The Lantern Strand

A retired Hollow Writ clerk's private file on Tarrow the Lantern — forty years of depositions, toll-ledger entries, and fireside testimony describing the same grey walker with the same lit lantern across four generations of witnesses. Begun as an audit of a man with no charter name; abandoned, by its own last page, as something better. The closest thing the Vale has to proof of him, and it proves nothing, warmly.

[a clerk's file-folio, ribbon-tied, the early pages ruled and severe, the later ones increasingly not; the cover bears an official docket-number that has been struck through by hand and replaced with: 'the Lantern Strand'] DEPOSITION THE FIRST, taken at the Spanstone toll-house. Warden's ledger, forty-one years ago this spring: 'Passed north, one elderly man, grey, staff, lit lantern by DAYLIGHT, no charter name given. Answered all questions of destination truthfully' — the warden has underlined truthfully with some force — 'and all questions of origin with remarks about my boots. Toll paid in a tale. NOTE: I am aware a toll cannot be paid in a tale. I have entered it as paid regardless and I decline to explain the arithmetic.' I was a clerk of the Writ for thirty years. I audited granaries and grave-registries and I have caught lies in ledgers dead men kept. I opened this file the year a young colleague of mine — it was I; the file may as well be honest, it has caught the habit from him — demanded a charter name of an old man at a fire on the Cairn Road, and was told, after the man consulted his lantern: 'It says I'm late.' He was gone before the watch changed. I have been late to something ever since. What the file holds, in brief, for the reader who wants the shape and not the forty years: ITEM. Nineteen depositions, oldest to newest spanning four generations of witnesses, describing one man. Not a similar man. The same man — same grey, same blackthorn staff glossy at the grip, same iron storm-lantern, lit at noon, lit in rain, lit, per the Rimeway entry, at the bottom of a snow-cave 'with no smell of oil, which I remarked on, and he said the lantern was economical, and I did not press it, because his tone was the tone of a door closing gently.' ITEM. Grandmother Vessa of the grain country, deposed at age ninety: heard him tell the Sera tale at her mother's fire when she was six. Her granddaughter, deposed separately: heard him tell it 'the same, but the dog was different' two winters past. Eighty-odd years. The same supper-eating, watch-taking, boot-mending old man. ITEM. Directions given by the subject and afterward tested by this file: eleven. Correct: eleven. Complete: none. The Halden's Ford entry is representative — 'take the cairn line up past the third ford, don't camp in the pines, you'll know the door when you're brave enough to see it.' The deponent adds that the pines in question flooded that night, that she does not know how the old man knew, and that she has not yet been brave enough, 'but I go back each spring and look at it, and one year I will be.' ITEM. Three separate accounts — the Cairn Road, the Vessing marsh track, the high Rimeway — of travelers lost after dark who steered by a small warm light ahead of them, and came to a ring of stones with dry wood stacked and the makings left, and no one there. I have stopped trying to file these under anything. THE THEORIES, since a file must weigh them: that Tarrow is a title, handed with the lantern from one grey walker to the next, which fits everything except that Grandmother Vessa's man and her granddaughter's had the same way of saying 'well, then,' and grand-daughters notice what clerks cannot. That he is the Grey Walker himself, keeping his own road on foot the way a good farmer walks his fences — which I am not paid to believe, and am no longer paid at all, and find on cold evenings that I believe. And his own account, thrice deposed, verbatim: 'An old man with good boots.' The file notes that all three things may be true, and that this is not how files are supposed to end. So I will end it as testimony instead, which is worth more. Last autumn, on the road home from my sister's, night caught me short of the waystation with the rain coming on, and there was a fire, and an old man at it, and a pot that stretched to two. I did not ask his name. I have learned that much in forty years. We traded the middle watch and a tale — he told the Kalder frostbite telling as if he had been there, and laughed at the eight better lies like a man remembering the liar fondly — and in the morning he was gone, before the watch changed, the way the file says he always is. On the flat stone by the ash he had left the makings for the next fire, stacked dry, and my boots, which had been letting in water since the Spanstone, mended. Filed under: kept walking. — V.O., clerk (ret.)

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