THE ERRATA

CHAPTER ONE

The Room That Wasn’t There

Kael Rho got home at ten past six on a Tuesday carrying a bag of lemons he didn’t need and a jacket with a leaked pen in the pocket, and the first thing wrong with the house was that the hallway was short.

He noticed it the way you notice a stair that isn’t there. His feet kept going and the floor gave out early. He stopped and looked down the length of it. Coat hooks. The mirror with the cracked corner. The narrow table where the post went to die. Then plaster: a flat cream wall, the colour the last owners had called Biscuit, standing exactly where the door to the box room should have been.

The house smelled of coffee, which was normal, because he’d left the machine on again. The kitchen clock, visible from where he stood, said 6:08. His watch said 6:10. Also normal. The clock had been two minutes slow since March and he had been meaning to fix it since March.

He checked that the front door had locked behind him. It had. He checked again. Then he walked the hallway heel to toe, counting, and got eleven paces from the door to the wall. He did it again and got eleven. He ran the tape from the drawer under the post table along the skirting board and got 4.62 metres. He had drawn the floor plan himself the week they bought the place. It was in the folder in the kitchen and it said 5.90. The difference was one doorway and the corner of a room.

He took a photo. On the phone it was just a short hallway ending in a wall.

He put the lemons on the floor, which he would later think was an odd thing to be careful about, and laid his palm flat against the plaster. Cool, dry, a little gritty over old filler. Real in every way he knew how to check.

Two centimetres from his hand a line began to draw itself on the wall. It started at the height of his eyes and ran across at the steady speed of someone using a ruler, thin and red, and when it reached the far side of where the door frame ought to be it stopped. It wasn’t sitting on the paint. He leaned in until his nose was nearly touching it and saw that it sat in the plaster, the way a grain sits in wood.

***

He did what he did at work, which was sit down and make a list.

The stairs were nearest. He took out his phone and typed with one thumb. Hall 4.62 m, should be 5.90. Wall where box room door was. Red line, appeared 18:12, about forty seconds to draw, no visible source. Photo shows no door. He wasn’t frightened yet. For now it was the old feeling of a site visit: something has failed, and it hasn’t finished telling you how.

Twenty-two years of that, and he knew the first rule: you don’t touch it until you’ve asked it a question. So he asked. He went to the kitchen, drank a glass of water and came back. Wall.Then, mostly out of irritation, he thought about the box room: the cardboard smell of it, the shelf of Mira’s things he kept meaning to sort, the chair with the cracked back leg he’d been going to glue since 2019. On the second shelf, next to a box of school reports, the mug she’d painted at six. A fish. Possibly a dog. The handle was blue because blue was what she’d had left.

The plaster went the way a photograph goes when you stop seeing the frame. There was a door-shaped gap with a door half open in it and a strip of dim room behind, and he was looking at the strip and thinking about the fish when his mind slid off to the lemons on the floor, and it was a wall again. He did it three times. Remember, door. Stop, wall. A room that was there only while somebody held it in mind. He wrote that down too, and the cold started at the back of his neck.

That was when the window opened. It hung at eye level with no frame and no glow, just pale text in a typeface so even he couldn’t imagine a person choosing it.

[ERRATA SYSTEM INITIALIZED]

Subject recognised: Kael Rho

Then, after a pause like someone clearing their throat:

[ERRATA STATUS]

Character Level ..... 1

MASS ................ 14.0 kg-eq

Anchors ............. 11

Skills .............. none

Role ................ ---

He read it twice, the way he read anything with numbers in it. Character Level meant nothing. Anchors meant nothing. MASS he thought he understood until the unit. Kilogram-equivalent. He weighed eighty-one kilos on the bathroom scales and eighty-one was not fourteen. A figure with a unit that looked like a unit and wasn’t one was the oldest trick in his trade. Somebody had decided what to measure and hadn’t said what.

“Hello?” he said to the hallway, and felt stupid, and added, “I’d like to speak to whoever’s responsible,” which was what he said on site visits and had never once worked. The window sat there. After a while it faded, like something that had been listening. Then the gap in the wall opened again, and this time he hadn’t been remembering anything.

***

The part he would go over later, on whatever floor he happened to be sitting on, was that nobody made him do it. He could have walked out the front door and phoned someone. Instead he put the box room in his head and stepped over the threshold with the red line level with his eyes, like a barrier arm at a car park.

The room was right. That was the first wrong thing. Too right: the boxes squared off, the chair whole, no dust on the shelf where there was always dust. It smelled of cardboard and of something sweeter underneath that he couldn’t place until he did. Baby shampoo. The room smelled like Mira at three.

It held more than he’d put there. He saw the extra things at the edges first. A wooden high chair with one tray arm missing, from the flat before this house. A bunk-bed ladder, three rungs. A paddling pool, folded, still damp. Things that had been thrown out or given away, crowded in like a lost-property office. He hadn’t remembered any of it. The room had, and had been keeping it.

Then one of the boxes turned its head.

It wasn’t a box. It was a shape in the stack, grey and about his height, standing as he stood, one hand on the shelf where his was on the doorframe. He moved his hand. It moved its hand, half a second late, like a bad video call. There were three of them, then five, then he stopped counting, because counting was what he did when he was afraid and he didn’t want them to see it. They stood in the cleared spaces and copied him. Their faces were sketches. Eyes where eyes went.

He tried it properly. Raised his left hand. They raised left hands. He raised it again. They raised it again, and this time the nearest one was already there, hand up, slightly early, and as his arm came level it closed that hand around his wrist with a grip like a door slamming on a coat.

They’d learned it. Do a thing twice and the third time they were waiting.

He didn’t decide. He dropped, just let his legs go, and the hand lost his wrist, and he rolled into the shelving and the shelving came down. Cardboard went everywhere. Something opened his forearm from wrist to elbow, a splintered shelf edge or a box lid, he never found out which, and the pain turned up a second afterwards, hot and absurdly specific. He threw a box of school reports at the nearest grey figure and it caught the box perfectly, the way he would have. So he went for the gap where two stacks leaned together, a gap he had never used, a gap nobody had ever seen him use. They were slow on it. One half-second slow, and that half-second was the whole of the thing.

He got his back against the far wall. Blood was running into his sleeve. He was breathing like he’d climbed something. The grey ones had stopped in a loose ring. One stepped out of it, and he knew it was the one that mattered, because it was wearing his jacket.

***

The jacket had no pen stain on the pocket.

“You keep this room for her,” it said. The voice was his, the flat recorded version he heard on the occasional video. “Everything in here is hers. Do you know how much of your life is boxes you can’t throw away?”

“Who are you?”

“You’ve got a fair idea.” It smiled, and he knew the smile, and not fondly. “I’m the one where the baby doesn’t come. Very tidy house. I get a lot done.”

Kael said nothing. A thing that talks wants you to talk back.

“She’s the one part of you that can be hurt,” the Echo said. “You’ve built the whole structure around a single point of failure. I just took it out.” It sounded reasonable. It sounded like him at work on a Friday, closing a report.

While it spoke, the room was warming. He felt it before he saw it: the cardboard smell going sweet, the strip light over the shelf turning yellow, a sound under the quiet like a child humming in another room. The room was feeding on him. Every time he thought of the mug, the shelf, Mira at six on a stool with paint to the elbows, the Echo got a little more solid. A crease appeared in the jacket. Somewhere in the ring one of the grey figures had started, very softly, to hum.

He looked at his own arm, at the blood, and made himself stop. Not this room. He didn’t need the room he loved. He needed one he’d hated, because you remember a hated room accurately. You remember the exact crack in the door.

The airing cupboard in his parents’ flat on Carver Road. He had been nine. They’d had a loud winter that year, and he’d gone in with a torch and his knees up and pulled the slatted door shut behind him. The tank gurgled and ticked. It smelled of hot dust and damp towels. The third slat from the top was split and let in a bar of light from the hall, and through it he had watched the toe of his mother’s slipper, not moving, for forty minutes. It had not been cosy. He’d had cramp in his left foot and needed a wee.

He took all of it. The cramp, the ticking tank, the slat, the slipper.

The box room started to go wrong. Not away, wrong, the way a drawing goes wrong when somebody lays a different drawing over it: slats where the shelves were, the smell of hot dust cutting through the shampoo. The grey figures turned their sketched faces toward each other. The humming stopped. They were built to copy what he did, and he wasn’t doing anything. He was standing in a cupboard in 1989 with his foot asleep. The Echo in his jacket looked at him and he saw that it had nothing for this. It had the room he loved. It had never been in this one.

“Pick a move,” Kael said. His voice shook and he let it. “Go on. Do something I haven’t.”

A word arrived in his head from nowhere in particular, plain as a stamp. REDACT. It wasn’t a thought so much as the feeling of drawing a line through a sentence, and he drew it, through the Echo, through the one small habit that made it his: the lag, the half-second, the way it waited to see what he’d do. The Echo opened its mouth and shut it. Its hand began to rise and stopped. It looked down at the hand as if someone had given it somebody else’s.

It had to choose. Copies never have to. It stood there in the cupboard with all its eyes on him and no idea what came next, and then it began to come apart at the edges, quietly, like wet paper, and the grey ones went with it one after another, and the smell of hot dust went out of the air.

[SKILL ACQUIRED: REDACT LV1]

[Ascension 1 complete. Character Level 2]

He sat down on the floor of the box room. The floor was just a floor.

***

The hallway was 5.90 metres when he checked. He checked twice. The box room door was a door again, brass knob that stuck and all. Inside, the shelving stood as if nobody had ever pulled it down, the chair was on its four legs with the one cracked, and everything smelled of nothing at all. The mug was on the second shelf. He picked it up. A chip had come out of the rim, a crescent the size of a thumbnail, right through the fish’s mouth, and the glaze under it was clean white. It hadn’t been there this morning. He knew that mug the way you know a tooth.

He wrapped the arm in a tea towel. The cut turned out to be long and shallow, a paper cut with ambitions. In the kitchen he rang Mira. It didn’t ring and it didn’t go to voicemail. There was only a gap on the line, the sound a call makes in the second before it connects, stretched to ten seconds, twenty. He hung up and tried again. Same. He sent a text and watched it sit there with its little wheel going round.

The doorbell went at half past seven. Walter Ostrander from number 14, who had lived next door for twenty years, who had lent him a ladder and a drill and an opinion on every bin day since 2006, was standing on the step holding a parcel with a worried, polite face.

“Sorry to bother you. This came to ours by mistake.” He held it out. “Have we met? You must be the new people.”

“Walter,” Kael said. “It’s Kael.”

Walter smiled, kindly. “Don’t think so,” he said. “Anyway. Welcome to the road.” He looked up at the front of the house as he went, a man glancing at a building he’d walked past every day of his life.

Kael shut the door and stood with his forehead against it for a while.

[STATUS UPDATE]

Character Level ..... 2

Anchors ............. 10

Skills .............. Redact LV1

Then he did what he’d have done for any client and wrote it up. HOUSE FAILURE 001. Timeline, measurements, the cut, the chip, Walter. It was while he was scrolling back for the exact time of the first line that he found the log, a column of small grey messages in the margin of the window that he hadn’t noticed was there. The earliest entry read [Predicted engagement: High]. The timestamp was 17:58:41.

He had turned his key in the lock at ten past six. The message was twelve minutes older than the house he’d come home to.

He went and stood in the hall. The red line was still there across the doorframe at the height of his eyes, thin as a hair. When he put a finger on it, it was warm.

On the table where the post lived, Mira looked out of her frame, sixteen and squinting on a beach in Whitby with the wind in her mouth. His own shoulder had always been cut off at the edge of that photograph. He’d never liked the picture for that reason and kept it anyway.

A second red line crossed the glass. It didn’t touch her face. It ran down beside her like a seam, and on the far side of it there was no beach, no sea, no sky, no shoulder, only a clean white nothing, like the part of a page that hasn’t been printed yet. She stood in the part that was left, smiling at someone who was no longer in the picture.

He picked up the frame. The glass was warm too.