The Memory Palace

by Gill Alderman

  The big door had no locks or bolts, but holes where they had been. A thick piece of string dangled. He lifted his arms to tug at it, expecting resistance, forgetting. The nimble hands ran down his arms, inserted their fingers between door and frame, felt around. While the useless muscles in his arms moved involuntarily the door opened. Outside, a dingy thoroughfare made darker by falling rain led away into greyness. Guy turned in the doorway, waiting as the hands came back to him and tucked themselves neatly away in his pockets. Daylight revealed more words, carved on a huge sheet of grey marble at the stair-foot. He made some of them out:

  “‘SOIERIES’ and ‘G. PAON, (Appartement)’

  The street led nowhere, debouching into a rough courtyard surrounded by high buildings of seven or eight storeys. He looked up, searching the windowed façades for a clue, for some sign of life. Some of the windows were curtained, some open; nothing moved. He scanned the steep faces of the buildings again: nothing; saw, with relief, an archway. Dark beneath it, always dark. That sign, high up: Rue des Voraces – should he follow where the narrow street led? He stumbled against the kerb-stones and fell sprawling in the puddles. Another archway reared itself above his head. Slowly he crawled forward and, pushing with head and shoulders against the wall, resumed his upright position. This was the way forward, along this tunnel.

  His mind led him on, through the maze. And now, he thought, I’m in a courtyard, but which one? Here is a flight of stairs and I shall climb them going up and across and up and across until at the top here’s another corridor (must be high) and a last flight with – ha – another handrail and a door through which I will pass (Hands!) though above, the underface of the stone steps continues. These steps lead down, turn; just like those in the cathedral tower, a spiral so tread with care at the outer edge because in the centre the steps are too narrow for any but the eleven year-olds’ feet. Through the window-less frame another courtyard. At the bottom another dark door but passing out of this, avoiding the old car seat and the bloody rags, I see a double row of tiny cupboards, each one painted with words in white, or black – or silver: A. Lavallé, D. Morel, Florent Navarre. Here, a door is broken, envelopes inside! Washing in this courtyard, wet as the miry ground. Hurry, wet as the washing and the dirty ground, beneath the arched doorway and begin to climb the steps. The windows on the stairs are blocked with walls of plastered stone but the arched metal frames remain. The scene is closed to view, so continue upwards into the light, dull, cold and strong. Come out – emerge in a street where a car (a Renault) is parked at the bottom of, dear God, a flight of stone steps which steps approach, avoiding a bronze lion on the kerb. His forefeet guard a tap. Climb. Ascend in the rain without slipping, fast as I can. Here at the top the street goes mercifully downhill and there are trees and a drain cover in the centre of the path, more steps but to the left. No need to go down them but pause – take in the misted view of roofs and towers far below, cars moving, two rivers. This is Lyon, the horse-butcher said. There is a Mini parked further down and I will walk that far before I rest.

  The Mini, which has figures on it, 2539 JJ68. It is grey like the dusk which creeps from every doorway and arched opening and is starting to fill the street. But I must go on, down, always down.

  Guy walked as quickly as he was able, veering in his course along the uneven pavement. There were a few passers-by, hurrying in winter coats or beneath umbrellas. They took him for a drunk and smiled, or crossed the street. One woman pitied him, alone and wet, night coming on; but the way was easier now he had quitted the labyrinthine traboules for the streets where each cross-roads presented an easy problem: which way? Downhill. And so he came into broader streets where he found rushing traffic which confounded him, a tunnel beneath the busy road and, beyond it, the public buildings and metropolitan elegance of Lyon, fountains adding their cascades of water to the falling rain, bright lights reflected, shop windows lit and, finally, a warm and sheltered doorway with a corner dark enough to hide him while he rested.

  He woke, bitterly cold. The rain had got into his bed and the flapping sheet was wet. It blew against him and he read the lettering on it: GUY PARADOS, ROMANCIER, DIS-PARU AU MOIS DE JUIN A LYON. His own face smiled up at him from the paper and from a different, sunnier time. Shuffling upwards, pressed against the wall, he twisted and jerked his body to rid it of the clinging and unwanted reminder. He walked. The cold had got right inside, deep under his sodden clothes; his hands were dead weights, heavy in his pockets, immovable sinew and bone. He must get warm.

  The lighted windows – chocolates, clothing, sausages, flowers – disappeared. Waste ground now, but lit. On the wall, a red mouth opened wide, screaming. Perhaps it was the source of the thunder, of the noise which rolled about him. In pain, for it was white and blue and red, torn from its column, sundered from its bodily root and neck, the head screamed. He walked past it. The street was more pleasant here, though empty of fellows and loud with the storm he was following. The yellow windows were misted over with warmth and there the people were, inside, sitting in comfort, eating, ignoring the noise. Where was its source?

  The row of cars glistened. A white one, a green one, a scarlet shape he knew well, or was it Guy Parados, Chris Young maybe, who had told him about the marvellous vehicle coloured like Christ’s blood, or Lèni’s, or his own cascading higher than a fountain? Guy’s car had Guy’s name on it; this one had too many numbers, one-two-three-four, seven of them. The word was the right one though: A-u-d-i.

  He paused beside the Audi, looking for more words, looking for clues. Blue again, how fond they were of electric blue neon and arabesques to make their arcane messages in the falling rain: DISCO < PHEDRE > DISCO. People here, more people – who did not turn to help him. Finding the open door, he went in on the heels of the laughing, rain-bespattered crowd and found his own face staring at him from the mirror which closed off the passage-way. Turn left. The mirrors came too, marching beside him, reflecting his new image and the already-dancing, prancing others in their tight and brightly-coloured clothes. He stumbled against them as he went, and one or two shrieked and one or two swore, but none of them stopped dancing, moving always faster as the storm increased. He slipped. The floor was glass and underneath it demons raged in a fiery pit while here the lights flashed on and on now blue now green now silver like the dress of this wild girl who was falling with him and screaming louder than the thunderous music ‘Gu-uy-uy-uy-uy!’

  The blond boy knelt down. All down, all on the shining floor looking at themselves. All fall down. The boy spoke,

  ‘Dad? – Dad! What the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Got out – came down. All the hills.’ He could not manage more. His hands had woken in his pockets and were scrambling out. The left was carrying something between first finger and thumb, running on the other three up, over his face. It scurried to his ears, left and right. A pleasant dimness succeeded the flashing lights as the sunglasses settled on the bridge of his nose and he watched both hands run in tones of brown and sepia across the girl’s spread hair and over the small promontory of her chin until, reaching her slender throat round which a black ribbon was tied tight, they fastened themselves over the ribbon and squeezed. The boy shook the girl hard – her body flopped and lolled like the cloth limbs of a puppet – and, his own hands encountering the severed ones, began to scream and pull at them.

  ‘Alice! My God! Alice, the hands! Alice!’

  The music never ceased and the dancers whirled on. He was alone again, in the centre of the crowd. SORTIE, the new letters said, SORTIE, pulsing with the dimmed lights. He crawled towards them and his sunglasses fell off. The letters were red like the car, or blood or the red flush the absinthe brought to Lèni’s cheeks or the roses-of-death which, spreading under Nemione’s high cheek-bones so alarmed me that I snatched a feather from the wing of the sleeping owl, Strix, and held it to her nostrils to see if she breathed. The owl did not wake, head turned backward, feathery horns laid flat, but Nemione did and sneezed
the feather away.

  Nemione favoured me with a lingering blue gaze, but it was an echo of her old, spirited glance. ‘Koschei! I suppose you came to see if I was dead?’

  ‘No, Lady, but to deny the rumours which abound in Pargur of your death.’

  ‘I am ill, it is true, but they must want added tragedy if they talk of burying me.’

  ‘That flush on your cheeks – it does not bode well.’

  ‘Pooh, I have been asleep: that is all. Have you come in peace or to torment me?’

  ‘I come as a friend, an old friend from the days of yore –’

  ‘Such a friend – how I love my enemies! When we were young, Koschei, we had the sanguine tempers of the beasts. What are we now but ancient stories?’

  ‘We are King and Queen, though we have always lived apart.’

  ‘Well, Koschei, you would not want me now. I am Famine. Look at my hands.’

  I sat on a stool beside her and took her wasted hands in mine. The blue veins showed, gnarled traceries, through transparent skin and the bones were long ivory skewers. Nemione’s face and figure were similarly consumed, and her dress of grey and her grey and white furs did not help dispel my impression that she was near death. The roses in her cheeks supplied some colour – she was beautiful even so, a graceful Death or an elegant Pestilence adorned with diamond rings whose glacial stones shone in the firelight, whose sapphire eyes had grown as cold as northern winters. Her magic couch, which slumbered easily beneath her bird’s weight, had also suffered from the years of famine and was white all over, save for its wooden head and feet. She closed her eyes and slept again and, softly releasing her hands, I went across to the fireplace – the same great cavern in which my demons had danced and my ghosts had played their play, so long ago – and stirred and fuelled the fire.

  Fallen timber was what she burned there, dry or rotted trees from the lands which once were forest covering the greater part of Malthassa. It burned well, fierce and hot, and was soon ashes. I piled on more – no one lacked for dead wood to burn.

  This room, once the place in which she made and studied magic, was in these days of dearth and decay her Winter Parlour. Snow lay deep upon the window ledges outside, all I could see of the ravished land Malthassa had become. In summer, though there was little difference, mud and rain replacing ice and snow, she removed to her house of glass atop the keep of Castle Lorne and tried in vain to revive her orchids, creepers and flowering plants. These, which used to blossom with great vigour and stupendous colour, were dead stalks to which a clung a few twisted brown leaves and a withered fruit or two. Neither magic nor water would bring them back from the dead. In the castle, heavy furs and thick woollen cloth had replaced the silk and velvet arras and nobody wore less than three layers of clothing. The familiars had all grown dense coats, even the naked dog which was covered in trailing black hair. Only Nemione’s cold-blooded Child, asleep on the couch with the rest, remained what she had always been, a creature more akin to fish than beast or fowl, her blue-green skin as chilly as the falling water of a cascade, colder than the drifted snow.

  As I sat there by the fire, plaster fell from the ceiling to lie on that which had fallen before and never been swept up, for the castle servants were too busy bringing in wood to keep the place warm enough for life; some, whose parents and siblings no doubt were starving in the wasted forest, had left without leave or word. The pellets the horned owl cast up, small cartridges of mouse-skin and – bone, lay on and in the fallen pargeting. Castle Lorne’s slow decay had begun with Nemione’s, or Nemione’s with her castle’s: I was not sure. It held itself miraculously up, on its steep riverside rock – looked, from a distant vantage point, complete and strong, just as my Lady kept her skin-deep beauty though her body rotted to the core. A complete invalid, she sat all day on her couch and lay sleepless all night long in her curtained bed. Erchon, her Silver Dwarf, kept guard, lying with poison-tipped rapier in the doorway, the end of a trip-rope in his dagger-hand.

  The Plague raged in many a city and market town – and there were many fatal ailments which went by this general name: the Bubonic, the Black, the Yellow, the Cachexic, the Defluxive, Felonic, Fistulous, Obstructive, Strangury and Tetterous. Malthassa’s quacks and doctors made their diagnoses and sent at once for a priest. All too soon it was impossible to find a doctor. Every one of them was dead, like their patients and the priests, of whatever god. Rats swarmed where once children had played. The grimmest portent, the hungry Duschma, was seen in every corner of the land.

  As for myself, Koschei Corbillion, Prince, Mage and Archmage, I was never alone, pursued as all magicians must be by the demons of Greed and Ambition and, in my unique case, Memory. I visited the Memory Palace often. Once there and snug, I dusted and re-examined all the artefacts I had brought together and puzzled over some which I could not remember collecting, two chiming silver balls and a pair of spectacles whose lenses (no use to magnify) were dark and kept out the light when they were put on. The afternoon’s warmth vanished the first time I tried them. On the second occasion they caused me to see terrifying visions of a land where naked dancers wheel in perpetual motion and a lustful hag bestrides a thin young man. The third time I tried the magic eye-glasses I saw Death, who sat beneath a gallows-tree, grin at me and I knocked the cursed things from my face and trod them till they were powder. I am not easily made fearful but I went then to the book in which my soul was hid and peeped at him to be sure he was safe. And I prospered thereafter, my fragile and fastidious soul well-hidden in that poetry book. I affected a certain style familiar to those who read of magicians and know how we live – to wit, I grew my grizzled beard longer than was comfortable or fashionable, dressed always in black or dark red, carried a staff (a trifling thing which could, when I waved it, summon up a sumptuous meal, or jewels to please a lady) and stopped trimming my fingernails which grew into hard talons and curled back upon themselves, as do the tusks of potent boars. Such petty distractions helped me forget the wrong which Peder Drum did me when, using the spoken charm he had heard me utter in the balloon, he was transported to Peklo Tower. Finding me in undress and deep in the contemplation of my Art, he wrought such irreversible harm upon me that I cannot speak further of it – suffice it to say, he paid well and Baptist Olburn was the man I chose to extract his payment from him. Like Manderel Valdine, he has no grave and no memorial but the hungry maws of Pargur pye-dogs and the stinking turds they drop when they have eaten meat.

  Sometimes, once or twice a month, the starving citizenry attempted to storm Castle Sehol and were driven back before they reached its walls. Their charges and the noise they made were regular diversions for me as I sat safe within the castle’s impregnable defences or else worked esoteric magic in Peklo where my mirrors, globe and map kept me ahead of the mob. I grew accustomed – I had endless practise – to the cold. Roszi’s fiery body warmed me at night, close against my back while on the other side, her pretty face to mine, the faithful Friendship clung, her warm brush close against my wrecked manhood – there, I speak my secret openly! – or caressed the single dug Nemione had wished on me. Sometimes the juggler (whose name was Concordis) joined us to chafe and cradle my cold feet. So, the two women and the golden-headed demon warmed me and I slept in comfort, forgetting the misfortune which had freed me from the tyranny of Love. I was eventually able, as you see, to visit Nemione in complete composure, without one lustful thought and without rousing Erchon’s ire.

  The cry of the owl brought me to myself. This is what she said: ‘Oh-o-o-o-o that I had never been bor-r-r-r-r-n.’ Nemione did not stir, but the owl, with a twitch of her wings, slipped from her perch and those soft wings which should have borne her up never opened. She fell to the floor, dead, while her song echoed from the cold stone of the walls. I reached out to retrieve her body from the rubbish on the floor and, as I did so, saw a little transparent thing slip from it and run to the window. It was Nemione’s soul, which she had hidden in the body of the owl and which, half-dead
itself, now ran confusedly away. I saw it floating in the window-space before it dropped from sight below the ledge, as much a mote driven before the wind as the snow which began relentlessly to fall.

  I left the fireside and crossed the room to Nemione. The owl feather lay where she had blown it, on the skirt of her gown. I picked it up and again held it to her nose knowing, even as I watched it for a sign of movement, for a scrap of hope, that it would not stir. The monkey, Halfman, crept from his warm nest under the other familiars and whimpered, scratching at Nemione’s hand with his, so like a human hand. The Child awoke and gave her forlorn otter’s cry. I felt the room grow colder and snowflakes whirled in from the open door which, as he crawled towards it across the endless, mirrored floor seemed more like an exit from hell than the blessedly open back door of a disco. His head was clear. Whatever he was leaving had no further place in his life here. They were all dead anyway, or transformed, Lèni and Helen, Alice and Roszi, and he was happy to be crawling, knee before stump, away from them into the snow. He wondered if it would be kinder to him than the rain.

  On the threshold he paused, in case they wanted to run after and detain him. No one came so he continued his slow journey into the dark, feeling the wind rise about him as he went, almost as if he, himself, Guy Parados, had bidden it be his companion and harbinger.

  PART THREE

  PARADISE FOUND

  ‘What is now proved was only once imagin’d

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  The darkness had withdrawn; perhaps he had been all night crawling down this alley to nowhere, soaking his already-sodden clothes, chilling his already-cold feet and the mutilations which were his arms. But the snow whirling about him made it hard to distinguish anything. The faint light ahead might be no more than the inhospitable light of a street lamp at the alley’s end – so it had an end – or new day. He need only crawl a little distance to find it, incapable of thinking further. The wind blew snow into his open, labouring mouth and covered his eyelids and lashes in soft, blinkering quilts; but there was something, directly ahead, a moving snowy form. What it was: impossible to tell. It took the shape of a tree and blew apart, of a mountain, of a ghost, of a bull, and again built itself up out of the half-light and the whirling snow. Whatever it was, it seemed to come no closer. Perhaps it moved before him and he, following it, would never catch up but creep for ever over the waste? A terrible weariness dragged at him, pulling him down to the ground, and he sprawled there seeing, even through his freezing tears of desperation, that the inhospitable ground was not tarmac or paving-stones but clean yellow earth across which the blown snow rolled swiftly and that there was grass growing in it, sparse stems blighted by winter but nevertheless alive. When the storm had overcome him and he lay dead upon it, the grass would continue his struggle with death and, triumphing, grow green and tall above him while its busy roots worked in his cadaver.