The Last Tally

The summer before he turned thirty, Marcus had a job that required him to count the dead. He was a forensic inventory clerk for a county that had just inherited a defunct funeral home’s records after a bankruptcy dispute. The building itself was a squat, bricked mausoleum of a place, tucked behind a strip mall that smelled of stale fryer oil and wet asphalt. Marcus’s task was to digitize decades of paper ledgers, cross-referencing names, dates, and cause-of-death codes into a state database. It was tedious, macabre work, but he was good with numbers, and the overtime was decent. He worked alone in a windowless office in the basement, the only light a flickering fluorescent tube that cast a sickly pallor over everything.

One night, after a long shift, his girlfriend, Dana, and his best friend, Paul, showed up with a six-pack and a battered cardboard box. Paul had found the box in a thrift store, and inside was a wooden planchette and a board with letters and numbers, the paint worn but still legible. ‘We can’t leave you down here with all these dead folks without a little entertainment,’ Paul said, grinning. Dana was skeptical but game, and Marcus, exhausted, just wanted to sleep. He had a cot in the corner for nights when the work piled up. ‘You guys mess around if you want,’ he said, lying down. ‘I’m done for today.’

They didn’t need him. They set up the board on a folding table and began to move the planchette with their fingertips. Marcus heard their laughter, then their hushed whispers, then a silence that made the hair on his arms stand up. He drifted off to the sound of their fingers sliding across cardboard.

When he woke, the room was dark, the fluorescent light had died. Dana and Paul were gone. The board was still on the table, but the planchette was missing. On the floor, near the cot, was a single sheet of paper, typed with an old typewriter font. It was a list of names, dates, and causes of death, but these were all from the ledger he hadn’t finished yet. At the bottom, in red ink, was a tally mark: ‘///.’ Marcus shook it off, assuming Paul had printed a joke from the office computer.

He didn’t sleep well after that. The next morning, he tried to call Dana, but her phone went straight to voicemail. Paul’s did too. When he got to work, the basement office was freezing, even though it was July. The list was still there, but now the tally mark had an extra slash: ‘////.’ Marcus laughed nervously and shoved it into a drawer.

His supervisor called him that afternoon, asking if he’d noticed anything strange in the records. The database had flagged a discrepancy: every record Marcus had entered that morning had a cause of death code that didn’t exist, a series of numbers that translated to a date in the future. Marcus opened the drawer, but the list was gone. He searched the office, under the table, in the trash. Nothing. But on his computer screen, an email from an unknown sender appeared, with a subject line: ‘You missed one.’

The email contained a single line: ‘Check ledger 17, page 402.’ Marcus knew ledger 17 was the one he’d been avoiding because it was water-damaged and barely legible. He pulled it from the shelf, and as he carefully turned the pages, the paper felt coarser than it should, almost like skin. On page 402, the entries stopped mid-sentence, and in the margin, someone had written in red ink: ‘Don’t let them finish the tally.’

Marcus tried to leave, but the door to the office wouldn’t open. He pushed, he pulled, he twisted the knob, but it was as if the door was sealed. Outside, he could hear Paul’s voice, but muffled, as if from a great distance, shouting, ‘Marcus! Don’t count them!’ Then Dana’s, but her voice was layered with a deeper growl underneath, saying, ‘You were supposed to sleep.’

A sledgehammer of panic hit him. He turned to the stacks of ledgers, and now every single one was open to a random page, each page covered in tally marks, hundreds of little slashes, all in red ink. And as he watched, the slashes began to move, slowly inching across the pages like ants, forming patterns. They spelled out his name, then his birth date, then his social security number, then a final tally mark, drawn with a flourish: ‘/////.’

The fluorescent light flickered back on, and the room was pristine. Ledgers shut, desk clean, door open. Marcus stumbled out into the hallway, and there he found Paul and Dana, sitting on the floor, pale and shivering. They said they’d been trying to wake him for an hour, but he wouldn’t respond, and then they’d seen something—a shadow that crawled along the ceiling—and they’d fled, but they couldn’t leave the building. They’d been walking in circles in the storage area, hearing the sound of a pencil scratching on paper.

Marcus never told them about the tally. He quit his job the next day. But that night, and every night since, when he closes his eyes, he sees the ledger pages, and he hears a voice, counted and measured, whispering, ‘Twelve more, and the tally is complete. Twelve more names.’ He doesn’t know what it means, but he knows this: every time someone dies in that county, another mark appears on the inside of his eyelids, whether he wants to see it or not. And he’s afraid to count. Because he’s already seen his own name at the top of the list.