Chapter 33 The Final Inventory
Evan could not stop thinking about unfinished things.
A drawer left open. A form not signed. A truth placed in the wrong folder.
The most bureaucratic situations are also the most dangerous, as their calculation disregards the warmth of the human heart.
His new, memory-less side was now completely obsessed with the notion of performing the final inventory. Having beaten back the curse of Bell’s with laughter and noise, his brain was still tied to the careful attention to detail of the Original Keeper, and he couldn’t bear to think about leaving a task unfinished. “The Bell Keeper’s Protocol was all well and good, but that was only half of it. The other half would, of course, be the paperwork.”
Jonas and M. Cole, we're exhausted but relieved, they were the last to be ferried from the Bell Tower island. The huge, battered boxcar stood as a temporary monument to the madness of the night.
Meanwhile, on the mainland, in the chill, brackish smell of the morning air, a maintenance car, the other, rickety one Cass had crashed, was discovered tipped over near the rails. It was no more than a mangled frame and an engine compartment.
None of the medical personnel attending to Cass's leg nor Ben's exhaustion deterred him from rushing to where the crashed car was.
“The transport unit,” murmured Evan, circling the vehicle with a critically analytical air. “It's paperwork that has to be filed in the central filing unit.”
“Evan, you just sacrificed your memory to save us! You’re going to look for a glove compartment?” M. Cole asked, with a mixture of exasperation and amusement over his latest quirk.
“The integrity of the closure depends upon it, Mother,” Evan persisted, even as he began to pry open the mangled dashboard. “If there was a final message, it would be part of the transport filings. He was a man consumed with protocol.”
He managed, finally, to wrench open a small, rusty compartment near the steering wheel. In it, among ancient engine receipts and congealed grease, lay a small, heavy object tightly swaddled in oilskin. Not paper.
Evan unraveled the oilskin with a certain finesse. In it, there was a small, glossy, egg-shaped object. This was a stone, a deep purple hue, very well-worn.
And chiseled into the stone, in a delicate, precise script, were these four words:
“The First Keeper Was A Liar.”
A crowd of people gathered, their eyes fixed on this small, heavy stone. This was no official form; it was a confession.
“It’s the final piece of inventory,” Elara, the grandmother, whispered, forcing her way through the small crowd. There was a look of wide-eyed understanding, but not of fear, in her eyes. “It’s my grandfather’s ultimate, unfiled truth.”
Jonas removed the stone from Evan’s hand and turned it slowly. “But what was with filing it in the glove compartment, in stone? Why not enter it in the protocol book?”
“Because he knew that the Protocol book would take any written contradiction,” explained Evan, a flicker of his knowledge as a Keeper reappearing in his voice. “The Bell Keeper’s Protocol only accepts promises and rules. A person’s confession won’t be processed. This needed to be written down out of the system, in a hard, lasting substance that could be brought in the utility car, this was in truth the vehicle of a Keeper’s life.”
M. Cole examined the stone. “So this curse, this decade of silence and guilt, rested on a lie that this original keeper attempted to perpetuate on all others, but which he admitted to himself in this stone?”
“Yes,” Elara affirmed, her eyes aglow with sudden, perfect understanding. “He constructed the Bell as a monument to sacrifice, but in truth, he only wished to escape his guilt over his son’s accident. The Bell was never imbued with magical properties, only those of guilt and belief. He desired to establish a means whereby he himself could impose his silence upon the town, thereby covering his guilt.”
Ben, all bundled up in a blanket, looked at where the indigo stone lay. “So, the Bell was like a big, dark, metal bully, and the Keeper was like a scared dad?”
"The Bell was a foolish, metallic joke," Cass went on, smiling through her pain. "And the original owner was just a guy who didn’t know how to apologize."
Evan stood back from this tearful reunion and watched. He saw their complicated, intricate, and beautiful rhythm of shared discovery. They were taking a joke, a confession, and an absurdity and using it to forge a deeper bond.
Next, he focused on the indigo stone in Jonas’s hand, and his analytical brain noticed a detail that no other person had.
"Wait," said Evan, moving forward. He reached out and gently removed the stone from Jonas. "See that engraving. That handwriting is not that of the Original Keeper."
All of them leaned in. The script was subtle, precise, and perfectly consistent.
“How do you know that, Evan?” Jonas asked, confused. “You don’t have your memory!”
“The Original Keeper’s script is very angular and professional, written to fit in the narrow columns of a book of protocol,” Evan described, pointing to the script of the stone. “This script, in contrast, has a softer, more flowing look, with a distinctive loop in the letter ‘L’. This script is characteristic of a contemporary, educated female.”
He locked eyes with Elara. “This confession had not been inscribed thirty years ago. This confession was inscribed by Lila.”
No one spoke.
The sea seemed to pull back, as if giving the truth room to breathe.
Elara stood frozen, her exhausted eyes widening in utter shock.
“Lila did this?” M. Cole asked in astonishment. “She discovered the stone, and she wrote the truth herself?”
“She must have,” Elara whispered, and for a moment, her own eyes were streaked with tears. “Lila was a linguist. She knew the secret alphabet of the Keepers. She discovered the stone, understood her own role as a part of the Keeper’s secret confession, and chose to inscribe her own truth upon it before she died.”
Jonas gazed at the stone, realizing with brutal intensity the truth of Lila’s last gesture. “Lila never gave the promise of silence to the Bell. She gave a promise of silence for the Bell, until she found the absolute truth and inscribed it herself. She gave a promise of closure to the world that we needed.”
“The curse is over, Father,” Evan affirmed, his voice mellow with true passion. “Lila has done it. She has filed the truth. The Keeper’s Protocol has been annulled for the Final Truth of the Liar.”
But it was a peaceful silence in the end for the island of the Bell Tower. The boat was long gone, and with it, so was the immediate peril, and the family was back in their home at the Lighthouse.
Cass lay back in her chair, her leg propped up, and watched as the sunlight poured into the main part of the house. Ben was asleep on the couch, exhausted but at peace. Jonas and M. Cole were in the kitchen, yelling loudly but passionately over a debate over whether to clean the kitchen floor before or after filing the inventory report.
On the porch railing, Evan stood gazing out at the ocean. He would stay. He was a man with no recent past but a very sharp sense of a bright, shiny future: a new family, a new Light Sequence to design, Indigo and Celery Green, and a new appreciation for complicated, contradictory truth.
Cass limped over to him, leaning on the railing.
“Well, Evan,” Cass said softly. “Welcome home. Again. Can you remember anything yet? Anything at all from me, or Lila?”
His eyes turned to her, and his smile softened, but it was still impersonal. “I remember that your name is Cass. I remember that you are structurally sound. You have a very strong, resolute will. I know I owe you an apology for pushing you down near the Bell. That was unacceptable despite protocol.”
He paused, then his eyes wandered over to the sea. “When it comes to Lila, I feel like I sense this incredible, complicated harmony. I no longer recall her features, but I recall her rhythm. This is a piece of music that’s perfectly imperfect. This is what I’m going to try to recreate with my life.”
Cass nodded. He no longer possessed that memory, but he still retained the tune. This would suffice.
"Good," Cass said, turning to face the Lighthouse. "Because I know the first line of the lyrics, Evan. The very first lyric."
“What is it?” Evan asked, curiously.
Cass leaned in close, whispering, "The first line of lyrics is: 'You’re standing on the coast, wearing two different shoes.'"
"Ah, yeah, I suppose that I did," he admitted, looking down at his feet. In his haste to get out of the wreckage, he had reached for two utterly different boots, his own and Jonas’s oversized oilskin boot.
He laughed, a deep, rich, beautiful sound. “Ah, yes, utterly nonsensical. Thank you, Cass.”
He looked at her, and his face was warm and sincere. “I couldn’t remember the past, but I am certain I want to build a future where I will not forget you again.”
Cass's heart swelled.
Then a deep BONG thundered across the water. This was no Bell Tower chime, but it came from the mainland. It was the huge, ancient clock in the center of Willow Lane, which had been silent for ten years, now chiming with the deep, rich note of noon.
The clock hadn't chimed just once. It chimed thirteen times.
Cass felt the same cold she’d felt at the Bell, only this time, it was curiousity, not cruelty.
He gazed at the town clock in the distance, his analytical mind already working out the impossible. “That clock is broken. That's acoustically impossible.” However, as the final thirteenth chime sounded, a faint, but all-too-familiar SCRATCH sound emanated from within the Lighthouse. They peered through the glass of the Lantern Room all the way up to the top.
The Sentinel Light, which was then set to White, was still burning. Beneath the lamp, a figure huddled, bent over the ancient, round Keeper's desk, writing with all haste, completely alone and completely noiseless.
This, clad in the black, heavy oilskin of a Bell Keeper, was Ben's grandmother, Elara, who had been left safely on the mainland… or so they believed.
With the curse now broken, then, what was she writing with such urgency in the Lantern Room, and why had the town clock just struck the impossible thirteenth hour?