The Editor’s Answer
By eleven o’clock Monday night, the Midnight Gazette had gone dark except for the third-floor editorial room.
Nora saw Samuel Pike’s lamp through the rain-streaked windows before she reached the front steps. The building was supposed to be locked. Its brass doors reflected the street in broken strips, and for one unpleasant instant she saw herself standing inside them, coatless, holding a newspaper she had not yet found.
Halden caught the door before it swung shut behind her. “You’re sure this is where you want to do this?”
“No,” Nora said. “I’m sure it’s where he’ll be.”
Pell remained under the awning. He had refused to enter the Gazette since they escaped the annex. His gaze stayed fixed on the upper windows.
“If the presses start,” he said, “don’t let them finish.”
Halden looked at him. “Finish what?”
Pell’s answer was barely audible. “The sentence.”
Nora pushed through the lobby. The night clerk’s desk was empty, though a cup of coffee steamed beside the telephone. The wall clock showed 10:47. Its second hand moved backward each time Nora looked away.
She climbed.
On the third floor, the editorial room stood open. Samuel sat behind his desk with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He had spread the first impossible edition across the blotter. Beside it lay a bottle of rye, two glasses, and a stack of ordinary Gazette pages covered in black bars.
He didn’t look up. “I was beginning to think you’d ask the wrong question at the door.”
Nora stopped. “You knew we were coming.”
“I knew you’d come before Tuesday.”
Halden entered behind her, one hand resting near his pistol. “That’s not the same thing.”
Samuel finally raised his eyes. They were bloodshot, but not surprised. “No. It’s worse.”
Nora crossed the room and placed the first edition on top of the one he had opened. “Tell me what happened five years ago.”
Samuel glanced at the newspaper. The line about Julian being the first reader had faded from the paper while they traveled. Now it was visible again, dark and wet-looking.
“That’s a broad question,” he said.
“It’s the one I’m asking.”
“Good.” Samuel poured the rye into both glasses. “The paper prefers broad questions. They leave room for it to put words in afterward.”
Nora did not sit. “You knew this edition existed.”
“Yes.”
“You knew Julian wrote the first installment but didn’t send it.”
“Yes.”
“You knew the Gazette was dangerous before Felix Armitage died.”
Samuel’s hand paused over the second glass. “I knew the Gazette could make dangerous things happen. I didn’t know it had selected Armitage.”
“Who selected him?”
The room tightened.
The fluorescent tubes overhead flickered. Somewhere below, a press roller turned once with a heavy metallic sigh.
Samuel looked past her to the blank wall behind the desk. “That is the question it wants you to ask.”
A thin black line appeared across the nearest page. Ink rose through the paper in letters that formed without a pen.
WHO SELECTED HIM?
Halden drew his pistol.
Samuel reached for the page, but Nora slapped his hand away. The words trembled. Beneath them, another line began to surface.
THE EDITOR WILL ANSWER—
Nora seized the page and tore it in half.
The lights went out.
For three seconds, the editorial room held no sound but rain. Then every telephone on the floor began ringing at once.
Samuel swore and moved behind the desk. “Don’t tear anything else.”
“You told me to let it answer.”
“I told you nothing.”
“You’ve been telling me nothing for five years.”
The emergency lights came on, bathing the room in red. The telephones stopped together. In the silence, Nora heard a faint clicking from the pressroom below, a typewriter key striking at measured intervals.
Halden kept his weapon trained on the dark corridor. “Start talking.”
Samuel looked at him, then at Nora. The old editor seemed suddenly smaller without his sarcasm, not frightened exactly, but exhausted by the cost of having been right too many times.
“Five years ago, I was managing editor,” he said. “Julian had been missing since the previous night. The police were looking for him. We received no manuscript that Tuesday.”
“Yet the paper printed one.”
“It printed itself.”
Halden’s expression hardened. “That’s not possible.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be.” Samuel tapped the edition with one finger. “At 4:12 in the morning, the presses started. No plates were set. No compositor was at the machines. The first copies came out with this story in the crime column and nothing else. We stopped the line. The next stack came out with a different headline. We shut down the power. The emergency press began running.”
Nora thought of the contradictory headlines in the annex, each one changing when the typewriter was damaged.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“What any editor does when a paper is printing something he doesn’t understand.” His laugh was dry. “I changed it.”
“You edited it?”
“I removed the final paragraph. Replaced it with a notice about a water main.”
The rain struck the windows harder.
Samuel reached into a drawer and withdrew a brittle strip of newsprint. “This is what I removed.”
Nora read the fragment. The words were almost identical to the first edition’s final paragraph, but one sentence had been added in a smaller typeface.
THE FIRST READER WILL OPEN THE DOOR.
Below it, in Samuel’s handwriting, was a note: I DID NOT KNOW WHICH DOOR.
“The altered edition went out,” he said. “People bought it. They read the water-main notice. They discussed the story anyway. By noon, the missing paragraph had appeared in three different copies. By evening, the city had supplied the room, the key, and the string.”
Nora’s mouth went dry. “Julian?”
“Was dead.”
The certainty in Samuel’s voice stopped her. “You saw him?”
“No. The police found enough to declare it. I saw what remained in his apartment.”
“What remained?”
“A typewriter with no ribbon. A manuscript half-written. And one page addressed to the Gazette.”
“Where is it?”
Samuel’s gaze shifted to the stack of black-barred pages. “I printed it.”
Halden stepped closer. “What did it say?”
Samuel did not answer.
Nora understood before he spoke. “You don’t have it anymore.”
“I have the consequences.”
The typewriter below struck twice.
Clack.
Clack.
A sheet of paper slid from the ancient office printer beside Samuel’s desk. No one had switched it on. Nora approached while Halden covered the corridor.
The page contained a single paragraph.
SAMUEL PIKE TOLD THE REPORTER THAT JULIAN VANCE WAS DEAD.
Nora read it once. Then again.
The final sentence appeared while she watched.
THE REPORTER ASKED WHETHER HE HAD SEEN THE BODY.
Samuel closed his eyes. “Don’t.”
That was when Nora saw the trap. The question was not about Julian. It was about permission. If she asked whether Samuel had seen the body, the paper would decide that the answer mattered more than the truth.
She turned from the page. “What did Julian’s letter ask you?”
Samuel opened his eyes.
For the first time, genuine fear crossed his face.
“It asked me to stop printing.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because the first time I tried, the city forgot a man who had never been born.” Samuel’s voice roughened. “His wife came to the office screaming that we had erased him. Then she looked at me and couldn’t remember why she was there.”
Halden lowered his pistol a fraction. “So you kept publishing to prevent worse effects.”
“I kept publishing because I was afraid.” Samuel’s eyes fixed on Nora. “There’s a difference.”
Outside, a bell rang midnight.
Every light in the Gazette came on at once. The presses below began to run.
Pell shouted from the stairwell. “The Tuesday envelope!”
Samuel stood so quickly his chair overturned. “No.”
A pneumatic tube in the wall coughed. A brass canister shot from its mouth and struck the floor. It rolled to Nora’s feet, warm enough to steam against the boards.
No return address marked it. No name appeared on the label.
Only a number had been typed there.
42.
Nora looked at Samuel. “You said Julian was dead.”
“I said he was dead five years ago.”
The canister clicked open by itself.
Inside was a manuscript page, still damp with ink. At the top, beneath the Gazette’s masthead, stood the title:
THE EDITOR’S ANSWER.
And beneath that:
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO.
Samuel reached for it. Nora caught his wrist before he could touch the page.
This time, he did not tell her to let go.
He whispered, “If you read it, it will know you’re here.”
Nora stared at the moving ink.
“It already knows,” she said.
The first line appeared.
NORA VALE DECIDED TO ASK THE QUESTION SAMUEL PIKE HAD FEARED MOST.
Nora has stopped the paper from dictating her question once, but Chapter 42 is now writing the answer Samuel has spent five years concealing—and the manuscript is already in her hands.