The Fifth Hand

The night the terminal threw off tomorrow's balance, I could not sleep.

That a number grows, I had explained by test. But that tomorrow's number — not yet closed — should be stamped on today's screen was bound by no variable. I needed a precedent to explain it, and the precedent was in one place only. The four bundles from Pnakotic Press.

My predecessor had said not to read to the end. But without reading to the end, I could not know what lay at that end that he had warned of. I opened the librarian's log — of the four bundles, the only record that handled not numbers but letters.

In 1924, Kim Jae-hyeon, an assistant librarian at a university library called Miskatonic. He had carried out of the library the journal of a vanished dean. In that journal were a bronze casket, constellations that were neither Orion nor the Bear, and a band engraved in Latin. Kim set out to copy that Latin — and from then on, when he heard a word, the syllables of it began to arrive apart.

I read the passage at a reasonable distance. It was a thing of 1924, an illness of the mind, a record like a story. I read to the end. On the last page, Kim began to fill in his own hand the page the dean had torn out, and came to the one line the dean had left in 1893.

I read that line, to the end.

When I read it and lifted my head, the letters on the index card on my desk — those familiar letters that until yesterday had arrived whole — stood apart.

I rubbed my eyes. The lamp might have guttered; one panel of the basement fluorescents always flickered. I looked at the card again. The letters still came in pieces. One syllable at a time, apart. As they had for Kim in 1924.

The illness did not stop at letters. As a test, I called to mind the short-term foreign balance I had memorized with my eyes alone at the terminal yesterday. The number I had memorized so as not to copy. When I summoned it in my head, the figures arrived apart.

I could not hold the number whole. Look at one figure and the others scattered; count the last and I forgot the first. How much the balance was, I could no longer read at a glance.

A records clerk who cannot read a number whole. As a librarian who cannot read letters is no librarian, I too was now one who could not do her work. But that was not all. To an eye that cannot read whole, one strange thing happened.

When the figures stepped apart, I came to see the empty places between them. Between number and number, in that gap where there should have been nothing, something was written — faintly. A thing invisible when read whole. A thing visible only to an eye that has read to the end.

I lifted the card to read that gap. And, as Kim had in 1924, that I must not set it down as it arrived — that, then, I did not yet know.

To an eye that cannot read whole, what is invisible to whole reading became visible.

I spread the four bundles side by side on the desk. With a fractured eye I could not read a sentence fast, but in exchange I saw the empty places — between sentence and sentence, between bundle and bundle. The four records pointed to one same place.

The lighthouse keeper Yun Sang-hak, 1934, the West Sea. Light and tide. The surveyor Paek Nam-su, 1923, Gangwon. Depth. The wireless operator Sin Gyeong-ha, 1937, the East Sea. Signal. The librarian Kim Jae-hyeon, 1924, Miskatonic. Letters. The four had never met, and what they handled differed — light, depth, signal, letters. But the four records reduced to one sentence.

Sound it and it deepens; copy it and it grows; answer it and you become the sender; read it to the end and it crosses to you. The observing hand enlarges its object. And all four, coming to the end, became part of what they recorded — the lamp beneath the tide, the next line on the rock, the caller on the empty frequency, and the reader who would turn the next page.

And on the cover of each of the four bundles, beneath the publisher's seal, the same one line was stamped. The line placed last in every editor's afterword.

Pnakotic Press. I had known it only as a defunct publisher. But laying the four bundles side by side, I saw it was not a place that issued books. It was a hand that recovered records like these, copied them out without changing a single character, and passed them to the next person. A hand that copies out — knowing what the copying-out begins. The hand called "we."

That the box had drifted into our company's storeroom was no accident. My predecessor had requisitioned it; I sat in the place he vanished from; the box came down to my desk. I read the four bundles, read them to the end, and caught it. I was the fifth hand.

I lifted the box and looked at the underside of the lid. There, five places where seals had been pressed. Four bore the same seal as the four bundles' covers. The fifth place was — empty. A fresh, never-pressed empty place. Waiting for the name of the fifth recorder.

I looked at my index cards, and at the log I had written each day. Short-term foreign balance, controlled test, the motto on the terminal. The record of those days I had read to the end. All along I had been copying something out. The fifth bundle — now, in my own hand.

I stopped the pen. If I am writing the fifth bundle, who is the next person who will read it to the end? And who will recover it, and copy it out without changing a single character?

I already knew. For on the first page of this log, a line I had not written had — somehow — been written. "This is the last record we recovered."

To get free of the thought that I was writing the fifth bundle, I needed fact. Hard fact, never copied out. I resolved to find out who my predecessor had been.

I asked the personnel office for his file. To finish the handover index, I said, I needed his record of duty. Half of it was true. The clerk drew a thin envelope from a cabinet and handed it over.

The card inside the envelope was hard to read with a fractured eye. The syllables arrived one at a time, apart, so I read slowly, tracing the letters with my finger.

The last character of the name field was blacked out with ink. The personnel office had struck items past their retention period, the clerk said indifferently. The surname and one character of the given name read, but the last character lay buried under the ink as if worn — like the predecessor's name in the lighthouse keeper's log, whose last figure was worn past reading.

Date of hire, date of assignment to the records room, and the last line of the filming log. The last thing he did was copy our own short-term foreign borrowing ledger onto film. The end of that line broke off — the film can's number set down half-finished. After that day he did not come to work, and the post was processed as resignation. The letter of resignation was not preserved.

In the envelope was also a requisition slip. A record of something requested from the storeroom to the records room. The requester was him, and the thing requested was — the box of materials from the defunct publisher 'Pnakotic Press.'

I asked the clerk who had been the records-room clerk before him. He shrugged. The records-room post does not keep a person long, he said. And he drew from the cabinet a bundle of old personnel cards for the same post, and laid them on the desk. Past their retention, soon to be discarded.

I turned the bundle slowly. The successive clerks of that same records-room post. Hire and resignation. Hire and resignation. Of the letters of resignation, not one was preserved. With an eye in which the letters arrived apart, I traced and counted the resignation dates with my finger.

Counting, I stopped. The date of the oldest resignation record stood before the founding date of our company.

A company's records-room post cannot process a resignation before the company exists. I brought the card close to the lamp. I had not misread. The records-room clerk's post had been taking people in before there was a company to hold the post, and sending them out, one by one. As more lines than men were cut into the surveyor's rock. As the shaft deepened though no one dug.

The empty desk was not my predecessor's. It was a post. A post older than the company. The post that takes the box, copies it out, reads it to the end, passes it to the next hand — and vanishes.

Closing the envelope, I realized one thing late. Among the cards the personnel clerk had handed me, there was, at the very last, a freshly filled one. A new card with only the hire date entered, the resignation date still blank. In its name field was written my name.