Most people, I feel, have an inborn desire to write their autobiographies. Among my many and admitted peculiarities is the fact that I never had any such compulsion ... until now. I have been so busy, so frightened, so worried for most of my years on this earth that the thought of making a coherent tale of them didn't occur to me.

Now I have the time to think of the past years. I am at rest ... in the eye of the hurricane that is my life? Or in a temporary eddy in the stream of existence. For the first time since before I was six, I am unworried. I almost find myself trying to find what the problem is ... and the reason is actually the fact that there is no problem, now. That seems amazing.

Everyone probably believes his own life story to be unique. In my own case, I suspect that this may be more nearly true than ordinarily, even though I am still less than twenty-seven years of age and have spent almost all of those years either immured between the walls of Palomer or attending a very strict and demanding girls' school in New England. Here, as well as there, I was haunted, not by ghosts or by psychoses, but by a tulpa.

You never heard of a tulpa? You are not alone ... I hadn't either until long after my active five-year-old imagination invented Willbe.

Now I feel that there is time to put the matter onto paper. My memory is eidetic. I have in my mind all the conversations, pertinent documents, newspaper clippings, and letters at hand, filed in my internal (not to mention my actual) computer system. My long-time governess has told me in detail about the matters concerning her that I did not see at first hand.

Perhaps the act of setting this strange sequence of events onto paper will remove the last of my long-held guilt. I understand now that the guilt is not mine ... experts have assured me of this ... yet emotions implanted when one is very small tend to be rooted deeply. I can still hear the sound of Willbe's teeth, busy outside that night-bound automobile, and the cries...

But I am getting ahead of my story. This, then, is a tale beginning with a small child. Neither a naively childish one nor yet one of those precocious, smart-alec children. A gifted, isolated, imaginative child. A lonely one.

The story of Willbe is, to a large extent, my own story, that of Araminta Palomer when just out of infancy, as a teenager, and as an adult. It is also the story of Lilian Marriott, for many years my teacher and always my friend. And it is the story of Mama, though she never, in her almost childlike naiveté during all the years of Willbe's invisible presence, suspected his existence until the very last day of his life.

All our lives were shaped by that creature, the tulpa. Several were ended by it, suddenly and bloodily. Willbe had an impact upon many, most of whom had no idea that such a thing could and did exist.

And yet ... he was the result of my need for someone to love. For so very long, he was a loving creature, and it still hurts me to think of the thing that he became.

For better or worse, this is the story of Willbe, the tulpa, made in loving ignorance by a child who was more talented than she knew.

Palomer June 28