Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Vol. 73, No. 3. Whole No. 424, March 1979

That’s not My Name by Barbara Williamson[17]

Barbara Williamson’s first story, “The Thing Waiting Outside,” appeared in the December 1977 issue of EQMM. We called it “a story of dark and terrifying implications.” Her second story offers more darkness and terror, but of an entirely different sort. There is the dream that keeps coming back, and the thing in her hand, and the puzzle that must be solved... a subtly written story, with fine imaginative touches...

Three months before Ruth’s twelfth birthday her father married again.

There was a garden wedding and Ruth wore a yellow dress with long full sleeves and carried a bouquet of late roses.

During the ceremony the bride was fidgety and the groom had trouble with the sun in his eyes, but Ruth stood very still and did not take her eyes from the minister’s face.

Later, when her father’s friends told her how pretty she looked — “Just like a Renoir!” one gushy matron proclaimed — Ruth smiled shyly, but said nothing.

No one was surprised. It was well known among her acquaintances that Ruth was a quiet child who enjoyed playing alone and reading her books behind closed doors.

At the reception she ate a small piece of cake and tasted her first champagne. She didn’t like it very much, but was too polite to say so.

Just before her father and his new wife left, they came to her to say goodbye. Her father kissed her and his wife, a plumpish blonde with stiff sculptured hair, gave her a hug.

“Now you’re my little girl too,” she whispered into Ruth’s ear. And you, Ruth thought, are my very own Wicked Stepmother and I shall hate you as long as I live.

Then she put her lips against the perfumed cheek close to her own.

“How sweet!” everyone said.

While her father and his wife were away on their honeymoon, Ruth stayed at the home of a classmate.

Every third day a postcard came for her. Ocean scenes with golden sands and blue water. Once there was a sunset with a lone palm tree black against the vivid sky.

“That’s pretty,” said the classmate, whose name was Patricia. Ruth thought her stupid, but at least she didn’t giggle like some of the other girls.

“Yes,” Ruth said.

The card was signed “Mother and Daddy,” but the fussy, curly handwriting was not her father’s.

When she was alone, Ruth tore each card into bits and flushed them down the drain.

That night she had the dream.

It was not a new dream. From time to time, as long as she could remember, the same house blossomed in her sleep. A silent place of higgledy-piggledy rooms with many doors and windows. There was bright sun outside and the rooms were filled with the airless, heavy heat of summer.

In the dream she was alone, walking from room to room, but always with the feeling that just beyond a certain wall or just beyond the next door was the person she was looking for. She also knew she must move with stealth so as not to be seen or heard.

Her breath came quickly. Not from fear, but from something close to exultation and a sense of purpose.

And always she held something in her hand.

What it was, she did not know. She could only feel it there, tight in her hand. Something hard and a little heavy. Something vital to her mission.

The dream always ended the same way. She was climbing the stairs, slowly, lightly, with the thing in her hand held close against her side. She climbed and climbed, but never reached the top of the stairs, and the dream dissolved around her in a red, shifting haze.

But the night the postcard came, there was a difference in the dream. Just as she started up the stairs, breathing the hot, sulfurous air, she looked down and understood at last why she could not see the thing she held in her hand. It was hidden in the folds of her long skirt. The kind of skirt that had not been worn for many years. And she knew that she was not a child, but a tall grown woman. She could almost feel the contours of her body and the strange lines of her face.

This time the dream did not fade. She was dragged from it by busy hands and a voice whispering in her ear.

“Wake up, Ruth! Wake up.”

Pushing the hands away with a strength not her own, she said, “That’s not my name.”

She opened her eyes to see Patricia’s impassive moon face close to her own.

It was almost morning. The windows were pale with light and the shadows in the room were turning gray.

“You were talking in your sleep,” Patricia said. “I think you were having a scary dream.”

Ruth didn’t say anything. She felt an urge to reach out and smack that stupid blank face. To keep from doing so she turned over and buried her face in the pillow. She could still feel the house in the dream. It was just out of sight in her mind, hiding from her.

After a minute Patricia padded back to her own bed.

The room grew brighter and colors began to appear. A blue lampshade. Pink ballet prints on the wall.

Ruth turned over. “What did I say?”

Patricia lifted her head. Her short hair frizzed over her ears. “What?”

“What did I say in my sleep?”

“Oh.” Patricia flopped back down and the bed squeaked. “Nothing that made much sense. Something about blood.” Then she yawned and turned over to finish her sleep.

When Ruth’s father and his wife came home they were brown from the sun and both of them laughed a lot. Ruth could see they were happy being married to each other.

The three of them moved into the house that Ruth had shared with her father. It seemed to have grown smaller. Nowhere could Ruth escape the sight or the sounds of her father and his wife. She made excuses to stay in her room or out in the yard under the maple trees. Sometimes she even visited Patricia, playing endless card games, often letting Patricia win just to postpone going back to the house where she lived.

She hated the house now. The warm colors in the rooms, the worn old rugs, were giving way to pale brittle things. Busy flower patterns covered the chairs and hung across the windows. Ruffles appeared — on the curtains and the beds and even on the tablecloths. Fat china animals of all sizes (“my collection” her father’s wife announced with pride) came to sit on the mantels and shelves. Some of them even had painted eyelashes, and Ruth was not safe anywhere from their coy, mocking smiles.

She was glad when the school term began, where for long hours she could hide in her studies, protected by the familiar smells of chalk dust and new books.

The dream came again and again and she began to look forward to it as she would to a puzzle that must be solved.

Sometimes when she woke from it, even in the middle of the night, she would go to the mirror and turn on the light, wondering who she would see. She was disappointed to find her own slender face and straight dark hair there in the glass.

On the first day of November the weather turned suddenly and bitterly cold. Ruth walked home from school slowly, savoring the emptiness of the streets and the wind that smelled of dead leaves and lost summer.

Inside the house she found her father’s wife wrapped in a heavy sweater and complaining of drafty windows. She insisted that Ruth put on more clothes and drink a cup of hot soup. “We’ll catch our death,” she said ominously.

That night Ruth’s father brought in a supply of wood and stacked it against the house near the back door. Ruth watched as he chopped away at the logs with a small hatchet, trimming them to fit the fireplace in the living room. Brown leaves swirled around his ankles and the blade of the hatchet flashed in the light from a single bulb over the back door.

Later, as flames began to flower in the fireplace, he put one arm around his wife and the other around Ruth.

“That should keep my girls warm,” he said and hugged them both.

To Ruth the room was already suffocatingly hot, and in the light from the fire the china animals were laughing at her, their hard mouths melting in glee.

That night she had the dream again.

She glided through the crazy-quilt of rooms, her long skirt brushing the walls and doorways without a whisper of sound. Sun glittered against the windows and the air was furnace-hot, burning in her throat and lungs.

She climbed the stairs and the thing in her hand pressed against her leg with heavy intent.

For the first time she reached the top of the stairs and saw the door she was to enter. It led into a bedroom.

A sound pulled her out of the dream.

She could feel the bed beneath her body, could sense her own room around her, but she did not open her eyes. I must know, she thought. I must know.

Tap-tap on the door.

“Wake up, Ruth, honey, or you’ll be late to school.” Again tap-tap. “Ruth?”

“That’s not my name.”

She whispered the words in someone else’s voice. Then she opened her eyes. She looked down at her hand and flexed her fingers. They were cramped and there were small indented crescents on her palm made by her nails as she gripped the thing in her dream.

The following Saturday was her birthday.

Her father and his wife gave her a red dress. It was an expensive dress, shirred and flounced. There were puff sleeves and small shiny buttons.

Her father had always given her books and games before. She turned to him, but she could not find him behind the smile his new wife had given him.

“Thank you very much,” she said, feeling the dress cold and slick under her hands.

There was a lamb roast for dinner and a large frosted cake, and later they went to the theater to see a magician and a hypnotist.

Ruth wore the red dress and sat next to her father’s wife. She suffered the small soft hands touching her now and then and the little voice whispering, “Isn’t he marvelous?” each time the magician performed a trick.

She chirps, Ruth thought. She chirps like a silly bird.

There was an intermission and Ruth was given ginger ale to drink. She stood quietly in her new red dress, sipping from a paper cup and saying yes, she was having a wonderful time, and yes, the magician was marvelous.

She disliked magicians almost as much as she did clowns. Her father had known that once, but he did not seem to remember. She looked at him, wanting to ask, “Where are you, Daddy?” — but, of course, she did not. She was much too polite.

After the intermission the hypnotist appeared on stage. He did not look the way Ruth thought a hypnotist should look — lean and satanic with sleek hair and perhaps a painted beard. He had almost no hair at all and his body reminded Ruth of a stuffed bear.

He introduced a woman whose name was Christine, but under hypnosis she called herself Zela and spoke of life in an ancient middle-eastern kingdom. The hypnotist explained that this was not unusual. Certain individuals, under hypnosis, or perhaps in sleep, re-lived earlier incarnations.

Christine-Zela left the stage and then the hypnotist called for volunteers from the audience.

One man was told that he was swimming the English Channel and the audience roared at his exaggerated strokes in the air. Another man was told he was George Washington.

“You are now going to chop down the cherry tree,” the hypnotist said. “Here is your hatchet,” and he placed an invisible object in the man’s hand.

The man tightened his fist and began to swing at the air, chopping furiously. The audience laughed, a swell of sound that hurt Ruth’s ears.

The man’s face was getting red and he was breathing hard.

The soft little hand clutched Ruth’s arm. “Isn’t that funny? Isn’t it?”

Ruth watched the man’s arm go up and down, up and down. The laughter grew and the lights were burning Ruth’s eyes. She squinted to see and now something was flashing in the man’s hand. Up and down, up and down.

She began to climb the stairs. The hot light shifted around her. Now she stood in the doorway of the bedroom. Outside, there was sun and bright sky. And in the room a dumpy old woman. No. The light shifted again. It was a man. Not in the bedroom. Somewhere else. She lifted her arm. Again and then again. The red mist fell around her and the room dissolved.

“Ruth,” someone said.

“That’s not my name.”

There was a laugh and she opened her eyes. Her father and his wife were leaning over her, their faces too close. The purple curtains were pulled across the stage and the people were leaving.

Ruth rubbed her eyes. “I must have fallen asleep.”

Her father’s wife chirruped. “Poor baby! We’ve kept her up too late. She doesn’t even know who she is!”

Her father grinned and patted Ruth’s hand. “She used to say that all the time when she was little. We’d say ‘Ruth, do this,’ or ‘Ruth, do that,’ and she’d say, ‘That’s not my name.’ ”

His wife put her little hand against Ruth’s cheek.

“I know who she is. She’s our little girl.”

Ruth, suffocating in the new red dress, shivered under the hand on her flesh.

On the ride home Ruth sat in the back seat. This was her place now, but she did not mind. Being there put her farther away from the chatter of her father’s wife. She was terribly afraid that some day they might ask her to sit between them.

She kept her face turned to the window. Stars glittered icily in the late-night sky and the houses and lawns were dusted with snow.

Once, when the chirping stopped for a moment, Ruth asked her father a question.

“Did I tell you what my name was when I said I wasn’t Ruth?”

“No.” There was a grin in her father’s voice. “I always thought it might be Cleopatra.”

Laughter trilled from his wife’s mouth.

Don’t, Ruth thought. But the sound went on, spiraling deep into her mind, touching forgotten pain.

Before she went to bed, Ruth was given a cup of hot chocolate. She sat in the living room, alone with her father. He poked at the ashes in the fireplace and yawned now and then. His wife had already gone into their bedroom. “To undo my face,” she said. Perhaps even now she was smearing her skin with the gooey pink cream she favored.

“I must have been a funny little thing,” Ruth said to her father.

“Um?” He covered another yawn with his hand.

Ruth sipped from the cup. The chocolate was too sweet. She thought of the soft hands that poured the milk and stirred the sugar and cocoa. She put the cup down, feeling a little sick.

“I said I must have been a funny thing when I was little. Do you remember when I thought I had a sister?”

Her father turned to her and smiled. “I sure do. You toddled around the house calling her.”

“Did she have a name?”

“I don’t think so. You just called for ‘sister’.”

Ruth picked up the cup and held it to her lips, but she didn’t drink. She could taste the name on her tongue. The name of her sister. But even as she searched for it, it drifted away.

She looked up at her father. “Do we look at the pictures now?”

Each year, on her birthday, she and her father looked at the family album and he told her about the woman in the pictures — the slim smiling woman who had been her mother and had died too soon.

Her father’s eyes slid to the doorway and then back to Ruth. “It’s late,” he said. “We’ll do it tomorrow.”

When he kissed her good night, Ruth thought, I’ll hurry to sleep. She could feel the dream just behind her eyes, waiting.

Deep in the night she woke, listening.

Sleet rustled against the windows.

Rain, she thought. We need it. It’s been so hot.

She got out of bed and went to the window. She did not see the frozen darkness. She saw instead a sun-soaked yard. A picket fence. Houses close by.

No. No rain. She sighed and lifted invisible hair from her hot neck.

She straightened her bed and left the room.

The house with its patchwork of rooms was very quiet. Sun pressed against the windows. The air was clotted with heat.

She went into the kitchen, wrinkling her nose at the smell. Mutton broth. How could they, on such a morning?

She went to the back door, holding aside a skirt that did not exist. She opened the door and looked out into the dark. She saw the barn. And the pear tree. The yard washed in sunlight.

The stovewood was stacked close by the steps. The hatchet lay on top of the pile, its blade catching the light. She smiled.

When her hand closed around the wooden handle, she knew at last what the thing in her hand was...

When it was over and all the people came — the police, the doctors, the neighbors — she was the only one who remained calm. But she was very puzzled. They kept putting their horror-struck faces close to hers and calling her “Ruth.”

Why were they doing this? To confuse her, perhaps. To make her confess.

But she gave them no satisfaction. She sat very stiffly in her chair, her hands folded in her lap. She knew how to be careful. Very, very careful.

At last one of the doctors came to her and took her bloodstained hand in his.

“Ruth...”

She turned to him and with her free hand smoothed the wrinkles from her invisible skirt.

“Why do you call me that? Surely you know my name.”

“No.” The doctor’s hand was cold and trembling. “I don’t know your name. Please tell me what it is.”

Poor fool! She straightened and took her hand from his.

“I’m Miss Borden, of course,” she said. “Miss Lizzie Borden.”