Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

  “Surely such things are just stories told by hysterics?” said Hal, returning to their conversation after emptying his ale.

  “All of them?” Manfred looked skeptical. “Every story ever, even those told by sober men with nothing to gain by it? That may be more farfetched than believing in ghosts.”

  “What else could ghost stories be?”

  “Something mankind has never seen before, or, far more likely, something our ancestors lived with daily, but which we forget. Perhaps a ghost is an echo from that time: a psychic residue. Perhaps it is the senility of the world trying to remember old and terrible tragedies and crimes, but not able to bring them clearly enough into focus to materialize them.”

  As if a small, inner voice were urging him, Hal said, “That reminds me! I just read a fascinating book on mnemonics. It is the art of building a memory mansion so that nothing is ever forgotten. You simply must read it.”

  “I am rather busy, between my schoolwork and my legal tribulations–”

  “It is fascinating! It will help with your schoolwork—how could it not?” Hal was half surprised to see his hands had, as if without consulting him, unzipped his rucksack, and pulled the book out, proffering it across the table. “Please! For me! I insist!”

  Manfred looked puzzled. “You seem rather keen on–”

  “You must read it! It is that good!”

  Manfred eventually agreed to take it, to make the time to read it. But he muttered, “I am not sure abolishing forgetfulness is a help. Perhaps we should be grateful that the world has amnesia.”

  “To the contrary! If the world could recollect Arthur in all his glory, manifest his ghost as a physical reality in broad daylight, surely he would set to rights all the wrongs of England of which you so complain. In any case, why list the victory of Arthur as an evil akin to the Invasion of Ireland?”

  “I did not call it an evil, but said it was a cause for grief.”

  “Why would anyone be grief-stricken at the victory of Arthur?”

  “Surely Mordred, for one.” Manfred smiled again, and again it seemed to be an ironic smile, a mocking smile. “As for who else, you are the one writing the paper on Arthur. Who did he overthrow?”

  “The pagan kings of Saxony.”

  “And did they practice polygamy, pederasty, slavery, and human sacrifice, and all the other delights of the true and honest pagans of yore?”

  “Of course.”

  “Now, tell me this, who keeps a grudge longer? Good men who forgive and forget? Or wicked men who every day dream about returning to the sins and brutalities that civilization, sanity, and Holy Mother Church forbid? Which ghosts linger longer? Those of criminals and monsters, eager for blood, or those of kindly men, eager to escape this vale of woes for the paradise above all stars? I say that everything in England, when you dig down deeper, has a dark past, one that is best unrecalled. Our only escape is to forget!”

  Hal turned and stared across the river. “You are in a grim mood. Let us forget the past for the moment and enjoy the day.” He raised his walking stick and gestured like a stage magician sweeping aside a curtain to reveal his shapely assistant, uncut by any saw. As if at his signal, the sun peered through cloud, and scattered a dancing path of brilliance across the water.

  Manfred nodded at the waters below their balcony. “Ah, the River Frome! You think it is fair and pleasant? I will tell you the tale.”

  Manfred leaned forward on the wood table, his eyes dark and piercing beneath their heavy brows, and he spoke in grim tones.

  “Near Wool is the ruined Cistercian monastery of Bindon Abbey. A boy who once served the monks there would dawdle and frolic on his errands, and swim in this river. His name was Lubberlu. Well, once from between the bulrushes appeared a maiden whose eyes sparkled like sunlight on blue water, and whose silver hair was like a flowing waterfall. They dallied and kissed and laughed, and the boy day after day finding any excuse to be sent on errands, always found his way to the waterside as the summer days turned toward autumn, and the feast of all souls drew nigh. Lubberlu approached one of the monks of the abbey, and said he wished to marry the girl. But the monk knew she was no mortal maiden, and forbade it, warning him of the murderous ways of the daughters of the river water, the nix, the mermaids. In tears the boy fled, vowing to bring the girl to a proper Christian wedding, and turn her from her ways. The next day his drowned corpse was found floating face up in the river, tangled among the bulrushes.”

  Hal raised an eyebrow, and his laughter broke the dark spell the story had cast. “So that is what this is about!”

  Manfred looked surprised.

  Hal said, “A man on his way to wed a rare beauty, and he is murdered by her instead. Why would you tell me such a tale today? You are getting bridegroom jitters. Cold feet. Why else such downcast looks?”

  New and Present Sorrows

  Manfred now frowned in earnest, and his face was like that of a dark hawk glowering. “It is moving into the Seigneurie House. It is so bad, it is affecting my dreams! The legal troubles, the maneuverings, the Countess Margaret sticking her nose into everything. Well, my lawyer managed to get some of the red tape untangled, so that furnishings are out of escrow, and I am the undisputed owner of them. Who writes a will that passes title to land and house but not personal property? I am having workmen ship the whole lot over from Guernsey and be unpacked. Lord knows what I will do for carpeting and wallpaper. So much was destroyed by the court of escrow agents before they found me.”

  Hal waved his walking stick at the barmaid to bring another round of drinks, and soon the warmth and ease flowing in his blood began to loosen his tongue. “I don’t know what Laurel sees in you, old man, if you don’t mind my saying. Are you sure you have no bridegroom jitters?”

  Manfred, after yet another drink, had also lost some of his usual stiffness of bearing. A melancholy look was in his deep-set eyes. “I am just not sure about her. Some time she and I—well, certain things are awkward…”

  “You mean you don’t like the same music? Or you mean something—more like a sexual incompatibility, ah–”

  Manfred stiffened, and Hal wondered if he had spoken too freely. Manfred said, “You and I swore a solemn vow to stay celibate until we were married. We are the laughingstock at Magdalen. I assume you did it mostly for the old-fashioned romance of it.”

  Hal said, “It seems very straightforward to me. I hate how adultery killed Camelot, snared Merlin, marred King David, and made Abraham the father of Ishmael, whose sons vex his sons to this day, and so on. The Trojan War was started by the adultery of Helen, and the murder of Agamemnon was finished by the adultery of Clytemnestra.”

  Manfred nodded. “And the Gnostics say Eve committed adultery with the serpent, which would make that sin older and deeper than the murder of Abel, and stain the race more deeply. All very romantic and nostalgic reasons. You are a living eulogy for a world long lost! A world perhaps nobler than our own. My reasons are deeper.” He looked down at his hands, and sighed. “I fear the damnation of Hell.”

  “Sorry, old man! I–I didn’t mean to pry!”

  Manfred spoke without looking up. “I think it is a real place, Hell. I saw it once in a dream, when I was a child, you know. Ten thousand faces of people drowning in boiling oil, all screaming, all biting and scratching and reviling each other, trying to push each other under, and climb up out of the sticky fires. And the worst, the worst thing, I cannot even tell you how this scared me when I was a little boy: I saw naked people diving in. Some were male and some female, but they had no age. Their faces were young and their eyes were old. They plunged in through a hole, like the mouth of the well, trying to get away from a beautiful clear azure sky filled with golden light. They could not tolerate the light, and hated it, and they dove into the pit to escape it, because they could not bear to see themselves. Dear God! What if such a thing were real?”

  Hal felt embarrassed, as if he had accidentally read someone else’s private diary.

/>   Manfred smiled one of his rare smiles. “You think I am crazy.”

  Hal said, “Everyone at school thinks we are crazy. The two virgins. Even the professors jeer. We are out of step with the world.”

  “Good. Who the hell knows where the world is headed?”

  “Something is really eating you, isn’t it, Manny?”

  “Hal, yes, damn it.”

  “And–”

  “And, yes, damn it, you said it. I am not certain I want to marry her. It is as if I hear this tiny whisper in my heart, warning me. I am almost willing to postpone again.”

  “Until when?”

  “Who knows? Forever. She is too damned interested in the house, in the title, in the island.”

  Hal felt a strange and disloyal leap of joy in his heart when he heard this. If Manfred broke up with Laurel, the beautiful, dark-haired Laurel, naturally she would need a shoulder to cry on, and late nights to sooth her woes in wine and …

  Hal, shocked, smothered that tiny voice in him, hoping nothing of his secret thought had shown on his face.

  But Manfred was staring down into the bottom of his empty mug, talking. “So much grief and tragedy! I visited the graves of my three cousins, and my great-aunt Sibyl. Horrible that they drowned. Islanders! They lived in boats! How could they lose control of such a large, fine yacht! And so close to shore. It does not make sense. I keep trying to form the picture in my head, and it does not add up. Why was there no radio call? Why did no one on shore see them? Were there no lifejackets aboard?”

  “And the report from the coast guard was that the boat had been scuttled, not holed. The valves were opened. Marie, and Pierre, and Earnest! My cousins were such handsome chaps, and Marie such a beauty, so kind, so good with horses. Willing to bend the rules to protect their tenants and servants, you know. Almost makes one forgive the aristocracy, to see old-fashioned loyalty like that. Without them—I don’t know what to say. I don’t believe in God any more, at least not in a kind and loving God. It is like having a leg ripped off. Like seeing the sun flicker, and go dark, and watch the final snow, the snow that will never lift, the cold that will never end, begin to drift down from the stars!”

  “Manny, don’t take it so hard—I mean, I thought you hardly knew them! You said you only visited them once or twice as a child.”

  “That is true. And yet somehow, in a way I cannot explain, my heart has grown cold. I suppose my visit to the family graveyard got me thinking about life and death. They are not happy thoughts.”

  Hal remembered burying his father. “I know the feeling. Believe me.”

  A small, inner voice told him not to say anything more. All he had to do was keep silent and let Laurel and Manfred drift apart. If Manfred were to decide not to marry her…

  The possibilities were endless.

  She was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen. She had that imponderable aura called glamour, something only actresses and models had, women whose whole livelihood was in their looks. Hal had never met a woman as lovely, as lively, or with such impish sense of humor. Laurel was different from the other English girls. She had that wildness of spirit gypsy girls were said to have, or sultry Italians, or passionate Spaniards, or, perhaps, the silver-haired mermaid from the tale of the River Frome.

  An image formed in his imagination. Laurel on Manfred’s sailboat, or perhaps at the pool, with her glittering green eyes, lashes half-closed, a sultry smile playing about her lips. What would she look like in a bathing suit? It should be black, but not a bikini, a one-piece number. But she should be decked with jewels, wearing earrings and clashing anklets even while swimming, and a diamond necklace.

  He could see it perfectly, a crisp and clear picture in his head.

  If Laurel was his, each time he went swimming in his pool, she would be there, dressed like that. And every night, when he went to bed, and every morning, he would never be lonely again.

  Hal, by an extreme effort of will, gagged his inner voice and blindfolded his inner eye. Lusting after your best friend’s girl was atrocious. Doing so just months before his wedding was doubly atrocious. Slavering like a vulture at the news that your best friend was having the doubts all bridegrooms had? That was triple.

  That was as low as anything Lancelot ever did.

  The small, still voice was still trying to talk, to say something urgent, something about love and memory and the inner truths in life, but Hal would hear no more.

  He reached out and clasped Manfred by the hand. “Manny, you have to listen to me! Laurel is a great girl, a wonderful girl, the best you will ever find! Tell her your doubts. Tell her about your cousins. Heck, tell her about your childhood nightmares. She is the one you have to pour your heart out to. Not me. Best friends are for bachelors. From now on, I am your best man. I have to move into an outer orbit in your life, and she has to be with you, one with you. It is like a bride who owns a cat on whom she dotes insufferably. Once she has a baby, she forgets the cat’s name. I am the cat. Tell her your woes, not me. She can comfort you in ways even your best friend cannot, believe me.”

  Manfred smiled, and then laughed, and then roared and slapped his knee. “You are right about everything but that! Friendship is something no one talks about these days, but it used to be the very bedrock of life. You are not moving to an outer orbit. She likes you, too! I can see it in the way she looks at you. You cheer her up. So, here!”

  And out from an inner pocket he drew a ring of seven large, old-fashioned keys. They were oddly and intricately made.

  The Keyring

  Each key was as long as a finger, and the bow of each was wrought and enameled to look like a different heraldic symbol: the golden head of a maned lion, a silver dove, a green apple, a Celtic cross in brass, a red rose, a white lotus, a black six-pointed flower.

  “Each key opens a different door. This opens the main door; this the west wing, where the dovecote is; the apple key is for the north wing, where the cider mill is; and this unlocks the chapel doors. All the inner doors lock. My ancestors were suspicious a lot. Piracy will do that for you. Or living on an island with no lights.”

  “Privateers. And there are some lights. And, good heavens, why are you giving me the keys to your mansion?”

  “Because you are not a damned cat. I am not going to forget you, although I will take my troubles to Laurel, as you said, and lay my head in her lap.”

  Hal smiled and hid his unexpected stab of jealousy.

  Manfred said, “Besides, with these keys, you will not need to break in again. Ah, don’t worry! Mr. Drillot saw you going up Rade Street into Wrongerwood near sunset, and old Mrs. Gascoigne, who is a better spy than anyone in MI6, she saw you as well. There is nothing else on that part of the island but my house. I am just wondering why you did it?”

  “Well, it was pretty inconvenient of you to send me a message inviting me to come see your fine new house in its fine old condition, and then forget the date!”

  Manfred shook his head, mystified. “I never sent you any message. In fact, I had plans that day. Laurel insisted, she practically twisted my arm, that I go meet her old man-eating harpy of a mother in Zennor village to try to get her blessing for the wedding. The woman lives in a gray shack on stilts that has two legs in the sea, like something out of a children’s fairy tale where the children don’t make it out alive. I nearly didn’t. Good thing my dove saved me. So who sent you that message? I was not planning on showing you the place until this coming week. There is not a stick of furniture there. Just a cot.”

  “Why not stay in the inn? And why shoot at dogs from your window?”

  Manfred looked blank. “Dogs? I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”

  “I found the room where you slept. It was filled with empty cans, as if you had been camping out there for months, eating baked beans cold, and the floor was covered with spent shells from your hunting rifles.”

  “I dragged in my old army cot for a night exactly once. It was part of the t
ransfer of title that I had to spend the night in the house. One of the damn stipulations in the original charter dating back to before the Spanish Armada. Why would I stay in an empty house when Mr. Stocks begs me to stay in the best room in the inn, free of charge? She feeds me rather better than cold beans straight from the can. I did that when I was a First Year, and I bloody well am never doing it again.”

  Hal Landfall felt himself suddenly more sober than he wanted to be. The sensation was the same as if a window in a warm room on a winter evening had opened behind him.

  Hal said, “You are right about things not adding up. We need to get to the bottom of this. I need to know I am not going mad like my poor … never mind. But this feels darker than it looks. That old house is strange. I wonder if it is…”

  “Hiding something?” asked Manfred.

  “I was going to say protecting something. Like there is a treasure there, for me.”

  “For you?” Manfred raised both eyebrows. “It’s my damn house.”

  “And somehow, I don’t know how, I get the feeling that Laurel is also involved. It is just a feeling that I have. I can't explain it.”

  Manfred sighed and said, “If there is a mystery involved, or a conspiracy, then it is coming at the worst possible time. I am supposed to be finishing my dissertation, supposed to be planning my wedding, and supposed to be beating my way through a massive thicket of British law and English customs, all while keeping my name out of the papers. The conspirators picked the time in my life when everything is demanding I not look into any conspiracy theories…” He had started the sentence as if he were telling a joke, but by the time his voice trailed off, his tone was very serious indeed.

  Hal Landfall said, “We can study the matter. Study hard! Things will clear up. We will get to the bottom of this. Together. As friends.” His eyes crinkled in a smile.

  Manfred said, “Well, you want to use any excuse not to work on your paper! I am glad. Let’s toast the quest! How do we set about it, this new resolution?”