I Work Overnight Security at a HAUNTED PRISON. Last Night Something Horrifying Happened.

Eleven months is long enough to stop jumping at shadows. That's what I kept telling myself, anyway.

Eastern State had a way of testing that theory on a nightly basis. The place is a ruin by design—a nineteenth-century penitentiary in the middle of Fairmount that the city preserved specifically because it looked like something terrible had happened there. Which it had, repeatedly, for over a hundred years. The cellblocks radiate out from a central hub like spokes on a wheel, and most nights my job was to walk those spokes and make sure nobody was doing anything stupider than what the building already suggested. Checking locks. Logging rounds. Confirming that history stayed where we put it.

I'd gotten good at the walk. Grade changes in the floor where freeze-thaw had worked the concrete apart over decades, spots where the vaulted ceiling let in enough exterior light to navigate by, the particular acoustics of Cellblock Seven that made your own footsteps sound like they were following you. That last one never fully stopped bothering me, but I'd learned to file it under ambient rather than threat. Phoenix would have called that professional development. Phoenix had a philosophical streak about buildings that seemed strange coming from a man who spent thirty years booking people into Philadelphia holding cells, but I'd stopped questioning it.

He ran our operation from an office over on Spring Garden, three monitors, a landline he actually used, and enough institutional coffee to fuel a small municipality. Our contract was a three-person rotation: me, Kaylee, and whoever Phoenix had covering the exterior perimeter on a given night. Most nights that was Darren, a former transit cop who treated the whole assignment as an extended break from his day job managing a parking structure. Darren did not share Phoenix's architectural philosophy. Darren did not share much of anything.

Kaylee was different. Kaylee Schmidt was a second-year graduate student out of Temple's architecture program, and she'd arranged the contractor position herself specifically because it gave her unrestricted nighttime access to document sections of the facility that weren't part of the tour circuit. I'd watched her spend forty minutes photographing a water stain on a corridor ceiling once, completely absorbed, like it was telling her something I didn't have the vocabulary to hear. The place made my skin crawl and she took notes on it. I respected that more than I could explain.

She had a system. Check-ins every twenty minutes over the radio, crisp and brief: location, status, any anomalies. She never missed them. In eleven months of working the same rotation, Kaylee Schmidt had never once been late on a check-in.

So when her 1:40 transmission came through from Cellblock Fourteen—location confirmed, status nominal, no anomalies—and then the 2:00 check-in didn't come, I noticed. Immediately. The way you notice when a sound you've stopped hearing suddenly isn't there anymore.

I gave it three minutes. Radios glitch. Batteries die. She might have had her hands full with equipment. I called her channel twice and got static, which was different from silence but not meaningfully better. Then I called Phoenix.

"She last checked in from Fourteen?" His voice through the radio had that particular flat quality of someone who wasn't panicking but was also not ruling anything out.

"One forty. Right on schedule. Nothing since."

A pause. I could hear him shifting in his chair, which meant he was already pulling up the facility map on one of his monitors.

"Fourteen's a dead corridor. Radio reception in there can be inconsistent—that east wing has always been problematic."

"I know." I'd done enough rounds through Fourteen to know exactly how the signal degraded near the far end. Stone walls two feet thick will do that. "But she knows it too. She usually moves toward the hub entrance to check in from there."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Run a sweep. Start at the hub entry, work toward the far end. If you can't locate her in twenty minutes, we escalate." He said it the way cops say things when they've already made a decision but want the next step to feel procedural. "She's probably fine, Jacob. Equipment issue, got absorbed in something. You know how she is."

I did know how she was. That was the part that was bothering me.

"Copy that. Starting now."

I pulled my flashlight from the belt holster—a Streamlight ProTac that Phoenix had issued to all of us at the start of the contract, good beam, solid construction, the kind of thing that doesn't fail you in the dark because the man who bought it had spent thirty years learning what happens when your equipment fails you in the dark. I did a quick radio check, confirmed Darren was on the exterior perimeter and aware I was going internal, and then I crossed the hub toward Cellblock Fourteen's entrance arch.

The arch is original stonework. Eighteen-something, cut limestone, worn smooth at the edges by a century and a half of institutional use. There's a faded stencil above it—the block designation, painted over multiple times until the letters are thick and soft-edged. Past the arch, the corridor runs roughly three hundred feet east before hitting a T-junction that dead-ends in both directions. The cells on either side are sealed. Not locked—sealed, iron doors rusted into their frames so completely that historical records had stopped tracking them as operable units sometime in the sixties. The kind of sealed that means nobody checked, because there was nothing left worth checking.

I stepped through the arch and clicked the flashlight on.

The beam cut clean and white down the corridor, pulling the floor's broken mosaic into sharp relief—cracked terracotta tile, gaps where sections had collapsed entirely, a fine silt of plaster and rust that settled new every season. My boots found the walkable line through it automatically. Eleven months of muscle memory.

Kaylee's last reported position was somewhere in that darkness ahead of me.

I started walking.

The smell hit me about forty feet past the arch.

I'd noticed it before on patrol—most of us had. Phoenix logged it twice in the incident reports as a probable drainage issue, something to do with the storm infrastructure under the east wing, and facilities management came out, poked around, and wrote back that they'd "assessed the situation." Which is facilities management for we found nothing and would prefer not to return. Point is, the smell had a history. Old water, old organic matter, something biological doing what biological things do in the dark. You work a place long enough, you stop registering it.

Tonight I registered it.

It wasn't just stronger. It had a direction, a weight, the way a bad smell gets when the air isn't moving and there's nowhere for it to go. I'd worked a summer stint at a water reclamation facility the year before Phoenix hired me, and there's a particular threshold past which a smell stops being an inconvenience and starts being a warning. My body clocked that threshold before my brain caught up. I kept walking. But my jaw had gone tight without me deciding to do that.

The ProTac beam cut about a hundred and fifty feet in good conditions. Down here it got absorbed—the walls drank light the way old stone does, all that density and age, and what came back was softer than what went out. Enough to see the floor, enough to read the cell numbers stenciled above each iron door, but the far end of the corridor stayed theoretical. I swept the beam side to side out of habit, the way Phoenix had drilled into us. Not looking for anything specific. Just establishing that the space was what it was supposed to be.

It was. Until it wasn't.

Cell twenty-three was two-thirds down the east run. I saw the flashlight first—the beam, technically, a pale cone lying flat across the terracotta—and my feet stopped before I'd consciously decided to stop. Kaylee's Streamlight was a different model than mine, a smaller handheld she'd bought herself because she didn't like the belt holster. She always carried it in her left hand so her right stayed free for the clipboard. I recognized it by the beam angle before I was close enough to see the housing.

The clipboard was on the floor beside it. Her handwriting filled about two-thirds of the top page—architectural notations, the kind of shorthand she'd explained to me once that I'd immediately forgotten, measurements and abbreviations and a small rough sketch of something I couldn't quite make out. The last line ended mid-sentence. Not at the edge of a page. Mid-sentence, mid-thought, the pen stroke trailing off and down like her hand had moved without finishing the word.

No Kaylee.

I picked up her flashlight. Still warm from her grip. Checked the corridor in both directions—nothing. Checked the cell doorways visible from where I was crouching—all sealed, all dark, all the same rusted iron that hadn't moved since before either of us was born.

"Kaylee."

My voice went down the corridor and didn't come back. Not an echo, not a response. Just the sound of a word becoming nothing.

I straightened up. Clipped her flashlight to my belt on the opposite side from mine, a decision I made without thinking about it. Both hands free.

"Kaylee, it's Jacob. Call out if you can hear me."

That's when the scratching started.

High on the door of Cell twenty-three. Above where a standing person's hands would naturally fall, up near where the door met the frame, a rhythmic sound—not random, not structural settling, not a rat. I've heard rats work at things. Rats are frantic. This was paced. Four beats, a pause, four beats, a pause. Deliberate the way a person is deliberate when they want you to know they're there.

I stood with the flashlight pointed at the door and did not move for what felt like a full minute and was probably eight seconds.

The historical survey on Cellblock Fourteen was in the onboarding binder Phoenix gave every new hire. Cell doors throughout the east wing: rusted into frames, mechanically non-functional, verified non-operable through assessments in nineteen sixty-three, nineteen eighty-one, and two thousand and seven. The locks weren't just seized—the iron had expanded and fused. Facilities had written it up as a liability note, actually, something about not being able to open them for inspection. It was in there. I'd read it.

I put my shoulder against the door anyway.

It swung inward.

Smooth. No resistance, no groan, no the-decade-long-argument-between-rust-and-iron sound that should have come from something that hadn't moved since the Johnson administration. The hinges moved like they'd been oiled. Recently. The door opened to about sixty degrees and stopped, and I stood in the gap with my flashlight up and my heart doing something it doesn't normally do, which is attempt to exit my body through my sternum.

Empty cell. Stone walls, stone floor, a rusted iron cot frame bolted to the far wall, ceiling about ten feet up with a single slit window that had been bricked over at some point. Roughly eight feet by twelve. No Kaylee. No person, no animal, no anything that could have made that sound. The smell was worse in here—concentrated, that same organic foulness with something underneath it I didn't have a category for. I swept the beam into every corner. Twice.

Nothing.

Four beats, pause.

Behind me.

I came out of the cell faster than I went in. Turned. Flashlight up, both hands on it now, the beam swinging down the full length of the corridor toward the hub entrance.

Empty.

The scratching stopped the instant I turned. Not faded out—stopped. Like a switch. Forty feet of cracked terracotta tile and rusted doors and silence, and the beam shaking slightly in a way that told me something about my hands I would have preferred not to know.

Cellblock Twelve is a three-minute walk from Fourteen if you know the route, which I did. You cut back through the hub, hang left past the administrative annex corridor, go through the arch marked with a faded stencil somebody had repainted at some point in a slightly different shade of gray. I'd done that walk maybe four hundred times. Never once thought about what was on the other side of those walls while I was doing it.

I found her about sixty feet in, sitting with her back against the left wall, knees pulled to her chest, clipboard nowhere in sight. Her jacket was on, zipper up, hands tucked between her knees like she was cold. She was staring at the floor about three feet in front of her, not tracking, not blinking at the right intervals. The beam of my ProTac hit her and she didn't squint.

That was the part that got me moving faster. When a light hits someone in the dark, they squint. It's just what the body does.

"Kaylee."

Nothing for a beat. Then her head came up slow, like the signal had to travel a long way to reach her. She focused on me and something came back into her face—not relief exactly, more like recognition. The difference between a person being present and a person remembering how to be present.

I crouched down. Put my hand on her shoulder and felt her flinch under it before she steadied. No blood, no obvious injury. I ran the beam quick over her arms and legs out of habit—security habit, not medical, I want to be clear about my qualifications—and she looked physically fine. Coat intact, no rips, no scrapes on her hands. She'd just been sitting there in the dark of Cellblock Twelve for somewhere between twenty and forty minutes with no flashlight and no explanation.

"Hey. You with me?"

"Yeah." Her voice came out rough. She cleared her throat. "Yeah, I'm here."

"You hurt anywhere?"

"No."

"You know where you are?"

She looked down the corridor, then back at me. "Twelve."

"Right. Your last check-in was Fourteen. How'd you get here?"

She didn't answer that immediately. I watched her work through something—not evasion, more like she was testing the edges of a memory and finding them soft. She pressed her lips together.

"There was a woman," she said.

I stayed crouched. Didn't say anything.

"In Cell Twenty-Three. I was doing notation on the ironwork along the east run and I saw light—not your light, something else, something inside the cell. Through the gap at the door frame." She stopped. Looked at her hands. "The door was open. Just a few inches."

I knew the doors were supposed to be sealed. I'd read the binder. She'd read the same binder, probably more carefully than me given that she was a graduate student writing about the architecture.

"There was a woman standing in the cell," Kaylee said. "Her back was to me. She was wearing—it looked like a guard uniform, but old. Not current. Buttons down the front, different collar. Her shoulders were—" She demonstrated, a slight rocking motion. "Like she was crying. Just standing there crying."

"You went in."

"I knocked first." A pause. "She didn't respond, and I thought maybe she was a visitor who'd gotten locked in somehow, or someone having a medical—I don't know. I pushed the door open and went in to help." She said the last two words like she was hearing them back and they sounded different than she intended. "And then I was here. Sitting here. I don't know how long. My flashlight's gone."

"I've got it." I touched the Streamlight on my belt. "It's fine."

She exhaled. Long and slow.

I should have radioed Phoenix right then. That's what the protocol said and that's what eleven months of working for a man who had spent thirty years as a Philadelphia detective had trained me to do. Unusual situation, unknown origin, escalate before independent action. It's not complicated. I had known it was the right call before Kaylee finished her sentence.

I did not do it.

I told myself I'd be quick. Told myself I just needed to see it to understand what we were dealing with before I tried to explain it to Phoenix over a radio. Told myself a lot of things in about four seconds while Kaylee was still catching her breath, and then I stood up and said, "Stay here, I'll be right back," and started walking.

She said, "Jacob—" and I was already moving.

The door to Cell Twenty-Three was exactly as I'd left it. Open to sixty degrees, no sound. I came up on it from the hub side, moving slow, keeping my footfalls light on the terracotta. The corridor was quiet. My own flashlight beam ran ahead of me and I kept it steady with both hands, the way Phoenix had shown us, elbows in.

I stopped at the threshold.

She was there.

Back to me, standing about four feet from the far wall. The uniform matched what Kaylee had described—dark fabric, vertical buttons, collar sitting high. The cut of it was wrong for anything modern, wrong for anything from the last forty years at minimum. Her arms were at her sides. Her shoulders were moving in that slow, rhythmic way. Not dramatic. Just present. Just continuous.

I said, "Excuse me. Do you need help?"

My voice came out level. I was proud of that, briefly.

Her shoulders stopped.

The silence lasted maybe two seconds, and then the scratching started—not from Cell Twenty-Three, not from one door, but from every door along the east run simultaneously. All of them. The whole corridor, both walls, that same paced four-beat rhythm but multiplied until it wasn't rhythm anymore, it was just sound, filling the space between the stone walls and bouncing back at me from every direction, and underneath it something that wasn't quite a vibration but registered in my back teeth anyway.

The flashlight beam was shaking. I noticed that. I let it shake.

She turned around.

I don't know what I was expecting. Something that would make sense of it—something distorted, something wrong in the way you can categorize and file and eventually stop thinking about. Her face was ordinary. Pale, calm, expressionless. The face of a person you'd pass on the street without registering. The face of someone waiting for a bus. Nothing about it was frightening on its own terms.

Then my ProTac beam caught her eyes.

Animal eyeshine is a tapetum thing—a layer behind the retina that bounces light back out, green or gold or red depending on the species. I'd seen it a hundred times in parking structures, in alleys, in the dark margins of every facility I'd ever worked. I knew what it looked like.

This wasn't that.

The light reflected back from her eyes the way it would from something constructed to look like eyes—something that had observed eyes carefully and reproduced the geometry without quite understanding what eyes were for. The reflection was wrong in the way a forgery is wrong when you know the original. Not different enough to name precisely. Just wrong enough that every instinct I had fired at once and kept firing.

The scratching did not stop.

Every light in the building went out at once.

Not a flicker, not a cascade from one end to the other the way breakers trip down a panel in sequence. One instant I had emergency lighting running the length of Cellblock Twelve's corridor — those amber strips mounted low on the walls, ugly and institutional and exactly what I needed — and the next I had nothing. Not dim. Nothing. The kind of dark that makes you touch your own face to confirm you still have one.

I'd had my ProTac aimed at the woman in Cell Twenty-Three when it happened. So for about two seconds I still had that beam, still had her in it, still had her eyes throwing that wrong light back at me. Then I was running and I couldn't tell you when I made that decision because I don't think I did. My legs made it. The part of me that had worked parking structures at two in the morning and learned which sounds meant somebody drunk and which sounds meant get out of the aisle — that part had already calculated the exit and started moving before the thinking brain caught up to file any paperwork on it.

I yelled for Kaylee as I passed her position. I know I did. Whether she heard me over the scratching — which had gone from unsettling to genuinely oppressive, every door on that east run going at once, stone walls bouncing it back and forth until it was more texture than sound — I couldn't say. I was moving fast and my flashlight beam was bouncing and the terracotta under my boots was uneven enough that half my attention was on not going down face-first.

The hub was darker than Twelve had been. No exterior windows in the hub, no ambient anything. I slowed to a jog, kept the ProTac sweeping in a tight arc, and pulled up what I knew about the layout from eleven months of walking it. Forty feet to the administrative annex corridor on the left. Staff exit beyond that. I'd done this route in the dark exactly once before, during a September brownout that lasted forty-five seconds and resolved itself before Phoenix even finished his sentence on the radio.

This felt like it intended to stay.

I found the annex corridor by trailing my left hand along the limestone and counting the arch openings. Two of them between the hub and the annex — a storage alcove that smelled like mineral dust and old paint, and a records room with a door that hadn't closed properly in years. Third opening was the annex, and I knew it by the way the air changed: drier, slightly warmer, the faint paper smell of the administrative office that no amount of ventilation ever fully cleared.

The staff exit was at the far end of the annex, a steel fire door with a push bar that Phoenix had tested personally at the start of every contract month. He was meticulous about that. Thirty years as a Philadelphia detective and the thing he transferred most completely into private security work was a profound distrust of anything that was supposed to work in an emergency. He tested that bar every month. I'd watched him do it. It worked.

I hit it at a run with both forearms and it didn't move.

Not stiff. Not swollen from humidity or warped from age. Solid. Like hitting a wall.

I backed up, got my shoulder into it. Nothing. I checked the bar mechanism with my flashlight — the hardware looked right, the bar itself was depressed when I pushed it, which meant mechanically it should have been releasing the latch. The door wasn't moving because something on the other side was holding it. Which was physically impossible for a fire exit during operational hours, and yet there I was, shoulder aching, standing in the administrative annex with a door that had decided physics was optional tonight.

I keyed my radio. Static. Not interference static, not the thick wall static from Cellblock Fourteen's east run — clean, empty static, the kind you get when the frequency has nothing on it. I tried Phoenix's channel and then the all-call. I pulled out my phone. No bars. I stood there for a moment looking at that little no-service indicator like it was going to feel embarrassed about itself and change its mind.

It did not.

The scratching reached me then.

I'd left it behind in the east run, or I thought I had. But standing in the annex in the silence after the radio static, I heard it in the wall to my left — faint, and then not faint. Four beats. Pause. Four beats. Moving. I've done enough facility work to know building sounds: pipes settling, expansion and contraction along a metal chase, animals in the structure. I knew all of those. This wasn't directional the way settling is, which happens and stops. This was traveling. Working its way through the stone toward where I was standing.

It knew where I was standing.

I thought about Cell Twenty-Three. About Kaylee describing a door open by a few inches, a light inside, a woman with her back turned. I thought about how neither of us had opened that door. How Kaylee walked in to help someone she thought was in distress and walked out in a different building with no memory of the time between. And I thought — this is the part that landed like cold water — that a thing capable of that doesn't stumble into those circumstances by accident. The door had been open. The light had been on. The figure had been positioned with her back turned, which is specifically the orientation most likely to read as vulnerable to someone with Kaylee's instincts.

Whatever had been in that cell had been waiting for someone to come through the door. And Kaylee had come through the door. And now the scratching was in the wall eight feet to my left and moving.

I stopped thinking about it and started looking for windows.

The administrative annex had two: a narrow one above the filing cabinets that hadn't been opened since approximately the Eisenhower administration, and a wider one at the end of the corridor that overlooked the east yard. The wider one had the kind of wire-reinforced glass they used in institutional construction, which I knew from parking structures would hold up to a lot of things but not to a direct strike from the butt end of a Streamlight ProTac swung with both hands and genuine motivation.

It took three hits. The wire held the glass in a spiderweb pattern on the first two. On the third the whole pane buckled inward, and I used my forearm to knock the remaining pieces out of the frame, felt a few catch the jacket sleeve but nothing serious. Cold air came through hard — late autumn Philadelphia cold, damp and real, the smell of wet leaves and car exhaust from Fairmount — and I got up on the filing cabinet, got my legs through, and dropped the six feet to the ground outside.

I landed wrong, stumbled, caught myself on one knee in the wet grass.

Behind me, through the broken window, the alarm cut loose.

It was still going when the first patrol unit came through the gate six minutes later, two officers out of the car before it fully stopped, hands on their belts, sweeping their lights across the grounds. I was on my feet by then, standing about thirty feet from the building with my hands visible.

They found Kaylee on the other side of the facility.

She was already outside when they arrived — standing near the main gate in the amber wash of the street lighting, arms crossed over her chest, no flashlight, no clipboard. She'd found a way out I hadn't found. She hadn't waited, and I didn't blame her. I wouldn't have either.

One of the officers looked between the two of us like he was trying to decide which one of us was the problem.

Fair enough. I was still working on that myself.

The officers cleared Cellblock Fourteen in under twenty minutes.

I know this because I was standing outside in the November cold with Kaylee and two patrol cops and a sergeant who kept writing things down in a spiral notebook with a ballpoint pen he had to shake twice before it would write. The first officers came back through the administrative annex — through a door that opened perfectly fine from the outside, I noticed, and did not say anything about — and the sergeant listened to them and wrote something down and then looked at me.

"Fourteen's clear," he said. "One open window, east yard annex. Glass on the filing cabinet."

"That was me," I said.

He wrote that down too.

They went back in with a third officer and a facility manager named Brent who'd arrived in a Ford pickup with a company logo on the door and the look of a man who'd been pulled out of bed and was not going to forgive anybody for it. I watched the flashlight beams move behind the barred windows along the east yard face of the building. Slow, methodical. They were doing it right.

Kaylee was standing about fifteen feet from me with her arms crossed and her eyes on the ground. She still didn't have her clipboard. I'd thought about that more than once — the architectural notations, the sketch I couldn't identify, the pen stroke trailing off the bottom of the page. All of that still sitting on the floor of Cellblock Fourteen next to a flashlight that was now on my belt. I unclipped her Streamlight and held it out to her. She took it without looking up.

The sergeant came to find me a second time when they finished. He had his notebook open.

"Cell Twenty-Three," he said. "East run. You have any contact with that door tonight?"

"I pushed it," I said. "It opened."

He wrote that down. "Rusted shut now. Both locks fused into the frame. Facilities manager says that matches the inspection record from 2007." He paused. "Door hasn't moved in decades, according to him."

I didn't say anything.

"There are scratches on the interior surface," he said. "High up, near the top of the frame. Pretty deep. We're logging it as vandalism, origin unknown." He looked at me over the notebook. "You see anybody in that corridor tonight? Besides your coworker?"

There is a version of that moment where I tell him what I saw. I ran through it while he was asking. Woman in a non-contemporary uniform, standing with her back turned, shoulders rocking. Eyes that reflected light in a way that was wrong in the specific way that a copy of something is wrong when whoever made the copy didn't fully understand what they were copying. Scratching from every door simultaneously, traveling through walls, present in the annex. A fire exit that couldn't be locked from the outside during operational hours, held shut from the outside.

"No," I said.

He wrote that down too.

Phoenix called me into the Spring Garden office on a Wednesday afternoon, three days later. I'd worked two shifts in the interim — Phoenix had been unreachable the night of the incident and had shown up at the facility at four in the morning after the patrol unit reached him, and since then he'd spoken to me exactly once, briefly, to tell me to keep my schedule until further notice. The office smelled like burned coffee and the same industrial carpet cleaner it always smelled like. He had a printed form on the desk and he turned it to face me before I sat down.

Property damage. Protocol violations. Failure to report via radio prior to independent action.

All of it accurate. I sat down anyway.

Phoenix is sixty-two years old and spent thirty years with Philadelphia PD before he retired into private contracting. He has the particular quality of stillness that some long-career cops develop — not cold, exactly, just economical. He doesn't use extra words. He looked at me across the desk for a moment before he spoke.

"The radio failure," he said.

"I know."

"I'm not asking. I'm telling you that's the one that matters. Everything else is paperwork." He tapped the form. "You had a coworker unaccounted for, an unknown situation, and you walked into it alone without giving me the picture first."

He wasn't wrong. He wasn't even close to wrong, and I'd known it while I was doing it, which is the part that stays with you.

I signed the form. He walked me out. We shook hands at the door and he said something about the reference and I said thank you and meant it, and that was the last time I was in that office.

The official incident report, when it circulated through the contracting company and eventually got summarized in the brief document they sent to the facility's management — infrastructure deterioration. The electrical failure was attributed to aging conduit in the subfloor of the administrative annex, consistent with the building's century-plus construction. Not wrong, necessarily. Old buildings fail. The report needed a cause and it found one that fit the available evidence without requiring anyone to document anything they couldn't explain.

I read it once. Filed it. Didn't think about it much after that.

Kaylee sent me a text in January. Short, just a few lines. She'd withdrawn from Temple and was transferring to Portland State — architecture program, different focus, she'd worked it out over the holidays. She said she was sorry she hadn't been more useful that night. I told her she'd done fine. She sent back a thumbs up and then nothing after that.

I think about her occasionally. The way she didn't blink when my flashlight hit her eyes in Cellblock Twelve. The way she couldn't account for the gap — not evasive, just genuinely missing the thing that should have been there. She's in Oregon now. I hope it's good out there. I hope she's documenting buildings that don't do what that one did.

I-76 runs elevated through Fairmount, and there's a stretch of maybe four seconds — eastbound, between the Girard on-ramp and the point where the highway dips back down toward the Vine Street Expressway — where you can see the cellblock roofline of Eastern State Penitentiary above the treeline. Just the roofline. The crenellated stone parapet of the east wing, gray against whatever the sky is doing that day.

I drive that stretch sometimes. I know it's coming before it gets there.

I don't look at it.