Thirteen
Thirteen
I just made a cup of tea, just for you and me.
So you may think, at first, that you are reading this. I would not blame you for it. There is paper beneath your eyes, there are words set down in ink, and the mind, being a tidy and cowardly thing, prefers the simplest explanation. A page is read. A voice is imagined. The dead remain dead. That is what I believed also. You may already have glanced towards the window. Most people do.
Yet I have written and rewritten these first lines so often that I no longer know whether my hand moves across the paper, or whether I am only speaking into the dark, trusting that someone—perhaps you—sits close enough to hear me.
Do not move away.
Not yet.
There is time enough for that later.
My name is of no consequence. Once, I think, it was printed on visiting cards and on the title page of a small volume concerning funerary customs in the northern counties. I was not an important man, though I had the vanity of a scholar and mistook accumulation for wisdom. I collected old tales. Not the pretty ones. Not those polished for children, with their clean morals and bright endings. I preferred the damaged things: village warnings, burial rhymes, charms muttered over cradles, sailor’s oaths, harvest taboos, the little remnants of fear that cling to a people long after they have forgotten what frightened them.
You know such things yourself. Do not deny it too quickly.
There are customs in your own life which you obey without believing in them. A hesitation at a threshold. A dislike of some particular room. The private conviction that certain words should not be spoken aloud in certain weather. You may smile at this, but smiling does not make a thing untrue.
For thirty years I gathered such fragments. I listened to shepherds in the Highlands, to fishermen along the Norwegian coast, to old women in Welsh villages where the chapel bell sounded thin in the rain. I sat in rectories, inns, kitchens, libraries, and once, God help me, in a charnel house beneath a ruined church in Moravia, where a priest with yellow fingernails showed me a row of skulls and asked whether I wished to count them.
I said no.
I hope you would have done the same. Most people believe they would.
I remember that clearly.
There are many things I do not remember now, but I remember saying no.
I was reminded of another incident. No... It happened earlier. Or later. Time has become unreliable. It hardly matters. It was in a village somewhere in Northumberland. Or perhaps it was Cumbria. The older I become, the less certain I am that places remain where one leaves them.
It was late afternoon. Rain had softened the lane until every footprint filled slowly with water, and a little girl sat upon the stones outside the church, drawing circles with a piece of white chalk worn almost to her fingertips.
She was singing to herself. Children rarely sing loudly when they believe no one is listening.
“Twelve for sleep.
Twelve for snow.
Never count, the one below.”
She repeated the little rhyme without pause, as though it possessed neither beginning nor end.
I stopped beside her. “Who taught you that?”
She continued drawing. The chalk described twelve neat circles around her boots. When she reached the place where a thirteenth ought to have been, she rubbed the dust away with the heel of her hand. Only then did she look up. She could not have been older than eight. She frowned as though I had asked who had taught her to breathe.
“Everybody knows.”
“Your mother or father?”
A shake of the head.
“The vicar?” I asked
She smiled then. It was not a child’s smile. It was the patient smile of someone humouring an old and rather foolish man.
“No,” she whispered. “The old people.”
“Which old people?”
She looked past me towards the churchyard. I turned instinctively. There was no one there. When I looked back, she was rubbing out the twelfth circle as carefully as she had drawn it.
By the time I reached the inn that evening, I realised something had been troubling me all afternoon. I had heard the rhyme before. Not in that village, nor in England. I cannot remember where. Yet I remember with perfect certainty that whoever first spoke it did not use the word thirteen.
At first the matter of thirteen seemed ordinary enough. Every fool knows the superstition. Thirteen at table. Thirteen steps to the gallows. Thirteen turns of the rope. Thirteen moons in a year when the calendar behaves badly. One meets the number everywhere superstition has been allowed to breed.
That was my first mistake.
I assumed it was a superstition. A superstition is a dead thing. It may twitch when touched. It may embarrass an educated man. But it has no will of its own.
Thirteen was not like that.
I cannot tell you when I first understood this. There was no single revelation, no thunderclap, no pale face at a window. Such things happen in stories, and stories are kinder than life. In life one notices a small wrongness, then another, then another, until the mind, exhausted by refusing them, sits down at last and says: very well.
It began, I suppose, with a story told to me by an old Highland woman named Mrs Macrae. I had gone north in the autumn of 1879 to examine a ruined burial cairn near the coast. The place had little academic value, but local people avoided it, and avoidance has always interested me more than stone.
I intended to describe the photograph. Instead I find myself thinking about the smell of damp wool. Mrs Macrae’s cottage. Curious. I have not thought of that place in years.
Mrs Macrae lived alone in a low cottage that smelt of peat smoke, damp wool and something medicinal. Her hands were bent badly with age. When she spoke, she kept one eye on the hearth, as though expecting the fire to answer before she did. She reminded me of... There was someone. An aunt perhaps? No, my mother. Forgive me. The older I become, the less reliable dead people seem. So I asked her whether the cairn had a name. She said it had thirteen. I thought I had misunderstood.
“Thirteen names?” I asked.
She looked at me then, and I remember the look because it was not fear exactly. It was irritation. As if I had been rude.
“No,” she said. “It has thirteen.”
“Thirteen stones?”
She shook her head.
“Thirteen dead?”
Again she shook her head.
I waited. At last she leaned closer and said, “You must not make a number of it, sir. That is how it gets in.”
I wrote those words down that same evening. ‘You must not make a number of it.’
At the time I found the expression curious, nothing more. Scholars are very good at not being frightened when they should be. We place terror between quotation marks and call it material.
Still, I did not visit the cairn that night.
The next day I went with a local boy as guide. He would not come within sight of the place, and left me at the edge of a sheep path with such visible relief that I almost laughed. The cairn itself stood on a rise above the sea, half sunken in heather. Wind moved constantly over it. There was no inscription. No cross. Only stones, blackened by lichen and weather.
I counted them, of course I did. Twelve large stones formed the outer ring. I remember my disappointment. Twelve is a solemn number, certainly, but not the number I had come to find. I was closing my notebook when I saw the thirteenth. It lay inside the ring, it was small. Almost hidden. Not placed like the others, but crouched among them, if stone can be said to crouch. I do not know why that word came to me then. I have crossed it out in my old notes and written “resting” above it in a neater hand. But the first word was crouched.
I bent to examine it. There was a mark upon its surface, shallow and much worn. Not a rune. Not a Christian symbol. Not anything I recognised. A single vertical line, that was all.
One.
I touched it with my gloved hand, and something in me recoiled. I did not leap back. I did not cry out. I merely withdrew my hand and stood there, foolishly cold in the bright afternoon, with the sea turning white below me and the wind pressing at my coat.
A line in stone, nothing more. Yet I felt then—no, I shall be honest—I felt watched. You have felt it too. That is why you are still reading. You have already supplied your own memory. There is no need for me to describe it. You know the sensation: the prickling at the back of the neck, the childish certainty that if one turns too quickly one will see something withdrawing out of sight. We outgrow many childish things. But we do not outgrow that.
I left before sunset. That night, in Mrs Macrae’s cottage, I asked again what she had meant. She would not answer directly. She sat with her shawl around her shoulders and poked the fire until sparks rose and died in the chimney.
“My mother told me,” she said at last, “and her mother told her. Count twelve if ye must. Leave the next alone.”
“The next?”
“Aye.”
“The thirteenth?”
She flinched “There,” she said. “Ye’ve done it.”
I apologised, though I did not know for what. She would say no more. Yet as I left, she took my sleeve with surprising strength.
“If it follows ye,” she said, “dinnae look for it. That’s what it wants.”
I slept poorly. The following morning I discovered that one page had been torn from my notebook. I had not torn it. At least, I do not remember doing so. The missing page contained my sketch of the stone.
For nearly six months I convinced myself that the missing page had simply been misplaced. You will perhaps think the same. Paper slips from books. Loose sheets disappear beneath desks and inside travelling trunks. I have mislaid spectacles while wearing them and spent an entire afternoon searching for a walking stick already in my hand. The mind is capable of astonishing stupidity when encouraged by routine. So I attributed the loss to carelessness. I even congratulated myself upon so sensible an explanation. It is remarkable how eagerly a frightened man embraces the ordinary.
I returned to London before winter. The city, with its noise and soot and endless traffic, restored something of my confidence. Ancient fears belong more naturally to lonely valleys than crowded streets. A superstition carried into the metropolis seems embarrassed by its own existence.
For several weeks I worked peacefully. I catalogued charms collected in Yorkshire, translated a fragment of a Breton funeral hymn and prepared a lecture concerning burial customs among isolated fishing communities. I met colleagues, dined at my club and complained about the weather with the satisfaction peculiar to Englishmen.
The matter might have ended there. I almost wish it had. One evening, while searching my shelves for a volume on Scandinavian folk rites, I noticed a notebook I did not recognise. It was bound in faded green leather. Entirely ordinary. Yet I could not remember acquiring it. Such a thing should not trouble a collector. Books arrive from estates, auctions, monasteries, private libraries and forgotten attics. Many pass through one’s hands.
Still...
I knew my own shelves. I removed the notebook. There was no title. Inside I found page after page of my own handwriting. Not similar, but mine. The pressure of the pen, the long tail beneath my letter ‘y’, the irritating habit of beginning a sentence before finishing the previous thought. Every fault belonged unmistakably to me.
The first pages contained notes concerning funeral bells in Cornwall. Then came a list of Icelandic customs. After that, something stranger.
One word.
Repeated, again and again. Thirteen times. Sometimes written neatly. Sometimes hastily. Sometimes so heavily that the nib had nearly pierced the paper.
I have often wondered whether obsession moves backwards. Or perhaps, no. That is nonsense, that’s not it. What I mean is simpler. I found proof of my madness before I remember becoming mad.
So, did I?
The final pages contained observations I have no memory of writing. One sentence in particular has remained with me. I have tried to forget it. And I have failed.
“It is pretending to be a number because numbers are harmless.”
Nothing more, no explanation. Nor a signature. Only that. I remember laughing. Not because it was amusing. Because laughter is a refuge when reason finds no purchase. I closed the notebook and locked it in my desk. The following morning it was back upon the shelf. No lock had been forced. No servant had entered my study. Of course you believe I moved it myself. So did I. For three days. On the fourth I realised I had no recollection of touching the thing. Yet there is something I have neglected to mention. The notebook was no longer green. It was black.
A trivial detail, perhaps.
Old leather changes colour, light deceives. Or memory fails. I accepted every explanation in turn. It did not satisfy me. I counted the books again. Three times. Then I laughed aloud because I had become exactly the sort of old fool I once mocked. I wish I could tell you I stopped.
At last that winter I ceased counting things. An absurd precaution, but a comforting one. If a staircase appeared long, I climbed it without numbering the steps. If candles stood upon a table, I observed only their light. If birds gathered upon a wall, I admired their movement and looked away. For almost a month this curious discipline restored my peace.
Then I began noticing other people. Noticing how often they counted. A child touching railings. A station porter stacking luggage. A woman arranging flowers in a church. They would reach twelve. And they begin again. Not one of them appeared aware of doing so.
One afternoon in November. No, it was in October I think. Let me checked my notes, February. Well, I stopped beside a flower seller in Bloomsbury. She was tying white lilies with rough twine.
Without thinking, I asked, “How many?”
She looked down. “Twelve,” she answered immediately.
Yet I could plainly see thirteen. She followed my gaze. Her expression changed. As if we had unexpectedly met in a foreign country after many years apart. Very quietly she untied the bundle. One lily fell onto the pavement.
Only then did she smile. “Twelve,” she repeated.
I walked home by another route. The streets seemed unfamiliar. Several times I experienced the uncomfortable certainty that someone walked just beyond my field of vision. Whenever I turned, I found only ordinary people about their ordinary business. A gentleman reading a newspaper. Two schoolboys chasing each other. A woman carrying coal. Nothing unusual.
But...
Have you ever had the feeling that a room grows silent a fraction before you enter it? As though conversation had ceased just beyond the door? I experienced that sensation continually during the months that followed. Even now I hesitate to describe it. I fear that by naming certain things one grants them permission. Forgive me. I find myself speaking as Mrs Macrae once did. Age has a cruel habit of making us resemble those we once dismissed.
There is another matter. I considered omitting it. Indeed, I crossed these lines out twice. But if I am truly speaking to you—and I am increasingly persuaded that I am—then honesty demands their inclusion. Each night before extinguishing my lamp I developed the peculiar certainty that someone occupied the chair opposite mine.
Not visible, merely expected. As one expects an old friend who has not yet arrived. I found myself leaving a second cup upon the tray. Moving books aside to clear a place. Once, without conscious thought, I wished the unseen guest good evening. When I realised what I had done, I remained standing for some minutes, unable to remember whether I lived alone.
It passed.
At least I believe it passed. There are evenings, even now, when I instinctively glance towards that chair before beginning to write. And on certain nights...
I could swear that whoever sits there already knows what I am going to say before the words reach the page. Perhaps that is why you have continued this far. Perhaps I have never been writing. Perhaps I have only been remembering a conversation that has not yet taken place.
I have delayed writing what follows.
Three evenings I sat before these pages and occupied myself with trivialities. I sharpened pens that required no sharpening. Rearranged books already in order. Folded and unfolded a letter from a man whose name I can no longer recall. Cowardice often disguises itself as diligence. You may discover this for yourself one day. Or perhaps you already know it.
Forgive me.
There are moments when I become convinced that you and I have spoken before. I cannot explain why I should think so. I know nothing of your age, your country or the room in which these words now find you, yet I have the uncomfortable impression that I am remembering you rather than addressing you. Pay no attention to that thought. It has occurred more frequently of late. I have found that ideas, if ignored long enough, begin to resemble memories.
I have often wondered whether memory is contagious. A curious thought, I admit. You have just reread that sentence. There is no harm in doing so. I frequently return to passages that trouble me, hoping they will have changed while I was looking elsewhere.
There is a village on the eastern marshes of Norfolk where the people have an odd habit. When strangers arrive, the inhabitants make no attempt to learn their names.
They wait.
Only after several days do they ask where the traveller has come from, whether he has family, whether he intends to remain. His name is never spoken.
I spent four nights there in the winter of 1888. On the first evening I assumed it to be a matter of rustic manners. On the second I found it amusing. On the third I asked the innkeeper why no one had once addressed me directly.
The old man became strangely quiet. He poured more ale into my cup than I had requested. Then he leaned across the table.
“There are names,” he whispered, “that hear themselves.”
I laughed. Not loudly and not kindly either. It was a sort of laugh scholars reserve for convictions they secretly envy. He did not smile. Instead he asked a question.
“How many stories have ye gathered, sir?”
I answered without thinking. “Twelve.”
He nodded, satisfied.
Only after returning to my room did I remember that there were thirteen notebooks in my travelling case. I lit a candle. Counted my notebooks. Twelve. Relieved, I extinguished the flame. Some instinct—I refuse to call it fear—made me light it again.
There were thirteen. I counted once more. Twelve and again. Thirteen. I should tell you that exhaustion affects the senses. So does poor light. So does expectation. Any physician would say the same. Indeed, I repeated these explanations aloud while standing alone beside the bed. It is astonishing how reassuring one’s own voice may sound.
Until it answers.
I have hesitated over that sentence. You see the mark above it. I nearly struck it through.
There was no answer. Not truly. Only the peculiar certainty that someone had completed the thought before I had spoken it. It is difficult to explain. Have you ever begun reciting a prayer only to discover that your mind is already waiting at the final word?
It was something like that. The sensation lasted only an instant. Long enough for the room to seem occupied. Long enough for me to feel, with complete certainty, that I was not alone. The following morning I left the village before sunrise. I have never returned.
Yet from time to time I dream of the inn. Always the same room. Always the same chair beside the fire. And it was always occupied. I never see the face, only the hands. They rest quietly upon the arms of the chair. Patient hands. Waiting for me to remember something. It was after these dreams began that I noticed another change.
My journals no longer read as I remembered writing them. An entire page written in a style almost, but not entirely, my own. Like hearing one’s voice repeated by a brother born only seconds later. I asked a colleague to examine several entries. He declared them perfectly ordinary.
“Your hand throughout,” he said.
“But look here,” I insisted.
“This paragraph was never written.”
He adjusted his spectacles. “It most certainly was.”
I did not argue.
There is little profit in disputing reality with a man who still inhabits it comfortably. I simply thanked him and walked home. Halfway across Russell Square I stopped. Quite without reason.
People flowed around me like water around a stone. Carriages passed. Children shouted. Somewhere a church bell marked the hour. I became aware that I was counting. Not consciously. My fingers moved against my walking stick.
One...
Two...
Three.
I forced myself to stop. Yet the counting continued. Somewhere behind my thoughts. Steady and patient. As though another mind had taken up the task. I wonder—
No.
I was about to ask whether you have experienced the same thing. But I think that is the wrong question. The correct question is this:
“Did you notice that, since the beginning of my account, I have never once asked you to count anything?”
There is a reason. I am afraid that if I invite you to do so, you may arrive where I did. And if you do... you may begin to suspect what has troubled me for many years. That thirteen is encountered only by those who have already been keeping company with it. If that thought disturbs you, close these pages now. Not because they are dangerous. Because I no longer believe they are a story. I believe they are a memory. The difficulty, dear friend, is that I cannot decide whether it belongs to me...
or to you.
Sometimes I miss her, even though I can no longer remember who she was. But I remember her gloves. Brown leather, always cold. I remember warming them by the fire. Strange. I cannot remember whether the hands inside them were kind. I cannot remember her face.
Please ignore my thoughts.
But there remains one final matter. I have postponed it for as long as I could, though postponement has never altered the nature of an unpleasant truth. It merely allows fear to settle more comfortably beside us. I told you that I spent thirty years collecting stories.
That is true. I told you that every nation seemed to preserve some broken remembrance of thirteen. That also is true. There is only one thing I have concealed. Not intentionally. At least, I hope not.
You see, I no longer possess those thirty years. I possess the notebooks. I possess train tickets, letters of introduction, receipts from inns long since demolished and sketches of churches whose towers I distinctly remember climbing.
I possess facts.
What I do not possess are memories. They have become strangely detached from me. Like paintings viewed through another man’s spectacles. Sometimes I discover my own handwriting describing an evening I cannot recall. Sometimes I recognise a face in an old photograph and know with certainty that I loved the person, while remaining utterly unable to remember his name.
It is a peculiar grief.
One mourns something that cannot even be described. Last Tuesday I found a portrait among my papers. A cabinet photograph. An elderly gentleman seated beside a fire. He held an open notebook upon his lap.
On the reverse, in my own hand, was written:
“Winter, 1891.”
I stared at it for several minutes. The room seemed familiar. The chair seemed familiar. The expression upon the man’s face... that troubled me most. He was listening. Not reading, just listening. As though someone sat opposite him. I turned the photograph over again. There was another sentence.
One I do not remember writing.
“He has almost arrived.”
I cannot explain why those words unsettled me. Perhaps because they imply expectation. Perhaps because they imply company. Or perhaps because, without quite intending to, I looked towards the empty chair beside my desk. It was empty. I smiled at myself. An old scholar frightening himself with scraps of folklore. There is dignity in such foolishness. I reached for my pen. And stopped. The second cup upon the tray was warm.
I have considered every reasonable explanation. Without ordinary explanations, the world becomes impossible to inhabit. Yet there are moments...
I nearly wrote something unworthy of us both. Permit me instead a question. Do not answer. If you are uncertain, it is already too late. Do not look up immediately. Remain where you are. Continue reading. There is comfort in continuing.
I have found that stopping invites reflection, and reflection is a dangerous occupation.
There is another curious habit among certain fishermen on the northern coast of Norway.
I arrived there once, before dawn. Twelve boats had already left. One remained tied to the pier. An old fisherman sat beside it.
“Broken?” I asked.
He looked at me as though I had insulted him “No.”
“Then why don’t you sail?”
He stared at the sea for so long that I believed he had forgotten the question.
Finally he answered. “Someone must stay.”
I once believed such customs to be born of ignorance. Now I suspect they are born of memory. Memory worn so smooth by generations that only the action survives. Leave the chair. Do not count the candles. Do not ask why some staircases seem longer descending than ascending. Do not trouble yourself if, in the coming days, the same number appears more often than chance would allow.
The human mind delights in patterns. Remember that. Hold fast to it. You will need such explanations.
As for me...
I find myself increasingly uncertain whether I am composing these pages or merely repeating words spoken countless times before. There is a strange familiarity in every sentence.
Even this one.
It occurs to me, as the fire settles into embers, that I have addressed you for many hours and never once thanked you for your patience. That was discourteous. Thank you for listening. You have listened so quietly that, from time to time, I forgot there was any distance between us at all.
In truth...
The candle burns low. The house has become very still. I can hear nothing save the slow ticking of the clock and the wind moving against the windows.
Forgive me. There is something else. That chair, wood settling beneath a slight weight. The smallest of sounds. So ordinary that another man would never notice it. Another man would say that old houses sigh. That timber shifts. That imagination completes what silence begins.
He would be right.
He must be right.
But I cannot persuade myself to look. Not because I fear what I might see. But because I have gradually arrived at a far more troubling suspicion. That no one has entered this room or that no one ever needed to. For if these pages have truly reached the one for whom they were intended... then perhaps you have been sitting opposite me from the very beginning. If so, I beg one final kindness. When at last you leave— please do not forget your cup.
For I have the most uncomfortable feeling... that there were only ever meant to be two. If you find this ridiculous, I ask only one favour. The next time you make tea, notice how naturally the hand reaches for a second cup.
