In the November mist, Heath looked like a photograph taken out of someone else's dream. Lena had returned here years later to tidy up the library after her aunt Sophie, the headmistress, who had left her a brass key and a note with one sentence: "Don't catalogue what isn't there". The building smelled of dust and salt, and the tower clock, often a few minutes late, creaked above the entrance. Silence crept up the stairs like a cat, stopping its breath at the door to the attic. Behind them was a room that had not been opened since the seventy-second year. "Please don't go in there after dark," Herman, the caretaker, warned her, placing a packet of cardboard on the lending table top. He had hands worn down from spreading boxes and a memory full of small, persistent facts. "The lock jams, and the clock then loses its beat. And it's better not to play with the bars of this house." Lena smiled briefly, unsure if she was joking, and felt the key warm her through her coat. The fog outside had thickened to milk, and the waves were pounding the quay so that the window frames trembled. The attic opened with a resistance, as if the wood remembered hands that were no longer there. Inside stood a large desk with a lamp on a stiff arm, maps of faded shallows and bookcases with shelf numbers written in ink. On the topmost shelf, Lena found a cloth-bound book entitled 'Index of Unborrowed Things'. The pages were filled only with signature marks and dates, no titles, no authors. One page bore the date of her birth and a sign she did not understand: H-9/3. The clock in the tower wailed in a muffled tone, and there was a quiet, persistent ticking in the hall, as if an alien mechanism were at work in the wall. "Lena?" shouted Herman from below, and the echo spoke her name in three different directions at once. "I'm closing the gate in ten minutes!" She replied that she was on her way down, but a note tucked into the back of the index card caught her eye. "If you're reading this, the clock has slowed down. Write down what's wrong before it strikes a third time." She unfolded it fully and saw Sophie's signature, clear as if it had been made yesterday. At the same moment, he buzzed the old recorder on the desk, swallowed the tape and played back a rustling whisper: "Don't look for titles. Look for gaps." Shelf H-9 stood by the window, overlooking the frosted harbour and the seagulls hanging over it. Behind the third volume of the encyclopaedia was an empty recess, and in it was a bottle with a cap and a rolled-up photograph. Lena slid it out carefully, as if pulling out a splinter, and saw herself as a child in the photograph, standing at the same desk, with the same lamp, in identical light. She froze, for she had never been here before. Somewhere below, the staircase creaked, as if someone was climbing very confidently, taking heavy steps. The clock struck for the first time, dust sprinkled from the beams, and the attic door closed on its own with a deafening clatter. Lena grabbed the handle, but the metal was icy cold and did not budge. The index on the desk swung open to a new page, and ink flowed out of nowhere and began to chalk her name, fresh and wet. The clock whirred with a second strike and somewhere, very close by, someone said in a whisper: "There is one census missing."