The Thirteenth Tale

by Diane Setterfield

Reading can be dangerous.)

making things up, it’s what we do for a living.

What a long time ago that was. Thirty years? Forty? More, perhaps. Time passes more quickly than you think.

There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner.

For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.

There was no thirteenth tale.

There are too many books in the world to read in a single lifetime; you have to draw the line somewhere.

I have always been a reader;

Tragedy alters everything. I was born, and the woman in the wedding photo disappeared.

The writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction.

of course the beginning is never where you think it is.

So used was she to hiding the truth that it had become atrophied in her.

the very twinness of the girls had a spookiness about it.

She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.

“When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.”

Dead in law, but that didn’t necessarily mean dead in person.

Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you?

the prescription. In a vigorous scrawl, he had inked: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. Take ten pages, twice a day, till end of course.

as I write this very sentence, this very word, I am aware of a ghost reader who leans over my shoulder watching my pen,

realized that until I knew what happened on the night of the fire, I knew nothing.

One thinks something is finished, and then suddenly it isn’t, quite.