Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Plinth of My Rounds
A man keeps a nightly inspection of an empty plinth as though it is a post still staffed, and signs off on it in his head before he can sleep.
- perspective: close-third
Wilfred Sorrell walks the plinth at eleven every night, and the doctors have stopped calling it his walks, because he refuses the word walks. He calls them his rounds. A round is a thing with a purpose, and Wilfred has the purpose, and the purpose is the keeping of the plinth at the head of Customhouse Lane, which has held nothing since the spring of 1971 and is inspected nightly for that reason.
The plinth is a square of dressed granite, waist-high, on the corner where the lane breaks for the harbor. It once carried a figure — Wilfred knows the figure, has the figure memorized in sections, the way a man memorizes a route — but the figure went in 1971 and the Corporations never replaced it and never filed the removal either, so that in the parish's own papers the plinth is, as far as Wilfred can establish, still staffed. That is the holding sentence of his case. If the papers say the post existed and no paper was ever filed saying it ended, then the post continues, and a post continuing must be kept, and a post kept must be inspected, and the inspection falls to whoever noticed the gap in the paperwork. Wilfred noticed it. Nobody else has.
He does the round properly. There is a rightness of form to it that he inherited from twelve years as a commissionaire at the gasworks gate before the gate went too. He approaches from the harbor side at eleven, he circles the plinth once, clockwise, keeping it on his right as any post is kept on the right. He checks the four corners in the order the corners would be checked. He lays two fingers on the top left of the capstone the way a sentry acknowledges a relief, and then he stands for exactly the count of a thousand and one and a thousand and two, and then he is off, back the way he came, and he does not look behind him until the corner is turned, which is the regulation, because a sentry leaves a post at the regulation pace and does not linger.
In his head he signs off. That phrase is exact. There is a small book in his head, the same shape as the gate book that lived on a spike at the gasworks, and before each round's end he writes the entry to himself, the way he used to write it for duty: PLINTH, HEAD OF CUSTOMHOUSE LANE — ROUND COMPLETE — ALL IN ORDER — BRADY, F., 2305 HRS. Brady, F., was the man whose book Wilfred once inherited at the gasworks, forty years ago, and the name at the bottom of his mental entries is Brady's, because a relief signs the post over and the relief is the one whose name the night expects.
The all in order is where the habit earns its keep. Because the plinth is not always in order. Nothing about the plinth has ever been out of order in any way that a diary could hold, but the corners vary. Sometime in each week the corner that should be the worn one is not, and the two faces that take the rain have spent a night taking shade, and the chips that were south are north. Never when he is standing in front of them. He has never once seen a move. He records the changes in an actual notebook at home — a Rodings 5-by-4, columns, dates — and the notebook is his only evidence that the changes occur, since the plinth at inspection is at all times the same plinth, and the entries at each visit therefore agree with each other, and the entries between visits contradict each other, and Wilfred has learned to hold the contradiction in working hours and put it in a column when the working day closes. The last of each of his rounds is closing the working day. He signs in his head, ALL IN ORDER, and means: in order for the record to be retrievable tomorrow.
Margery, his wife, understood the rounds as insomnia for the first two years and as a post for the four after that, and now leaves him the door key on the hook turned to face the street, which is her concession to the regulation and one she does not explain to the neighbours.
What Wilfred cannot resolve — and he is a fair-minded man, and would resolve it if he could — is what the plinth is keeping, or kept, or is a keeping of. The papers say the post stands. The post has no post. Rounds complete, all in order, every night for nine years, and no inspection has had anything in it to inspect. And yet a post that is stood is stood for something, and something is choosing, nightly, which corner of its own base to be worn on.
He signs off. He does not sign off entirely. In the head book, under 2305 HRS, he leaves a line space, the way the gate book left one, for the next entry, and the space is not for him.