Some songs teach themselves to you—they don't require conscious learning, don't need repetition or practice. They simply arrive one day in your throat, in your breath, in the space between thoughts where melody lives. By my second week at Blackstone, I caught myself humming Lucy's lullaby while drawing up medications, while updating charts, while walking empty corridors at 3 AM. I'd stop mid-phrase, startled by my own voice, by the realization that I'd been singing something I'd never learned. The other nurses had stopped going into Lucy's room alone. They'd fumble for excuses—checking on another patient, needing to finish documentation, suddenly remembering urgent tasks elsewhere. I thought they were being ridiculous. I thought I was different, stronger, more professional. I was wrong about that. Wrong about a lot of things.
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By the end of my first week, I'd been assigned Lucy as one of my primary patients.
This happened during morning rounds when Morrison pulled me aside and said, "You seem to have a rapport with her. She's calmer when you're on shift. Can you take her case for the next rotation?"
I should have recognized the relief in Morrison's voice, should have questioned why an experienced charge nurse was so eager to transfer responsibility for a silent eight-year-old who spent her days drawing circles and humming. But I was flattered. Fresh out of school with something to prove, hungry for validation that I was competent, that I belonged here despite being younger than most staff by a decade or more.
"Of course," I said. "I'd be happy to."
Morrison's smile didn't reach her eyes. "Good. Her medication schedule is straightforward—just the evening anxiolytic. But she needs close observation. We do room checks every two hours minimum, more if she's agitated. And..." She paused, choosing words carefully. "If she says anything unusual, just document it. Don't engage. Don't ask follow-up questions. Just write it down and move on."
"She hasn't spoken since admission," I pointed out. "According to her file."
"I know what the file says." Morrison's tone sharpened slightly. "I'm telling you what to do if she speaks. Clear?"
"Yes, ma'am."
That afternoon, I sat with Lucy during recreation period. She was in her usual spot—window seat in the common room, sketchpad balanced on her knees, pencil moving in those slow deliberate strokes I'd come to recognize. Today's drawing was different from the usual circles. She was sketching a house, but wrong somehow—walls that leaned at angles that shouldn't be structurally sound, windows that were too many or too few depending on how you counted them, a door that appeared in multiple locations simultaneously.
"That's an interesting house," I said, keeping my voice gentle, non-threatening, the tone we'd been taught for engaging with traumatized children. "Does it have a name?"
Lucy didn't look up. Didn't acknowledge my presence at all. Just continued drawing, continued humming that melody that had already started infecting my subconscious, that I'd caught myself whistling while preparing medication trays.
I tried different approaches over the next hour—direct questions, observations about her art, comments about the weather visible through the window she seemed to prefer. Nothing. Complete silence except for that constant humming and the scratch of pencil on paper.
Then, just as I was about to leave her to finish documenting another patient's behavioral incident, Lucy spoke.
"The walls like to sing when they're hungry."
Her voice was small, soft, exactly what you'd expect from an eight-year-old girl except for the complete certainty in it, the absence of doubt or confusion. She didn't look at me, didn't stop drawing, just delivered this statement like someone commenting on the weather or noting the time.
I froze. First words in six months according to her chart, and it was this. Morrison's instruction echoed: Document it. Don't engage.
"I see," I said carefully, neutrally. "That's an interesting observation."
"They taught me the song," Lucy continued, still focused on her drawing. "So I could sing back. So they'd know I was listening. You're learning it too. I can hear you humming in the medication room. You're learning faster than the others did."
Cold settled in my stomach. "What others, Lucy?"
She finally looked at me. Her eyes were dark, too dark, and for a moment I could have sworn her pupils were wrong—too large or too small or simply different in some way I couldn't articulate but felt in my hindbrain, in the part of consciousness that processes threat before thought arrives.
"The ones who used to work here. The ones who learned the song and then became part of it. The ones who live in the walls now."
Morrison's voice again: Don't ask follow-up questions.
But I'm a nurse. My training is to assess, to gather information, to understand what's happening with my patients so I can provide appropriate care. Professional curiosity overrode caution.
"What do you mean, 'live in the walls'?"
Lucy smiled then. Small, sad, knowing. "You'll understand soon. Everyone does eventually. The building is very patient. It has time." She returned to her drawing, to her humming, and didn't speak again for the rest of my shift.
I documented exactly what she'd said, word for word, in her chart. Added my assessment: Patient demonstrated first verbal communication since admission. Content suggests ongoing psychotic symptoms, possible auditory hallucinations. Recommend psychiatric evaluation and medication review.
Professional. Clinical. The language of someone who understands that childhood trauma manifests in strange ways, that psychosis in children can present as elaborate delusions about buildings and walls and songs that aren't quite songs.
I almost convinced myself I believed it.
That night, Stevens pulled me aside during shift change. "Morrison said you're taking Lucy full-time."
"That's right."
He studied me with expression I couldn't quite read. "How long have you been here? Two weeks?"
"Week and a half."
"Right." He nodded slowly. "Listen, Reeves—can I give you some advice?"
"Of course."
"When Lucy talks about the walls, about the singing, about people living in the structure..." He glanced around, confirming no one else was close enough to hear. "Don't dismiss it as psychosis. I'm not saying she's right, I'm not saying the building is actually conscious or whatever. But there's... there's something here. Something about this place. And the kids who talk about it, who acknowledge it—they last longer. They do better. The ones who ignore it, who pretend everything's normal institutional care..." He trailed off.
"What happens to them?"
"They don't stay. They leave, or they get moved to other facilities, or they..." He seemed to reconsider. "Just be careful. Follow protocol. Don't work the east wing alone after dark. And if you start having dreams about this place, about the corridors or the rooms or the patients—talk to someone. Don't let it build up."
He walked away before I could ask what he meant about dreams, about the east wing, about any of it.
The medication logs started going missing three days after Lucy spoke to me.
Not obviously. Not all of them. Just Lucy's specifically, and occasionally the logs for patients in rooms adjacent to hers—Marcus two doors down, Sarah across the hall. I'd complete documentation, file it properly in the medication room's locked cabinet, return the next shift to find it missing or misfiled or, strangest of all, altered.
Not in my handwriting. Not in anyone's handwriting I recognized from other documentation. Just small changes—dosages adjusted, times shifted, notes added in margins that I definitely hadn't written.
Patient resistant to medication administration. Required additional supervision.
Except Lucy had never resisted. She took her evening anxiolytic without complaint, swallowed it with water, opened her mouth for inspection just like we'd taught her during intake.
Patient demonstrated agitation during room check. Humming increased in volume and tempo.
Lucy's humming was constant, yes, but never agitated. It was methodical, calm, almost meditative in its consistency.
I brought this to Morrison's attention during our weekly supervision meeting. "I think someone's tampering with medication logs. Specifically Lucy's. Adding notes that don't match my observations."
Morrison's expression remained carefully neutral. "Are you certain you didn't write them? Night shifts can be disorienting. Sometimes we document things we don't consciously remember doing."
"I'm certain. The handwriting isn't mine."
"But it's similar?"
I pulled out the altered log, pointed to the margin notes. Morrison studied them for long moment, face unreadable.
"Similar enough," she finally said. "Could be your handwriting when you're tired. We all get a little sloppy during the last hours of a double shift."
"I haven't worked any doubles this week."
"Then perhaps someone else documented on your behalf. Covering for you during a break, trying to be helpful." Morrison closed the file, her tone indicating the conversation was over. "I'll send a memo reminding staff that each nurse documents only their own observations. Problem solved."
But it wasn't solved. The alterations continued. And worse—I started recognizing some of the phrasing. Not just similar to mine, but identical to thoughts I'd had but not written down, observations I'd made but decided weren't significant enough for official documentation.
Like the log entry noting Lucy pressed her palm against the wall exactly seventeen times during one observation period. I'd counted, had thought it was oddly specific behavior, but hadn't written it down because what would I say? Patient demonstrated compulsive wall-touching? That wasn't clinical language. That wasn't useful information.
But someone had documented it. Someone had written exactly what I'd observed but chosen not to record.
I started catching myself humming Lucy's lullaby everywhere.
In the medication room while counting pills. In the break room during my thirty-minute lunch. Walking the corridors during room checks. I'd be mid-phrase before I even realized I was making sound, before consciousness caught up with my throat and breath and the melody that had somehow installed itself in the parts of my brain that operated below awareness.
The other nurses noticed. Stevens mentioned it casually: "You've got Lucy's song stuck in your head too, huh?"
"I don't know how I learned it," I admitted. "She hums it constantly, but I've never consciously tried to memorize the melody."
"You don't memorize it," Stevens said. "It memorizes you. Gets into your head and just... stays there. I hummed it for three months after I worked her case last year. Still catch myself doing it sometimes."
"Why did you stop being her primary nurse?"
Stevens's face closed down, professional mask sliding into place. "Schedule change. Morrison needed to redistribute cases. Normal staff management stuff."
He was lying. I knew he was lying. Could see it in the too-casual way he shrugged, in how quickly he found an excuse to be elsewhere.
I started asking around, careful and indirect, about Lucy's previous primary nurses. There had been four before me in the six months since her admission. None of them still worked at Blackstone.
One had transferred to a facility in Boston. One had quit to pursue a career in pharmaceutical sales. One had taken medical leave for "stress-related issues" and never returned. The fourth—a nurse named Patricia Chen—had simply stopped showing up one day, hadn't called, hadn't given notice, hadn't responded to administrative attempts to contact her.
"We assumed she'd found other employment," Morrison said when I asked. "People leave without notice sometimes. It's unprofessional, but it happens."
"Did anyone check on her? Make sure she was okay?"
"We're not a family, Reeves. We're colleagues. She was an adult who made a choice to discontinue employment. What she did after that isn't our concern."
But Morrison's tone suggested she was trying to convince herself as much as me.
Late at night—2 AM, 3 AM, those hours when circadian rhythms bottom out and consciousness feels thin, permeable—the lullaby would echo through Blackstone's corridors.
Not from Lucy's room. I'd check during rounds, find her deeply asleep, mouth closed, no sound coming from her small form under institutional blankets. But the melody persisted, came from everywhere and nowhere, from the pipes that ran through walls, from vents that carried not just air but something else, from the structure itself learning to reproduce the song its occupants sang.
I documented this. Tried to. Would write "Unusual acoustic phenomena—3:17 AM—melody audible from ventilation system" and the words would feel inadequate, insufficient, too clinical to capture the particular wrongness of hearing a child's lullaby sung by a building, by architecture that shouldn't have vocal capacity but clearly did.
Other staff confirmed they heard it too. The night orderly, Jenkins, mentioned it during shift change: "That humming that comes through the pipes. It's gotten louder recently. Used to only hear it near Lucy's room, but last night it was in the west wing too, clear down by the staff bathroom."
"Does it bother you?" I asked.
Jenkins considered this. "Not bother, exactly. More like... worry. Like the building's trying to tell us something, but we don't speak the language yet. And I'm not sure I want to learn."
I understood what he meant. The melody wasn't threatening, wasn't discordant or unpleasant. If anything, it was soothing, almost hypnotic. That's what made it unsettling—not that it disturbed, but that it didn't disturb, that it felt natural and right to hear buildings sing, that accepting this as normal was easier than maintaining the resistance of rational objection.
By the third week, most of the nurses had stopped entering Lucy's room alone.
They'd find reasons to delay—"Can you do Lucy's evening meds? I need to document that incident with Marcus first"—or they'd insist on company—"Come with me for Lucy's room check, I need to run something past you anyway."
I didn't understand. Lucy was quiet, compliant, never aggressive or violent. She drew her circles and hummed her song and occasionally pressed her palm against walls like she was feeling for something, but none of this constituted dangerous behavior requiring buddy-system precautions.
"It's not about danger," Morrison explained when I asked. "It's about... comfort. Lucy makes people uncomfortable. She always has. Some patients just have that effect."
"Because she's silent?"
"Because she's attentive." Morrison chose the word carefully. "She watches things. Notices things. And when she looks at you, it feels like she's seeing through you, past you, into you. It's unnerving."
I'd noticed that about Lucy's gaze—the way it seemed to focus on something beyond your physical presence, like she was perceiving your outline against background you couldn't see, reading information written in wavelengths invisible to everyone else.
But unnerving wasn't dangerous. Wasn't a valid reason for experienced psychiatric nurses to avoid a child patient.
I found out why during a Thursday night shift.
I was doing routine room check at 11 PM—knock twice, open door, visual confirmation of patient presence and safety, close door, move to next room. Standard procedure I'd performed hundreds of times by then.
Lucy was awake when I entered, sitting up in bed with her sketchpad, drawing by the light of the small lamp we allowed her to keep on. She looked up when I opened the door, made direct eye contact—which was unusual, she typically remained focused on her drawings—and smiled.
"You're learning the song better now," she said. "Soon you'll know all the words."
"I didn't know there were words," I said before remembering Morrison's instruction not to engage.
"There are always words. The building speaks them in the walls, in the pipes, in the spaces between rooms. You just have to listen the right way. The others couldn't. That's why they had to leave."
"The other nurses?"
Lucy nodded. "They heard the song but wouldn't sing back. The building doesn't like that. Doesn't like when people notice but pretend they don't notice. It's rude. Like someone talking to you and you acting like they're not there."
Morrison's warning echoed: Document it. Don't engage.
But I was already engaging. Already asking questions. Already treating this like psychiatric assessment rather than something else, something Morrison had tried to warn me about without saying explicitly what she meant.
"What happens when people pretend not to notice?" I asked.
Lucy's smile widened slightly. "The building teaches them. Shows them in dreams first, then in waking. Makes them understand that ignoring doesn't make things not-real. Makes them understand through walls moving and doors opening and corridors stretching until they admit what they're seeing. Patricia learned. She learned really well. That's why she stayed."
"Patricia Chen? She left. She doesn't work here anymore."
"She doesn't work," Lucy agreed. "But she didn't leave. She's in the east wing now. In the walls, where the others are. Singing the song, keeping the building company. You'll meet her eventually. Everyone does if they stay long enough."
Ice crystallized in my blood. "Lucy, that's not—"
"You're humming it right now," she interrupted gently. "While you're talking to me. You don't even notice anymore. That's how you know you're learning. Soon you won't be able to stop. Soon you won't want to."
I realized with horror that she was right. My throat was making sound, my breath shaping melody, and I hadn't even been aware. Had been humming Lucy's lullaby while conducting a room check, while standing in a patient's room at midnight, while trying to maintain professional boundaries and clinical objectivity.
I left quickly. Documented the interaction in language that sounded rational, detached: Patient Lucy demonstrated ongoing delusions regarding building consciousness. Verbalization suggests paranoid ideation and possible auditory hallucinations. Continue current medication regimen and monitor.
But my hands were shaking while I wrote. And I couldn't stop humming.
That night, I dreamed about Blackstone for the first time.
Not nightmares exactly. Just dreams where I walked the corridors, except they stretched longer than waking dimensions allowed, bent in directions that didn't have names, led to rooms I'd never seen despite having worked here for weeks. And in those rooms: people. Nurses, orderlies, staff I didn't recognize but somehow knew had worked here once, who'd learned the song and sung it back and been invited to stay in ways that didn't require physical presence.
Patricia Chen was there. I recognized her from the old staff photo in the break room, from before she "quit." She stood in a room with no door, humming Lucy's lullaby, and when she saw me she smiled and said, "You'll like it here. It's peaceful once you stop fighting. Once you understand that the building loves us. Wants to keep us safe. Wants us to become part of something larger than ourselves."
I woke at 3 AM in cold sweat, in my apartment twenty minutes from Blackstone, and I could still hear the humming. Not in my head. Not memory of the dream. Actual sound, coming from my bedroom walls, from pipes that carried water and something else, from the ventilation system that connected my living space to some larger network that included Blackstone, that made distance irrelevant, that made leaving impossible even when you physically departed.
I called in sick the next day. First time in my nursing career, first sick day I'd ever taken.
Morrison's voice on the phone was understanding, unsurprised. "Sounds like you're coming down with something. Take the time you need. Rest. We'll see you when you're feeling better."
But I heard something underneath her words: We'll see you soon. You'll come back. They always do.
I spent three days away from Blackstone. Tried to. But I caught myself humming constantly, caught myself drawing circles without realizing, caught myself standing at my window at 3 AM listening for sounds in the walls of my apartment building, for songs sung by structures that shouldn't have voices.
And when I returned to work—because I did return, because quitting would mean admitting something I wasn't ready to admit, because professional pride and student loans and simple human stubbornness all conspired to bring me back—Morrison took one look at me and nodded.
"The song's in deep now," she said. Not question. Statement. "You're past the point where leaving helps. Might as well stay, do your job, help the kids as much as you can. That's all any of us can do."
"How long have you been hearing it?" I asked.
Morrison's smile was tired, resigned. "Fifteen years. Since I started here. I've tried leaving twice. Transferred to other facilities, worked pediatrics in normal hospitals. But the song followed. In my dreams, in my walls, in the spaces between thoughts. Blackstone doesn't let go once it's taught you its lullaby. So I came back. Better to be here, where at least the singing makes sense."
She walked away, left me standing in the corridor with the weight of understanding settling into my bones.
I was humming again. Had been humming since I walked through Blackstone's doors this morning. Would probably be humming when I left tonight, when I slept, when I woke, for the rest of my life however long that lasted.
Some songs teach themselves to you.
Some buildings have voices.
And some children see through walls into spaces where the disappeared continue singing, continue waiting, continue being part of architecture that loves them in ways love was never meant to function.
Lucy was right. The building is very patient.
It has time.
And I was learning the song faster than the others had.
Lucky me.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
By week four, Reeves stops resisting the humming, stops pretending she doesn't hear the building's voice in the pipes at 3 AM. A new patient arrives—Daniel Chen, seven years old, eyes that see too much—and Lucy immediately gravitates to him, shares her drawings, teaches him the lullaby's variations. Morrison pulls Reeves aside with explicit instructions: "Document everything about these two. Everything they say, everything they draw, who they interact with. Dr. Lee needs detailed records." Reeves realizes she's not just treating patients—she's gathering data for something, participating in observations that feel less like medicine and more like cultivation. The medication logs continue their mysterious alterations, now including notes about "Subject compatibility" and "Resonance patterns." And when Reeves tries to raise concerns with Dr. Lee, he smiles and says, "You're doing exactly what you need to do, Nurse Reeves. Exactly what Blackstone needs."