Iron Chamber of Memory (6 page)

“The world is not as safe as all that,” Hal observed. “There are still dangerous deeds that need to be done, and God knows there are people who need to be protected.”

She laughed deep in her throat and laid a hand on his arm. “That is what is so charming about you, Hal. You always see the nobility in things! You really lost your true calling when they shut down the Round Table.”

Hal chuckled as if this had been a joke, but he was warmed in his heart. Laurel had a talent for saying exactly what men wanted to hear. “You are an insightful woman, Laurel. Manfred is a lucky fellow.”

He smiled at her in the dark, glad that, ever since they had found the torch, the unexpected intimacy in which they had found themselves earlier in the evening was gone, vanished as mysteriously as it had come, and they were back to their customary ways, easy and companionable.

As they turned a corner, a window at the end of a hallway showed a glimpse of the sharp cliffs and the moonlit sea.

“This island is an angler’s dream,” Laurel told him. “Do you know that this island is fishable from any water’s edge? In most cases, you need to climb a bit, though. Competing for fishing records is one of the tourist attractions here. If you catch anything you think might make the cut, you can bring it round the tackle and bait shop in town to be weighed and measured. The owner is a member of the Bailiwick of Guernsey Record Rod-Caught Fish Committee.”

Then she laughed. “Look at me, and my useless array of knowledge. Which just goes to show, you can take the girl out of the fishing town, but you can’t take the fishing town out of the girl. No matter how desperately the girl might want it.

“Hang on!” She stopped abruptly. “We’ve gone in a circle. There is the door you kicked in.”

Hal said, “This house is insane, or maybe we are. We must be near the window we saw before, the one with the lights.”

“We should have seen the light we saw, leaking under a door or something. Do you think the candle went out? If it were a candle.”

“Douse the flashlight. Perhaps if our eyes adjust we’ll spot it.”

Darkness closed in like a tomb. The wind could be heard moaning softly in the distance, and taps and creaks, such as old houses are wont to make, began creeping near to them. She stepped near to him nervously, and he put his arm around her before he realized he had done so. He told himself this was not an embrace. It was like putting one’s arm around one’s little sister, really.

In the darkness, he said, “Is there any madness in your family?”

Her voice was close in the dark, her breath scented and warm on his cheek. “I don’t get along with my mother very well. Our mother-daughter love is expressed by shouting, as it were. I have an uncle who collects Spanish coins and believes in ghosts, if that is what you mean.”

“Dementia runs in my family. I’ve always been worried that—well, when things seem odd, I need to know it is not just me. Haven’t you been in this house before?”

She said, “I wish I could say I have, to put your mind at ease. But no, never. Manfred just inherited it from his great-aunt or something. Dame Hathaway. She lived in London, where it is civilized. Not here. No one lived here. Manfred was thinking of reopening the old house to save on expenses, because he could not afford to live anywhere else. He is just a penniless student, like you.” He felt her shrug beneath his arm. “Like nearly everyone we know.”

“Other houses on this island have electric power. Why would the Seigneurie House not?”

“Rank hath its restrictions, you know. Maybe some queer law dating from the reign of Alfred the Great forbids lighting lamps here during Lent. Or a Masonic rule reaching back to Solomon the Wise. Maybe Dame Hathaway never filed the proper tax receipt in triplicate from the Inland Revenue to show the Utility ministry. I have no idea. The International Dark Sky Astronomy Association might have forbidden it. Sounds like a gloomy organization if you ask me; like something from a spy novel.”

“So you don’t think all this is odd?”

“Very odd, but I think Manfred knows what is behind it all. The dead dog, the bare room where he’s been living for two months without telling us. Him telling us to meet on this date at the dock, and then skipping off who knows where…”

“And my feeling that I know this place? It looks so familiar.”

“There is a simple explanation. Must be! This place just reminds you of what you see every day at Magdalen and Oxford. The College dates back to Henry the Sixth, and the University to Henry the Second. Manfred has a knack for ending up in creepy old buildings. They all start to look the same after a while.”

“There was an empty bookshelf we walked past. It is coming back to me. It was filled with books with red leather bindings. There was a steeplechase scene hung above it. I remember because the horses were drawn to look as if they were jumping like frogs, with their forelegs and hindlegs spread in opposite directions. The stone corridor slopes down to a tunnel built by the Nazis when they were here during the war. It leads through an old silver mine shaft to a sea cave. How do I know that? And don’t tell me Manfred wrote me a letter. You know he hadn’t.”

She was silent a long while. Laurel said, “You know he does tricks with mesmerism, altered state of consciousness? Research for his Master’s Dissertation.”

“You think he hypnotized me? That’s absurd.”

“I think he is a magician.”

He said, “I have seen him on No Talent Night in our fraternity pull a dove out of his sleeve. It was a good trick. But it is the same one he did last year. My act was juggling bowling balls. Harder than it looks.”

“No, I mean an occultist.”

“You must be joking.”

“Hal, have you never seen that little green book he always carries with him, the one that he keeps locked with a key? It is filled with all sorts of diagrams and recipes and morbid little pictures.”

“His diary, no doubt. He hates the occult. He even hates the astrology page in the newspaper. It is rather extraordinary. He does believe in ghosts, though. Did you know? Fancy that, in this day and age.”

“My mother says he must have hypnotized me; she still cannot believe I am marrying him. I suppose she’ll change her tune once she sees the house and realizes that I am to be the lady of the manor and mistress of the whole island.”

“And allowed to keep pigeons, too, don’t forget that!”

By now, their eyes had adjusted to the dark. There were lines of moonlight seen beneath the cracks of the doors facing toward what must be the east. But one line was pink, not silver, and farther away than the others.

“There,” he said. This knob turned. Hal said, “I know we checked every doorknob. This is impossible.”

She flicked on the flashlight, and shined the beam towards either side, surveying the passage. This corridor passed under an archway and led away without turning from the many-angled corridor ringing the central nave. Anyone approaching as they had just now would find himself in a new wing of the house merely by going straight. Anyone coming down the ring corridor the other direction might not see the archway behind him in the dark. “I don’t think we were up this wing before. I think we are above the cook’s quarters.”

“I feel like I am in a dream or something.”

She opened the door. Beyond was a narrow stair leading sharply down. The passage was lavishly decorated. The oak railing was hand-carved with floral patterns and impish faces of children. The stairs were carpeted with a design of fishes. The barrel-vaulted ceiling was painted with birds of fantastic shapes trailing long tail feathers. The stairway passage was set with silver-backed niches to both sides. In the niches were ivory or brass statuettes, each about one foot tall, of crowned and haloed figures bearing wands or swords, or holding babes, or books, or longbows.

Hal stopped and peered at a statuette of an armored knight spearing a writhing serpent. It was not brass after all, but gold, or at least, gilded.

“This is getting odder and odder.”

At the bottom of the stair was an alcove containing an arched door. The door was painted and enameled in pink, beneath a stone carving of a rose in bloom.

“Turn off the light a sec,” he told her.

She complied. To either side of the red door were glass panels of translucent quartz, that allowed a flickering light to escape, but no view of the chamber beyond.

He pulled on the large glass knob, which was just above a brass keyhole fashioned to look like a rose. “Locked. Who locks all their inside doors? Does Manfred carry a keyring with five dozen keys on it?”

She said airily, “Don’t break anything.”

Laurel handed him the flashlight, which was still off. In the dim illumination from the tiny windows to each side of the red door, he could see her untie her silk bowtie with a slither of noise, unbutton her high collar and undo the top two buttons of her blouse.

He saw her draw out the fine gold chain that had lain around her neck, along with a glimpse of a lacy black brassier. Around the chain was a large and old-fashioned key. The bow of the key was carved like the rose above the door.

Where had she gotten that, he wondered. But he did not ask.

She inserted the key. To his surprise, the door unlocked with a metallic chime. Laurel pulled the door open. He smelled the scent of lavender from the chamber beyond. Hal could not see inside the chamber at first, because he only saw the rosy light that spilled out of it to surround Laurel.

For a long, lingering moment, she stood staring at the room he could not see. She fidgeted, but did not speak.

In the soft half-light her profile, her lowered eyelids with luscious lashes, seemed mystical and dreamlike.

“I’ve been here before,” she whispered, more to herself than him. “But when? When?”

She put out her hand. Perhaps she merely wanted the flashlight, but he put his hand into hers, astonished at the smallness and fineness of her fingers.

He pulled the door further open, and looked within, expecting to see more barren boards and empty walls.

Instead, the chamber was a phantasmagoria of coral, pink, scarlet and lavender. It was larger than it had seemed from without. Slender white-painted posts held up a silvery dome, each decorated with a different floral design. The ceiling was pink and white. The curving walls were covered with tapestries and Japanese rice paper screens; there were women with foxes tails playing with burning, floating pearls; and women singing to a Greek sailor tied to a mast; and a young woman seated beneath a tree, luring an unwary unicorn to lay its head in her lap. The walls themselves were hidden behind drapes of colored silk, giving the chamber more of the aspect of an Arabian pavilion than the sort of room one expected to find in a English manor house. On one wall, the drapes parted to reveal a massive fireplace made of pink-veined marble.

Beneath the dome, suspended by chains, was a pink-glassed lantern made of silver metal and ruby-hued leaded glass, sculpted to look like the petals of a rose. From this rose, pale red beams illuminated the chamber. Directly opposite them was the arched window looking out to the northwest they had seen from without. Next to it, at a slight angle, stood a full-length looking glass in a heavy wood frame next to the window. The mirror showed the reflection of the space of the floor behind them to their left. A second arched window was to the other side, facing north. The stained glass showed a knight, raising his sword against a menacing wolf.

There were couches and divans draped in silk. There was a brass table to one side, an unlit candlestick to the other, a brass image of a deer on a pedestal, and flowerpots.

The chamber was not round, but was shaped more like the heart of a nautilus spiral. In the mirror, they could see that the stairwell was near the center of the chamber, and the wall behind them curved away out of sight, passing behind the rear wall without meeting it.

They took a footstep together. There was a mild sensation of an electric tingle, almost like a bubble popping, as they stepped over the threshold. Now they were in position to see themselves in the reflection. The first was a tall, blond man with the broad shoulders of an athlete and strange scars on his arm.

He held hands with a dark-haired beauty with an hourglass figure, pale of skin and red of lip, her teeth perfectly white, her eyes half-lidded as if she thought droll, dark, sultry thoughts.

In the mirror, her engagement ring seemed to be on the wrong hand, and the stone was missing, the tines to hold it bent and twisted.

The green-eyed girl's eyes grew wide as she screamed.

No, not a scream. A shout of joy.

The green-eyed girl spun around and grabbed him, her hands seizing his arms, her eyes urgent and giddy and wild.

“What is my name?” she whispered.

His answer was to kiss her so passionately that her supple form swayed against him, held close in his strong right arm. He recognized her now. He knew her.

“Laureline,” he whispered back, “Laureline du Lac. Not Laurel.
Laureline
. And it will be Laureline Landfall soon enough.”

Then there was neither breath nor time for speech.

In this arms was his true love, whose wit and high spirits he adored. She was a fairy creature from the Arthurian myths that for all his life fascinated him, the Matter of Britain that would win him his master’s degree. With her, he could see a rich, strange, unimaginable future that held all the glories and honor of that lost past, and find something as fine as the Holy Grail for himself. He could not see what it would be, not yet, but he knew it was coming.

And yet, he could imagine no possible future with her, because outside this chamber he could not recall himself, his love, or his soul. Nor could he imagine any future without her.

Here, in the Rose Crystal Chamber, he could recall his outside life, everything about it, his father’s death, his coming to England to study, the master’s dissertation on which he had been working for months:
Arthur’s Great Wound: The Origin and Development of Substitutionary Atonement in The Matter Of Britain
. He had been pleased when his roommate and best friend, Manfred Hathaway, had met and fell in love with an alluring third cousin from Zennor, a village near Saint Ives. She was the great-great-granddaughter of the privateer John Allaire, the daughter of a minister, studying theater arts, a bit of a prankster and a bit of a flirt, eager to escape the smell of the fish cannery forever.