The Family Bible Updates Itself

The Bible is the real thing — a great heavy Victorian family Bible, brass clasps, the middle pages given over to the generations: births, marriages, deaths, recorded in the changing handwriting and changing inks of whoever held the pen across a hundred and fifty years. My great-grandmother's copperplate gives way to my grandmother's rounder hand gives way to my mother's biro. It's the most precious object my family owns, and I'm its current keeper. I know its pages the way you know a face.

Last month there was a new entry.

In the deaths column, below the last one my mother had written years ago, in a fresh line, in black ink, in a hand I did not recognise — not my mother's, not any hand in the book, an old-fashioned confident copperplate more like the earliest entries than anything recent — was a name and a date. The name was my uncle's. The date was eleven days in the future.

I want to be clear about what I did, because I did not sit passively. I photographed the page. I showed it to my mother, who went white and swore she hadn't written it and couldn't have forged that copperplate if she tried. I checked the ink — it was dry, settled, aged-looking, not fresh. I considered every prank vector and there is none; the Bible lives in a locked cabinet, I have the only key, and the hand is beyond any of us. And I told myself, with the desperate rationality of the frightened, that it was a hoax I couldn't yet explain, and that my uncle — hale, active, sixty-three, no health concerns — would prove it wrong simply by being alive in twelve days.