beat I ah Marsha dorend

1250
00:59:50,360 --> 00:59:53,039
irene Daniel gibble. Every one remember us? I remember, ye'd

1251
00:59:53,079 --> 00:59:56,679
I remembered. The shadow roared, the temperature plummeted further, and

1252
00:59:56,760 --> 00:59:58,639
I dropped to my knees, badge burning in my grip

1253
00:59:58,679 --> 01:00:01,920
as if electrified. Light streamed up from my hand's blie, silver,

1254
01:00:02,239 --> 01:00:05,119
piercing the gloom. With each name, another pulse, like bells

1255
01:00:05,159 --> 01:00:08,159
tolling through falk. And then in the center of the cold,

1256
01:00:08,239 --> 01:00:11,679
a figure, resolved, iery, in spectral and resolute, standing between

1257
01:00:11,719 --> 01:00:14,920
me and the darkness arms wide, her voice at once,

1258
01:00:14,960 --> 01:00:17,719
everywhere and nowhere, cut through the uproar. No more, not him,

1259
01:00:17,880 --> 01:00:20,199
not to night. He keeps the names, He bears the chain.

1260
01:00:20,800 --> 01:00:23,519
The shadows shuddered, recoiled, its edges unraveling as if at

1261
01:00:23,559 --> 01:00:26,159
the touch of sun. For an instant a glimpse face

1262
01:00:26,199 --> 01:00:28,800
is in the depths, snarling with loss, weaving with relief,

1263
01:00:29,079 --> 01:00:32,280
calling out name after name after name, before the fog shrank, contracted,

1264
01:00:32,360 --> 01:00:34,119
and was suck loudly through the hole in the window,

1265
01:00:34,239 --> 01:00:35,440
trailing a storm of whispers.