The thirteenth tale by Diane Setterfield

gaze from the dark corner, she told him she was leaving.
     
    At first he hardly understood what she had said. He felt a pulse
beat his ears. His vision blurred. He closed his eyes, but inside his head
there were volcanoes, meteorite strikes and explosions. When the flames died
down and there was nothing left in his inner world but a silent, devastated
landscape, he opened his eyes.
     
    What had he done?
     
    In his hand was a lock of hair, with a bloodied clod of skin
attached at one end. Isabelle was there, her back to the door, her hands behind
her. One beautiful green eye was bloodshot; one cheek looked red and slightly
swollen. A trickle of blood crept from her scalp, reached her eyebrow and was
diverted away from her eye.
     
    He was aghast at himself and at her. He turned away from her in
silence and she left the room.
     
    Afterward he sat for hours, twisting the auburn hair that he had
found in his hand, twisting and twisting, tighter and tighter around his
finger, until it dug deep into his skin, until it was so matted that it could
not be unwound. And finally, when the sensation of pain had at last completed
its slow journey from his finger to his consciousness, he cried.
     
    Charlie was absent that day and did not return home until
midnight. Finding Isabelle’s room empty he wandered through the house, knowing
by some sixth sense that disaster had struck. Not finding his sister, he went
to his father’s study. One look at the gray-faced man told him everything.
Father and son regarded each other for a moment, but the fact that their loss
was shared did not unite them. There was nothing they could do for each other.
     
    In his room Charlie sat on the chair next to the window, sat
there for hours, a silhouette against a rectangle of moonlight. At some point
he opened a drawer and removed the gun he had obtained by extortion from a
local poacher, and two or three times he raised it to his temple. Each time the
force of gravity soon returned it to his lap.
     
    At four o’clock in the morning he put the gun away, and took up
instead the long needle that he had pilfered from the Missus’s sewing box a
decade before and which had since seen much use. He pulled up his trouser leg,
pushed his sock down and made a new puncture mark in his skin. His shoulders
shook, but his hand was steady as on his shinbone he scored a single word:
Isabelle.
     
    Isabelle by this time was long gone. She had returned to her
room for a few minutes and then left it again, taking the back stairs to the
kitchen. Here she had given the Missus a strange, hard hug, which was quite
unlike her, and then she slipped out of the side door and darted through the
kitchen garden toward the garden door, set in a stone wall. The Missus’s sight
had been fading for a very long time, but she had developed the ability to
judge people’s movements by sensing vibrations in the air, and she had the
impression that Isabelle hesitated, for the briefest of moments, before she
closed the garden door behind her.
     
    When it became apparent to George Angelfield that Isabelle was
gone, he went into his library and locked the door. He refused food, he refused
visitors. There were only the vicar and the doctor to come calling now, and
both of them got short shrift. “Tell your God he can go to hell!” and “Let a
wounded animal die in peace, won’t you!” was the limit of their welcome.
     
    A few days later they returned and called the gardener to break
the door down. George Angelfield was dead. A brief examination was enough to
establish that the man had died from septicemia, caused by the circle of human
hair that was deeply embedded in the flesh of his ring finger.
     
    Charlie did not die, though he didn’t understand why not. He
wandered about the house. He made a trail of footprints in the dust and
followed it every day, starting at the top of the house and working down. Attic
bedrooms not used for years,