The knock came at 2:17 AM like a fist against bone. Maya woke with the taste of copper in her mouth and the certainty that something in Blackstone's carefully maintained equilibrium had finally snapped.
"Dr. Taylor! Please—"
The voice belonged to Jenny, the young nurse with strawberry hair who'd lasted longer than most but still jumped when shadows moved wrong. Maya was pulling on her robe before consciousness fully caught up with movement.
"It's Dr. Lee," Jenny gasped when Maya opened the door. "Something's happened to him."
The corridor stretched longer in the emergency lighting, walls breathing with barely perceptible rhythm. Maya's bare feet found cold spots on the linoleum that shouldn't exist—patches where the building's fever had broken through.
Dr. Lee's office looked like the aftermath of a controlled explosion. Papers covered every surface in drifts and eddies, as if scattered by wind that belonged to no weather system. His desk lamp cast sickly yellow light over the chaos, making shadows that moved independent of their sources.
Dr. Lee himself paced a figure-eight pattern around the room's perimeter, moving with the mechanical precision of a windup toy. His usually pristine hair stood in sharp points, and his face held the particular pallor of someone who'd seen the underside of their own thoughts.
"Henry," Maya said carefully, noting how the air near him shimmered with heat that had nothing to do with temperature. "Stop. Look at me."
"They're not what they pretend to be," he said without breaking stride or making eye contact. His voice carried the breathless urgency of revelation. "The words. You stare at them long enough and they stop being what you wrote. They become what they were always trying to say underneath."
Maya approached him like someone approaching a ledge. "When did this start?"
"Start?" He laughed, a sound like paper tearing. "It never started. It never stopped. It just is. It's always been. The building dreams in our handwriting."
He seized a manila folder from the desk and thrust it toward her. Maya recognized it as one of his daily logs—mundane administrative notes about supply orders and staff schedules. But when she looked at the familiar sight of his careful script, the letters began to move.
Not dramatically. Subtly, the way peripheral vision catches movement that vanishes when you look directly. The words rearranged themselves with his own handwriting, keeping his precise loops and measured spacing:
The darkness grows stronger.
She blinked hard. The text reformed:
Elijah sees you.
Then, with terrible gentleness:
Some horrors are better left unspoken.
Alex's words. Alex's exact words from the newspaper clipping, but written in Dr. Lee's hand, on paper that had never seen either of them write it.
"Henry," she said, closing the file with hands that wanted to shake. "We need to get you to the infirmary."
"I recruited you," he said suddenly, stopping mid-pace to address the corner where nothing stood. His tone was conversational, almost apologetic. "No—that's not right. I didn't recruit you. You were already coming. I just... opened the door."
Two orderlies appeared in the doorway with the particular urgency of people responding to codes they'd hoped never to hear. They moved Dr. Lee with professional gentleness toward a wheelchair that materialized as if the building itself had provided it.
At the threshold, Dr. Lee turned back toward Maya with perfect clarity. His eyes, for one moment, were entirely his own.
"The building remembers you," he said with the careful precision of someone delivering an address. "It's been waiting since you were five years old."
Then they wheeled him away, and Maya was alone with the scattered papers and the particular silence that follows revelations.
She knelt to gather the files, and they felt heavier than paper should—saturated with something that wasn't quite moisture. As she lifted each sheet, words rearranged themselves in the periphery of her vision. Staff schedules became patient lists. Patient lists became names she'd never written but somehow recognized. Names became a single phrase, repeated in different handwritings:
Come home.
"Stop it," she whispered to the room.
The papers stilled, but the feeling remained—that sense of being watched by something that had learned patience from stone and hunger from human hearts.
When she turned to leave, the woman in white stood directly behind her.
Not across the room. Not glimpsed in reflection. There, close enough that Maya could see the individual threads in her gown, could smell the particular cold that clung to her like perfume made of winter mornings.
The woman lifted one translucent hand and placed it against Maya's cheek.
The touch was gentler than ice and more final than any caress Maya had ever received. It carried recognition, welcome, and something that might have been love if love could exist without warmth, without pulse, without the messy complications of living flesh.
In that touch, Maya understood why she had come to Blackstone. Not because of Alex. Not because of guilt or curiosity or professional ambition. She had come because this woman—this patient, eternal presence—had been calling her name for twenty-five years, ever since the day her brother disappeared into hedges that grew too thick and too quiet.
The woman smiled with a mouth that had forgotten how to need breath, and Maya felt something inside her chest unlock—not her heart, exactly, but the smaller, more secret room behind it where she kept the truths too sharp for daily handling.
"I know," Maya whispered. "I've always known."
The woman nodded once and stepped back, fading like morning mist until only the scent of old roses remained.
Maya stood alone in Dr. Lee's office, surrounded by evidence of minds coming undone, and felt more at peace than she had in months. The building hummed around her with satisfaction, and for the first time since Alex's death, she hummed back.
Outside in the corridor, footsteps echoed in patterns that spelled out her name.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
Maya's past finally surfaces as visions force her to confront the truth about her lost brother and the night Alex died. The woman in white becomes more than apparition—she becomes guide, showing Maya memories that have been buried beneath twenty-five years of careful forgetting. In these visions lies the key to understanding why Blackstone chose her, and why some doors, once opened, can never truly close.