Story: Manuel Losada | Illustration: Santipérez | Based on an idea by Luis M. Rosales

THE NIGHT SHIFT

Marta was assigned the night shift on the first Saturday of the festival.

She didn’t complain. She had been cleaning public buildings for years and knew there were jobs nobody wanted. What struck her as odd was the order: that night she wasn’t to clean the rooms or the bathrooms, only the corridors and the entrances. Nothing else.

“Don’t go into the rooms,” the supervisor told her. “Others are taking care of those.”

She didn’t ask who.

The Salón García smelled different at night. It wasn’t dirt or cleaning products. It was an old, damp smell, like wood that never quite dries out. Every time she mopped, the water darkened sooner than expected, as if the floor were giving back something it had been keeping for a long time.

In the side corridor, she noticed the first anomaly.

It wasn’t a noise, but a slight, continuous pressure that rose from her feet and settled in her chest, marking a slow rhythm. Marta stopped for a moment, her mop resting in the bucket. She thought of a generator, an old installation, a minor fault. She thought of whatever always works to keep one moving.

She continued.

The corridor lights didn’t go out, but they dimmed for a second, as if someone inside the building had taken a deep breath. Marta didn’t look up. She had learned long ago that looking too closely usually complicates things.

At the door of one of the rooms, the cleaning bucket had been moved.

Marta was sure she had left it right against the wall. She approached, put it back in its place and, without knowing why, rested her hand on the door.

She withdrew it immediately.

It wasn’t warm in a normal way. It was an irregular, sustained temperature, as if on the other side there were something alive, breathing very slowly, adjusting itself to the space.

She took a step back.

From inside came a muffled sound, similar to a collective murmur. Not voices. Something deeper. Something that needed neither words nor clear intent.

Marta took her cart and kept working.

She didn’t look back. She had turned discipline into a form of protection. There are things, she thought, that work better if they are methodically ignored.

When her shift ended, in the locker room, she found residue on the hem of her trousers.

Not dust. Not usual dirt. Fine, damp grains, clinging to the fabric, impossible to explain in a closed building.

She cleaned them in the sink without stopping to think too much.

The water took longer than usual to go down the drain.

As she left, she checked her watch. It was 5:16 AM. The building was silent, but not completely empty. Marta couldn’t explain that feeling; she simply noted it mentally, as she did with other things.

The next day, the supervisor asked if everything had gone well.

“Yes,” she replied. “All quiet.”

She didn’t tell him that, since that night, when she sleeps, she dreams of an endless corridor, of a floor that seems to give way beneath her feet, and of a warm door that someone pushes from the inside, with patience.

Nor did she tell him that, some early mornings, she hears in her own home a familiar, muffled sound, like a distant projector starting up without any reason.

And that then, without thinking, she gets out of bed and waits.

As if she were still on duty.