The message came at nine minutes past ten on Saturday night, and it said, in full: Arrived. Snow here too. I wish.

Elias read it standing at the kitchen window, with the telephone in his gloved hand and a cold cup of tea at his elbow. He read it twice. He read it a third time, and found that the third reading was no different from the first, and that the small flat words went on sitting in the lit rectangle of the screen with a patient, steady, unadorned meaning that he could not make himself look away from.

I wish.

He did not say what. He did not need to. There had been a call at nine, as promised, and the voice at the other end had been low and warm and slightly hoarse, and they had spoken for eleven minutes about nothing at all. The flight. The hotel. A man in the elevator with a mustache like a push broom. It had been the most ordinary conversation in the world. And at the end of it there had been a long silence on the line, a small breathing quiet, and neither of them had hung up for a very long time.

He thumbed the keys.

He wrote: Good. He looked at it. It was a poor word, a cold flat stone of a word, and he stood with his thumb above the little arrow and felt his face grow warm. He thought of adding something. He thought of a dozen things. In the end he sent it as it was, a single syllable, and stood holding the phone against his chest like a man who has dropped a letter in a box and cannot get it back.

The reply came in under a minute. It was only a small round yellow face, smiling very slightly, such as one sees on the screens of children.

He laughed.

It came out of him by itself, a short surprised breath in the empty kitchen, and he put his hand over his mouth. It was the first time that he had laughed aloud in that apartment. It sounded strange. It sounded like someone else, a younger man, a person who might have been fond of jokes.

He did not sleep that night.

Sunday came in white and windless. The snow had stopped in the small hours, and a hard pale sun stood over the river, and every roof in the city lay under a clean thick quilt. From the thirty-first floor the whole of Blackwood looked like a model of itself, made of sugar and glass. Elias stood at the east window with a cup in his hands and looked down on it for a long time.

He did nothing.

It was the thing that he did best, and the thing that he did worst. He moved through the apartment in his stocking feet, from window to window, like a man in a house in which someone has recently died. He washed a cup, and dried it, and washed it again. He read three pages of a book, and did not know what they said. He sat on the sofa for an hour with his hands between his knees, and the warm place in his palm, which had not faded in a day and a night, went on glowing under the leather like a small coal.

He could not stop looking at the end of the hall.

He did not go there. He told himself that he was not going to go. He stood in the main room with the width of the apartment between him and it, and he did not turn his head. But he knew where it was, every instant, as one knows the position of the sun on a cloudy day. A narrow dim passage. A gray steel door. And on the wall beside it, steady and green and patient, a small light.

It was not a temptation. That would have been simple. A temptation is a thing that pulls, and one may resist a pull. This was something quieter. It was a gate that had been left ajar by a hand that wished it to be found. It stood in the back of his mind, and said nothing, and did not need to.

By six o'clock the light had gone from the sky. The city lit up below him, in long glittering lines, and the river went black and silver. He sat at the oak table, in the kitchen, with a plate of bread and cheese in front of him that he had not touched. He had been sitting there for a quarter of an hour.

He took the little notebook from his pocket.

He opened it on the table, beside the plate. He did not look at the page of lists. He turned past it, to the back, to a space he had left bare, and wrote, with a hand that was almost steady, the date. He wrote beneath it the three digits that had been polished bright upon a keypad.

One. Zero. Six.

He looked at them.

They had been on his mind for five weeks. He had known the wear on those buttons, the faint sheen, the dull gold glint of a thing often touched. And he had been wrong. He had taken them for a date, and the date for a grave, and the grave for a key. Ten, sixteen. October the sixteenth. He had stood in a corridor and pressed it, and the red light had come on, and he had learned in an instant how wrong a man could be about another.

But the three digits had never moved.

They had been there from the beginning, untouched, in the sheen of the metal. The one, and the zero, and the six. He had thought of a date with those figures in it, and found the wrong one, and stopped. He had not asked himself whether there might be another. Whether there might be a different date, written with the very same buttons, that a man would press every night, in the dark, with the same unthinking hand.

He wrote it out again, slowly, in a different order.

One. Zero. Zero. Six.

The pen stopped.

He sat quite still.

It was a number so ordinary that it was almost invisible. Four digits, in a row, with a pair of zeros in the middle. A month, and a day. It was not a date that anyone would have marked in red. It was not on any calendar, or in any file. It had never been written in a ledger, or carved on a stone. There was nobody in the whole city to whom it could have meant anything at all, except one.

October the sixth.

He had stood in a cold white room at a quarter to three in the morning, with the rain on the high windows, and scrubbed his arms for three minutes by the clock, and told himself that he was not tired. A body had come in from a bridge. A man had said, Doc, you want me to stay? And he had said no. He had been thirty years old for twenty-one hours.

He had not told anyone.

It was a thing he never did. In the whole of his adult life he had not once said it aloud to a living soul. He did not keep it in any file. He had never sent a card, or received one. He had let it come and go, each year, like a day of weather, and gone on working through it with his face composed. It was written in one place alone. On a county record, in a cold clerk's office, in a drawer. And in the long thin personnel file of a man who had pulled up the papers of a stranger three years ago, and read them through, and noted a date.

That night in October, in the lab, the coffee had been black.

He saw it. He saw it as plainly as if it had been set before him on the table. A paper cup on a steel counter, with a curl of steam going up from the lid. Black. No sugar. Set down at a threshold in the dark, on a night that no one knew, by a man who had said only: I saw your light on. It had been a birthday. It had been the single day in the year on which he had sat down, alone, in a corner behind a refrigerator, with his knees against his chest. And a man had stood at the edge of the tile, in a long dark coat, and left him a cup of something hot.

He had not known. Or he had known. Elias had never been able to tell, and now he saw that it did not matter. It was the same gift. It was only a cup, and a day, and a very large care.

He closed the notebook.

The kitchen was warm and very still. The clock above the door ticked. A truck went by in the street, and its lights swept across the ceiling and died. He sat with his hands on the cover of the book, and breathed, and felt something go through him from head to foot, a long cold shuddering wave, like the passage of a train under a house.

It was not fear. It was something much stranger.

A man had set a lock, in the dark, on the door of the room in which he kept the whole of his life. And the key to it was a single day, which nobody in the world had ever marked, but one. He had chosen it from all the days that there were. He had not picked the date of his mother's birth, or his own, or the night that a house burned. He had chosen the day on which a stranger had been born. He had put it on a steel door. And every night, for three years, he had gone down a long hall in his bare feet and pressed it, with his thumb, with a single steady hand, and stepped inside.

Elias put his hand over his eyes.

He sat there for a long while. When he lowered it, the room had not changed. The plate of bread lay untouched. The tea had gone cold. But the warm place in the palm of his hand had grown very bright, and he knew, as plainly as if it had been spoken to him in a clear voice, that he was going to go.

He did not hurry.

He washed the plate, and the cup, and put them away. He turned off the lamp in the main room. He took off his shoes and set them in the rack by the door, side by side, with the toes turned out. He stood for a moment in the dark with his hand on the wall. Then he walked down the passage, in the green glow, and stopped in front of the door.

The panel waited.

It was a very small black square in the gray wall. A narrow glass window. Twelve buttons. A light as bright and steady as a leaf. He looked at it, and at his own hand, a black glove in the dimness, and he thought of a mouth in the middle of a palm.

I wish, he thought. I wish.

He lifted his finger.

The one. A chirp.

The zero. A chirp.

The zero. A chirp.

His hand was perfectly still. He had expected a tremor. He had expected, all through the long gold afternoon, to find that his fingers would not obey him at the end. But they moved of themselves, with a steady cold ease, and he watched them, from a very great height, as one watches a man cross a street.

The six.

For a moment, nothing at all.

Then the little glass lit up, softly, from within. A line of pale letters formed across it, one by one, as frost forms on a pane. ACCESS GRANTED.

And behind the wall, in the dark, somewhere in the heavy gray door, there was a sound. It was a low solid mechanical sound, a single deep, round, final note, like the closing of a very good clock. A bolt slid back.

The door moved.

It moved an inch. It stood ajar, in the dim, and from the crack there came a breath of air. It was cool, and dry, and very faintly sweet. It smelled of paper. It smelled of old books, and leather, and a lamp that has burned for a long time in a small room. And under all of that, quite faint, unmistakable, it smelled of cedar.

He put his hand on the steel.

It was cold. It was only a door. He pushed.

It swung open without a sound, on well-oiled hinges, and the light from the passage went in before him, a long pale wedge across a polished floor. He stood on the threshold. He did not breathe. He looked.

It was a small room.

That was the first surprise. He had imagined something much larger. In the dark of five weeks he had built a great cold vault, a chamber of horrors, a place with a drain in the floor. But it was only a study. It was a plain square room, perhaps twelve feet on a side, with a low ceiling and no window, and walls painted a dull warm gray. A desk stood in the center, an old oak desk with a green-shaded lamp. A leather chair. A single bookcase. A steel filing cabinet against the left-hand wall, four drawers high, each with a small white card in its brass frame.

And the right-hand wall was covered.

He stepped in. His feet made no sound on the boards. He reached out, without looking, and found a switch by the door, and the lamp on the desk came on with a soft click, a small circle of yellow light in the gloom. It was enough. It fell on the wall, and the wall came out of the dark like a face.

It was a corkboard.

It was large, six feet by four, and it was pinned from edge to edge. There were maps, and charts, and long strips of paper covered with figures. There were photographs, dozens of them, and newspaper cuttings gone yellow and soft. A web of red thread ran between the pins, looping and crossing, from one card to another, in an intricate and exact design, like the plan of a very orderly spider. It was a thing that had been built over years. It had the dense, patient, obsessional neatness of a work made by one man, alone, in the small hours, for a very long time.

And in the center of it, in a row, hung six photographs.

He knew them before he reached them. They had been cut from the one on the easel, the great tinted print in the golden gallery, and each face had been trimmed out and mounted on its own square of card. They were arranged in a neat line, from left to right, shoulder to shoulder. A lean attorney. A plump sandy man. A tall white-haired judge. A ruddy fellow in a hard hat. A thin dark younger face, with a crooked tie.

Five of the six had a cross.

It was a small neat cross, in red ink, drawn across each face from corner to corner. It was done very carefully, with a ruler, as one marks off the days on a calendar. The ink was fresh on the last. It had been done in October. There was a little number written at the foot of each card, in the same square hand, a numeral, one to five, and a date.

The sixth had no cross.

It hung at the end of the row, a little apart from the others, and the face looked out of its card with the easy warmth of a man who has never been refused. A silver shovel lay on his shoulder. He was smiling. Beneath the photograph, in the same neat square hand, there was only a numeral, and a blank.

VI.

Elias stood looking at it.

It was very quiet. The lamp hummed. Somewhere behind the wall, in the thick walls of a tower, a pipe gave a small low knock. And in the circle of yellow light, a few feet away, on the corner of the old oak desk, he saw two files.

They lay side by side, squared to the edge. One was very thick, bound with a black elastic band, and its cover was creased and soft with handling. A white label was pasted on the front. ALDRIDGE, E. The other was thin. It was gray with age, and the edges of the cardboard had gone brown. It had no band. It had been opened many times and shut again very gently, and the label on its cover had been written in a different hand, an older, rounder, schoolboy script, in pencil.

MERCER, T.

His own name. Not his, his father's. Thomas Mercer. He had not seen it written out in twelve years. He stood and looked at the five soft pencil letters, and the capital with its little tail, and the room seemed to tilt very slowly, and settle.

He opened the file.

It came apart in his hands. The first sheet was a photograph, a small black-and-white print, curling at the corners. It showed a man in his late thirties on the steps of a courthouse, in a dark overcoat, with a briefcase under one arm and a faint wry smile. He was tall. He had a long grave face, and a high forehead, and his hair was beginning to go gray at the temples. He was looking at something just outside the frame.

Elias made a sound.

He did not know what it was. It came from low in his chest, and it was not a word. He stood with the sheet in his hand, in the yellow lamplight, and looked at a face that he had last seen in a bed of white satin, under a sheet of glass, with its eyes closed and its hands folded, and a stranger's make-up on its cheeks. They had made him look so tired. He had not known him. He had looked and looked, in the cold, in the smell of lilies, and had not been able to find him in it.

Here he was.

He had been fifty. He had been alive. He had been looking at something with a half smile, in the sun, on a step, with a case in his hand and a long day before him. And somebody had stood there with a camera, years ago, and thought it worth the trouble. And somebody else had kept it. Somebody had found it, in a drawer in a library, or a newspaper morgue, and cut it out, and pasted it on a clean sheet of paper at the front of a file.

He turned the page.

It was a sealing order. It was a single sheet, with a printed heading, and a block of formal type. He read it slowly. In the matter of the death of Thomas A. Mercer and others. The records of the medical examiner relating to the same, pending the outcome of a continuing investigation, are hereby sealed by order of this court, and shall not be released to any party. It was dated four days after the fire. It was signed in a confident, upright, slanting hand at the foot.

Harlan Pruitt, Judge.

Beneath it, in the square black script that he had come to know like his own, someone had written a line in the margin. It was a short note, in ink, underscored twice. It was written in the hand of a man who has been staring at a thing for a very long time, and has at last forced himself to put it in words.

Autopsy sealed. 7 pp. missing from original. Who took them?

Elias put the file down.

He did it carefully, on the blotter, squared to the edge of the desk. He took a step back. He was aware of the room, and the wall, and the face of a man at the end of a row of cards. He was aware of his own breath, coming quickly and lightly, in the silence. His hands had begun to shake.

There was a shelf above the filing cabinet. He had not noticed it. It was a plain board of pale wood, bracketed to the wall, and it held a single object.

It was a box.

It was a small, flat, gray archival box, about the size of a hymn book, with a lid that fitted closely. It was made of heavy board, acid-free, of the kind that museums use. A white label was stuck on the front, and across the label, in the same square careful hand, there were four lines.

MERCER, T. TISSUE BLOCK 1 OF 3 RECOVERED 12 YRS.

He did not touch it.

He stood with his arms at his sides, and his eyes on the little white label, and he understood. It came to him quite slowly, in the dim warm hush of the study, as a tide comes up a slipway. A man had been cut open on a table in a basement. They had taken from him, as they take from all of them, a few small samples. A fragment of heart. A sliver of lung. Each one had been fixed in wax, and cut, and labeled, and filed, as a matter of course, in a drawer, in a cabinet. And someone, twelve years ago, had gone down to that basement in the night and opened the drawer.

Somebody had taken them. Somebody had kept them.

Somebody had carried a small gray box through twelve years, and four apartments, and a hundred nights. He had set it on a shelf where he could see it from his chair. He had sat beneath it, in the lamp, with a pencil, and gone over the file line by line. And in all that time he had never once taken the lid from it, because to do so would have been to ask of another man what he could not ask of himself.

He wanted to give it to me, thought Elias.

He did not know how he knew. It was no more than a quiet certainty, like the knowledge that a fire is warm. He stood in the middle of the room with his hand pressed against his lips, and looked at a small gray box on a shelf, and the whole of the world seemed to narrow down to the white square of the label.

Somewhere, very far away, a door closed.

It was a soft, solid, final sound. It came from behind him. He did not turn at once. He stood with his eyes on the shelf, and the sound passed through him like a draft, and he thought, quite calmly: that is the study door.

He turned.

It had swung to. It had not been pushed. It had closed of its own weight, gently, on its heavy hinges, and the small green light on the other side of it was shut away. He was standing in a room without a window, in a pool of lamplight, with a gray steel door at his back. There was a small noise, a click, from the lock.

He did not move.

He told himself that it was only a latch. It was a thing that doors did. But he stood alone in the yellow circle, with the dead at his back and a locked door before him, and a faint cold prickle began at the nape of his neck, and he thought of a man who left a light burning on purpose.

It was ten past nine.

He read the time on the little brass clock on the desk, and it was the first thing he had done that night without thinking. A moment passed. Another. He took the thin gray file in both hands, and sat down in the leather chair, and opened it again at the beginning.

He would read it. He had come this far.

He did not look up again for a long time.

He did not hear the first sound.

It was far off, a long way beyond the walls, and very faint. It was no more than a slight shift in the quiet of the tower, a vibration in the floor. He read on. He turned a page, and another. He had reached a sheet of fire-brigade notes in a cramped, stiff, official hand, and the words swam before him like fish in a pond, and he was thinking of nothing but the lines.

The second was nearer.

A key, in a lock.

He raised his head.

It was the front door. He knew it, with the cold sure instinct of one who has lived three weeks in a house. It was a sound he had heard a hundred times: the dry small turn of a bolt, the hush of the weatherstrip, the breath of the corridor coming in. A pause. A soft thump, like a case set down on a floor.

He did not move.

The clock on the desk said twenty past one. He had been sitting in the lamp for four hours. The file lay open on his knee, and his hand lay flat on the page, and he had not once, in four hours, thought of anything but the dead.

A footstep.

It came down the hall, slowly. It was soft and measured and quite unhurried. It was the step of a man who has traveled a long way, on a night of snow, and who has not once, in all that journey, been in any haste. It came down the length of the passage, past the white doors, past the little room, and stopped.

It was outside.

He sat in the lamp with the file on his knee and heard, through two inches of steel, the faint dry sound of a person standing very still.

Then the keypad chirped, four times.

The bolt slid.

The door of the study opened.

Luke stood on the threshold.

He was covered in snow. It lay on his shoulders and the crown of his dark head, in a fine bright powder, and on the lapels of his coat, and in the creases of his scarf. It was melting. It ran down his cheek in a single bright track. His face was white, and drawn, and tired beyond words, and his eyes in the light of the lamp were enormous. A black case stood at his feet.

He did not look angry.

That was the thing that Elias saw first, and would remember always. He had thought, in the long hours, with a sort of cold fatalism, about the way that this would look. He had imagined a hard face, and a blow, and a gun. But there was none of it. The man stood in the doorway with the snow on his coat and his hands hanging empty at his sides, and he looked at the thin gray file on Elias's knee, and the board, and the box on the shelf, and then, at last, at Elias's face.

And he smiled.

It was the smallest smile in the world. It was tired, and rueful, and quite without bitterness. It was the smile of a man who has been walking toward a thing for a very long time, in the dark, and who has just arrived at it, and finds that it is not so terrible as he thought.

"I thought that it might be tonight," said Luke.

He said it very softly.