Free The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield

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.
     
    Together we began the little ritual of preparing our desks. We
divided a ream of paper into smaller piles and flicked through each one, to let
the air in. One by one we sharpened our pencils, turning the handle and
watching the long shavings curl and dangle their way to the paper bin below.
When the last pencil had been shaved to a fine point, we did not put it down
with the others, but kept hold of it.
     
    ‘There,“ I said to her. ”Ready for work.“
     
    She opened her mouth, seemed to speak to me. I couldn’t hear
what she was saying.
     
    I have no shorthand. During the interview I had simply jotted
down lists of keywords, and my hope was that if I wrote up our interviews
immediately afterward, these words would be enough to jog my memory. And from
that first meeting, it worked well. Glancing at my notebook from time to time,
I filled the center of my sheets of foolscap with Miss Winter’s words,
conjuring her image in my mind, hearing her voice, seeing her mannerisms. Soon
I was hardly aware of my notebook but was taking dictation from the Miss Winter
in my head.
     
    I left wide margins. In the left-hand one I noted any
mannerisms, expressions and gestures that seemed to add something to her
meaning.
     
    The right-hand margin I left blank. Later, rereading, it was here
that I would enter my own thoughts, comments, questions.
     
    I felt as though I had worked for hours. I emerged to make
myself a cup of cocoa, but it was time suspended and did not disturb the flow
of my recreation; I returned to my work and picked up the thread as though
there had been no interruption.
     
    ‘One gets so used to one’s own horrors, one forgets how they
must seem to other people,“ I wrote at last in the middle column, and in the
left I added a note describing the way she closed the fingers of her good hand
over the closed fist of the damaged one.
     
    I drew a double line under the last line of script, and
stretched. In the window the other me stretched as well. She took the pencils
whose points she had worn and sharpened them one by one.
     
    She was mid-yawn when something began to happen to her face.
First it was a sudden blurring in the center of her forehead, like a blister.
Another mark appeared on her cheek, then beneath her eye, on her nose, on her
lips. Each new blemish was accompanied by a dull thud, a percussion that grew
faster and faster. In a few seconds her entire face, it seemed, had decomposed.
     
    But it was not the work of death. It was only rain. The
long-awaited rain.
     
    I opened the window, let my hand be drenched, then wiped the
water over my eyes and face. I shivered. Time for bed.
     
    I left the window ajar so that I could listen to the rain as it
continued to fall with an even, muffled softness. I heard it while I was
undressing, while I was reading and while I slept. It accompanied my dreams
like a poorly tuned radio left on through the night, broadcasting a fuzzy white
noise beneath which were the barely audible whispers of foreign languages and
snatches of unfamiliar tunes.
     
    AND SO WE BEGAN…
     
    At nine o’clock the next morning Miss Winter sent for me and I
went to her in the library.
     
    By daylight the room was quite different. With the shutters
folded back, the full-height windows let the light flood in from the pale sky.
The garden, still wet from the night’s downpour, gleamed in the morning sun.
The exotic plants by the window seats seemed to touch leaf with their hardier,
damper cousins beyond the glass, and the delicate framework that held the panes
in place seemed no more solid than the