THE MEMORY GAP

Day 3 of 100

By the third day she had filled forty pages and found nothing she could use.

Mara sat at her desk in the narrow room under the eaves of Corbin House and read her own handwriting back to herself. It was a clean hand, small and upright, trained by six years of marginalia; she wrote every note twice, once in pencil on the day and once in ink that evening, with the date and the source, and she cross-referenced the whole in a system of numbered flags that Josie described as a filing cabinet that has taken a vow. The notebook lay open at its center. It was a squat brown book bound in calf, as thick as a hymnal, with a strap and a brass catch. Her mother had given it to her. It was the last thing her mother had given her. It was on its fifth refill.

Doppel, she had written at the head of the page, and underlined it twice.

Origin: Dutch, doppelgänger, "double-goer." Bureau usage since 1887 (the Doppel Act). Technical sense: a duplicate of a sigil-bearer, generated spontaneously at or near Ascension, bearing the form, faculties and memory of the original.

Causes (hypothesized): (1) peak magical discharge; (2) severe psychic trauma during the Ascension window; (3) unknown.

Cases documented in the public record since 1887: fourteen. Cases documented in the public record with a surviving original: nil.

She read that last line again.

Nil, she thought. She had underlined it on the first reading, and again on the second, and now it sat there on the page like a stone in a shoe. Fourteen cases. Fourteen times a young man or woman had gone up to a Founder's Stone and come away with something extra, and fourteen times the Bureau had come with its gray coats and taken them away. The records were sparse. The newspapers were hysterical. The Act itself, which she had read four times, was written in a language of such scrupulous vagueness that it might have been composed by a committee of eels. Where it cannot be established, to the satisfaction of the Director, which of two persons is the original. She had tried to parse it. It seemed to say that when the Bureau could not tell, it would not try.

She put down the pen.

The room was very quiet. It was a small room, whitewashed, with a sloped ceiling that made her stoop when she crossed to the window; a narrow bed with a patchwork quilt, a washstand, a wardrobe that did not quite shut. A fire of three coals muttered in the grate. On the desk, in a plain silver frame, stood the only photograph she owned: a woman of thirty, with fair hair and a wide laughing mouth, in a straw hat, squinting into the sun on the end of a jetty. Behind her was water. The picture had faded to the color of tea.

Margaret Ashgrove, the back said, in a round hand. Merrow Falls, July. The year was missing.

She did not often look at it. She looked at it now, because she was tired, and because she had slept badly, and because there was a thing she had not told anyone, not even Josie, and she wished to see her mother's face while she thought it.

…

It had begun on the second night.

She had been lying in bed with the lamp out, not sleeping, going over the Ascension in her mind as one worries a sore tooth. The Dean's face. The crack in the stone. The quiet hand-wringing in the gallery, the whisper of poor thing; and, last of all, the gray man in the doorway, with his stare, and his frown. She had counted the knots in the beam. She had said her six-times table. And somewhere between one breath and the next, as she was drifting at the edge of sleep, a thing had come into her head that was not hers.

It was a picture. It was not like remembering. It came entire and sudden, as a lantern-slide drops into the gate: a stretch of dark-green water, glittering, under a high white sun. A wooden dock. A hand. A boy's hand, thin and brown, with scabbed knuckles, held out across the water towards her, the fingers spread. She was in the lake. She knew she was in it. The cold was in her chest, and her skirts dragged, and the hand was a long way off, and she was reaching, and the water went on filling her mouth.

And a voice.

Mara. Mara, look at me. Look at me. Don't look down. Look at me, I've got you, I've got—

She had sat bolt upright in the dark, with her heart going like a drum.

It had been nothing. She had told herself so. A dream, a scrap of nightmare, stirred up by the Stone and the strain. She was a person who had drowned her mother in every dream she'd had at fifteen. It was an old, familiar horror, and it was only that it had come with a new face. The boy. The dock.

But she had not been dreaming. She had not been asleep. And she had never in her life, at any age, been in the water at Lake Merrow.

Because I wasn't there, she had said to herself, in the dark, with great firmness. I was at the house. My mother went out in the boat alone, and she did not come back, and they found her at dusk. I was told. I did not see. I was in bed with a fever, and I woke on the third day, and they told me.

That's the whole of it.

But she had written the picture in the book the next morning, in pencil, before she could stop herself. A boy. A dock. A hand. "Look at me." And under it, because she was honest: I do not remember this. Source unknown.

Since then there had been three more.

They came without warning. At breakfast, a smell: pine pitch and wet rope and boy. In the library, a flash of sunlight on a boathouse roof. A voice again, once, very young and very frightened: Don't tell them, Mara. Don't tell. Please. It'll be all right. She had gone cold to the fingertips and sat gripping the table until the reading room came back. Nobody had noticed. She had gone straight to the margin of her book and written the time.

She knew what it was. That was the worst part. She had written a monograph on it.

Leakage, she thought. Memory leakage. The recovery of material from a blocked region. It was in the literature of the Sigil, a well-known sequel to a trauma at Ascension, when the soul's architecture was strained. It was benign. It passed. A scholar of her own training could hardly be alarmed to find the phenomenon in herself.

Except that I did not have any trauma at Ascension, said a small cold voice, that was not the one you already had.

…

"There you are!"

The door swung wide, and the room filled with Josie.

She did that. She came into a space as a gust comes through a window, all at once, with a rustle of skirts and a flash of color and a smell of the hot chestnuts she carried in a paper twist. Her curls had given up and tumbled down her back. She wore a plum-colored walking dress with the sleeves rolled and a streak of ink across the front, and a woolen muffler wound round her neck in what appeared to be seven turns. She kicked the door shut behind her with her heel.

"I've been all over," she announced. "I looked in the library. I looked in the refectory. I even looked in the chapel, and nobody looks in the chapel, it's full of ghosts and Presbyterians. Have you eaten anything?"

"I had tea."

"Tea is not a meal, it's a vice." Josie dropped into the chair by the fire and began to unwind the muffler. "Here. Chestnuts. Eat. I won't be argued with, I've been on my feet for six hours, I've bandaged a first-year's thumb and a cat." She held out the twist. "How is the fracture?"

"Fine."

"Show me."

"There's nothing to see."

"I'm a healer, Mara. I'm going to be a very good one. Show me your arm."

She hesitated. Then she pushed back her cuff.

The sigil lay on her wrist, pale and fine. It had not changed since the dais: a three-armed snowflake, silver-blue, dull as a thumbprint on glass, with its thin white line across the center. It did not glow. It did not hurt. She had looked at it a great many times in the last two days, in the mirror, in the lamplight, in the cold gray of the stair, and each time she'd felt the same slow sinking sense of having been handed a letter in a language she could almost read.

Josie took her wrist in both hands. She bent over it. Her face, so mobile and so merry, went quite still. She held the arm to the firelight, and turned it, and ran a fingertip along the crack, and Mara felt the faint tingle of a healer's touch, a cool shiver, a lazy warmth. It lasted a minute.

"Hm," said Josie.

"Is it bad?"

"Why does everybody keep saying that? You sound just like the Captain." She let go. She sat back. "No. It's not bad. It's strong, it's healthy, it's got a lovely clean pulse. It's like—" She frowned. "It's like a bell that's been cracked and gone on ringing. It shouldn't. But it does. I can feel it hum."

"I thought sigils didn't crack."

"They don't."

"I looked it up. There's no precedent."

"Then you've made history. Congratulations." Josie smiled, but the smile went out of her eyes a little too fast. "It's odd, though. It's got a— I don't know. A sibling."

Mara went still.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing! It's a feeling. The way it hums. As if there were two notes, very close together, and they were trying to be one." Josie waved a hand. "Don't mind me. I've been up since four and I had a sherry at lunch. Eat your chestnut."

"Josie."

"What?"

"Did you see me at supper last night?"

"Of course I did."

"At what time?"

"Half past six, in the refectory, where I always see you, and where you ate—" She stopped. She screwed up her face. "Oh, now you mention it. You did eat. A cherry tart. A whole one. I was astonished. You never take dessert, and you took two spoonfuls of cream, and you laughed at Tobias Marsh's terrible joke about the goose."

"Josie, I was in the library until nine."

"No, you weren't."

"I was. I have it in the book. I was in the reading room from five until the bell."

"You were at supper."

"I wasn't."

"Mara." Josie had put the chestnuts down. "I sat across from you for forty minutes. You wore your blue dress. You had your hair down, which I remarked on. You said you were feeling liberated."

"I have never said the word liberated in my life."

They stared at each other.

The fire popped. A coal fell in the grate with a small, dry, settling noise, and Mara found that she was gripping the edge of the desk so hard that her knuckles stood out like pebbles.

"It was probably someone else," said Josie slowly.

"Who?"

"A girl in a blue dress. It's a common color."

"With my face?"

"It was— I mean, it must have been—" Josie laughed, a short unsteady laugh. "It was you. It was just that you were— different. Happy. I thought it was the Ascension. I thought maybe the crack had shaken something loose, a relief, you know, after twenty-four years of holding your breath. I was glad." She put her hand to her mouth. "Mara, you're white as a sheet."

"I'm all right."

"You're not."

"I'm tired." She pulled the cuff down over the sigil. "It's been three days of very little sleep. I'm confused about the time. Josie, it's all right. I must have been mistaken."

"You didn't look mistaken."

"I wrote it wrong in the book."

"Did you?"

"Yes."

It was the first time in six years she had lied to her. It lay in her mouth like a coin. She saw Josie's eyes narrow, saw the flick of a glance at the notebook, the brass catch, the strap done up tight; and she thought, with a rush of fierce unreasoning tenderness, Don't ask. Please, please don't ask me yet.

Josie did not ask. She picked up the chestnuts again, and held them out. Her hand was not quite steady.

"Eat," she said. "Just eat."

…

Professor Pryce received her at five, in his rooms, without sherry.

That alone was a warning. His study was in the old tower of the East Court, a round room lined floor to ceiling with books, so crammed that the shelves bowed, with a spiral stair going up to a gallery and a great oak desk in the middle heaped with papers like a wreck at low tide. A fire burned. A kettle sat on a trivet. On the mantel, in a place of honor, stood a human skull with a pair of spectacles balanced on its nose, which he called Dr. Hobbes and consulted on questions of epistemology.

He was at the desk when she came in, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, writing, and he did not look round.

"Miss Ashgrove."

"Professor. You asked to see me."

"I did. Sit. Sit, there's a good girl, mind the Ptolemy." He gestured with the pen. "I wished to inquire after your health."

"I'm well."

"The sigil?"

"Quiescent. Dr. Veldt has examined it. He says it's an eccentric formation, but not unstable."

"Does he." Pryce laid down the pen. He took off the glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked, she thought, extraordinarily tired. The lines in his face had deepened in three days. "I should like to look myself, if you'd allow it."

She gave him her wrist.

He held it in both hands, as Josie had, but differently: with a reverence that was almost fear. He did not touch the crack. He only bent, and looked, with his long nose almost on her skin, for a very long time. His breath stirred the fine hairs on her arm. When he released her he was pale, and his hands were not quite steady.

"Thank you," he said. "That is — remarkable. A great deal of control."

"Is it?"

"Oh, yes." He went to the kettle. "Tea?"

"Professor, forgive me. I came because I have a question for you, and I'd rather not wait for you to arrive at it by degrees."

"Ah." He did not turn round. "The research."

"The Doppel research."

"Yes."

"I've been reading," said Mara. "In the library, and then in the Bureau's published summaries. And I don't understand them. They're so thin. They say a Doppel is a hazard to public safety. They say it is a duplicate, unstable, and short-lived. They say it begins to flicker and fail within the first fortnight, and so the Bureau takes it in for its own protection, and for the original's." She drew a breath. "But there are fourteen cases in eleven years and in not one of them is there a recorded original. There's only 'the subject.' 'The pair.' And then they simply stop. And you, Professor, are listed as a contributing author on the 1861 Bureau survey of soul-division."

The kettle began to sing.

"I am," said Pryce.

"Then you know more than the summaries."

"I knew a great deal, once." He lifted the kettle and poured. The water struck the pot with a hollow sound. "A long time ago. It was theoretical work. We thought it was a curiosity. A footnote in the metaphysics of the Sigil. No one imagined the thing would ever happen."

"But it did."

"It did."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why does it happen, Professor? The summaries say peak discharge. They say trauma. But I've been through the whole of the Ascension register for the last ten years, every candidate in New England, and the discharges at Ascension aren't unusual. They're ordinary. They're rather dull. The thing must be something else." She leaned forward. "A division like that, a whole person, with memory and body and a separate will. It can't come out of a surge. It would have to be a separation. Something has to be torn. And you can't tear a thing that is whole, unless it was already—"

She stopped.

"Yes?" said Pryce.

Very quietly.

"Unless it was already broken," said Mara.

The tea steamed between them. He had set a cup at her elbow, and one at his own, and neither had touched it. The fire shifted. Dr. Hobbes regarded them from the mantel with a sardonic eyehole.

"You are very clever," said Pryce at last, in a voice she had not heard from him before.

"I'm only asking."

"I know." He sat down heavily in the chair opposite. "And as your teacher, Mara, I ought to tell you that you are asking the wrong question. Not because it's a bad question. Because it is the sort of question that has done great harm. There are men in the Bureau who would give a good deal to hear you ask it. Men who would like very much to find out what a person like you was made of."

"A person like me?"

"A scholar with a gift for this subject."

"I thought you meant something else."

"I meant nothing else." He did not meet her eye. "I would counsel you to leave the matter alone."

"Professor. May I ask you something that isn't about the research?"

"If you must."

"What happened to me when I was fourteen?"

He did not move.

It was a very small stillness, hardly different from the stillness of a man who has not heard. But she had been watching him for six years, and she saw it: the way the hand holding the cup became, in an instant, not a hand but a piece of carved wood. A muscle jumped at the corner of the jaw. His breath, which had been slow, stopped.

"You were ill," said Pryce.

"I know I was ill. I want to know with what. I've asked four doctors. They all say a fever. And nobody will say what kind. I've looked in the Merrow Falls parish register, and there is no record of a physician visit for my family in that year. I have looked for the date in the lake-keeper's log, and the page has been cut out." She watched his face. "I was told my mother drowned. I was told I was sick. I was told I woke on the third day. And I have not got one single memory from that week, not one, but I've had three in the last two days, and every one of them is of a boy."

He put the cup down. It rattled against the saucer.

"Mara—"

"Who was he?"

"I don't know."

"I think you do."

"Child, I—" He stood, abruptly. He crossed to the fire with his back to her, a stooped old man in a rusty gown, and stood with his hands extended to the coals as if he could not get warm. "It's a long time ago. I knew your mother a little. I was at the funeral. I recall that the day was hot. I recall that you were not there. I was told you were still unwell." He cleared his throat. "That is the whole of what I know."

"That isn't the whole."

"It's all that I can say."

"You told me, on Ascension night, that I'd done nothing wrong."

"I—"

"That I never had. What did you think I might have done?"

The fire hissed.

"I thought," said Pryce, very low, "that you would be afraid. I wished to spare you that. I was an old fool, and I'd had sherry. I'd prefer that you forgot it."

"I won't."

"No," said the old man, with a ghost of his familiar dry humor. "I did not think you would."

He turned. His face was gray in the firelight. For a moment she thought he was going to say something else, something true; she saw it come up in his eyes and fight and go down. And then he was only Pryce again, her tutor, her friend, a tired scholar in a rusty gown, gently moving his hand to indicate the door.

"Go to bed, my dear," he said. "Eat something. And do not, I beg you, go looking for that boy."

…

She did not go to bed.

She walked back across the court in the dark, in the cold, with her hands in her sleeves, and let herself into Corbin House by the side door. The corridor was empty. A single gas-jet burned at the foot of the stair. The whole house had the sleepy, creaking, thick-aired quiet of a boarding-house at ten o'clock; somewhere above a girl was practicing a scale on a flute, over and over, never getting past the fourth note.

She went up the stairs. She let herself into her room.

The fire had burned low. She lit the lamp. She sat down at the desk, and took up her notebook, and unbuckled the strap, and turned to the page where she had been working that afternoon, and reached for her pen.

And stopped.

There was something on the page.

It was not where she had left it. She had left the sheet half-filled, with the last line in the middle: Cases documented with a surviving original: nil. That was still there, in her own hand, in ink, underlined. But below it, in the white space at the foot of the page, where there had been nothing at all that afternoon, there were two lines of writing.

She did not touch them.

They were in ink. They were fresh; the strokes were still glossy where the pen had pressed. The letters were capitals, large and quick and slanted, as though written in a great hurry by a person who was pressing hard. They were made with her own pen, which lay in the groove of the book as she had left it. They were made with her own ink; she could smell the iron gall. It was a hand like her hand. It had the same long R, and the same low-set A, the same way of closing a loop. It might have been the hand of a sister, or a twin.

But the R had a flourish at its tail. A long, fast, careless stroke, curling up and to the right, like a lash.

Mara had never in her life flourished an R.

She read the words. She read them with her hands flat on the desk and her breath held and her heart beating up in her throat, as the lamp hissed, and the flute upstairs stumbled again at the fourth note, and beyond the black window the ice on Lake Merrow began, softly, to sing.

RUN, MARA.