The Night Shift
I. The Night Shift
The hospital had been closed for twelve years, yet the lights on the fourth floor still flickered every night.
No one was supposed to notice. No one except Aaron Vale, the night security guard who’d stopped asking questions months ago.
It began as a hum in the walls—like distant machinery still running somewhere deep in the bones of the building. Then came the elevator, its doors sighing open by themselves at exactly 3:03 a.m., every single night. It only ever opened to one floor, one that didn’t exist on the schematics: Ward E.
The first night Aaron stepped inside, the elevator didn’t move. It sank.
When the doors opened again, the world outside was washed in pale blue light. Rows of rusted beds lined the corridor, each one occupied by a patient with a sheet drawn up to their throat. Their chests didn’t rise or fall—but their eyes followed him.
Dozens of them. Empty, cloudy eyes.
He tried to speak, but his voice felt trapped behind his ribs.
A nurse stood at the end of the hall, her cap crisp white, her smile fixed and wide.
“Visiting hours are over,” she said softly. “But you came back. You always come back.”
Aaron backed toward the elevator, slamming the “close” button again and again. The doors crept shut like something reluctant to obey.
When he woke up, he was back at his desk. The clock read 3:03 a.m.
That was three weeks ago.
Now, every night, he hears the intercom whisper his name. Every night, the elevator opens, waiting.
And every morning, when the new guard arrives, the logbook shows Aaron’s signature written again and again on the same line—
as if he never left.
