Prologue
Read This First
If you are reading this, there is a good chance you do not know who I am.
That is not an insult. It is only the most likely arrangement of the facts. I have spent eight days learning how easily a name can be removed from a person, and how quietly, and how politely, and I do not expect to be an exception. By the time these pages reach anyone, I may be nothing more than a line of handwriting in a black notebook with a cracked spine. A man somebody once knew. A man somebody should have known.
So. Some instructions.
My name is Daniel Carter. I am twenty-six years old. I was born in Saint Aldous Hospital, in the city of Veyra, on the ninth of March. I have lived on Tannery Row for three years, in a flat above a shop that mends umbrellas. I work in the freight records office at the rail depot. I like my tea black and my records in triplicate, and I have always believed, with the dull confidence of a man who has never had a reason to doubt it, that if a thing is written down, it happened.
I am telling you all this because I have learned that none of it is safe. Not the date. Not the street. Not the umbrella shop. I have checked each one against the official record, as a clerk should, and found that I cannot swear to any of them. I can only tell you what the notebook says.
I will tell you the rest in order. I will try to write it as I would write a customs entry: time, place, what was observed. I will not decorate. If I decorate, you will not know which parts I have invented, and I will not know either.
There is one more thing, and it matters more than the others.
Veyra has two rules about the night.
The first is printed on a brass plate beside every bridge and bus shelter in the city, in the same square black letters: NO ONE SHOULD BE OUTSIDE AFTER 11:17 P.M. You have seen it. Everyone who has ever lived here has walked past it ten thousand times without reading it, the way you walk past a fire extinguisher. It is explained in school. There was an accident at the old ironworks, a long time ago. A great many men died. The air is not good at night, in certain districts. It is only sensible.
The second rule is not printed anywhere.
I learned it when I was nine years old, from my mother, in the kitchen, in a whisper, while she held both my wrists. I did not understand it then. I have not stopped understanding it since. It goes like this:
If you hear someone you love calling your name from an empty street after 11:17, do not answer.
I asked her why. She would not say. She only looked at me, very hard, the way a person looks at a clock they are afraid of, and said, Promise.
I promised.
I want you to hold on to that word, because there will come a moment in this account when I did not keep it, and another when I did, and I am no longer certain which of the two was the mistake.
And one last instruction, if you have read this far and still do not know me.
If, in the next few nights, you are lying in bed and hear someone you love say your name outside the window, in a voice you would know in a crowd, in the dark, from any distance, and you find that you cannot remember whether you promised anything to anyone, do not get up.
Please. Do not get up.
That is all. I will begin where it began, which was with a telephone, on a Monday, a few minutes after eleven at night, in a flat that smelled of wet umbrellas.
I should say, before I start, that the telephone was not mine.