第6章 The Trainee

Ione Kester came to the night shift in the last week of the month, a transfer off the ambulance, twenty-nine years old and earnest in a way the Well had not seen in a while. She had requested nights. That alone told Sabine something, because nobody requested nights unless they were running from something or toward something, and Ione had the look of a person running toward, which was the harder kind to survive. Sybil Arden assigned her to Desk 2, under Sabine's wing, which was Sybil's way of deciding, without saying so, that Sabine was not yet a problem. For three nights Ione watched and asked the good questions. She wanted to know how Sabine decided which calls to hold and which to clear, how she kept her voice even when a caller was screaming, how she knew when a request was real and when it was a man alone with a birthday cake. She was quick. By the fourth night she was taking calls on her own board with Sabine listening, and she was better than Sabine had been at that stage, cleaner, less entangled. On the fifth night, at 03:09, Sabine looked over and saw Ione frown at her screen. "Hey," Ione said. "What's a null address?" Sabine's chair was at the other desk before she had decided to move. "Put it on hold. Don't take it." Ione's hand was already on the mouse. "It's a call, though. It's been ringing. It says incoming." "Trust me. Put it on hold and don't answer it." Ione looked at her. Sabine heard, in the pause, all the nights to come, all the ways this would have to be explained or hidden. Then Ione clicked the call to hold and the chime cut off, and the two women sat in the low room with the board breathing around them. "Okay," Ione said. "Why." "Because it will hold for fifty minutes and connect you to someone who is not on any street we can send a unit to, and you will not be able to file it, and it will follow you home." Sabine heard her own voice and did not like the sound. "Just clear it." "That's not an answer." "It's the answer you're getting." Ione did not clear it. She kept the line on hold, and at 03:13 exactly, another null address chimed in on Sabine's board, and Sabine answered, because she always answered, and because the accounting of her own conscience had begun to run in only one direction. The call that night was an old woman, and it was, in its shape, the plainest of the anomaly's faces. She had been baking. She had opened the oven, and the kitchen had turned into a corridor, and she had walked down it looking for her front door, and she had found a wall-mounted telephone at the end, in the dark, and she had called her daughter's number, and the line had rung somewhere far away, and a woman named Sabine had answered. Sabine kept her talking. The woman's name was Maud. She remembered her daughter's phone number and could not remember whether she had a daughter, and she remembered a kitchen and could not remember the address of it, and under her careful voice the three notes rose and fell. Behind Sabine, at Desk 2, Ione had picked up her held call. Sabine heard it happen, the soft electronic click of a line connecting, and then Ione saying the opening line into her headset, and then a long silence. She could not leave Maud. She kept Maud counting seconds and said a prayer she did not believe in that made no sense, and across the room she listened to Ione handle a call that Sabine could not hear. Six minutes later Ione said, very quietly, into the room rather than the line, "she says she's the operator." Sabine's blood went cold. "Maud," she said into her own headset, "I need you to find the brightest light in the corridor and walk to it, right now, don't look back." She kept her voice level, and her hands were not level at all, and she listened to Maud's footsteps on the other end, and to the three notes, and then to the click of a line ending, and then she cleared her screen and turned to Desk 2. Ione had the headset off and was sitting very still, looking at the blank screen as if it had insulted her. "What did she say," Sabine asked. "She said her name was Ottoline." Ione's voice was thin. "She said she used to run the board at the Gorse Exchange and she never went home, and she said she's been keeping everyone comfortable, and she said" — Ione stopped, and started again — "she said to tell Desk 4 that Noelle is doing fine." Sabine did not answer, because she was doing arithmetic that had no numbers in it. Eight months ago Noelle had taken a call at 03:13 on Desk 6, and at 03:24 a supervisor had walked over and found the line open and the chair empty and the recording still running toward its forty-seventh minute. In eight months nobody had said the words Noelle is doing fine, because there was no version of that sentence that helped. Now a voice that claimed to be a switchboard operator from a building that had been dark since the early eighties, a voice that called itself Ottoline, had spoken them to a recruit in her second week, through a line that did not exist, as casually as a nurse passing along that a patient was resting. The room went quiet in a way the Well almost never went quiet. The ventilation hummed. Somewhere above them a courtroom emptied and a door closed. Sabine looked at the empty chair at Desk 6, and then at the new recruit she had been trying to keep out of all this, and she understood that the thing on the other end of the line had learned her name, and her desk, and the name of the woman she had lost, and that there was no longer any version of this in which she could protect Ione by sending her away. "Who else knows," Sabine asked. "About the calls? Nobody." Ione's hands were folded on the desk, very still. "I filed the hold as a misdial. It's still in my queue. I can clear it." "Clear it." Ione cleared it. The screen went its ordinary gray, and for a few seconds the Well looked like nothing more than a basement full of equipment and tired people, which was the lie it told every night and the lie Sabine had spent eight months needing to believe. She took out the pad and wrote the fifth entry, and under it she wrote two more lines. Ottoline. The operator. Keeps the board. Says she keeps them "comfortable." She knows Noelle. She knows my desk. Then she looked at Ione and said the first honest sentence she had said to anyone at the Well in eight months. "I'm going to tell you about the calls," she said. "And then you're going to decide whether you want to keep taking them." ---