Iron Chamber of Memory (21 page)

Hal decided he needed more time with Laurel. Schoolwork had to wait. After all, he was doing so well on his studies, and was so far ahead on his paper, he could afford to take this week off. That would leave him with all of next week to start and complete the dissertation!

Now, why it was that this one room in Manfred’s spooky old house held such an attraction for him, he did not know. And, with no money now left for rent or food, he practically had to make the daily pilgrimage to Laurel, to see her, to…

No, wait, what was he thinking? Laurel was marrying Manfred in less than a month! He was traveling all this way to see Manfred, of course, and to help him along with his studies. Manfred seemed unaccountably worried about how the dissertation paper would be received. Hal wondered why.

It was late in the day when Laurel met him on the lawn in front of the house. Perched atop masses of coiffed hair was her broad straw hat. Apparently it had been returned to her after that night it fell from her head in Wrongerwood Forest. She wore a short, sheath dress which displayed her figure to its best advantage. Hal wondered for the first time why she never seemed to get cold? He had not once seen her dressed as warmly as a person should be.

She seized both his hands in hers, and in a bubbly voice of enthusiasm described how she’s hit on the idea of inviting her sisters to come here, to England, to Sark, to help with the dress and the wedding preparations.

Hal said, “You cannot just buy a dress in a shop?”

Laurel drawled, “And be a laughingstock? There are traditions to be upheld, you know, and appearances. In any case, I found this letter in my handbag, inviting them, and laying out all the plans. It was in my handwriting, but I don’t remember writing it. I cannot seem to sleep at night, I am so excited. Manfred thinks I am sleepwalking—or perhaps sleepletterwriting—but, just between you and me, it is nice to have an excuse to knock on his door at night … well …”

His heart bumped oddly. He said, “You look a little sad. Having second thoughts?”

She raised her shoulders and her eyebrows in an exaggerated shrug that, to him, looked adorably girlish. “All brides get cold feet.”

“Well, the clever ones run off with the best man,” he said with a grin.

Laurel said, “Good heavens, Hal, are you making a pass at me?”

“I must be doing it wrong, if you have to ask.”

“Aren’t you the bold one! I should slap your face!”

He put his arms around her, and hugged her tight, pinning her arms to the sides. “Be careful! If you slap me, who knows what I might do?”

He gazed down at her as she stared up at him, startled. Her expression was haughty, but in her eyes, he saw something else, a frantic innocence that pierced him to the very center of his heart. It reminded him of an animal, trapped at the back of a canyon in its efforts to escape a wildfire—watching as its crackling doom approached, yet unable to do anything to alter its fate. But Laurel was as tough as steel and as resilient as bamboo. What could possibly so frighten such a fearless girl?

The wedding. The wedding was her wildfire. She did not wish to marry Manfred, and yet she could not contrive to escape.

Staring down into the helpless agony of her eyes, Hal felt his universe tremble as it came to him, with a terrifying certainty, that it was he, and not Manfred, that Laurel loved.

No. It must be his imagination. Perhaps, her agony came from the tightness of his grip. Perhaps, he entirely mistook…

Manfred came pacing around the corner of the eastern wing at that very moment, staring at the ground. Hal released the girl and stepped away. Laurel, his cheeks pink, drew back her arm to slap him. Hal grinned and proffered his cheek. Laurel hesitated, and looked over her shoulder at Manfred. It was not clear if he had seen anything or not.

Manfred looked up. “What is all this, then? Having a tiff? I want my bride and best man to get along, you know.”

Laurel smiled her dazzling smile and laid her upraised hand on Hal’s shoulder. “Oh, I was just asking Henry to step into the Rose Chamber with me, to look at swatches.”

Oddly enough, Hal had also been tickled by a strange urge to visit that Chamber again, but for what reason, he could not say.

Memory returned. They were in the silk-lined chamber beneath the silver dome. Laureline had somehow cajoled her outer self into replacing the smashed furniture, stocking the chimney side with wood, and moving a small icebox in here, some futon mattresses, and other little comforts needed for a lover’s nest.

Henry said, “That was a very good sign! That last scene—Manfred saw, and he was not angry. The Out-of-Doors you is coming around!”

But Laureline was angry, almost panicking, her eyes like green fire. “Your brutal antics are ruining everything!”

“Brutal antics?” He asked, entirely confused. “Weren’t you complaining that I was not caveman enough for you?”

Laureline ignored him and charged on. “Manfred has seen you traveling between here and Oxford for days now, doing without sleep, ignoring your school! He’s getting suspicious and angry. Even my other self is starting to hate you! You are so creepy!”

He shook his head as if to clear away the mental cobwebs. He said, “I don’t think you know your outside self very well. She is about to come around. She is falling in love.”

Laureline’s eyes flashed. “She’s not.”

Now it was Henry’s turn to be angry, “Well, she would be, if you were inside her doing your job, and pulling for me!”

“Don’t throw the blame on me. Things are worse than ever!”

Henry said, “How can you say that? The spell is breaking! It is working!”

Laureline said, “No, all that is happening is that your out-of-doors self is losing his mind, getting more desperate, taking longer and longer chances to see me. It smells of desperation.”

“We only have two weeks left. There is no harm in me being away from school.”

“You fool!” she blazed. “Women hate desperation! We can smell it like a dog smelling a hidden wound that has started to fester! No, no! We have to try something more reliable, something that will get you to come into this chamber every day.”

“So you
do
think the spell is breaking?”

She kissed him, and he forgot whatever it was he was going to say. He pushed her down onto the rug, and when her hair fell out of her hat, it spread like a black pool for a yard in each direction.

Not long after, she leaned over him, kissing him on the chest and neck and lips, and saying, “Henry, I have a plan, a foolproof plan, that will ensure you must return to the chamber each and every day.”

He said, “You are far too worried. The spell is breaking–”

“I tell you it is not. We must take bold steps.”

After a little more kissing and snuggling, and a daring game involving chilled baby oil and hot fudge and a blindfold, he was not in the mood to argue. “Whatever you say, darling.”

“Here,” she said with an odd smile, “Drink this!” and she handed him a glass of wine she poured from a small black flask she took from the cooler.

“To us!” he said. Her manner was so odd, and the look in her eye so bright, that initially he took only the merest sip. But it was delicious, so he drank it eagerly, downing the whole in one searing swallow.

Then he had to lay down, because a feverish dizziness was coming over him, and a sensation of ascending into the unimagined heights of deep space, beyond the nearer constellations, to where the stars were strange and sang in the silver voices of women.

Hal woke in a strange room, feeling sick. The mattress was rough and lumpy, and the bed was sort of a boxlike affair built into one side of a slanting wall. It had been made for shorter sleepers: his head and feet brushed the opposite walls. There was a dormer window admitting light that dazzled his eyes and made them water. He was in an attic, but one where all the exposed wood was lacquered and polished, and the drywall smooth and white. There was another bed opposite, two narrow doors, and a staircase leading down.

It was not until he stood that the nausea assailed him. Aches and pains clenched his limbs.

On his feet, shaking and sweating, he looked out the window. He recognized the tiny street on which no motor vehicle had ever run. Across from him was the Stock’s Inn, and he saw the constable, who was also the Island’s postmaster, on his bicycle coming out the back door.

From the position of his coign of vantage, he knew which house this must be: Mammy Levrier, whose boys were working as gardeners at Le Seigneurie.

His gorge started to rise. He staggered over to the two narrow doors. One was a closet of shelves stocked with children’s toys from seventy-five years ago, a blue schoolbus made of metal, a set of solid wooden blocks, a toy space helmet from the days before the moonshot, a Raggedy Anne doll. It was odd how sturdy and well-preserved they were. Hal had never seen toys that were not built to fall apart in a year. He found his clothing, neatly folded, in a wooden drawer beneath.

The other door contained a porcelain sink-bowl beneath a mirror, and a porcelain toilet bowl. The light was a naked bulb worked by a pull-chain. He managed to get the lid open before he upchucked the contents of his stomach. At first he could not see how to flush it, but then he saw the water tank on a high shelf, connected by pipes to the bowl, and another pull chain.

Hal dressed himself and went down the narrow stairs. Again, the woodwork was finely done. To his left was a kitchen, with a sink and washbasin beneath a hand-pump, a larder and an icebox with a big metal handle. To his right was a den, with a collection of geodes and semiprecious stones stored neatly along the walls under glass. Here was a large easy chair facing a small television, and a few paces beyond that, on a nice rug, a large dining table under an unexpectedly fine chandelier. Everything was spotless, well-kept, clean. He stared in puzzlement at the several wolf heads stuffed and mounted on the wall. One particular head was huge and shaggy beyond normal proportion, looking like something from before the last ice age, a dire wolf. The paws of the wolf were stuffed and mounted as well, and formed the gun rack on which several well-made American hunting rifles were resting.

On the wall opposite was an ornate booth with a statuette of the Virgin Mary, and rosary beads hanging on little brass hooks. He stared and saw among the rosaries a chain without beads. It bore a large silver image of the crucified savior as the pendant. Hal touched his own bare neck. That was the very crucifix had had picked up the other day from the Brising Brothers, not very long after he bought the diamond pendant from them. Someone in the house must have hung it here, in this little shrine, for safekeeping while he slept.

Hal stepped over and took it down, running his fingers across it. It was a handmade item, with no twin in the world. Two scrimshawed ivory pieces to the left and right of the crucifix displayed a Roman soldier with a spear, and a slaveboy holding a sponge on the end of a staff. Beneath the pendant was a medallion smaller than a dime, showing a graybeard rabbi carrying a cup overhead, almost touching the nailed feet of the dying man. As with the dolphins on Laurel’s necklace, the work was almost impossibly fine and small.

Hal looked around, worried that if someone saw him take his pendant back, he might be thought a thief. He shouted, and was rewarded with a stab of pain through his head and his joints. There was no one here. He knew Mrs. Levrier was in a hospital on Guernsey, and the boys were no doubt on the northern end of Sark, working on the gardens behind Wrongerwood House.

Why was he here?

The front door looked handmade as well, and by someone who took pride in his carpentry. It was arched, made of polished boards over an inch thick, and held in place with massive wrought-iron hinges and hasps. The door could have shrugged off a battering ram.

Henry found his boots by the door, newly polished and smelling of oil. In a can next to a tightly curled umbrella was Henry’s hawk-headed walking stick. Here on a hook was his coat. In the coat pocket was his memorandum book. It was too dark in the kitchen to read.

He stepped outside, and sat down on the little steel box where the milkman put the daily bottles. There were flowers in a little well-tended strip of garden to his right and left, and the only traffic on the road was the mailman on his bicycle, and a plow-horse pulling a haycart coming the other way.

In the book was a ferry ticket to St. Helier Harbor. With his pounding headache and fuzzy memory, he could not recall where that was. On the back of the ticket was the image of two crossed golden axes on a blue field. He had no idea what that meant.

Rented room from Wolfhounds. Beware the pale, gaunt man.

“I should go see a psychiatrist,” he muttered. He did not recall writing that note, nor what it was about.

Reminder: left medicine with Manfred.

That made more sense. Hal had suffered some sort of powerful allergic reaction to something, perhaps a bee sting (he still felt the pain of the sharp sting in his forearm), and Manfred had offered to run his antihistamine through some filters to strengthen it. And, naturally, it would have been dangerous to stay in the house until whatever it was that provoked his allergic reaction was isolated.

Of course! The memory was coming back now. He had to return to Wrongerwood House immediately for his medicine, and to do whatever else Laurel wanted him to do. That only made sense.

But then there was another note:
MUST go to Brising Brothers and ask for package: I promised Manfred!

Hal clenched his teeth. He wanted (oh,
how
he wanted!) to go to pick up his medicine and see Laurel again. And Sark house was only a short walk up the island’s one road to the north end. But then there was that word
promised
. Also, Laurel would not be home regardless. She had insisted on borrowing his yacht, since she had wedding plans to make, florists and bakers and such to meet in London, and she had asked so nicely, saying how convenient it would be not to be chained to the schedule of the one, lone ferry that sailed by the morning tide and the evening tide, twice daily, no more.