The Janitor’s Cadence

In 1994, I was twenty-two, a restless art school dropout who’d traded paintbrushes for a mop at a private girls’ academy in the leafy hills of Wellington, New Zealand. The job was supposed to be temporary—just enough to fund my next escape. But the academy, with its ivy-choked brick and iron gates, had a way of keeping people longer than they planned.

My routine was rigid. Every evening, after the last student had left and the dorm lights dimmed, I’d unlock the supply closet, fill my bucket with hot water and pine disinfectant, and begin my circuit: the east wing’s six classrooms, the grand hallway with its peeling portraits, and finally, the old chapel that doubled as an assembly hall. It was mindless work, which suited me. I’d listen to my Walkman, the tinny hum of a mix tape, and lose myself in the rhythm of the squeegee.

One Thursday, in the middle of a particularly dreary July, I noticed a new set of scuff marks on the hallway floor. They were odd—long, deliberate scrapes, as if someone had dragged a heavy, flat object across the linoleum. They started at the chapel door, led past the main stairs, and vanished into the library, which was off-limits after hours. I shrugged it off. Perhaps a teacher had moved a filing cabinet.

The next night, the marks were longer, extending now from the chapel to the staff room, circling a spot where I’d once found an old, broken metronome. I’d thrown it in the bin, thinking it was junk. But that night, I saw it again, sitting on the floor as if it had never been moved. Its pendulum was swaying slowly, tick-tock, tick-tock, though there was no one around. I froze, then quickly gathered my bucket and moved on, assuring myself that a cleaning colleague had a sick sense of humor.

The following week, my Walkman started to malfunction. The batteries were fresh, but the sound would warp, slowing to a glacial crawl, then distorting into a low, rhythmic thump—like a giant heartbeat. I switched it off, but the thumping continued, coming from the chapel. I paced closer. The door was ajar, and inside, in the dim emergency light, I saw a figure at the piano. It was a student, a girl in a blue tunic, her back to me. She was playing a single chord, over and over, each note punctuated by a violent, jerky movement of her arms. The sound was off—the notes were flat, wrong, as if the piano was out of tune in a way I’d never heard before.

I called out, ‘Hey, you’re not supposed to be here.’ The girl didn’t turn. The chord stopped. The silence was so absolute that the hum of the fluorescent lights seemed to be a roar. Then, she began to play a melody that I recognized from the school’s old hymn book. But she played it in reverse, the notes like a mirror image of a song, and with each descending note, the scuff marks on the floor, which I could see through the open door, started to shimmer and pulse, as if the linoleum were breathing.

I didn’t run. I couldn’t. My legs were heavy, and my mind told me to watch. The girl’s shoulders began to shake, and then she slowly, mechanically, turned her head. Her face was smooth, like a mannequin’s, with no features at all. The skin was pale porcelain, and where eyes, a nose, and a mouth should have been, there was just blankness that seemed to absorb the light. In that void, I saw a reflection—not of the chapel, but of myself, but older, tired, still holding a mop, still trapped in a routine that would never end.

I blinked, and the face was normal—a girl of sixteen with deep-set eyes, her lips moving in a silent ‘shhh’. She pointed to the piano’s sheet music, but when I looked at it, the notes were not notes but a series of numbers: 7, 3, 1, 9, 9, 4—a date, my birthdate. She then mouthed the words, ‘You’ll find it.’ And in a whisper that seemed to come from inside my head, she added, ‘When you stop counting.’

The next morning, I quit. I packed my bags and took a bus out of the city, but no matter where I went, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was still in that hallway, that the scuff marks were trailing behind me. I started to see the marks in other places—on sidewalks, on bus floors, on the carpet of cheap motels. They always pointed toward an exit, but when I followed, they led to a dead end, a wall, or a locked door. I stopped sleeping, afraid of what I might dream.

Years later, I discovered that the academy had been built on the site of an old mental asylum, and that in the 1930s, a janitor had been found dead in the chapel, his face contorted in an expression of pure terror. His journal, which was never published, contained a single line: ‘The piano plays at midnight, and the counters mark the days. I have lost count.’

I still hear that chord sometimes, at the edge of sleep, and I always feel compelled to count my steps, to trace the lines on my palm, to watch the second hand on a clock. I’m not sure I ever truly left that chapel, or that the girl with the blank face wasn’t just a precursor to the thing we all fear most—the realization that the routine we cling to is just a rhythm we’ve been trained to follow, and that sometimes, breaking the circle only leads to a deeper one.