CHAPTER ONE What the Water Left #3
Same man, mind. Same slant, same crossed t’s.
Only slower. Every letter finished, every word written out in full.
The whole line pressed down harder, so the ink stands up off the page and you can feel it with your thumb through the back of the leaf.
You write like that when you already know somebody will read it after you’re dead and you’re frightened of being misunderstood.
I found the first without knowing I was looking. I put my finger on the page and said, “Here,” and Elias said, “Yes,” very quietly, and he’d been waiting three hours for me to say it.
The old watchers have stirred at the Deep and my father says we are to do nothing and my father is wrong.
That was the whole of it. The next line was ordinary again, the hand gone slack. A note about a delivery of pitch.
“There are two more like that,” he said. “1811. 1849.”
“And?”
“And after each one.” He reached past me, found the place and turned the leaf over.
There was nothing wrong with it, which was the point.
The next leaf just carried on in a different year.
No tear, no ragged margin, no stub at the gutter where paper had been ripped out.
Somebody had opened the binding, taken out whatever lay in between, and closed it up again so neatly you had to run a finger down into the fold, and feel the thread lying flatter over that stretch, to know anything had ever been there.
“How many pages?”
“1783, I can’t tell. 1811, four at least. 1849.” He stopped. His jaw moved once, as if he were chewing on the number before he’d let it out. “Eleven. Maybe twelve.”
“That’s not somebody vandalising a book.”
“No.”
“That’s a man with a needle and good light and a free afternoon.”
“That’s a Keeper,” Elias said. “With a needle and good light and a free afternoon. Nobody else has ever had these books.”
? ? ?
I got up and went to the window. I needed to be anywhere that wasn’t the table.
Outside was the plain black of my own lane. Two doors up, someone was having a row about a door being left open, and it went on and on.
“So they weren’t guarding a boundary at all.”
“They were. I think they were. I think they were also, every few generations, deciding what the next lot were allowed to know. And I think each of them believed he was being kind.” He hadn’t got up from the chair.
“My father used to say the job was mostly not doing things. I always took that for modesty. I don’t any more. ”
Something underneath his voice made me turn round.
“Elias.”
“There’s a fourth.”
“You said three.”
“I said the phrase turns up three times in a hundred and forty years. That’s true.
” He drew the sewn-through-the-fold one over to himself, the hurried one.
“This isn’t a record. It’s somebody’s working notes, bound up afterwards by whoever cleared out the room.
No date on it. The last entry’s four lines long, and the hand goes careful for every one of them. ”
He didn’t read it out. He turned it round on the table so it faced me, sat back, put both hands flat on his knees and looked at the wall.
If she exists she will be found before she is grown and she must not be. I have written down where I looked so that no man after me has to look there again. Burn what follows.
Whatever followed had been cut out. Very clean. The thread lay flat.
I read it twice. The third time through, the shape of it hit me all at once, the way the floor does when you’ve miscounted the stairs in the dark.
“He was looking for me.”
“He was looking to see whether there was a you.”
“And he wrote down where he’d looked so that.” My voice was climbing. I dragged it back down. “So the next one would know to look where he hadn’t. That’s what this is. It’s not protecting anybody, it’s a method, he’s leaving them a.”
“I know what it is.”
“Then say it.”
“It’s my father’s hand,” Elias said.
? ? ?
The row two doors up had stopped. The lane had gone back to being nothing.
I stood with the table between us and several things came clear, in the wrong order.
That he’d known this for some number of days, and had spent them building a way to show me that left me free not to believe him.
That he hadn’t wanted to say it out loud, and said it anyway because I’d asked.
That the man who walked into the Gull and Anchor at the end of summer and failed to burn had been sent to Duskmere by somebody who’d already narrowed it down.
And that the narrowing had been done in that handwriting, by the man who’d taught him to sail.
“You told me he never explained. Why you. Why here.”
“He didn’t.”
“Do you still believe that?”
Elias took his time. The lamp ticked.
“No.”
I came back and sat, because my legs had developed opinions. The sewn book lay open between us with its four careful lines and its tidy hole. Somewhere outside a cat was working its way through a long complaint.
I put my hand flat on the page. The ink stood up under my palm.
“Then we’d better find out where he looked,” I said.
Elias got up and put the kettle on, which nobody does at midnight, and neither of us said anything about it. We sat in that kitchen until the fire was out and the kettle was stone cold and the window had started going grey, and not once in all that time did either of us say his father’s name.