The Night Shift Tutor

Rufus Smyth, thirty-four years old and recently signed to a two-week security contract, pulled up to St. Aldric's Preparatory Academy at nine on a Tuesday night and immediately wondered why he'd agreed to this.

Well, he knew why. Money. And a veteran's discount so good the principal had practically teleported the paperwork onto his desk.

The place looked exactly as he remembered it, which was the problem. He'd gone to school here, sixteen years ago, and he had hoped the years would have plastered over all that history. Instead the oak doors, the stone archway, the ivy gone red with autumn, all of it just sat there being nostalgic at him.

A light was on in the library. That was his first real surprise. A big yellow rectangle of it, glowing out across the quad as if the building itself had left a lamp on for somebody.

"Nobody said anything about night classes," he muttered, grabbing his bag.

The security shed was a squat little hut over by the maintenance garage, and the man who came out of it was built like the shed's older, sturdier brother. Sixty-ish. Flannel. A thermos in one hand and an expression of deep institutional suspicion on his face.

"You the contractor?" the man asked.

"Rufus Smyth. You'd be?"

"Sherman Brooks. Head of maintenance, going on thirty years." He stuck out a hand like he was testing Rufus's grip for structural integrity. "Didn't know they were sending somebody so young."

"I'm thirty-four."

"Huh. You look tired for thirty-four."

"Thanks, Sherman. That's very welcoming."

Sherman shrugged and led him inside through the service corridor, handing over a clipboard with a checklist on it and a flashlight that weighed about as much as a brick. "Your rounds are simple. Doors, windows, fire exits. Nothing happens here at night except me and the boiler."

"The library light's on. Is there a study group or something?"

That got a reaction. Sherman stopped walking so abruptly that Rufus nearly went into the back of him.

"Who's in the library?"

"Beats me. Saw the light from the drive."

"It'll be Davies," Sherman said, and something in his voice changed, flattened out. "Night librarian. She does her own hours, which is technically not allowed and technically nobody stops her." He resumed walking. "The library's your last stop anyway. Leave her to it."

"Anything I should know about the building before I wander around it in the dark?"

"Nope."

"That was quick."

"I'm a quick man."

Rufus did his rounds. Doors, windows, fire exits, all shut and locked, all boring. The school at night was a different animal than the school by day, all long shadows and radiators ticking like something was counting down. Old paper smell everywhere, and floor wax. He kept his eyes off the trophy cases with the old team photos because he did not need to see his own face, young and grinning, staring back at him from behind glass.

He saved the library for last, which was cowardice dressed up as procedure, and then he made himself push the big door open anyway.

The light was coming from the reading room at the back. And there was a woman there, sitting cross-legged on a table with three books open around her and a thermos of her own, and Rufus's whole plan of keeping his distance lasted roughly four seconds.

Because it was Shelley. Shelley Davies, thirty-three now, night librarian and part-time admin according to the contract file he'd skimmed, and the file had not prepared him for the fact that she looked exactly like the last summer of his twenty-second year.

"Oh," she said, seeing him. Then, louder, "Oh, no. No, no, no. They hired you?"

"Hello, Shelley."

"Rufus Smyth." She slid off the table, and for a second neither of them seemed to know what to do with their hands. "You went and got... broad."

"Security work does that."

"Right. Yes. Obviously!" She pressed her palms flat against her jeans like she was drying them. "So. They hired you. For the, uh..."

"The after-hours audit, yeah. Budget cuts, veteran's discount. I'm here two weeks."

"Two weeks. Great. Fantastic." She laughed, a short weird sound. "Of all the security firms in the tri-county area."

"I could say the same about night librarians."

"I like the library at night! It's quiet!"

"It's clearly not quiet, you're sitting on the furniture making noises at books."

She pointed at him, and that gesture, that exact gesture, unlocked about a decade of memory Rufus had filed under do not open. "That's the thing," she said, dropping her voice. "Actually, okay, you're here now, so listen. Something is going on in this building."

"Something like what?"

And that was when the bookshelf came down.

It didn't tip. It didn't lean. It went from standing to flat on the floor between one blink and the next, three shelves of hardcover poetry hitting the oak boards with a boom that rolled down every corridor in the east wing. Both of them stood dead still. Dust drifted down through the lamplight like slow snow.

"Something like that," Shelley said, very calmly, like a person narrating her own heart attack.

Rufus moved first, of course. Old habits. He was up on the shelf rungs checking for somebody behind it, checking the window latch, checking the door, and finding nothing at all. "Was anybody in here when I walked in?"

"Besides you, me, and the approximately four hundred books now on the floor? No."

"Could the shelf have been overloaded?"

"It's been overloaded since 1990, it just chose tonight to have opinions about it." She crouched by the fallen shelf, not touching it, just looking. "This is the fourth one this month. Things falling. Cold spots. The books rearrange themselves when nobody's here, and I don't mean shelving errors, I mean the whole Dewey system gets shuffled like a card deck."

"Uh huh."

"And there's a smell." She said it fast, embarrassed. "Perfume. Old-fashioned kind. It comes and goes and it's always in empty rooms."

Rufus looked down the dark length of the reading room, at all that polished oak and shadow, and felt the hair on his arms stand up in a way he wanted to blame on the heating. "Okay. So you're telling me this place is haunted."

"I'm telling you nothing else fits! I did the rational thing first, I promise. I checked the HVAC, I checked for drafts, I checked the shelf anchors, I filed a maintenance request that Sherman answered with a single word and it was 'no.'" She stood, brushing dust off her knees. "I'm not crazy, Rufus. I've got witnesses. Students heard the shelf in the stacks fall last Thursday. Nobody was in the stacks."

"You've got a lot of nerve using the word 'crazy' and 'witnesses' in the same sentence with a straight face."

"Do you have a better explanation?"

He did not, and the silence said so. She actually smiled at that, small and victorious, and something about the smile did more damage than the falling shelf had.

"Fine," he said. "Fine. Look, I'm being paid to walk these halls and write down anything unusual. Ghosts count as unusual."

"So you'll help?"

"I'll document. Document is the word I'm comfortable with. Times, locations, temperatures if I can borrow a thermometer. We treat it like a report, not like an episode of a ghost show."

"Deal." She stuck her hand out and he shook it, and her grip was still exactly as firm as he remembered, which was another entry for the do-not-open file. "Tomorrow night, nine o'clock, we start with the annex."

"The annex?"

"The old headmaster's study, off the back of the library. It's been locked since before I worked here. It's also the room where the perfume is strongest." She said it brightly, the way people say brightly terrible things.

Sherman had mentioned the annex, sort of, by refusing to. Rufus thought about that flattened voice in the corridor. Leave her to it.

"Does Sherman know you've been going out there?"

"Sherman knows the annex exists, which is apparently one mention more than he prefers." Shelley started re-shelving books off the fallen shelf, working fast, not looking at him. "He'll come around. He always does. Thirty years in a building does something to a person, I think. It makes the building yours, and then everything in it is your business, even the parts you'd rather not have."

Rufus picked up an armload of poetry and helped, because it was either that or stand there staring at her, and staring felt like the more dangerous job.

"Two weeks," she said again, quieter, almost to herself.

"Two weeks," he agreed. "We'll have your ghost filed and photographed by Friday."

"And after that?"

"After that I go home and you keep sitting on tables, apparently."

She laughed for real this time. Somewhere down the dark hall, a radiator ticked. And from the direction of the locked annex, faint but unmistakable, came the smell of old-fashioned perfume.

Shelley froze mid-shelve. "You smell that?"

"Yeah," Rufus said. "Yeah, I do."

The next night, Wednesday, Shelley was waiting outside the annex with a ring of keys and the expression of a woman about to commit a minor crime.

"Sherman's not on tonight," she said by way of hello. "He left at six. I checked."

"You checked his schedule?"

"I checked whether his thermos was on the counter in the maintenance kitchen. His thermos is like a bear going into hibernation. When it's there, he's settled in. It's gone, he's gone. It's basically science."

"That's not science, that's stalking a thermos."

"Stalking a thermos and getting results, thank you very much." She held up the keys. "Also, look what I found in the admin office. The annex key has been sitting in a drawer marked SPARE MISC since at least 2011."

"So nobody's guarding the door, just misfiling it. Good system."

The lock took some persuading. The key turned eventually with a grinding complaint, and the door swung open on a room that smelled, immediately and overwhelmingly, of old paper and that perfume. Old-fashioned, floral, faintly powdery. It was the kind of scent that had a person attached to it, somewhere, sometime.

"Okay, wow," Shelley said, fanning her hand in front of her nose. "That's a lot."

The annex was the old headmaster's study, and it still looked it. A heavy desk. A leather chair with the stuffing coming out of one arm. Shelves of ledgers. A tall window with ivy pressed against the glass from outside like something wanted in. Everything wore a grey film of dust except, oddly, the chair, whose armrests were worn clean and shiny.

"Look at the chair," Rufus said. "Everything's dusty but the chair."

"Maybe mice."

"Mice don't polish armrests."

"Fine. It's creepy. Noted. Add it to the report." She was already unpacking her bag: a little tripod, a webcam, a laptop, a strip of tape. "Principal Stein signed off on the security audit, so technically this counts as security equipment. I looked it up."

"You looked up whether a webcam counts as security equipment?"

"I looked up whether the principal would ask questions, and the answer is she doesn't want to know anything that might cost money. So we're golden."

They set the camera on a shelf facing the desk, taped down the cable, and Rufus aimed it while Shelley clicked through the laptop's settings. Their hands met at the same time over the same cable, both of them reaching to untangle it, and neither of them pulled back fast.

"Sorry," he said.

"It's fine." She didn't move her hand either. The perfume smell had faded a little, which somehow made the room quieter, or the two of them quieter, or both.

Rufus had been rehearsing not-thinking-about-this for two days and was losing badly. "Shelley."

"Yeah?"

"You know how this went last time."

"Badly, because you shipped out and I cried into a novelty mug for a month, and then we both got on with it." She said it lightly but not carelessly. "That was twelve years ago. I'm thirty-three, you're thirty-four, and I'd like to think we've both improved at talking."

"Marginally."

"Marginally." She laughed. "Look, if this is going to be weird, tell me now, because we've got two weeks of chasing a ghost together and I'd rather not spend them pretending my hands aren't sweating."

He looked at her. She looked back. The ivy scratched at the window in a little gust, like an editorial comment.

"Can I kiss you?" he asked.

"Yes," she said, with relief, like he'd finally answered a question she'd been grading. "Obviously. I've been sitting on tables at you all week."

He kissed her, and it was twelve years gone in about four seconds. Her hand found the front of his jacket and his found the small of her back, and they stood there in the dusty headmaster's study kissing like the room wasn't haunted, which was an optimism the room declined to share, because the temperature dropped about ten degrees in the space of a breath.

They broke apart. "Did you feel that?" she whispered.

"Cold. Yeah." He looked at the laptop. "Camera's recording. We should probably..."

"Probably," she agreed, and neither of them moved for another second, which said something, and then they packed up fast and got out.

The footage, reviewed Thursday evening in the warm reading room over two vending machine coffees, showed eleven hours of an empty room. A chair. Dust. Around two in the morning, the temperature reading on the little on-screen display dipped sharply and the image stuttered, and Shelley, chin nearly on Rufus's shoulder to see the screen, said, "There. Rewind it."

Nothing in the frame moved. But the cold showed on the display like a dent in the air, right where the chair was, and it sat there for forty minutes before fading.

"Forty minutes of sitting in a chair that isn't there," Shelley said. "Or is there. Ugh."

"It's data," Rufus said, writing the time down. "That's all it is.