legends · 4 min read ·
The Last Entry for Today
A night supervisor's handover note explains the room, the rules, the twelfth console, and why it has been warm since the new supervisor was born.
**HANDOVER NOTE.**
*From: night supervisor, Mercer Street control room.*
*To: day supervisor.*
*Please read to the end before you take the keys.*
· · ·
Morning. I've left the coffee on. I know you'll want to be off this seat the minute you're in it, so I'll keep the note short, and I'll tell you the order of the things I tell you in.
**1. The board.** There are twelve consoles in the control room, as you know, numbered 1 to 12. Console 12 is the one by the window. It's switched off at the wall. Please don't switch it on. If someone does, switch it off again and don't ask them why they did.
**2. The log.** The log is the paper one, in the black folder, not the screen. Entries are made by hand at the top of every hour. You write the time, your initials, and "All quiet" if all is quiet. Do it even if it isn't. Especially if it isn't.
**3. The time.** At 23:58 each night, the second hand on the wall clock stops. It stops for exactly two minutes. It always starts again at midnight, and the log for that two minutes is blank. Please don't try to fill it. I did, once. The pen wrote in a hand that wasn't mine.
**4. The calls.** Calls come in on the six lines. Ordinary ones, in the ordinary way. But if on the seventh line the light comes on, and there is no seventh line, I would ask you not to answer. The sound is of someone breathing. Sometimes the breathing stops, and a voice says "Control?" in a very polite tone.
If you answer, it will ask you what the time is.
If you tell it, it will ask for the date.
If you tell it, you will find that you can no longer tell the difference between today and any other day.
**5. The key.** The key to the roof door is on the hook by the kettle. Don't use it. There is a ladder up to the roof, and it has twelve rungs. I counted them going up. I counted them again coming down. There were thirteen.
**6. What I think.** I've worked here nineteen years and I've kept my head down. But over the years, in the quiet spells, I've worked a few things out. This is not a control room for anything in the town. It's for the other thing. For something that the town needs to be monitored, as one monitors a pressure or a temperature. We take the calls. We log the hours. We keep it, I think, from noticing us.
The twelve consoles are for twelve of us. There have always been twelve. When one goes, another comes. That is how I came to be here.
**7. The thing I should have said first.** You are the twelfth. I'm sorry. I know you thought you were the new supervisor, applying for the day post. The advertisement was our way of asking. I've been trying for a month to find a way to say it without frightening you, and I have failed.
Console 12 is yours. It has been yours since the day you were born. It's been warm all that time. It is ready for you to switch it on.
**8. The reason I'm leaving.** I'm not going far. I'll be at the end of the corridor, at console 11, from tomorrow. We take it in turns. The numbers go up by one.
**9. What I'd advise.** Take your time. Walk once round the room. Read the log back a few pages. You'll see your initials on entries from before you were born. You'll see "All quiet" in your own hand, on a date that hasn't come. This is normal. You'll feel an odd calm. That's the room. It's not an unpleasant calm.
**10. Last.** When the second hand stops tonight, at 23:58, you'll notice the clock has the most extraordinary silence in it. If you listen in that silence, you'll hear what we've been logging all these years. It sounds like someone, a very long way away, quietly taking their seat.
Thank you for taking this on.
I've left the lights on at 12.
*— (initials illegible)*