Chapter 15 What the Wall Wants

She rigged the camera to shoot on its own. It was a simple apparatus, the one she used for time-lapse surveys of damp movement: the camera on the tripod at the fixed station, a cable to the shutter, a mechanism she had made years ago from a clock and two switches that tripped the shutter at every hour, on the hour, day and night. She framed the lower right quadrant, the company and the gate, and she set it and left it and did not touch it for three days. When she developed the sequence, she had fifty-nine images of the same wall, and the wall was the same in none of them twice. Not one frame showed a hand at work. Between the image taken at three and the image taken at four, in a passage of one hour in which no one had entered the church—she could prove no one had, because the door's snow was unmarked in the morning and the bell had been rung and the brothers accounted for at Matins—a figure had moved from the left rank to the right, and a fold of drapery had become, without any transition, a different fold. She had the proof she had asked three weeks of this house to give her: a change that could not be a hand, a change that was instantaneous between exposures, a change in paint that was old on both sides of it. She took the sequence to the abbot and laid the prints along his table, edge to edge, fifty-nine walls, and she did not say what she believed. She had learned that in this house it was better to let a man read for himself. He went along the prints the way a man reads a psalm, slowly, with his finger, and when he reached the end he sat down and looked at his hands. He said, I have believed it for sixty years and I have never seen it before. He said, What does it want? And she found, to her own surprise, that she had an answer, and that the answer was not the one she had expected. She said, It wants the count to be right. That is all. I have been calling it a ghost for a month and it has never once behaved like one. It has not touched anyone. It has not spoken. It has arranged itself, night after night, the way a clerk arranges a ledger, finding the figures that were left out and putting them back in their places. When I hide a square of it, it holds still, because a ledger that no one reads does not need to be corrected. When I look, it corrects itself. It is not trying to be seen. It is trying to be accurate. And it cannot be accurate, because it is missing the only thing that would make a count a count. He said, A name. She said, A name. Faces it can make. It has been making those for its company all winter. But a faceless figure cannot be counted, and a person without a name cannot be counted, and so the account never balances, and it revises itself every night, and it grows, and it will not rest until the account is closed. Your ancestor walled them in and struck their names, and he took the one witness and left her without a face, and he made the wall an incomplete ledger, and the wall has been trying to complete it ever since. The abbot was quiet. Then he said, The prior believes the closing of the account takes a living face. She said, The prior has been watching it take living faces for forty years, and so has everyone in this house, and they have called it the wall's hunger. I think it is the opposite. I think the account takes faces that have been offered, not faces that have been stolen. She thought of the three who had gone into the company: Leuthold, who had remembered the names; Hartwig, who had tried to hide them; Gotthard, who had died with his face to the wall of his cell. She said, They were all here when it happened. I do not know what that means and I will not lie to you and say I do. But I know what the wall has never once done. He asked what. She said, It has never taken anyone who was not already being given. And there is only one thing I can give it that no one in this house has been able to give it in three hundred years. She reached into her coat and took out the folded leaf with the nineteen names on it. She said, A count needs a clerk and a name. I am the clerk. In three days is the feast of Saint Veylen, and you have promised me the door, and I am going to finish the picture and read these names aloud before it, all nineteen, in the annals and out of them, and let the account close, and whatever it takes in exchange, it has had my face in front of it every day for two months and has not once reached for it. The abbot looked at the leaf of names in her hand for a long time. Then he said, And if the prior was right? She said, Then you will bury me in the pine, and the wall will count me, and the account will balance. She folded the leaf and put it back inside her coat. She said, I would rather be a figure in a wall than the woman who stood in front of it and did nothing. That night the storm came down out of the pass and shut the valley's last light away, and the generator failed, and the house sat in the dark for the whole of a night and a day, and when the power came back and she went into the church with a lamp, the company of the hidden had turned to face her again, all of them, every averted head, and at their head the tall one wore a face at last, and the face was not her own and was not Emmerich's, and she did not know yet whose it was, and she stood on the ladder in the cold dark of the empty church and looked at it for a long, long time, and the mouth on the finished face was closed, and patient, and did not move. ---