Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

  Hal said, “Wait a moment. You mean that ragged, starving bum outside your back door?”

  The second one peered at him, and his right eye seemed swollen and enormous when seen through the lens of the loupe he had forgotten to remove from his eye. “The Mists of Everness have fogged his wits. He is surely sunken deeply in her charms.”

  The first one said, “How are we to know, brother, that things will work out well? We send him to his death. The Gaunt Man is strong, stronger than before! No arms of our make can prevail against him!”

  The second said, “The air of Earth beclouds our eyes as well. We must trust in all the things we have forgotten, for the Fisher King would not have sent us into this world unprepared.”

  Hal said, “Listen, if you boys have been drinking too much at your little Mardis-Gras here….”

  “You have lost the count of time,” said the first little man, exasperated. “That was thirty nine days ago. This is the Feast of Saint Guthlac.”

  Hal said, “I am here to pick up an order for Lord Manfred of Sark. I’m—I am afraid I don’t remember what it is, exactly. I wrote it down in my book…”

  The second little man hopped down from his stool, the tools jangling in his apron loops. “We remember. Come with me, please, sir. Our special order customers must go deeper into the shop.”

  He walked between the tall cases of many cut and polished stones set in rings and earrings, broaches and pins. Here were amethysts, and jacinths, chrysoprase as green as grass, peridot and beryl. Yellow chrysolite, red sardius and sardonyx, emerald and carnelian, blue sapphire and purple jasper.

  The little man in front of him, with the Fu Manchu moustache, stopped at a blank wall and gestured toward the jewel cases. “You see our approaches are warded. You may tell the Lord of Sark we cherish our duties.”

  Hal said, “What is going on? What is this place?”

  The little man behind him, the one with the enormous side whiskers, pulled shut a metallic grating behind them, and locked it. He said angrily, “He does not know us. His spirit is corrupted with morphine alkaloid of opium, a witchbrew.”

  The second one said to Hal, “We always pay our debts. For the lifeblood of my brother, whom you saved, we should like to gift and grant you with an amethyst stone, whose virtue is to bring sobriety, not only for inebriation but also for over-zealousness in passion. Here is an amethyst taken from the ring of an Archbishop, who threw it in the sea when the Parliament decreed King Henry to be greater than Christ, for His Eminence wished in that hour for the wine to blind his memory.”

  “Uh, really, it was nothing.” But the little man thrust a ring onto Hal’s finger, and the purple stone winked like fire. The ache immediately began to throb less and less, and the room spun more slowly.

  Without a further word, the first little man slid open a panel in the wall. Behind was a door that Hal was certain he had seen before, perhaps in a dream. His dreams at Wrongerwood House had been so vivid.

  The door was made of white metal, brighter than snow, and hexagonal in shape. In the middle was the Seal of Solomon, two opposite triangles crossed. Passages from the Gospel and the Talmud were inscribed in concentric rows along the edges of the door, and the Enochian script in which Noah had written his book of prophecy, the only written language of the world before the Flood.

  The two little men now donned thick goggles of smoked glass. The first one took out a key, the twin to the one in Hal’s pocket, which had a silver white lotus inscribed in the bow. There was a loud click as the bolt shot back. The portal began to open. A nimbus of light escaped through the widening crack, and the rush of music beating in a hypnotic fantasia: lute and zither, rebec and bamboo flute, buzzing reeds and sounding brass.

  Henry squinted against the blinding brilliance. He stepped forward, and the air seemed as thick and fluid as the bottom of a deep pool.

  11. Hue and Cry

  Captain Hezekiah

  To his infinite surprise, the two Brising brothers insisted on finding him passage back to Sark that very evening. The first brother gave him a note written in strange letters to a certain fisherman whose houseboat he described with great peculiarity: a small black tug with a squat iron chimney adorned about the prow and stern with the bones of whales and teeth of sharks. The captain’s name was Hezekiah. This captain must have had very good eyes indeed, for he stood on the gangplank to his small steamboat, and read the note in the night, with no lamps nearby, and not even the moon.

  He was not French, but spoke in a thick accent of Southern England. “They pay their debts, the sons of Albrecht, sure enough, but are skinflinted enough in collecting them! You have any charms to ward ye? They are worthless. Throw them in the sea. Call upon your name saints!”

  “My name is Henry,” Hal answered, climbing aboard. “And I am not, ah, what you might call a churchgoing man, so I don’t know what my name saints are.”

  “Do you charge into battle with a sausage for a sword? Barmpot! Saint Henry of Conquet is yours, as is Saint Henry of Uppsala, and Saint Henry II the Holy Roman Emperor. Saint Henry Walpole the Martyr, or Saint Henry of Sweden! Call on them.”

  There was an awning aft beneath which was an open coal bin. Hezekiah took a billows and blew on banked coals of his engine, and spat and cursed, until the fire was reborn. With efficient motions of his rippling arms, the old sailor man began to shovel coal into the grate, which opened and shut like the mouth of a demon, letting hot sparks and red leaping light escape into the night each time the iron teeth snapped open and shut.

  “There are women in the channel and witches in the air, and they say the Gaunt Man flew back to the hollow caves the Nazis carved in Brecqhou. Hell take him! Old Captain Hezekiah knows the better nooks, even with the tide against us, even in the dark, and I can find where John Allaire diddled with his doxy on the south coast past the pools of Venus and Adonis, while on the north coast in his tall, old house, his lady lay alone and pining. Come!”

  But the pains in his limbs, and the sweating, overcame Hal soon, and he slept before the lights of Saint Ouen village were out of sight aft.

  Hal woke in an undersea cave, in the middle of a dark pool. The cave mouth he could hear but not see behind him, and he saw the starlight on the waters.

  The captain handed him a tin lantern, and pointed to an ancient dock. Between two stalactites covered with barnacles and bright shells was a stairwell, almost a ladder, leading straight up a natural chimney in the rock. Captain Hezekiah told him which wall to follow so as not to get lost in the empty caves. “You’ll be aland in the old smuggler’s tunnel at the south island’s end. Recall the law! It is the clamour de haro and it is old Norman law, used in all these islands, but only in Sark does the memory keep! You must say the Lord’s prayer where a Christian man can hear your words, to show you are no warlock, nor heathen, nor deceiver, and they cry out Haro, Haro, Haro! À mon aide mon Prince, on me fait tort!”

  Hal blinked in confusion. “And the prince comes?”

  “All unlawful acts must cease until the matter is heard by the court. You must should register your complaint with the Greffe Office within twenty-four hours, or the cry can be annulled for sitting on your rights. You know the Lord’s Prayer?”

  “Um. Now I lay me down to sleep?”

  “Barmpot!”

  Commotion under the Stars of Sark

  Hal emerged from the mouth of one of the old silver mines in Little Sark, the southern half of the island. A chain ran at knee height between two posts carrying a tin sign, no doubt the name of the mining company long defunct, or perhaps a warning to keep out. He stepped over it and walked past the pumphouse and an empty shed to the dirt road leading north. The sound of the waves on the seashore was all around him, dimly in the distance. He covered the tin lantern and let his eyes adjust to the starlight, for the stars were bright indeed tonight, and seemed closer to the Earth. The Milky Way was a silvery river in the heavens, bright and clear, which was a sight he had never seen from the brightly
lit streets of Williamsburg or New York or Oxford any other place he had lived. It was an amazing sight: he now understood why Sark was called a Dark Sky island.

  With his lantern dark, and the aches in his limbs diminished to an occasional twinge, Hal tramped beneath the stars uphill and down, and granite boulders protruded from the lush grass to either side of the path as he went.

  He came to the narrow isthmus called La Coupée. The path leaped boldly along this sheer ridge of rock two hundred sixty feet above the sea, with an abyss of air to either side. There were stone posts linked by cables to the left and right, but the wind-gusts from the sea made the footing uncertain despite this railing, especially in the star-filled dark.

  He was halfway across, and had another fifty yards to negotiate, when he saw two groups of men in leathery, dark coats and dark caps, perhaps a dozen in all, struggling roughly with each other. In the starlight he saw them rolling on the ground in awkward wrestling, or throwing wild punches. The strangest thing was that they were making no noise aside from hisses and grunts.

  There was a solitary figure standing tall and pale-faced in the starlight at the far side of the airy isthmus, a thin man with naked legs, wrapped in a blanket or cloak. He stood looking on, and the starlight was reflected in his eyes.

  Hal knew, because Manfred had boasted, that there was no crime on Sark. The two jail cells of the local volunteer constabulary were reserved for tourists. So he knew this scrum could not be as desperate as it seemed. It was probably mere boyish roughhousing. But to fight here, in this narrow space with an appalling drop to either side, was madness.

  Hal stepped forward, waving his walking stick in the air. There was a bright flash: Hal had accidentally banged the cover of the lantern open and shut, producing a momentary blinding dazzle. “Notre Père, qui es aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifié, que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté soit faite sur la terre comme au ciel!” he shouted.

  He now saw that the fight was uneven, that it was ten young men against two. Hal broke into a jog, feeling anger in his limbs, a blush of heat in his face. His bellowing must have disturbed some large osprey or albatross nesting nearby, because a winged shape launched itself from the stone bridge and soared away over the sea. The pale man standing at the far end, beyond the commotion, was gone, even though there was not really any place he could have hidden.

  He was now close enough to see that the two boys being harassed were Liam and Burt, the Wolfhound brothers who had been doing gardening work at the manor house.

  ”…Et ne nous soumets pas à la tentation, mais délivre-nous du mal!”

  Hal strode toward the young men boldly, flourishing his walking stick in the most menacing fashion he could contrive, feeling ridiculous.

  “Hear me! Hear me! Hear me! Come to my aid, my Prince, for someone does me wrong!” Hal cried in French.

  To his astonishment, that worked. The fighting stopped, and the young men stared at him in wonder and fear. One of them, a scruffy farm lad with a beer bottle in his hand, fainted away on the spot, and fell to the road. The nine of them broke and ran, whining like dogs, sidling past Hal and pelting away down the narrow isthmus toward the abandoned silver mine.

  Hal helped Liam to his feet, “Good lad!” he said soothingly, petting the young man’s hair and scratching under his chin. “What happened here?”

  “There is trouble at the House, sir,” said Liam. “You’d better hurry on up. Burt and me will see that Luc finds his way back home.” He nodded toward the drunk boy lying motionless on the road.

  Without waiting for more words, Hal jogged, ran and walked the two miles past Convanche Chasm, past the hills called Le Grand Beauregard and Le Petite Beauregard, up Mill Lane to Chasse-Marais, past the Chief Pleas House, the Inn and its one lamp, and up the one village street. Then he was among fields and pastures, and then he plunged into the dark woods.

  He came suddenly upon four men in fur caps with thick beards leaping up and down in front of the main doors of the house, gnashing and snapping their teeth. They were armed with bricks and bats. The image of the lion hanging above the heavy doors seemed to frighten them, for they kept darting closer to the doors, trying to hurt it. Evidently a swung bat or thrown brick had already wounded the figure, because some of the gold was scraped away from the image about the paws and mouth, revealing a red gold underneath, in long red streaks.

  As before, Hal called out the hue and cry, haro, haro, haro, and waved his walking stick in the air. Hal swatted one or two of the rough looking hairy men on back or legs with the walking stick. Manfred or one of the servants must have been watching from inside and wanted to help him, because, just then, the porch light came on, dazzling bright, and burned out, going dark again after one eye-dazing flash.

  And, as before, the men broke and ran, two men helping a third who limped, although Hal was sure he had not struck the fellow that hard.

  Hal banged the door and called, but no one answered. He used the key whose bow was decorated with the gold lion head to let himself into the main door.

  It really was quite extraordinary, Hal thought to himself, that these rustic folk had so much respect for the law that they would go home and go back to their beds just when someone raised the hue and cry. Extraordinary! Hal shook his head sadly, thinking of the crime-ridden streets of New York.

  Inside, the manor house was dark and silent. Provoked by a strange impulse for which he could not account, Hal climbed the stairs and headed for the upper gallery circling the nave of the old priory, seeking the Rose Crystal Chamber.

  Love’s Bitter Fruit

  Memory fell into his mind.

  The purple divan beneath the silver dome now had a silk curtain draped in a circle all about it. An electric heater was here, coils red like hot coals, and cast a shadowless pink light across the floor. Within was Laureline, asleep, outrageously voluptuous, her lips as red as blood and skin as rosy-white as snow seen by dawn, her black hair spilled across pillow and floor as a scented flood. On a little end table next to the divan was a stoppered bottle and a hypodermic.

  His gaze traveled slowly from the line of her neck to her naked shoulder, down the slopes of her torso to the valley of her waist, and then upslope again to the rounded hill of her hip, with rolling slopes of long thighs and calves trailing away in the distance. By the time his gaze had traveled this landscape of luxurious flesh back from toes to head again, he saw something that made his heart lurch.

  There were odd bruise marks, set like fingerprints, upon her neck, and her black lacy negligee was ripped along the back. As he frowned at this, he saw her eyes were half-open. How long she had been watching him, motionless as a cat, from beneath half-closed lids he could not say.

  Henry’s eyes traveled back to the bottle and needle. He said sharply, “You addicted me? What is in that bottle? Morphine? Heroin?”

  Laureline sat up. The brassiere of the ripped, lacy, black negligee strained to contain her breasts.

  “It was necessary,” she said, her voice groggy from sleep.

  “Necessary?” His voice snapped with cold fury.

  “There was no other way to make certain, absolutely certain, that you would return here!” she said, turning her back to him, then picked up a comb of gold and ran it through her rippling yards of hair. “How was I to know that the Outer You would not suffer a spasm of conscience and go flying off to America until after the wedding? You are too addicted to foolish notions of wrong and right, niceties of honor: I had to act to protect us, since you will not.”

  He said, “We discussed this. The spell is breaking! Now that you and I have been, ah, intimate…”

  She turned again, and smiled a sharp smile with no humor in it. “You mean now that we have rutted like maddened weasels in heat? No, there was no other way.” She pointed with her golden comb at his walking stick. “Leave that here. It has got to be at hand.”

  “At hand for what?”

  Laureline raised her golden comb again and then frowned slig
htly, touching the bruises on her neck as if to soothe their ache. Like someone suddenly recalling themselves after rising from the oblivion of sleep, her eyes grew wide and her whole aspect changed.

  The slow, sweet smile of the woman combing her hair vanished. Instead, her eyes blazed like those of a she-wolf, half in terror and half in wrath. Her half-naked body trembled with fear and rage, flushing bright red from cheek to neck. The diamond pendant in her cleavage winked and caught the rose-red light, like the trinket of a mesmerist glinting as her bosom rose and fell in the passion of her words.

  “He saw us, you fool! You and your groping hands! You don’t know how to hide your expression. You had your octopus arms all over my body, and he saw it. He knows, I tell you! He knows what we did in this chamber! Mandrake was waiting for me here last time I entered, sitting there, just there, in that chair! Who knows for how long—all day, perhaps. Waiting. Waiting for her to come in.”

  “I see,” Henry crossed his arms, refusing to be distracted by her frenzy. “And he must have told you–.”

  But she was still speaking, her voice a tremor of wrath and terror. “Mandrake raised his foot and kicked the door shut. He smiled this little, hard, frozen smile like I have never seen. He said all sorts of mad things, about how Lords of England need an act of Parliament to get a divorce, and how this Countess was a witch who had enchanted him, and somehow I was to blame as well. He could not escape her, but now he had found a way out. The only way out!

  “It was terrible.” Her body trembled as she spoke. “He was out of his mind! Possessed! He said there was only one way to make sure he would never marry me in the outside world. With no more words than that, he rose, he grabbed me by the neck; he started to strangle me!”

  Laureline clawed at her own throat, panting, eyes wild, as if she still felt the strong fingers at her throat. “I kicked and screamed, but what can I do? No one outside this room could hear me. I clawed at the door handle. We fell out over the threshold, and all at once his strangles turned into embraces and kisses, because outside, in that world, we love each other. The next time, by whatever impulse, I happen to walk into this Chamber, and he just happens to be here, it will be my last hour on Earth!”