The Airport That Ate Our Memories

Kerry Gibbons had a problem, and the problem was that she couldn't stop performing. She was twenty-eight years old, a journalist with three years of bylines and a reputation at her paper for being fearless, and honestly? Half of that reputation was built on her doing stupid things while Aisha watched. She'd been doing it since they started dating. She'd asked a question at a panel that got her laughed at by half the room, and Aisha had come up to her afterward and said, "That took guts," and Kerry had been chasing that feeling ever since. They'd been dating for two years now, and Kerry still couldn't walk past a closed door without wondering what was behind it.

"Stop staring at the departures board," Aisha said. "It's not gonna change."

"It might change."

"Kerry. Babe. It's not gonna change."

Aisha Freemont was thirty, a travel photographer, and she had the calmest face of anyone Kerry had ever dated. She could look at a canceled transatlantic flight at one in the morning the way other people looked at a menu. It was honestly infuriating.

The announcement had come forty minutes ago. Weather in the Atlantic, the gate agent said. The flight to Dublin was gone, rescheduled for the day after tomorrow at six pm, and the airline was putting people up in hotels except there weren't enough hotel vans for two hours. So here they were, in a regional airport in the middle of the Midwest, with a carry-on bag, a dead phone charger, and a coffee shop that was the last thing open in the whole terminal.

"So I booked us a room at the airport hotel," Aisha said, scrolling. "There's a shuttle at two."

"Aisha."

"What?"

"Think about it. When is the last time you got to shoot an empty airport?"

Aisha looked up from her phone. "What?"

"Think about it. This whole place is empty. The main concourse. All that chrome and light. You're always saying you want a series about transit spaces. The one you pitched to that magazine in the spring."

"That got rejected."

"It got rejected because you didn't have the shots yet. And now the shots are just sitting here, at one in the morning, waiting for you."

Aisha leaned back in the plastic chair and looked at her, and Kerry knew that look. It was the "you are doing the thing" look.

"You want to explore the airport," Aisha said.

"I want to *work*. There's a difference."

"You want me to follow you around an empty terminal so you can write some story about it and look tough in front of me."

"That is a horrible caricature of what I want."

"Is it?"

"...It's a partially accurate caricature."

Aisha laughed, and Kerry felt that little win settle into her chest, warm as coffee. God, she was easy. Two years in and one laugh still worked on her like a slot machine.

"Fine," Aisha said, standing and stretching. "One hour. Then the shuttle, then sleep. And you're carrying the tripod."

"Deal. You won't regret this."

"I already regret this."

They walked out into the main concourse, and it was exactly what Kerry had hoped. The fluorescent light came down in long flat rows and made the whole place look like a photograph of itself. Every gate was dark except one, and their footsteps echoed off the floor in a way that felt almost private. Aisha got her camera out before they'd gone fifty feet, which Kerry counted as a moral victory.

"Okay, this is actually good light," Aisha admitted, crouching near a bank of empty seats.

"See? I'm a genius."

"You're a menace with a good instinct occasionally."

They walked the length of the concourse. A cleaning cart sat abandoned near gate B4. A single soda can rolled a few inches when Kerry nudged it with her shoe, and the sound of it went on for way too long. Kerry was already composing the lede in her head. Something about how an airport at night is a body with the blood pumped out of it. Maybe too much. Maybe just right.

It was around gate B9 that they saw the hallway.

It sat between two gates, a service corridor marked with a painted stripe on the floor, and at the end of it was a gray metal door. The sign on it said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, and under that, in smaller letters, MAINTENANCE ACCESS, LEVEL 2.

Kerry stopped walking. Aisha noticed immediately.

"No," Aisha said.

"I didn't say anything."

"Your whole back said it. Your shoulders said it in surround sound."

"Okay, but consider. It's a maintenance corridor. On level two. In an airport built in, what, the sixties? Do you know what's behind doors like that?"

"No, and neither do you, which is my whole point."

Kerry was already moving toward it. "Old infrastructure. Old signage. Layers of the building nobody photographs. This is your series, Aisha. Transit spaces, the bones under the skin."

"You should write ad copy, honestly."

The door had a cheap push-button lock, the kind that's more suggestion than security. Kerry jiggled the handle first, purely for show. Locked, of course.

"Kerry."

"Just a second." She pulled the bobby pin out of her hair, which she'd been wearing for exactly this kind of situation since she was, well, not recently, but for a while. "I read a thing about these locks."

"You read a thing."

"I read a *thing*. It's basically a paddle lock. You press the button, you turn the handle. If the button mechanism gets stuck, you can shim it."

"And where'd you learn to shim a lock, Kerry Gibbons of the small-town gazette?"

"College. There was a girl on my floor who was very into locksport, and I was very into the girl on my floor, and neither of those facts is relevant to anything."

"Mm-hm."

Kerry felt the flush of excitement she always got at moments like this. That was the honest truth of her, and she knew it. She liked being watched being brave. She liked Aisha seeing her do something slightly wrong and slightly skillful. Somewhere in her chest was a twenty-one-year-old, showing off at a college party, and that kid had never really gone away.

The pin slid in along the seam. Kerry wiggled it, felt for the button plunger, felt it catch. Her heart wasn't pounding, but it was up a little, and she liked that. She liked that a lot.

"Come on, come on," she muttered.

"If you set off an alarm, I want it on record that I said no."

"You didn't say no. You said 'no' in a preemptive way."

"Kerry, I swear."

"There." The plunger gave. The handle turned with a cheap clack that sounded enormous in the empty corridor. Kerry looked back at Aisha with what she knew was an obnoxious grin. "Authorized? We are now authorized."

"You're impossible."

"You love it."

"I really do, which is a character flaw I'm working on."

The door opened onto a stairwell going down, all concrete and sodium-yellow light, and a smell of dust and old floor wax that Kerry found weirdly pleasant. The air coming up was warmer than the terminal, and the hum of the airport's machinery came through the walls, a low constant sound like the building breathing.

"See? Totally normal stairwell," Kerry said.

"Totally normal stairwell that was locked."

"Doors get locked. That's what doors do."

There was a sign on the stairwell wall, and Kerry's journalist brain snagged on it before her eyes even finished reading. It was a framed photograph, actually, black and white, the kind of thing airports hang to look like they have a history. It showed a large brick building on a hill. Under it was a caption that read: ST. AUGUSTINE ASYLUM, DEMOLISHED 1963. SITE OF THE PRESENT TERMINAL COMPLEX.

Kerry stood there for a second.

"Aisha."

"What?"

"Come look at this."

Aisha came up the two steps and looked, camera still hanging from her neck. She didn't say anything for a moment. Then, quietly:

"Huh."

"Yeah."

"That's the building this airport is sitting on?"

"That's what it says."

"Kerry, that's an asylum."

"I know."

"You're smiling."

"I'm not smiling."

"You're absolutely smiling."

She was. She couldn't help it. Somewhere under her feet, under all that chrome and fluorescent light, was a whole buried building with its own history, its own stories, maybe its own records, and Kerry Gibbons was the only person in this entire airport standing on the first step of a stairwell leading down to it.

"One hour," Aisha said, in a tone that meant she'd already lost the negotiation and knew it. "Then the shuttle."

"Aisha, do you know what kind of story this could be?"

"I know what kind of trouble this could be. Those are different things, no matter what you think."

"Come on. What's the worst that could happen?"

Aisha gave her a flat look, raised the camera, and snapped a picture of her standing there grinning on the stairs.

"That," Aisha said. "That's the face of the worst that could happen."

The stairs went down two flights. Kerry counted them without meaning to, thirty-four steps, and at the bottom there was a landing and another door, this one unlocked, swinging inward when she pushed it.

"Okay, that's a little creepy," Aisha said. "The unlocked door. Why lock the top one and not this one?"

"Because nobody expects anyone to get past the top one."

"That's not comforting, Kerry."

"I wasn't going for comforting. I was going for interesting."

The corridor down here was different from the service hall upstairs. Upstairs had been painted cinder block, industrial, boring. This was old brick, and the floor was concrete, patched in places with newer gray material that stood out like scars. A single string of lights ran along one wall, caged in wire, buzzing faintly. The warmth was stronger down here, and the machine hum was louder, but underneath it Kerry could hear something else. A sound that came and went. Scratchy. Rhythmic.

"You hear that?" she asked.

"What, the hum?"

"No, under the hum. It kinda sounds like scratching."

Aisha stopped walking and tilted her head. The camera came up off her neck on its strap. "Huh. Yeah. Like something dragging."

"Like fingernails on plaster, sort of. But slow. Steady."

"Rats."

"That's a very steady rat."

"Kerry, I have been to forty-some countries and every rat on earth lives near a food source, and airports are all food sources. It's a rat with a metronome."

Kerry laughed, but she kept her voice low after that, which she noticed she did without deciding to. The corridor bent left, then right, following some older building's logic instead of the airport's grid. She kept snagging on it. This wasn't a maintenance tunnel somebody had dug. This was the asylum's actual basement, and somebody had just routed pipes and conduit through it and called it a day. The caged lights followed the old brick around corners that made no sense for an airport.

Then they hit the jackpot, and Kerry knew it was a jackpot the second she saw it.

There was a room off the corridor, doorway open, no door left on the hinges. Inside, metal shelving stood against one wall, and the shelves were stacked with boxes. Cardboard mostly, water-stained and sagging, but also a couple of ledger books with cracked leather spines. A dusty clipboard hung on a nail. Somebody, at some point, had used this as storage and then, apparently, just forgotten it existed.

"Oh my god," Kerry said. "Aisha. Oh my god."

"I see it."

"This is a records room. This is an actual records room."

"For a demolished building."

"For the demolished building. Do you know how many journalists would trade a kidney for a forgotten archive? People dump old records all the time, nobody ever goes back for them, and these," she pulled the top box off the shelf, sneezed at the dust, and set it on a low shelf, "these are patient intake logs."

"You can tell that from the box?"

"The box says intake, 1954 to 1958, in pencil. Aisha. Aisha, this is a story."

"It's a story about paperwork."

"It's a story about an asylum that got demolished in 1963 and buried under an airport, and nobody talks about it, and the records are still sitting here. Somebody made a decision to just seal this stuff in instead of dealing with it. That's always the story. The sealing-in."

Aisha had drifted to the ledger books. She opened one carefully, holding the spine, and Kerry watched her face go tight with worry. "These are photographs," Aisha said. "Staff, I think. Group shots."

"Let me see."

A woman in a nurse's uniform stood at the center of the first photograph, one hand on a gurney. The image was sharp, better than most photos from the era, and the woman was looking slightly off camera, like something had caught her attention a half second before the shutter clicked. Kerry felt a small cold spot in her stomach and told it to settle down.

"She looks familiar," Aisha said.

"She looks like every old nurse photo ever taken."

"No, I mean, hmm. Maybe I'm thinking of a movie. She's got that look though, doesn't she?"

The scratching sound came again, and this time it was closer. Or clearer. Kerry couldn't decide which. It had a rhythm to it, she realized. Not random gnawing. Slow and even, like a pen across paper, or a fingernail dragging a line down a wall, then lifting, then dragging again. Scratch. Lift. Scratch. Lift.

"Okay," Kerry said, and her voice came out quieter than she wanted. "You hear the pattern, right? Tell me you hear the pattern."

"I hear it. It's probably a pipe expanding. Buildings make noises, Kerry, especially old buildings with hot air running through them."

"That's not what pipes sound like."

"How many haunted basements have you been in?"

"Zero, so far, but the night is young."

Aisha laughed, and the laugh helped, and Kerry was grateful to her for that. This was the whole balance of them, and Kerry knew it. She ran toward the interesting thing and Aisha made the interesting thing not eat her. Two years of this exact rhythm, and it worked. She pulled another box down, this one marked transfers, and was reaching for a