The Thirteenth Tale

FIVE NOTES

A scratchy veil of fatigue irritated my eyes. My mind was paper thin. I had been working all day and half the night, and now I was afraid to go to sleep.

Was my mind playing tricks on me? It seemed that I could hear a tune. Well, hardly a tune. Just five lost notes. I opened the window to be sure. Yes. There was definitely sound coming from the garden.

Words I can understand. Give me a torn or damaged fragment of text and I can divine what must have come before and what must come after. Or if not, I can at least reduce the number of possibilities to the most likely option. But music is not my language. Were these five notes the opening of a lullaby? Or the dying fall of a lament? It was impossible to say. With no beginning and no ending to frame them, no melody to hold them in place, whatever it was that bound them together seemed precariously insecure. Every time the first note struck up its call, there was a moment of anxiety while it waited to find out whether its companion was still there, or had drifted off, lost for good, blown away by the wind. And so with the third and the fourth. And with the fifth, no resolution, only the feeling that sooner or later the fragile bonds that linked this random set of notes would give way as the links with the rest of the tune had given way, and even this last, empty fragment would be gone for good, scattered to the wind like the last leaves from a winter tree.

Stubbornly mute whenever my conscious mind called upon them to perform, the notes came to me out of nowhere when I was not thinking of them. Lost in my work in the evening, I would become aware that they had been repeating themselves in my mind for some time. Or else in bed, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, I would hear them in the distance, singing their indistinct, meaningless song to me.

But now I really heard it. A single note first, its companions drowned in the rain that rapped at the window. It was nothing, I told myself, and prepared to go back to sleep. But then, in a lull in the rainstorm, three notes raised themselves above the water.

The night was very thick. So black was the sky that only the sound of the rain allowed me to picture the garden. That percussion was the rain on the windows. The soft, random squalls were fresh rain on the lawn. The trickling sound was water coming down gutters and into drains. Drip… drip… drip. Water falling from leaves to the ground. Behind all this, beneath it, between it, if I was not mad or dreaming, came the five notes. La la la la la.

I pulled on boots and a coat and went outside into the blackness.

I could not see my hand in front of my face. Nothing to hear but the squelch of my boots on the lawn. And then I caught a trace of it. A harsh, unmusical sound; not an instrument, but an atonal, discordant human voice.

Slowly and with frequent stops I tracked the notes. I went down the long borders and turned into the garden with the pond-at least I think that is where I went. Then I mistook my way, blundered across soft soil where I thought a path should be, and ended up not beside the yew as I expected, but in a patch of knee-high shrubs with thorns that caught at my clothes. From then on I gave up trying to work out where I was, took my bearings from my ears alone, followed the notes like Ariane 's thread through a labyrinth I had ceased to recognize. It sounded at irregular intervals, and each time I would head toward it, until the silence stopped me and I paused, waiting for a new clue. How long did I stumble after it in the dark? Was it a quarter of an hour? Half an hour? All I know is that at the end of that time I found myself back at the very door by which I had left the house. I had come-or been led-full circle.

The silence was very final. The notes had died, and in their place, the rain started again. Instead of going in, I sat on the bench, rested my head on my crossed arms, feeling the rain tap on my back, my neck, my hair.

It began to seem a foolish thing to have gone chasing about the garden after something so insubstantial, and I managed to persuade myself, almost, that I had heard nothing but the creation of my own imagination. Then my thoughts turned in other directions. I wondered when my father would send me advice about searching for Hester. I thought about Angelfield and frowned: What would Aurelius do when the house was demolished? Thinking about Angelfield made me think of the ghost, and that made me think of my own ghost, the photograph I had taken of her, lost in a blur of white. I made a resolution to telephone my mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold you to a decision made in the middle of the night.

And then my spine sent me an alarm.

A presence. Here. Now. At my side.

I jerked up and looked around.

The darkness was total. There was nothing and no one to see. Everything, even the great oak, had been swallowed up in the darkness, and the world had shrunk to the eyes that were watching me and the wild frenzy of my heart.

Not Miss Winter. Not here. Not at this time of night.

Then who?

I felt it before I felt it. The touch against my side-the here and gone again- It was the cat, Shadow. Again he nudged me, another cheek rub against my ribs, and a meow, rather tardily, to announce himself. I reached out my hand and stroked him, while my heart attempted to find a rhythm. The cat purred. "You're all wet," I told him. "Come on, silly. It's no night to be out."

He followed me to my room, licked himself dry while I wrapped my hair in a towel, and we fell asleep together on the bed. For once-perhaps it was the cat's protection-my dreams kept well away.

The next day was dull and gray. After my regular interview, I took myself for a walk in the garden. I tried in the dismal light of early afternoon to retrace the path I had taken by dead of night. The beginning was easy enough: down the long borders and into the garden with the pond. But after that I lost my track. My memory of stepping across the soft wet soil of a flower bed had me stumped, for every bed and border was pristinely raked and in order. Still, I made a few haphazard guesses, one or two random decisions, and took myself on a roughly circular route that might or might not have mirrored, in part at least, my nighttime stroll.

I saw nothing out of the ordinary. Unless you count the fact that I came across Maurice, and for once he spoke to me. He was kneeling over a section of churned-up soil, straightening and smoothing and putting right. He felt me come onto the lawn behind him and looked up. "Damn foxes," he growled. And turned back to his work.

I returned to the house and began transcribing the morning's interview.