The Court Transcript Includes a Witness Named Room 4B

At least, that was what Facilities had told me.

The machine made three dry clicks. Its paperless display filled with strokes I had not entered. Translation software opened on my laptop and rendered them as ordinary text.

COURT IS NOW IN SESSION.

CASE 0: THE COUNTY V. ROOM 4B.

I unplugged the stenotype. The display stayed lit.

A new line appeared.

CLERK: CALL YOUR FIRST WITNESS.

WITNESS: THE BUILDING.

The fluorescent lights dimmed as though something enormous had drawn breath through the ceiling. Then the machine began taking questions and answers.

QUESTION: STATE YOUR NAME FOR THE RECORD.

ANSWER: I HAVE HAD MANY NAMES. THIS ONE WAS CUT INTO MY CORNERSTONE IN 1914.

QUESTION: WHERE DO YOU RESIDE?

ANSWER: AROUND YOU.

I called Leon at security. Before he answered, the stenotype clicked out his greeting in the peculiar shorthand rhythm I knew better than my own pulse.

“Security,” the transcript wrote. “You all right up there, Mara?”

Three seconds later, Leon said exactly that.

I asked whether anyone had entered the fourth floor.

The transcript answered before he did.

“Only you.”

Leon repeated it. Then his radio crackled, and another voice used his mouth.

“Reporter will identify herself for the record.”

I said nothing.

“Mara?” Leon asked.

The machine typed: REPORTER DECLINES TO APPEAR.

A gavel struck somewhere beyond the wall. Dust jumped from the shelves.

Our fourth-floor directory listed 4A and 4C with six feet of blank plaster between them. That night a bronze handle protruded from the blank section. Above it, old gilt letters spelled COURTROOM 4B. Paint covered the edges of a door that had apparently always been there.

I should have taken the stairs. Instead, I searched the archive.

There were references to 4B in boxes that the database claimed were empty. Carbon transcripts described hearings held after midnight, always under Case 0. The defendants were janitors, clerks, night guards, and one court reporter. Each had been charged with REMAINING AFTER ADJOURNMENT. Each proceeding ended with the same ruling.

VERDICT: RETAINED.

I recognized three names from memorial plaques downstairs. The plaques said they had retired. In the transcripts, they begged to be released.

The last file was dated tomorrow.

It already contained my testimony.

QUESTION: DID YOU HEAR THE COURT CALL YOU?

ANSWER: YES.

QUESTION: DID YOU REMAIN IN THE BUILDING?

ANSWER: YES.

QUESTION: DO YOU CONSENT TO BE RECORDED?

The answer was blank.

Behind me, the painted door opened inward.

Courtroom 4B was much larger than the annex. Its ceiling disappeared into darkness. Rows of gallery benches climbed upward farther than my lamp could reach. Pale shapes occupied every seat, not bodies exactly, but impressions left in dust after bodies stand. All of them faced the witness box.

The box was made from the same scarred desk where I had been working. My stenotype waited on it, though I could still see the machine glowing behind me in the archive.

Something shifted inside the judge's robe. The robe hung above the bench without a wearer, sleeves folded neatly.

“Reporter,” it said in Leon's voice, “please take your place.”

I backed away. The archive door slammed.

My laptop displayed a live transcript. Every noise became testimony: my breathing, the buzz of the lights, a pipe knocking inside the wall. Beneath those sounds ran hundreds of whispered statements. Children asking which parent they would see again. Witnesses retracting lies too late. Defendants insisting they had been in the wrong place. Sentences nobody had preserved because a judge had ordered the recorder stopped.

The building had kept everything said off the record.

It had filled its walls with it.

The stenotype wrote: THE COURT REQUIRES A REPORTER.

I grabbed the machine and struck the line. In stenography, a correction removes the last translation. The words vanished.

So did the witness box.

For one hopeful second I understood. The room existed because it had a record. Change the record, change the room.

I struck the line saying the archive door had slammed. The door opened, but the hallway beyond now stretched for miles. Its lights made a white chain into the distance. Every doorway along it was labeled 4B.

The transcript added: CORRECTION NOTED. CORRIDOR WILL BE RETAINED AS EXHIBIT A.

Leon appeared far down the hall, running toward me. He never came closer. With each stride, another doorway passed behind him, but his body remained the same distant size.

“Mara!” he yelled. “Tell me where you are!”

The judge's robe leaned forward.

“Answer the bailiff.”

I knew the question was bait. Every old proceeding began when someone declared their presence. I pressed my lips together.

Leon shouted again. Behind him, the corridor lights switched off one by one. Something in a judge's robe was crawling along the ceiling, gaining on him.

I broke.

“I'm here!”

The stenotype struck a single chord.

REPORTER: PRESENT.

Every dusty figure in the gallery turned its head.

The blank answer in tomorrow's transcript filled itself.

ANSWER: YES.

The courtroom doors locked. The robe rose behind the bench, and the murmurs in the walls sharpened into one voice.

“You may record one final statement.”

The machine placed my fingers on its keys. They felt cold and impossibly deep, like pressing teeth into a mouth. A caption waited on the screen: THE COUNTY V. MARA VALE. Beside DISPOSITION, the word RETAINED flickered.

I could not delete my consent. Each time I struck it, the stenotype restored it in a different voice: mine, Leon's, my dead father's. The court did not care whether I understood. It only needed a record saying I had answered.

Leon was still running in the corridor. The thing above him had lowered one empty sleeve toward his head.

I typed the only testimony I could think of.

REPORTER'S NOTE: NO OTHER PERSON IS PRESENT.

The hallway snapped short. Leon stood six feet away. Then he did not. His radio and badge hit the carpet. The thing on the ceiling folded flat and soaked into the plaster.

For several seconds I could not remember Leon's name. I saw a brass badge, felt grief, and had no idea why. Erasing his presence had erased him from everything except my raw notes.

But it gave me a way out.

I wrote: PROCEEDINGS CONTINUED IN THE PARKING LOT.

The courtroom vanished. Cold asphalt struck my knees. I was outside beneath the orange lot lamps, clutching a dead stenotype and a security badge assigned to nobody. The annex doors were chained from within. My phone said 2:14 a.m.

Only one minute had passed.

The clerk of court laughed when I asked about 4B. Renovation plans showed solid masonry between 4A and 4C. Employment records showed no guard named Leon. The archive box I had opened contained blank paper.

My transcript remained. Each page carried the county seal pressed so deeply that it punctured the fibers. The final line read: RECESS UNTIL A JURY IS PRESENT.

I quit and left the stenotype in the evidence locker. It was waiting on my kitchen table when I got home. I smashed it, soaked it, and dropped the pieces in separate dumpsters. Every night at 2:13, I hear its keys inside the walls.

This morning, a new transcript appeared on my laptop. It labels this account Exhibit B. Under POTENTIAL JURORS, it records a number each time someone opens the page.

I am posting this because the court already knows I wrote it. Deleting it only changes where the hearing happens.

The counter was eleven when I began this sentence.

The stenotype just clicked from inside the wall.

It says we have twelve.