By midnight, the town beyond the park had turned flat and strange. Televisions glowed in the windows of the nine-storey blocks. Reeds rustled by the pond. The wind rocked a single carriage on the big wheel, and it tapped softly against the metal.
Ilya could have left. He could have locked the ticket booth, put the ledger in his rucksack, phoned Roman Zuev in the morning and said he agreed. He could have decided that after a funeral, debts and a sleepless night, a man could be forgiven for hearing things that were not there.
But his name was already on the page.
Ilya Lazarev. Taken on.
He entered the Room of Fear with a torch in his hand. Varya Gordeeva went beside him, not because she believed, but because she disliked leaving the main switch on and unattended.
By day, the first room was the cheapest set in the entire park. A plywood factory: painted pipes, a dummy in a hard hat, a red lamp meant to flash like a warning light. A clock-card rack hung on the wall, but half its hooks were empty, and rubber nuts lay on the floor for children to trip over and laugh.
At night, the room had grown larger.
Ilya's torch picked out a concrete floor that could not have been there. Wet, dark, marked with oil. Instead of painted pipes, real ones ran away overhead, filmed with rusty sweat. Somewhere in the distance, a machine hummed. Not loudly. Not like a mechanism at work, but like the sleep of a man who had dropped off from exhaustion beside the machinery.
Varya spun round towards the exit.
There was no exit.
In its place hung the clock-card rack.
"It's a projector," she said.
Ilya listened.
He knew how to hear a projector. A projector had a fan, a frequency, the faint whine of its power supply. An old speaker had mains hiss. A looped recording had a splice, even if someone had cleaned it up.
There was no splice here.
There was space.
"No," Ilya said. "This isn't sound."
"Then what is it?"
"A shift."
The word slipped out by itself, and the room answered.
The shift bell struck again. The cards on the rack trembled. Each bore a name, but the letters blurred like ink underwater. Ilya passed the torch over the first.
Pavel Ryabtsov.
The second.
Galina Sheina.
The third.
Semyon Kurochkin.
He did not know these people. How could he? They came from before his lifetime. But whenever he spoke a name aloud, something changed on the shop floor. One machine stopped humming. One lamp stopped flickering. One wet mark on the floor dried.
Varya understood before she admitted it.
"We have to read them all."
"Why?"
"Because the door won't open until we do."
It was no longer the mechanic speaking. It was the woman who had repaired the park for years and knew that sometimes machinery refused to obey not because it was broken, but because no one had given it the right word.
They read the names. Ilya lost his place, went back, marked the cards with his finger. Varya held the torch, then took a second when Ilya's hands began to shake. With every name, the shop floor grew quieter.
The last card was blank.
It did not even have a number. Only a dirty thumbprint.
"Blank," Varya said.
A voice answered from the darkness by the machine:
"Because that's how they wrote me down back then."
Tolik Zharov stood by the wall. The same man who had appeared at the ticket-booth window. He was closer now, and Ilya saw that his padded work jacket was not wet from the rain. It was soaked through the way clothes become soaked on a man who has lain in a ditch for a long time.
Varya raised the torch.
"Who are you?"
"The shift," Tolik Zharov said. "The last one."
He did not take a single step towards them. That made it worse. A chase would have been easier. A scream would have been easier. But Tolik Zharov stood calmly, like a man who had waited too long to waste his strength on anger.
"Your name is in the ledger," Ilya said.
"Which one?"
"The one in the ticket booth."
Tolik Zharov looked at the clock-card rack.
"So it was in the ticket-booth ledger. It wasn't in the factory book. It wasn't in the hospital book. It wasn't in the police book. At home they said I'd gone off drinking. At work they said I hadn't come in. The envelope said it was empty."
He raised a hand and touched the blank card.
Letters came through on the white paper.
Anatoly Pavlovich Zharov.
The shift bell struck a third time, and a door appeared where the rack had been. Not all at once. First the handle came through, then the gap, then the dim corridor of the Room of Fear, ordinary and plywood, with peeling black fabric on the walls.
Ilya took a step towards the exit.
Tolik Zharov said:
"What about the envelope?"
Ilya stopped.
"What envelope?"
"The one they gave my daughter. Empty. They said her father hadn't been on the shift, so there was no one to pay. She spent her whole life thinking I'd drunk away my final week's wages."
"You read my name, cashier. Now find who it's owed to."
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