Not long after, Ariah discovered that her husband, like most sons of officials, was carrying on relationships with several women. One of them seemed to have become a favourite. Ariah knew the woman: a singer, beautiful, younger than she was. Ariah wanted a divorce but her husband refused, wanting to uphold his reputation. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, yet she was being kept as a trophy wife. According to her, her husband had been like a gnome incessantly panning for treasure, arranging, collecting. He had been after a wife, a lover and a perfect reputation, all at once.

She spoke as if possessed by her tales. I watched her face grow more and more contorted.

Her comfortable life had begun to feel drab. She frequently returned to the fantasy worlds of her youth. She imagined the Evil Queen, role model for her aborted career as a scientist, venturing into a serpentine underground chamber, coming across her victims’ skeletons, crossing rivers at midnight, exploring forests, scrambling over cliffs. The Evil Queen transformed herself into whatever she wanted, beautiful damsel or ugly crone.

In Ariah’s formulation, the glamour of experimenting lay in metamorphosis.

She no longer spoke of chameleons, but of butterflies. Not changing clothes, but shedding skin. She had contacted friends from long before and had returned to work in a lab. One night, alone with all those chemicals, she opened a bottle and doused her face with liquid. Her gorgeous features blistered in an instant, corroded beyond recognition.

I shuddered. Not skin cancer – this was even more awful. She wasn’t on the verge of death. Not at all.

Ariah had lost consciousness and had been rushed to the hospital. Nobody tried to investigate what had happened. Her husband divorced her shortly afterwards and supplied her with an enormous settlement.

I’d been dragged into a universe of tales so terrible and yet so riveting, I could only gape. I still couldn’t fathom what made her destroy herself – divorce, money, boredom?

My sweaty fingers clutched a cigarette until it grew damp. This woman didn’t just love tales. She lived them.

‘How marvellous,’ she said cryptically, ‘that the body can be so malleable and change however you want.’

She had a tyrant’s arrogance. She celebrated her metamorphosis. And it’s not like she had become a butterfly. Then, heightening my alarm, she whispered, ‘And, haven’t I also managed to capture you?’

—

What could be more terrifying than a devil that speaks truth?

After two months, I still crouched inside the wardrobe, awaiting her. Every morning I hurried to leave the house, playing along with Beauty’s game, until we got to a place where she swore, scratched, hurt me. My wife was surprised, even angry, that I was no longer job-hunting, especially when my contract was about to expire.