The Thirteenth Tale

And then she emerged.

"Do you know why my books are so successful?"

"For a great many reasons, I believe."

"Possibly. Largely it is because they have a begi

She sighed and fidgeted with her hands. "I am going to answer your question. I am going to tell you something about myself, which happened before I became a writer and changed my name, and it is something for which there exists a public record. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. But I did not expect to find myself telling it to you so soon. I shall have to break one of my rules to do it. I shall have to tell you the end of my story before I tell you the begi

"The end of your story? How can that be, if it happened before you started writing? "

"Quite simply because my story-my own personal story-ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished."

I waited, and she drew in her breath like a chess player who finds his key piece cornered.

"I would sooner not tell you. But I have promised, haven't I? The rule of three. It's unavoidable. The wizard might beg the boy not to make a third wish, because he knows it will end in disaster, but the boy will make a third wish and the wizard is bound to grant it because it is in the rules of the story. You asked me to tell you the truth about three things, and I must, because of the rule of three. But let me first ask you something in return."

"What?"

"After this, no more jumping about in the story. From tomorrow, I will tell you my story, begi

Did she have the right to place conditions on our deal, having already accepted it? Not really. Still, I nodded.

"I agree."

She could not quite look at me as she spoke.

"IlivedatAngelfield."

Her voice trembled over the place name, and she scratched nervously at her palm in an unconscious gesture.

"I was sixteen."

Her voice grew stilted; fluency deserted her.

"There was a fire."

The words were expelled from her throat hard and dry, like stones.

"I lost everything."

And then, the cry breaking from her lips before she could stop it, "Oh, Emmeline!"

There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a person's mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name, either one's own or someone else's, is to invite jeopardy. This, it seemed, was such a name.

Miss Winter pressed her lips together, too late. A tremor ran through the muscles under the skin.

Now I knew I was tied to the story. I had stumbled upon the heart of the tale that I had been commissioned to tell. It was love. And loss. For what else could the sorrow of that exclamation be but bereavement? In a flash I saw beyond the mask of white makeup and the exotic draperies. For a few seconds it seemed to me that I could see right into Miss Winter's heart, right into her thoughts. I recognized the very essence of her-how could I fail to, for was it not the essence of me?

We were both lone twins. With this realization, the leash of the story tightened around my wrists, and my excitement was suddenly cut through with fear.

"Where can I find a public record of this fire?" I asked, trying not to let my perturbed feelings show in my voice.

"The local newspaper. The Banbury Herald."

I nodded, made a note in my pad and flipped the cover closed.

"Although," she added, "there is a record of a different kind that I can show you now."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Come nearer."

I rose from my chair and took a step, halving the distance between us.

Slowly she raised her right arm, and held out to me a closed fist that seemed three-quarters precious stones in their clawlike settings. In a movement that spoke of great effort, she turned her hand and opened it, as though she had some surprise gift concealed and was about to offer it to me.

But there was no gift. The surprise was the hand itself.

The flesh of her palm was like no flesh I had seen before. Its whitened ridges and purple furrows bore no relation to the pink mound at the base of my fingers, the pale valley of my palm. Melted by fire, her flesh had cooled into an entirely unrecognizable landscape, like a scene left permanently altered by the passage of a flow of lava. Her fingers did not lie open but were drawn into a claw by the shrunken tightness of the scar tissue. In the heart of her palm, scar within a scar, burn inside burn, was a grotesque mark. It was set very deep in her clutch, so deep that with a sudden nausea I wondered what had happened to the bone that should be there. It made sense of the odd set of the hand at the wrist, the way it seemed to weigh upon her arm as though it had no life of its own. The mark was a circle embedded in her palm, and extending from it, in the direction of the thumb, a short line.

Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbed me the way I would be disturbed by the appearance on a page of English of an unfamiliar symbol from a lost and unreadable language.

A sudden vertigo took hold of me and I reached behind me for my chair. "I'm sorry," I heard her say. "One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people." I sat down and gradually the blackness at the edge of my vision receded.

Miss Winter closed her fingers into her damaged palm, swiveled her wrist and drew the jewel-encrusted fist back into her lap. In a protective gesture she curled the fingers of her other hand around it.

"I'm sorry you didn't want to hear my ghost story, Miss Lea."

"I'll hear it another time."

Our interview was over.

On my way back to my quarters I thought of the letter she had sent me. The strained and painstaking hand that I had never seen the like of before. I had put it down to illness. Arthritis perhaps. Now I understood. From the very first book and through her entire career, Miss Winter had written her masterpieces with her left hand.

In my study the velvet curtains were green, and a pale gold watermark satin covered the walls. Despite the woolly hush, I was pleased with the room, for the overall effect was relieved by the broad wooden desk and the plain upright chair that stood under the window. I switched on the desk lamp and laid out the ream of paper I had brought with me, and my twelve pencils. They were brand-new: unsharpened columns of red, just what I like to start a new project with. The last thing I took from my bag was my pencil sharpener. I screwed it like a vise to the edge of the desk and set the paper basket directly underneath.

On impulse I climbed onto the desk and reached behind the elaborate valance to the curtain pole. My fingers groped for the tops of the curtains, and I felt for the hooks and stitches that attached them. It was hardly a job for one person; the curtains were floor length, lined and interlined, and their weight, flung over my shoulder, was crushing. But after a few minutes, first one then the other curtain was folded and in a cupboard. I stood in the center of the floor and surveyed the result of my work.

The window was a large expanse of dark glass, and in the center of it, my ghost, darkly transparent, was staring in at me. Her world was not unlike my own: the pale outline of a desk on the other side of the glass, and farther back a deeply buttoned armchair placed inside the circle of light cast by a standard lamp. But where my chair was red, hers was gray; and where my chair stood on an Indian rug, surrounded by light gold walls, her chair hovered spectrally in an undefined, endless plane of darkness in which vague forms, like waves, seemed to shift and breathe.