The Night Composer

*This one came from a late-night thought about how the scariest places are the ones we think we know. Thanks for reading, hope it makes you look twice at your own office after dark.*

Tessa had done her share of dumb things at two in the morning, but driving across town to a recording studio on a weeknight, at thirty-four years old, with a key card she probably should not have had, felt like it deserved its own category. The streets were empty except for one bus and a guy on a scooter, and she watched the warehouse come up on the left with its big glass front and the loading dock doors nobody had ever bothered to repaint. She parked next to Ralph's sedan, which annoyed her a little, because it meant he had beaten her there again, and he would be smug about it, and she would let him be smug, which annoyed her more.

The key card worked on the side door like it always did, a soft beep and a green light, and the hallway beyond it was dark except for the emergency strips along the floor and the red standby glow leaking out of the control room at the end. The building smelled like carpet and old coffee. It had been a textile warehouse once, then a furniture place, and now it was the Carter Music Studio, which was a fancy way of saying a bunch of glass-walled booths bolted into a big concrete box downtown. Tessa had been freelancing for the studio for three years, and she knew the sound of her own shoes on this tile better than she knew most people.

Ralph was sitting in the producer's chair in the control room with the only light coming off two monitors, so his face was blue-lit and half shadow, and he had his shoes off and one foot tucked under him as if he lived there. He was forty-one, had never married, and liked to say marriage was a demo he never wanted to mix. Six months ago the thing between them had started, and since then he had developed a habit of appearing in rooms before she got to them.

"Hey," he said, not turning around.

"How did you know it was me."

"Nobody else comes in at two a.m. on a Wednesday. Ahmed comes in at four, and he has a key for the dock door." He swiveled the chair around and looked her over like he was reading a meter. "You brought your laptop."

"I always bring my laptop."

"You brought your laptop and your nice headphones, the ones you claim you hate. That means you're ready for something."

Tessa dropped her bag on the couch against the wall and sat down next to it. The couch in the control room had been there since before she started and had a permanent dip in the middle cushion, and she fit into the dip without thinking about it anymore. On the desk there were two empty coffee cups and a receipt from the taco place on Ninth.

"So," she said. "The surprise."

"Right." He laced his fingers behind his head. "Here's the deal. I've got a client who needs a track, and I lied to him and said I had a composer who could turn something around in one night. That composer is you."

"You lied to a client."

"I lied to a client. I do that. The point is you have until dawn to write something from scratch, full arrangement, and if you finish it, you get a surprise."

"What kind of surprise."

"A good one."

"Ralph."

"A very good one, and before you ask, no, I'm not telling you, because the whole point is you don't know. That's the game. You've been saying for two months that you miss working on something that scares you a little, and I listened, which should frighten you more than the deadline."

Tessa looked at the monitors, at the empty session file already open on the big screen, named TESSA_ONE_NIGHT in his stupid all-caps habit. She was tired, she had a real deadline Friday, and none of that mattered as much as she wanted it to, because the truth was she had been bored for about six months in every part of her life except this building and this man, and he knew it.

"Fine," she said. "But if I finish, the surprise happens tonight, in this building, and you don't get to reschedule it."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

"And I'm billing him double for the lie."

"Triple. Take triple, he can afford it."

She got up and went into the live room to set up, which meant pulling out the keyboard controller, checking the cabling, waking up the monitors, all the boring little rituals that made her brain go quiet enough to work. The live room was the big one, the glass box in the middle of the floor with the high ceiling and the panels on every wall, and it was cold the way the building always got after midnight when the HVAC cycled down. She could see Ralph through the glass, silhouetted in the control room, and he gave her a thumbs up through the window like a goon, and she gave it back, and then she got to work.

For the first hour it went well, actually. She built a drum loop, messed with a synth patch until it had some teeth, laid down a bass line that she liked more than she expected to. The building stayed quiet around her in the way it did, that thick soundproofed quiet where you can hear your own blood if you pay attention. She noticed the clock on the wall said 3:12, which meant she had about two and a half hours left, and she figured she was maybe a third of the way there.

That was when she heard the hum.

At first she wrote it off as the HVAC, because the HVAC in this building made a range of noises and she had catalogued most of them over three years, the rattle in the northeast duct, the click of the compressor, the low drone that came through the floor. But this hum was different. It was coming from the back of the building, from the direction of the old booth, and it had a rhythm to it, a slow pulse, like something breathing out and then waiting and then breathing out again. The HVAC did not wait. The HVAC was a machine and machines did not pause between breaths, and Tessa stood in the live room with her hand still on the keyboard and listened to it pulse four times, five, six, steady as a metronome set to some tempo she couldn't count.

The old booth was the small one at the back of the floor, the one from the studio's first fit-out that nobody used anymore because the sight lines were bad and the wiring was old. It had a padded door and no window into the control room, and it was where old gear went to die.

"Ralph," she called through the glass, not loud, because loud felt wrong in a way she couldn't explain.

He looked up, pulled off one headphone. "What."

"Is the HVAC doing something weird tonight?"

"It's always doing something weird. Why."

"Come listen to this."

He came around into the live room with his shoes in his hand, which he did sometimes, padding around on the concrete like he owned the place, which he did, and they stood together in the middle of the room and listened. The hum kept going. Pulse, pause, pulse, pause. Ralph's face did something she had never seen it do in six months, which was go carefully blank.

"That's not the HVAC," he said.

"No."

"It's coming from the old booth."

"I know where it's coming from."

"Okay, well." He put his shoes back on, which she found interesting, like his feet suddenly needed armor. "Nothing in there makes noise. There's no power run to that booth anymore, I had it cut three years ago when we did the renovation."

"Then what's making the sound."

"I don't know. Could be the compressor carrying through the ducts, some resonance thing, buildings do that," he said it in the tone of a man listing reasons so he would not have to pick one. "Could be water in a pipe. Could be pigeons."

"Pigeons don't keep a beat, Ralph."

"Alright, well, let's look, then, if you're going to be like that."

They crossed the floor together, past the two main booths, past the lounge with its dark vending machine humming a much dumber hum, down the short corridor to the old booth door. The pulsing was louder here, close, and Tessa could feel it now, faintly, in the floor under her feet, like the building had a heartbeat and it was on the other side of this door. The hallway emergency strip threw a thin green line along the frame.

Ralph put his hand on the padded door handle and looked back at her.

"If there's a squatter in my booth I'm calling the cops," he said. "And if it's pigeons, you owe me a coffee."

"And if it's neither?"

"Then I owe you a coffee and we don't stay in this hallway." He turned the handle and pulled the door open toward them, and the hum stopped, all at once, like something had heard them coming and decided to hold its breath.

The booth was empty. That was the first thing, the thing they both stood there and absorbed for a second, the padded door open, the light from the hallway strip falling across a stack of road cases and the dead piano, and nothing in there at all, no pigeons, no squatter, no source for a hum that had sounded close enough to touch. Ralph stepped in first, careful, and walked the little room end to end with his phone flashlight on, checking behind the piano and along the wall seams where the soundproofing had buckled a little with age.

"Nothing," he said, coming back out. "There's nothing in there."

"There's nothing in there now."

"Meaning what, it got up and walked out?"

"I don't know. I'm not saying anything. I'm saying the hum stopped when you opened the door and now there's nothing in the room and that's two facts I don't like."

He looked at her, and in the green wash of the emergency strip his face looked older than 41, older by a lot, and then, which surprised her, he laughed. It was a short laugh, mostly air, the kind you let out when the other option is saying something true and scary. "Okay. Okay, well, it's 3:15 in the morning and you have a track due at dawn and I have a client I lied to, so here is what I propose. We go back to work. We write the thing. In the morning I call an electrician and a locksmith and possibly a priest, in that order, and we never speak of this again."

"You don't believe in priests."

"I believe in somebody who takes my money and tells me the building is fine."

They walked back out onto the main floor, and Tessa noticed her hands were shaking a little, not from fear exactly, or not only from fear, but from the whole night stacked up, the 2 a.m. drive across town, the dead building, the lie she was going to bill triple for, and the hum that had pulsed like a thing waiting. She stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the live room glass and the two main booths beyond it, and Ralph stood next to her, and neither of them moved for a moment, and then he said, "Come here," and pulled her into the nearest booth.

It was booth two, the smaller of the two, with the mixing desk along the back wall and a window that looked out onto the dark main floor, and it was cold in there because the HVAC had cycled down after midnight and the building went cold the way old warehouse buildings do, slowly and then all at once. He shut the door behind them and hit the little lamp on the desk instead of the overheads, and the room went down to one warm circle of light.

"Ralph," she said. "We have two hours and fifty minutes."

"I know exactly what we have. I did the math on the way back down the hall."

"We're supposed to be working."

"We are working. This is how I manage stress. You've been managing stress your way for six months and it's been working fine for both of us, so don't change the system on me now."

She laughed, which she hadn't expected to do, and the laugh broke some of the wire out of her spine, and she turned and looked at him in the lamplight, this man she had known for three years as a client and six months as something else, a man who had never married and said he preferred it that way and who had never once, in all that time, made her feel like a scheduling problem. He was looking at her with the particular patience he had, the one that waited instead of pushed.

"Ask me," she said.

"Can I kiss you?"

"Yes."

It started there, against the mixing desk, which was an awful place to be pressed against if you cared about faders, and neither of them cared about faders. His mouth was cold from the hallway and his hands were not, and she got her fingers into his shirt and pulled him closer until there was no space left between them, and the desk edge dug into the back of her thighs and she did not move away from it. He worked her shirt up and she got it over her head and dropped it on the chair, and her bra went after it, and the air of the cold booth raised goosebumps along her arms and made her nipples stiff and aching before he even touched them.

"God, you're freezing," he said, palms flat on her ribs, warming them.

"You're the one who wanted to work after midnight in an unheated warehouse."

"You could have said no."

"I drove forty minutes at two in the morning on a weeknight. That was me not saying no."

He laughed into her neck and then his mouth went lower, and he took one nipple in his mouth and sucked until she gasped and her hips came forward off the desk on their own. His hands were busy lower down, getting her jeans open, and she helped him, shoving them down over her hips with an efficiency that would have embarrassed her if she'd had any attention to spare for embarrassment, but she didn't, she was all the way in her body for the first time in months, every hour of boredom and flatness burned off like fog. He got his own belt open, and she reached in and wrapped her hand around his cock, hard and warm in the cold room, and stroked him twice and felt him shudder.

"Tell me what you want," he said, mouth against her ear.

"Fuck me. Right here, right now, against this desk, before I come to my senses."

He turned her around and bent her over the desk, careful of the faders even now, one hand braced flat next to the console, and he pushed into her slow, inch by inch, until he was deep and she