The Thirteenth Tale

FIND HER.

Was it because I had decided to look for Hester that I saw her that night in a dream?

A plain figure in a neatly belted dressing gown, on the galleried landing, shaking her head and pursing her lips at the fire-stained walls, the jagged, broken floorboards and the ivy winding its way up the stone staircase. In the middle of all this chaos, how lucid everything was close to her. How soothing. I approached, drawn to her like a moth. But when I entered her magic circle, nothing happened. I was still in darkness. Hester's quick eyes darted here and there, taking in everything, and came to rest on a figure standing behind my back. My twin, or so I understood in the dream. But when her eyes passed over me it was without seeing.

I woke, a familiar hot chill in my side, and reexamined the images from my dream to understand the source of my terror. There was nothing frightening in Hester herself. Nothing unnerving in the smooth passage of her eyes over and through my face. It was not what I saw in the dream but what I was that had me trembling in my bed. If Hester did not see me, then it must be because I was a ghost. And if I was a ghost, then I was dead. How could it be otherwise?

I rose and went into the bathroom to rinse my fear away. Avoiding the mirror, I looked instead at my hands in the water, but the sight filled me with horror. At the same time as they existed here, I knew they existed on the other side, too, where they were dead. And the eyes that saw them, my eyes, were dead in that other place, too. And my mind, which was thinking these thoughts… was it not also dead? A profound horror took hold of me. What kind of an unnatural creature was I? What abomination of nature is it that divides a person between two bodies before birth, and then kills one of them? And what am I that is left? Half-dead, exiled in the world of the living by day, while at night, my soul cleaves to its twin in a shadowy limbo.

I lit an early fire, made cocoa, then wrapped myself in dressing gown and blankets to write a letter to my father. How was the shop, and how was Mother, and how was he, and how, I wondered, would one go about finding someone? Did private detectives exist in reality or only in books? I told him what little I knew about Hester. Could a search be set in motion with so little information to go on? Would a private detective take on a job like the one I had in mind? If not, who might?

I reread the letter. Brisk and sensible, it betrayed nothing of my fear. Dawn was breaking. The trembling had stopped. Soon Judith would be here with breakfast.