Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

  Every weekend for two years, you have tricked or lured yourself to come to the Rose Crystal Chamber in the North Wing.

  Only when you enter here, can you see and read these words.

  Only when you enter here, do you remember love.

  “I am yours,” Laureline murmured softly, “not his.”

  Only When You Enter Here

  “How is this possible?” Henry muttered furiously, rubbing his temples. “I mean, scientifically, how is it possible? Is there a gas in the air? Some hypnotic power in the lamp…”

  She said, “Give it a moment. It will slowly come back to you. If we are careful, you and I, we can write ourselves notes to remind or trick or lure us into coming back in here. Leaving a book behind that you need for your research or something.” She drew out a notebook smaller than the palm of her hand, bound in tooled pink leather. It had the slenderest possible little pencil tucked in the spine, with an equally dainty tassel.

  “See?” She held her little book up, opened a page.

  Friday: Unlock the Rose Door for H; he left his Mallory in the desk. V Important!

  She said, “But if I write any plain and open words, words of love, my eye cannot see them, not when I am in the Out-of-Doors World. Only here in the Inner World. We’ve experimented before, tried dozens of things. You forget the moment your heart passes over the threshold of the door or window. Yes, you tried climbing out the window once. You suddenly woke up, and found yourself clinging to the wall outside, with no memory of how you got there.”

  “No, I do remember that. I was helping one of the Levrier boys clean the gutters, and the wind gusted, and the ladder fell…”

  “What color was the ladder? Wood or aluminium? What happened to the boys that they did not immediately lift the ladder again? There were no boys. There was no ladder.”

  He was silent.

  Laureline said, “You see? The spell is very subtle. It not only sponges out memories, it covers them over with false ones. It explains away little inconsistencies. It made you forget this house entirely, this last time. Even though you have been coming here for years! Before, you were able to remember the house and the outside of the chamber. It is getting stronger, not weaker. It is an enemy, and a cunning one…”

  Henry had rolled up his sleeve. He was staring in horror at the large and angular knife-scars which covered his left forearm from elbow to wrist. Two-year-old scars. The letters spelled out I LOVE LdL.

  Henry said, “But it? It who? Some mind, some deliberate thing, must be doing this!”

  “Must it? Does a deliberate mind send dreams, the little details in a dream, the color of a pair of shoes, or the words spoken by a figure we meet? Or do we do it to ourselves?”

  “How can we fight this?” Henry asked angrily.

  Laureline said, “We can influence ourselves subtly. The last time we were here, you wrote The Memory Palace of Giordano Bruno in your little memorandum book.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I became fascinated with the idea of picking up books about Bruno from the library. He died in 1600, burned as a heretic. Some say he was a warlock. He was famed for having the best memory in the world, the best in all history. He developed what he called the Ancient Art of Memory, mnemonics, based on the writings of the Greeks.”

  She was frowning, biting her thumbnail delicately, staring at the floor. “How does it work? How can that help us?”

  “The idea was to build an imaginary house in your mind, a palace of memory, so that every room and bit of furniture is just so. You use rhymes and colors and figures from astrology or myth to help keep things in order. In each room, you fix an image to remind you of what you want to remember. For example, I can never remember the taxonomic classifications, so in the den, beneath the stuffed heads of a leopard, lion, and a she-wolf, I imagined a chessboard made of reddish-purple glass and I have a crowned king in an ermine-lined robe playing a game. I can remember Kings Play Chess on Fuchsia Glass Surfaces. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genre, species.”

  “So?”

  “These led to other books on memory and memory-binding. I came across the theory of state-related memory. You know drunks who wake sober on Monday, and forget the whole weekend of what they did. The surprising thing is next time they’re plastered, the forgotten memories can return. The same with certain states of mind, drugs, hypnosis, altered states, or even returning to an old place. Memory retrieval is most efficient when a man is in the same state of consciousness as he was when the memory was formed.”

  “What does it mean?” she asked softly, searching his face with her eyes.

  “Something in this chamber is changing our state of consciousness.”

  “And what does that mean?”

  He looked bewildered. “I–but I don’t know what it means. It is a start. If we can think of a solution, solve the puzzle…”

  Laureline sighed scornfully. “You know we will forget the answer the moment we step out of this chamber, and the puzzle too. What is worse is that if I subconsciously influence myself, my out-of-doors self, to call off the wedding, then I will lose you too! Manfred owns the house and the Rose Crystal Chamber.”

  She pulled away from him now, and went and sat on a purple divan, and put her face in her hands.

  “Only here, in this chamber, am I am alive. Out there, I am a sleepwalker.” A broken sigh came from her. “I am so very weary of this! For two years we’ve been trying to make our Outer Selves remember, to let the truth out! But don’t you see what’s happened? What is happening to me? I’ve turned into a shameless flirt!”

  Henry said gallantly, “I don’t know what you mean!”

  She raised her face from her hands, and her eyes were like two green rays boring into him scornfully. “So you did not notice how many times outside me contrived to press up against you this evening, to take your hand, to fall into your arms? I do not know which is more shameful: being a shameless hoyden or one who is so amateurish that the efforts go unnoticed!”

  “No, Outside Me thinks you are very attractive indeed,” said Henry. “He is just not going to hurt his friends by—wait a minute! Why am I apologizing for him? I mean, for me? In any case, you are not a flirt. All that was happening was that you subconsciously were aware of your true self. Your true heart. The real you was pushing you into my arms. You should be happy! It means we can beat this thing! Break it! My love, my darling, nothing can keep us apart!”

  “But something is. The marriage is two months from now. Something, something we cannot understand, cannot put a name to, has kept us apart for two years. Six hundred days and counting we have been separated. Sixty days remain. The nothing that keeps us apart is amnesia. It is time for firmer steps.”

  Henry’s face darkened. “Don’t bring this up again.”

  “I tell you—there is only one way to break a spell in a fairy tale like this. Sleeping Beauty was not just kissed, you know. Prince Charming needed a deeper intimacy to wake his love. The Brothers Grimm just cleaned the story up. Here is a roomy purple couch. We can light a fire in the rose-red marble fireplace to warm us. Sit with me! Take me in your arms!”

  She tugged on his hand, urging him to lower himself. Henry shook his head.

  Laureline said, “But everyone does it these days!”

  “Everyone can go to the devil. All we need do is bring a parson in here, have us perform the ceremony.”

  Her green eyes flashed scornfully. “And then what? After the Honeymoon, once the nuptials are over, and we’ve consummated the wedding, as soon as I walk downstairs, I will be unwed again, and marry Manfred, an adulteress in my own house? A different husband for every floor of the manor? I can go back and forth between this chamber and the master bedroom on cold nights, when one or the other of you grows tired. That will be a new scandal, even for England.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” he snapped.

  Laureline’s eyes grew wide with dismay, and her lip trembled.

  He knelt where she was kneeling b
efore the divan, and took her hands in his, and kissed her. “Sorry—I don’t mean to be sharp.”

  “No, it is my fault. I don’t know what has come over me. I am so … so…”

  “Darling, I know. Shush. I know. But maybe our wedding vows would break the spell. There is an odd power in those old sacraments. Then we can consummate our love, and we will be free.”

  She rolled her eyes in scorn yet again. “Fine! You write a note to yourself to invite a minister into this chamber when I am here. And somehow talk me into bringing a wedding dress. But I think those notes will be ones your eyes will never let you read, once you are out-of-doors. They are too close to the heart of the matter.”

  He glared at his scarred arm. “Maybe…”

  Laureline said, “Do let me suggest a plan, for once. Let us try your new method. Write down in your little black book these words: Buy diamond necklace. Now in your memory palace, let us say in the swimming pool in the back, picture me wearing a black one-piece bathing suit, but with diamonds on a chain around my neck. See?”

  He said, “What will that accomplish?”

  “You are going to buy me a diamond necklace. When you see it on me, you will remember. Also, write down Golf on Wednesday the 27th.” She smiled, showing her dimples, her eyelids half-lowered, as she scribbled in her own little pink-leather notebook.

  Henry said, “How is this going to work for us? There is no way Outside Me would buy a diamond necklace as a present for his best friend’s fiancée. For one thing, how can I afford it?”

  But Laureline said, “If I tell you the whole plan, that might drive the memory too close to the forbidden memory of love, and you will forget it. But if you don’t know the details, well, you might recall just enough to do as I say. Trust me. We only have two months. I have written myself notes of very natural things for my Otherself do to, that will ensure you and I can meet here again.”

  Henry said, “How is it that this lamp was lit, just in this one room, and you have the key to it?”

  Laureline said, “I arranged it. Last time we were here together, I wrote myself a reminder note to ask Manfred to let me see to moving the furniture out of this chamber.”

  “Out of the house?” asked Henry.

  “The lawyers are forcing us to move materials left behind into storage until the ownership questions are cleared up. Naturally, every time I stepped into it intending to pack a box, I remembered myself, and left everything as it is. I was here earlier today, looking for Manfred. When I came in here, I remembered myself again, and lit the lamp, hoping it would lure us back in, once we found the house empty. I even arranged for this!”

  And with a grin, she danced over to one of the hanging silk drapes, and pulled it aside. Here was an ice bucket and bottles of champagne. She smiled a most luxurious smile. “Why don’t you pry open one of these stubborn corks, while I slip into something more comfortable? I tricked myself into bringing something for an overnight stay. Nice in a naughty way.”

  Like a man walking into the teeth of an arctic wind, Henry forced himself to turn away, and, step by leaden step, he walked toward the door behind which the upward stair waited.

  She said, “Wait! What are you doing? There is no other place to sleep.”

  “But with you?” He hefted the flashlight in his hand. He would be able to find his way back to the one inn on the island, with that light.

  Her lips trembled, but she said nothing.

  Henry gritted his teeth and turned his face away, knowing one look at her would shatter his resolve. “My love, I adore you. Believe that. That means I love you too much to be selfish, to demean you.”

  She rushed up behind him, put her arms around him, put her cheek against his back. “I want to be demeaned, if it is by you. You may do what you’d like to me.”

  “Don’t talk that way!”

  “How else can I prove to you that nothing else matters, but us?”

  Henry shook his head. “I will have you as an honest woman, or not at all. In the sunlight, not in the shadows. I will not betray Manfred.”

  “But what if his life outside is as meaningless to him as ours are to us? To whom are you really being loyal?”

  He turned, and with some difficulty, disentangled himself from her. “One day the spell will break. We will be wed. I promise it! One day, your happiness and mine will be complete. You will belong to me and you will own me. On that day, I will not look back and regret that I did not love you strongly enough. You are worth the wait.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You go out into that oblivion and you will forget your promise the moment your heart passes over that threshold. And I will stay here all night, alone, knowing that you walked away from me.”

  He kissed her roughly, intending it to be goodbye, but she pulled him with her small hands back toward the center of the chamber, toward the divan, toward the champagne. He took one step in that direction with her, then a second, and a third.

  But then he firmly, but gently, put her aside, and turned, and walked out the door.

  4. Tales of Ancient Water Maidens

  Old and Forgotten Woes

  When Hal and Manfred met next, it was at a pub called the Old Granary in Dorset. They sat on a balcony with the River Frome chuckling and sliding on below, and beyond was the green view of the Purbeck Hills. Hal drank the Tanglefoot ale, brewed by a family of brewers who had been in business longer than his home country. Manfred drank the Kronenbourg Lager.

  At first they spoke seriously, as friends do, about their progress and obstacles with their dissertations, but as the ale flowed freely and the afternoon progressed, the talk turned to more frivolous and exotic topics.

  Hal looked at Manfred over the rim of his ale cup. Manfred was thirty years old, with a square brow hanging over deepset eyes. This gave his face an aspect of brooding and scowling which receded when he smiled, but never entirely vanished. His cheek bones were high and definite, his nose like the beak of a hawk. His jaw jutted, his lips were thick and red as those of an Assyrian. His hair was so dark as to seem almost blue. At all hours, even when he had just shaved with a close razor, his chin and jawline was shadowed with the hint of dark, coarse hair. He did not have the height of Hal, nor his wide shoulders, but he was thick through the chest, as stout as an old oak barrel, and his neck and arms were surprisingly muscular.

  “I am surprised you drink a German brew, you being a lord now, and such,” said Hal with an easy grin. “Surely love of Queen and Country demands otherwise? Surely there is some law from the time of Henry the Second, or something, demanding true Englishmen drink only their own true England beer?”

  Manfred, as always, seemed to be glowering under his close-knit brows, but a slight smile touched his lip. “This lager is from France, and in the time of Henry the Second, we ruled France, or part of her. Brewed by a German family, of course. Trust the Huns with hops, the Gauls with grapes. Everything fine and good among the English came from the Continent. This was a haunt of giants before Brutus came, you know, and Caesar saw nothing but savages painted blue, Picts and cannibals, and druids burning slaves alive in wicker men on the moor. England is like a dark house of forgotten things, with basement, cellar, bunker and dungeon leading down to ever darker things no one remembers. Sometimes it is a mercy to forget.”

  “That is a glum attitude!” protested Hal.

  “So says the Yank, whose country is hardly old enough to wipe its own bum. You Yanks still berate and bewail the bad deeds of yesterday, your one and only civil war, your slave-trade, driving off the Indians. When were those deeds done? Mere moments ago. We have had nine civil wars or more, and our slave trade since the time of John Hawkins swelled to encompass the world entire! Christendom was shipwrecked on this stony-hearted island in 1536, split in two, never to be whole again. All the subsequent wars in Europe spring from that, for without Henry and good queen Bess, the Reformation would have been suppressed like every other heresy before it. Without the divide between Catholic and Protestant kin
gs, perhaps one contender would have eventually led the Holy Roman Empire from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains, and world wars never been invented. Earlier, the troubles of Ireland started in 1192. Earlier still, Arthur in 518 fought the battle of Badon Hill, where he slew eightscore men singlehandedly: and the grief of that still haunts the Badbury Rings, through green turf covers the Roman stones. What are the ills of your measly two hundred years compared to that?”

  “Haunts as in haunting?”

  “Of course. The locals say the shades of Arthur and his knights appear there on moonless nights, fighting ghostly foes. In 1970 the spectral armies drove away an archeological expedition, who fled in panic from the clamor of an unseen battle in the air. And a ghost of a knight with a hideously scarred face was seen at night there, as recently as 1977.”

  “A real ghost?”

  Manfred smiled again. “I am glad you did not say a real, live ghost.”

  Hal laughed with joy. Manfred was the only man he’d met in Oxford who took the older tales and yarns completely seriously. Even the other students of history and ancient literature seem to regard the past as dead, or, worse, as absurd. They almost seemed like amnesiacs, unaware of the true glory of their ancient and richly-fabled island even while they vivisected the records of it.

  Not Manfred. He seemed to Hal to be a living relic of the days of yore, of the times of myth, like a wizard who had stepped out of an enchanted sleep into the modern world.

  Manfred was by far the most open-minded man Hal had ever met. Hal could have an honest conversation with him without ever once having to worry about stepping onto the invisible landmines and pitfalls of forbidden topics and unspoken thoughts with which every other man he knew surrounded his conversation.

  Best of all, he was as deeply interested in the topic of Hal’s dissertation as Hal was in his. It was a joy to converse with someone who valued all the old, strong, beautiful things that Hal himself so cherished.

  There was one other topic upon which they agreed, as well; they were the only two men either of them knew who still believed in the wisdom of chastity.