The raft of flat stone where the wagon road crossed the south branch of the creek sat in water deeper than a man could throw a stone. Six meters, more in flood. The locals called the place Black River Hollow, though the name had not existed until a summer night in 1879, when a covered wagon carrying two men and a team of horses went into that water during a storm and never came up. Nothing floated.

Not the wagon, not the horses, not a single splinter of wood. For forty-four years the hole kept everything it had taken. Then in 1923 two men in canvas suits and brass helmets went down to find it. Before they brought anything up, before they opened a single lock or read a single page, the older diver told his supervisor that the river smelled wrong.

Not like a river. Like ink. Like an inkwell left open for a very long time. The Black River Hollow Commission was a small outfit: four engineers, a foreman, and whatever local labor could be hired for the season.

Their work that year was a survey. The dam at the mouth of the hollow had stood since the 1890s, backing up a narrow stretch of still water, and the owning company wanted to raise the level another fourteen feet to feed a new mill downstream. Before raising it they had to know what lay on the dam’s bottom. Logs could foul the new turbines.

Old fence wire could tie up a diving crew for hours. Anything made of iron meant an extra week of work. In late September they sent for a diver. The man who came was named Ezra Halver.

He was thirty-eight, broad-shouldered, his hair gone white on one side from a fever caught working the oyster beds of Florida in his twenties. He kept it short, as men in his trade did, because long hair caught in the helmet gasket and could kill a man who was not careful. He spoke quietly. People sometimes took that for shyness.

It was not. It was the habit of a man who had spent half his life in places where talk did no good. Halver had worked Norfolk for nearly a decade, mostly harbor work, and before that the pearl beds off Florida. He knew cold water and dark water.

The Kentucky job was supposed to be short. Two weeks. Maybe three. He arrived Thursday on a wagon driven by a tall man named Aldus Trench.

Trench was fifty-one, thin as a fence post, and ran the Commission’s field crew. He had lost two fingers on his left hand when a piece of rigging fell on him in 1910, and the stumps still ached when the pressure dropped. Halver noticed him rubbing them on the ride in. “Storm coming,” Trench said by way of explanation.

“We’ll be home before dark tomorrow. ” Halver looked at the sky. It was that deep autumn blue you only saw in those mountains, clear and unbroken. The second diver was already at the site when they arrived.

His name was Mercer Doyle. He was thirty-one, smaller than Halver, lean in the way of a man who had grown up on poor land and never quite filled out. His face was sharp-angled. His eyes were a pale, nearly colorless gray.

Doyle had come from West Virginia, diving for a coal company that ran flooded mines. He had less open-water experience than Halver, but he had spent more time under rock, which counted for something in a place like this. Doyle shook Halver’s hand without ceremony. “You’ve worked rivers before.

This one’s different. ” Halver waited. Doyle did not elaborate. He turned and began checking the air pump.

The camp was three canvas tents and a small wooden shed, flooded out the previous spring and set on a flat rock shelf about fifty yards above the pool. From the shelf you could see the whole pool. It was shaped like an open hand, the river entering at the wrist from the north and leaving between the fingers to the south. The ford sat at the heel of the hand, where the bank ran lowest and the rock bottom came closest to the surface.

The dam lay a quarter mile downstream, out of sight behind a stand of hemlocks. The water itself was the color of strong tea. That was normal in those mountains. Tannin from the leaves.

Nothing strange in it. But where the pool deepened, the color changed. Tea became coffee. And in the deepest part, near the old ford, it went black.

Not because the water was dirty. It was clear. You could see your hand through six feet of it without trouble. It was black because there was nothing on the bottom to return the light.

Halver stood on the shelf that first day looking down. He said later he felt a strange urge to descend. Not to jump. Just a lean, the way a man leans toward something interesting in a window.

He took his eyes off the water and went to rig his gear. That night the storm came exactly as Trench predicted. It rolled off the high ridges just after eight and sat over the hollow for about three hours. Lightning lit the pool from within the way a lantern lights frosted glass.

The four of them sat in the biggest tent, drinking coffee gone bitter from sitting on the stove, waiting it out. That was when the old man came. His name was Lemuel Boyt. He was sixty-six and lived in a cabin about a mile up the ridge.

He had heard about the diving. He had not come to wish them luck. He ducked in out of the rain, cap in hand, oilskins dripping on the plank floor, and sat at the table uninvited. “You boys won’t find what you’re looking for,” he said.

Trench looked at him. “And what do you think we’re looking for, Mr. Boyt? ” “Logs.

Wire. Old plow blades. That’d be a fair guess. You’ll find those.

” He paused. “But you’ll find Phineas Quayle’s pen, too. And his wagon. And what was in it.

And I’m telling you, Mr. Foreman, you’d do better to leave it alone and move on. ” Nobody at the table spoke for a long moment. “Who’s Phineas Quayle?

” Halver said at last. Lemuel Boyt told them. He told it slowly, because he had told it before and had not enjoyed the telling. In the spring of 1879, when Lemuel was twenty-two and working as a stable hand at his uncle’s livery, a man named Phineas Quayle came into the county on the seat of a heavy covered wagon.

He had come up from Tennessee. A tall, thin man in his mid-forties, with a long jaw and pale, deep-set eyes, wearing a black coat that looked tailored for a heavier man and ink-stained at the cuffs, as if he spent his days hunched over a desk. He had a passenger, a younger man named Saul Avery, maybe thirty, with a faint voice and a perpetual slight tremor in his hands. Avery told the boy at the livery he was a scrivener.

When the boy asked what a scrivener was, Avery said, “A man who writes other people’s letters. ”

Quayle and Avery stayed in the county nineteen days. They sold nothing. They preached nothing.

They paid cash and never haggled. They kept to themselves, but they asked questions. Lemuel said this carefully, because he did not want to be misunderstood. They asked questions, and they were not the kind a stranger was supposed to ask.

They asked Widow Marsh, who had buried her husband in 1875, what color shawl she had worn to the funeral. She said she didn’t remember. Quayle said it was green with a brown tassel. She agreed it was green.

She didn’t remember the brown tassel until she went home and looked, and there it was in her trunk, where it had been since the burial. They asked the blacksmith, a man named Onto Salus, how he got the scar on his right leg. Salus told them a mule kicked him when he was a boy. Quayle said, “By a mule that went wild in a barn that burned sometime after.

You were holding a tin cup. The cup is still hanging in the rafters. ” Salus said nothing for a long time. The barn had burned in 1861.

The cup had been his father’s. He had thrown it into the rafters the day his father died of a fit, and had never told a soul. They asked the schoolteacher, Miss Pernilla Cobb, twenty-eight years old, what she had dreamed the night before. She slapped Avery and walked out of the inn.

That evening she came back pale and told the innkeeper the dream had come true. She never said what it was. On the nineteenth day, Quayle and Avery loaded their wagon and prepared to leave. The morning was clear; by afternoon it had turned.

A storm moved in. “Up on the ridge, much like the one above us now,” Lemuel said, and tapped the table once with his knuckle as he said it, as if to confirm the table was there. The road south of town crossed the river at the ford. There was a covered bridge, but it had been damaged in the flood the previous year and the county had not finished repairing it.

Travelers used the ford instead. In ordinary weather the ford was safe. In a storm it was another matter. Quayle knew this.

The delivery boys warned him. He waved them off. He told them, Lemuel remembered the words exactly, “There is something I have written that I must be on the far side of that river to do. The river will not stop me from it.

” Then he climbed to the box, Avery climbed up beside him, and they drove out of town as the rain began. They reached the ford around dusk. A man named Hiram Quait was on the hill above the ford that evening, sheltering under a lean-to with his dogs. He saw the wagon come up the road.

He saw it stop at the edge of the ford. He saw Phineas Quayle stand up on the box, and he saw Quayle do something Hiram Quait never understood and never explained to anyone’s satisfaction afterward. Quayle took a small book from inside his coat. He opened it.

He read from it. And he laughed. Then Quayle sat down, took up the reins, and drove the team straight into the water. Hiram Quait said the horses did not balk.

That was what he kept repeating afterward. The horses did not balk. A team in a storm going into rising water would balk. They would scream.

They would rear. They would do anything but walk in willingly. These horses walked into the river the way a man walks into his own kitchen. The wagon dropped off the edge of the ledge about two-thirds of the way across.

It tilted slowly. The canvas top filled with water and slid under. The horses fought then, finally, but by then the current had them, and they drowned with the rest. Hiram Quait said he heard a short cry from inside the wagon.

He said it sounded like a laugh, but he was not sure. By morning the storm had passed and the river ran clear again. Men came from the county with hooks and ropes and a boat, and dragged the pool for three days. They found nothing.

Not the wagon, not the horses, not Phineas Quayle or Saul Avery, not a single plank, not a single buckle, not a scrap of cloth. The river had taken everything and given nothing back. For weeks afterward, men from the county would walk down to the pool and stare into the black water in silence, then go home. After a while they stopped coming.

That was when the hollow got its name. Before that summer it had been called South Ford. After that summer it was Black River Hollow, and the name stuck so hard that within ten years nobody remembered the old one. Lemuel Boyt finished his coffee.

He looked at Ezra Halver across the table. “You’ll go down there tomorrow. ” “Yes,” Halver said. “You’ll find that wagon.

” “Maybe,” Lemuel Boyt said. He pushed his cup away. “I’m asking you, as a man who watched two souls go into that pool of their own will, to leave what’s down there where it is. ” Halver was quiet a moment.

Then he said, “I have a job, Mr. Boyt. ” The old man nodded once. He rose slowly, put his cap back on, and walked to the tent opening.

At the flap he turned. “You said the river smelled wrong when you stood on the shelf this afternoon. ” Halver had not said that. Not aloud, not to anyone.

He had only thought it. He looked at Lemuel Boyt, and the old man looked back. After a moment Halver said, “How did you know that? ” Lemuel said, “Because every man about to go down says it.

And because Phineas Quayle said it before he laughed. ” Then he went out into the rain. By morning the storm had broken and the sky was back to the blue of the day before. The four men in camp went to work.

Ezra Halver made his first descent at nine o’clock. The equipment they used in those days was heavy: a canvas suit that laced at the boots, a brass breastplate, a brass helmet bolted to it. Air came down a hose from a hand pump on the surface. Communication was a single line with a pull signal.

One pull, all is well. Two pulls, pay out more line. Three pulls, take up slack. Four pulls, bring me up.

A series of short pulls meant something was wrong. Bring me up fast. Mercer Doyle worked the pump. Aldus Trench worked the line.

A young engineer named Orin Gable, the youngest on the Commission at twenty-six, took notes from the bank. Gable was a college man from Lexington with clear, precise handwriting, the handwriting of a person told all his life that he had nice handwriting. He had a notebook open on his knee and a pencil in his hand, waiting to record whatever Halver called up the line. Halver went over the side of the boat at exactly 9:04.

The water was clear for the first ten feet. He could see his boots. He could see the line running up to the boat above him, swaying slightly where the current pushed it. At twelve feet the light began to fail.

At fifteen feet it was gone entirely. He had a small lantern lashed to his chest, run off a wet-cell battery. He lit it, and the water around him shifted from black to a smoky, pale brown. He could see about four feet in front of his helmet.

The bottom of the pool came up under him at about twenty feet exactly. It was not what he expected. He expected mud. River bottoms were mud.

Even rocky bottoms wore a coat of silt, slow accumulation over decades. This bottom was bare stone. Flat, dark, polished, clean. No silt at all.

He stood on it for a long moment, then turned slowly. He saw nothing but the stone itself in every direction, fading into the brown dark. He pulled the line once. All is well.

He started walking. He had been walking about two minutes when his lantern picked up the first piece of it. A wheel. A wagon wheel half-sunk in the stone, lying on its side.

He bent down. The wheel was wooden, iron-rimmed, still in one piece. The iron had rusted to a fine red, but it had not corroded away. The wood beneath was dark and slick, but it had not rotted.

That was impossible. Wood did not survive forty-four years underwater. Not softwood, not even oak. The fish got it.

Freshwater swelled and split it. Even the insects, in the dark, found it eventually. This wheel looked like it had been laid down yesterday. Halver straightened.

He turned slowly, and his lantern picked up the rest of it. The wagon was about fifteen feet from where he stood. It was upright. Not on its side, not broken, not shattered.

Upright, level on the stone, as if someone had driven it carefully down a ramp and parked it. The canvas cover was gone, taken by time. But the box was there, the frame was there, the seat was there, the tongue was there, lying level on the stone before it. There were no horses.

There were no bones. Halver stood looking at the wagon for what he later described as a long time. He had no way to measure it. His watch was in the boat.

Time gets hard to judge under six meters of dark water. He pulled the line again. All is well. He walked toward the wagon.

He circled it slowly and found that the side facing him had a small door, like a hatch, set into the wagon box. The hatch was locked. The hasp was held by a brass padlock. The padlock was not rusted.

That was the part Halver had the hardest time describing later, when the engineers wrote their report. The wheel was rusted. The iron rims were rusted. The bolts holding the seat to the frame were rusted.

The lock was not. The lock was bright. The brass had a soft yellow gleam, the gleam of metal polished within the last week. He reached out and touched it.

It was warm. Not water temperature. Warmer, the way metal is warm when a hand has just been holding it. He pulled his hand back.

He stood perfectly still. He listened. In a dive helmet you can hear two things. You can hear your own breath, close and loud.

And you can hear the water against the brass, a low constant ringing. He listened past both, the way a man in a dark house listens past the ticking of his own clock. He heard nothing. But he had a strong feeling that something on the far side of the wagon door was listening back.

He pulled the line four times. Bring me up. When they hauled him into the boat, Aldus Trench took one look at his face and said, “What did you find? ” “A wagon,” Halver said.

“Whole. Every piece of it. ” Trench frowned. “How deep?

” “Twenty feet. Maybe a little more. And the bottom’s clean. Clean as if it’s been washed.

Clean as if it’s been polished. ” The two of them stood on the deck of the small boat the Commission had launched for the diving, the water beneath them so still that the reflection of the trees on the far bank was a perfect inverted line. “What are you not telling me? ” Trench said.

“The padlock on the door is new,” Halver said. Trench did not answer. He looked at Orin Gable, whose pencil had stopped over his notebook, eyes wide. “Don’t write that down yet,” Trench said.

Gable wrote nothing. That evening they made a plan. The wagon was too large to raise whole. Even if they could rig the lines, the frame would not survive the lift.

There was no way to know the true condition of the wood, and dropping it into the bottom could shatter whatever remained. So they would open the wagon underwater. They would inventory what was inside. They would bring the contents up in canvas bags.

That was the engineer’s plan. Trench did not like it. He said so plainly. He wanted to leave the wagon in place, document its existence, and move on with the survey without disturbing it.

Orin Gable, twenty-six years old and a college man, said that was not science. And Aldus Trench, fifty-one years old, who had pulled three dead men out of holes in the ground, said science was not what worried him. The argument was settled by the chief engineer back at the main camp, a man whose name need not be recorded, who sided with Gable. So at three o’clock that afternoon, Ezra Halver went back down.

This time he carried a heavy iron pry bar. He walked to the wagon. The wagon was where he had left it. The lock was still bright.

He set the bar against the hasp, put his weight on it, and after a moment the hasp came off the wagon door with a soft sound he felt more than heard. He opened the door. He had expected to find bones when he went down. He found no bones.

The inside of the wagon was perfectly dry. He would repeat that, because the engineers at the time did not believe him, and the man who wrote the final report tried to find a way to change its meaning. The interior of the wagon, six meters down, was perfectly dry. Not damp, not slightly wet.

Dry. When Halver reached his hand inside, the canvas of his glove went from waterlogged to dry along the line of the opening, as if he had passed through a window between two different rooms. His lantern showed what was inside. A small folding table.

A single chair. A chest. A writing desk with an inkwell, a quill pen, and a sheet of paper laid under the pen with a single word written on it. Halver bent to read the word.

It was his name. Ezra. Nothing else. Written in the slow, careful hand of a man who had been a scrivener.

He stayed still for a long time. Then he reached in very slowly and picked up the chest from the floor of the wagon. It was small, the size of a solid chest a traveling clerk would carry. He turned it over.

There was a brass plate on the lid, engraved. It read: “For Mr. Halver, whose curiosity will bring him to this door in the year 1923. ”

He pulled the line four times.

He brought the chest up with him to the boat, the sun on his face and the trees on the bank moving as trees move. Halver sat on the deck for a long time with the chest between his knees, and did not open it. Aldus Trench did not press him. Mercer Doyle, who had not gone down, looked from the chest to Halver’s face and back.

Orin Gable was writing, writing very fast. At last Halver said, “I want everyone who isn’t necessary off this boat. ” Trench said, “All right. ” The young engineer was sent to shore.

Mercer Doyle was sent to shore. The boatman was sent to shore. Aldus Trench stayed. Halver opened the chest.

Inside was a single book. Bound in dark leather, the size of a country store ledger, no title on the cover. When Halver picked it up, the leather was warm, as the lock had been warm. He opened it.

The hand on the first page was the same hand that had written his name on the desk inside the wagon. Slow, careful, a scrivener’s cuffs. The first entry was dated April 4, 1879. It read: “This book begun by Saul Avery, scrivener in the service of Mr.

Phineas Quayle. Its contents are not to be shown to any living man. If it is found after our crossing, inform the finder that what is recorded here was recorded faithfully, and that I am sorry. ” The second entry was dated April 5.

In plain language it described a small fire at a hardware store in a town fifty miles east. The store was owned by a man named Orville. It burned at dawn. Three barrels of nails were saved.

A horse died in the alley behind it. Halver had no way of knowing whether this was true. The third entry, April 6, described the drowning death of a nineteen-year-old boy named Castle Moon in the south fork of the Cumberland. The boy had been in a canoe.

He had not been wearing his boots. The fourth entry, April 7, described a conversation between two women in a hat shop in Knoxville, about a hat ordered and not paid for. The entry said one of the women would die of consumption before the end of the year. Halver turned the pages slowly.

The book was full of entries like these. Hundreds of them. Each dated. Each specific.

Each catastrophic. Small fires. Small deaths. Small rooms filling with dates.

The pages ran on. He turned past April 1879. He turned past the date of the storm, past June 22, the day the wagon went into the water. The pages did not stop.

July 1879, August, the whole year, the next year, the year after that. He turned pages by the handful. 1885, 1890, the turn of the century, 1910, 1915. The year of his own birth passed under his thumb.

He stopped turning. He laid the book on the deck very carefully and stood. He took two steps to the rail of the boat and leaned over and was sick into the water. Aldus Trench did not move beside him.

After a moment Halver wiped his mouth and came back. He sat. He picked up the book again. He turned to the newest pages, the pages of the current month, September 1923.

He read aloud. “September 21. Mr. Halver arrived at the camp on the shelf above the hollow.

He stood at the edge of the rock and felt the urge to lean. He has felt this before, at the docks in Florida in 1904. He did not lean then. He will not lean now.

” Trench, who knew nothing of any of this, looked at Halver. Halver was very pale. He kept reading. “September 22.

The storm arrived at eight o’clock and three minutes. Visit of Mr. Lemuel Boyt, who told the story he has told before. Mr.

Boyt is sixty-six years old today. He will be sixty-seven on the eleventh of November. He will not see sixty-eight. ”

Trench took the book out of Halver’s hands.

He turned the pages himself. He read in silence for a long time. He reached the entry for that day. September 23: “Second descent of Mr.

Halver; opening of the door; ascent of the book; loud reading in the boat of the entry of September 21; loud reading of the entry of September 22; recovery of the book by Mr. Aldus Trench, who lost two fingers of his left hand, and who at this moment is considering whether to close the book, weight it, and return it to the pool. ” Aldus Trench closed the book. He held it in his lap.

“How does it know? ” Halver said. “It doesn’t matter how it knows,” Trench said. He turned his head and looked at the water.

“What matters is what it says next. ” He opened the book again. He read the next entry. It was dated September 24.

That was tomorrow. The entry was short. He did not read it aloud at first. He read it to himself, and his face did not change, but his shoulders settled a little, the way a man’s shoulders settle when he hears news he expected.

Halver waited. After a moment Trench said, “The book says that tonight I will return this book to the pool, weighted with a chain and a stone, and that I will tell none of the engineers what I have done. ” “And will you? ” Halver said.

Trench thought about it. He thought about it for a long time, the trees on the far bank moving and the boat rocking gently. At last he said, “Somewhere in that camp a man is going to call for coffee. I don’t know.

But the book says I will, and the book has been right about everything else. ” The two of them sat there with the book between them. After a moment Halver said, “Read me the rest. ” “There isn’t much comfort in it,” Trench said.

He turned the pages. Past September. Past the end of 1923. Past 1924, 1925, 1926.

The pages began to thin. After 1926 there were only a few pages a year. After 1930, one or two pages. After 1940, nothing.

The book ended. There were many blank pages left. But the writing stopped. It stopped at a single line, written in that same slow, careful hand, on a page dated June 14, 1940.

The line read: “On this day, Mr. Halver, aged fifty-five, sits in an inn in Mobile, Alabama, in a chair facing the harbor, and does not rise again. ”

Halver read it twice. Then he read it a third time.

He closed the book. He did not speak for a long time. Aldus Trench did not speak either. The sun was dropping behind the ridges.

The water in the deep part of the pool went from dark brown to black, and it was impossible to tell from the surface that anything at all was down there. That night, in the largest tent, the four men of the camp sat around the table again, and Aldus Trench did what the book said. He told the engineers the wagon was empty. He told them the chest, when opened, contained only two stained account ledgers from a small dry-goods firm in Tennessee that mattered to no one.

He said the dive had been a waste of an afternoon. Orin Gable, who had seen Halver’s face when the chest came out of the water, did not look at him while he said it. Gable wrote down what he was told. He did not write down what he had seen.

That was the only act of cowardice Orin Gable ever committed in his life, and he carried it with him to his death, which the book predicted in 1962 in a quiet hospital in Lexington, and which came to pass. Late that night, after the camp had gone to sleep, Aldus Trench walked down to the edge of the pool with the book, a canvas sack, and a long chain coiled over his shoulder. He wrapped the chain around the sack three times, tied a stone to it, and threw it into the deep part of the pool where the water went from brown to black. The sack went under without a sound.

Ezra Halver watched him do it. He had followed Trench from the camp unasked. He stood on the bank in his shirtsleeves, the autumn night cold on his arms, and watched the surface of the water close over the sack and go still. Trench turned and saw him.

He did not look surprised. “The book said you’d be here,” he said. “I know,” Halver said. They walked back to the camp together.

They did not speak again that night. In the morning the survey resumed. Halver made two more dives that week. Each time he went to a different part of the pool, and each time he reported logs, old wire, the rotted base of a fence post.

He did not go back to the wagon. The engineers were told the wagon was empty and best left alone. On the last day of work, Mercer Doyle, who had never gone down into the pool, who had spent most of the week pumping air for other men, asked Halver a question. He asked it quietly.

They were standing by the wagon road, waiting for the wagon that would carry them out of the hollow. “What was really in that chest? ” Halver looked at him for a long time. Then he said, “A book.

” “A book about what? ” “Everything. ” Doyle waited. “It had my name in it,” Halver said.

“It had the date I would find it. It had the date Aldus Trench would throw it in the water. It had every small thing that had happened to me for thirty-eight years, and every small thing that would happen to me for the next seventeen. ” “Then what?

” Doyle said. “Then it stopped,” Halver said. The wagon came around the bend. They climbed into the back.

They did not speak of the book for the rest of their lives, though they exchanged letters twice a year until Mercer Doyle’s death in 1936, when he fell into a coal mine outside Beckley, on a date that was not, as far as Halver knew, recorded in any book. Ezra Halver left the diving trade in 1929. He went to Mobile, Alabama, where his relatives lived. He bought a small inn on a quiet street near the harbor.

He ran the inn for eleven years. He never went near the water. He never wrote, as far as the woman who later swept his rooms knew, a single letter or kept a diary. He kept one thing only.

A small slip of paper, kept in a desk drawer, with a single date written in his own hand: June 14, 1940. The woman who swept the rooms, whose name was Letitia Raff, found the paper after he was gone and gave it to the police, who did not know what to make of it. On the morning of June 14, 1940, Ezra Halver woke early, put on a clean shirt, and came downstairs to the front sitting room of his inn. He placed a chair facing the window that overlooked the harbor.

He sat down, folded his hands, and did not get up again. The coroner wrote the cause of death as heart failure, and there is no reason to doubt his diagnosis. But Letitia Raff, who had seen him alive an hour before, said this: the window had been shut all morning, and the air in the sitting room was perfectly still. But when she entered, she noticed a faint smell coming from the chair where he had been sitting.

It was not the sea, though they were near the harbor. It was not the smell of a sickroom. It was, she said, the smell of an inkwell left open for a very long time. I don’t know what happened in the sitting room that morning.

I don’t know whether the book stopped because Halver’s life stopped, or whether his life stopped because the book stopped. I have thought about both for a long time. What I do know is this. Black River Hollow Dam was never built.

The mill downstream changed hands twice and closed for good in 1931. The Commission was dissolved. The shelf above the ford went back to brush. The road was abandoned.

The pool is still there. Still twenty feet at the bottom. The bottom, as far as anyone knows, is still polished stone. And the sack Aldus Trench threw into the dark water that September night in 1923 is still, as far as anyone knows, down there with its chain and its stone and its book.

Aldus Trench lived to be eighty-three. He died in a veterans’ home in Frankfort in 1955. He never spoke of the dive again. Did the book tell him not to?

No. But on the day he died, the nurse who attended him in his last hour said he kept asking for paper. She gave him a sheet. He wrote a single line, in a hand that was no longer steady: “Tell the one who comes after to leave it.

” Then he put down the pen and closed his eyes. And that was the end of it. Nobody ever knew who the next one was supposed to be. In the summer of 1971, a young man from the University of Tennessee came with a small boat and a wetsuit, and a curiosity of the kind the old people in those hills had learned to be wary of.

He wanted to dive the hollow. His name doesn’t matter. He never published anything. The people in the county who remembered him remembered only that he was tall and thin, with a long jaw, a face that appears often in those mountains and means nothing.

He was in the water half a day. He went down once, then came back up. He sat in the bottom of his little boat for a long time. The man who rented him the boat watched from the bank.

He said afterward that the young man’s face looked like the face of someone who had just received news he had half expected. The young man rowed in, returned the boat, thanked the man, and left the county. A week later, at a small post office in Knoxville, the man who rented the boat received a package. Inside was a book bound in dark leather, the size of a country store ledger, with no title on the cover.

There was a short note with it. It said: “Burn this. Do not open it. I am sorry.

” The man who rented the boat was not curious, or at least not curious enough. He took the book out behind his house, set it on a flat rock, poured kerosene over it, and burned it to ash. He said the smoke smelled like ink. He said the ashes, when he checked, stayed warm for a long time after the fire went out.

He said that for the rest of his life, he would sometimes wake in the dark with the feeling that someone was sitting at the foot of his bed writing something. But he never opened the book. And as far as I know, the next page is still blank.