The Archive
Where we keep the accounts people gave us, printed the way they gave them.
Ada Merrick spent four years writing other people's sightings into a school exercise book before anybody thought to call it an institute. Everything below is that same work, carried on: a person came in, sat down, and said what had happened to them, and somebody wrote it down.
We publish them whole. The Institute does not tidy a testimony, and it does not remove the parts that do not fit. A witness who contradicts herself in the third paragraph is telling you something, and cutting the contradiction would be throwing away the most useful sentence in the file. Each account carries the investigator's notes underneath, which is where the Institute says what it thinks, and where it says when it does not know.
They are filed by the date of the report rather than the date we put them up here, so the oldest sighting is first. That ordering is the point. Read down the page and you are reading the order things happened in, which is not the order anybody found out about them.
The county wrote its explanation in eleven days. He has been writing his ever since.
The physician who went looking for a diagnosis and found a pattern instead.
Eleven seasons reading the same drainages, and one afternoon that did not fit any of it.
She ran the post office. She dealt in facts. She went the long way home all that winter.
He had handled more octopus than he could count. That is the whole problem with what he measured.