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 Elias 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.

Elias parked in the staff lot, where the gravel had already frozen into ridges, and crossed to the side door with his bag over one shoulder and his breath going up white. Somewhere in the building, as Elias 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.

Elias set his bag on the step and held the coffee can while Otto knelt at the second radiator, the one on the first-floor landing below. He worked the key in the valve with the gentleness of a man winding an old watch, and the air came out of it in a thin, rising whistle that went up almost into a note before it broke into spitting water.

"Hear that?" said Otto. "That's the pipes singing. Old steam jobs, they sing when the air's moving. There's pipes in this building nobody's had eyes on since Eisenhower." He closed the valve. "Tubes, too. Speaking tubes, from the old nurses' days. Brass, all through the walls. They capped 'em when they did the conversion, but capped don't mean quiet. On a cold night with the boiler coming up you can hear the whole building breathe."

He said it plainly, as a fact about plumbing, and took his can back, and nodded Elias up the stairs. "Go on. Teddy's got a new one for you in six. Nice old fella. Drove himself down from Two Harbors in a pickup older than you."

Elias climbed the rest of the way with the whistle still in his ears, that thin note rising and breaking, and was surprised at how long it stayed.

At half past eight Elias went down the hall to Room 6 to meet the patient.

Room 6 was halfway along the corridor on the lake side: a narrow room with a high ceiling, a hospital bed made up to look like a hotel bed, a nightstand, a chair, a camera in the corner up by the crown molding, and under the window a big old radiator painted the same cream as the walls. Above the radiator, just below the ceiling, a louvered metal grille covered the mouth of a vent. The window beyond was black. When Elias came in the radiator was ticking steadily to itself, warming up, and the glass had begun to fog at the edges where the heat met the cold.

Glen Haapala stood up out of the chair when Elias came in, the way men of his age stand up for anyone. He was big and slow and gray, a wide man in a flannel shirt buttoned to the collar, with enormous careful hands and a face creased from forty years of wind off Lake Superior. On his left wrist was an old wind-up Timex with a scratched crystal.

"Evening," he said. "You'll be the one who sits up with me."

"That's right. I'm Elias. I'll be here all night."

He nodded slowly, as if that settled something, and looked down at the watch, and then up at the vent above the radiator, and then back at Elias.

"Then I suppose," he said, "you'd better know about three-oh-four."