The Archive Opens

Tabby Estrada was thirty-three years old, and her life had become a list. She kept the list in her head, and it went like this: wake up, coffee, drive to the gallery, catalog, drive home, microwave something, sleep. Her divorce had been final in March, seven months ago, and the only real change it had made to her routine was that the microwave something now happened at a counter instead of a kitchen table.

She thought about this on a Tuesday while she sat at her desk in the gallery, a converted Victorian house on the edge of campus with high ceilings and track lighting and a furnace that clanked at odd hours. The gallery was quiet. The student assistant had gone home at four. Outside, the October light was going gold over the ivied buildings, and somewhere down the hill the grad students were starting their cheap beer hour at the bars on Maple Street.

Seven months divorced from Daniel, who was a decent man who had wanted a decent life, and who had not done anything wrong except exist in the same house as her while she slowly went numb. That was the honest version. She had signed the papers in a lawyer's office that smelled like carpet cleaner, and then she had gone to work, and nothing had changed, which told her something about how much of herself she had already given up before the marriage even ended.

The trouble was, she couldn't remember the last time she had done anything that scared her.

Well. She could, actually. She just didn't let herself think about it much.

Five years ago, at an opening for a photography show, she had kissed Alex Dawkins. She was twenty-eight then, recently hired as curator, and Alex was twenty-nine, still finishing his doctorate, helping her hang the last few frames an hour before doors. They had been alone in the front room. He had said something funny about the artist's statement, she had laughed too hard, and then they were kissing against the wall by the window, his hand at her jaw, and it had been the single most awake moment of her adult life.

He had ended it. Pulled back, breathing hard, and said, "We work together. This is a bad idea," and she had agreed, because it was easier than arguing, and they had never spoken of it again. Five years of polite colleagues. Five years of her occasionally catching him looking at her and then looking away.

She had done the safe thing, in other words. Again.

The bell over the gallery door rang at seven that evening. Tabby looked up from her cataloging and saw Alex come in with a box of archival folders under one arm, shaking rain off his jacket.

"It's coming down out there," he said. "Do you have the sector four inventory done?"

"Half of it. The rest is in the basement and I didn't feel like going down there alone in the dark."

"Scared of the basement, Estrada?"

"I'm not scared of the basement. I just have standards about lighting and spiders."

Alex set the box down and pulled a chair around to her side of the desk, which he did not usually do. He was thirty-four now, a full assistant professor of folklore with an office in the humanities building and a habit of teasing her that she had learned to live with. He sat down and looked at her in a way that made her put her pen down.

"You know what I think?" he said.

"Enlighten me."

"I think you're careful. Careful all the way through. You park in the same spot every day. You eat lunch at eleven forty-five so nobody's in the break room. You haven't taken a risk since..."

He stopped there. She felt her face go warm.

"Since when," she said.

"You know since when."

"I don't actually." She crossed her arms. "Say it if you're going to say it."

"The opening," he said, quieter. "Five years ago. Which was my fault, by the way, and I've said that to myself plenty of times, just never to you."

Tabby did not know what to do with that, so she picked up her pen and put it back down. "Fine. I'm careful. So what."

"So here's a dare." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "The basement archive. You spend one night down there. Alone, after hours, with nothing but a candle and your phone. Old paper, no lights, the furnace clanking away like a haunted house soundtrack. You make it till sunrise and I will never call you cautious again. I'll retire the word."

"That's ridiculous," she said.

"It's a folklorist's dare. Every campus has one story or another about that basement. Nothing's down there but accession files and a dehumidifier, and we both know it. But it would prove you can still do something foolish."

"Why do you care whether I can do something foolish?"

Alex looked at her, and for a second there was something in his face that she remembered from five years ago, a heat under the politeness. "Because I liked you better when you weren't," he said. "And I've wondered for a long time if she was still in there."

The gallery clock ticked. The rain hit the front windows. Tabby sat there and thought about her list, the one in her head, and how the most interesting item on it in seven months had been switching from oatmeal to eggs.

"All night," she said. "In the dark."

"Candle and phone. That's the deal."

"And if I say no?"

"Then nothing. We do inventory on Friday and I buy you a coffee and it's a joke, same as always."

She should have said no. She knew that, in some dull part of her brain that had handled decisions like Daniel and the lawyer and the carpet-cleaner smell. But there was the other thing too, the real thing, which was that she wanted to see that look in his eyes again, and she wanted to prove something to herself, and the two of those together were stronger than her good sense.

"Okay," she said. "Saturday night. But if I hear one rat I'm coming upstairs and you owe me a month of coffee."

"One rat and you're out, fair. Zero rats and sunrise, and I never say the word cautious again." He stood up and picked up his box, and at the door he paused. "Tabby. For what it's worth, ending it that night is the dumbest thing I've done."

"Goodnight, Alex," she said, and he went out into the rain, and she sat at her desk for a while afterward with her heart beating faster than it had in years.

Saturday, then. She would have to buy a candle.

Saturday came slower than she wanted it to. Tabby spent the week cataloging like normal, eating lunch at eleven forty-five like normal, and telling herself the whole thing was a joke between colleagues. She bought a candle at the hardware store on Elm Street anyway. A big jar one, three wicks, the kind that smelled like nothing at all. She also bought a flashlight, because she wasn't an idiot, and a thermos of coffee.

At nine that night she locked the gallery's front door behind her and the bell over it clinked, louder than usual with nobody there. Alex had left at eight, at least she thought he had. He'd stopped by at seven with a pizza box, and they'd eaten upstairs at her desk like it was any other night.

"Rules," he'd said, wiping his hands on a napkin. "One night. Candle and phone. You can come up for the bathroom, I'm not a monster. But you sleep down there or you don't count it."

"And you'll know how? You going to check on me?"

"Nope. That would ruin it. You text me at sunrise and I'll believe you, because you don't lie."

"I lie plenty."

"Not to me."

She hadn't known what to say to that, so she'd eaten her pizza.

Now she stood at the top of the basement stairs with the candle in one hand and the flashlight in her pocket. The door was open and the stairs went down into black, and the furnace at the bottom clanked once, like it had heard her coming. She lit the candle with a kitchen match, and the little heat circle of light made the stairwell almost worse, all those corners the flame couldn't reach.

The archive was two rooms really, the front one with the accession files and the back one with the dehumidifier and the older boxes. Somebody had put a couch down there years ago, a brown plaid thing with a sag in the middle. She set the candle on the metal shelf, unrolled the sleeping bag she'd brought, and sat down on the couch with her thermos.

It was fine. It was a basement. The furnace clanked. The dehumidifier hummed. She checked her phone at nine forty and there was a text from her sister about a birthday dinner, and she answered it, and everything was normal.

At ten thirty the candle did something odd.

There was no draft down there. She'd checked the vents her first week on the job, back when she still noticed things, and the basement had almost no airflow at all, which was the whole problem with the paper smell. But the flame bent sideways, hard, all three wicks leaning the same direction like wind had come through the wall. Then it straightened up again, like nothing happened.

"Okay," she said out loud, to the room. "That's a thing."

Her voice came back at her flat and small. She texted Alex, because texting him was easier than thinking.

Me: Flame just bent sideways. No draft. Should I be flattered the ghost hates me already?

She stared at the screen. The little dots appeared, then stopped, then appeared again.

Alex: Still time to quit.

That was it. No joke back, no emoji, nothing. She read it three times. It didn't sound like him. Or it sounded exactly like him, like the part of him that ended the kiss five years ago and called it a bad idea while his ears went red.

Me: Not quitting. You'd retire my favorite word.

Alex: Your favorite word is standards.

She smiled at that one, a real smile, and put the phone face down on the couch cushion.

It was after that when she heard the breathing.

At first she thought it was the dehumidifier. It made a two-part sound, hum and rattle, and she'd been hearing it all night. But she got up and walked to the back room and the dehumidifier was just humming its hum, and the sound was still there, behind her, in the front room. Low. Rhythmic. In and out, slow, like somebody asleep on the plaid couch. Like somebody asleep three feet from where she'd been sitting.

She stood in the doorway between the rooms with the flashlight in her hand and did not turn it on.

The breathing kept its pace. It didn't speed up when she moved. It didn't stop when she stopped. It was just there, patient, the way the furnace was patient with its clanking, except furnaces don't breathe.

"Hello?" she said.

Nothing answered her. The breathing went in. The breathing went out. The candle in the front room bent sideways again, all three wicks, and held there this time, leaning toward the back room like it was pointing at something.

Her hand shook when she picked up the phone. She typed with one thumb.

Me: Alex. There's something breathing in here with me. I'm not doing this as a bit. Answer me.

The dots appeared immediately. He was awake, then, sitting somewhere with his phone in his hand, and that was almost worse.

Alex: Describe it.

Me: Slow breathing. Front room. Candle bends with no draft. Twice now.

The dots stopped. She watched the screen. The basement was cold in a way it hadn't been cold at nine forty, and she could see her own breath now, faint, mixing in with the