The Night Watchman's Round
- 3 minute read
- Ages 9-13
- Horror Stories for Kids
My uncle was the night watchman at a cloth godown for nineteen years, and his round never changed.
Out of the office at the front. Down the left side. Along the back past the loading door. Up the right side. Through the middle aisle. Back to the office. He did it once an hour, on the hour, and he carried a stick and a torch and a register that he signed at each of six points.
Nineteen years of exactly the same walk.
The extra door
He told me this when I was older, and he told it in the flat way he told everything, which somehow made it worse.
On the back wall, between the loading door and the corner, there were two doors.
One was a store cupboard with the fuse box in it. The other one was the same size and the same colour and had the same handle, and it was always locked, and in nineteen years he never once saw it open and never once wondered about it.
"You did not wonder?"
"There are a lot of doors in a godown," he said. "You do not think about the ones that never open."
The night it did
Then one night in his last year, at about two in the morning, he came round the back and the second door was standing open.
He stopped.
Every rule he had ever been given said to look in it, note it in the register and report it in the morning. That was the job. That was the entire job.
He stood there for what he said was probably four or five minutes.
Then he walked past it, finished the round, went back to the office and sat down.
The rest of the night
He did the round again at three.
The door was shut.
He did it at four, and five, and six, and it was shut every time, and at seven the morning shift came in and he signed out and went home and slept badly.
Why
I asked him, years later, why he had not looked.
He said something I have thought about ever since.
"Because in nineteen years that door had never opened. Not once. So on the night it was open, something had opened it. And the only reason for a door to be open at two in the morning in an empty godown is so that somebody will look in it."
He put his tea down.
"It was not open," he said. "It was waiting."
Moral of the story
Nineteen years of routine is what let him see it. A person who did not know the building would have looked in the door and thought nothing of it.
Questions and answers
- What was the watchman's round?
The same six-point circuit of the godown, once an hour, every hour, for nineteen years.
- What were the two doors on the back wall?
One was a store cupboard with the fuse box. The other was identical and always locked.
- What did he find one night at two in the morning?
The second door standing open for the first time in nineteen years.
- What should he have done according to the rules?
Looked inside, noted it in the register and reported it in the morning.
- Why did he walk past it?
He reasoned that a door which had never opened in nineteen years had been opened for a reason, and the only reason was to make someone look inside.
Word meanings
- godown
- A warehouse for storing goods, a word used across South Asia.
- register
- A book in which records are written down.
- aisle
- A passage between rows of shelves or goods.
- circuit
- A route that goes round and returns to the start.
Questions about The Night Watchman's Round
What is the moral of The Night Watchman's Round?
That deep familiarity is a kind of protection. He noticed the door only because he had walked past it thousands of times without noticing it.
Is anything shown or described?
No. The door is never opened further and nothing comes out. The story ends on his reasoning, which is the point.
Why is his last line effective?
Because it reframes everything before it. An open door is a fact; a waiting door is an intention, and he decided which one he was looking at.
What age is this for?
Ages nine and above. There is no violence and nothing appears, which makes it one of the more suggestive stories in this section.