They sent for me from the guard post in the second autumn, and that was the first irony of a night that would have several.
Eight months earlier that same man with that same tablet had explained to me very patiently that I was nobody as far as a table was concerned. Now he was sending a boy to fetch me before midnight because there was a corpse in a grain warehouse and the owner of the warehouse was somebody.
I said nothing. I went.
The dead matter to no one until they turn up inside a property.
The warehouse was the third in the eastern row, one of the large ones, with the floor raised on planking for the grain and a side passage where two watchmen slept per shift.
The dead man was one of the watchmen. His name was Menon and he was forty-one.
He was lying on his side in the passage with his legs drawn up, in a position that was neither a fight nor a fall. His eyes were open. His throat was open too, on the left side, with a wide dirty tear and ragged edges.
And the floor was dry.
That is what I saw before anything else, from the doorway, before going near. A man with his throat opened like that paints the floor, the wall and everything within two paces. There was nothing. There was a stain the size of a hand under his shoulder, dark, dry, and that was all.
The guard from the post was watching me from the door with the face of a man who wants to leave.
"An animal," he said. "Dogs get in at the back."
I knelt.
I lifted his eyelid. I looked at his gums. I pressed his thumbnail and let go, counting.
"What are you doing?" said the guard.
"Seeing how much blood he has left."
"And how much has he left?"
"None," I said. "He has none left."
I am going to give the whole examination because I want it understood how I knew, and because the way I knew is exactly why I panicked.
A human body holds about five litres. When somebody bleeds out from a wound in the neck, those five litres do not vanish: they are on the floor, they are in the clothing, they are soaking the ground over a wide radius, or they are inside the body if the haemorrhage was internal, in which case the belly or the chest swells and hardens.
Menon had no internal haemorrhage. The abdomen was soft and empty.
On the floor there was, calculating very generously, half a cup.
And the body weighed wrong. Not everybody could notice that, and I noticed it at once when I turned him: the corpse of a forty-one-year-old man, broad, with a belly, and I moved him with two fingers. He was short of weight. He was short, literally, of a quarter of what that man had weighed two days earlier.
Then I looked at the wound.
It was not a cut. A knife leaves one clean lip and one ragged. This was ragged on both, and it had at its upper edge two sunken marks, deep, a little over a centimetre apart, which had not cut but punctured.
And around those two marks, in the skin, there was bruising.
That is what froze me. A bruise only forms if the heart is still pumping. That man was alive when it was done to him, and he was alive for a while.
I looked at his hands. Clean. Not a broken nail, not a scratch, no dirt.
He had not fought back.
I looked at the back of his head and the temple and the occiput and found nothing. He had not been struck. He had not been tied; there were no marks on the wrists. He was not drunk: I could smell that, and there was no wine.
An armed grown man, in a passage two metres wide, with his back to a wall and a short spear propped a pace from his hand, let his throat be opened without landing a single blow.
I closed my eyes for a moment.
Then I stood up and told the guard it had been a large animal, probably one of the wild dogs from the waste ground, and that they should close off the back.
And that was where I began lying professionally, which is a thing I have been doing ever since.
I spent three days with that on me before deciding to do anything, and I spent those three days thinking about myself.
Not about Menon. About myself.
Which is exactly what has to be recorded and what I do not like.
Because the first thing I thought, kneeling beside that body, was not there is a thing like me loose in this city. The first thing I thought was:
If this goes on, they will look for an explanation. And the most convenient explanation in this district is me.
I was the foreigner. I was the one who did not eat in public. I was the one who only came out at night because of a skin disease nobody had ever seen. I was the one with cold hands who had done too well too fast. I had spent eighteen months being tolerated with amusement by a neighbourhood that considered me odd, and a neighbourhood's amusement lasts exactly until the third corpse.
I did not need to be caught. It was enough for people to talk.
A rumour does not kill me, but it forces me to leave. And if I left Alexandria, where would I go? I had there the only two things I had gained in eighteen months of work: a house where I had been told I could come in, and the only building in the ancient world where corpses were opened in order to be understood.
That thing in the harbour did not frighten me for what it was. It frightened me because it might cost me the Library.
I wrote it on the workshop wall, out of honesty, and I have never scratched it out:
I am starting to hunt it out of self-interest. Let that be on record.
I made a mistake that week and it was the worst of my early years, and I made it out of vanity.
I told Herophilus.
Not all of it, of course. I told him as one tells a case: a body, a cervical tear, total absence of blood at the scene and total absence of blood in the corpse. I told him because I had had it inside me for three days and because he was the only person in the world with whom I could discuss a corpse without watching a face change.
And because I wanted to see what he would do with the problem. That is the bottom of it. I wanted to see how the finest brain of that century would solve it, without telling him that I already had the answer.
He stopped what he was doing.
That alone should have warned me. Herophilus never stopped what he was doing.
"Say the weight again," he said.
I said it again. I told him the body weighed, by eye, a quarter less than it should for that man.
He wiped his hands and sat on the edge of the table, which was what he did when something genuinely interested him, and began reasoning aloud.
First he ruled out the easy thing. An animal does not drink blood, he said; an animal eats flesh, and where there is an animal there is torn meat and there are viscera outside and there are prints and there is a drag trail. I had described none of that.
Then he ruled out the second. An internal haemorrhage fills a cavity, and cavities can be palpated, and I had palpated them.
Then he was quiet for a long while.
"Then it was taken away," he said.
And from there he developed it with a logic that froze me, because it was exactly the correct logic from correct data, and it led straight to a place I did not want anyone arriving at.
He said: if it is not on the floor and it is not in the body, somebody took it. Five litres of liquid do not evaporate. Somebody was there with vessels. A small amphora, three or four skins, something. Somebody held the man, opened his throat and collected.
He said: and to collect five litres from an open throat takes time, and it requires the heart to go on working for a while, because a dead man does not bleed. So they kept him alive while he emptied.
He said: and that is not done by a thief, or an enemy, or one of the madmen you see in the street. A man does not go to that trouble out of rage. He goes to it because he wants the blood.
And then he looked at me and said the word.
"A rite."
And I, who knew perfectly well that there had been no amphorae, no skins, no rite and nobody with vessels, heard myself say:
"It is possible."
Herophilus nodded slowly, with that ugly satisfaction that comes of having an ugly hypothesis that fits.
"There are sects," he said. "More than you would think in this city. They come from everywhere and here nobody asks them anything. And what is done in the south, in the old temples, do not lightly call superstition: I have seen things from priests that I would not tell you about."
And then he said the sentence that kept my stomach shut for the rest of that autumn.
"If another one turns up, I want to see it. Send for me at whatever hour."
I said I would.
And I left the Museum that night understanding what I had just done.
I had wanted to watch the best mind in Alexandria work. And the best mind in Alexandria, with three true facts and not one lie, had built in four minutes a coherent, plausible and entirely false explanation, and was going to tell it to other people, and those people were going to believe it, because it came from him.
They were going to look for a sect.
They were going to look for it in the Egyptian quarter, obviously, because that is where these things are always looked for, and where there were four thousand people who had done nothing.
And it occurred to me that night — I thought it while walking, and I thought it without the slightest effort, which is why I record it — that this was not altogether bad for me. That an imaginary sect in Rakotis was a splendid place for the city to be looking while I got on with my own business.
It took me two days to decide against it.
Two days. And I did not decide it out of decency: I decided it because I calculated that if they started searching the Egyptian quarter at night there would be guards awake everywhere and it would complicate my hunt.
That was me, in the autumn of my second year.
The second body appeared eleven days later, and the third six days after that, and with the third the silence ended.
The second was a woman who slept under the portico of a warehouse, one of those with no house. Nobody knew her name.
The third was a boy of fifteen who worked on the unloading and slept beside the sacks because his shift began before dawn.
And at that point there was no calling it a dog.
In the market they were saying something else. There were two versions, and both were bad for me. The first said it was a desert animal, a small lion, something that came in at night. The second said it was a lamia.
The second won within four days, because it is more interesting.
And with the lamia came what I knew would come: people began looking at one another. They began asking who walks at night, who does not sleep, who is odd. On the sixth street a man accused his neighbour of being an old witch and they had to be pulled apart. A Nubian porter who was already looked at askance was beaten for going near the harbour after midnight.
And a woman I had treated the year before, on the ninth, asked Kleio, quite naturally and with no ill intent, whether the foreign physician slept at night or by day.
Kleio told me herself. She told me laughing at the neighbour.
I laughed too.
I saw the third one whole, because they sent for me before anyone else.
His name was Anthemios. Fifteen. He had been four years on the unloading, which is what a boy does in Alexandria when his father dies and he has three sisters.
And in that body I found the two things I was missing.
The first was the position of the wound. In Menon, the watchman, the tear was on the left side of the neck, high, almost under the jaw. In the boy it was in exactly the same place. In the woman from the portico, from what I had been able to see at a distance when they carried her off, the same.
Always the same side. Always the same height.
An animal does not do that. An animal bites where it can reach. That was a habit: somebody who always came from the same angle because he was left-handed, or because the first time it had worked that way and it had not occurred to him to change.
And the second thing I found in the knees.
Both kneecaps were skinned, with dirt driven into them, and there were fresh symmetrical bruises on the front of both legs. That is the mark left by dropping suddenly to one's knees on stone.
That thing had not leapt on him from above, nor knocked him down. It had knelt beside him while he slept.
It had knelt slowly, on the ground, beside a fifteen-year-old boy snoring on some sacks, and from there had put its mouth to his neck.
I stayed still for a long while with my hands on those skinned knees.
Because there is a way of killing that belongs to a hunter, and there is another that belongs to an animal, and that was neither.
That was the way of somebody who comes as slowly as he can because he is afraid the other will wake.
That night I went back to the Library for the first time in four months, and I went back to the worst of it, to what I had already discarded.
I sat down with the scrolls about the lamias.
I had read them the previous winter with the disappointment of a man who looks for a treatise and finds a ghost story. I read them again with a different question in my head, and the question was this: if a frightened man sees once in his life something like the thing in my harbour, and tells it forty years later, and his grandson repeats it, and a poet puts it into verse, and a compiler copies it badly — what is left at the end?
Rubbish is left. I knew that already.
But rubbish is not random. Invented details contradict one another, because each man invents his own. True details repeat, however much rubbish surrounds them, because they all come from the same place.
So I made a table. I took every version I could find — six, from three different centuries and four regions — and noted what each one said. And then I kept what appeared in four or more and discarded everything else.
Almost all of it fell away. The bronze leg fell away. The shape-changing fell away, which appeared in two versions and differently in both. The eyes that come out and are kept in a jar fell away, which is one of the loveliest things I have ever read and means nothing at all.
And three things remained.
The first: that they feed on blood. In all six.
The second: that they come out at night. In all six, and with no explanation in any of them, which is the interesting part: nobody says because the sun kills them. They merely say they come out at night, the way one says owls come out at night.
And the third, which was in five of the six and which made me lower the scroll and stare at the wall:
That they have to be invited in.
In one version a minor poet from Cyrene says it in passing, inside a list of superstitious advice which he is himself treating as a joke, in the same tone in which in my own century one said not to walk under a ladder.
Do not call her. Do not tell her to come in.
It is exactly the line from the Egyptian papyrus on the sealing of tombs. The same information, three centuries later, a thousand kilometres away, in another language, degraded from a technical instruction to an old woman's superstition, inside a poem that mocks it.
And I had spent two whole years unable to enter a house.
I left the Library that night with a conclusion that has never since left me, and which is the reason I have spent twenty-three centuries reading material that nobody considers serious.
Real knowledge about us exists. It is out there, scattered, in pieces.
Only it has been so badly transmitted, and by people so frightened, that it has ended up in the box of things that are not believed. And that box is the finest hiding place there is: nobody goes looking for the truth in the place where the lies are kept.
I wrote it on the workshop wall that same night, and of everything written on that wall it is what I have quoted most often:
Look in what nobody believes. That is where the true things get thrown.
I began with the map, because I always begin with the map.
I went to the three sites. I paced them out. All three lay within a circle some four hundred paces in radius, centred on the eastern grain warehouses. Not one in the Egyptian quarter, which was ten minutes away. Not one in the workshop district. Not one near the palace, obviously.
Then the hours. The warehouse guard had made his round at the second hour and Menon was alive; the relief at the fourth found him. The woman from the portico was seen by a baker on his way to light his oven, already dead, and that is the fifth hour. The boy had been talking to a workmate at the second.
All three between the second and the fourth hour of the night. None at daybreak. None at dusk.
And finally the victims, which told me most.
A watchman who slept in a passage. A homeless woman who slept under a portico. A boy who slept beside some sacks.
All three alone. All three in the open. All three, and this is the important part, without a door.
I sat a long while with that list in front of me.
Because I knew why it chose people who slept outdoors. I knew perfectly well. I had done it too, in my first week, when I discovered I could not enter any house and went towards the only pulse that was out in the open.
That thing was not choosing the destitute out of cruelty or out of cunning.
It was choosing them because they were the only ones it could reach.
And from that I built the rest of the portrait, and the portrait reassured me and saddened me in equal measure.
It kills every time. All three times it drank the whole of them, to the end, and that means either it does not know how to stop or it does not know that stopping is possible.
It does not hide the bodies. It leaves them where they fall. A predator with any sense hides the body, or throws it in the water, or drags it out of the city; there is a canal two hundred paces away. It does not occur to it.
It does not change ground. Three dead within four hundred paces in four weeks, with the whole city available.
It uses nothing. On none of the three bodies were there marks of anything but teeth and hands. Nothing of what I knew how to do with blood and shadow.
And it feeds every ten or eleven days, roughly, which with a whole body each time gave me an arithmetic that did not work and that took me a while to understand: it is not rationing. It is eating until it bursts and then holding out to the limit, and bursting again. It eats the way an animal eats, not the way somebody eats who administers himself.
I finished the list and looked at it.
New. It is new. It has not been here long, nobody is looking after it, it knows nothing, it has nobody to ask and it is terrified.
The same as I was eighteen months ago, with the difference that I was given a beach with one man on it and it was given a harbour full of them.
And with the other difference, which is the only one that matters: I sat down at a wall with a nail and began to make lists, and it did not.
I set the trap in two nights and it was the first time in my existence that I did something I now recognise as mine.
I did not wait for it. I built it the place.
I went over the whole circle and located everyone sleeping in the open inside it. There were nineteen people, in eleven spots. I counted them one by one, on two consecutive nights, to be sure.
And then I moved them.
Not all of them, and not by telling them the truth, because the truth does not move anybody. For the four under the big portico I got, through Demetrios, a shed on the ninth street for nothing, and I told them it belonged to the stonecutter and needed watching. To the ones on the sacks I said, in front of the foreman, that the grain was mouldy and that sleeping on it would give them a fever, and since the foreman had already seen me be right twice he obeyed and sent them to the far end. An old man who slept by the canal I paid a month's lodging with what remained of Demetrios's purse, telling him it was a commission from the temple, and the man looked at me with a face that said he knew perfectly well I was lying to him and did not care.
In two nights I emptied the circle.
I left one single point.
A stretch of the old wharf, north of the warehouses, with a low shed of nets and tackle where two brothers who carried fish slept. Those two I did not move: I got them drunk.
I brought them a jug of good wine, which I cannot drink and pretended to drink three times, and sat with them a while talking about nothing. By the second hour of the night they were both snoring under the netting.
Bait.
And yes, I know what that is. I knew it perfectly well at the time. I stood a while looking at those two sleeping men, whose names were Iason and Philon, who were twenty-eight and thirty-one, who had given me their conversation willingly for half an hour, and who were there because I had brought the wine.
If it went wrong, one of the two would die because of me.
And I decided that if that happened it would be my fault and that was that, and I climbed onto the roof of the warehouse opposite and waited.
That is the kind of decision I have been taking ever since, and the way of taking it has not changed. What has changed is the number of people.
I waited three nights.
The first it did not come, and the first night was the one I bore worst, because it was the night I understood what I had built.
I spent nine hours flat on my stomach on a terrace roof, without moving, watching two sleeping men I had got drunk myself.
And I had nothing to do. That is the part nobody mentions about waiting. I could not read, I could not get up, I could not distract myself. I could only watch and think, and I had spent eighteen months learning the hard way that leaving me alone with my head for nine consecutive hours is the worst thing I can do to myself.
So I did the usual: lists.
And by the fourth or fifth list I found myself making one I had not intended to make, which was of every time I had handled somebody in those eighteen months.
The smell of mould in the grain, which was a lie, to move the porters.
The stonecutter's shed, which needed no watching at all.
The commission from the temple, which did not exist, for the old man by the canal.
These two men's wine.
And before that: the skin disease. The invented master in Massalia. The two blows to the temple I never saw. The conversation with Kritias through a door, which was the cleanest of them all and the worst.
I had never harmed anyone with any of them. They had all worked. Two of them had saved lives.
And the five people of that night were where I wanted them, doing what I wanted them to do, and not one of the five knew why.
I remembered Kleio on the step, patting my knee twice.
The second night it did not come either, and on the second I nearly ruined everything, because one of the brothers woke in the middle of the night needing to relieve himself and walked a hundred paces off and was ten minutes out of position, and I spent those ten minutes unable to decide whether to follow him or stay. If that thing took him at a hundred paces, in the open, I would not reach him.
He came back on his own, tripped over his brother, laughed, and went back to sleep.
And I lay shaking on that roof, and not from fear.
The third was the one, and it came at exactly the hour my list said it would.
I heard it before I saw it, and I heard it because there was nothing to hear. It was that again: a hole in the sound. A place where the night stopped having hearts and did not have silence either, but a sort of gap that moved.
It came along the wharf, hugging the wall, and it came fast and badly. It did not conceal itself. It checked nothing. It went straight for the smell of two sleeping men the way a dog goes for a kitchen.
I saw it by moonlight when it crossed the gap between two warehouses.
It was small. That was the first thing. It went hunched, it moved in bursts, and it wore a rag tied round its body and nothing else.
And it was skin and bone. That threw me and it took me two seconds to understand, two seconds that almost cost me the night: if it ate a whole body every ten days, why was it like that?
Then I understood, and I understood it too late to be of use.
It had not been eating every ten days. It had been eating every ten days for a month because that was the only thing it knew how to do. Before that, for who knows how long, it had eaten nothing at all.
That thing had been starving for months.
I came down when it already had its hand on the elder brother's neck.
I did not jump on it. That is the mistake anyone would have made and the one I had spent three nights deciding not to make.
I did three things in order.
The first: I threw the mist at it.
It filled the whole gap between the two warehouses, wall to wall, and inside it I could see and it could not, and I confirmed that at once because it let go of the man and straightened up and turned its head searching, and searched wrong.
The second: I took the brothers away from it.
Both were drunk to the bottom. I took one by the belt and the other by the shoulder of his tunic and dragged them eight metres back, behind a stack of amphorae, and neither of them woke, and that still astonishes me.
And the third was what decided the fight, and it was not strength.
I brought the stack down.
They were empty oil amphorae, thirty or forty, stacked three high against the warehouse wall. I kicked the base of the stack from the correct side and the whole thing came down into the alley, into my mist, on top of it.
It did not crush it. It was not meant to crush it. It was meant to fill its floor.
Forty broken clay amphorae turn an alley into a surface you cannot run on, and that did not matter to me because I knew where everything was and it could see nothing.
I heard it fall twice.
At the third I was on top of it.
What came next I am not going to tell as a fight, because it was not one.
It was a two-metre adult who had fed well for eighteen months, who had measured his own strength against stone blocks of two hundred and fifty kilos and knew exactly what he could do, against a thing of one metre sixty, skin and bone, that had been emptying itself for months.
It clawed me. It opened my face from the cheekbone to the jaw and tore off a piece of my left ear, and it bit my forearm when I put it in front of it on purpose so that it would bite it, and that hurt a great deal more than I expected.
And it could not touch me for a second.
I put its face against the ground among the shards and held both arms behind it, and sat on it with my whole weight, and waited.
And there, underneath me, that thing did the last thing I expected.
It began to shriek.
Not to roar. Not to snarl the way it had snarled during the fight. It shrieked high and short, three or four times in a row, stopping to take air it did not need and starting again.
It is a noise I knew. I had heard it on the ninth street, in houses I went into at night with my bag.
It is the noise a boy makes while something is being stitched.
And with its face against the ground, among the broken clay, with my knee in its back, it began to say words.
I did not understand them. They were not Greek. It was Egyptian, and it was the first time in eighteen months I had heard Egyptian close to, and I did not understand a syllable.
But there are three or four things that are understood in any language, and one of them is when somebody is asking you not to hurt them.
There was less than an hour to dawn.
And there I stayed, kneeling on the back of a creature that had killed three people and that was weeping without tears underneath me, with my face open and half an ear gone, in an alley full of broken clay and dissolving mist, having to decide three things at once and with no time for any of them.
The first decision was easy and I took it without thinking: I was not killing it.
Not out of pity. Arithmetic again, as with Kritias, and this time the arithmetic was very clear: that thing was the only living being I had found in eighteen months who knew what I was.
Everything that was not in the Library of Alexandria was inside the head I had pressed against the ground.
The second was where. I could not take it to Demetrios's house; it did not even cross my mind. The cistern had one exit and was too far. That left the workshop, the half-built house in the western quarter, with no owner, no threshold, nobody.
And the third was how one transports that.
First I had to clean up, and cleaning up cost me more time than the fight.
There were forty broken amphorae in an alley, two unconscious men behind a stack, and a considerable quantity of my own blood on the ground, which was the only detail that actually mattered and the one nobody would ever have noticed.
The brothers I returned to the shed, under the netting, in the same position they had been in. I put the empty jug between them.
The amphorae I left as they were. Forty broken amphorae on a wharf are an accident. Forty broken amphorae carefully gathered up by somebody at five in the morning are a question.
And the blood I dealt with using sand, twice, and then dragged over the spot a basket full of fish that was standing on the corner and left it overturned there, because a dark pool under an overturned fish basket is nothing, and because fish covers any smell for anyone who is not me.
Afterwards I looked at my hands and realised I had spent ten minutes arranging the scene of a crime with an efficiency I had not had to learn anywhere.
I solved the transport with the brothers' netting and two tackle ropes, and it was not elegant, and it took me forty minutes I did not have, and the eastern sky was already grey when I came into the workshop dragging a bundle that writhed.
I put it down in the back recess, threw the tarpaulin over it, blocked the door with the three stones and lay down against the opposite wall, my face still open, feeling the sun climb across the world on the other side of a mud-brick wall.
But before that, in the yard, there was one more thing. A second, no longer.
I was tying the bundle into the netting, in the alley, with the mist almost gone and in a very great hurry, and I lifted my head for no reason, because ever since that first week I have lifted my head every few minutes for no reason.
On the roof of the warehouse opposite, some fifteen metres away, outlined against a sky beginning to pale, there was a figure.
Standing. Absolutely still. The shape of a person wrapped in something.
It had been there I do not know how long.
It had seen the mist, and the amphorae, and the whole fight, and me on top of that thing, and it had done absolutely nothing.
And this time I did not move, and I did not look away, and I stared at it for three or four whole seconds so that it would know I was looking.
Then the figure made a gesture.
One only, small, perfectly clear, with the head. A short movement down and up.
And it was gone.
And I stayed on my knees in that alley, among the broken clay, with my face hanging open and a monster tied in a fishing net, understanding with appalling clarity two things I had not considered all night.
That it had spent a month watching people die in its harbour and had not lifted a finger.
And that it had just greeted me.