The Room That Is Always in Use

Nobody booked Room 7. That was the first thing Diane noticed when she took over the facilities spreadsheet from Paul, who had left without notice and without explanation, which itself nobody seemed to find strange.

The room sat between the stationery cupboard and the second-floor toilets. It had a number, a handle, a frosted panel through which light was always visible. Not the cold flicker of fluorescents. Something warmer. Something that occasionally shifted, very slightly, the way light shifts when a body moves through it.

The booking system showed it as perpetually unavailable. When Diane cleared the block, the grey returned within the hour. When she cleared it again, it returned within minutes. The third time, it was back before she had closed the browser tab.

She began to notice other things. The carpet outside Room 7 was more worn than the surrounding stretch, as though many people had stood there, pausing before the door. But she never saw anyone pause. She never saw anyone enter or leave. She checked the corridor twice on a Tuesday, three times on a Wednesday. The light behind the glass was always on. The handle was always cold, even in August, when the second floor was airless and close and everyone complained about it.

The smell was harder to place. Not unpleasant, exactly. Something like the inside of a cupboard that has been closed for a long time. Old paper. Warm dust. She noticed it first in October. By November she had stopped noticing it, which she later understood was not the same as it being gone.

She raised it with her manager once, at the end of a one-to-one. Her manager made a note, nodded, and asked whether Diane had completed her fire safety refresher. By the following week, Diane had stopped raising it.

By spring, when a new graduate asked her about the grey block on the booking system, Diane heard herself mention server maintenance, or possibly occupational health. Her voice was steady and pleasant. She held the young woman’s gaze for exactly the right amount of time.

That evening, tidying the shared drive before the office emptied, she found a folder she didn’t recognise. Inside was a single spreadsheet, an older version of the facilities document, dating from three years before Paul had handed it over. The booking history went back further than she’d expected.