Third Floor

I sat very still and looked at the light for room 31 until it went out on its own, about forty seconds later. Then I wrote it down. 10:51 — call panel registered room 31 (3rd floor). Light only, no patient in residence. Investigated panel; see below. That is the discipline of the job. You record the impossible thing in the same handwriting as the ordinary things, and you keep the impossible thing from getting larger by refusing to give it more ink than it earns. I checked the panel. The wiring ran into a metal cabinet beside the station, and the cabinet was locked, and the key was not on the ring Sandra had given me. So I could not prove the upper rooms were disconnected, and I could not prove they weren't. I could only note that a disconnected circuit does not generally chime. The rest of that first night passed without event. I did my rounds at twelve, two, and four. Eleven patients, all asleep, all breathing. Mr. Aldous in room 6 had kicked his blanket off and I tucked it back. Mrs. Cardew in 9 was awake and wanted water and asked me, the way the very old sometimes do, whether her sister had visited, and I said not tonight, and she accepted that as easily as if I had told her the weather. At no point did I go near the stairs. In the morning I gave my handover to the early nurse, a tired young man called Petrie, and when I mentioned the room 31 light he stopped writing. "You wrote it in the book," he said. It was not quite a question. "Of course." He nodded slowly, and I waited for him to explain, and he didn't. He just said, "Sandra reads the book every morning. She'll talk to you," and he picked up his pen again, and that was that. I slept badly through the day, the way you do when your body is learning a night rota, and I came back at eight to find a note in the logbook in Sandra's small upright hand. It was not about room 31. It said only: Good detail. Continue exactly as you have been. Empty pages, not empty rooms — remember that. — S.P. I read that sentence four or five times. Empty pages, not empty rooms. I told myself it was a clumsy bit of phrasing from a woman whose mind ran on procedure. I told myself a lot of things, that second night, sitting under the panel with its three dark rows. At 11:20 the light for room 34 lit. At 11:46, room 31 again. At 1:09, two lights together, 31 and 29, and the double chime had a flutter in it like a phone ringing in another house. Each time I wrote it down. Each time the light burned forty seconds, give or take, and went out. I want to be precise about what I felt, because precision is the thing I have to offer and the thing that, looking back, kept me sane longer than most people would have stayed sane. I did not feel afraid, not yet. I felt summoned. A call bell is not a frightening sound. It is the most familiar sound in my working life. It means a person, somewhere, needs something, and it is my job to go and find out what. For three nights I sat with that feeling and did not climb the stairs. On the fourth night, the light for room 31 lit at 10:51 exactly — the same minute as the very first one — and stayed on. It did not go out at forty seconds. It did not go out at a minute. I watched it burn steady and patient while the chime repeated, soft, soft, soft, and I understood that whoever was pressing that button up there had decided to keep pressing it until somebody came. I am a thorough person. I picked up my torch, and I unclipped the NO ACCESS strap, and I went to see what was needed on the third floor of a building where eleven people slept and nobody else was supposed to be alive.