The counter on the front door is a beam across the doorway that counts people in and out, and the figure goes to the council every month because the grant depends on it. Every day at two minutes to five it counts one in. It never counts them out. The building is searched at close and is empty. By the counter's arithmetic there are three thousand people in it who never left.
I am the visitor services manager at a museum and the door counter is the number I live and die by.
The counter.
A beam across the front door at waist height. Break it going in, one on the in count. Break it going out, one on the out count. At the end of the day the two should be within a person or two of each other, because a museum is a place people leave, and the in figure is what the council funds us on.
At two minutes to five, every day, one in.
Never out.
The one in.
The camera on the door sees the beam. At two minutes to five, when the last visitors have been asked to make their way to the exit and are, and the desk is cashing up, the in count goes up by one and nobody is in the doorway.
The out count does not go up. Not at five, not at close, not overnight, not ever. I have gone through the logs back to the day the counter went in, eight years ago, and every day has one more in than out, and the difference, added up, is three thousand one hundred and eighteen people, and by the counter's reckoning they are all still here.
The building is searched at close. It is a small museum. It takes twenty minutes and it is done every night by two of us and it has never once found anybody.
What has been checked.
The counter, replaced. The beam, realigned. The camera, which shows an empty doorway and a count going up.
The doorway, by me, at two minutes to five, standing to the side of it. The beam is a red light on a sensor and the sensor has an indicator that flickers when the beam is broken. It flickered. At the height of a waist, for the time it takes a person to pass through a door, the beam was broken, by nothing, going in, and the cold came past me, the cold of the outside, at the end of the day, in the shape of a person, and went in.
Who.
I do not think it is one person. The council's own records, which the museum keeps because nobody else will, have the building's history in them, and it was a school before it was a museum, and before the school a workhouse, and the workhouse took people in at the door at the end of the day, when the light went, because a person who came to the workhouse door came at the last moment they could, and the door was at the front, where ours is.
They came in. They were counted in, in a book. The book is in our store. It has the in column. It has no out column, because the out column was the graveyard, and the graveyard is under the car park.
I think the building is still counting them in.
What is done about it.
The monthly figure to the council has the extra thirty in it, and I have been declaring it, because the council funds on the in count and I have not known how to explain that thirty of my visitors a month are people who came to the workhouse door in the 1850s and have not been discharged.
What I do.
I run the front of house.
I have started counting them out. At two minutes to five I stand in the doorway, inside it, and when the beam breaks and the cold comes in, I say, good evening, and I stand aside, and I let it in, because it is a museum and everybody is welcome.
And at close, at the end of the search, when the building is empty and the lights are going off, I go back to the door and I stand outside it, and I hold it open, and I say, we are closing now, thank you for coming, which is what I say to everybody, and I wait.
The out count goes up. Not by one. The first night it went up by four hundred and twelve, in the time I held the door, the sensor flickering so fast it was a light, the cold going past me out into the car park in a stream that I stood in and did not move from, and I closed the door, and the counter has been three thousand one hundred and eighteen behind, and now it is two thousand seven hundred and six, and every night I hold the door, and every night it comes down, and I have worked out that at this rate they will all be out by the spring, and I have not decided what I will say to the council when the in figure drops by thirty, and I have decided that I do not care.