Night Five: The Eighth Mark

Wren read the journal aloud at breakfast on the fifth day, to all of them, with the Warden standing at the end of the table with her hands folded exactly like the woman in the painting.

She read Oriel Bellwether and 1891. She read the Tally is a door. She read it wants the sixth morning. When she reached the three words in the small hand at the bottom of the last page, Agatha Pell put down her knitting for the first time in five days, and her son put his hand on her shoulder and left it there.

Nobody spoke for a while. Then Mrs. Varga said, "Yes."

"Yes what," said Callum Finch.

"Yes, that is what I believe it wants. Yes, I posted Rule Seven in the winter of 1997, after Mr. Hale had gone, because his letter to the Trust said that his journal would make the next Caretaker refuse to keep the Tally, and a Tally that is refused is a Tally that is kept by something else. I have been the Warden of this House for thirty-one years and the chair of its Trust for twenty-six, and I have never read that book, and I would not have let you read it." She looked at Wren without heat. "You have broken Rule Seven. You are still the Caretaker. There is nobody else."

"Did you know where it was?"

"I have never been up to the third degree," said Mrs. Varga. "I am afraid of stairs. That is the whole of my secret, Miss Calloway. Mr. Hale knew it."

Dr. Roux said, slowly, "Ilse. The eighth mark in 1997."

"Was not made by Edmund Hale. He did not keep the Tally on the fourth night. He went up to hide that book, and the slate was left in the hall with the chalk on its string, and in the morning there were eight marks." She paused. "Seven guests were paid on the sixth morning. I have never known who collected the eighth. I have kept the Rules for twenty-seven years so that I would never have to find out."

"And Hale?" said Wren. "Where did he go?"

"Up," said the Warden. "That is all anyone knows. Up, and not down."

They spent the day as the condemned spend days, usefully. Simon Pell nailed the Cellar door shut from the hall side, which was not against any Rule, and his mother held the nails. Nora Finch photographed the slate from every angle, four rows, eight and eight and seven and seven, as if a record could hold a thing to its number. Nora Fitch, who had taught primary school for thirty years, sat with Mireille Dunne in the hall and talked to her in the voice she had once used for children on the first day, and Mireille, who had sat under the slate for three days with her dead husband's absence in her lap, began at last to answer.

Callum found Wren in the Gallery at dusk, where she was filling the lamp with Howard's lighter in her pocket.

"My sister thinks the painting is the first Warden," he said. "Oriel Bellwether. She thinks it isn't that it looks like Mrs. Varga, it's that Mrs. Varga has come to look like it. Thirty-one years in the same chair." He tilted his head at the brass plate. "Still doesn't say who painted it."

"No," said Wren. "It doesn't."

At eleven Mrs. Varga covered the warden by the light of the lamp. At a quarter to midnight Wren counted. Agatha and Simon. Nora Finch and Callum. Nora Fitch. Dr. Roux. Mireille. "Seven." She made seven marks in the fifth row and gave the chalk its string and did not put it down.

"I'm staying in the hall tonight," she said. "In the chair. I won't open a door because I won't be behind one. Rule Four doesn't say the Caretaker has to be in bed."

"Rule Four does not say a great many things," said the Warden. "Mr. Hale was also fond of its exact words." But she did not forbid it. She went up, and the doors closed one by one along the corridor, and Wren sat down in the chair where Mireille had sat and Howard had died, with the slate above her and the lighter in one hand and the chalk in the other, and waited for one o'clock.

The Hour of Silence came in. The clock, which had never once been wrong, ticked through it.

At ten past, Howard Dunne's voice on the gravel. "Mireille. Love. Open the door." Wren did not move. Along the corridor, no chair scraped. Mireille's door stayed shut, and Wren thought: she has learned it too. It went on for some minutes, and then it did what it had done before, and said the name wrong, and stopped.

At twenty past, three knocks from under the floor, from the fourth degree, slow, against a door that had been nailed shut that afternoon. The nails held. The knocks did not come again.

At half past, the chalk on its string beside her head began to move.

She did not look at it. She had decided that before one o'clock: that she would not look, because looking was not against the Rules but the thing that looked might speak, and she was not certain, any more, that she could trust her own mouth. She heard the string creak. She heard a long cold breath that was not hers and that smelled of nothing. She heard, very clearly, a single stroke of chalk on slate, slow and deliberate, the sound she had made thirty-seven times in five nights, made once by something else.

Then the breath withdrew, and the string swung, and there was nothing in the hall but the clock.

She did not stand until two. When the clock struck, she rose and turned and looked at the fifth row, and there were eight marks on it.

The eighth was longer than the others, and a little crooked, and the chalk dust under it on the floor lay in a thin white film that was faintly greasy and had the shape of a narrow foot.

Wren wet her thumb and rubbed the eighth mark out.

It came away. That surprised her more than anything. It came away like chalk. Seven marks stood in the fifth row, and the slate was black where the eighth had been, and behind her the doors were opening along the corridor and Mrs. Varga was on the stairs with her hand on the rail, looking at the slate, and then at Wren, and then at the slate again.

"Seven," said the Warden.

"Seven."

"Then on the sixth morning seven guests are paid." Mrs. Varga came down the last step. "And the Caretaker gives the Warden back her keys, and goes home, and never comes back, if she has any sense. The Trust will send a letter to the next one. I will sign it. That is what the chair of the Trust is for."

Wren took the keyring out of her coat. Eleven keys. Brass, iron, silver, black. She looked at it in her hand, and then she looked at the slate, at the five rows and the one dark gap, and at the thin white curl of residue on the floor that she would have to scrub when the sun was up because that was what the Caretaker was for.

"Who was paid in 1997, Mrs. Varga?" she said. "The eighth one. Where did it go, when it was counted? Did it go up?"

The Warden did not answer. Wren had not expected her to.

Dawn came grey through the fanlight over the door. Mireille Dunne stood in it with Nora Fitch at her elbow and asked Wren, quietly, for her husband's lighter back, and Wren gave it to her, because there were matches again, somewhere; there were always matches again by daylight. Nora Finch took one last photograph of the slate. Callum folded the Trust papers and put them in his coat. Agatha Pell took her son's arm and said that she would not be coming next year, and Simon said, "Mum," and for once it sounded like agreement.

Wren put the keys back in her pocket, not in the Warden's hand. She did not know, yet, whether that was an answer. She only knew that the House had five nights and four degrees and seven Rules and a slate with one gap in it, and that something between the Cellar and the Attic had counted to eight and been told, by a woman with a wet thumb, that it was wrong. It would not be told that forever. Somebody would have to be the Caretaker when it tried again.