The Sleeper in Room 4

The fog came off Whitlow Lake at dusk the way it did every evening that October, rising from the dark water in slow white sheets and drifting up the lawn toward the building until the old sanatorium seemed to float on it: three stories of yellow brick, the long glassed-in porches catching the last of the light, the cupola black against a sky going from pewter to ink.

Elias parked at the far end of the staff lot, where the gravel met the birches, and sat for a moment with the engine off.

Fifth week. Long enough that the drive north from Duluth no longer felt like a trip into a stranger's house, not long enough that the building felt like anything but one. The Whitlow Sleep Institute had been a tuberculosis sanatorium for thirty-four years, county storage for thirty-five more, and a sleep lab since 1994, and it had kept a little of every one of its lives. The front doors were automatic glass set into a limestone arch carved with WHITLOW LAKE SANATORIUM 1924. The radiators still knocked. The corridors were painted a cream so clean it looked new, but the floors under the carpet runners were the old green terrazzo, and sometimes, on the stairs, Elias's shoes found a place where the sound changed and the building felt hollow underneath.

Elias pushed a strand of black hair back under a knit cap, took the thermos and the bag off the passenger seat, and walked up through the fog.

The lobby was warm and smelled of floor wax and the lake. Beyond the reception desk, dark now, one lamp burned in the scoring room on the first floor, and in its doorway stood Noreen Haugland in a lilac cardigan, holding a scrapbook against her chest with both arms, the way people hold something they've been told not to drop.

"There you are," she said. "I stayed to finish the fall pages. You look cold. Everybody looks cold their first October up here." She fished in her cardigan pocket and held out a peppermint in cellophane. "Take one. They help with the drive home at seven, you'll see."

Elias took it. Noreen had been at the Institute since the day it opened, scored studies faster than anyone in the region, knew everyone's children's names by the second week, and kept the sanatorium scrapbook on the side, with clippings and photographs and floor plans going back a hundred years. She had given Elias a tour the first day, and a pan of lemon bars the second.

"Teddy's upstairs already," she said. "Otto's doing the boiler. Twelve booked tonight, one no-show. Room 4's a new one. Adult sleepwalker. Dr. Marsh wants him watched close." She tucked the scrapbook tighter. "Go on, I'll lock up down here."

Behind her, along the lobby's long inner wall, the old photographs hung in black frames in a row under picture lights: nurses and patients and porches, the building young.

Elias stopped at the wall. It was an easy habit to have picked up in five weeks: a minute with the photographs before the night began, the way some people touch a doorframe.

Patients in wicker chaises on the sleeping porches in 1926, wrapped in blankets to the chin in what must have been January, their breath visible. A row of nurses in white caps on the front steps. A Christmas tree in a dayroom. The lake frozen, with skaters. And one Elias always ended on without quite knowing why: a small print, brown with age, labeled on a typed card underneath, Night Staff, Whitlow Lake Sanatorium, 1951. Four young women in white, standing in a row in a room tiled to the shoulder, behind them a tall window full of pale sky and, faintly, water. Their names were typed below in a line. Elias had read them once and forgotten them.

One of the four was smiling. The others looked as if they had been asked to stand still for longer than they wanted to.

Elias went up.

The second-floor corridor ran long and dim in both directions, cream walls and soft night lighting, the doors of rooms 1 through 12 closed on the left and right, each with a small lit plaque. At the west end, where the corridor opened into a bay under tall windows, the monitor station glowed: twelve screens in two rows, each showing a room in infrared gray, a sleeper-to-be sitting up in bed or reading, and below them the long desk, two chairs, a coffee maker, a plant that Teddy swore was plastic and watered anyway.

Teddy Vang looked up from his phone and grinned.

"Five weeks," he said. "You're officially haunted now. That's the rule." He pointed at the top-left screen. "Room 4. Your sleepwalker. He's been sitting on the end of the bed looking at the wardrobe for twenty minutes like he's waiting for it to say something."

On the screen a tall man in a gray cardigan sat perfectly still at the foot of the bed, his hands folded between his knees, facing the old oak wardrobe against the room's east wall.

Elias set down the bag, flexed his right hand once against the chill, and reached for the hookup kit.