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.

He died on the date in the book. A heart attack, sudden, no warning, eleven days after the entry appeared, on the day the copperplate had recorded before it happened. My family buried him a week ago. And the entry sits in the Bible now not as a prophecy but as a record, indistinguishable from the true deaths above it, because it IS a true death now, written down before it was true by a hand none of us owns.

I've read the whole death column since with new and terrible eyes, wondering how many of the entries above — going back generations — were written before the fact by the same confident copperplate, and simply became true, and were never questioned because who questions a name in the family Bible. I can't tell. The hand is too like the old hands. It hides among them.

There is no new entry as I write this. I check the book every morning now, the way you'd check a diagnosis. I don't know whether I'm hoping to find nothing, or hoping, if it must come, to at least have the eleven days' warning it gave my uncle, that we didn't know to use. I keep the key on me always now. As if a lock could stop a hand that writes from the wrong side of the page.