Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

  “Is that your answer to everything? I am in love with a crazy exhibitionist! It’s a wonder you manage to keep any scrap of clothing on you at all!”

  He saw her shocked face, and wondered if he had gone too far. But the anger and frustration was still strong in him. Two days without water, and two nights of poor sleep and vivid nightmares, was making objects seem to swell and recede in his vision. He gathered up her white nightgown and tossed it at her roughly. “Here! No more running around naked for you! It does not help. And what is it with you and your shoes? What girl wears silk stockings to bed?”

  She sighed in exasperation. “I am staying in a guest room, and did not bring everything I own. My slippers are at home, and I have to wear shoes to walk around this drafty mansion at night because the carpeting is installed yet. And you cannot wear these shoes without stockings. These are the only pair in my closet that I can tell by touch match each other. I can’t see anything in there because I have to leave the room to go to the closet to find a candle.”

  She stepped into his arms and whispered softly. “And when I wake up in the dark, and I go roaming, it is almost as if I am hoping to see my someone I love. A girl wants to look nice. I am wandering the dark halls, looking and looking for something, unable to sleep, but not knowing what I seek!”

  “It will not be long now, darling!” he said, his anger subsiding.

  She smiled sadly, “So you say. It might be forever.”

  “Then I will die in this room! I will not forget you again. In here, you love me. Outside, you do not love me!”

  “Oh, but I do!” she said. “I realized it on the golf course, when you walked out on me! That is why I wanted to show off the house to you, rather than have you study. To be alone with you, to look at you, to find some excuse to stumble so that you would put out your hand! You do not know how ashamed I am, or how foolish I feel.”

  “I see you flirting with Manfred. You do not look ashamed.”

  Her eyes darted to the window, and, from the thunderstruck look on her face, it was clear that only now did she realize all he had seen. “I’ve explained before,” she said smoothly, “Without you, I have no courage. Without you, my choice is between a fine income with a rich lord for a husband, or living with my mother downwind from the fish cannery in her freakish house on stilts, and maybe doing small theater roles for pin money, with no real chance for a career, for independence, for freedom. I’ve mentioned the state of the British theater these days? I am trapped. Trapped!”

  “You could work in a shop in London and rent a flat!”

  “Spoken by a man who has no idea what London flats go for, or what shopgirls have to do to keep their jobs these days. I’m penniless. I don’t even have enough to put down.”

  “If you married me, you’d still be penniless.”

  She twined her arms around his neck and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “The wife of a scholar! You get meals free in the dining hall or something. Besides, you are rich enough to buy a motorcar two weeks ago, buy it outright, without a bank loan. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t remember doing that.”

  “You loaned me the car at the golf course. You left it for me. The man at the front desk of the club said so.”

  “Yes, yes, I remember that, but–what am I doing in this room? I should be talking to a psychiatrist. There is something wrong with my brain chemistry. Why do we think this is a curse? Is there a witch after us?”

  “My mother is a witch,” said Laureline, “but perhaps not in the way you mean. You mean a fairy-tale witch. A cunning woman is what witches are called in the old stories. Listen. This is no ordinary madness. How is it influencing both of us? Did your brain chemistry leak into mine?”

  He said, “Never mind. Write yourself these two notes: first, you have to store some wine bottles here in the Rose Chamber to see how well they keep in this temperature, meaning you have to check every day. Second, you’ve realized that you keep waking up at night because you are hungry, so ask the cook to fix you a snack for midnight, wrapped up in wax paper or something, and you want to eat it up here … uh … because this is where the wine bottles are, and you need to check to see they are not going flat or stale or whatever. Got that? And remember to water the flowers. And oil for the lamp. It is dry.”

  The look in her eyes told him, more profoundly than words, how she admired the sacrifice he was making, and how she pitied his suffering.

  “I’ll try to remember to bring paper and ink next time,” she said. “So you can write a letter to your smokeshop owner, what’s his name.”

  “Mr. Drake.”

  She tried to leave the candle with him, but could not. Each time she stepped out into the darkened hall, she turned, saw the candle burning in the room, and went back to get it. After the fourth repetition of this, he broke the candle in half, lit one half, and gave her the other.

  She left, and he watched the tiny yellow reflections of light dwindle and vanish from the staircase as she ascended, and then he watched the reflections of reflections from the unseen hall above, until all was black as pitch.

  He carefully watched the distant window across the courtyard that framed the master bedroom door. But the bobbing light appeared and disappeared though other windows, and went elsewhere.

  That night he dreamt of howling wolves trying to climb the south wall and force themselves in through in a large double-arched window, wolves wearing jackets and caps, and one large black wolf who carried a lantern. In the dream, his walking stick somehow caught fire, and he thrust the terrible wolf-things out the window, while Manfred stood on the round signal tower, and fired the Spanish cannon at a cloud, which so angered the cloud that it shot back lightning in forked bolts, which Manfred deflected with the little green book he carried, and threw the bolts on the ground, to burn the wolves.

  Tuesday

  Late Tuesday afternoon, Manfred and Laurel were again in the little courtyard garden where the quern stood. Since the kitchen was in the west wing, and the view from the outbuildings were blocked from the gallery, Manfred must have assumed this was a fairly secluded spot.

  Today, he and Laurel played tag, and wrestled on the grass, and Manfred had her blouse halfway unbuttoned when Henry, faint with thirst and anger, turned away from the window. Not long after, he heard them talking: Manfred had decided to take her with him on an overnight stay to the City, to meet with lawyers. Henry rushed to the window, shouting, but she did not hear. He broke a chair against the wall, to get a length of wood small enough to fit through the window, and he threw it straight and true, but a sudden gust of wind caught the wood at the last minute, and it fell silently to the ground behind the couple as they kissed and laughed. Their eyes were full of each other, they saw nothing.

  He was sorry later for that last missing bit of wooden chair. He had burned the other chair in the fireplace last night, and now the wood was exhausted. He had no blanket, but had wrapped himself in the tiger rug.

  That night he dreamed of Laureline’s mother, Mrs. du Lac, a wrinkled and surly old stoop-shouldered crone whose dentures had been improperly made and were the color of cast iron. In the dream, she had cut off the head of a girl scout, and was cooking the body in the oven, while she ate the brains out of the severed skull, blond hair still attached, and hair ribbons still in place, with a wooden spoon.

  Wednesday

  Wednesday he saw no one and nothing. The gardeners and workmen had been given leave, and the cook and butler never came near enough to his part of the mansion for him to glimpse them through the windows.

  He was near-delirious with thirst but had lost the ability to feel hunger. He was sorry now that he had relieved himself out the window, for he realized he could have tried the stranded sailor’s trick of gargling his urine in order to kill his thirst.

  He was tempted to try Laureline’s trick of wandering outside without clothes, knowing he would get a drink before he returned here for his pants, but he decided to wait until he was m
ore desperate. Because he was now not sure what his false and outer self would think the situation was with Laurel. Would Hal outside know that Manfred had slept with Laurel? And what would the reaction be? Shame? Guilt? Envy? Nothing good, that was certain. And what if that emotion drove Hal to commit some noble, irrevocable gesture? What if he flew back to the United States, vowing to remove himself entirely from possibility of temptation? It was the kind of the sacrifice that he would indeed make for his friend. And then the one spot where Henry was fully awake and fully true to himself, this chamber, would be gone.

  Ideas came to him from time to time, ways to improve his situation based on techniques Hindu sufis used for banishing the effects of mesmerism, or on early tests on the subject done by scientists in the nineteenth century, or on the work of modern psychiatrists, or on other snippets of information about the nature of hypnotism that he would unexpectedly recall. He turned these ideas over in his thoughts, hoping that one of them would provide the hidden key they needed to break the curse. After a while, however, he was struck by a thought that he found tremendously disturbing.

  Every single fact he recalled, every hint, every snippet, every clue, came from something that Manfred had told him while working on his dissertation.

  Henry shivered. He knew these fears were false. Manfred was his best friend, and yet…

  The happy thought struck him that there might be something in the chamber that broke the curse and warded off the amnesia, not the chamber as a whole. If so, he need only lean out the window, holding any candidate for this protective charm, and, if the object was normal, even the noblest and most grief-stricken version of himself would not climb down the outer wall rather than merely pull his head in the window. But he decided to remove his trousers and shoes, just in case.

  The lamp from which the chamber took its name was the most obvious candidate, and it was awkward and slow, but not hard, to find the chain to lower it. In the process he discovered the location of a second and full flask of oil, and a box of Lucifer matches.

  But neither lit nor unlit did the lamp protect his memory when he leaned out the window with it in his arms. With other objects, one by one, anything small enough to fit through the frame, he tried the same experiment, to no result.

  But his search took him to explore each part of the wall of the chamber, which was shaped like a spiral. The far wall, where the spiral ended, was covered in wooden panels carved with images of lotuses and roses. There were no windows here, and this was the first time he had been holding a candle, so he spotted what looked like a raised boss that was worn smooth, whereas all the other bosses in the design still had their edges. It moved aside at a finger touch, revealing a keyhole behind.

  He went back to his pants, donned them, got the key with the lotus design for the bow, and returned. It fitted. He turned the key.

  There was a click, and a black line running from roof to floor appeared in the wood an inch to the left of the keyhole. He put his fingernails into the black crack and it widened. The whole wooden panel slid to one side.

  Beyond was a stone wall pierced by a portal made of the whitest, brightest metal he had ever seen. The portal was not square like a gate nor rectangular like a door, but hexagonal. There was writing in Arabic and Hebrew and one other system of letters he did not recognize all along the edges of the hexagon in three concentric rows. Midmost in the portal was the image of two opposite triangles superimposed. There was something peculiar about the white portal that reminded him of his vivid dreams.

  Henry touched the door, wondering if there were a chamber dedicated to Jewish observances hidden on the other side. He knew that there were houses with priests’ holes and escape tunnels built during the bloody reigns of Henry and Elizabeth to let priests escape, and he was sure that the Jews had been driven out of England, or forced into hiding in the days of King Edward I. If there was a second keyhole in the portal, or some hidden latch or catch to open it, he decided not to try, for fear his current memories would be lost. He slid the wooden frame shut, locked the door, and pulled the silk hangings back in place. He told himself there would be a time to experiment with this door later.

  He was surprised when he heard high heels clattering on the stairs, and saw Laureline appear that night, once again in a nightgown, this one long and green, almost too big for her. This time, she was carrying a three-branched candelabra, and, better still, a sandwich wrapped in wax paper, and a thermos bottle of cold tea. For once, his hunger was greater than his desire, because he wolfed down the sandwich and swallowed half the contents of the thermos before he kissed her.

  “I woke up feeling a bit peckish,” she said. “And this time I wore my wrap as well as my nightie, because I could not think of any excuse to give myself to smuggle pillows and blankets up here.”

  “You are a lifesaver! I will love you forever!”

  “Oh, darling, I knew that already. I am not suffering as bad as you, but I had quite the argument with Manfred convincing him to get away from his lawyer friend in time to sleep here. I made such a fuss about hating hotels—which he knew was a total and complete lie, because I love the London hotels. So mannerly! Such high quality—and my nerves were on edge because I did not even know why I was lying to him, or why I wanted to get back here.”

  “My sister acted that way some times,” said Henry. “With her boyfriends back in her schooldays, of which she had a lot. Very popular girl. I always thought she was acting erratic on purpose, trying to see which one she could push around versus which one would not put up with her nonsense. Like a two-year-old testing boundaries. But maybe it really is nothing like that. Does everyone have a true, inner self that whispers to him? Maybe there was as something as important to her inner self in each of the cases where she seemed to be acting crazy as you must have seemed tonight to Manfred. You returned from a nice night in a London hotel to meet a man who loves you entirely, and who will break this curse for you. You and I will both see the truth, and soon. I promise.”

  “Before, I doubted. Now I never will again. Maybe it is getting easier to break this curse. Maybe it is like, I don’t know, I have heard of cases of brain damage where you have to train a new part of your brain to do what the old messed up one once did. Something like that? Because even without knowing why, I came back.”

  She gave him the green gown she wore, with its puffy sleeves and delicate lace throat, and was wearing her white nightgown beneath. He took two of her three candles, but he found he could not get her to leave without the thermos—Laurel kept returning for it before she reached the stairs.

  He poured the tea into the empty wine bottle, one of the few readily-breakable things he had not smashed in the chamber.

  Fed and free of thirst, he wrapped himself in the green satin for warmth, and spent an almost comfortable night on the divan, wrapped in the scent of Laureline’s perfume.

  Thursday

  Thursday made up for all the previous suffering. This time, she appeared not long after sundown, wearing her black nightgown, and more importantly, carrying a picnic hamper, a rolled-up blanket over her shoulder. In the hamper were several meals’ worth of food, two bottles of wine, two two-liter bottles of water and two six-packs of soft drinks.

  “You would not believe the lies I had to tell myself to trick me into lugging this stuff into this room! I also brought a sponge, some soap, and a laver, and look! A canteen! While you might want to drink most of this, we should use some for a sponge bath. I used to do this as a nurse. Come on! Off with everything. You are smelling awful ripe.”

  “Meal first.”

  The wine took the edge off of any sorrow or anxiety. She poured a small bowl of water, beat it to suds with some soap, and set it on the battery-powered hotplate to warm up.

  Henry said, “Just out of curiosity, what lie did you tell yourself?”

  She said, “I wrote it in my little memo book last night. Manfred needs to move his cot and all his survival gear from that garret room to his chamber here. W
anted me to arrange it in here in a way that looks nice. I believed it only because I think the outside me is starting to listen to her hunches.”

  Running warm soapy water over a naked man with a sponge is sure to lead to some sort of distractions, and Henry, after the last few days, was beginning to have grave doubts about the wisdom, and the practicality, and the sanity, of his old promises. If Manfred was not keeping them, why should he?

  And she insisted on disrobing, so as not to get her nightgown wet, and she suggested something that could not cause pregnancy, and so perhaps was not technically the same as having sex.

  Henry’s reservations were lost in his passion, and he had drunk more than a bottle of wine to make up for days of thirst, and was in the act of finally sliding her panties down the curve of her hips when they were unexpectedly interrupted by the noise of someone walking heavily down the steps outside.

  Laureline leaped to her feet, picking up her nightie and clutching it to her breast. “It's Manfred!”

  It was true. He was somewhere in the pentagonal corridor that circled the central nave of the priory, and his voice was echoing though the empty hall. His voice sounded angry.

  She was wild-eyed. “I have to go!”

  Henry said, “If you run out there undressed, the curse will convince you to go to him again!”

  “You’d worry about that now?”

  But she was out of his reach and ran through the door, and suddenly slowed, puzzled. He followed and tried to reach her with his hand without actually stepping over the threshold.

  But she took a step in order to put the nightgown on the floor in a circle and pull it up over her body, and then tuck her breasts into the silky cups. It seemed a strange way to put on clothes, and Henry was not sure if he had ever heard of women donning a dress that way. He realized he knew rather less than he thought about what women do when no man is looking.