From inside the walls, all tragedies echo equally. A thousand stories pulse beneath Blackstone's pipes and lath, flickering like heartbeats in cracked plaster. Here, Daniel is a witness and a retelling, feeling every loss, every rewriting, every echo become song.
-------------------------------
Now
I am heat drifting westward through winter pipes; I am condensation at the coal chute's mouth.
We are Daniel, Lucy, J.C., Margaret, the house, the wind—voices braided into a single draft.
Before
Thorne lays another blueprint flat, his pencil whispering more feverishly:
walls never wide enough to silence grief, doors opening deeper into the shape of what he had lost—
If you say it out loud, the walls answer.
Motors hum, chalk dust drifts.
In his mind:
—Clara,
—foundation stone thick with secrets,
—mourning sublimated into angles no one will understand for a hundred years.
Now
I ride the wires as Thorne scratches the margin: If the wall answers, you've built it wrong. Or right.
After
Nurse Reeves, years, decades, a blink:
her shoes tap-tap down the corridor, each echo tracing the same line as mine.
She doesn't see me; she feels me as a pressure drop, a gnaw in her ribs, the old chill she blames on age or failing boiler.
Reeves writes notes none will ever read, despairs over vanished children, keeps the rules written small and shivering in desk drawers—
Never count the children twice
Never stay when the lullaby begins
Still she is caught; still she teaches; she keeps humming.
Now
Alex Winters, paper soul, dissolves—
Watches his words pool and drain, photographs lose their nerve, calendar appointments tear themselves into the static.
He carves, desperate—A W—into the southeast stair's plaster, but even as he inscribes it the lines try to fade.
I feel the scrape in the stone, the effort:
His memory as grit at the bottom of my pipes.
I want to anchor him, but Blackstone's story is greedy, wants to keep only what it chooses.
Before
After
Always
Someone new—a girl who wakes with a sudden cold at her wrist,
A boy tracing circles in condensation, speaking in his sleep—
Names are incidental, though we try to keep them.
They arrive, breathe Blackstone, become chapter, become cloud.
—I taste Lucy's last night, lights flickering, her circles multiplying behind her eyes.
—I melt into a moment from J.C., running the corridor, laughter chopped by sudden silence, nurse shouting don't run, then the feeling of slipping, the dull bounce of bone.
—I hover at the edge of Reeves in her final shift, watching her hands as they touch three vanished toy houses in the dark.
—Always, always: the lullaby, a corridor of notes that never finish.
The Mourner stands vigil in every era.
Her face is a blank spot in memory; sometimes she's at the threshold, sometimes by the cornerstone, always exactly where transitions go unmarked.
She is stillness while the house remakes the living and the dead.
Sometimes we feel a new child's fear—a sprint, a protest, a plea to be remembered. Sometimes we tease loose the last joke told before a vanishing, the warmth of sun through a cracked window, a taste of chocolate given to bribe a too-awake patient into sleep.
We catalog these not as biography but as weather—the chill at three a.m., the flare of static when the vent cover is lifted, the weight of sorrow warm as laundry in the hands of a matron at midnight.
Now
—The building makes its own revision.
A new door appears overnight, gloss paint still tacky.
A file in the nurse's office reorders its pages: Margaret is a boy, Daniel is a ghost story, Lucy is erased, then conjured again in the rumor this wing tells itself.
Lines are the first to go, then faces, voices, then even the impression in the mattress.
But I, we, Blackstone—
we keep the pressure, the hum, the way the light bends when someone wishes they could see their reflection just once more.
After
After
After
Some of us are shadows, seen in the periphery:
A ghost remembered by the flick of a lamp or the sudden lag in a monitor's time.
Some of us are integration, our names dissolved into the slow self-explanation of stone, our longings mellowed into the patience of brick.
Some of us, most cruelly, are unwritten—disappear not with a bang but as if the present turned away and the past let go.
The house keeps memories not as stories but as sensations: heat, cold, noise, hush.
Now
Maya dreams, a voice sighs from the vent—my vent, our vent—
and she wakes crying, not sure why, the song still sticky in her mouth.
The pipe groans beneath her bed, and for a moment, she nearly remembers that, once, someone tried to tell her what comes next.
I want to scream, but my warning becomes a cold draft, only noticed as complaint.
Always
We are the witness, the echo, the carrier of ache made useful, ache made shelter.
Our memories crash into each other, suture themselves in a scatter of weather:
a light burns out in the kitchen just as a child in the east wing sits up in bed,
a pool of warmth appears under an old nurse's blanket as she almost remembers the face of a vanished child.
We gather, lose, gather again.
And still—tragedies echo equally.
Blackstone forgets nothing, even as it insists on erasing us.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
Dawn never quite arrives inside Blackstone. As the outside world changes, we remain—a palimpsest of sorrow and welcome, yearning and tune. Something stirs: someone new navigates the hall, hope flickers, weather sharpens. The collective's desire to gather and keep grows, scene by scene, tightening the threads between memory and structure, selfhood and building.