The Immortal Emperor Returns to Work the Museum Night Shift novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: The Sub-Basement
"Coming," I called up the stairwell, and my voice only cracked a little.
Ruthanne's footsteps went away above us.
Sam was still pinned against the wall with his jeans open and his eyes shut, and I was still holding him.
I took my hand out of his jeans and wiped it on his T-shirt, which made him laugh without a sound.
"Come down tonight," he said, against my hair. "After the doors are locked. I would like you to see where I live."
"You live here?"
"Under here. I have for six weeks."
I went up to the meeting, red-faced, and sat through forty minutes of Leland saying the word synergy.
At ten that night I took the service stairs down past the lab.
Past the cold-storage vault, and down one more flight than I had ever gone.
The sub-basement is a long concrete corridor with pipes on the ceiling.
At the end of it is a heavy grey door with a cardboard sign taped on it.
The sign said, in neat block capitals, THE NIGHT WATCH. PLEASE KNOCK.
I knocked.
He opened it at once, in a clean white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, and he stood back to let me in.
The room was small.
It was the old watchman's room from the museum's first days, with a stone floor, a brick wall.
A single high window of frosted glass.
There was a narrow iron cot made up as tight as a barracks bed, with a grey wool blanket.
There was a kettle, a hot plate and a shelf of library paperbacks held up by two bricks.
On the wall above the cot, he had pinned one thing, a postcard of the Providence river at dusk.
"It's not much," I said, and then I wanted to bite my tongue.
"It is warm, and it is quiet, and it has a door," he said. "I have lived in worse. I have lived in a palace."
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of The Immortal Emperor Returns to Work the Museum Night Shift are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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