My father folded the ticket over the warning and put himself between Peter and the shed. The postman closed his bag, but did not leave; he stood beneath the dripping hedge, watching the open doorway. A boy came out carrying the lamp, its light trembling across a scarf wound twice around his neck. He was perhaps ten, with my father’s dark hair and the same small notch in one ear, and his shoes left wet prints in the coal dust. My grandmother made a sound I had never heard from her and took a step toward him, but Daniel caught her arm. The boy lifted the lamp higher and looked past us to the lit windows of the house. “You said I could come in when I found her,” he told my grandmother.

Clara went to him before anyone could stop her, holding the smaller ticket so tightly that its corners had cut into her palm. The boy set down the lamp and touched her cheek with the back of his hand, as if testing whether she was warm. “I went back for you,” he said, and she answered that she knew, though he had taken a very long time. My father unfolded the warning again, comparing the boy’s face with the handwriting, while my mother drew Peter close against her skirt. “What did you bring back?” she asked. The boy opened his fist to show a little brass watch hand, blackened at its tip, and the stopped watch in my father’s pocket gave a single hard tick. “It was under the door,” he said. “Something held the other end.”

My grandmother reached into the drawer beneath the bench and brought out the scarf, shaking loose the coal caught in its fringe. “I shut the gate on you,” she said to the boy, “and when you came back, I told myself there had only ever been one of you.” She held out the scarf, but he kept his fist closed, watching the house. The front door had begun to ease inward, though I had seen my mother latch it when we came out; through the widening crack came the slow scrape of the hall clock’s pendulum. Daniel took the watch from my father and held it open beneath the lamp, and Clara laid her ticket across its face. The boy placed the loose hand on the paper, where it turned once toward the house and began to burn through, leaving a fine brown circle. My father snatched up the scarf and wrapped it around the watch, ticket and all, while Daniel ran to push the front door shut.

For a moment the boy pulled against my father’s grip, his face pinched with the effort, and Peter called out for him to let go. Then my father knelt in the wet yard and held him until his fist opened, the little brass hand dropping harmlessly into the mud. The pressure on the door ceased, and Daniel slid the bolt home from outside with a length of wire kept for the gate. The boy leaned against my father’s shoulder, looking smaller now, and Clara tucked the end of the scarf around both their hands. Across the road, the postman opened his bag again and took out a letter addressed to my grandmother. It was thick and unstamped, and when she turned it over, we saw that the flap had been sealed from the inside.

Clara did not take the envelope at once. She touched the stamp with one finger, then looked toward the yard, where the rain had stopped but the gate still shone black between its boards. “It has to be posted,” she said, and Daniel turned the envelope over, finding the familiar brass circle impressed in the flap. The hands now pointed to six and twelve. My mother fetched the photograph from the bench and held it beside the letter, and Clara’s eyes moved from the watch in the older girl’s hands to the clock mark. “She’s holding it stopped,” Clara said. “I remember how cold it was.”

My father asked who had given her the watch, but she only shook her head and went to the hatch, kneeling where Peter had pushed the coal back over the boards. With her bare fingers she cleared a space beside the ring, exposing a narrow groove that none of us had noticed, and Daniel fitted the key into it. The wood sprang up an inch, not at the hatch but along the wall, where a shallow drawer slid from beneath the workbench with a scrape of swollen timber. Inside lay a watch wrapped in a child’s scarf, its glass clouded and its chain caught in the fringe. My grandmother recognised the scarf and took it by one end, smoothing the faded wool across her knee. “I sent it with him,” she said to the neighbour, who had been standing quietly by the door, “when I asked you to take him home.” The woman looked at my father before answering, “He came back without it, and you wouldn’t let me ask where he’d been.”

My father lifted the watch from the scarf, and its hands began to move, dragging through the damp at first and then ticking so loudly that Peter covered his ears. Beneath it was a second ticket, smaller than the first, with Clara’s name on one side and my father’s on the other. Clara reached for it, but the watch gave a sharp click and the hands stopped at twelve; at once the hatch shuddered, scattering coal over Peter’s boots. My father put the ticket in Clara’s hand and closed her fingers around it before my grandmother could speak. “You waited for me,” he said, though he seemed to be asking her, and she nodded without looking up. From under the floor came the sound of a door opening, followed by footsteps on the lower stairs, slow and deliberate.

Daniel carried the envelope to the gate, and we followed him into the cold, leaving the shed lamp burning beside the open drawer. The postman stood across the road with his bag open, although none of us had seen him return; when Clara laid the stamped letter inside, he drew out another and offered it to my father. It was the old ticket, folded into a square and sealed with a smear of blue wax, and on the outside someone had written, “For the boy who came back.” My father broke the seal with his thumbnail, while behind us the footsteps reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Inside the ticket was a single line in his own hand: “Do not let me into the house.”

“Clara,” the voice called again, and the little girl turned toward the hatch. My father stood beside Peter, his mouth shut, yet the voice below was his, even to the roughness left by the coal dust. The woman with the black case moved away from the opening, and my grandmother rose from the bucket with one hand pressed against her side. “I knew a Clara,” she said, looking at the girl, “but she was older than you, and she went away before your father was born.” The girl took the photograph from my mother and held it close to the lamp, studying the older face in the shed doorway. “I waited for him,” she said, and ran her thumb over the watch until the wet paper began to fray.

Daniel tried the key in the latch of the woman’s case, but it would not turn, and she took the case from him before he could force it. She laid it on the bench and opened it with a clasp hidden beneath the handle, revealing a row of small pigeonholes, each lined with faded blue paper. Most were empty; in the last lay a watch chain and a folded ticket, which she gave to my father. His name was written on it, along with the date on the photograph, thirty years before Peter had vanished. “You came to the gate when you were a boy,” my grandmother said, and her fingers closed around the edge of the bench. My father unfolded the ticket again, although there was nothing written on the other side. “You told me I’d dreamed it,” he said, and she looked down at his coal-stained hands.

The voice below called Clara a third time, and the lamp flame pulled so sharply toward the hatch that my mother cupped her hand around the chimney. Clara set the photograph beside the case and held out her palm for the key, but Daniel kept it between his fingers. “What happens to the next keeper?” he asked, and she glanced at Peter before answering that someone had to stay where the letters could be found. The boards under the case began to knock, not in threes now but in a hurried, uneven rhythm, and Peter pressed his mittened hand against my father’s coat. Daniel put the key into Clara’s palm, then caught her wrist when she moved toward the hatch. “You’ve already waited,” he said, taking the case himself, and my mother lifted the lamp while he knelt and turned the key in a small brass lock beneath the iron ring.

The knocking stopped as the hatch opened, and a breath of air rose from the stairs, carrying the smell of rain on warm rails. Daniel placed the case on the top step, where the loose letters stirred in their compartments, and the ticket in my father’s hand slipped free and fluttered down after it. Clara leaned over the opening and called softly that the letters would be delivered, though we could see no one in the dark. Far below, a door shut and the whistle sounded once, receding until the shed was quiet enough for us to hear water dripping from the woman’s shoes. My father drew the hatch closed, and Peter bent to help him slide the coal back over it. When Daniel lifted the case from the step, an envelope lay in the compartment that had held the ticket, addressed in blue to Clara, with a fresh stamp and tomorrow’s date.

Daniel held the warm envelope against his coat while we listened to the knocking: three blows, a pause, then three more, each one lifting a little coal dust from the shed threshold. My father reached for the door, but Peter slipped past him and went into the yard with one mitten on and the other tucked beneath his arm. We followed him through the cold, my mother carrying the lamp and my grandmother keeping so close to the boy that her skirt brushed his coat. The coal had slid away from the hatch in a crescent, exposing the iron ring, which rose and fell with each knock from below. Daniel knelt to lift it, and Peter caught his wrist. “Ask who it is,” he said, and Daniel put his mouth near the crack and did as he was told.

For a while there was only the sound of someone breathing on the stairs, then a woman answered that she had come for her letters. My grandmother sat down heavily on an overturned bucket, and the little girl took the sheet she had set aside from her bag. Daniel opened the hatch, and the woman climbed into the shed, one hand on the ladder and the other holding a narrow black case against her chest; her hair was pinned neatly, though her shoes were wet through. I knew her face from a photograph in my grandmother’s kitchen, where she stood beside a rosebush with a spade in her hand. She looked at my grandmother without smiling, and my grandmother said her name twice before the woman answered. “I kept calling,” she said, and my grandmother pressed her palms together as if she could warm them.

The little girl gave the woman the damp sheet, and when she opened it, several smaller envelopes fell into her lap, their blue addresses running in the lamplight. She examined them carefully, turning each one over, but her fingers stopped at the last, which had been sealed with a circle crossed by two lines. “This one isn’t mine,” she said, and handed it to Daniel, whose own envelope had begun to pulse faintly against his coat. He laid the two side by side on the bench, and the clock hands on their flaps shifted until they pointed toward each other. From below came the train’s whistle, so close that the lamp chimney rattled, and my father pulled Peter back from the open hatch. The woman put her case over the opening, but the boards beneath it bowed upward, forcing her to brace both feet against the floor.

My mother passed Peter to me and took the envelopes from Daniel, slipping a finger beneath the stranger’s flap before he could stop her. Inside was a photograph of our house with the gate unboarded and the shed standing open; in the doorway was the little girl, older than she was now, holding a watch in both hands. Daniel opened his own letter and found a key wrapped in a strip of paper on which the same blue hand had written, “For the next keeper.” The pressure beneath the hatch eased, and the woman lifted her case away, but no one came up the stairs. The little girl reached for the photograph, then drew back when she saw the watch, its face turned toward the camera and its hands pointing to twelve. In the house behind us, the hall clock struck once, and from the bottom of the stairs my father’s voice called the little girl by a name none of us had heard before.

The postman crossed the road without looking at the house, keeping the envelope raised between two fingers as if the rain might reach it even now. The little girl stepped out to meet him, but he passed her and came up the path, his boots leaving dark half-moons on the stones. My father rose when the letter came through the slot, and Peter caught at the blanket, drawing it up under his chin. The envelope was addressed to number thirteen in the same blue hand as the papers from the girl’s bag, though there was no street and no stamp. My mother picked it up carefully and found a brass impression in the flap, a small circle crossed by two lines. When she held it near the lamp, we saw that the lines were the hands of a clock, both pointing straight down.

Inside was a sheet of paper folded around a single coal-black button. My father knew it at once and went to Peter, who held still while he fitted it to the empty place on his coat; the thread was still attached, stiff with soot, and my mother fetched her sewing box from the kitchen. The letter contained only a few words: “Return what was given before the next departure.” Beneath them was a list of names, most of which had been crossed through so heavily that the paper was worn thin, and at the bottom my father’s name remained clear. My grandmother put on her spectacles and brought the page close to the window, tracing one of the crossed-out names without quite touching it. “That was our neighbour,” she said, “the one who kept asking after letters that never came.” Outside, the postman was back at the gate, tapping its boards with the end of a stick.

Daniel went out to speak to him, and we followed as far as the step, where the morning smelled of wet earth and the coal my father had scattered over the hatch. The postman listened with his head bowed, then opened his bag and showed Daniel its empty lining; when he tipped it toward us, a faint whistle came from inside, and the little girl seized the strap before he could close it. My grandmother took the letter from my mother and crossed the pavement, stopping only when the stick began to tap again. “I sent him away once,” she said to Peter, who had come to stand behind her, “and I won’t do it again.” She pushed the letter into the bag, but it slid back out, its edge curling against her wrist, until my father took Peter’s hand and laid the button on top of the paper. The tapping stopped, and for a moment the postman’s face looked less like a stranger’s than a tired man’s, with rain caught in the creases beside his eyes. He drew the string on the bag and handed the button back to my mother, who closed her fingers over it as the letter disappeared.

By the time we returned to the house, the hall clock had reached twelve, though the morning outside had barely brightened. My mother sat Peter on the bench and sewed the button onto his coat, pulling each stitch tight while my father held the cloth smooth beneath her hands. The little girl gathered her damp papers from the bag and counted them twice, then laid one aside for the neighbour my grandmother had named. When Daniel went to fetch his coat, he found an envelope on the mat beneath it, addressed in blue to number thirteen and bearing no stamp. This one was warm, and when he turned it over, the brass impression on the flap showed two hands pointing in different directions. From the shed came the sound of the hatch lifting, followed by a knock against the underside of the floor.