The seventh day of every week was the day Hesper read the cancelled pages aloud. That was the whole of her work. She was seventeen and the under-reader, and the under-reader read the struck-out pages to the choir in the sacristy, so that everybody would hear exactly what the book had given up on. If a page was cancelled and nobody said so out loud, then the salt did not know, and what the salt did not know, it did.

The cancelled pages lived in a black wooden case under the sacristy stair, kept flat and dry, because a page kept in the damp grows a leaf a season, and the book has four hundred and eleven pages and there are no more. It was a Friday. All six of the choir were up the shaft at the wellhead with the water allocation, the freight cage was gone, and there was nobody in the cathedral but Hesper. She opened the case on the table.

“Hesper is going to start at the top,” she said, “and go down to the bottom, and count them as she goes, and that is the check.” There were nineteen. She read them out. Number 44, cancelled the winter the cistern tap was re-polished. Number 88, struck and then written on again fifty years later, because somebody had heard it hum under their hand. Then she came to page 212.

Column 212, north aisle, sixth from the crossing. Note of the plate, set by A. Sorrel, witnessed, entered the 3rd of April, 1904. Cancelled the 19th of September, 1911. The column does not hold. The line was struck through with one stroke, and over the top of it, in red, was the stamp: CANCELLED. Hesper put a finger on the page to turn it, the way she always did, because her hands are damp from handling the leaves and the white crescents of salt under her nails have not come off since she was twelve.

The book went hot under her finger. Not warm. Hot, the way a stone in a hearth is hot, right at the one point where she was touching. And through the floor, up through the sacristy boards and the stair and the whole weight of the building, something hummed.

Hesper took a candle to the north aisle. Sixth from the crossing, exactly where the page said, stood a column like all the others, milk-white with a green heart in it, round as a tree and two storeys high. It was standing. Of course it was. Two hundred years of singing had put it exactly there, and nothing that afterwards happened to a piece of paper could pick it up and move it.

But it was not like the others. It was cloudy, the way a window is cloudy in an old house, and round its foot a soft white bloom had spread out over the grit, and where the bloom met the floor the grit had gone to a wet crust. Hesper laid the brass rule flat across the growth, the way she had been taught. Beside it on the stone was a chalk mark and a little arrow with a date in a small careful hand.

The chalk mark was ninety-one years old. The bloom had gone past it by nearly three inches. She sat down on the cold step with her back against the column. It was warm, and it hummed its own note, thin and steady, like a kettle that has been on so long that nobody notices it any more. Nobody is paying for this, she thought. It is still here, and still working, and nobody is paying for it. That is not the same as gone.

The Reader was in the Ledger Room, where it is too warm, with the book open on the brass-cornered lectern and one candle going. Lida Trask was thirty-nine and forty years in the book, and on her left wrist was a black ribbon renewed every twelfth month, for the one column she had cancelled on her own authority in her twentieth year. “The cancelled pages are read on Fridays,” she said, without looking up. “It is Friday.” “Page two hundred and twelve is not cancelled.” Lida Trask closed the book on one finger. “The gallery stands,” she said. “It is not entered.”

That was how she spoke about them, in the present tense, always. It was not coldness. It was grammar. A cancelled column was a thing that was not there, and a thing that was not there could not be spoken about. “It has not been taken,” said Hesper. “I have just been sitting on it.” “It is being taken. It is being taken this minute. I looked at it when I cancelled it, and I have looked at it every year since, and every year it is more not there than it was.” “Then why is it still standing?”

“Because salt holds a shape. Cancelling a page does not unmake a column. It stops paying for it. The book struck the page in 1911 and the salt has gone on holding that column out of its own good manners ever since, and the book has not paid it one drop of brine in ninety-one years. It has gone soft, and the aisle is eating it. That is the whole of what cancelling is. It is not a killing. It is a stop payment.”

“There are eleven of those,” said Hesper. Lida Trask looked up. “Nineteen pages in the case, and eleven of them are for columns you have not laid eyes on since,” said Hesper. “Two are down the far aisle with the growth round them like a blanket, and nobody reads them aloud except me. And this morning there was nobody to check for, so nothing was checked. The salt did not know about any of them.” Lida Trask went very still. “The book has not killed anything,” said Hesper. “That is not—”

“Nobody in this building has ever fallen down in the middle of singing because a page was struck. The worst thing that happens here is a person sets, and that takes years of leaning. Cancellations are not a murder. Cancellations are a budget.” “A budget is not a small word.” “No. But a budget is not a knife either.” Hesper did not take her hand off the book. “You all behave as though striking a page out made the column stop existing. It did not. It is the only thing in this building that nobody writes down.”

In her second case, under the window, was the cancellation schedule, in Lida Trask’s own small hand, in the order the pages are to be published, one at a time, because that is the law. Hesper had read it over her shoulder a hundred times. It was not in order. The pages in the case are in book order, and book order is the order they were struck, and on the schedule two dates stood a year apart with the later one sitting nineteen places earlier than it should have been. “You have moved them,” said Hesper.

Lida Trask said nothing at all. “You have moved the schedule so that people do not read about themselves at the wrong time of year,” said Hesper. “For two years. You have been holding a shape nobody has paid for. That is what you told me the salt does. You are doing it on purpose, and you have got away with it, and the only reason I know is that I read the pages in order.” “That is not the same thing.” “It is the same thing,” said Hesper, “except you are the one doing it.”

Garrick Bole came in with his ledger, clerk and second tenor, with a leather finger-cuff on his right forefinger, brass-shod and worn to a shine. “There is an irregularity,” he said. “The page is struck. The column is standing. Per the count, that is nineteen. Per the schedule, two hundred and twelve is not due for publication for nine years, and it is not in the order you have written it. Per the entry—”

“The page exists,” said Hesper. “It is in the case, dry and flat, with a line on it and our names on it. The law says a column is paid for if its note is entered in ink by hand with a date. It says nothing about the page being in a box in a cellar, or the ink being older.” Garrick Bole took off the finger-cuff and turned it over, the way he did when he was thinking about arithmetic.

“The book has four hundred and eleven pages,” he said, “and no more, and every one of them is spoken for. A cancelled column does not free its page. The page is the page.” “It is the page,” said Hesper. “So write on it.”

It took until midnight, and it was the hottest work any of them had done in a year. The note of column 212 was a plate note, low and wide and very level, and it wanted a full hour of unbroken singing to set, because a plate note makes things hard and flat and true, and it cannot be hurried.

Ilde Marrow sang it, and Ordin Brack sang under her, and Garrick Bole sang, and Nissa Ashkel sang her spire on top of it, holding the top edge of the plate up in the air. They drank at the copper tap under the crossing between phrases, and by the fourth phrase their lips were white at the corners, and their hands stood in a bucket of water, not cups, and the water went brackish by the eighth. Hesper read the page aloud.

She read the struck line, and the stamp, and then the new entry as Lida Trask wrote it, word by word, with the date, so that every word was said out loud in front of five living people before it was finished. Her damp fingers stayed flat on the paper, because that was where the book was hottest, and the page was warm under her hand like a cup of tea. At the fifty-ninth minute, column 212 stopped humming the note it had been humming since 1911 and began humming the note it was supposed to.

Hesper felt it come up through the boards into her knees. The bloom at its foot went hard, and stopped spreading, and turned from snow to glass, and became a clean square collar like every other collar. The cloudiness went out from the bottom up, and the green heart came on like a lamp in a room. At sixty-one minutes, Nissa Ashkel put her hand over her mouth.

Before the end, Lida Trask sat down on the stool nobody was allowed to sit on. She took a fresh nib, cut the red stamp off page 212 with one stroke, did not tear the page out, and wrote beneath the old entry in small even ink: Column 212, north aisle, sixth from the crossing. Re-entered this day by the Reader, on the word of Hesper Vail, under-reader, who read the struck page aloud and felt it hum. Note of the plate, sung true for sixty-one minutes and witnessed by Marrow, Brack, Bole, Ashkel and Vail. Paid from this date.

Then, in the margin, in smaller writing: Read back into the book by Hesper Vail, who is not yet a choir member, and is on this page anyway. Hesper looked at that for a long time. “It is not a column,” she said. “You have not made me a column.” “No,” said Lida Trask. “I have written down what you did, on a day, in ink, with a name on it. That is a smaller thing than a column. It is not a smaller thing than a column. Hold still.”

The growth did not stop that night. It is not that kind of story. It is a filing system with an appetite, and it had been eating for ninety-one years. But it stopped at the chalk mark by the sixth of June. There is a new arrow beside the mark now, and a date in a small careful hand, and a line under the date that says: held.

And the nineteen is still nineteen. That part of the arithmetic never moved, because Lida Trask will not move it, and Garrick Bole checked it four times before he went to bed, per the count, per the entry, per the schedule, which is in order now, in the true order, with the dates as they were struck. Hesper reads the cancelled pages on Fridays. All nineteen, in order, out loud, exactly as they are struck. And then she reads the restorations. There is one now, and it is short, and it is the part she likes best. “The gallery stands,” she says. “It is entered.”