The Long Room

Davi did not go up to eleven that night. He finished his rounds by the stairs, kept his eyes on the treads, and told himself the building was old and old buildings keep their own hours.

But the log required him to note anything, and he was, before everything else, a man who did what the page required. So the next night he climbed to eleven at the fourth hour, and opened the door to the long room, and turned on no lights.

The desks ran away from him into the dark in their unbroken rows. Every chair was pushed in. Every screen was black. And at the far end, where the windows held the city like a held breath, one chair had been turned to face the glass, as if someone had sat a while to watch the lights, and meant to come back.

He wrote it in the log exactly as he found it. He did not round it off, or explain it, or make it tidy. Then he turned the chair back to its desk, because that was the rule he had decided to keep, and went down to begin the fifth hour.