Chapter 2 The Boy With the Book of Numbers

The first morning of the autumn term at Selkie Cove High ran on a bell that had been broken since the previous winter, and the school's solution to the broken bell was to ring it more often rather than to fix it, so that by a quarter past nine Tove had counted eleven rings and had begun to dislike the sound of her own name. Room 12 was half empty. Journalism met in the second bay of the library, wedged between the microfiche machine and a wall of encyclopaedias that had stopped being consulted in 1994. The school paper was called the Current, which was the third name it had carried since 1971. On her desk lay the last issue, printed in the school corridor, eleven pages, four of them sports, one a crossword nobody ever finished. "You must be the Vinter girl." The voice came from behind the microfiche. A woman in her forties with reading glasses pushed up into grey-streaked hair and a coffee ring on a paperback. "Sit anywhere. Hallberg's in the printing room, he'll be back in ten. He has a thing about punctuality that I did not create and could not destroy." "Tove Vinter." "Bernice Doyle. The Current has had four editors in three years and I am a parenthetical." She held out a hand. "What do you want to write about?" "Whatever is here." "Depends what is here. The council has spent two months fighting about the breakwater armouring. There is a dog that got into the Co-op and the Co-op would like the dog entered in the minutes, by name, as a hazard. Mrs. Ostler from the Co-op is extremely serious about the dog." Doyle shrugged. "You'll find something. People always find something. It is usually something boring, and then you have to pretend for a while." The far door opened at nine forty, and a boy came in with a registration slip folded in his fist and a paper bag under his arm, and sat down in the last row with his hood up. He was tall and thin and entirely still in the way of somebody counting the room. Tove, who was a person who counted rooms, recognised the posture and made a decision about it within four seconds. He did not look at anybody for the first eleven minutes. He opened the paper bag, took out a hardback book the size of a dictionary, and set it on the desk at a precise right angle. Then he opened it, and Tove caught the heading from four rows away, upside down and backwards, because she had been reading upside-down headings off other people's desks since she was twelve. "Those numbers are positional," he said, to nobody, in the flat voice of somebody reading aloud. "Three digits of word, two of page, or the other way round. Either way they are book cipher and it needs a book, and if it is a book cipher then somebody has made sure the numbers stay small, because five digits will not hold a date and a page and a word. So it is a short book. Or a book nobody skims." The room was empty except for the two of them. Tove put her pen down. "Say that again slower." "I did not say it to you." "You said it out loud, which in a library is the same thing." She stood up, walked to the back of the room, and put her folded note on his desk. "One hundred and thirty-two groups of five digits, and I have counted eight distinct numbers in the whole page, and I have no idea what any of it means, and it has been in my coat since seven this morning." He did not touch the paper. He looked at it for eleven seconds, which was longer than she expected, and she watched his hands, which were clean and bitten at the nails and did not move at all. "Where did you get it." "Out of the water." "That is not a place." "It's the tide pool in the split rock at the far end of the strand, and I found it at seven o'clock this morning with the tide going out, and it was dry, and the paper smelled of a printing press." She held his eye. "I have a grandmother who told me to burn it. I have an archivist at town hall who told me the same thing and then lied to my face about how many there are. He said six. So somebody has been putting them in that pool since November and the whole town has been putting them in stoves." Piet Beaulieu, as it turned out, was sixteen, had been at Selkie Cove High for one day and one period, and had been living since June in two rooms over the harbour office with his aunt Jorunn, who ran a guest house that had three guests, one of whom was in hospital in Norhaven. He said all of this in about ninety seconds and then stopped, as if he had heard himself and found the whole arrangement embarrassing. "I am not from here," he said. "You are extremely from here. You have got a local register in your mouth." "Then you have heard it." He shut the book. "Look. I will not help you with this." "Why not?" "Because in eight months I go back to Norhaven, and my father is sixty-one and he tells me what to do, and if I turn up in this town asking a librarian about the nineties, one of two things happens. Either everybody is very kind and extremely vague and I learn nothing and my father never finds out. Or somebody decides that a fifteen-year-old with a cipher book is more use than a sixty-one-year-old with a bad knee." He shrugged one shoulder. "I have watched the second version. It went badly." "You are sixteen." "Almost seventeen, in March." He looked at the note again, and his jaw moved. "Page 12, word 44. That is in the margin on the back, in a different pencil pressure, which means it was not written with the rest of it. Somebody added it afterwards. Or somebody checked it afterwards." He slid the paper back across the desk toward her. "That is a bookmark, not a message. That is a person saying: this page, this word, start here." "Start there with what?" "I do not know. That is why I am not helping you." He pulled his hood further forward. "But I will tell you the one thing I know, and then I am going back to the microfiche, which has the entire whaling history of this county in it and which nobody has touched since 1991. If those numbers are positional, then five digits holds about one page number and one word. Which means your book is not a book. It is something in this town with numbered pages, and the margin said page twelve, and the twelve is not a chapter. Nobody numbers a chapter twelve. People number an entry, a minute, a page of a ledger, an annual report." The bell went. It went nine fifty-three times. Tove Vinter stood in the second bay of the Selkie Cove High School library, holding a piece of lined paper with one hundred and thirty-two groups of five digits on it, and understood that her entire autumn had just acquired an address. She had two candidates. One of them was a building in the town she had walked past on her way in, and the man who swept its steps had already told her, without being asked, that anybody at all could come down. ---