Chapter 3

The basement had been sealed since the hospital closed, the real one, not the one that lived in the tapes. Lena found the stairs behind a sheet of drywall that had been nailed over them by someone who did not want the stairs to be found again. The boards came away with a wet sound. She went down carrying the portable recorder and the portable light, the same way she had gone down every other set of stairs since the first box of reels arrived.

The air changed temperature three times on the way down. The third change stayed. At the bottom there was a door with a small glass window wired into it, the kind that turns milk-white when it is hit. The glass was intact. Through it she could see a table and a chair bolted to the floor and a microphone on a stand that had been lowered until the capsule nearly touched the wood. The microphone was live. A thin red light glowed on its base though nothing in the room was plugged in.

She opened the door. The red light went out. When she closed it again the light returned. She stood for a while with her hand on the knob, listening to the nothing that filled the space between the two actions.

The table held three reels already threaded on a machine that had not been manufactured in her lifetime. The leader tape on the first reel had been marked in pencil with her initials. She had never used pencil on tape. She sat anyway. The chair was the right height for her. When she pressed play the machine took up without hesitation.

Her own voice came out of the speaker, younger than she had ever been.

“I’m going to say the date so you remember. March twelfth. The one before the last one. I keep thinking if I say the date out loud it will stay where I put it.”

A pause followed that was not silence but the sound of someone deciding whether to continue.

“They asked me to describe the room. I told them there is no room. They wrote it down anyway.”

Lena stopped the machine. She rewound ten seconds and played it again. The voice was exactly hers, down to the way she swallowed before the second sentence. She had not swallowed on purpose. She did it again now without meaning to. The tape kept turning.

On the second reel the voice was older, not by years but by the amount of time it takes to learn that certain things will be asked again. It described the color of the walls correctly. Lena had never seen the walls. The description matched the paint that flaked under her thumb when she touched the corner nearest the door.

She listened until the reel ran out. Then she threaded the third. This time the voice did not wait for a prompt.

“You’re here. I can hear the machine through the wall. Don’t answer if they ask you to. They’ll keep the answer and use it later when you’re not in the room. That’s how they make the next one.”

Lena’s hand hovered above the stop button. She did not press it.

The voice continued, slower now, as if reading from a page that kept changing.

“When you leave tonight the door will be locked from the inside. You will think you left it that way. You didn’t. Someone else will be in the room after you. They will sit in this chair. They will have your hands. They will not know your name but they will answer to it when it is said in the dark. That is the part that matters.”

The tape ended on the word matters. The machine kept running, heads spinning against nothing. Lena switched it off. The red light stayed on.

She stood. The chair made the same sound leaving her weight that it had made accepting it. She walked to the door and tried the knob. It turned. She opened it and stepped into the stairwell. The light she had left at the top of the stairs was off. She had not turned it off. She climbed anyway, counting the steps the way she always counted steps, and found that the count was one short of the number she had used on the way down.

At the top she pushed the drywall sheet aside and stepped back into the main basement. Marcus was there. He had come in while she was below. He held a clipboard and looked at her as though she had been expected.

“You found the lower level,” he said.

“You knew it was there.”

“Everyone who stays long enough finds it. Most of them don’t go down twice.”

Lena set the portable recorder on a crate between them. She rewound the third reel by hand until the voice reached the part about the door. She played it. Marcus listened without changing expression.

“That’s you,” he said when it finished.

“It’s me before I was born.”

“It’s you after you leave,” he corrected. “They record the room after the person is gone. The room keeps talking. Sometimes it talks in the voice the person will use later. The dates get confused.”

Lena looked at the drywall. It had been nailed back into place from this side. The nails were new.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked.

“Since the day after the last patient left. I was the last patient. They let me stay to keep the records in order. Records like to be kept in order.”

He set the clipboard down. On it was a list of names and dates. Her name appeared three times, each with a different year. The earliest was before her mother was born.

“You should go home,” Marcus said. “The next reel is already threaded. If you stay you’ll hear yourself say you’re going home. Then the tape will be right and you’ll have to stay to make it true.”

Lena picked up the clipboard. Her name on the third line had been written in her own hand, the one she used when she was tired and did not check the letters. She set it down again.

“I’m going home,” she said.

Marcus nodded as though she had given the correct answer on a test he had not told her she was taking.

She climbed the outer stairs. The door at street level was unlocked. She stepped into the evening and did not look back. Two blocks away she realized she was still carrying the portable recorder. She stopped under a streetlight and rewound what was on it. The tape was blank until the last thirty seconds. Her voice came through the tiny speaker, recorded in the stairwell on the way up, counting steps that were not there.

The count ended one short.

She turned the machine off. The red light on its face stayed lit until she reached her building and the battery finally gave out.