The Cabin's Guestbook Skipped Every Seventh Guest

The cabin was gloriously remote, exactly what we'd wanted — no neighbours, no signal, a woodstove and a view and a well-worn guestbook on the mantel that I, being the sort who reads guestbooks, settled in with on the first evening while the fire caught.

It went back years, the guestbook, entry after cheerful entry — anniversaries, birthdays, walkers, writers, the usual warm testimonials remote cabins accrue. Lovely handwriting and terrible handwriting, sketches of the view, thank-yous to the (absent, never-met) host. I read it the way you'd read anything by a fire, idly, until the pattern in the dates snagged me and would not let go.

The dates were continuous — one booking's entry after another, the cabin clearly let most weeks — except that regularly, rhythmically, there was a gap. A booking's worth of time, skipped. No entry, and the dates jumping across a missing week, and then resuming with the next guests. And it was regular: I started counting, and it was every seventh entry. Six cheerful entries, then a silent gap where a seventh booking's week should be, then six more, then a gap. For years. Every seventh guest left no entry — and more than that, once I looked closely, the guests who came AFTER each gap never referenced it, never wrote 'lovely to follow whoever left the firewood stacked' or any of the small continuities guests note; they wrote as though the week before them, the seventh week, the silent one, simply hadn't happened, hadn't held anyone, was a blank the following guests didn't know to see.

Every seventh booking, for years, came to that remote cabin and left no trace in the book that everyone else signed, and the people after them behaved as though those weeks were empty.

I did the arithmetic on the current dates, by firelight, with a slowness I remember physically. Counted back through the gaps. Counted forward. And understood, with the fire warm on my face and the dark absolute at the windows and no signal on any phone, that we were the seventh. That our week was the silent one. That if the pattern held, we would leave no entry, and the guests who came after us would arrive to a book that skipped our week, and would not know we'd been here, and would write as though the cabin had been empty.

We left the next morning. Made an excuse to ourselves about the weather, packed in the grey dawn, drove the long track out to signal and daylight and other human beings. I don't know what happens in the seventh week at that cabin, to the seventh guests, that leaves them unable or unwilling or unremembered enough not to sign a book that everyone else signs. I know only that we were the seventh, and that I read the book before I was supposed to, before the week could do whatever it does, and that we left while the entry we were apparently meant not to leave was still unwritten.

I did, at the last moment, do one thing. I signed the book. Dated it, our names, a line about the view. A seventh-week entry, where the pattern said there should be a gap. I don't know if it stayed there, or if some silence swallows the seventh entry after the guests are gone, unwrites it, keeps the rhythm. But I signed it, defiantly, proof we'd been real, and we drove away, and I have never booked a remote cabin since without reading the whole guestbook first, by daylight, counting.