# The shoebox

[[lore/sisken]] carded for nineteen years. The Index is the most valuable
missing object in the folder — unlike the [[lore/marchford]] ledger, which would
settle one incident, the Index would name people, and per
[[lore/the-unnamed]] the names are the thing the tradition does not have.

Its location rests on one sentence.

## The remark

Ossuary, in a message on [[lore/dead-letter]], in passing, in the course of
answering something else: that he had *the boxes*.

He did not say whose, did not say what was in them, and never mentioned them
again in eleven thousand messages. He produced nothing from them, cited nothing
to them, and did not respond to at least two people who asked directly.

[[lore/lineage]] draws the edge dotted and it is the thinnest solid-looking thing
in the diagram.

## Why it is believed anyway

Three weak reasons that people find persuasive together and should not.

**Sisken did not arrive in 1994 and Ossuary was still active.** Material has to
go somewhere, and Ossuary is the nearest person who kept things.

**The phrase is oddly specific.** *The boxes*, definite article, as though the
referent were obvious. That reads like a man mentioning something he assumes
everyone knows he has.

**Nobody else has ever claimed them.** Thirty years, and no competing claim —
unlike the ledger, which has three.

The third is the strongest and it is an argument from silence about a group
whose defining practice was silence.

## Against

Ossuary published constantly and at length about everything. A man who wrote
daily for fifteen years, who argued for eleven of them about a point of
practice, who would have found the Index directly useful in that argument, and
who never once cited it, probably did not have it.

The counter to the counter is that the Index's cards record sources as an
initial and a year — [[lore/carding]] — and that Ossuary, holding a box of
material naming people who had not consented to be named, might have concluded
that the honest thing was to say nothing and use nothing.

That is entirely in character and completely unfalsifiable, and the folder
should be candid that it is a story constructed to make a silence meaningful.

## What would settle it

Any card, anywhere, with a source initial on it that is not already attested.

None has surfaced. [[lore/the-specimen-card]] is a printed illustration, not a
card from the Index, and the distinction gets blurred constantly in secondary
accounts — the specimen is a page from a newsletter that sixty to a hundred and
ten people received.

Thirty years of not producing a single card is, on any ordinary reading, what it
looks like when the boxes are gone.