Source A: The record room

An original contemporary non-fiction-style practice text, written for this question.

At nine, the record room was behaving itself. The shelves stood in their numbered rows; each box faced outwards, its label square with the edge. I had been asked to check the register against the contents before the building closed for repairs. It was the sort of task that promised an answer for every question.

I worked from left to right. Box 14: minutes of the harbour committee. Box 15: a bundle of maps, tied with cotton tape. Box 16: empty. I wrote EMPTY in the register, pressing hard enough to mark the page beneath.

A noise came from the corridor: one soft, deliberate tap. I looked up. Nothing moved. The room’s clock continued its thin ticking, and the fluorescent tube above me hummed as if it had been waiting to speak. I returned to the register, though I had lost my place.

Then I saw the dark line beneath the door. It widened slowly, with no splash, no urgency. Water slid across the floor and stopped at the leg of the nearest shelf. I told myself it was a leak, the sort that could be mopped up before anyone needed to worry. But the boxes on the bottom shelf were already drinking from their cardboard edges.

I reached for the register. Its neat columns now seemed to belong to another room, one in which every object stayed where it was put. I lifted the lowest box onto the table. The label said 16. Inside, folded between two damp sheets, was a map I had not recorded.

The water made no sound as it crossed the floor. I began moving the boxes, one at a time, calling out their numbers so I would not lose count. The list had been my way of keeping the room in order. Now I used it to decide what could be carried first.

At the door I looked back. The shelves still stood in their rows, but the dark water had reached the first one. On the register, beside EMPTY, the ink had begun to blur.