The audio guide has forty stops, numbered on the wall, and the handset plays the track for the number you press. There is no stop ninety nine. It plays. A different voice, a man's, describing an object that is not on display, in a room that is not on the plan, and the handsets log where they are when a track is played, and they are all in the same place when it is, and that place is a wall at the end of the east corridor.
I run the audio guides at a museum, which means I record the narrator, load the handsets, and read the logs, and the logs are how I know about ninety nine.
The guides.
Forty stops. Press the number on the wall into the handset and the track plays. The handsets log which track was played, when, and roughly where, from beacons in the ceiling, because we like to know which galleries people linger in.
Ninety nine is not a stop. There is no track. I recorded every track myself with the narrator, a woman, in a studio, and there are forty, and ninety nine plays.
The track.
A man's voice. Older. Not a professional, by the way he reads, but a man who knows what he is talking about and is glad to have somebody to tell it to. He says, you are now standing in front of the reading room. He describes it. A long room, a table, a case with one object in it, and he describes the object, which is a book, a particular book, a manuscript, and he describes the hand it is written in and what it says, and it is a good description, the kind a curator gives, and it is two minutes long, and it ends with, the reading room is not open to the public, thank you for your interest.
There is no reading room. There is no manuscript. There is no room in the building that is a long room with a table.
Where it plays.
The logs. Every play of ninety nine is from the same beacon, the one over the end of the east corridor, which is a corridor that ends in a wall with a fire extinguisher on it. A visitor gets to the end of the corridor, finds no stop number on the wall because there is none, presses something, and gets ninety nine, and stands there for two minutes, and the log has them standing there, and then they come back.
About one a day. More on quiet days. The visitors who do it, when I have caught them at the desk on the way out and asked, say they pressed ninety nine because it was the number on the wall. There is no number on the wall. I have stood at the wall with them and they have pointed at the fire extinguisher and said, there, and it is a fire extinguisher.
What has been checked.
The handsets. Wiped, reloaded from my master, which has forty tracks. Ninety nine plays.
The wall. It is a wall. Behind it, according to the building plans, is the outside. According to the older plans, the ones from when it was a private library before it was a museum, behind it is the reading room.
The voice. I played it for the archivist, who is old, and she said, before the track had finished, that's Mr so and so. The librarian. The last one, before the library closed and the building became the museum, and he had been, she said, the only person who ever used the reading room, and he had died in it, at the table, in the seventies, and the manuscript in the case had been his, on loan from himself, and it had gone back to his family and been sold and nobody knew where it was.
The room had been bricked up when the museum was made because it was not needed.
What is done about it.
Ninety nine is on the play log as an invalid track and the software company has been told and has said it is not possible and has stopped replying.
What I do.
I run the guides.
I put a number on the wall. A real one, on a plaque, the same as the others, at the end of the east corridor, and it says ninety nine, and under it, in the small print we use for every stop, it says, the reading room, and in smaller print, not open to the public.
The visitors press it. One a day, two. They stand for two minutes and they listen to a man describe a room they cannot enter and a book that is lost, and they come back to the desk and hand in the handset and some of them say, that was the best one, and I have started to agree.
The logs have changed in one way. The play of ninety nine used to be two minutes. It is longer now. The track has grown a line at the end, which I did not record and which the master does not have, and the line is, in the same voice, a little quieter, thank you for coming, it has been a long time since anybody did.