Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Oath I Take Every Night
Every night in dream a man raises his hand to take an oath whose wording shifts by one syllable, and each morning he wakes and counts what has changed.
- perspective: close-third
Harold Wren kept a notebook on the second shelf, below the torch, because a man who counts in his sleep should keep the arithmetic where his hands can find it in the dark. The notebook had no cover title. Titles invite attention. He had learned, in thirty-one years of clerical work in Murrow, that the safest documents are the ones nobody opens.
The oath began, he believed, in November of the year everyone in the city declined to name plainly. Not the Misprint, exactly — he had never seen the Misprint, had slept through the whole of it as a young man in a bedsit above a launderette, and had woken to a world that was the same world, only filed differently. But somewhere in the shuffle, something had been sworn on his behalf, and ever since, each night, the dream came.
In the dream he stands in a hall with a high ceiling he cannot count without losing his place, and his right hand is raised, and a voice — not loud, not cruel, only patient in the way that ledgers are patient — prompts him through the words. He does not see the questioner. He sees the edge of a desk, and a stamp, and a cord of grey string waiting to be tied.
*I swear to keep the record true,* the voice says.
And he answers, and he believes, while answering, that he has answered it correctly, and the cord of grey string is tied, and the lights go down the way lights do in a hall at the end of a working day.
Then he wakes, and he knows — the way you know a coin is lighter without weighing it — that one syllable was different.
He began the notebook in the second winter. **Keep the record true.** Then: **keep the records true.** Then: **kept**. Then a night when the first word was not *keep* at all but something with one more beat in it, a word he could feel the shape of with his tongue and could not write. He marked that entry with a small tick in the margin, and then ruled the tick out, because a tick might mean approval and he did not want to approve.
He tried, in the third winter, to refuse the oath. He rehearsed refusal by daylight. He stood at the sink and said, *no,* and then said it again with his hand lowered, and made a small note of the date. That night the hall was as it always was, and his hand was raised as it always was, raised before he had any say in the raising, and his voice said the words on the correct beats with a fluency that felt borrowed. In the morning he added a line to the notebook: *refusal entered. refused on my behalf.* He looked at that line for a long while, because it sounded like something he had read once, in someone else's hand, somewhere official.
He told no one. Telling invites forms. He had spent his working life in a department whose function nobody above him could name without using the word *continuity*, and he knew that when a man reports a discrepancy, the discrepancy is then assigned. He did not want to be assigned. He wanted only to be counted correctly.
His habit became this: he woke, he lay still, he counted backward from thirty-three, and in that span he tried to hold the whole of the oath above water. Some nights it came up intact, word for word, and those mornings were grey and slow and slightly sweet, like a day off he hadn't earned. More often a syllable had shifted, and he noted the shift in the blunt shorthand he had developed: *-1, mid,* meaning one syllable fewer, in the middle. Over the years the shorthand filled two notebooks, then three. He never once wrote what the oath might be *for*. That question had a door behind it and he did not knock.
In the most recent winter the shifts became directional. Each night, one syllable nearer one particular ending — he could hear where the words were going, the way you can hear a staircase going above you, step by step, toward a landing you have never visited. He began, on the last pages of the third notebook, to write not what was said but what the words were tending toward, and when he had written the ending out once, in full, he read it back, and it was an oath he would gladly swear, and that frightened him more than any miscount.
He keeps count still. Last night the syllable gained had moved to the first word. He has begun, some mornings, to reach for the torch before he has fully woken, and some mornings the counting is finished before he knows he has begun it.
The hall, tonight, will have its lights on already.