The Date on the Undertaker’s Ledger

I never believed in precognition, not until the night I watched my uncle drown in a puddle of moonlight. That sounds poetic, but it was anything but. It was March, and the thaw had turned the cemetery paths to mud. I was twelve, and my uncle Edwin had been dead for three weeks. In the dream, I stood on the gravel path, and Edwin was face-down in a shallow depression filled with rainwater, his Sunday suit billowing around him like a dark flower. I saw the date on the gravestone – March 14. The numbers burned into my mind, 3-1-4. I woke up with a scream lodged in my throat, and for a week, I couldn’t look at a clock without seeing 3:14.

My mother dismissed it as a nightmare born from grief. My father, a pragmatic engineer, said my brain was just processing the funeral. But I knew better. The dream was a message. A week later, my cousin Lisa – Edwin’s daughter – had a seizure while driving home from a night shift. She crashed into a utility pole at exactly 3:14 PM. She survived, but the doctors discovered an inoperable aneurysm. They gave her three months. I didn’t need a doctor to tell me the date she would go. I felt it in my bones, a cold certainty that settled in my chest like a stone. September 19. The date I saw in a second dream, where I was standing at her bedside, and she looked at me with eyes that were already glassy, and the clock on the wall read 7:07.

Lisa died on September 19, at 7:07 in the evening. I watched the minutes tick by from the waiting room, and when the nurse came out with that look, I didn’t need her to say a word. The third dream came a year later. I was in a place I didn’t recognize – a dusty archive, rows of metal shelving filled with boxes, and a single fluorescent light flickering overhead. There was a man there, tall, with a gaunt face and hollow eyes. He wore a black suit that seemed to absorb light. He was holding a thick ledger, and he was writing in it with an old-fashioned fountain pen. He didn’t look at me, but I knew he was aware of my presence. He turned the ledger toward me, and on the page was a list of names. I saw my own name, my full name, Jane Elizabeth Holloway. Next to it was a date: October 31. And above that, a column of other dates and names I didn’t recognize. He then pointed at a different part of the page, where a name was half-erased. It was my father’s name, Thomas Andrew Holloway. But the date next to it was wrong – it said November 5, 2010, and my father had died the previous year. The tall man spoke, and his voice was like dry leaves scraping on concrete. ‘Some dates are written in ink, some in pencil. The pencil can be erased, if you know how.’

I woke up drenched in sweat. My father had died of a heart attack, but he had a history of arrhythmia. What if the dream was telling me that his death was not set in stone? That I could prevent it? But my father was already dead. Or was he? I called my mother. She was still living in the old house. I asked her about Dad’s medical records, the exact time of death. She said, ‘He passed at 11:58 PM, on November 5th.’ I felt a cold flush. The date in the dream – November 5 – was the day he had actually died. But in the dream, the date was written in pencil. Was that his original date, or was it a warning? I became obsessed. I dug out his old appointment cards, his prescription bottles, anything with dates. And I found something strange: his last prescription was filled on October 31, at 10:31 AM. Exactly his age, 51, and the date 10/31.

The coincidence was too much. I started having more dreams, not just about death, but about the tall man. In one, I followed him through a door that led to a hospital ward. The walls were lined with glass jars, each containing a small object – a button, a key, a child’s toy. He stopped at a jar with a silver locket. He opened it, and inside was a tiny piece of paper with the name ‘Maggie’ and a date. I didn’t know anyone named Maggie. Then I remembered my grandmother’s name was Margaret, but we called her Maggie. She had passed away when I was ten. The date in the jar was the day she died. I started to understand: the tall man was a collector, gathering the last moments of the dying. And my dreams were his way of showing me the ledger.

The fourth dream was the worst. I was at my own funeral, but I was still alive, sitting in the front row. My mother and sister were there, sobbing. The coffin was closed, and on top of it was a photograph of me. The priest was speaking, but I couldn’t hear him. I looked at the date on the program: October 31, 2012. That was today. I looked at the clock on the wall: 11:59 PM. The tall man appeared behind the coffin. He was cleaning his glasses with a cloth. He looked at me and said, ‘You are not supposed to be here.’ Then he walked toward me, and his face shifted, and it was my father’s face. He said, ‘Jane, you have to choose. You can accept this, or you can erase your name from the ledger. But to erase, you must take a different name.’ I woke up gasping, and I realized that the dream had been so vivid that I could still smell the lilies.

Now I am writing this from a tiny apartment in a city I do not know. I changed my name, legally, to Rebecca Lane. I stopped calling my mother, my sister, anyone. I threw away my phone, my ID, everything that could link me to my old identity. I have been having fewer dreams, but last night, I had one. I was back in the archive. The tall man was there, but he was not alone. There was a second person, a woman in a gray dress, who was also writing in the ledger. She looked up at me and said, ‘We have been expecting you, Jane.’ And I realized, the pencil marks weren’t my father’s date; they were mine all along. The date October 31 might still be written somewhere, waiting for me to fulfill it. The only way out, I think, is to find the archive, to find the ledger, and to erase my name completely. But to do that, I have to die first. I am scared, but I am also curious. What will happen when I wake up from the final dream? Will I still be alive, or will I become one of the collectors? I do not know. But I know I cannot run forever. And every time I close my eyes, I see the date, October 31, glowing in the dark, like a final warning.