The Book That Wrote Names by Itself

Not every silence is God's. Listen to the silence there was that night. The wind outside the walls of the inn seemed to have fallen asleep in the weeds, and the oil lamp burned steady, without a single crackle, as if afraid of startling someone in the dark corners. Move in closer to me, for a raw cold drifts from the door, as if old water were rotting under the threshold. I did not invent this story - and why would I take such a sin on my soul at an hour like this.

It was told to me by an old deacon from near Pereiaslav; as he told it, his hands were shaking, and under his nails you could see deep ink stains he had tried in vain to wash away with holy water. A smell hung about him of dry incense, old paper and river silt. And what the deacon told of was an old church book kept in a locked chest behind the altar, and of why he never again takes up a pen after sundown.

The parish there was small, ringed by deep forests and bogs where strangers seldom looked in. People lived by tree-beekeeping, wove baskets and carted clay pots to the fair. The old wooden church stood on a hill, and every day the deacon duly entered into a thick parish register of goatskin everyone who was born, married or went into the earth. The book was old, begun back in the days of his grandfather's grandfather, and its pages had yellowed with time and candle wax.

Everything went its usual way until one rainy autumn the deacon noticed a strange thing. Recording the death of an old mower, he happened to leaf a few pages ahead in the book, where the paper should have been perfectly blank. On the white sheet, close to the spine, a name stood out, written in a small but strangely familiar hand. It said: "Hrytsko, son of the widow Marfa". Only the widow's daughter-in-law was not yet even carrying a child under her heart.

At first the deacon thought it was his own mistake, or an old man's dream. That he had dozed off over the lamp and written down someone's talk or an old memory. He took the sharp little knife he used for trimming quills and tried to scrape the letters carefully away. But the paper under the blade only grew thinner, and the ink showed through deeper still, turning dark and moist, like fresh blood on snow. He shut the book and decided to tell no one, so as not to sow alarm.

A month passed. The widow Marfa did indeed come to the church and quietly shared with the priest that her daughter-in-law was expecting a child. Frost went over the deacon's skin then. He waited until the church stood empty, unlocked the chest and looked into the book. On that same page the name "Hrytsko" was no longer merely dark - it seemed to have swollen a little. Beside it two more names had appeared, written in the same ink that smelled of river rot and wet iron.

He began studying those entries by the light of three candles. The ink did not come off on his fingers, but to the touch the paper in those places was icy, as if it had just been pulled from a hole cut in winter ice. The most terrible thing was that the dates beside the names were set down in advance. They named feasts that would come only years from now: "on the third day after Pokrova, three summers hence".

The names belonged to the families of local blacksmiths and beekeepers who had not even paired off yet. Then the deacon tried to cheat fate. He took a goose quill and tried to blot those names out thickly with ordinary ink he brewed himself from oak galls. He closed the book, laid a heavy iron cross on top of it and prayed until morning.

But when he opened the page at dawn, his ink had come away in dry scales, and beneath it those same foreign letters glowed brighter still, as if mocking his efforts. Before long the village began to notice that the children whose names appeared in the book ahead of time were born silent and frail. They hardly ever cried, and their eyes were dark and deep, like well water on a moonless night. Mothers fretted that you could not hear the child breathing in the cradle.

And when the deacon checked their names against what was written at the end of the book, his heart clenched with horror: the dates of their deaths were already neatly set down opposite their names. On his last night in that church, the deacon could bear it no longer. He seized the book, hauled it out into the yard and threw it into the blazing oven used for baking the communion loaves. The flame flared up blue, but the leather binding did not so much as char.

Instead a heavy, sweetish smoke rose from the chimney, smelling of raw earth and wet roots. When the deacon snatched the book back out, every blank page was covered from edge to edge in small, wet letters. On every white page hundreds of new names stood out, stretching decades ahead. There were the names of those not yet born, and the dates when they were to go under the earth.

The deacon understood that this book did not simply record human lives - it held the whole village in an invisible iron vice, measuring out every breath and every step. Something ancient, lying beneath the foundations of the old church, had long ago decided how many souls were to remain in that valley. The deacon dropped everything and fled that very night, wandering the roads until he washed up at our inn.

Since then, no one in our village hurries to give a child its name before the christening, and the christening itself they try to keep quiet, without needless guests. And when at night the church gate is heard creaking, the priest does not go to check the locks. He simply lights one more candle by the icon and waits for the silence to settle outside the window again...