Chapter Eight: The Door With No Nameplate

The boy was eight, and he was becoming a nightlight, and he was frightened.

He wasn't frightened of the nightlight. He seemed to quite like the idea, once Mira had explained it. A little lamp shaped like a moon, that came on when the room got dark and made the shadows go back where they belonged. He had had one, he told her, until he was six, and then his brother had laughed at him and he had made his mother take it away.

It was the edges that frightened him.

He kept looking down at his hands. They had started to go soft at the fingertips, the way they all did, the shape loosening as the sentence took hold. Most adults didn't notice until it was nearly done. Children always noticed.

"Is it going to hurt?" he said.

"No," said Mira. "It feels like falling asleep in the car. That's what people tell me."

"I don't want to fall asleep yet."

Regulation intake time was twenty minutes. The boy had been in her office for nineteen. There was a clock on the wall to remind her, and there was a man from the Boundary Section who had been sitting on the bench outside her door since that morning, to remind her of everything else.

Mira looked at the clock. Then she reached into her drawer, took out a hold slip, and signed it.

A hold slip let a reaper pause a sentence for review. It was meant for paperwork errors, a wrong name, a missing testimony. It was not meant for an eight-year-old who did not want to fall asleep yet. If anyone checked, she would have to explain herself, and with Crane's man on the bench outside, somebody would check.

"There," she said. "Now we've got as long as we like."

The edges of the boy's hands stopped going soft. He looked at them and then at her with enormous suspicion, as though she had done a magic trick and he wanted to see the other hand.

"How long?"

"Long enough for you to tell me about your brother," said Mira, "and whether he deserved it."

He did. At length. When he had finished, and laughed twice, and yawned once without noticing, Mira tore up the hold slip, and he went very gently, a little moon-shaped lamp on the chair, glowing faintly even in the daylight. She put him on the shelf next to the diary, where it was darkest.

The man on the bench wrote something down. Mira didn't care.

That night, she went back to the archive.

This time she went to the door behind the counter, which was locked, and which opened, as most locks in the Office did, to a reaper's master key and a certain amount of patience. She had told herself that she was going to look at the register. That she was going to find the old key list, and see whose initials were on the line that said destroyed, and stop thinking about where the counter clerk's eyes had gone when she said the word Keeper.

The register was where Crane had said it would be. A tall black book on a lectern. She found the page. A column of keys, each with a number and a date and the same word in faded brown ink. Destroyed. Destroyed. Destroyed.

Every entry had been initialled by the same person. The same small, upright hand. There was no name. In the column where a name should have been, someone had simply written, Keeper of the Archive.

There was a drawer under the lectern. It was not locked. Afterwards, Mira thought that was deliberate.

Inside was a single file. Old, its cover gone soft as cloth, tied with a ribbon that had once been red. The case number on the front had only three digits. It was an appeal file, like her mother's. The appellant's name had been scratched out so long ago that the paper had healed over it.

The deceased had been a girl of seventeen. Her name was Agnes. She had been remembered, by a village that had not liked her very much, as careless with other people's things, and she had been classified as a music box with a broken key, for an indefinite term. Underneath, filed over and over again, were appeals. Sixty years of them. The handwriting the same in every one, small and upright, getting a little shakier, then steadier, then shakier again. Grounds for appeal. New evidence. Request to reconvene.

And then, three hundred years ago, they stopped.

There was no ruling. No refusal. The last page was simply a form that had been started and never finished. Grounds for appeal, it said, and then nothing. As though the person writing it had put down the pen to go and get something, and had never come back.

Mira thought of the shelf in the supervisor's office. The row of pocket watches. The doll with one eye. A small wooden music box with its lid shut.

"I wondered," said a voice behind her, "how long it would take you."

He was in the doorway. Dark suit, pale eyes. His coat was dry tonight. He did not come in. He stood there with his hands at his sides, and for the first time since she had known him he looked exactly as old as he was.

"It was you," Mira said.

"Yes."

"You have a key."

"I kept one. When they recalled them. I wrote destroyed in the book, and I put it on a hook on my wall, and I looked at it every day for two hundred years." He said it plainly, as if reading out a list. "A week before your letter came, I took it down."

"Why?" It came out smaller than she meant.

He was quiet for long enough that she thought he wasn't going to answer.

"Agnes was my sister," he said. "I filed for her for sixty years. And then one day I didn't. Nobody stopped me. Nobody noticed. Least of all me. I simply found, one morning, that I'd stopped expecting anything, and that it was easier. I took the job upstairs. I kept her where I could see her. I've been keeping her for three hundred years, and I've been very good at my job, and I have not once filed anything since." He looked at the folder in her hands. "Then you arrived. And I watched you do what I did, for three years. Every appeal you filed for a stranger, and every season the notice on your mother's file, and you getting a little quieter each time. I knew where you were going. I've been there. I couldn't watch you get there too."

"So you broke the boundary."

"Three times." He held up one hand, and she saw it properly for the first time. The fingertips were pale as candle wax. "The key only keeps the way open while you have warmth to spend. An hour, if you're lucky. The first night I went to the shelter. They'd refitted it. The bureau was gone, and there was a receipt from a house clearance pinned to the noticeboard.

"The second night I found the bureau in a shop at the end of a high street, with a price on it and every drawer empty. There was a tag inside. It said, contents returned to the shelter, for the family, if anyone asks." Something that wasn't quite a smile. "Nobody had asked. The third night, the box was on a shelf in the back office. The good paper. The stamps. A tin of mints. And that." He looked at the file in her hands. "It was raining. It always seems to be raining over there. I haven't been warm since."

"How did you even know it existed?"

"The same way you'll have found out, if you've been in the registry. Your mother told her intake officer that she had written it down once, for her daughter. He put it under Remarks. Nobody ever pursues Remarks."

"And Hollis copied it."

"Hollis copies everything. And he put a tick beside every one of those five words, and never said a thing to anyone. I found the marks last winter." He paused. "I'm never seen on your floor, Mira. If I'd been outside your door at dawn, every clerk in the building would have known by lunch. So I asked him to carry it the last forty yards. He said yes before I'd finished asking. I think he had been waiting four years for somebody to ask him anything."

Mira thought of the trolley stopping at her door. The eyes going to her blotter, and away. She had been right about Hollis and wrong about him, both at once.

Mira looked down at the file. Agnes. Sixty years, and then a form with nothing on it. She thought about her own file, the thick one at home. She thought about how many more years she had in her before she put the pen down to go and get something, and never came back.

What would she be by then? Somebody who sat in a long room full of other people's things, telling young reapers to file openly, while she kept her own sister on a shelf?

Or something worse. Somebody who didn't even keep the shelf.

"Crane knows a key was used," she said. "He's got until the season turns. Article Nine says that if he can't name who brought it, it's me."

"I know," said the supervisor. "That's why I'm here. Tell him."

"What?" Mira stared at him.

"Tell him it was me. That was always the arrangement, Mira. That's why I asked you to come to me first. Give him my name and your mother's appeal stands on its own."

"You don't have a name," she said, and was shocked at how angry she sounded. "You took it off your door."

"Then tell him it was the supervisor. He'll know."

She put the file back in the drawer under the lectern, very carefully, and tied the ribbon again, the way it had been.

"No," she said.

"Mira."

"No," she said again, and walked past him out of the door, and did not look back, because she already knew what his face would look like and she did not want to see it.