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 took the stairs two at a time and came out at the west end of the second-floor corridor, where the monitor station sat under its bank of screens like the bridge of a ship. Twelve rooms ran away down the hall toward the fire door at the far end. The runner carpet was the color of wet sand. The radiators along the baseboard ticked as they heated, one after another, like a line of clocks being wound.

Teddy Vang was at the desk with his feet up and a phone in his hand, playing chess against someone in Singapore. He lifted two fingers without looking away from the board.

"Six," he said. "Mr. Haapala. Seventy-two, widower, snores like a two-stroke engine, according to his GP. He's early. He's sitting in the family lounge in his coat reading a farm magazine from 2019." He moved a knight and looked up at last. "Nice guy. Sad. He told the receptionist he's only here because his doctor made him, and then he told her the real reason, and she came up here to tell me with her eyes all wet."

"What's the real reason?"

Teddy put the phone down. "Better you hear it from him."

On the board, a new line had been added under Room 6 in Noreen's neat day-shift printing: Haapala, G. — dx PSG — pt. reports waking 03:04 nightly. Elias read it twice without knowing why, and then set down his bag.

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."