The first thing I hear is the stitcher, I think, still cycling down after the eight o'clock run. That metal tick-tick-tick as the staple arm settles into its rest position. I don't look up from the proof sheets until I remember I switched the stitcher off myself forty minutes ago. Logged it in the sheet, 22:14, cooldown complete.
The tapping keeps going. Even, unhurried, coming from the bindery floor where there's nothing left plugged in but the fire exit light.
I'm on nights at Lindell because my mum's on dialysis three times a week in Dunstable, Tuesdays Thursdays Saturdays, and someone has to cover the gap the sick pay doesn't close. The job itself is simple enough that I could do it half asleep, which is mostly what I am by two in the morning. A scanner fault's been garbling runs for a self-publishing outfit called Harrow & Vane, mostly memoirs, local history, one bloke's self-help book about grief that sells four copies a year according to Pam in accounts, who checks these things for reasons nobody's asked her to explain. My job is to read each flagged page aloud against the master file, catch where the OCR has turned a letter into nonsense, mark it for reprint.
Tonight's job is a manuscript called The Long Coil. No author photo. The dedication page reads, to the ones who kept counting after I stopped, which isn't the kind of line Harrow & Vane usually lets through, but the copy editor flags style, not sentiment, so it's not mine to fix.
The tapping stops at eleven. I've counted roughly forty taps before it does, though I lose track twice checking page ninety against the screen, where the scanner has rendered a woman's name as a string of brackets. I write the correction in the margin. Mary Dunn becomes clear enough once you squint. I go back to reading.
It starts again near midnight, and this time I count properly, holding my pen still on the desk. One. Two. Three. It goes to thirty-one and stops exactly where it stopped before. Thirty-one taps, every time, for the rest of the shift. I check this three separate times because the alternative, that I'm imagining a number, bothers me more than the sound itself.
At half past twelve I go down to the bindery floor, which I've been putting off since the first tick. The staple arm sits where I left it, cold, the safety guard still down. Nothing on the floor could make that noise. The fire exit light hums at its usual pitch, which is its own kind of sound, not what I've been hearing. I stand there a while with my arms folded, feeling stupid, and go back up.
Page one-forty of The Long Coil is where I find it, half an hour later, a paragraph the scanner has rendered almost entirely into brackets except for one clean sentence sitting in the middle like it refused to be eaten: she counted the staples going in because it was the only number that ever came out right.
I don't finish the page that night. I mark it for reprint and move on, because that's the job, and because the next flagged page is only a typo, a missing comma, the kind of thing that doesn't need me to think about it.
The tapping is at thirty-four taps the next night. Thirty-seven the night after. I tell myself the stitcher's got a mechanical fault that's slowly getting worse, something in the pneumatic return, and I put in a ticket with maintenance that nobody actions because the daytime run never has the problem. I don't mention the count going up. I'm not sure what I'd be reporting.
On the Thursday, my mum's appointment runs late and I come in forty minutes behind, badge already half out of my coat, and the bindery floor is tapping before I've even sat down, no warm-up tick, straight into rhythm like it's been waiting on the hour rather than on me. I don't go down to check this time. I sit at the desk with The Long Coil open to page one-forty-one and read the next line the scanner's spat out, mostly brackets again, except for a clean run near the bottom: forty-one is where the box runs out of room, and after that she has to start again from one.
I count along with the taps under my breath without deciding to. Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.
The forty-first doesn't come. Instead there's a long pause exactly the length of a breath held too long, and then the sound starts over from the beginning, soft and patient, as if nothing had happened at all, as if it has all the nights left that it needs.
I mark the page for reprint and sit with my pen against the paper until the fire exit light buzzes the half hour and it's time to read the next one.
"The National Cash Register Company" by Joe Schneid is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0. To view the terms, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/.