What the Walls Said at Night
Old buildings speak. The question is whether you are listening or whether you have been placed here to listen.
Night || Sounds || Terror || Mystery
She began keeping a log of the nocturnal sounds on her eighth night. Not because anything she had heard was definitively alarming — as she wrote at the top of the first page, she was applying scientific method to a collection of sensory data that might have entirely mundane explanations, and she was doing so without prejudice — but because the accumulation of small anomalies had reached a threshold that her training told her required documentation rather than individual dismissal. The log was kept in a small green notebook separate from her clinical notebook, because she was aware — with the professional self-awareness of a psychiatrist who has spent eight years reminding patients that self-awareness is not the same as being wrong — that if she were found keeping this particular record, the question of what it said about her state of mind would be at least as relevant to people in this building as the question of what it said about the building’s state.
Night eight: 2:14 a.m., a sound from above her room — the third floor — of something moving across the floor in a slow, regular pattern, like a large object being dragged with pauses between each movement. Duration: approximately four minutes. Night nine: 1:40 a.m., voices from the direction of the north end of the building, too muffled to be intelligible, in a cadence that was not the cadence of ordinary conversation — slower, more deliberate, with rhythmic spacing that suggested either a formal recitation or someone reading aloud from a text. Night ten: 3:08 a.m., complete silence that was somehow louder than the ordinary silence — she had no more scientific way to describe it than that, and she noted her own frustration at the imprecision — followed by a single sound from the direction of the sealed end of the third-floor corridor directly above her, a sound that her mind immediately and insistently categorised as a hand pressed flat against a surface and then drawn slowly down it, the distinctive friction of palm on plaster, though she acknowledged this categorisation was interpretation rather than fact. Night eleven: nothing at all. She slept straight through. This, paradoxically, was the most disturbing night of all, because she could not shake the impression — recorded in the log with appropriate scepticism markers — that the absence of sound was curated. That the building had, for that one night, decided to be quiet.
On the twelfth night she did not go to bed. She sat at her desk with the green notebook and a cup of tea and the desk lamp turned low and waited. She was fully dressed. She had brought from her car, on the pretext of needing warmer outdoor clothing, a small electric torch she kept in her coat pocket. She sat and waited and watched the clock. At 1:30 a.m. she heard the voices begin from the north end of the building — same cadence as before, slow and rhythmic — and she stood and put on her coat and took the torch and went out into the corridor of the second floor. Quiet. The nurses’ station was manned by the overnight nurse, whose name she had learned was Petrie, and Petrie was visible at the desk through the glass partition, reading. She walked past without speaking — she had learned that the night staff did not expect social exchange from a doctor moving through the ward and would not record her movement as anything other than routine — and went to the door marked MAINTENANCE at the north end of the corridor. Through it, up the secondary staircase, to the third floor. She stood in the third-floor corridor and listened. The voices were clearer here. Still muffled — still coming from the other side of the wall rather than from the corridor itself — but with a directionality she could now resolve with confidence: they were coming from the north end, from behind the sealed door of Room Seven. She walked the corridor slowly, passing the numbered patient rooms with their closed doors, until she reached the end. She stood before the place where the door was — was, unambiguously, she could see the outline of it now, could put her fingers into the slight depression where the handle socket had been plastered over. She pressed her ear against the plaster-covered wood. The voices were two. One was reading, in the slow rhythmic cadence she had identified. The other was responsive — answering in single words or short phrases, the pattern of a dialogue structured around a text. She could not make out the words. She pressed harder. The reading voice was male, elderly, proceeding through something with the patient deliberateness of someone who has read this many times before and is not reading for the content but for the act. The responsive voice was also male, younger, and carried — she stood in the corridor with her ear against the sealed door at two in the morning and admitted this to herself without qualification — carried the terrified precision of someone answering questions under conditions where the wrong answer has established consequences. She took the torch from her pocket. She put its beam along the floor at the base of the door. In the gap — perhaps three millimetres, the slight imperfection of a door sealed but not completely flush — there was light. Warm, amber light, the colour of a lamp kept low, coming steadily from the other side. There was someone in Room Seven. There had always been someone in Room Seven. She turned off her torch and stood in the dark corridor for a long time, listening to the voices she could not quite hear, and the light under the door burned steady as a kept secret, as a fact that has been true for a very long time and has no intention of stopping.