Graveyard Shift

Roger Webb signed his name on the logbook at 11:58 PM, two minutes early, the way his father had taught him. Show up before you're needed. It was good advice for a first day, even a first day at a job nobody wanted.

"You'll be fine," said Gary, the security guard finishing his shift. He was already shrugging into his jacket. "Quietest job in the city. Nothing in here's done anything in ten thousand years. Not about to start tonight." He laughed at his own joke, the sound swallowed fast by the marble lobby, and then he was gone, and the door locked behind him with a sound like a held breath being let out.

Roger stood alone in the Grand Hall of the Natural History Museum.

The lights had been dimmed to a third of their daytime brightness — building policy, energy saving — which meant the vaulted ceiling disappeared into a kind of soft brown dark, and the exhibits below sat in pools of weak amber light like things displayed in the bottom of a mine shaft. He liked museums. He'd told the agency that in his interview, thinking it would help. Now, walking his first round with a torch he didn't yet need, and a radio clipped to his shoulder that hadn't made a sound in an hour, he wasn't sure liking museums in the daytime had prepared him for this, the graveyard shift.

He reached the Hall of Human Origins a little after 1.00 am.

He'd walked past it during his orientation tour, glanced at it the way you glance at anything you've seen photographs of a hundred times — the diorama, the cave mouth built into a fiberglass outcrop, the family of Neanderthals frozen mid-task around an artificial fire that never went out, never needed another log, and didn’t warm anything. During the day, school children pressed their noses to the glass and made grunting noises at them. During the day, they were furniture.

At 1 AM, with the hall lit only by the dim recessed bulbs meant to simulate dusk, Roger stopped in front of the glass and felt — for one unplaceable second — that the big Neanderthal male was looking directly at him.

He told himself it was the angle. Exhibits were designed to engage the viewer; that's just craftsmanship. He moved on. He checked the fire exits, the loading dock, the gift shop with its shelves of polished geodes that looked like sleeping eyes in the dark. He drank some of his coffee from a thermos. He texted his sister, a nurse at the general hospital — night one, nothing's eaten me yet — and she sent back a laughing emoji, and the silence of the building closed back in around him like flowing water closing around a rock in a creek.

It was 2:47 AM when he heard the first sound.

A muffled scrape. Low, dragging, the kind of noise a heavy object makes against a stone floor. He told himself: pipes. Old building, old pipes. He walked toward the Hall of Human Origins because the sound was coming from that direction, and because walking toward things was his job. If the noise had been coming from any other display, it wouldn’t concerned him as much, but the sound, coming from the Hall of Human Origins, gave him a chill down his spine. Roger walked toward the door he didn't want to open on his first night.

The diorama lights had gone out.

Not the hall lights, just the diorama — the small, warm bulb that created the artificial fire, that lit the cave mouth and the family just outside it, were still glowing and flickering. The fire than never went out. The glass stood dark, and behind the dark glass, Roger could no longer make out the shape of the big Neanderthal, the head of the clan, the one who'd seemed to look at him on his first pass. That big Neanderthal was no longer behind the glass.

Roger heard the second sound before he understood what it was — a soft, wet exhale, close, far too close, the kind of breath that comes from a chest much larger than a man's. He turned his torch light toward it and the beam found a face that should have been fiberglass and was not: heavy-browed, deep-set eyes catching the light like an animal's. Skin weathered the colour of old wood, breath fogging faintly in air that was not cold enough to fog.

He had time to think that's not possible and no time at all to think anything else, because there were more of them behind the leader — younger, quicker, fanning out the way hunters fan out around their quarry, stopping something from being able to run — and then, the big one's hand closed around Roger’s arm with a grip like an iron clamp being closed.

Roger's finger found the panic button on the radio strapped to his shoulder, purely on reflex, the way a drowning man's hand finds the surface without being told to. He pressed it once, twice, and the world then tipped sideways, and the smell of cold woodsmoke and wet hair, and something far older filled his nose, and then there was only the cave mouth, dark, swallowing, and Roger Webb did not see the Grand Hall again.

ooooooooooooooOoooooooooooooo

The response team arrived nine minutes later — a supervisor and two officers from the security firm. They entered the halls, their torchlight sweeping through every hall.

They found the Hall of Human Origins exactly as it should be. The diorama lights glowed their usual dim amber. The big Neanderthal stood in his usual pose, spear raised over the usual artificial fire, his fiberglass family arranged around him in postures unchanged since installation. The glass was unbroken, undisturbed, faintly dusty in the way glass that nobody touches collects dust.

There was no sign of forced entry. No sign of struggle. No sign, anywhere in the building, of Roger Webb.

His thermos sat on the security desk in the lobby, coffee gone cold. His jacket hung on the hook where Gary's had hung earlier in the night. The logbook held one neat signature, timed at 11:58 PM, and beneath it, nothing — no sign-out, no note, no second entry of any kind.

The supervisor stood for some time in front of the diorama glass, torch light beam resting, for no particular reason he could name, on the face of the lead hunter — the big Neanderthal, spear raised, eyes that were now fixed on him.

He told himself it was the angle.

Then he radioed in to headquarters, notifying of a missing person. Behind the glass, the artificial fire that never warmed anything went on burning the same as it always had, the same as it always would, waiting for someone else to walk this hall alone, between midnight and dawn, while the rest of the city slept and believed itself safe.

While he stood in front of the diorama, the other two security men made another sweep of the hall where the display was located,

They walked to the rear wall of the diorama where there was an access door to the display. One guard for no apparent reason just pushed the door, when lo and behold, it swung open. At a passing glance it looked properly closed, but no, it swung free.

The access area behind the diorama was pitch black, not a skerrick of light entered the area. The guard swept the area with his torch and there was Roger, sitting on the floor with his back against the rear wall that lead to the fibreglass cave, knees drawn up to his chest, exactly the way you'd sit if you'd been backed into the farthest corner of something and had nowhere left to retreat.

They radioed their supervisor.

"Roger." The supervisor crouched in front of him, hand out, slow. "Roger, can you hear me?"

For a quite some time, nothing in Roger's face suggested that he could. His eyes moved across the supervisor's features the way a man's eyes move across a word in a language he used to speak and has since forgotten — recognizing the shapes, finding no meaning in them. Then something in him seemed to register.

"Cold," he said. His voice came out wrong — too low, too slow, each word built individually like he was relearning the architecture of speech as he used it. "It was so cold in there."

He seems fine. That was the official word for it, the word the paramedics used, the word that went into the report. No injuries. Vitals normal. Mild hypothermia, mild dehydration, mild disorientation consistent with a panic episode in a low-light environment. He was given a blanket and a paper cup of warm water, and he drank it like it was the first water that he had drunk in days.

It was three days after the event before anyone noticed the trivial things that had changed with Roger, and longer before anyone said them aloud.

He flinched from the fluorescent lights when they flickered on, like they hurt him in some way that didn't show up on any chart. He ate his meals with his hands before he remembered there was a fork beside the plate, and looked at the fork afterward like he was trying to recall what it was for. Once, his sister found him standing at the kitchen window at 2 AM, perfectly still, watching the dark with an attentiveness that had no fear in it and no boredom either — only the patient, total focus of someone that has learned that in the dark is where the food is, and where the danger is, and that the two are often the same thing.

His hands changed first, or seemed to — the doctors found nothing on X-ray, no measurable difference, but his sister swore his grip had become a different kind of grip, blunt and total, the grip of something that closes around a tree branch or a wrist and does not, under any circumstance, let go.

He went back to work a week later, because he said the silence at home was worse than the silence at the museum, which struck everyone as a strange thing to say and which he would not explain further. He did not go back to the Hall of Human Origins. The new schedule kept him in the East Wing, with the minerals and the meteorites, and if you asked him why, he would go very quiet and say only that some doors, once they have opened for you, know your face.

Gary, training Roger’s replacement, Neil James, walked past the display of the Neanderthal diorama a week later, and made his old joke — “Quietest job in the city, nothing in here's done anything in ten thousand years, so it’s not likely to start tonight,” — and laughed, the way he always laughed at his old joke, not noticing that behind the glass, the big Neanderthal's arm holding his spear had changed position, it was now about thirty centremeters lower than the museum's own restoration photographs showed it to be. Oddly, no member of the staff noticed the change either. And, in the dim amber light of the graveyard shift, if you stood where Roger had stood, the big Neanderthal didn’t look like he was hunting something in the painted distance, and more like he was looking at who was passing, with the patient satisfaction of someone who is about to be captured, from directly on the other side of the glass. Neil felt a chill pass through his body, but shrugged it off as imagination, or was it?

Roger never went near the Hall of Human Origins again. But sometimes, late on the graveyard shift, while on security in the East Wing, the control room would hear him stop walking his rounds entirely, and stand motionless in the dark for minutes at a time — listening, they assumed, but for what reason, no one thought to ask him, and he never once volunteered to tell them.