The thread appeared one morning in a place no one remembered. It rose from a seam in the exposed rock at the summit of a mountain, silver and about as thick as a person's arm. The first survey team felt a faint vibration when they touched it. Their instruments could not establish its temperature.
They tried to cut it with diamond blades. When those failed, they brought in a laser, which left no mark either. Attempts to alter its molecular structure were no more successful. They marked the thread just above the rock. By the next morning, the mark was several meters higher. They measured it again over the following days. It kept rising at the same rate, though the part emerging from the rock looked unchanged.
People went up the mountain to watch the instruments. After a while, they stopped making the trip.
Then a girl tied a red ribbon around the thread. The following morning, it was several meters above the place where she'd tied it. Someone fastened a letter below the ribbon, and soon visitors were bringing things of their own. Photographs appeared among the handkerchiefs. People pressed coins into the knots before letting go.
Some had come to remember someone they'd lost. There were also names for children not yet born. No one knew where the offerings went as they rose, but people kept coming.
The trouble began with the measurements. One team reported that the thread had not moved. Another, working from the same instruments, recorded that it had already disappeared. Both teams checked their results, and neither would withdraw its report.
During another survey, workers discovered that the base continued below the rock. The ground beside it gave way easily, opening into a chamber with a spiral staircase at its center.
The girl who had tied the first ribbon came back while they were working. A rope had been strung across the path. She stood behind it and looked up the thread, but her ribbon had risen beyond where she could see.
On the first descent, a researcher counted the steps aloud. At the landing he stopped and looked back. The rest of the team had gone on ahead, though he'd heard their footsteps beside him. They waited for him, but farther down the same thing happened again.
One man came back holding a photograph of his mother. At the entrance he asked a colleague who she was, then refused to believe the answer. Another researcher tried to say his child's name. He could remember the child's face, but his mouth would not form the word. In the reports they filed afterward, the years some of them had spent at university were missing.
At the bottom of the staircase was a pool of water. Its surface did not move. People who looked into it returned without saying what they had seen. Back above ground, they discovered that parts of their lives had gone missing. A road they had taken home for years might no longer be familiar. Someone could remember being in love but not the other person's name.
The offerings continued to rise.
A man who had tied a letter to the thread returned home and greeted his neighbor. She had lived across from him for years, but now she asked who he was. He waited for her to laugh. She went inside.
A woman opened her family album and found that someone who had offered a handkerchief at the summit had vanished from the photographs. In a town where people had left coins at the summit, clerks opened the cabinets that should have held several years of financial records. The folders were missing.
The investigators tried to compare what had happened. By the time they collected the accounts, some of the people who had made them had forgotten doing so. Names in earlier notes led nowhere. At their meetings, no one could agree on what they were supposed to discuss.
The girl who had tied the first ribbon returned to the mountain with an old photograph of her mother. She stopped a man on the path and showed it to him.
"Do you know her?"
He studied the picture before handing it back.
"No. Sorry."
She asked other visitors. No one recognized the woman.
At the summit, she tied another red ribbon around the thread, fastening it the way she had before. She waited beside it, then went down the staircase beneath the mountain.
It was longer than she'd expected from the reports. As she descended, she repeated her own name. She could remember its sound while she was saying it, but each time she stopped, she had to begin again. Before she reached the bottom, she could no longer say it.
The pool was where the surveyors had described it. In the water she saw her mother smiling, with a younger girl beside her. The girl's face was unfamiliar. When she looked away, she thought it might have been her own.
By the time she reached the summit, she had forgotten her name. She was holding the photograph, though she could not remember what she had once called the woman in it.
Someone near the path was tying another wish to the thread. A woman waiting her turn held a family photograph. She turned it over and looked at the back, then turned it over again.