Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
Reading for the Thirteenth Name
A rota-reader scans staff lists each winter for a name that has not yet been entered and will never be her own, and reads faster as the years go on.
- perspective: first
The lists are posted at a quarter past six, Monday through Friday, and I read them before the kettle has finished. I have done this for nineteen winters and I can tell you the exact posture of the peg that holds the clipboard, and the exact yellowness of the fourth sheet when it has been out overnight.
My name is Margery Aldercott, and it is not on any list I have ever read. I want to be clear about that, because everything else follows from it. I read the lists the way other people watch a tide: not hoping, only measuring. Somewhere down the column, under the twelve names that make up the night rota, there will one day be a thirteenth. It will not be mine. I have never once thought it would be mine. But it is coming, the way winter is coming, and I read to know how far off it is.
The thirteenth name has no shape yet. That is the difficulty of it. A name you are waiting for, when it is not yours, cannot be searched for, only scanned for. I read faster every winter for exactly this reason — a slow reader can check, but a fast reader can sweep, and sweeping is what the task requires. I read the way a hand passes over bedclothes feeling for a coldness. Nothing yet. Nothing yet. Nothing yet.
The first years I told myself I was reading for my own name, out of ordinary vanity, and that any woman would. That lie kept me warm through two winters. Then came the January when I found I had read the whole sheet standing, twice, and could not remember whether I had looked for *Margery* even once, and I stood in the corridor with the click of the corridor clock going through me and understood what I was actually doing. I was reading for the gap. The list belongs to a building in this city whose corridors nobody maps twice, and a list with twelve names on it is a sentence that has not finished. I read to hear where it stops.
The habit has teeth in it now. If I am away — and I am never away; I arranged my leave, years ago, to fall in August, when the rota is thinnest and reads quickest — if I am away, I dream of the fourth sheet with its yellowness and its column, and in the dream I read it at the speed of speech, and there is no gap, the column is full at twelve, and I wake with my mouth dry and my hands flat on the counter, reading the darkness of the ceiling for the gap. Nothing yet.
Colleagues ask, sometimes, why I volunteer for the posting-up. Twelve names on four sheets, they say, any junior could peg it out. I say I like the early air. I say the kettle needs watching. Both are true, in the way that a shape cut from paper is true about the paper. The truth beneath both is that I want the clipboard in my own hands for ninety seconds before anyone else's eyes are on it, because on one morning, some winter, I will read to the end of the column and the gap will not be there.
I have prepared for that morning in only one way, which is to admit I have prepared no way at all. If the gap is not there, it means the name has been entered. A name entered is a person expected. Everything on these lists, everything on every list this city keeps, is a promise the building makes to itself about who will be where, and I have read enough of them to know that the building keeps its promises in a licence we would not recognise as ours.
Nineteen winters, and the column still breaks at twelve. I read faster now than I did at fifty. My eye has become an instrument, the way a tuner's ear becomes an instrument, and an instrument does not get sentimental about the note it is waiting for.
The kettle is on. The peg holds. It is a quarter past six on a Monday in October, and the sheet is fresh, unfaded by any night, and I am standing in front of it with my hand already moving down the margin before I have decided to read.
Twelve names. Nothing yet. Nothing yet.
Not yet.