Chapter 16

For a few more seconds we stared silently at the white sheet of paper.

Then I carefully folded it back in half, trying to match the old creases exactly. For some reason it felt wrong to keep it unfolded. Every object in this world has a natural, safe state. This letter preferred to stay closed.

"Do we take it?" I asked.

Helen nodded, brief and decisive.

I was already slipping the folded sheet into her grey folder when the caretaker appeared cautiously in the doorway. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, the keys jingling softly in his hand.

"Sorry… Did you find anything? Any old documents?"

I shook my head automatically:

"No. Nothing."

"Shame," the old man said with complete sincerity. There wasn't a trace of professional curiosity in his voice. An ordinary London pensioner who just wanted to be useful. He'd already turned to leave, but paused right at the threshold. "Though…"

Helen and I reacted at the same instant — turning our heads in sync.

"Though what?" I asked quickly.

The caretaker frowned, rubbing his unshaven chin in a funny way.

"About two weeks ago… yes, that's right, last Tuesday. A man came round here too. Asking specifically about this office on the third floor."

Behind me, Helen straightened slowly, taut as a wire.

"Did he look like us? From a ministry?" she asked.

"No… not at all," the caretaker thought about it. "More like… tired. Very tired, you understand? You looked at him and it seemed like the man hadn't slept in weeks. Bags under his eyes, a heavy look. Said he was assessing the property. His papers were all in order, official forms, everything proper. Paid cash. Very polite. Looked the place over for ten minutes, no more. And left."

"Was he looking for something?" I asked. "Checking the walls?"

"I suppose… actually, no," the old man shook his head. "He acted a bit strange. Like he hadn't come to search, just to confirm that nothing was left here anymore. Stood in the middle of the room, looked around the corners, sighed heavily — and that was it."

A dense, muffled silence settled over the empty office. Through the window came the hiss of tires on wet asphalt.

"Do you remember his face?" Helen took a step toward the old man.

He smiled, apologetic, bewildered:

"Funny thing… not really, now. I remember the voice — quiet, a bit hoarse. I remember the coat — dark, expensive, but badly worn. I remember he kept coughing into a handkerchief. But the face… no. Nothing at all. I try to remember, and it's like it's been cut off. A grey smudge."

We already knew that symptom.

When the caretaker went back down to the ground floor to his plumber, giving us five more minutes, we started going over the room again. Not like investigators hunting for clues, but like people trying to reconstruct the logic of someone else's movements. Someone who'd been here before us.

I went back to the lighter square on the carpet. Knelt down on one knee, put my face almost to the floor, catching the sidelong light from the window.

And that's when a cold sweat broke over me. The compression marks in the carpet were too deep. Too solid. Whatever this object was, it hadn't stood here for one year. Or five. The backing had practically fused into the concrete beneath it, and the carpet fibers had lost every trace of spring, permanently remembering some colossal foreign weight.

"Helen," I called, without getting up off my knee.

She came over silently. I pointed to the edge of the flattened square:

"See the pattern?"

She studied it closely for a long time, head tilted slightly. The light from the window fell sideways, and in that slanted glow the crushed fibers cast tiny shadows, making the square stand out clearly, almost like a footprint in snow.

"It's not furniture," I said. "Furniture doesn't weigh this much, and no one keeps a piece in the middle of an empty reception for decades."

"No. Not furniture."

Helen walked slowly to the panoramic window. Looked down into the internal light well, where the bins sat soaking in the rain, then turned back to the empty room.

"Michael…" her voice came out flat, as if she were speaking words she hadn't fully grasped herself yet. "Do you know what's directly below us?"

"The dentist and the insurance office. We saw the signs."

"Not in the building," she pulled the phone from her pocket. Without turning on mobile data, Helen opened an offline photo of the building's cross-section plans — one she'd taken of the fire-evacuation board by the lift. For a few seconds her finger traced slowly over the faded construction lines. Then it stopped. And she silently turned the screen toward me.

The spot of our light-colored square on the plan matched the axis lines of the load-bearing structure exactly, down to the millimeter. But below it, on the lower floors, there were no rooms. No service niches, no ventilation shafts, no basement. On the architectural drawing, under this exact section of the third floor, there was just one terse word written into an empty rectangle:

VOID

A void. A sealed shaft running clean through the whole building from foundation to roof, boxed in by solid concrete walls.

"A planning consultant's error? A construction defect?"

"Maybe," Helen answered. But her tone made it clear she'd stopped believing in that saving explanation a while ago.

We switched off the dim overhead light and stepped out into the corridor. When the heavy lock of the entrance door clicked shut with a dull metallic sound, I turned automatically and looked through the narrow glass pane into the dark office.

There, deep in the empty room, for a split second I could have sworn someone was standing. A tall, motionless grey figure. Right in the center of that same light-colored square. Watching us through the dark.

I stopped short. Blinked.

The room was completely empty. Only grey glints of streetlight trembled on the bare walls.

"What is it, Michael?" Helen touched my sleeve gently.

I stared into the glass rectangle for a few more seconds. Then slowly shook my head:

"Nothing. I imagined it. My mind's slipping."

But all the way down the stairs, a suffocating feeling wouldn't leave me: today, we hadn't been the first ones in that empty office. Not even the second. Someone invisible was standing there right now, listening to our footsteps fade away down the stairwell.