The Polished Brass Button

The night shift at St. Wilfred’s Psychiatric Annex was always a different beast. I, along with Senior Nurse Dlamini and Nurse Khumalo, were responsible for the male ward, a sprawling Victorian-era building that had been converted from a tuberculosis sanatorium at the turn of the century. The air inside still carried a faint, medicinal tinge, a ghost of carbolic and despair. Our domain consisted of four six-bed dormitories, two side rooms without ensuite, and two more with ensuite, the latter reserved for our more ‘distinguished’ or agitated patients. The front two dorms were full; the side rooms, flanking the open-plan duty station, were occupied by a Mr. Nkosi, a quiet, trembling man with a phobia of open doors, and a Mr. Ebrahim, a recent admission who hadn’t spoken a word since his arrival, just staring at his own hands as if they belonged to someone else.

That day, however, had started with a peculiar jolt. I was asleep in my cramped flat, trying to bank rest before the week of nights. At half past two in the afternoon, I was ripped from a dreamless sleep by a violent bang that seemed to come from inside the room. Half-dazed, I scanned the space, sure a window had been left open and a door had slammed. But all windows were sealed, and the only door was firmly shut. My eyes eventually fell to the floor at the foot of my bed. There, on the bare boards, lay a small, heart-shaped pewter frame, its glass face cracked. I knew it had been sitting on the portable television set across the room, which was turned off. There was no draft, no cat, no explanation for how it had flown across the room and landed at my feet. I must have blinked, and it was there. I chalked it up to my overactive imagination, perhaps a rat on a shelf, and forced myself back to sleep, but the unease lingered.

At to night, the hospital was eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that feels heavy, as if the building itself is holding its breath. The fluorescent lights in the duty room hummed a low, monotonous note, and the smell of stale coffee mixed with the ever-present bleach. We did our rounds, checking on the men. The first dorm was a symphony of snores and restless tossing. The second was calmer, but as I passed the bed of a middle-aged man recovering from a stroke, I noticed the polished brass button from his pajama top lying on the floor, neatly placed at the center of the doorway, like an offering. I picked it up, puzzled. His pajamas were intact, no missing button, and he was sleeping so soundly that he wouldn’t have noticed if I had lifted his blanket. I placed it in my pocket and continued on.

In the side room, Mr. Nkosi was huddled in his bed, his eyes wide and fixed on the open doorway, which I left ajar as per his usual request. ‘The door,’ he whispered, his voice trembling, ‘it keeps moving. It was shut a moment ago.’ I checked the hinges, but they were solid. Yet as I watched, I could have sworn I saw the door sway, just a fraction, towards the inside, as if a breath of wind had pushed it, though the air in the corridor was still. Dlamini shrugged it off, but Khumalo looked uneasy, and she whispered to me that the brass button on his pillow was missing too. ‘What is it with buttons?’ I thought, but said nothing.

We settled back at the duty station, the central hub from which we could see both side rooms. The clock above the desk showed 2:07 AM. That’s when the old telephone on the wall, a relic of the sanatorium days, let out a single, shrill ring. It had been disconnected for years, its wires severed. Dlamini, ever the pragmatist, laughed it off as a short circuit. But then the bell in the corridor, the one used to call for assistance during the day, gave a soft, metallic tinkle, like someone had tapped it with a fingernail. I looked up, and there, at the far end of the corridor, stood a figure. It was a man, tall and gaunt, dressed in a shabby, old-fashioned suit, one of those from the 1920s. His face was obscured by a wide-brimmed hat, and his left hand was outstretched, palm up. In his palm, I could see a glint of brass. He didn’t move, just stood there, as if waiting.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked, my voice cracking. Dlamini and Khumalo both turned, and their faces went ashen. ‘There’s no one there,’ Dlamini said, but I could see the fear in her eyes. ‘I just saw a man,’ I insisted, my heart hammering. Khumalo grabbed my arm. ‘Let’s check the patients,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper. We walked towards the first dorm, and as we passed the side room, Mr. Nkosi was sitting up in bed, his mouth open in a silent scream, his eyes fixed on the doorframe. On the floor, just outside his room, lay the brass button I had pocketed earlier. I hadn’t placed it there. It was as if it had returned to claim its spot.

We entered the first dorm, and the atmosphere hit us like a wave. It was cold, far colder than the corridor, and the air was thick with a musty, earthy odor, like freshly turned soil. The men were all awake now, sitting upright in their beds, their eyes blank and staring at the far wall where the window was. The window was open, I don’t know how, and the sheer curtains billowed in a breeze that didn’t exist outside. On the windowsill, arranged in a neat row, were four brass buttons, each one polished to a brilliant shine. One of the patients, an old man with Parkinson’s, pointed a trembling finger and whispered, ‘He wants them back.’ I turned to see the figure again, now at the foot of the beds, closer. This time, I could make out his face. It was gaunt, with deep-set eyes that seemed to be hollow, and his mouth was set in a grim line. He wore a black suit, and I noticed his left sleeve was empty, pinned to his shoulder.

I stumbled backward, pulling Dlamini and Khumalo with me. ‘We need to gather all the buttons,’ I said, remembering the one in my pocket. ‘Every one we find, we must return to the window.’ We frantically searched the rooms, retrieving buttons from strange places: under pillows, in bedpans, in the pockets of deceased patients’ robes. Some we found in the corridor, leading a trail to the door of the fourth dorm, which we had thought was empty. But when we entered, there was a patient we had not seen before, an ancient man lying in the corner bed, his skin like parchment, his breathing shallow. On his nightstand was a small brass bell. ‘The old bell,’ Dlamini whispered. ‘It belonged to Sister Marguerite, who worked here in the 1940s. She used to ring it to summon the orderlies. They say she was found dead in this very room, her face frozen in terror, clutching a button.’

At that moment, the bell on the nightstand rang, a clear, piercing sound. The ancient man’s eyes snapped open, and they were not the eyes of a human; they were black, like polished obsidian. He sat up, his joints cracking, and spoke in a voice that was not his, a deep, resonant voice that seemed to come from the walls: ‘The war is over, but the debt remains. One button for each life lost.’ And then he collapsed, dead. The window in that dorm was also open, and on the sill lay a single brass button, larger than the others, perhaps from a military greatcoat.

The moment I touched that button, the air around us changed. The temperature normalised, the curtains fell limp, and the patients in the other wards began to moan and stir as if waking from a deep sleep. The figure had vanished, but from outside the window, I heard a faint, mournful whisper: ‘Fourteen. Fourteen for the fourteen who died in the flu ward in 1918. Now you will remember them.’ We gathered all the buttons we could find, fourteen in total, and placed them in an old leather satchel I found in the duty room. We locked the satchel in the hospital’s safe, and the weird phenomena ceased. The next day, we learned that the hospital was to be demolished in a month. I have never spoken of that night until now, but I still carry one of those brass buttons in my pocket. It’s warm, always warm, and sometimes, in the dead of night, I can feel it move, as if it yearns to return to its place on the windowsill.