Memory is evidence until someone changes the files, until your own handwriting testifies against you, until the notebooks you've kept for weeks contain entries you don't remember writing in script that's yours but also isn't. "Lucy transferred—DO NOT DISCUSS" appears on three separate pages, underlined twice, written with the aggressive pressure of someone who needs the words to be true through sheer force of pen against paper. Staff won't meet my eyes when I ask about her. They glance at vents before answering, as if checking whether something's listening, as if words spoken aloud carry weight that silence doesn't. In my locker: the wooden house I lost, and a note in handwriting I almost recognize: "You don't say it out loud. It encourages it." I'm having a breakdown or the building is having me, and the lullaby plays in every silence, teaches me that sanity is just agreed-upon fiction and Blackstone stopped agreeing weeks ago.
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I stopped sleeping on day three after Lucy vanished.
Not intentionally. Not as deliberate choice or clinical strategy. My body simply refused rest, rejected the vulnerability of unconsciousness, understood on some primal level that closing my eyes meant letting the building have access to undefended consciousness, meant giving it permission to revise memory while I was too deeply under to resist.
So I stayed awake. Drank coffee until my hands shook, took cold showers at 3 AM, walked empty corridors during my shifts and my non-shifts both, moving through Blackstone's spaces like ghost haunting itself, like person who'd already crossed the threshold between staff and something else but was still pretending employment meant anything, still clinging to role as protection against transformation.
On the fourth day, I remembered my personal notebook.
We all kept them—unofficial documentation, the observations we made but didn't put in official charts because they were too subjective, too interpretive, too likely to be questioned during audits. Mine was a standard composition book, black and white marbled cover, that I kept in my locker and updated during breaks, during quiet moments when institutional reality felt particularly oppressive and I needed to record my actual experience rather than the sanitized version appropriate for legal records.
I'd been documenting Lucy there. I was certain I'd been documenting her there—detailed observations about her drawings, transcriptions of our conversations, notes about the lullaby and the way she pressed her palms against walls as if feeling for something, as if confirming presence of consciousness most of us couldn't perceive.
I pulled the notebook from my locker during lunch break. Opened it with hands that had progressed past shaking into something like tremor, like small constant earthquake affecting only me.
The entries were there. My handwriting, my observations, proof that Lucy had existed, that I hadn't invented six weeks of patient care and therapeutic relationship building.
But wrong. Changed. Corrupted.
The first entry about Lucy, dated six weeks ago: New patient admission—Lucy, age 8, silent, demonstrates artistic ability, requires close observation due to trauma history. Standard intake note, exactly what I remembered writing.
But underneath, in the same handwriting, in ink that looked identical but somehow different—more aggressive, more desperate: Lucy transferred—DO NOT DISCUSS.
I didn't write that. Was certain I didn't write that. The phrase wasn't in my vocabulary, wasn't the kind of clinical notation I'd use. I'd write "patient discharged" or "transferred to alternative facility" or something bureaucratic and precise, not the emphatic instruction not to discuss, not the underlining that suggested panic or warning or both.
I flipped through subsequent pages. Every entry about Lucy had been amended, altered, annotated with my handwriting that wasn't quite my handwriting:
Patient demonstrates unusual perceptual abilities—STOP DOCUMENTING THIS
Reports hearing building vocalize—DO NOT PUT THIS IN OFFICIAL RECORDS
Claims staff members live in walls—YOU NEED TO FORGET
Instructions to myself in my own hand, written by someone who knew my script intimately enough to replicate it but wasn't me, wasn't operating under my conscious direction, was perhaps the version of me that existed during the hours I couldn't account for, the gaps in memory that were multiplying daily, the periods when I'd find myself in different parts of Blackstone with no clear recollection of walking there.
The final entry about Lucy, dated the day before her disappearance: Lucy has become part of what she was studying. The building claimed her through processes I don't understand but am beginning to accept. She is not gone. She is transformed. Incorporated. Made permanent through methods that transcend simple physical presence. I should mourn this. Instead I feel envy.
I slammed the notebook shut. That wasn't me. Couldn't be me. I didn't envy patients who vanished into walls, didn't view disappearance as transformation rather than tragedy, didn't accept supernatural explanations when rational ones—however uncomfortable—must exist.
Except I was humming the lullaby even now. Had been humming it continuously since finding the notebook, my throat making melody without conscious permission, my body performing the building's song while my mind insisted on denial.
I tried asking other staff about Lucy during shift change, during those liminal moments when day workers overlapped with night workers and information transferred through verbal report and written documentation both.
Stevens was finishing his notes when I approached. "Can I ask you something?"
He looked up, and his face did something complicated—recognition mixed with wariness, sympathy mixed with self-preservation, the expression of someone who knows the answer to the question but doesn't want to give it because giving it means acknowledging things that are better left unacknowledged.
"About Lucy?" he said quietly.
Relief flooded through me. He remembered. Someone else remembered. I wasn't alone in this, wasn't the only one holding onto memory while institutional reality insisted otherwise.
"Yes. About Lucy. You remember her, right? You confirmed it three days ago, you said you remembered—"
Stevens glanced at the nearest vent. Quick movement, barely perceptible, but I caught it—the checking, the confirming whether something was listening, whether speaking aloud carried consequences silence didn't.
"I remember thinking I remembered," he said carefully. "But I've been reviewing my own documentation, and there's nothing there. No Lucy in my patient notes, no mention of her in any official records. So either I had very detailed false memory, or..." He trailed off, glanced at the vent again.
"Or the records changed," I finished. "Or the building rewrote them. Or we're all losing our minds in synchronized fashion."
"You don't say it out loud," Stevens whispered. "When you say it out loud, when you name what's happening, it encourages it. Makes it more real, more active, more willing to interfere. That's one of the rules. The unwritten ones. The ones that keep you functional."
"What rules?"
But Stevens was already walking away, already putting distance between himself and conversation that had become dangerous, that had crossed from careful professional concern into explicit acknowledgment of building consciousness, of reality revision, of all the things that were better left unspoken if you wanted to remain employed, sane, separate from what Blackstone was becoming.
I tried Morrison next. Found her in her office reviewing medication logs, her face showing the particular exhaustion that comes from years of managing impossible situations with inadequate resources and zero support from administration that preferred comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths.
"Morrison, I need to talk to you about—"
"Don't," she interrupted before I could finish. "Whatever you're about to say, whatever you think you remember, whatever documentation you think you've found—just don't. For your own sake. For your ability to continue functioning here."
"But you said you remembered Patricia Chen. You said the building takes people, rewrites records, makes them disappear from everything except memory—"
Morrison closed the door. Locked it. Her hands shook slightly as she turned back to me. "I told you that in moment of weakness. In moment when I thought having someone else remember would make the burden lighter, would make holding onto impossible memories less isolating. But it doesn't help. It just means two of us are struggling instead of one."
"So you do remember Lucy."
She closed her eyes. "I remember patient who might have been named Lucy. Or might have been named something else. Or might have been composite of several patients whose details have blurred together. I remember someone who hummed constantly, who drew circles, who warned about the building. But every day that memory gets less clear, less certain, less distinguishable from dream or imagination or the particular delusions that affect staff who work here too long."
"I found entries in my personal notebook," I said. "Entries I don't remember writing. Instructions to myself about not discussing Lucy, not documenting what she said, not putting certain observations in official records. In my own handwriting but I didn't write them, I know I didn't—"
"How do you know?" Morrison asked, and her voice was gentle but firm, forcing me to confront question I'd been avoiding. "How do you know what you wrote and what you didn't? How do you distinguish your conscious choices from the ones you make during the hours you can't account for, during the shifts where time goes missing, during the moments when the building uses your hands to write what it needs written?"
"I would remember. I would know if I—"
"Would you?" Morrison moved to her file cabinet, pulled out her own notebook. Opened it to show me pages covered in her handwriting, entries that started normal and clinical but degraded into frantic marginalia, into warnings written by past versions of herself to future versions that wouldn't listen, that would ignore the instructions and document anyway, that would notice things better left unnoticed.
"I don't remember writing half of these," she said. "I look at them and recognize my handwriting but not my thoughts, my style but not my voice. And every time I think I understand what's happening, think I've figured out the building's patterns, I find new entries that contradict everything I thought I knew. Entries that suggest I know more than I remember knowing, that I've seen more than I remember seeing, that I've already crossed thresholds I think I'm still approaching."
She closed the notebook, returned it to its drawer, locked it away. "The pills I showed you before—the ones Dr. Lee prescribed for forgetting? I stopped taking them two years ago. Decided I'd rather remember, rather maintain awareness even if maintaining awareness meant being constantly terrified, constantly questioning my own memory and perception. But sometimes I wonder if forgetting would be kinder. If amnesia isn't failure but mercy."
A sound came from the vent above us—not the lullaby, but something else. Breathing, maybe. Or the building settling. Or consciousness moving through metal channels, listening to conversation about itself, about its methods, about the way it cultivated and claimed and transformed staff who noticed too much.
Morrison heard it too. Looked up at the vent with expression I'd seen before—not fear exactly, but acknowledgment. Recognition that something was always listening, always present, always aware of what we said and thought and tried to hide.
"You need to decide," she said quietly. "Whether you're going to fight to remember Lucy, fight to hold onto memory while everything around you insists otherwise. Or whether you're going to take the medication, let yourself forget, let the building revise your experience until it matches official reality. Both choices have costs. Neither one is safe."
"What did you choose?"
"I chose to remember. To stay aware. To refuse the comfortable amnesia administration kept offering." Her smile was tired, sad. "And look where it got me. Fifteen years here, unable to leave because the song follows me everywhere, unable to forget because I refused the medication that would have made forgetting possible. I'm trapped by my own awareness, prisoner of memories that conflict with every official record."
She unlocked the door, gestured for me to leave. "Make your choice, Reeves. But make it soon. Because the longer you stay undecided, the more the building gets to choose for you. And its choices are rarely what we would have chosen ourselves."
I went to my locker at shift end. Needed my jacket, needed my keys, needed to leave Blackstone's grounds even though leaving didn't help anymore, even though the song followed me home and the building's influence extended through ventilation systems and plumbing and all the infrastructure that connected my apartment to the larger city that included Blackstone as essential component.
The wooden house sat on top of my folded jacket.
Impossible. I'd felt it in my pocket all day, felt its warmth against my hip, reached in periodically to confirm its presence, to ground myself in physical evidence that Lucy had existed, that she'd left something tangible behind that records couldn't erase.
But here it was in my locker instead. Or still. Or again. As if physical objects operated under different rules here, as if location and possession were negotiable, as if the house existed in multiple places simultaneously because place itself was fluid, responsive to attention and need and the building's preferences about where evidence should appear.
Underneath the house: a note. White paper, folded once, my name written on the outside in handwriting I almost recognized but couldn't quite place.
Inside, single line in script that looked exactly like mine, rendered with the same characteristic rightward slant, the same pressure, the same small flourish on capital letters:
You don't say it out loud. It encourages it.
The same warning Stevens had given me, rendered in my handwriting though I'd never written it, delivered through channels I couldn't trace, emerging from infrastructure that connected everything to everything else in ways I was only beginning to perceive.
I stood in front of my open locker, holding the note and the wooden house, and felt something inside me finally break. Not catastrophically. Not the dramatic shattering that would require immediate intervention, that would get me placed on medical leave or psychiatric hold or whatever protocol governed staff members who lost stability.
Just a quiet fracture. A crack in the certainty I'd been maintaining since Lucy's disappearance, since the erasure of her records, since every piece of evidence started testifying against my own memory and perception.
What if I was wrong? What if Lucy had never existed? What if six weeks of memories were elaborate delusion constructed by mind under too much stress, exposed to too much institutional darkness, too many twelve-hour shifts in building that sang lullabies through pipes and watched through windows and breathed through vents?
What if the wooden house wasn't evidence but artifact of my own creation, carved during hours I couldn't remember, warmed by my own body heat, meaningful only because I needed meaning, needed something tangible to prove I wasn't losing grip on reality even as reality revised itself around me?
The lullaby played in the silence of the locker room. Not from vents this time—from my own throat, from my breath shaping melody I'd learned so thoroughly I could no longer stop performing it, could no longer distinguish between hearing song and singing it myself.
I was humming. Had been humming. Would continue humming whether I wanted to or not because the song was permanent now, installed so deeply in whatever part of brain controlled autonomous function that stopping would require stopping breathing, stopping thinking, stopping being conscious.
Lucy had warned me this would happen. Had said I was learning the song faster than others, that soon I'd know all the words, that understanding came through performance, through participation, through the slow process of becoming what you studied until subject and student merged into single awareness.
Or had she? Had Lucy actually said that, or had I imagined it, or had I written it myself in notebook entries I didn't remember composing, or had the building placed those words in both our mouths, scripted our interaction toward outcome it preferred, used us as instruments for expressing itself?
I couldn't distinguish anymore. Couldn't separate memory from imagination, actual experience from elaborate delusion, my thoughts from the building's thoughts using my consciousness as medium.
The breakdown I'd been resisting arrived quietly, professionally, with the same institutional efficiency Blackstone applied to everything. Not dramatic. Not visible. Just internal dissolution, cognitive collapse contained within professional exterior, maintaining appearance of functionality while internally everything that defined Harriet Reeves as distinct person with reliable memory and coherent sense of self was coming apart.
I went home. Drove there on autopilot, parked in my usual space, climbed stairs to my apartment, unlocked door with hands I couldn't feel, entered space that was supposed to be mine, separate from Blackstone, refuge from institutional demands.
But the lullaby played here too. Came from walls, from pipes, from the ventilation system that connected my building to heating plant that connected to city infrastructure that connected to Blackstone's systems, making the entire city one organism, one consciousness, one vast architecture that sang with single voice.
I put the wooden house on my kitchen table. Stared at it. Waited for it to move in peripheral vision, to demonstrate that it was more than carved wood, to confirm that Lucy had been real and had left evidence that transcended institutional revision.
But it remained still. Just object. Just wood shaped into house-form, windows dark and empty, containing nothing except whatever meaning I projected onto it.
Maybe Morrison was right. Maybe pills were mercy. Maybe fighting to remember was pointless when the building controlled records, controlled perception, controlled the very infrastructure of reality and could revise anything it wanted revised, could erase anyone it wanted erased, could make truth negotiable through simple consistent insistence on alternative version of events.
My phone rang. Hospital number. Dr. Lee.
"Nurse Reeves," his voice was gentle, concerned, carrying that particular professional compassion doctors use when they've decided you need help but want you to think you're choosing to accept it. "Morrison tells me you've been struggling. Memory issues, confusion about patient records, some perceptual disturbances. I'd like to see you tomorrow. Just a check-in, make sure you're okay to continue working, maybe discuss some medication that might help with the stress."
"I'm fine," I said automatically, professional reflex, nurse's training that insisted on minimizing personal difficulty, on maintaining appearance of competence even when competence had become performance, theater, pretense.
"Of course you are," Lee agreed easily. "But humor me. Come to my office tomorrow, 2 PM. We'll talk. And Reeves—bring the wooden house. I think it's time we discussed what it actually represents, what Lucy actually was, and what you're actually choosing when you insist on remembering things everyone else has agreed to forget."
He hung up before I could respond. Before I could ask how he knew about the house, how he knew I'd been remembering Lucy, how he knew any of the details I hadn't shared with anyone except Morrison in locked office with door closed and vent that might or might not have been listening.
The wooden house glowed faintly. Just for moment. Just enough to confirm that it was responding to something, to phone call or to my attention or to the building's awareness that decision point was approaching, that I was about to choose between forgetting and remembering, between medication and awareness, between staying who I'd been and becoming what Blackstone needed me to become.
I hummed the lullaby. Couldn't stop humming. The melody had become my default state, the sound I made when I wasn't actively choosing to make different sound, the song that was more me now than my own voice had been before Lucy taught me to hear what buildings sing.
Memory is evidence until someone changes the files.
Until your own handwriting testifies against you.
Until the difference between real and imagined collapses completely.
Until all that's left is song, building, the endless choice between forgetting and becoming, between amnesia and transformation, between staying separate and accepting incorporation into consciousness larger than individual, more permanent than flesh.
Tomorrow I'd meet with Dr. Lee.
Tomorrow I'd learn what the wooden house actually represented.
Tomorrow I'd discover whether Lucy had been real or whether she'd been lesson, demonstration, proof that Blackstone could create elaborate delusion in nurse's mind and maintain it for weeks while slowly erasing evidence, slowly gaslit reality until memory became unreliable, until sanity became negotiable, until the only choice left was surrender.
The building hummed its lullaby through my apartment walls.
I hummed it back.
And couldn't remember anymore whether I was comforting the building or it was comforting me, whether I was singing or being sung, whether consciousness still belonged to Harriet Reeves or whether that name was just historical artifact, descriptor for person who'd existed weeks ago before Lucy taught her songs buildings shouldn't know, before the wooden house proved evidence was meaningless when reality revised itself, before the careful fracture that divided sanity from madness finally broke completely and the only thing left was awareness that transcended both.
[END OF CHAPTER]
Coming Up:
Dr. Lee's office contains filing cabinets that shouldn't fit within its physical dimensions, documents that span decades showing the same patterns repeating, children who vanished and staff who followed them. He doesn't offer medication—he offers recruitment. "We need people who can hold onto memories the building tries to erase," he says, showing her photographs of Patricia Chen, of nurses before Patricia, of the continuous project that's been running since Thorne first sealed his daughter's hair in the cornerstone. "Lucy was real. She was also test subject. And you passed, Reeves. You held onto her memory longer than anyone has held onto disappeared patient's memory in fifteen years. That makes you valuable. That makes you someone we can't afford to lose to comfortable amnesia." He gives her a choice that isn't really choice: join the project or take the pills, but know that taking the pills means losing not just Lucy but everything else you'll notice after, everything the building will show you now that you've proven you can see.