Some Other Town by Elizabeth Collison Page A

the nurse told it. The girl wasn’t sleepwalking that night.”
    And here Earnest gives me a look. “Something else made her jump. Something out in the night was calling her.”
    He stands.
    â€œThat little one in the nightie, you watch out for her,” he says. “She’ll be calling to you now too.”
    Earnest nods once toward the balcony. Then he picks up his mop and is gone.

Editors’ Lunch
    But now it is noon, and Frances is in the hallway calling us out for lunch. It is something the editors and I do, we take lunch here together in the cafeteria. We most of us would go elsewhere if we could. The sanatorium’s food service is resolutely uninspired and, what is worse, they insist on feeding us in the basement.
    This last part is not all the food service’s fault. When our building was still a sanatorium, it housed a large dining hall on the first floor, an elegant, sunlit place next to the building’s little theater. But now Continuing Nursing has taken over the hall and divided it into meeting rooms. The continuing nurses are fond of assembling, they have annexed the theater for it as well. And as a result, the sanatorium’s cafeteria has withdrawn to the basement floor.
    It is a dark and moist space to dine. To get there from where the elevator lets off, we must walk through long halls with low ceilings and giant, exposed metal pipes. Where it is not just the visuals that affront. Although the food service tries to disguise it, the place has the smell of a laundry room, an odd mix of mildewand bleach. I am sure it is where in the old days they washed blood from tubercular sheets.
    Or blood from the gurneys they ran through the steam tunnel below. Back in the day, Earnest says, they called that tunnel the death chute. Or so Earnest says. It is another one of his stories.
    Since the sanatorium was built, that tunnel has served a purpose. Steam flows through big pipes there and heats the sanatorium all winter. But the tunnel is large, a tall man can stand up in most places, five people can fit across, and soon enough the sanatorium figured out steam is not all the tunnel is good for.
    For instance, the cafeteria these days uses it as a kind of back door. The tunnel leads a long way underground and at the train tracks behind our building, there’s an entrance like two large cellar doors. It’s where trucks stop every week with deliveries, crates of eggs, sacks of flour for our meals, which kitchen workers haul back in through the tunnel on the sanatorium’s old hospital gurneys.
    But then again, years ago, when people came to the sanatorium mostly just to die, “Wasn’t all eggs they wheeled through that tunnel,” Earnest says. “Used to be bodies, going the other way.”
    Earnest explains: The directors who ran the sanatorium then didn’t much want all the dying to be known. Bad for business they said, bad for morale. They didn’t want other guests feeling downbeat, what with the hearse always out in the drive. So aides laid the dead bodies on gurneys instead and rolled them out through the tunnel, loaded them onto Pullmans, and sent them all home by rail.
    Earnest’s stories, as I’ve said, run to the macabre, and as usual the editors and I ignore him. When we lunch together in the cafeteria here, we try not to think of our provenance. Rather, we makea point of being informative. That is to say, the series editors take every opportunity they can to talk at length about themselves. Or about their latest romance. The editors all are single, they are forever coming up with new men.
    â€œSo much the better for romance,” Lola says today as we take our places at table.
    Lola, who has a generous heart but the underbite of a sea bass, could not actually be called good-looking. She is instead mostly large—over six feet of strong healthy bones, great aquiline nose, tree-trunk ankles and legs. Even Lola’s voice is ample, a