THE RULE OF HUNDRED

Day 14 of 100

The archive of the Thornwick Wardens lay under the Post like a held breath.

You reached it by a stair behind the cell block, twelve stone steps worn to shallow dishes, and a door of iron-strapped oak that Okafor unlocked with a key the size of a trowel. Beyond it ran a vaulted cellar that had once, Pip claimed, been a cold-store for the lake-keeper's ice. Now it held paper. Rows of it: tall black presses with brass labels, ledgers shelved on their sides, bundles in red tape, boxes of loose depositions gone the color of weak tea. A single gas jet burned at the stair foot. A second, at the far end, lit the reading table. Between them lay forty feet of dust-colored dark, and the smell of it was the smell Mara loved best in the world: old paper, old ink, the faint sweetness of glue.

She had been down here every night for four nights.

Nell Fenwick works late, the Post had decided. Nell Fenwick is dull. Nell Fenwick has no friends, and loves a file. It was all true. Okafor had taken to leaving a heel of bread and a wedge of cheese on a saucer by the stair. Pip had stopped asking whether she wanted to come to the Rose and Crown. And the Captain had said nothing, ever, about the hours she kept, except once, on the third morning, to set a second lamp on her table without remark.

She had not thanked him. She'd looked at the lamp for a long time.

Tonight she did not look at it. She pulled it close, with the gas turned high, and opened the press marked D-1887/SEALED.

…

The Bureau kept two kinds of record, and the Wardens were not meant to read the second.

The first kind was what Mara had read at the interview: the digests. Printed, bound, circulated to every district office; tidy summaries of cases and rulings, with the dates in italics and the grief removed. The second kind lay in the presses with the red tape, and had never been printed, because no one in Washington wished to see it in type.

They were the depositions.

She took out the first bundle, laid it on the table, and untied the tape.

Case 1887-04. Hartford, Conn. Subject: Abigail Marsh, 31, schoolmistress. Doppel manifested at 11 p.m. in the Subject's bedchamber. Both parties identical in aspect, dress, speech, and recollection. Examined separately by three Wardens and a physician. No distinguishing mark was found. Both parties asserted themselves to be the original.

On the nineteenth day, both parties were conveyed to the Blackfrost Vault at Fort Ethan Allen, under Section Four of the Act.

On the twentieth day, the Subject's husband applied for the release of the original. Request denied.

She read it twice. She turned the page.

Case 1887-07. Concord, N.H.

Case 1887-11. Burlington, Vt.

Case 1888-02. Troy, N.Y.

They were all the same. That was the thing that began to press on her, as the gas hissed and the clock above the stair ticked past eleven, and she worked down the first bundle, and the second, and the third. The names changed, and the towns, and the ages. A clergyman. A girl of sixteen. A man who made pianos. But the shape was one shape, like a stencil pressed again and again on a wall: Doppel manifested. Parties examined. No distinguishing mark. Conveyed to the Vault.

She had come looking for the exceptions. Somewhere, she thought, in the thirty-one cases of the first four years, there would be one in which the Wardens had found the true one. One in which an examiner had held up a hand and said this woman, not that one, and been right. One story she could take upstairs and lay on the bed like a lucky stone.

She found a ledger at the bottom of the press that told her otherwise.

It was bound in gray buckram, labeled in a clerk's copperplate: Summary of Dispositions under the Doppel Act, 1887–1893. It had been compiled, she saw, by a Warden at the Burlington office, in the spring of '93, and never forwarded. The preface was a single paragraph.

The undersigned has been instructed to determine the rate at which Originals are successfully identified. I report that the rate is nil.

Of the 67 cases on record, in 67 the Wardens were unable to distinguish the parties. In 67 both were sealed. In the 3 cases where a party was observed to weaken before the sealing, that party was in each case the one subsequently identified by family and friends as the Original. The Bureau has chosen not to draw a conclusion. The undersigned has none to offer that he is willing to sign.

—T. Hollis, Warden, Burlington.

She sat very still.

The one subsequently identified by family and friends. Not the copy. The copy, in the three cases, had been well. The one who had gone gray and thin, who had faltered at the door, whom the husbands and the mothers and the friends had known, afterward, for their own: that was the original.

I knew it, she thought. I knew it in the barn, in Ruth's kitchen, I knew it when I was lying on the floor of that hay-loft looking at my own hand. I knew it. But I thought it was only me.

It was not only her.

Sixty-seven, she thought. Sixty-seven times the Bureau looked at a woman or a man going slowly to pieces, and said: this is the counterfeit. Seal them both. And sixty-seven times—

She did not finish. She put the ledger down.

The lamp had been blurring for some time. She took off the spectacles and pressed the heel of her hand to her eyes and found that it came away damp. She was not weeping. She had no breath for weeping. It was only that the thing in her chest had gone quiet and heavy, like a stone dropped in a well, and she was listening for the sound of its landing.

…

The Rule of Hundred was in the Act itself.

She had known it by heart since she was nineteen, when she had first read it for a seminar on administrative law, and thought it a fine, grim piece of drafting. It was Section Six. She turned to it now in the thin red volume with the Bureau's seal on the spine, and read it as she had never read it: as one reads a will with one's own name in it.

Where, at the expiry of one hundred days from the manifestation of a Doppel, the Bureau remains unable to establish the identity of the Original beyond reasonable doubt, the parties shall be deemed to constitute a single disputed Person, and shall be delivered into the custody of the Vault, there to remain without trial for the term of their natural lives.

Provided that where the hundredth day falls upon an eclipse of the sun or moon, the said delivery shall be made at the moment of totality, the Bureau holding such conjunctions to be of especial efficacy in the matters of the soul.

Hundredth Night.

She had been counting it since the notice on the tavern wall. She counted it now, with a pencil, on the back of her hand: the twenty-first of March, 1894, the night of the Ascension, was Day Zero. The calendar on the Post wall said it was now Day Fourteen. She wrote it out in the margin of the black notebook, small and neat:

100 − 14 = 86.

Eighty-six days. And on the eighty-sixth night from this one, in a sky which some astronomer of the Smithsonian had promised would swallow the moon, a pair of iron doors would swing shut in a mountain.

Both of us. Whichever of us is real.

Well, said the cold, clear part of her, the part that counted buttons. You have been seeing this as a puzzle. It is not a puzzle. It is a clock.

She turned back to the ledger. There were twenty-six pages of annexes at the end, tabulated reports from medical men, which she'd skimmed and set aside as dull. She turned them now with a new, sharp attention. They were dull. They were also full of numbers. Duration from manifestation to first observed decline. Duration from first decline to unconsciousness. In the three cases she had read of, she saw, the declining party had begun to fade between the ninth and fourteenth day.

Day fourteen.

She read the line a second time.

…

At the foot of the annexes was a list. It was headed Authorities consulted in the framing of Section Six (Bureau of Arcane Oversight, Advisory Committee on the Doubled Soul, 1886). There were nine names. Seven were strangers: lawyers, physicians, a bishop. The eighth was a man named Ames who had died in '90.

The ninth she knew at once, the way you know your own handwriting.

Pryce, Aurelian, M.D., Ph.D., Late of the Bureau; Professor of Natural Philosophy, Thornwick.

She put her finger on the line. It was quite steady.

Of course, she thought.

She heard his voice as she had last heard it, in the dusty office with the skull on the shelf, the half-moon spectacles and the wandering hand. I thought you might come to me, if there was trouble. Nothing else. But since the dinner she had heard from Okafor that the Professor had been "off his feed," and not himself, and had gone twice into the chapel to sit for an hour in the dark. Pryce had known her mother. Pryce had read every paper she wrote. Pryce had stood stock still, once, when someone said her name in his hearing, and had said nothing, and had let her go.

He wrote the rule. She laid it down for herself, flatly, the way she'd lay down a card. He sat on the committee that wrote the rule, and he has known, since the morning after the Ascension, that I am the one who is fading. And he has said nothing.

She did not know if it was cowardice or a plan. She did not know whether to run to him or from him. Both thoughts were in her at once, quite calm, like two birds on a wire.

Aurelian Pryce, who taught me the Aristotelian categories and sent me a Christmas orange every year when Mother died.

She closed her eyes.

…

When she opened them again she was looking at her hands.

It took her a moment to see what was wrong. They lay on the open page, the left over the right, in the full light of the gas jet and the lamp: two small, ink-stained, ordinary hands, with bitten nails. There was a smudge on the thumb. There was the rice-grain scar on the left wrist. And through them she could see the print.

She did not move.

It was very faint. It was no more than a thinning, as though the skin had been rubbed with oil. She could see the grain of the paper through the web of the thumb. She could read, beneath her fourth finger, the word Vault.

She lifted her right hand and held it up, between her face and the lamp. The flame showed through the palm as a dim red coin. She could count the bones. She could see, in the bright blur of it, the delicate fan of the metacarpals, the shadow of the tendon, the pulse. Her own pulse, ticking in the web of the thumb like a small trapped moth.

It's the lamp, she said to herself, calmly. It is the angle. It is late. You have eaten nothing but a heel of bread.

She moved the lamp. She turned her palm in the light. She tried the gas, and the shade, and the far end of the room.

It was no use. In the lamp's whole circle, in every direction, her hands were glass.

She sat there for some time. She did not make a sound. She was aware, in a distant way, of a sort of low roaring far inside her, like the sea heard in a shell; and of a tenderness, which she hadn't expected, for the hands themselves. She had never thought of them as a thing she owned. They had held the pencils and turned the pages. They had held her mother's, once, on the edge of a bed. Don't go, she thought at them, absurdly, as one speaks to a child on a platform. Don't go. I haven't finished with you yet.

"Miss Fenwick."

The voice was very low. It came from behind her, and a little to the left, from the stair.

She had her hands under the table before she knew she'd moved.

…

He had not made a sound on the stairs. She had never learned how he did it; he was a big man, and the stone was worn, but he moved like a man crossing a room in which a child is sleeping. He stood at the edge of the lamp's reach with a tin tray in his hands, his coat off, his shirt-sleeves rolled, and his face in half-shadow, the scar a pale thread through the brow.

"I beg your pardon," said Captain Rooke. "I should have knocked."

"There's no door to knock on."

"No." The corner of his mouth moved. "That's the usual difficulty."

He crossed the flagstones. He did not look at the ledger, nor at the red-taped bundles heaped upon the table, nor at the little thin volume of the Act. His eyes rested on her face, and went away; and she understood, with a slow wash of gratitude that was almost pain, that he had seen all of it, the open depositions and the Summary and her white face, and that he was not going to say so.

He set the tray at her elbow.

There was a pot of tea on it, a brown earthenware pot with a chipped lip, and a single cup. A plate with two slices of buttered bread. A saucer with a spoonful of damson jam.

"Okafor's," he said. "He insisted. I think he is afraid of you."

"Of me?"

"You have corrected his sums."

"They were wrong."

"They were. He's a surveyor. He thought it was a matter of principle." He poured. The steam went up past the lamp and through the dark. "I would like it if you drank this. I'm told it improves the temper."

"Whose?"

"Any."

She took the cup in both hands. She had to, they were so cold. She felt the heat go through the china and into the bones, and was dreadfully afraid that the Captain would see the light through her fingers; but the cup was thick, and the room was dim, and the steam clouded the lamp. She held it under her chin and breathed.

He did not sit. He leaned against the nearest press, with his arms crossed, and looked at the ceiling.

"It's a hundred and four years since this cellar was dug," he said, after a while. "My father used to say that the ice came in blocks as big as a coffin, and was packed in sawdust, and lasted till September. As a child I'd come down here in August and put my cheek to the wall. It was colder than anywhere else in Vermont."

"Was it a comfort?"

"It was an escape." A pause. "One does want somewhere, now and again, to be cold."

She said nothing. She didn't trust her voice.

"I will not ask what you are reading," said Rooke. His eyes were still on the vault of the roof. "You have the run of the cellar. It was in your agreement. And I think, Miss Fenwick, that you read these things for a reason, and that the reason is yours."

"Captain—"

"I only ask that you eat the bread."

She laughed. It came out of her without warning, a short cracked sound, very small. It startled her. It startled him; he looked down, and for a moment they regarded each other in the gaslight with an expression of mutual astonishment, like two strangers who have been handed the same umbrella.

"I will," she said.

"Good."

He pushed himself off the press. He stood a moment longer, as if he had something to add; she saw him take a breath, and let it go. His glance went once, quickly, to the table, and to the pages open there, and to the ninth name on the list under the sputtering lamp.

"Good night, Miss Fenwick."

"Good night."

He went up the stair. She heard the iron door close without a sound.

…

She sat for a long while after that with the tea going cold.

The bread she did eat, every crumb, and the jam. She did it slowly, like a patient. It tasted of damsons and woodsmoke and something else, something simple and stern, which she could not name until she had licked her thumb and was sitting with her head in her hands.

It was being looked after. That was all. She had not been looked after in ten years. Not since she was fourteen, in a wet black dress at a graveside, and Aunt Cora had said brave girl, and left her alone with the housekeeper.

He doesn't know me, she thought. He has looked at me three times in the full light and he does not know me. He thinks I am a poor cousin. He puts tea on the table for a clerk with a bad chest, and talks about ice.

And that is the kindest thing anyone has done for me since the day I died.

The word stopped her.

She had not meant to use it. It had come up from the cellar floor, from the cold and the stones, as plain as a bell; and she sat there with her hand on her breastbone and let it ring.

She picked up the pencil.

Beneath 100 − 14 = 86, in the margin of the black notebook, in a hand that did not shake, she wrote four more lines. She wrote them as she had written everything since she was a child, because it was the only way she knew to make a thing hold still.

1. The Bureau has never identified an Original. Not once.

2. The one who fades is the Original. Three of three.

3. Pryce wrote the rule. Pryce knows.

4. I have eighty-six days. And I am already beginning to go.

She looked at the last line a long while.

Then she held up her hand again, the pencil-hand, her right, to the lamp. It was clearer now. It was nearly clear. She could see the flame straight through it, a small orange tongue, standing in the middle of her palm as if it had been planted there; and the dark behind, and the shelves, and the long unlit dark of the cellar going on and on to the stair.

She was becoming a window.

Eighty-six days, thought Mara, and the glass is already thin.

She closed her fist on the flame, and held it, and did not let go.