The water bed leaked again.

Arthur Wentworth woke to the sound of it—drip, drip, drip—like the slow ticking of a clock that had long since stopped keeping time. The羽绒 bed, heavy with the damp weight of a London November, pressed against his sides like a shroud. He lay still for a moment, listening to the water pool on the floorboards, and then he sat up.

The gas lamps in the street outside cast a sickly yellow glow through the fog-thickened window. Arthur pulled on his dressing gown and went to the sink. In the mirror, his face was the same as it had been yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.

He did not know why this thought did not frighten him.

---

Eleanor Crawford was waiting for him on the corner of Bloomsbury Street. She stood beneath the gas lamp, her black cloak pulled tight against the fog, her face pale as parchment. When she saw him, she did not smile.

"You are here again," she said. Her voice was quiet, almost gentle.

Arthur frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

"You are here again. On Monday." She looked at him with eyes that were older than her twenty-eight years. "Arthur, you have died forty-seven times."

He stared at her. She stared back. Then he turned and walked away, telling himself she was a madwoman, that the fog played tricks on the mind, that there were explanations for everything in this rational age.

But when he reached the British Museum and opened the manuscript he had been restoring—the thirteenth-century text on the nature of time—he found, written in the margin in a hand that could only be his own, the words: Monday. Again. Monday.

---

The bank was on Threadneedle Street. Arthur had never been there before, and yet he knew every step of the way. He knew that the third stair creaked. He knew that the clerk on the ground floor had a scar on his left cheek. He knew that the vault on the second floor contained something he was meant to find.

Eleanor followed him. She always did.

"Arthur, listen to me," she said, grabbing his arm as they crossed the street. "You must not go in there. Not today. Not ever."

"I do not know what you mean," he said, but his voice lacked conviction.

"The man inside—the one in the grey coat. His name is Bernard. He is going to be shot. You are going to try to stop it, and you are going to fail, and you will die trying." She paused. "You have died trying. Forty-seven times."

Arthur pulled his arm free. "This is absurd."

But he did not go into the bank.

---

He stood across the street, hidden in the fog, watching. Bernard—the man in the grey coat—stepped out of the bank at half past ten. A black car pulled up. A man with a scar on his left cheek stepped out. He raised a pistol.

Arthur did not think. He ran.

He reached Bernard just as the pistol fired. The bullet tore through the air like a hornet. Arthur pushed Bernard aside, and the bullet caught him in the shoulder. He fell against the wet cobblestones, gasping.

Bernard stared at him. "Who are you?"

"I—" Arthur tried to speak, but the blood was filling his mouth. He looked up at Eleanor, who stood at the end of the street, watching him with those ancient eyes. She was crying.

"You tried," she whispered. "You always try."

And then the fog swallowed everything.

---

Arthur woke to the sound of dripping water.

The water bed was leaking again. The gas lamps cast their sickly yellow glow through the fog. He sat up, and he knew, with a certainty that was neither rational nor comforting, that he had been here before.

Many times.

He dressed in silence. He walked to Bloomsbury Street. Eleanor was waiting beneath the gas lamp.

"You are here again," she said.

"Yes," Arthur said. "I am."

She looked at him, and for the first time, he saw not madness in her eyes, but something worse: resignation.

"Arthur," she said quietly, "this time, do not go to the bank."

He nodded. He would not go to the bank. This time, he would find another way.

But as he walked away from her, through the fog and the gas lamps and the dripping water of a Monday that would never end, he realized the terrible truth:

He had said the same thing forty-seven times before.

And each time, he had failed.