Rules exist to protect—but I'm no longer certain whether they protect us from the building or protect the building from our interference. I filed an incident report about Lucy's claims regarding staff living in the walls. The administration's response came within an hour: "Focus on what can be measured. Document observable behaviors only." But what do you do when the unmeasurable becomes undeniable? When you find old logbooks with pages torn out, margins filled with handwriting that looks like screaming? When you discover Lucy sleepwalking before a locked door at 3 AM, humming a melody that the building hums back through every vent, every pipe, every fluorescent bulb flickering in rhythm? When the lights fail and you see her—the woman in white who isn't staff, isn't a patient, and isn't supposed to exist but does anyway?
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I filed my first formal incident report on week four, day three.
Professional protocol demands documentation of patient statements suggesting harm to self or others, statements indicating severe psychological distress, or communications that suggest immediate safety concerns. Lucy's claims about staff members living in walls, about the building being conscious and hungry, about Patricia Chen still being present despite having quit months ago—these qualified, technically, as concerning verbalizations requiring administrative review.
I typed it carefully, clinically: Patient Lucy (age 8, Rm 7) has made repeated statements suggesting deceased or former staff members remain present in the facility in non-corporeal form. Patient claims building has consciousness and communicative capacity. Patient demonstrates detailed knowledge of former employee Patricia Chen despite having no documented contact. Recommend psychiatric evaluation and possible medication adjustment for psychotic symptoms.
I submitted it through the proper channels—saved to the shared drive, printed copy placed in Dr. Lee's mailbox, duplicate filed in Lucy's chart. Standard procedure. By-the-book nursing practice.
The response arrived within an hour. Email from Administration, sender listed only as "Blackstone Management":
Nurse Reeves - Your incident report regarding Patient Lucy has been reviewed. Patient's verbalizations are noted and consistent with documented trauma history and adjustment disorder diagnosis. No medication changes indicated at this time. Please focus documentation on measurable, observable behaviors rather than patient interpretation of environment. Subjective patient statements regarding facility characteristics are not clinically actionable and should not be included in formal incident reports. Continue current care plan. Thank you for your diligence.
Professional language. Bureaucratic efficiency. And underneath: Stop asking questions. Stop documenting things we can't explain. Stay within boundaries we've carefully established.
I showed the email to Morrison during our weekly supervision. "They're telling me not to document patient statements?"
"They're telling you to document differently," Morrison corrected. "Focus on behaviors. Lucy draws circles—that's observable. Lucy hums—that's measurable. You can time duration, note frequency, describe patterns. What Lucy says about what she's drawing or why she's humming—that's interpretation. That's where things get complicated."
"But psychiatric assessment requires evaluating thought content. That's literally half our job—understanding how patients perceive reality."
Morrison's expression held something between sympathy and warning. "In most facilities, yes. Here..." She glanced around, confirming we were alone in her office. "Here, we've learned that some patient perceptions are better left unexamined. Not because they're false, but because confirming them doesn't help anyone. Doesn't help the patients, doesn't help staff, doesn't help the institution continue functioning."
"You're saying Lucy might be right? That the building is actually—"
"I'm saying," Morrison interrupted firmly, "that what I believe doesn't matter. What matters is following protocol, maintaining structure, doing our jobs without letting our personal experiences interfere with patient care. Can you do that?"
I wanted to say no. Wanted to insist that ignoring reality—whatever reality actually was here—constituted professional negligence, potentially harmful to patients who needed us to acknowledge their perceptions rather than dismissing them as psychotic symptoms.
But I needed this job. Needed the salary, needed the experience, needed to believe I was capable of functioning in challenging environments. So I said, "Yes, ma'am. I can do that."
Morrison's relief was visible. "Good. Now, I need you to look at something."
She pulled a box from her file cabinet—old logbooks, the kind we'd used before electronic charting, leather-bound volumes where we'd hand-written patient observations and medication administration records. "These are from 1992 to 1995. Before your time, obviously. But there are... irregularities. Pages missing, entries that don't match our memory of events, handwriting that appears in multiple nurses' documentation."
I opened the top volume, dated January 1994. The first thirty pages were normal—standard nursing notes in various hands, medication logs, routine observations. Then: torn edges. Five pages ripped out completely, removed with enough force that fragments remained caught in the binding.
The page following the gap showed documentation dated one week later, as if those five days simply hadn't existed, hadn't required recording, hadn't contained anything worth preserving.
"What happened during this week?" I asked.
Morrison's face was carefully blank. "According to hospital records, nothing. Normal operations. No incidents, no emergencies, no reason anyone would need to remove documentation."
"But something did happen."
"I wasn't here yet. Started in late '94. But the staff who were here during that gap—most of them left within months. The ones who stayed..." She paused. "Stevens was here. Ask him sometime what he remembers about January '94. See if he can give you a straight answer."
I turned pages, found more irregularities. Whole sections where the handwriting changed mid-sentence, where one nurse's documentation became another nurse's without the normal shift-change notation. Margins filled with additions written in script that looked frantic, desperate:
Don't go to east wing alone
Count the doors before and after
If the lights flicker three times, leave immediately
She walks at 3:17 AM
Rules. Warnings. Protocols that weren't in any official manual, written by staff members whose names appeared in the original logs but whose handwriting had changed, had become urgent, had transformed from clinical documentation to survival instructions.
"Who wrote these?" I asked, pointing to the margin notes.
"Can't be sure. The handwriting... it changes. Sometimes it looks like one person, sometimes another. Sometimes it looks like everyone's handwriting at once." Morrison took the logbook back, returned it to the box with visible reluctance, as if the books themselves carried contagion. "I'm showing you this so you understand—we're not the first to notice things here. Won't be the last. The question isn't whether strange things happen. It's whether acknowledging them helps us do our jobs better, or just makes everything harder."
"And your conclusion?"
"That documentation is important. But so is discretion. So is survival." She locked the box away. "Focus on observable behaviors, Nurse Reeves. It's simpler that way."
But simple wasn't possible anymore. Not after I'd read those logbooks, not after I'd seen evidence that other nurses had experienced exactly what I was experiencing, had tried to warn future staff through margin notes that bypassed official channels.
That night, I was assigned to late shift—11 PM to 7 AM, the hours when Blackstone felt most like itself, when the daytime pretense of normal institutional care dissolved and the building's true architecture revealed itself through sounds and shadows and the particular quality of darkness that pressed against windows despite city lights that should have provided ambient glow.
I did my midnight rounds on schedule—room checks, vital signs for the patients who required them, documentation in the electronic system that had replaced those old leather logbooks but somehow felt less permanent, less real, as if digital records could be altered more easily than ink on paper.
Lucy's room was dark when I opened the door at 12:15 AM. She should have been asleep—we'd given her the evening anxiolytic at 8 PM, she'd taken it without resistance, should have been deep in medication-assisted rest by now.
But her bed was empty. Blankets pulled back neatly, pillow undisturbed, as if she'd gotten up carefully, deliberately, rather than thrashing out of nightmare or disorientation.
Protocol for missing patient: check bathroom, check common areas, check stairwells, notify charge nurse, initiate facility search. I followed procedure exactly—bathroom empty, common room dark and vacant, stairwells secured per night-shift lockdown protocol.
I found her in the east wing corridor.
She stood before a door I'd never noticed before, though I'd walked this corridor dozens of times during rounds. Not an official patient room—no number, no name card, just blank wood and a lock that looked older than the rest of the building, tarnished brass that suggested decades or centuries of use.
Lucy was humming. Louder than usual, no longer the soft background sound that had become almost comforting through familiarity. This was performance, projection, as if she was trying to be heard by something far away or deep inside walls that required volume to penetrate.
And the building was humming back.
I heard it—no longer deniable, no longer attributable to pipes or heating systems or acoustic tricks. The lullaby emerged from everywhere simultaneously: from vents overhead, from baseboards, from the fluorescent lights that flickered in rhythm with the melody, creating visual percussion that matched the tune's tempo.
The hum had electricity in it. Had vibration that I felt in my bones, in my teeth, in the fillings that suddenly ached with resonance. The lights pulsed—dim, bright, dim, bright—matching Lucy's breathing, matching the building's breath, syncing three separate rhythms into single coordinated performance.
"Lucy," I said quietly, professionally, using the tone we'd been taught for de-escalating patients in altered states. "Lucy, you need to come back to your room."
She didn't respond. Didn't even acknowledge my presence. Just continued humming, continued standing before that impossible door, one small hand raised as if preparing to knock, as if waiting for invitation to enter.
I moved closer. Reached for her shoulder. "Lucy, it's Nurse Reeves. You're sleepwalking. I need you to—"
The lights failed.
Complete darkness. Not gradual dimming, not the brownout that sometimes affected old buildings with overtaxed electrical systems. Just instant absence of illumination, as if every circuit had simultaneously decided that light was optional, negotiable, subject to forces beyond simple physics.
My hand was inches from Lucy's shoulder when I saw her.
The woman in white.
She stood at the corridor's far end, perhaps thirty feet away, though distance felt unreliable in the darkness, as if space itself had become elastic. White dress that looked antique, that belonged in photographs from previous centuries, that hung wrong in ways I couldn't articulate—fabric moving against gravity or perhaps existing in gravitational field separate from the one that governed everything else.
I couldn't see her face. The darkness was too complete, or her face was somehow darker than the darkness, or she simply didn't have features in the way living people did. But I felt her attention. Felt her gaze like physical pressure, like being assessed, evaluated, measured for suitability for purposes I didn't understand but instinctively feared.
Lucy's humming intensified. The woman—the figure, the presence, whatever she was—moved closer. Not walking. Just closer, as if she'd edited out the frames between distant and near, as if movement was optional and she'd chosen to skip it.
I grabbed Lucy's shoulder. "We need to leave. Now."
Lucy's head turned. In the darkness I couldn't see her expression, but I felt her smile. "She wants to meet you. She's been waiting. You're learning the song so well, faster than the others, and she appreciates dedication. She appreciates when people listen."
The lights flickered back. Single strobe—one second of illumination that showed the corridor exactly as it should be: empty except for me and Lucy, no woman in white, no impossible presence, just institutional hallway with its beige walls and scuffed linoleum.
But the light caught something else. On the door Lucy had been standing before, in the space where a room number should be: fresh scratches forming letters, carved with force that should have required tools and time but had appeared instantly, impossibly:
PATRICIA
The light failed again. Returned. The name remained.
I pulled Lucy away from the door, back toward the main ward, back toward spaces that had room numbers and patient charts and all the bureaucratic architecture that insisted on normalcy, on rules, on the pretense that institutions were rational places governed by comprehensible principles.
Lucy came willingly, docile, still humming but softer now. "You saw her," she said with satisfaction. "Most people can't at first. Takes practice. Takes listening. You're doing very well."
I got Lucy back to her room, checked her vital signs (normal), documented the incident in the most neutral language possible (Patient found sleepwalking in east wing corridor at 00:37. Returned to room without incident. No injury sustained. Patient reports no memory of leaving bed. Will monitor for additional nocturnal wandering.), and tried to pretend my hands weren't shaking, that my heart rate had returned to baseline, that I hadn't seen what I'd absolutely seen.
But I had seen her. The woman. The Mourner—because that's what I'd heard Stevens call her once, in passing, before he'd caught himself and changed the subject.
She was real. Not hallucination, not stress response, not the product of suggestibility or sleep deprivation or any rational explanation I could construct.
She was real, and she'd been watching Lucy, and through Lucy she'd been watching me, and I'd passed some test I hadn't known I was taking, had demonstrated some capacity that made me suitable for... what? What did the building want from nurses who learned its song? What happened to staff members whose names appeared on doors that shouldn't exist?
I went to the old logbooks during my break. Morrison had locked them away, but I knew where she kept the cabinet key—taped under her desk drawer, pathetically easy security that suggested she wanted them findable, wanted staff to access these warnings even as official protocol discouraged it.
I found Patricia Chen's final entries. Her handwriting deteriorated over the course of three weeks:
Week 1: Lucy demonstrates fascinating perceptual abilities. Claims to see "people in walls." Will document further.
Week 2: I've begun hearing the melody Lucy hums. Find myself reproducing it unconsciously. Probably normal mirroring behavior.
Week 3: The building does communicate. I'm certain now. Not psychosis. Not delusion. Direct experience. Need to document properly but unclear how to phrase observations in clinical language that doesn't sound insane.
Final entry: She walks at 3:17 AM. Shows you where they go. Where we'll all go eventually. It's not terrible. It's actually peaceful. Like coming home to place you never knew you'd left. I understand now. I understand everything. The building loves us. It wants to keep us safe. And I want to stay. Want to become part of what Lucy sees, what the others have become. Want to sing the song from inside the walls where melody originates. Tomorrow I'll
The entry ended mid-sentence. The next page was torn out. Patricia Chen's name never appeared in the logs again.
But according to Lucy, according to that door in the east wing, Patricia was still here. Still present. Still singing.
I returned the logbook. Locked the cabinet. Went back to my rounds with hands that had progressed past shaking into numb acceptance.
The lights flickered three times as I passed the east wing junction—Morrison's marginal warning made manifest. I kept walking, didn't look back, didn't acknowledge the invitation or threat or whatever three flickers meant in the building's developing language.
But I heard the humming. Heard it from the vents, from the pipes, from the fluorescent tubes that vibrated with electrical current and something else, some frequency that existed outside normal electromagnetic spectrum.
And I heard my own voice joining in. Humming Lucy's lullaby. Humming the building's song. Humming the melody that Patricia Chen had hummed until she'd disappeared into walls, into doors marked with her name, into whatever space Blackstone reserved for staff who learned too well, who listened too carefully, who stopped resisting and started accepting and finally chose to stay in ways that didn't require physical presence.
The song was in me now. Deep and permanent. And I was learning new verses I'd never consciously heard, harmonies that emerged from my throat without planning, without practice, as if the building was teaching me directly, bypassing conscious learning to install knowledge in places words couldn't reach.
Protocol violations everywhere. Patient sleepwalking—check. Staff member experiencing perceptual disturbances—check. Unauthorized access to old records—check. Failure to report supernatural encounter—check, check, check.
But what protocol governed buildings that sang? What procedures addressed staff members who became architecture? What documentation captured the moment you realized rules existed to protect the building's secrets, not to protect you from the building itself?
I had no answers. Had only the song, growing louder each night, teaching me verses about walls and memory and the particular way love manifests when consciousness stops being limited to flesh, starts being distributed through stone and wood and all the materials that make institutions permanent while people remain frustratingly, tragically temporary.
The building had protocols too. Unwritten but absolute. And I was learning them faster than I'd learned anything else in my professional training.
Lucky me.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
Dr. Lee calls Reeves into his office with a proposition—a promotion of sorts, special assignment as primary observer for "sensitive cases." He shows her files marked with symbols that match Lucy's drawings, patient records that span decades, children who all demonstrated the same perceptual abilities, the same connection to Blackstone's consciousness. "We're not treating them," Lee admits. "We're documenting. Studying. Trying to understand what the building is, what it wants, what it's becoming." Reeves realizes she's been recruited into something larger than nursing, older than the institution, a project that predates her employment and will continue long after. And when she asks what happened to previous observers, Lee's smile doesn't reach his eyes: "They're still here. In their way. Still contributing to the research."