Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

  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.

  Nausea

  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.

  Well, now he was chained to the ferry schedule. Looking at his watch, he realized he had just enough time to haul his aching body to the boat and collapse into a seat, if he were to make it at all. Going up to Sark House meant catching the evening ferry which meant, in effect, deliberately breaking his promise.

  There was nothing he hated more than breaking a promise, even over the smallest things.

  He waved his stick at the haycart. It was a modern-looking thing of green metal with rubber tires, shock absorbers and springs, but pulled by a long-maned old nag. A farmer named Beaumont sat on the bench.

  Hal wiped his nose, gritted his aching teeth, and said, “When you see Liam, tell him I have taken the ferry to St. Ouens, on Jersey.”

  Beaumont smiled, and said in French, “You seem unwell, my sir. Must you travel? I will give you a ride to the dock.”

  Hal climbed up behind him, his joints aching. “I don’t have a way to lock the door.”

  “There are no locks on the doors here, except in the Seigneur’s House. And that is to stop the ghosts from coming out, not the robbers from getting in.”

  The Parish of Saint Ouen

  The journey was a disaster. He had diarrhea on the ship, and lost control of his bowels, and ruined his pants. Passersby on the street of the port town of St. Helier watched in disbelief and disgust as he limped through the street, stinking, trying to find a hotel. He checked in, had the bellhop take the pants to be cleaned, and then sat on the bed, sick and shaking, while the hours passed. Eventually the bellhop returned, and, when Hal had no money for the tip, the manager arrived, asking him to pay immediately for the room. When it turned out that Hal had nothing, could find none of his traveler’s checks, and that his credit card was exhausted, the manager, in a fine Gallic fettle threatened him with jail, and the bellhop (who seemed to think Hal was a dope addict) threatened him with a beating. Hal managed to make some phone calls from the manager’s office, and send some messages, and get his sister Elaine to wire him some emergency funds.

  By the time he was released from the manager’s office, the sun had set. He had missed the ferry back to Sark.

  He was also destitute of money for a bus or cab, so he had to walk the five miles from St. Helier’s at the south of the island to St. Ouen’s village in the north. He faded in and out of agony during the walk, which took twice as long as it should have. He was glad for his cane, and, for once, actually made use of it with each step.

  At the start of his tramp, in the moonlight, he saw the ruins of the Twelfth Century hermitage where Helier was martyred by Vikings. During the Reformation, that hermitage was closed and rebuilt into a fortress by Queen Elizabeth. And at the end of his long walk, hours later, he saw the silhouette of the La Rocco Tower in the Saint Ouen Bay, illumined by the gleam of the lighthouse, looming like a rook from the chessboard of a giant. La Rocco Tower had been erected during the Napoleonic wars, one of thirty round towers raised to defend the coastline.

  The weight of history soaked into the ground was like nothing he had seen in America, no, not even in places like Williamsburg, where he had gone to school before Oxford. He wondered if all these ruins, and fortresses built on hermitages, and warlike towers each were visited by the ghosts of men who defended them in life, and whether their battles were fought over again forever until doomsday.

  It was late in the evening, but the streets of the town were crowded, and colored lamps were hanging on wires over the square. Folk in shaggy costumes, wearing masks of fierce animals, were dancing and cavorting in the square. Hal waved at a couple, a boy with a sparkler and a girl with a wineglass, and asked if either knew the way to the Brising Brothers.

  “But yes, my sir!” said the girl, red-cheeked and glancing-eyed with the wine. “The shop you seek? He is there, beneath the old windmill. The main street is closed for the procession of relics. You must find the back way.”

  “Are they still open at this hour?” shouted Hal over the sound of the raucous music.

  The boy said, “You’ve had too much. Are you unwell? Do not drink any more.”

  But the girl said, “It is the feast of Saint Guthlac of Crowland! He lived in the stinking fens and swamps where the monsters and devils dwelt. He was friends with the wild animals and had the gift of prophecy. He held the marriage.”

  Hal’s head was pounding. “What marriage?”

  “Saint Guthlac convinced a Sir Lanval, the poverty-stricken knight exiled from Camelot, to wed rather than to slay the mermaid he caught. Each year we celebrate the marriage of the water-woman to the knight, because she gained a soul. When the church bells rang the wedding, and she stepped over the threshold, her tail fell off, and she became a mortal named Tryamour. All the old families in this parish are descended from her. See!”

  The girl pointed to a procession of figures in papier-mâché heads, led by a bishop in a miter of absurd size and proportion. Behind him was a man in white armor adorned with ermines, and a sword of tinfoil, and a woman hidden in her wedding veils. Even as Hal looked, rockets went off, and bells rang out, and the bride threw off her veil, revealing a pretty young brunette beneath, with the wide and expressive features of a Gallic woman. Amid many whoops and rowdy cheers, the bride shook her hips, flourishing the long silly-looking fish tail trailing from her bustle. The bishop touched the tail with his crook, the woman untied the fake tail, and, while the crowd roared, she whirled the tail over her head and sent it flying into the thickest part of the crowd, where women young and old leaped to catch it. The crowd threw rice, blew tin whistles and sent spouts of champagne into the air.

  The boy said, “Look there! That is one of the brothers, it is he. Him you seek, is it not so?”

  He pointed to a man so short, that Hal wondered if he were a dwarf hired for the celebration. The bald little man was dressed like a burgher from a hundred years ago, complete with watch fob and waistcoat, and sporting with an enormous set of side whiskers. He was walking into a dark and narrow space between two buildings, evidently to avoid the commotion of the beast-bride and her knightly bridegroom.

  Hal, leaning on his walking stick a little unsteadily, stepped into the alleyway. Just then, Hal saw a pale, thin hoodlum dressed in filthy rags crawl out from beneath a trash dumpster. The crawling hooligan grabbed the little man by the ankle.

  “Hey!” shouted Hal. “What is going on?” He could not believe it was a robbery. The noise and lights from the festival were only a pace or two behind him. Any number of people near the head of the alley would have seen everything clearly.

  The pale man looked up, his eyes filled with insane malice. The man’s face was so white, Hal wondered if he were an albino. The pale man had discolorations around his mouth, like bee stings or cold sores.

  The pale man stood, and stooped over the little man, licking his face.

  Hal took step forward, and raised his walking stick threateningly. “Now, you let go of him!” But the gaunt man looked at him with such a dark look in his eyes that Hal hesitated. Just then, another one of the cramps and muscle spasms that had been plaguing him that day struck his arm. His elbow joint was aching. He dropped the walking stick with a clatter.

  Hal drew out the crucifix he wore on a chain around his neck, and held it up. The gaunt man looked like he was trying to stifle a sneezing fit. The gaunt man shuddered a
nd twitched, doubled over, and then suddenly collapsed.

  Hal turned, picked up his walking stick, and looked behind him. They were within plain sight of a dozen people in the main road. Why had no one noticed? Why had no one come to help, or even raised a voice? Perhaps the alcohol was stronger or the music louder than it seemed.

  The little man was shivering and trying to straighten his old-fashioned clothes. He had fallen, and there was a cut on his neck. He was holding his handkerchief there to staunch the blood. Hal helped him to his feet. The little man said to Hal, “I remember you. Come.”

  Hal said, “Shouldn’t we call the police?” He pointed at where the gaunt man had fallen down, but the gaunt man was no longer there.

  The little man was already a half-dozen paces down the alleyway. Hal followed, feeling as if he were in a bad dream or was the butt of a bad practical joke.

  Twelve steps more, and the little man opened a metal door in the rear of his shop. Inside were glass cases, row upon row, as fine and beautiful as anything Hal had ever seen in the finest shops in London or New York. There were also antiques for sale. Hal gazed in admiration at a suit of black and gold armor refurbished from some museum, inscribed with images from elfin myths of swords and swans and wounded kings, bleeding lances and cups seated among the stars, and an arm clad in shimmering samite flourishing a blade from the midst of the lake waters.

  “Yours is scale,” said the little man, “Set with images of the ermine.”

  Also here was a second dwarf seated on a stool, a twin to the first, except that his scalp was snowy with hair, and his mustaches drooped like those of Fu Manchu, dangling past his jaw. He had a jeweler’s loupe in his eye, and he was tapping delicately at some bright thing shining in the confluence of several goose-necked lamps.

  The first one said, “This is one of our special order customers from Sercq. He saved me from the Great Gaunt Man not a moment ago, at terrible peril to his life and soul.”