The Fourteenth Tide

For four days, each time I passed the nailed table I remembered that chill at my fingertips. To forget it I chose my duty. I trimmed the wick of the lamp to an even length, I counted the twelve-second arc, I set down the tide at its appointed hour. But the printed table hung on the wall holding my predecessor's hand — that drawn-in cell — and every watch I had to pass that one cell by.

That morning I took it down from the wall. As the nail came free, a dust of plaster fell. I would make a cleaner copy to hang, I told myself — a table of the printed figures only, without my predecessor's scribble. A scholar's task, I thought. The task of one faithful to his duty.

I spread a blank sheet and copied the printed cells one by one. The hours of spring and neap, of high water and low. My hand was practiced and the ink ran even. Then I came to the very bottom of the table, to the margin that should have been blank.

I should have stopped there. But my hand was already tracing the lines of the cell my predecessor had drawn in. The hour between midnight and dawn. "The thirteenth tide (第十三潮)." I called the copying of it a record made for erasure — for one must set down what is false before one can strike a line through it.

And beneath that cell, I drew one more.

I had not meant to. My hand set the rule to the paper, drew the line, entered an hour. An hour I had not chosen. Only when I lifted the pen did I see the cell — beneath the thirteenth, a fourteenth.

The instant my fingertip traced that fourteenth cell, a cold ran down my spine — the chill of the nailed table, of a table no longer even on the wall. I brought the printed table I had taken down close to the lamp. And on its back, where there should have been nothing, a faint lettering rose, as if scratched with a chisel. The name my predecessor had left, it must have been. But the name was worn, its last figure past reading.

Yun. The same surname as mine. The handover papers had borne no name for my predecessor. The mainland Bureau called him only by a number — as it called this island, this table, this lamp by numbers. I gazed a long while at the worn name. I tried not to do the thing of laying my own name over the worn place.

All at once the line engraved on the brass mount rose to my mind. The Latin I had only polished for five months and read at last six days before, now rose unbidden.

Whether the light kept the abyss, or kept the light from the abyss — six days before I had asked it and not answered. That night I came to another question. If the light must stand above the abyss, must not someone stand below it, holding the light?

Past midnight, at the low-water hour of the printed table, the water withdrew exactly. I set the height down in the new table I had drawn. The promise was kept. And at the thirteenth hour I had copied out by hand, the water withdrew once more — as it had six days before. I set that down too. My hand did not tremble. That it did not tremble was what made me tremble.

The fourteenth hour was coming on — the hour I had not chosen, that the table had called up in its own shape.

The sentence breaks off there. As it had six days before. But this time the pen was not refused. The ink did not stop; I stopped — so as not to give a name to what I had seen in that black place on the flats.

Beneath my hand on the gallery rail, the lamp turned its twelve-second arc. When the light came round and swept the flats' edge, there was nothing there. When the light turned away and the dark came down, something stood again. A thing that was empty while the light fell on it, and there only while the light did not. I called it a phantom made by the afterimage of the light.

That night the clockwork of the lamp did not falter once. Not once. The thing that had turned five months without rest kept its twelve seconds that night without a single slip. I feared that perfect regularity. As though something wished that the light would not go out.

As I write this, only plaster dust is left where the nail had been, and the new table I drew lies beside it. The fourteenth cell is not empty. An hour is written in it. An hour I did not choose.