encounters · 2 min read ·
The Night Clerk
The Archive keeps one chair warm. Tonight it is yours.
The stairwell under the Municipal Hall smells of wet concrete and carbon paper. Eleven floors down, the lights come on one by one ahead of you, as if someone has been waiting for the sound of your shoes.
At the bottom there is a desk. A brass lamp, already lit. A stamp pad, still damp. A logbook open to tonight's date, and on the line marked CLERK ON DUTY, a signature in blue ink that looks very much like your own.
You did not sign it.
The pneumatic tube above the desk coughs. *Gom* — a pause, the hiss of air — *po*. A canister drops into the wire basket. Inside is a card the colour of old teeth, heavier than paper should be. A Writ. A name you do not know, a date from last Tuesday, a cause of death typed in capitals: UNRECORDED.
In the margin, someone has written in pencil: *File under H. Not under the stairs. Never under the stairs.*
The handwriting is small, slanted and careful. You will see it again. It appears on the oldest Writs in the stacks, on the backs of procedure manuals, on the inside of the desk drawer where it says, simply, *O.V. — 2 Nov 87 — still here.*
The records say Odile Varga was the clerk on duty the night of the Misprint. They say she stayed on after the Archive was sealed, that she was seen at the bottom of the stairwell through the gap the concrete left, that one morning in 1988 there was only the lamp, the stamp and the logbook. The records say a great many things. The records, you are beginning to understand, are the problem.
The tube coughs again. Another canister. Another Writ. Then another. The basket fills faster than you can read.
You reach for the stamp. The handle is warm, as if a hand has only just let go of it. And for a moment, at the very edge of the lamplight, you think you see her — a woman in a cardigan bent over the farthest desk, writing in a margin, not looking up.
*File under H*, she does not say. *Never under the stairs.*
When you look properly, the farthest desk is empty. Its lamp is on. Its chair is pulled out.
Someone has already signed for that one, too.