Psychological horror · 3 min read ·
The Voice That Counts My Steps
A night warden is kept level, tread by tread, down one stair in the district, and the count under his heels has never once said one.
- perspective: close-third
Ronald Tull has been night warden of the multi-storey on Collier Street for six years, and the west stair is the only one of its three stairs that counts him.
The count is under his heels. That is where he would place it, if place is the word: not in the stairwell around him, not overhead, but under, in the treads, dry and level, a voice addressed to the concrete that arrives through the soles of his boots on the way down. In twos, most nights — two, four, six. If he takes the treads at speed it changes over to threes without hurry and is level with him again inside three treads, and rides there. If he skips a tread the count skips its number. The once that he stopped, on nineteen, wanting to be sure of what he was hearing, the count stopped in the middle of the number and held it, the way you hold a door; and when he took the next tread it finished the word first and went on from there, courteous about it, which he found worse.
The landings are silent. The east stair is silent, and he has given it fair trials, both directions, lamp on and lamp off. On his Thursday off he carried his tea to the public library and stood on the third tread of the library's concrete stair a polite while, the way a man tests ice. Nothing. The district is full of stairs and the choosing is not his to make or question, there being no form. His business is the west stair, and the west stair, being his, counts.
The stair is drawn at thirty-eight treads. It is drawn that way in the deposit plans hung in the keeper's cupboard — a flight of twelve, a flight of fourteen, a flight of twelve — and it paces that way under his own thumb-count, and the count under his heels has never gone past thirty-eight, and it has never once said one. It opens at two, every night, as if one had somehow been spent on the landing above, at the top, before his foot ever came to stand there.
He logs it nightly in the duty book: count heard, level, 38. Pell, the day warden, reads the book over his tea and signs without comment, which is the correct amount of comment. There are older books in the cupboard under the ramp, and on a quiet Sunday Tull went through the oldest. Same stair, same column, decades back. On the last written page of that book the count runs to thirty-eight, and the page after is blank, and the next book begins as books begin, with no word in the gap between them. There is an arithmetic to patrol records, and gaps are not usually part of it, and he looked at that gap longer than he needed.
Of late he has taken to counting aloud — under his breath, evenly, two, four, six, in his own dry voice over the one under his heels — to give the stair something of his to be level with. The two counts sit together down the flights, his a little loud, the other a little true. He does not say which of them he trusts. He says the numbers instead, and the numbers come level, and level is a thing he has always been able to vouch for in his work.
A tally is kept against something; that is what a tally is. Keeping level means keeping level with a weight, and his boots are one weight, and the stair has never once been out. It has never said one. He has decided, in the plain way he decides things, that the one was spent before he ever stood at the top of that flight, and that the spending had a foot in it. The question he carries down all thirty-eight, night after night, keeping level with the count that keeps level with him, is whose foot that was.