The man in the grey coat asked for water and then did not drink it."Ask," he said."What is the rope.""It is not rope." He set the glass down. "It is the feeling you get carrying something downstairs when you cannot put it down and there is nobody in the house. I have been carrying it downstairs for two hundred and eighty-one years."* * *"Where.""Everywhere I am." He held up his hand. "Here. In this room. It is always the weight of a thing that will fall if I open my fingers.""And what falls," Serena said."The door.""Falls where.""Out," the man said. "That is the whole answer and it is not satisfying. Out is where the thing on the other side has been waiting to go."* * *Evan leaned against the windowsill."You said the arrangement has held. Two hundred and eighty-one years.""It has.""So why are you in my stairwell.""Because three days ago it moved," the man said. "Not much. The width of a hair. I have held this thing long enough to know the difference between a strain an

It came up the stairs at four minutes past midnight and it did not knock.Evan heard it first because he was standing closest to the door. Not footsteps exactly. A sound like a man in wet boots walking on stone, and then a pause on every landing, and then the sound again."That is four floors," Yuna Park said."I know.""There is nobody in this building but us.""I know."* * *The man in the grey coat stood up."Do not touch it," he said. "Whatever it is, do not put your hands on it until I have looked.""You said you would not do it again.""I said I would not put the knife in her." He moved past Evan and stood with his back to the door. "That is a smaller promise than you think it is."* * *The sound reached the third-floor landing and stopped.Then something sat down on the other side of the door.* * *"Who is there," Serena said.No answer."Who is there."The door did not move.Yuna Park picked up the grey book and held it against her chest, which Evan had never seen her do."

They left Yuna Park upstairs with the thing in the chair and the man in the grey coat standing in the corridor with his back to the wall, and they went down to the Archive kitchen because it was the only room in the building with a kettle.She stood at the sink with both hands on the rim and looked at the tap, and Evan sat on the table with his right hand in his lap and did not say anything, because he had learned in eleven days that she talked when she was ready and not before.* * *She came and sat on the table next to him, close but not touching."My hand fits the seal. I am the file that has been open for two hundred and eighty-one years. And I am on the shelf."She said it flatly."There is a volume down there with my name in it. I read it an hour ago while you were arguing with him about the stairs. I did not tell you."Evan did not move."What did it say.""A shopping list," she said. "Bread. Batteries. A note to a woman called Marie to say she could not come Thursday."* * *

The back of the register was a page the same colour as the rest of it.Evan put it on the reading-room table under the lamp and the three of them stood around it."There is no heading," Serena said."There is no heading.""Every other page in this book has a heading."* * *There were four names in a column down the left side, and three of them had a line drawn through them.The lines were not the same. The first was drawn in ink with a ruler. The second was ink, by hand, and had gone slightly downhill. The third was pencil, lighter than the others, and had been drawn twice, as if the person had not been satisfied with the first pass."There are three hands here," the man in the grey coat said."Three different people crossed three names out.""Yes.""And the fourth one has no line through it.""No.""And it is mine."* * *Serena read the names out loud, top to bottom, because Evan had read them and had not wanted to say any of them.The first one had a date beside it. Two hundred an

It took both of them to get him up the stairs.The man in the grey coat held the rail with his left hand and Serena took his right and Evan walked behind with the green book, and by the time they reached the third floor all three of them had stopped talking.He sat down on the corridor floor with his back against the wall opposite four-oh-seven."How long," he said."Until you read what.""The cover." He had his eyes shut. "You are carrying the green book. I watched you pick it up in the shelf room.""It is the keeper's book," Evan said. "Yuna's.""It is nobody's book," the man in the grey coat said. "It is a cover. Somebody pressed a palm into it four hundred years ago and somebody else pressed a palm into it four hundred years later and it has never once belonged to either of them."* * *Serena opened it to the inside of the front cover.The palm was still there, gone the colour of weak tea, low and off-centre."Read it out," the man said."You have already seen it.""I have seen a