The book on the wharf - A New York History mysterious story

The wharf wasn't a place where a man could stand still for long without someone shoving a sack into his arms or putting a story in his mouth. Wood groaned under wet boots, ropes sang like old strings, and somewhere water was always slapping against pilings, like the sea was practicing a rhythm it planned to teach the city later.

Samuel Reed stood still anyway.

He stood in the doorway of the countinghouse, where it smelled of wet leather and cold smoke, and looked at the quill in his hand as if it were some foreign creature that might spring up any second and jab him in the eye. In front of him lay the ledger-the big book you didn't call a book, but the book, the way in a small settlement you only have one church and one fort and one truth you're allowed to say out loud.

The paper was thick, the edges frayed from the salt in the air. Samuel had opened the ledger often enough that it felt like it knew where his fingers belonged. Today, though, it didn't.

Today the ink glued the pages together.

Samuel wrote the last letter of a name, lifted the quill, and the line gleamed as if he'd just drawn it. He waited. He blew, careful not to spit on the paper. He fanned it with a thin piece of wood like a hand fan.

The ink stayed wet.

Outside someone shouted in Dutch, a curse that sounded so neatly groomed it might have put on its Sunday coat. Then came the dull thud of a barrel hitting a plank, and the sharp laughter of men with enough rum in their bellies to feel immortal.

Samuel slid his sleeve over the ink, just a breath of contact, to see if it would smear. The cloth turned black instantly.

He cursed under his breath, in English. He rarely did that here. English was the language you kept in your head if you could afford to.

He lifted his sleeve and saw a sentence at the edge of the page.

He hadn't written it.

The sentence sat there as if it had always been there: tight, clean, in the same handwriting as his own, only one breath neater. No blot. No hesitation.

WHAT YOU OWN FORGETS YOU.

Samuel swallowed. He grabbed the sand shaker, rubbed sand over the wet line, blew the sand away again. The sentence stayed.

Outside someone called his name: "Reed! Samuel Reed! Come on, write it down before the wind turns!"

Samuel set the quill down like it had turned hot and closed the ledger. The cover creaked like a door being bolted.

For a moment-just one-it was quiet enough in the countinghouse that Samuel heard something that didn't come from the harbor.

A scratching. Right near his ear. A word he didn't understand, but that felt like a name rolled back and forth on a rough tongue until it bled.

He pressed his fingers against the cover as if he could keep the book from opening itself again.

And outside the wood kept groaning, and the sea kept practicing its rhythm, and New Amsterdam did what it did best: pretend everything was trade and nothing was memory.

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