Three A.M. Voices

The clocks had gone back on Sunday, and now the dark came down on Whitlow Lake before five, all at once, like a lid. By the time Mara turned off the county road onto the Institute's long drive, the birches were only pale strokes in the headlights and the lake beyond them was a flat black nothing, rimmed along the shallows with the first thin skim of ice.

The old sanatorium stood at the top of the lawn with its windows lit, three stories of yellow brick and glassed-in porches, the cupola lost against the sky. In October it had seemed to float on the fog. In November it simply sat there, square and heavy, holding its warmth against the cold like a man with his collar turned up.

Mara parked in the staff lot, where the gravel had already frozen into ridges, and crossed to the side door with her bag over one shoulder and her breath going up white. Somewhere in the building, as Mara reached for the handle, something went clank — a deep iron sound, like a wrench dropped in a church — and then a long ticking, and then a hiss.

Inside, the heat hit like a hand. The first real cold of the year had arrived over the weekend, and the old steam system had woken up with it, and the whole place smelled of hot dust and paint and the faint mineral breath of radiators coming back to life after a summer asleep. The corridor lights hummed. From the back stairs came the sound of a man talking to a pipe.

It was Otto Pellinen. He was on the landing between the first and second floors, crouched beside the big cast-iron radiator under the window with a radiator key in one hand and a coffee can in the other, bleeding off air. The valve spat and sputtered and then ran clean, and he closed it with a satisfied grunt.

"Every November," he said, without looking up. "She sleeps all summer and wakes up full of air, and then she knocks all night and everybody thinks the building's haunted." He straightened, one hand on the small of his back. "Evening."

"Evening, Otto."

"Timer's set," he said, nodding toward the ceiling as if the timer lived up there. "Night setback. Boiler drops back at eleven, fires up again at three, so the day people come in warm. You'll hear her about four after. Knocks like a drunk at the door." He picked up his coffee can. "Don't let it get to you."

Up the stairs, faintly, a phone was ringing at the monitor station, and then it stopped.