Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Signature in Advance
A wholesale paper merchant who has signed his name fifty thousand times finds the receipt lines already carry his hand, dated three days ahead, every time.
- perspective: first
I sign my name some fifty times a day and have done, in one warehouse or another, since my father's hand stood second on the firm's receipts and mine stood third. Vint & Sons sells paper, cream envelopes, ring binders, ruled pads of every width, so I will be understood on the matter of lines: I know a ruled line, and I know what I have written on it.
My signature is a settled thing. The V hooks left, the t is crossed once and level, and there is a double stroke under the whole, put there in my first year and never since varied except by tiredness, which varies it in a known direction. When I sign, I date in figures of the same height as the letters, because a signature and a date are one instrument, and I have told junior staff so at every induction since 1971.
On the Tuesday after the fog closed the harbour the pads came up from the warehouse and the top sheet of the first pad failed me in one particular. The signature line was filled. It carried my hand, and the date beside it was the Friday. Three days on. It was not a good copy of my hand, it was not a colleague's imitation, it was mine: the double stroke under the V had the slight lift at the exit that mine has, the exit that Mr Rayner our checker once marked in the trade press as a security feature and I never had the heart to alter.
I did not sign. I sent for Mr Rayner, who counts signatures against sheets delivered as a matter of course, and the count balanced. That is the sentence I have been unable to pass on to anyone at the firm without sounding like a man who wishes to be excused from arithmetic, so I will set it here plainly: the count balanced, which can only mean that Friday's signature was already counted on Friday's column while Tuesday's sheet sat unsigned in front of me.
Since then I have tried the plain experiments and recorded them, in pencil, in my specimen book. I have signed nothing since the Monday. The sheets keep arriving at the warehouse and leaving it already signed, dated three days ahead of the day I am standing in, whichever day that is, which is the detail I keep arriving at and walking away from. The gap has never been two days and has never been four. I have gone back through the counterfoil cards to my father's time and the gap is three days there as well, unbroken, a rule of the trade nobody taught me.
I wrote today's date over a future one once, in the space left, and the pink correction slip came back from the checker in four words: correction noted, balance unaffected. I have tried leaving the line blank on a sheet I counted myself before it went down to dispatch — blank as a held breath — and it left signed. I have not attempted the left hand. I forestall the obvious suggestion: the office suspects nothing, because there is nothing at Vint & Sons to suspect. The roller pad, the ruled line, the date in figures: the instrument is complete and in order. It may be that I misdate by habit under pressure of fog. It may be that my hand, at closing time, runs ahead the way a stopwatch runs. Both accounts are available to me and I hold both, one in each pocket, the way you hold two keys to a door you have not had to open.
What I have kept is the column of dates. Every day I enter the date on the sheet and the date on the line and the difference, and every day the difference is three. Three. Always three. In six weeks the column has never wavered, and column upon column of a wager you cannot lose is its own kind of trap, because a difference that never varies stops being information and becomes furniture.
The gaps are what exercise me now. A week of days sits between the date on my calendar and the date under the line, and I walk forward through it every morning like a man pacing out a room, and every morning the line has moved the same distance back. I do not feel ahead of myself. I feel precisely on time.
So I keep the specimen book and the pencil column, and the name I get down four times a day into it is mine and is not quite mine, near as a wrist is near, and the firm's count has not been out once. The question I keep off the books, at the bottom of the pencil column, where no auditor looks and no goods move, is this one: has the line been waiting three days ahead of me all along for me to catch it up — and on the day the calendar and the column finally meet, what exactly will be left for me to sign?