"Nothing happened last time," murmured Godric, his face resting in his palm and staring at the security cameras. Tonight was the fourth night—nothing ever happened on the fourth night of the occurrences before. Yet he was still pensive.

He started when an alarm on his phone exploded in metallic beats. Time for a patrol. Around him the building stood in silent darkness beyond the occasional rustle of wind.

"Fine," murmured Godric. He stood.

A small rapping noise rung out, he paused.

But not by the front door, so it was nothing. Something must have caught in the wind—perhaps one of the eves. Maybe a branch of the surrounding trees beating against a window or wall.

"Now I have to go outside and look," he muttered.

Durst paused to listen in the staff hall—the noise came a bit louder here. Maybe something damaged on the building? Pried loose. Slapping against the siding.

Godric dropped down a floor.

Passed the opening to a third-floor balcony that overlooked the Grand Hall. The French door had been left open, and a banging crash rang out. Godric started—stepped out onto the balcony—it might've been a broken window. Was the wind that bad? But there was no glass tinkling. He leaned on the balcony railing to peak out the Grand Hall's latticed windows.

The trees outside were still. There was no wind at all.

Crash!—it came louder than ever. And it was inside the museum. On the interior halls of the upper floors this was obfuscated, but here it was unignorable. The sound was inside—always had been.

Godric exhaled, "Oh fuck!"

Ran his eyes across the Grand Hall's wide floor and the baubles of Rome and England's ancient tribes—no intruder among them, no noise.

The bang came again. Three hard starts and stops. Like a body throwing itself against a door. Trying to get out. Again, and again in multiple disparate series of three. Almost on its own his head swivelled towards the East stair. He could see that dread portal shaking in his mind, bones clicking behind it.

The beam of his flashlight lighted the way through a narrow channel of green wall-paper as he rushed forward. He'd neglected to switch any lights on before this, and now that same alabaster emperor's crimson stare glared out at him in low-light as he began to run.

Durst paused and almost crashed into the door between himself and that stair with his hand on the knob, terror clawing at his back with steel needles. But he threw himself into it. The doors wooden weight swung easily and revealed nothing beyond.

He shone his light down to that dread portal of the East basement door below—closed—no grave-soil laden footprints on the carpet of those old stairs. He took the stares down at a sprint and hauled the basement door open.

Nothing perched in readiness on the stone landing beyond. Not a ghoul to be found in the first-floor basement when he stomped down to it. No skeleton's lurking in the second basement under that.

Even the taped door down to that dungeon of the third was untouched; the door every bit as locked as it ought to be. The only thing to give him a second's real fright was the unmistakably human form standing among boxes.

Another headless statue. Again, of some muscular, dominating form hewn in red alabaster.

"Fuck you," he muttered as passed it in the rows of storage shelves in the cluttered second basement. Couldn't help but feel the missing head glaring at him from the finger holes of some rotten bankers' box.

The noises returned when he resurfaced by the West stairs. Not just with a bang—a shout travelled with it this time.

Feminine verbs of a type Godric couldn't get a handle on besides a punctuated topper at the end of a string—"Cazzo de testa!"

The banging noise was a door—the records room door. None of those disturbances after all.

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