Marla Voss found the text message at 11:42 on a Tuesday night, sitting at her kitchen table with a mug of tea gone cold beside her laptop. SHIFT CONFIRMED: WARD 9, ST. AUGUSTINE MEMORIAL, 11 PM START. PLEASE BRING ID BADGE. The sender was listed only as SCHEDULING.
She read it twice. St. Augustine Memorial had closed in 1994, the year she was born. Her mother used to point at the building when they drove past it on the interstate, its windows boarded, ivy chewing through the brick, and say, that's where the old psychiatric ward was, before it shut down for good. Marla had worked agency nursing for six years, and she was not on any roster for a building that had been condemned before she could walk.
She almost deleted the message. Her thumb hovered over it. But there was a badge number in the footer — RN license 88214-M — and it was hers. Not a number close to hers. Hers exactly, down to the check digit, the one she'd memorized the way you memorize your own heartbeat.
She called the number back. It rang four times and then a woman answered, brisk and unbothered, as if it were the most normal call in the world. "Scheduling, this is Denise."
"Hi, I got a text about a shift at St. Augustine Memorial? I think there's some kind of mix-up, that hospital's been closed for thirty years."
There was a pause, not confused, just patient, like Denise was waiting for Marla to catch up to something obvious. "Ward Nine's still open, hon. We've had trouble filling nights. You're confirmed for eleven. Just come to the east entrance, the one by the loading dock. Someone will let you in."
"Which year do you have listed for today's date?" Marla asked, feeling foolish even as the words left her mouth.
"It's the fourteenth," Denise said. "Same as it's always been." And then the line went dead, not hung up so much as simply gone, a click and then a silence with a different texture than the silence before it.
Marla should have let it go. She told herself that later, many times. But she was three weeks behind on rent, freshly divorced, sleeping in an apartment that still smelled of her ex-husband's cologne no matter how many candles she burned, and the idea of skipping a shift — even a shift that made no sense — felt like exactly the kind of thing her therapist would call "self-sabotage born of superstition." So she put on her scrubs. She clipped on the badge she'd had since nursing school, the plastic gone yellow at the corners. She drove.
The interstate at midnight was empty in the particular way small highways get empty, more absence than traffic, and the exit for St. Augustine came up faster than she remembered, though she'd sworn she hadn't taken it in years. The building rose out of the dark like something surfacing. Most of the windows were indeed boarded, just as her mother had said, sheets of plywood gone silver and split. But three windows on the ninth floor were lit, a warm sodium yellow that looked, from the parking lot, almost cozy.
The east entrance by the loading dock had no boards on it at all. The door was propped with a folded orange traffic cone, and above it a hand-lettered sign read STAFF ENTRANCE — PLEASE SIGN IN, in a font of ballpoint pen that looked freshly written, ink still faintly blue-black rather than sun-faded.
Inside, the smell hit her first: bleach laid thin over something mustier, mildew and old paper, and beneath that, so faint she almost decided she'd imagined it, the smell of a hospital cafeteria, of steam-table gravy and coffee left too long on a burner. The lights in the corridor buzzed a fluorescent white utterly unlike the tired yellow glow she'd seen from outside.
A sign-in binder sat on a wheeled cart, its cover cracked, and when she opened it to find a blank line, she found instead pages and pages of names in different handwriting, different inks, going back — she checked, heart tightening — to March of 1994. The most recent entry, at the bottom of the current page, was dated that night. It read: M. VOSS, RN, 11:00 PM. In handwriting that was, unmistakably, hers.
She had not signed it.
Somewhere above her, through the ceiling, she heard the particular squeak of a hospital cart wheel, rhythmic, patient, moving down a hallway she could not see. Then a second sound layered under it — soft, wet, rhythmic breathing, amplified as if through an intercom, the sound of somebody sleeping, or trying to.
An elevator at the end of the hall dinged, the doors sliding open onto a lit car, empty, waiting. Marla stood with the pen from the sign-in cart still in her hand, uncapped, ink drying at the nib, and understood with a cold, total certainty that whether or not she stepped inside, whatever staffed this ward already believed she'd arrived a long time ago.
She looked back at the propped door behind her, the orange cone, the ordinary parking lot beyond it, her car still running its interior light where she'd left the door ajar. It would take four steps to reach it. The elevator doors stayed open, patient as the binder, patient as Denise's voice had been. A voice came from the ceiling speaker then, tinny, warm, almost kind. "Ninth floor, Nurse Voss. Mr. Halloway's chart is overdue."
She had never heard the name Halloway before in her life. And yet some small, dreadful part of her chest recognized it, the way you recognize a name you said in your sleep.