I did not know my visitor was dead until his double tried to kill him.
The first man wore a grey coat with the lining coming loose at the neck. He had brought the book in a flour sack. I put my trimming knife in my apron and lifted the book onto my table. He stood beside the window looking down at the canal. His fingers kept opening and closing, as if he had forgotten something he was supposed to hold.
“You read the old script?” he asked.
“Some of it.”
“They said you read all of it.”
“They were trying to get rid of you.”
At the school, anyone with a difficult visitor sent them to the translating room. I had been there three years. I could read seven dead languages and was not permitted to use the scholars’ staircase. The visitor’s money would buy me a room outside the school and enough time to apply elsewhere.
He put a small purse on the table. I did not open it before he spoke again.
“Only the last diagram. The rest I know.”
The book’s cover was warm. Its leather had split along the hinges, exposing threads as pale and fine as the hair on an infant’s arm. The old script ran in columns toward a diagram of eight figures surrounding a ninth. The ninth had been scratched out, but I could still see the points where lines met it.
“Someone’s altered this,” I said.
“Yes.”
“That makes it harder.”
“Yes.”
I opened the purse. There was more inside than I had expected. I was counting the coins when the second man entered.
He wore a dark coat, properly lined. His face was the first man’s face, down to the pale notch at the upper lip. He looked at the book, then at the grey coat.
“You’ve brought her into it.”
The grey man moved between him and the table. The second man took out a short blade. There was no flourish, no warning beyond the small movement of his hand. He struck beneath the grey man’s ribs.
I threw the purse. Coins hit the floor, the window, the intruder’s cheek. He turned toward me, surprised. The grey man pushed him into the doorframe and kicked the door shut on his wrist.
The blade fell. The hand stayed through the gap. Its fingers reached toward the floor until the grey man closed the door harder. Then it withdrew. We heard footsteps running down the stairs.
The grey man sat against the wall. His coat had darkened across the front. I pulled the bell for the porter, then pulled it again. Nobody came. The bell had been disconnected after the scholars complained about interruptions.
“Don’t fetch anybody,” he said.
“He’s still in the building.”
“He’ll bring the others.”
I took a cloth from my washstand. The grey man tried to press it to his coat and could not hold his arm steady. I held it for him. Beneath my hand his body felt solid and frighteningly ordinary.
“Who is he?”
“Venn.”
“And you?”
“Venn.”
“I need a better answer.”
He looked at the book. “He thinks he’s the one who matters.”
The portrait of Scholar Venn hung in the lower gallery. He had died eight years earlier. His lectures were still assigned to students, and his former room stood locked beside the good staircase. In the portrait he wore the same dark coat as the intruder, with his hand resting on a book.
I had translated three pages copied from that book for an application examination. They concerned turning one substance into another. I had failed because the examiner disliked the word change. He wanted perfection.
The grey man said, “Find the last line.”
I dragged the table close enough that he could see. His hand left a damp mark on the paper.
The surrounding figures were numbered. The central figure had no number. A note in a different hand instructed the reader to gather the eight impressions before sunrise, then close the binding. Each figure had a line returning to the centre.
“These are copies,” I said.
“We know.”
“Of him.”
“We know that too.”
I studied the erased centre. The note used a verb with two senses: to return a person home, or to reduce a material to its first state. The examiner would have liked the second. So had whoever wrote the alteration.
“You return to the book,” I said.
The grey man shut his eyes.
“Every morning?”
“Every morning we bring back what we’ve done. At evening he lets us out again.”
“Who lets you out?”
He tapped the scratched figure.
That was Venn’s immortality. His body had died, but the book still held the impression from which he made new bodies. He spent his nights in eight places, then gathered the night’s work into himself. Tomorrow’s copies began with what he chose to keep.
I read the warning under the diagram twice. Any impression still outside the binding at sunrise would disperse. The grey man watched me reach the end of it.
“I’ve tried staying at the lock,” he said. “Got as far as seeing through my hand.”
“What do you do?” I asked the grey man.
“I keep watch at the north lock.”
“And he?”
“He has the old room. He’s the first one out. He reads our nights in the book and marks what to keep. Then he closes us in.”
I thought of eight men bringing their nights to a dark room, waiting to find out which parts of themselves would survive the binding.
“Why haven’t you asked for help before?”
“I have.”
He looked down at my hand. I was holding the cloth too tightly. He made me loosen it before he continued.
“Sometimes I remember asking. Sometimes I wake with a plan in my head and don’t know where it came from. Yesterday there was a piece of paper in my coat. Your name.”
He had written to himself. Venn had kept the coat and discarded the memory.
Below us the outer door closed. More than one set of feet began climbing the stairs.
I gathered the loose coins, put the purse in my pocket and tucked the book into its sack. The grey man said there were seven others, including the one outside. I said the hall was narrow enough that we would only meet two at a time. It was a stupid thing to say. I wanted him to stand up.
He managed it by pulling on the table. I took his weight under one arm and brought him into the storeroom. There was a delivery door there, opening onto the canal steps. The school used it for coal. Sacks were piled across it; I pushed them aside with my foot until I could reach the bolt.
We reached the bottom step as the men entered my room. Across the canal a lamplighter was lowering the last street lamp. The water shone beneath it like a long strip of damaged copper. I called across for him to fetch the school’s physician. He put down his pole and hurried toward the bridge.
The grey man could not walk any farther. He sank down beside a mooring ring. I unwrapped the book, keeping it away from the wet stone, and worked by the borrowed light.
The diagram was not the oldest part of the page. Beneath it, almost erased by repeated handling, was a smaller diagram. Eight impressions around an empty centre. No returning lines.
Venn had not discovered how to live in eight bodies. He had changed a process that made eight separate things into one that called them back. The older instructions described how to finish the work: open the binding while all impressions were present, then remove the central leaf. The copies would separate from their first form. They would survive the daylight, but there would be no source from which to make them again.
The grey man watched my finger trace it.
“Then we live?”
“It says you’re separate.”
“For how long?”
“It doesn’t say.”
He looked down at the cloth. He understood before I could soften it. Separate bodies would keep their wounds. The book would no longer take his injury away at dawn.
“Can you carry me back?” he asked.
“They’ll close you in.”
“I know.”
He pressed a hand over mine. “I don’t want to die here.”
The first Venn came through the delivery door. Behind him stood a man wearing an organist’s cuffs and another with a red scarf tied around his neck. Their faces were identical. Their eyes were not all looking at the same thing. The organist watched the wound; the first watched my hands.
“Give it to me,” the first said.
I held the book over the water. He stopped. The organist caught his shoulder.
“You struck him.”
“We can repair him at the return.”
“You struck him,” the organist said again.
“He took us out in a flour sack. One dropped lamp and we’d all be gone.”
“I wrapped it,” the grey man said.
The first pulled away. “Bring him upstairs. We don’t have time for this.”
The man with the scarf knelt beside the grey man. He took the cloth from me and held it in place. He loosened the grey man’s collar; the breaths came easier. When he moved his free hand away, the grey man caught it.
One by one the remaining men appeared on the steps. A shopkeeper with a ledger, a messenger carrying an unopened packet, a man in the school’s faded gardener’s coat. The eighth had a bandage over one eye. Nobody introduced himself. I counted them twice, including the wounded man, because the first kept moving and made it hard to be certain.
“She says there’s a way out,” the grey man told them.
The first lunged toward me. The organist caught him. The book slipped from my hand; its lower cover touched the canal. Every man on the steps flinched. I pulled it back, water running from the spine.
The man with the scarf said, “Don’t do that again.”
I set the book on the dry part of the step and kept my hand on the cover.
I explained the old diagram. The shopkeeper asked to see the page. He could not read the script, but he followed the erased returning lines. The gardener asked whether they would age. The messenger wanted to know if they would remember tomorrow. I could answer neither question. The text described what the separation did to the book, not what living apart would feel like.
The grey man asked them to carry him upstairs.
They hesitated. The man with the scarf shifted his hand on the cloth. Seven men stood around someone who needed their help, each able to save him by accepting the return he had tried to escape.
The bandaged man bent to lift him. The shopkeeper said, “Wait.”
I searched the old text for a return that would take only one. Every returning line joined the same centre. The grey man could go back with all of them, or stay outside with all of them. There was no smaller bargain on the page.
Across the city a bell rang for the bakers. Behind the roofs the sky had begun to whiten. At the school, the first morning bell would soon call the scholars to prayers; by the time they finished, sunlight would be on these steps.
The first Venn said, “You can have another night. All of you. I will keep everything.”
“My wife told me her name four times this week,” the organist said.
The first tried to turn his head. “You still know the music.”
“Her name.”
“You don’t keep promises,” said the messenger.
“I keep you.”
The messenger opened his packet. Inside was a scrap of paper, creased and dirty. He laid it beside the book. It said, in the same cramped hand as the original alteration, Ask for the old ending. Do not tell the first.
Perhaps each attempt had lasted just long enough to leave something Venn considered rubbish.
The organist held the first against the wall while the others crowded closer. The man with the scarf said he wanted separation. The shopkeeper said the same. The gardener nodded. The messenger put his packet away. The bandaged man looked at the wounded one and then at me.
“He doesn’t want it,” he said.
“No,” I said.
The grey man began to cry. “Tell him I’ll go back,” he said, though the first was close enough to hear. “Tell him.”
He had paid me to get him out. I wanted to say that they should let him have the binding. Then the organist shifted his grip. The first had almost worked an arm free.
“I can close it,” I said. “You can all go back.”
“No,” the man with the scarf said. He did not look up from the wound.
The bandaged man put his hands beneath the grey man’s shoulders. “Do it, then. And help me carry him.”
The school bell started.
The grey man caught my sleeve. He was trying to draw me away from the book. I loosened his fingers one at a time and put his hand into the bandaged man’s.
The shopkeeper opened the cover. The gardener held it flat. I found the central leaf, sewn separately into the older text. I took the small knife from my apron pocket and cut the stitches. There were only four. My hand shook enough that the gardener put his hand over mine for the last one.
The leaf came free.
The first Venn collapsed against the organist. His mouth opened. I heard a sound like someone taking a breath after a long dive, and then eight men made it together. Their shadows separated on the stone. They had been touching before; I had not noticed.
Nothing else happened. The canal continued past the steps. The book lay open, its old diagram faded almost out of sight.
The organist released the first. He stood looking at his hands. The wrist that had been caught in the door was swelling. He held it against his chest and walked up the stairs without taking the book. The shopkeeper followed. The gardener stayed to help us lift the wounded man.
We carried him to my room. The lamplighter brought the school’s night physician through the delivery door a few minutes later. He asked which Venn he was treating, and when nobody could tell him, he asked for a name he could use. The grey man said, “At the lock they call me Moss.”
The physician worked until the morning light reached the table. Moss died before noon. The man with the scarf stayed beside him. I had expected him to accuse me, and I had prepared nothing useful to say. He only asked for the grey coat, which we had taken off and hung over the stove.
We buried Moss three days later. Four of the other men came. The organist’s wife came with flowers cut from their garden. “Elna, give them here,” he said at the grave. She passed him the whole bunch and kept hold of his sleeve. The first stayed away. Nobody knew where the messenger had gone.
I used the money in the purse to pay for Moss’s burial and my new room. There was enough for both, but very little more. The old book went into a locked drawer. I could have sold it. A collector asked twice. I had no way to tell him what the remaining pages might still do, so I refused.
When I returned to the school for my things, the portrait in the lower gallery was being taken down. The gardener had asked for it. He was waiting by the door with a wrapping cloth and the impatient look of a man whose shift should have ended hours ago.
“What will you do with it?” I asked.
He turned the portrait over. The back was clean wood, wide enough for a small shelf. He measured it with his hand, then tucked it under his arm and left by the scholars’ staircase.
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