Page 1The Errand
Adrien de Varennes happened to meet an old companion in arms, the Marquis de La Tour-Samuel, now gray and nervous. The marquis asked a favor: enter his long-abandoned château and retrieve a bundle of letters from a sealed bedroom. He refused to explain why no servant would agree to go back.
The château stood at the end of an avenue drowned in fog. The caretaker handed Adrien a key without looking at him. “If a woman asks you to comb her hair, sir, do not touch it.” Adrien took it for a joke. Yet on the dusty glass of the vestibule, five long blond hairs clung to the inside, as if someone had just rested her head there.
The appointed room smelled of faded roses and cold wax. The shutters were closed. Adrien found the writing desk, but the packet of letters bore his own name in old ink: To be given to Adrien de Varennes, when he returns.
Page 2Hair on the Window
The first letter had been written twenty-two years before his birth. A woman named Hélène wrote that every night she dreamed of an officer she had not yet met. She described Adrien with impossible precision, down to the scar hidden beneath his collar. The final sentence broke off: When he comes, I will be behind…
The sound of a comb slid through the next room. Adrien opened the door: there was only a veiled mirror and a chair facing the wall. Yet in the glass a woman was seated. Very tall, dressed in white, she combed hair that fell all the way to the floor. When Adrien turned around, the chair was empty.
He backed into the corridor. The château’s candles lit one after another without a hand touching them. A voice whispered his name through every door. Then fog began to creep beneath the closed windows, shaping fingers around his boots.
Page 3The Woman in White
At last the woman appeared before him. Her face was pale but alive, her eyes dark and wet. She offered him an ivory comb and softly said, “Help me. They left me like this.” Adrien remembered the caretaker’s warning, but the sorrow in her voice overcame his caution. He took a lock of hair.
The hair was icy, yet it trembled like nerves. With every stroke of the comb Adrien saw a scene that was not his own: Hélène locked in this room by a jealous husband; the younger marquis hiding letters; a struggle; a fall; then a wall hastily bricked shut. The final memory showed Hélène still conscious behind the masonry.
Adrien dropped the comb. The woman turned. For an instant her face doubled: untouched beauty and a dried skull superimposed. “He took my body,” she said. “He did not take my waiting.” Behind the mirror, something scratched three times.
Page 4The Second Room
Adrien smashed the glass. He expected a wall; instead he found a second room, identical to the first but untouched, filled with morning light. A man who looked like him slept on the bed. At his bedside, Hélène was writing the letters Adrien had just read.
The double woke and begged Adrien not to cross the threshold. “Every man who enters becomes the man she is waiting for.” Adrien tried to retreat, but the corridor behind him had vanished. Hélène placed a hand on his cheek. Every candle flickered. Years that were not his flooded his memory: a marriage he had never lived, a jealousy he had never felt, then the terror of a murder.
He understood that the marquis had not sent him to fetch letters. He had sent Adrien to take his place inside the memory. Adrien forced the door, crossed the fog, and fled the château before dawn, carrying one letter as proof.
Page 5The Missing Portrait
In Paris, the marquis had died during the night. A long blond lock was found in his hand, tied around a key. Adrien burned the letter without reading it. For several weeks he believed himself free. Then his hair began to turn white, strand by strand, always on the side Hélène had touched.
One morning he received an old portrait purchased by an antique dealer. It showed Hélène in the château bedroom. Beside her stood a man whose face had been carefully scraped away. In certain light, however, Adrien could make out his own features beneath the scratches.
That night he heard a comb moving behind his mirror. He took it down. There was no wall, only the château room with Hélène waiting. On the table lay a freshly written letter: To be given to the next Adrien de Varennes. When he looked up, his apartment was gone.
In the morning, his concierge found only a mirror covered in mist-and on the glass, the prints of two people holding hands.
