THE THIRTEENTH DOMINO
On the afternoon that Horace Bellamy purchased an ivory domino marked only with the number thirteen from a blind peddler on Wabash Avenue, three wholly unrelated events occurred.
A church bell in Duluth rang exactly seventeen times though no one had touched the rope.
A retired lighthouse keeper in Maine opened a dictionary and found a pressed violet between the pages devoted to the letter K.
And a barber in St. Louis discovered a silver button sewn into the lining of a customer’s hat.
None of these facts appeared to possess the slightest connection, yet Horace would later insist that each had conspired against him long before he was born.
The domino carried an odd peculiarity. Every midnight it seemed warmer than the room around it, as though it had been resting in a human hand. Horace, being a collector of curious objects rather than a believer in superstition, placed it beside an antique railway watch that had stopped forever at 3:17.
The next morning the watch was running again, but only backward. When he consulted the neighborhood jeweler, the old man merely asked whether Horace had recently met anyone with a violet in his pocket. The question was absurd enough to be forgotten until a funeral procession passed the shop, and every mourner carried a single violet except one.
Three days later a letter arrived bearing no stamp and no address. Inside was a newspaper clipping dated twenty-two years earlier describing the unexplained disappearance of Professor Erasmus Coyle, whose final lecture had concerned the mathematics of coincidence.
Scribbled beneath the article were eight words: “Find the button before the bell rings seventeen times again.”
Horace laughed until he noticed that one corner of the clipping had been fastened with a silver button identical to the one discovered in St. Louis. At that precise moment, somewhere far away, a church bell began to ring.
His search led not to a cemetery or an abandoned mansion, as sensible mysteries generally do, but to the attic of a defunct umbrella factory whose ledgers had never been destroyed.
There, hidden between invoices for green-handled umbrellas, rested a narrow cedar box. Inside lay the missing dominoes from Horace’s set, except that each bore a different number thirteen written in different handwriting. Folded beneath them was a faded railway ticket issued to Professor Coyle, the blind peddler, the barber, and the lighthouse keeper, all for the same train on the same day, though two of the men had never met and one had supposedly died years before the ticket was printed.
Only then did Horace understand that the mystery had never concerned the domino at all. It concerned the people who happened to touch it. Every owner became a single link in a chain stretching backward through generations, each entrusted with one meaningless object that would become meaningful only when assembled with the others.
The violet, the button, the backward watch, the seventeen bell strokes, and the forgotten railway ticket were not clues to a crime. They were fragments of a message patiently carried by strangers who never knew one another.
When the church bell finally rang its seventeenth stroke that autumn evening, Horace placed the ivory domino into the cedar box and closed the lid. Instantly the backward watch stopped forever at 3:17 once more.
The domino felt cold at last. On the inside of the lid, in ink so faded it could scarcely be seen, was a final sentence written by Professor Coyle decades before: “Nothing in this world is accidental except our belief that accidents exist.”
Horace locked the box away, though he often wondered whether someone, years hence, would discover an ordinary ivory domino marked with the number thirteen and unknowingly begin the entire web anew.
This plot is absurd. But consider the greater absurdity that intelligence, morality, and life itself emerged from purposeless matter. The story is impossible. But so is the notion that a universe filled with information, order, and life assembled itself without an Author.
BDD
