Night Four: The Journal

Rule Seven said the Caretaker does not read the previous Caretaker's journal. It did not say the Caretaker does not look for it, and Wren had decided, somewhere between the second night and the third, that she was going to hold the Rule to its exact words.

She went up on the fourth afternoon, while Agatha Pell slept and Simon sat in his chair and the fog pressed its face to every window on the Ground Floor. The silver key turned in the Attic door as if it had been oiled yesterday. Simon had wanted to come. She had told him no, because the third degree was closed to guests and because if Mrs. Varga found a guest in the Attic the Warden would have one more reason to say nothing, and Wren had had enough of nothing.

The Attic was one long room under the slope of the roof, and it had been lived in. That was what she had not expected. A bed with the blankets turned back. A washstand. A row of books on a plank shelf, swollen with damp. A calendar for 1997 still pinned to the beam, with the days of October crossed off up to the ninth. Edmund Hale had been the Caretaker from 1990 until the autumn of 1997, and on the fourth night of a residency he had come up these stairs, and here was the bed he had not got into.

She looked for an hour. Under the mattress. Behind the books. In the washstand drawer, which held a razor and a comb and a photograph of a woman who was not Mrs. Varga. Nothing.

It was the floorboard that gave it away, in the end, because the floorboard was the one thing in the Attic that was not dusty. Three boards from the wall under the window, a short length, wiped clean. She got her fingers under it and it came up, and beneath it, in the gap between joists, lay a book bound in black cloth, with a tally of chalk marks drawn on the cover in white pencil: seven, then a stroke through them, then one.

Wren sat on Edmund Hale's bed with the journal in her lap and thought about Rule Seven for a long time. Then she opened it.

Most of it was weather and lists. A caretaker's book. Then the entries thickened, and the hand got faster, and she read with the lamp unlit and the grey light going.

October 1997. The Trust has sent seven guests. I have told the Warden I will not keep the Tally this year and the Warden has told me that the Tally is not mine to refuse.

What I have worked out in seven years, and what nobody told me, is this. The Rules were posted in 1891 by the first Warden, a woman called Oriel Bellwether, the year the House was finished. They have not been changed by a word since. The Rules are not for keeping the guests safe. They are for keeping the Tally honest.

The thing I call the Pale Lodger is a lodger. That is the whole of it. It lodges in the House and it has no mark on the slate and it wants one. It wants to be counted. Every Rule that costs a life is a Rule that keeps a mark off the slate that should not be there. It knocks from the Cellar so that someone will answer and make it a guest. It speaks in the Hour of Silence so that someone will speak back. It stands on the gravel in a dead man's voice so that a widow will open the door and let it in and count it. The Tally is not a record. The Tally is a door, and the chalk is the key.

If a mark is ever made for it, it will be a guest. The sub-clause in the residency papers is older than the Trust's lawyers know. Payment to each guest whose mark stands. It wants the sixth morning. I do not know what it would do with it.

I will not keep the Tally tomorrow night. I will go up to the Attic instead and I will hide this where the Warden will not look, because she has never once come up here. If I am wrong, I will come down in the morning and burn it. If I am right, then God help the next Caretaker, because the Warden will post Rule Seven, and Rule Seven will be the only Rule in the House that is a lie.

That was the last entry. The ninth of October, 1997. Below it, in a different pencil, in a hand so small it might have been written in the dark, three words: it is counting.

Wren closed the book.

So that was it, then. The question of the journal, which had hung over her since the first night, since Mrs. Varga had said his journal was never found in the hall, was finished. It was found. It had been under the floor of the third degree for twenty-seven years, three boards from the wall, where a woman who never climbed the stairs would never look. She knew now what the Pale Lodger wanted. It wanted a mark. She did not know, still, what had become of Edmund Hale. The journal said he had come up here on the fourth night. The bed said he had not slept in it. The calendar stopped on the ninth. Where had the last Caretaker gone? The question had a new shape now, but it was the same question, and the Attic did not answer it.

She put the journal inside her coat and the board back over the gap and went down to the Ground Floor, and the first person she met in the hall was Dr. Roux.

"You have been in the third degree," he said. He was looking at the dust on her knees.

"I'm the Caretaker. The Attic is closed to guests. I'm not a guest."

"No." He studied her for a moment. "Neither am I, strictly, but the Warden has never agreed. If you found anything, Miss Calloway, I would consider it a kindness to the Trust if you told the Trust before you told the Warden. I am a member of it. I would like, for once, to know something before she does."

"You'll know when everyone knows," Wren said, and went past him.

At eleven Mrs. Varga covered the warden. At a quarter to midnight she stood at Wren's shoulder in front of the slate, as she had every night, and Wren felt the journal flat against her ribs and counted, and did not look at the Warden's face.

"Seven," she said, and lifted the chalk.

"Wait," said Callum Finch, from the drawing room door. He had the Trust papers in his hand again. "Wait. I've been going through the ledger in the back of this. The 1997 residency. Seven guests. Seven marks on the first three nights and then, on the fourth night, eight. Eight marks, and seven guests, and no note of who the eighth was for."

"Mr. Hale kept the Tally in 1997," said Mrs. Varga. "Mr. Hale is not here to be asked."

"And the sixth morning? Who was paid?"

"Seven guests were paid," said Mrs. Varga. "Make your marks, Miss Calloway."

Wren made seven. She was very careful about it. Seven white strokes in a fourth row, under three rows above, and she stepped back and counted them twice, and then she counted the guests again with her eyes, Agatha and Simon, Nora Finch and Callum, Nora Fitch, Dr. Roux, Mireille, seven, and the marks were seven, and she let out her breath.

"Good," said Mrs. Varga, and for the first time in four nights Wren heard something in the Warden's voice that might have been relief, or might only have been the same word said by a tired woman. "Lock your doors."

The Hour of Silence came and went, and nothing knocked, and nothing spoke, and nothing stood on the gravel. It was the quietest night of the four. Wren lay with the journal under her pillow and the lighter in her fist and listened to the House not making a sound, and thought that silence, from a thing that counted, was not the same as absence. It was only a thing that had finished counting, and was waiting for the sum.