Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

“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.

  The Chamber from Without

  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 fi
replace 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.

  3. The Rose Crystal Chamber

  The Chamber from Within

  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.

  Two Lives

  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.

  Henry was never sure what she saw in Manfred, who was ten years her senior, sober and intent, and seemingly nothing like her type. But the two of them had suddenly announced the date for a marriage and been planning it for months. It was delayed when the death of a remote relative allowed Manfred to inherit an ancient mansion on an island in the Channel. Henry had been shocked, a week or two later, when he learned Manfred had inherited not just the house, but a title, and the whole island as well. The letters from Manfred had grown few, and strange, and the last one had invited him here, to Sark, to the Seigneurie, to the House of Rongeur d’Os Wood.

  Except it was false, all of it was false.

  It was all there in his head, as clear as something from a favorite novel he’d read and re-read, the words and busy actions and the moods, passions and emotions of the characters. But not his.

  It was not him.

  He drew back, his hands on her white shoulders. “What do you remember?”

  She rolled her enormous emerald eyes. “It always takes you longer than me. I remember everything. Just think, think back, and it will come back to you. How did we meet?”

  Like a man shaking off the embers of dream, his true recollections returned to him….

  True Memories

  Dame Sibyl Hathaway was not some remote relative. Manfred visited her a dozen times in London during his school years, often bringing Henry with him. She was a gray-haired, sprightly old woman with a twinkle in her eyes.

  The two old ladies, the thin and elfin Dame Sibyl and the sour-faced Countess Margaret, had explained the labyrinthine intricacies of the laws of the estates and peerages to them. It seemed a wealthy newspaper owner named Clayton, who lived a stone’s throw from Sark on his own private island of Brecqhou, was agitating for a change in the form of government of Sark, on the grounds that it violated the European Convention on Human Rights. He wanted Sark changed from a direct Crown possession to some more democratic form of government, and joined politically with the neighboring island of Guernsey. But the marriage of two descendants of John Allaire, the 18th Seigneur of Sark, would make it more difficult for the Privy Council of the United Kingdom to enact the reforms.

  Manfred had objected. Were there not three of his cousins in line for the title ahead of him? Countess Margaret dismissed his objection with a wave of her fan. “The fate of the uncooperative is not as certain as mortal men imagine,” was her cryptic reply.

  Manfred had come to Hal after a particularly long evening cloistered away with his aged relatives and explained that he was being offered up as a lamb to the slaughter. Either he had to marry some sharp-tongued minx, or the house and title—or the entire Sark Island, the last slice of living history—would be lost.

  A month later, Henry accompanied Manfred to a New Year’s Ball held by an association to which Dame Sybil belonged. It had been a formal party, white tie and tail. At first Henry was a bit awed, as the affair was far more elegant than any he had previously attended. Soon, however, he found himself looking through the glamour at the dreary reality. The wrappings might have been more stylish, but they clothed the same horse-faced girls who laughed too loudly and spoke too crudely with whom he rubbed shoulders every day at Oxford. The gloom of disillusionment fell over him.

  As he stood nursing his second glass of champagne, Manfred strolled up to him, forbidding yet dapper in his black finery.

  Inclining his head toward Henry, Manfred had murmured, “Don’t look now, but the man-killing harpy to whom Dame Sibyl is trying to hitch me just walked in. Look at the door.”

  Henry looked.

  Through the doorway glided a young woman, decked in her winter furs. She shrugged out of her long coat and drew off her gloves, carelessly tossing them to a footman who stood by the door without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Released from her outer garments, her curvaceous beauty put the pale and boyish charms of the other young ladies to shame. A few steps into the assembly hall, she had paused. Standing merrily aloof, with an arrow-like smile upon the bow of her lips, she surveyed the chamber like a queen reviewing her court. Something about her reminded him of the ladies of antiquity, a Nimue or Lynette, plotting how best to ensnare the wary Merlin or lead some hapless knight astray.

  As she looked out at the gathered company, however, a weariness came over her face, as if she, too, ha
d pierced the veil of the evening and discerned the banality hidden beneath the shining veneer of gaiety. The look passed over her for an instant, and then was gone. Then, she hid her ennui beneath a cloak of good cheer and sailed forth to join in the festivities.

  However, in that moment, her eyes had locked with Henry’s. In each other’s eyes, they recognized the same discontent with the offerings of this modern world, the same longing for something finer, that they both felt in their own hearts.

  Henry recalled very little about the rest of the event, except for her scent, her swaying grace, her smile, the way she had felt in his arms as they waltzed.

  True Love

  His mind still whirling from the sensation of stepping into the Rose Crystal Chamber, Henry smiled and spoke of what he recalled. “Sibyl invited Manfred to a swank party in London, and he took me along as moral support. Margaret, the Countess of Devon, introduced you to Manfred. You wore a blue shoulderless gown with a plunging neckline with a silver choker with an opal stone and matching opal earrings. You and Manfred had disliked each other at first sight. The marriage was suggested—strongly suggested, otherwise Manfred would be cut out of the family funds, and booted from school—in order to block some sort of political shenanigans. You never loved him.”

  “Yes on the plunging, no on the blue. I wore red,” Laureline said, “And this house?”

  Henry said, “I remember now. Manfred first invited me here four years ago. It was beautifully furnished and appointed. His cousins lived here while Sibyl was in London. Two years ago, you were here, with Manfred, with me … and…”

  He dropped his hands from her shoulders, and pulled out his little black memorandum book. There it was, written in his own handwriting, on the first page.

  You are in love with Laureline du Lac, and have sworn to break the spell of forgetting that separates you, and promised to marry her.