Locked Rooms

by Laurie R. King

  His laconic words bore just the slightest edge of true concern, as if a question lay behind them. I reached up to adjust my hair-pins, only to find them gone—weeks after chopping off my thick, waist-length hair (a necessary element of disguising myself as a British officer) my hand was still startled to find the weight of it missing from my head. Spreading my fingers instead to run them through the brief crop, I glanced back at the straight path laid out behind us, and felt a shudder play up my spine. Perhaps I shouldn’t lean over any more rails while I was as tired as this, I told myself, and allowed Holmes to thread my hand through his arm and lead me back towards our cabins.

  I picked at my meal, making no more response to the conversations around me than would a stone statue. Afterwards we listened to the ship’s string quartet render a competent selection of Beethoven, and took a turn around the decks, Holmes chatting, me unresponsive. Eventually we took ourselves to bed, for another night’s broken sleep.

  The next morning the mirror showed a woman with stains beneath her eyes. Holmes had already risen, and I dressed slowly, drank several cups of strong coffee, and took a book up onto the sun-drenched deck. The pages, however, made no more sense than the conversations of the night before, and eventually I merely sat, staring at the almost imperceptible horizon of sky and sea.

  After some time I became aware that Holmes had settled into the adjoining chair. My gaze came reluctantly back from the distance and settled onto the bit of brightness he held in his hand. It was, I decided, the silken scarf he had purchased in a bazaar on the first leg of our voyage out from England, a garish item perhaps useful for one of his gipsy disguises. He held it in his hands as if its bright dye bore a hidden message; it was his focussed concentration that finally caught my attention.

  “What is that, Holmes?”

  “The length of silk we bought in Aden. I thought to use it as an aide-mémoire, to bring back the details of that curious afternoon. The whole affair puzzles me still.”

  Recalling the events of Aden was something of a wrench, since so much had taken place in the intervening months—weeks in India tracking down a missing spy and jousting with a mad maharaja, followed by the better part of a month in Japan with all the complexity of events there, interspersed by the dream-plagued weeks at sea. Granted, we had nearly been killed in the Aden bazaar by a balcony falling on our heads, but near-death experiences were no rarity in my life with Holmes. I had in the end dismissed it as a curious series of events that might have had tragic consequences, and fortunately had not. Clearly, Holmes was not of the same mind.

  “It had to have been an accident, Holmes,” I objected. “The balcony fell because the bolts were old, not because someone tried to pull it down on our heads.”

  “So I tell myself.”

  “But yourself will not listen.”

  “A lifetime’s habit of self-preservation leaves one disinclined to accept the idea of coincidence.”

  “Holmes, one event does not a coincidence make.”

  “But two oddities catch at the mind.”

  “Two?”

  “The fallen balcony, and the ship’s passenger who enquired about us, then disembarked. In Aden.” He raised an eyebrow at me to underscore the importance of that last.

  “The ship’s . . . Oh, yes, Thomas Goodheart’s little story. A Southerner, didn’t he say?” Tommy Goodheart, American aristocrat and occasional Bolshevik, had led us a merry chase across India over the course of January and February. Deep in a tunnel beneath a hill palace, with the maharaja’s guards close on our heels, Tommy happened to mention that a female passenger on board our ship, a passenger who mysteriously disembarked in Aden, had been talking to him about Sherlock Holmes. Later, in a spymaster’s office one sultry afternoon in Delhi, Holmes had pressed the young man for further details, but there were few to be had.

  “From Savannah, or so she’d claimed. It might be noted that the accents of the American South are among the easiest to feign.”

  “Holmes,” I chided, “don’t you find it difficult to mistrust that the sun will rise in the east come morning?”

  “Not in the least. I am more than willing to operate under the hypothesis that past experience will continue to provide the paradigm for Nature’s functions. Although I do not believe that witnessing the sun rising in the west would cause my heart to stop.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Watching my wife go over the rail of a ship, however, might have done the job.”

  “I was only—”

  “You were three degrees from overbalancing.” His hard voice brooked no argument, and although that in itself would not normally have prevented me from arguing, at the moment all I could think of was my inadvertent shudder at the alluring smoothness of the ship’s wake.

  When I did not answer, he sighed. “Russell, clearly something is tormenting your mind. And while I firmly believe that all persons should be allowed to wrestle with their own demons, it is nonetheless possible that two minds working in tandem on the problem might have more effect than one tired mind on its own.”

  “Yes, very well,” I snapped. I set my feet onto the deck, then spent some time studying my hands while the words arranged themselves in my mind. “When I suggested that after Bombay we should go to San Francisco, it seemed a logical idea. My business in California is best served by my presence, and . . . Well, I thought it a means of saying my farewells, which I was in no condition to do when I left ten years ago. But I am finding that the nearer we get, the more I wish we’d just turned for home. I . . . I find I am dreading the entire thing.”

  “Of course you are,” he said. “It is quite natural that you do not wish to go to San Francisco.”

  “What do you mean?” I protested, stung. “It’s taken me days to admit to myself that I was wrong, yet you claim to have known all along?”

  “I do not say you are wrong, merely that you are torn. Russell, the moment we turned for California you became irritable, insomniac, restless, and without appetite. When we paused in Japan, your troubles were suspended—you slept, ate, and concentrated as you normally do—but when we resumed our easterly progress, they began again. What else could it be? Some curious aversion to the ship itself? I think that unlikely.”

  I could only stare at him, openmouthed, until his face twisted in a moue of impatience. “Russell, we are sailing on a straight path for the place that holds the most troubling memories of your childhood. It is only natural that you feel concern about seeing the place that burned to the ground when you were six—yes, yes, you weren’t there, but even if you were not present you would have been told about it, over and over. Furthermore, it is the place where, at the age of fourteen, you experienced the horrendous crash that killed your mother, your father, your brother, and nearly you. It would be decidedly odd if you were not fearful. What concerns me is that your degree of apprehension seems excessive. Those dreams, whatever their message, clearly spring from powerful roots.”

  “But these dreams have nothing to do with the accident. They’re nothing like the Dream I used to have when I was a child—the one I told you about. There’s no motorcar, no family. No fire or explosion, no road or cliffs. Not the same at all.”

  He thrust the scrap of orange into one pocket, then drew his pipe from another and started packing tobacco into its bowl. As he rolled the top of the pouch shut, he remarked, “This faceless man of the second dream. He seems to alarm but not threaten.”

  “That’s a fair description, yes.”

  “He does not reach for you, or harm you in any way?”

  “He just appears, says ‘Don’t be frightened, young lady,’ and leaves.”

  He paused with the brass lighter halfway to the bowl, and two sharp grey eyes locked on to me. “Young lady, or little girl?”

  “Young—No, you’re right, it’s little girl. How did you know that?”

  “That was the phrase you used the first time you told me.”

  “Well, it scarcely matters.”r />
  “I shouldn’t assume that,” replied my husband, in his customary irritatingly enigmatic style, and concentrated on getting the tobacco burning. When he had done so, he let out a fragrant cloud and sat back, his legs stretched out before him. “What do you suppose it means by his being faceless? Is it literal, or is something obscuring his features—a mask of some kind, perhaps, or heavy makeup?”

  I gazed out over the sea for a minute. “I just think of him as faceless, but it could be a white mask, or bandages, or as you say, heavy makeup. Like those dancers we saw in Japan, only without the features accentuated. He’s just . . . faceless.” It was frustrating, trying to grasp a thing so firmly lodged in the dim recesses of the mind.

  “And he appears in a white room.”

  “Yes, always.”

  “Tell me about the room.”

  “It’s brightly lit, windowless, and crowded with an odd assortment of furnishings.” I had already decided that this room was a place of importance to my subconscious mind, which had furnished it with elements from all the sides of my life. An almost mythic place, as it were, a sort of Platonic cave.

  “But not the same as the locked rooms of the third dream.”

  “Oh, no, nothing like. Those are dim and solid, this is bright and, I don’t know, soft somehow.” Womblike, I thought—other than the brightness.

  “Ah,” he said, and bit down on his pipe-stem with an air I knew well: The case was coming together in his mind.

  For some reason, that gesture made me uneasy; I got to my feet to walk over to the railing, looking down at the lower decks, refusing to rise to his bait.

  “It’s a tent,” he said after a minute.

  “From my childhood? Not very likely, Holmes—my mother wouldn’t have been caught dead tenting. We did have a summer house, south of San Francisco, and although we left the servants behind when we went there, it was a far cry from roughing it.”

  “Not a holiday. Following the earthquake and fire, the parks of San Francisco were covered with the canvas tents of refugees.”

  “I told you, I wasn’t there during the earthquake.”

  “So where were you?”

  “I don’t remember—I was six years old, for heaven’s sake, and we moved around. England, most likely. Or Boston. Not in San Francisco.”

  “You were born in London, and lived in California fourteen years later; were you not resident in between?”

  “On and off. Not the whole time,” I said, far more decisively than I felt. Did anyone pay much attention to memories of childhood? Personally, I rarely thought about them.

  “Where did you live when you were six years old, Russell?” he asked patiently.

  “Oh, Holmes, leave it, do.”

  “Where, Russell?”

  God, was the man out to drive me mad? “Boston, I think.”

  “Do you recall the house?”

  “Yes,” I said triumphantly, and turned to face him, my chin high. “A large brick mansion with a portico, a pianoforte in the parlour, and a stained-glass window over the stairway landing that used to cast its colours on the walls.”

  “Your house, or that of your grandparents?”

  “Ours, of course.” But the moment I said this, the stairway in memory became populated with a number of small white dogs, their fluffy bodies spattered magically with blue and red from the window. My grandmother’s dogs.

  No: I must have seen that when Grandmother came to visit.

  Bringing her dogs with her? Reluctantly, I prodded at the memory, trying to locate a bedroom or nursery I could call my own; all I came up with was an uncomfortable trundle bed in a room that smelt of lavender.

  Damnation. Why couldn’t I remember such a simple thing?

  My fingernails located a rough place on the wooden railing, and began to worry at it. “Honestly, Holmes? I don’t know.”

  “Russell, I propose that in all likelihood you were, in fact, in San Francisco during the earthquake. That would explain the flying objects in the first dream, don’t you think? And the soft white walls of the crowded room, a tent full of odds and ends rescued from a damaged or burning house.”

  “Damn it, Holmes, I was not there! Why are you so insistent that I was?”

  “Why are you so insistent that you were not? Russell, you never speak of your childhood, do you realise that?”

  “Neither do you.”

  “Precisely. Happy childhoods nurture memories; uncomfortable events cause the mind to wince away.”

  A splinter came abruptly up from the railing and drove itself into my finger. With a stifled oath, I sucked at the offending digit and shouted furiously around it, “I had a happy childhood!”

  “Certainly you did,” he retorted drily. “That is why you speak of it so freely.”

  “Later events made the memories painful.”

  “Russell, where did you live in 1906?”

  “I’m going to go find a plaster for this finger,” I told him, and went down the stairway at something close to a run.

  I had a happy childhood.

  I did not live in California during the quake.

  And I did not intend to linger in San Francisco long enough to dig over what sparse portions of my past lay there.

  Chapter Two

  It is a characteristic difficulty of shipboard life that one cannot escape an interrogator or a boor for long. It is particularly true when one is sharing rooms with one’s interrogator.

  So it was that the next morning, Holmes knew as well as I did that the dreams had not plagued me during the night. I did dream of the locked rooms, but for the first time since we had left Japan, the flying-objects nightmare did not arrive to jerk me gasping from my bed.

  The other two dreams persisted. The faceless man had returned, although he had stood clearly outlined in the door-way of a tent, and had not spoken. Still, his presence had not been as troublesome as before. Instead, that night and the following, the enigmatic concealed rooms became the focus for my sleeping mind, dimmer yet ever more sumptuously laid beneath the dust of disuse.

  Had I been in the city as a child of six? Had I felt the earth leap and split, watched half the city go up in flames in the worst fire America had ever seen? The disappearance of the first dream forced me to consider the possibility that Holmes was right, for it seemed almost as if, by naming the demon, he had stolen its authority.

  Later in the afternoon of our last full day at sea, another image came to me that confirmed Holmes’ interpretation beyond a doubt. The day was warm and bright and, passing under the ship’s white canvas sun awnings, I was suddenly visited by a vision of my mother, wearing men’s trousers, a ridiculous wide-brimmed straw hat with an enormous orange silk flower, and a delicious, self-mocking grin. She was turning from an open fire with a cast-iron skillet in one hand, a large spoon in the other, the bright canvas of an Army tent behind her; for a moment it was as if a door had been thrown open, permitting me, along with that tantalising glimpse, all the sensations the room-dream held: a thud of heavy sound beneath the crisp noise of breaking glass, a sharp thrill of terror, the feel of arms wrapping around me, and over it all an angry red haze. Then the door slammed shut, and I stood motionless for a long time, until a child ran past and broke my reverie.

  It was, I knew without question, real. For that brief glimpse of recovered memory, I could forgive Holmes any degree of meddling. I could even admit to him that he was right: I had been in San Francisco during the earthquake, a child of six.

  Why, however, had I pushed away all memory of the event?

  We came at last to my childhood home, the West’s biggest, youngest city, which spread over the end of a peninsula between ocean and bay. Eighty years ago, a ship coming through the Golden Gate would have seen nothing but a handful of Indian shacks clustered around a crumbling mission. Then, in 1848, John Marshall picked up a gleaming lump of yellow metal from a creek near Sutter’s Mill, and the world came pouring in.

  I had relatives in that first wave,
victims of gold fever who worked claims, made fortunes, and lost them again. I had other relatives who joined the second wave of those who supplied and serviced the miners; their fortunes were more slowly made, and not as quickly lost. But unlike the others who now reigned supreme in the state of California, my grandfather had clung to his East Coast roots: Although he had built a house in San Francisco, it had been on Pacific Heights, keeping its distance from the showy Nob Hill mansions of Hopkins and Stanford; and although he had kept his holdings and remained a financial power on the West Coast, he had also bowed to his wife’s demands that they return to the civilised world of Boston to raise their children, and thus loosed his hold on Californian political authority.

  Still, my restless iconoclast of a father had claimed San Francisco as his home, declaring his independence by settling his Jewish-English wife in the family house there, and taking control of the family’s California business interests. My father loved California, that much I knew, and I remembered him speaking of San Francisco as The City, a phrase that from my mother’s lips meant London. I remembered almost nothing about the place itself, but I looked forward to making The City’s acquaintance before I turned my back on her for good.

  Thus it was that on a morning in late April, seventy-five years after the gold rush began, I stood on the deck and saw the Gate that had welcomed my father’s people, smooth hills bracketing the entrance to the bay—green now following the winter rains, but golden in summer’s long drought. Stern gun placements protruded from the hills on either side, but as we entered the Golden Gate and followed the curve of the land to our right, the white-walled city that carpeted a dozen or more hills came into view, its myriad piers and docks stretching long fingers out into the bay.

  Our pilot took us in to one gleaming set of buildings not far from the terminal where ferries bustled in and out. We eased slowly in, coming to rest with a barely perceptible judder; ropes were cast and tied; the crowds on board and on land pressed towards each other impatiently, while behind them rough stevedores lounged among the lorries and heavy wagons, smoking and making conversation. The first officials started up the board walkway; as if their uniforms made for a signal, the passengers turned and scurried for their cabins.