Thirteen Tales

Tell me the truth. The words from the letter were trapped in my head, trapped, it seemed, beneath the sloping ceiling of my attic flat, like a bird that has got in down the chimney. It was natural that the boy's plea should have affected me; I who had never been told the truth, but left to discover it alone and in secret. Tell me the truth. Quite.

But I resolved to put the words and the letter out of my head.

It was nearly time. I moved swiftly. In the bathroom I soaped my face and brushed my teeth. By three minutes to eight I was in my nightdress and slippers, waiting for the kettle to boil. Quickly, quickly. A minute to eight. My hot-water bottle was ready, and I filled a glass with water from the tap. Time was of the essence. For at eight o'clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.

The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bedspread the white pages of my open book, illuminated by a circle of lamplight, were the gateway to another world. But that night the magic failed. The threads of plot that had been left in suspense overnight had somehow gone flaccid during the day, and I found that I could not care about how they would eventually weave together. I made an effort to secure myself to a strand of the plot, but as soon as I had managed it, a voice intervened-Tell me the truth-that unpicked the knot and left it flopping loose again. My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, WutheringHeights, Jane Eyre…

But it was no good. Tell me the truth.…

Reading had never let me down before. It had always been the one sure thing. Turning out the light, I rested my head on the pillow and tried to sleep. Echoes of a voice. Fragments of a story. In the dark I heard them louder. Tell me the truth.…

At two in the morning I got out of bed, pulled on some socks, unlocked the flat door and, wrapped in my dressing gown, crept down the narrow staircase and into the shop.

At the back there is a tiny room, not much bigger than a cupboard, that we use when we need to pack a book for the post. It contains a table and, on a shelf, sheets of brown paper, scissors and a ball of string. As well as these items there is also a plain wooden cabinet that holds a dozen or so books.

The contents of the cabinet rarely change. If you were to look into it today you would see what I saw that night: a book without a cover resting on its side, and next to it an ugly tooled leather volume. A pair of books in Latin standing upright. An old Bible. Three volumes of botany, two of history and a single tatty book of astronomy. A book in Japanese, another in Polish and some poems in Old English. Why do we keep these books apart? Why are they not kept with their natural companions on our neatly labeled shelves? The cabinet is where we keep the esoteric, the valuable, the rare. These volumes are worth as much as the contents of the entire rest of the shop, more even.

The book that I was after-a small hardback, about four inches by six, only fifty or so years old-was out of place next to all these antiquities. It had appeared a couple of months ago, placed there I imagined by Father's inadvertence, and one of these days I meant to ask him about it and shelve it somewhere. But just in case, I put on the white gloves. We keep them in the cabinet to wear when we handle the books because, by a curious paradox, just as the books come to life when we read them, so the oils from our fingertips destroy them as we turn the pages. Anyway, with its paper cover intact and its corners unblunted, the book was in fine condition, one of a popular series produced to quite a high standard by a publishing house that no longer exists. A charming volume, and a first edition, but not the kind of thing that you would expect to find among the Treasures. At jumble sales and village fêtes, other volumes in the series sell for a few pence.

The paper cover was cream and green: a regular motif of shapes like fish scales formed the background, and two rectangles were left plain, one for the line drawing of a mermaid, the other for the title and author's name. Thirteen Tales ofChange and Desperation by Vida Winter.

I locked the cabinet, returned the key and flashlight to their places and climbed the stairs back to bed, book in gloved hand.

I didn't intend to read. Not as such. A few phrases were all I wanted. Something bold enough, strong enough, to still the words from the letter that kept going around in my head. Fight fire with fire, people say. A couple of sentences, a page maybe, and then I would be able to sleep.

I removed the dust jacket and placed it for safety in the special drawer I keep for the purpose. Even with gloves you can't be too careful. Opening the book, I inhaled. The smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

The prologue. Just a few words.

But my eyes, brushing the first line, were snared.

All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.

It was like falling into water. Peasants and princes, bailiffs and bakers' boys, merchants and mermaids, the figures were all immediately familiar. I had read these stories a hundred, a thousand, times before. They were stories everyone knew. But gradually, as I read, their familiarity fell away from them. They became strange. They became new. These characters were not the colored manikins I remembered from my childhood picture books, mechanically acting out the story one more time. They were people. The blood that fell from the princess's finger when she touched the spinning wheel was wet, and it left the tang of metal on her tongue when she licked her finger before falling asleep. When his comatose daughter was brought to him, the king's tears left salt burns on his face. The stories were shot through with an unfamiliar mood. Everyone achieved their heart's desire-the king had his daughter restored to life by a stranger's kiss, the beast was divested of his fur and left naked as a man, the mermaid walked-but only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever After was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

The tales were brutal and sharp and heartbreaking. I loved them.

It was while I was reading "The Mermaid's Tale"-the twelfth tale-that I began to feel stirrings of an anxiety that was unconnected to the story itself. I was distracted: my thumb and right index finger were sending me a message: Not many pages left. The knowledge nagged more insistently until I tilted the book to check. It was true. The thirteenth tale must be a very short one.

I continued my reading, finished tale twelve and turned the page.

Blank.

I flicked back, forward again. Nothing.

There was no thirteenth tale.

There was a sudden rush in my head, I felt the sick dizziness of the deep-sea diver come too fast to the surface.

Aspects of my room came back into view, one by one. My bedspread, the book in my hand, the lamp still shining palely in the daylight that was beginning to creep in through the thin curtains.

It was morning. I had read the night away. There was no thirteenth tale.

In the shop my father was sitting at the desk with his head in his hands.

He heard me come down the stairs and looked up, white-faced. "Whatever is it?" I darted forward. He was too shocked to speak; his hands roused themselves to a mute gesture of desperation before slowly replacing themselves over his horrified eyes. He groaned.