The Thirteenth Tale 精彩片段：
THE GHOST IN THE TALE
Thoughtfully I lifted my eyes from the final page of Hester’s diary. A number of things had struck my attention as I had been reading it, and now that I had finished, I had the leisure to consider them more methodically.
Oh, I thought.
Oh.
And then, OH!
How to describe my eureka? It began as a stray what if, a wild conjecture, an implausible notion. It was, well, not impossible perhaps, but absurd! For a start—
About to begin marshaling the sensible counterarguments, I stopped dead in my tracks. For my mind, racing ahead of itself in a momentous act of premonition, had already submitted to this revised version of events. In a single moment, a moment of vertiginous, kaleidoscopic bedazzlement, the story Miss Winter had told me unmade and remade itself, in every event identical, in every detail the same—yet entirely, profoundly different. Like those images that reveal a young bride if you hold the page one way, and an old crone if you hold it the other. Like the sheets of random dots that disguise teapots or clown faces or Rouen cathedrals if you can only learn to see them. The truth had been there all along, only now had I seen it.
There followed a long hour of musing. One element at a time, taking all the different angles separately, I reviewed everything I knew. Everything I had been told and everything I had discovered. Yes, I thought. And yes, again. That, and that, and that, too. My new knowledge blew life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend. The jagged edges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts were regenerated. Puzzles explained themselves, and mysteries were mysteries no longer.
At last, after all the tale telling and all the yarn spinning, after the smoke screens and the trick mirrors and the double bluffs, I knew.
I knew what Hester saw that day she thought she saw a ghost.
I knew the identity of the boy in the garden.
I knew who attacked Mrs. Maudsley with a violin.
I knew who killed John-the-dig.
I knew who Emmeline was looking for underground.
Details fell into place. Emmeline talking to herself behind a closed door, when her sister was at the doctor’s house. Jane Eyre, the book that appears and reappears in the story, like a silver thread in a tapestry. I understood the mysteries of Hester’s wandering bookmark, the appearance of The Turn of the Screw and the disappearance of her diary. I understood the strangeness of John-the-dig’s decision to teach the girl who had once desecrated his garden how to tend it.