The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  The automaton stretched its wings, opened and closed its beak. Its liquid song poured down, fluid and clear as the water that powered it.

  With her arm still raised, Zeal disappeared.

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  A reasonable man with worldly experience doubts such things. Nevertheless, as John Nightingale stared at the spot where Zeal had been standing, he fancied he might smell sulphur in the air. Under the bird’s song, he had heard her clothing rustle, the faint creak of what he thought was the whalebone in her bodice, then a muffled thump. He had not heard feet crossing the gritty floor.

  ‘Zeal!’

  Nothing dreadful has happened, he told himself. This is her own doing.

  One minute she was there, within reach, white-faced and jittery as an unbroken colt, but still as beautiful as he remembered. He had wanted to seize her in his arms but held back. She was in no fit state to be rushed.

  Now she was gone again.

  Why didn’t I grab her while I could? Is that what she wanted me to do?

  A heavy weight of foreboding settled on his chest.

  I let her go again. Lost her a second time.

  He had been flattered by the mechanical bird, and absurdly cheered that she had set up his namesake to sing in his absence.

  ‘Zeal?’ he called again. This was impossible.

  ‘…ealealeal?’ replied the dome of the ceiling.

  She had not had time to escape up the staircase. Hardly time to reach the bottom step. He had not heard a door open and close. He took three experimental steps. He would most certainly have heard her crossing the remains of last night’s rubble.

  He began to feel both frightened and angry. That is to say, he began to feel frightened and foolish, and that made him angry.

  ‘What the devil do you want me to do now?’ he shouted. And how can I do it, if you don’t tell me what it is?

  I could call her bluff. Leave her to her game, whatever it might be.

  He looked up at the clockwork nightingale and felt even more foolish. It was, after all, here with the public posturing, her first monument to deceit, and the pretty lies.

  I am to be dismissed then?

  But angry and foolish or not, he knew that he must find her to be certain. Otherwise, it was already over.

  Pure terror jolted through him.

  ‘Tell me how to find you again,’ he had said. His last words, before she vanished. Oh, brave words! And he had thought that she was then about to reveal her private map.

  What had she said?

  ‘…you must try to put yourself into my place.’

  Haven’t I been trying to do just that, remaining so unruffled by the news of the two husbands? He knew nothing yet about that ‘London bugger’. But old Philip Wentworth! Already married, while he was writing of his own desperate hope and love.

  To say nothing of biting his tongue about not being told of his dead child!

  Zeal ran through the dimness, setting mechanisms, striking light. All she could think was what she might do if he had not listened.

  What else had she said?

  She had pointed up. ‘…put yourself into my place.’

  He leaned forward suddenly, then squatted on his heels to examine the floor where she had been standing. On Hell’s Mouth, on an island near the coast of India. He ran his fingertips over the floor.

  ‘Oh, my dearest love,’ he said aloud. ‘Most wonderfully precise.’

  He stood and stepped exactly into her place.

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  Though he had prepared himself, he staggered nevertheless when the earth opened under his feet. The floor, which he had expected to sink, tilted instead. He fell back, slid downwards on his arse, helpless, into a black sloping tunnel, kept sliding in an uncontrolled rush, curving downwards through darkness and the improbable smell of polished saddles. He tried furiously to reverse his fall but still kept sliding helplessly, blindly. Twenty feet? Thirty feet? Farther. He lost all sense of distance, gave himself up to the black rush.

  He spun around a sudden, steep dizzying spiral and shot out into the light. Landed softly, on the smell of feathers. Shook his head to clear it and saw that he sat looking down a short hall at a small but splendidly painted stage.

  His throne was oversized and well-padded with feather pillows.

  A deep rumbling began, muffled by stone walls. And the sound of running water.

  Drowning.

  He had had too much water. He turned, but the hole that had admitted him from the leather chute had closed like the iris of an eye. To his left, he saw a stone arch, but the opening had been walled up.

  He looked back at the stage. Though there were brackets to hold torches, enough faint daylight fell from somewhere overhead for him to see the painted screen across the front of the stage. He leaned forwards and peered.

  A bosky woodland, a tumbling river that spilled into a distant sea. Water nymphs disported themselves on the riverbanks. In the half-light, they seemed to move.

  The missing Hawkridge nymphs, unless he was very mistaken…another question he had not yet asked. Yes, there was old Nereus, leaning on a rock beneath the overhanging roots of a tree with his dolphin now on his crown. On the highest bank, in a bower of ivy and vines two forest divinities sat in warm embrace, gazing into each other’s eyes. He wore John’s face, or a fair attempt at it. She was unmistakably Zeal.

  John unclenched his muscles. Apart from the fact that no water had yet entered the chamber, the happy scene did not suggest that Zeal had nursed a secret vengeful rage.

  A new lighter rumbling now joined the earlier sound. John just had time to note that one of the nymphs had lost her hand. Then music began to play, a limpid yet complex stream of notes like a giant musical box. The stage screen cracked down the centre. With a grinding not entirely masked by the music, the two halves began to slide apart.

  A little ahead of him, out of breath, Zeal stopped to listen. If he had followed her he would be in the theatre by now. She could not tell whether the rumbling machinery marked her passage or his.

  The parting shutters revealed a scene in three dimensions. Billowing clouds and a shining, illuminated golden sun swayed in the heavens. John recognized Hawkridge House before the fire, almost like the painting at the top of the stairs, but subtly transformed here in placement and scale. On every ledge and rock around the house sat or lay paired creatures of all sorts, sheep, pigs, magpies, and dogs, but also lions, monkeys, and two rat-like creatures which might have been agoutis. Painted children played among the trees. All together in harmony, as in God’s peaceable kingdom in Eden. Then he saw the pregnant Zeal, fecund but solitary among the others. The music flowed on like a small clear brook.

  So far, a play without players, he thought. And nothing required of me but to pay attention.

  He studied the scene for any clue to her desires or purpose, relieved that she seemed to intend such straightforward exposition. After the opening game with the map, he had feared she would set him a more veiled quest.

  His breathing began to steady. His heart slowed a little. This secret world of hers, where he must now find and reclaim her, was not proving to be as obscure or fearsome as he had expected, given what he had already learned in his arrival and could surmise.

  With a muffled wooden clunk and a metallic rattle, the sun above Hawkridge House jerked and slid behind a cloud. He heard thunder, like cannon balls rolling across a deck. Lightning flashed. And flashed again while the thunder still pealed. A bolt seemed to strike the house. A wisp of smoke rose. Then a black cloud boiled up from the house. Through a dark veil of smoke, he watched Hawkridge House go up in flames.

  For a moment, the flames were real. Sparks bit at his hair as he staggered across the steep bake house roof, beating at the fire. Zeal on the ground watching. He felt her holding him safe with her will.

  This is merely theatre, he told himself. He wrinkled his nose at the sharp smell of sulphur and saltpetre. All trickery and illusion. But he was clutching the arms of hi
s chair nonetheless.

  In the flickering orange light, the burning house seemed to collapse and sink into the earth. Deep within the smoke, still to the sound of heavy rumbling, the Memory Palace began to rise in its place through a veil of flames. The paired creatures had gone.

  I think I still follow your narrative…

  The thump of an explosion struck him like a piece of heavy timber. He threw himself sideways onto the floor. After a moment with his ears ringing and without breathing, he lifted his face from the cold stone floor. No rush of flame had seared off his hair or sucked the air from his lungs. No lethal fragments of rock had struck him. None littered the floor around him.

  Just another theatre trick. If perhaps a little overemphatic.

  He cursed and rose cautiously to his feet, unsure whether he was angrier with her or with himself. He turned to glare through the pungent, smoky air. Where the Memory Palace had been, he now saw nothing at all. A gaping cavern in the earth filled with smoke and darkness.

  Zeal heard the dull thud with profound relief.

  He understood and chose to take the first step. Chose to follow me.

  John stepped forward cautiously. Took two more steps. Then two more. Nothing but chilly darkness. He felt into the smoke. Still nothing. The stage itself had disappeared. Suddenly he doubted everything he had thought he knew about where he had found himself. The entertainment of theatre had become something else.

  He advanced a little further, then stopped. He did not like darkness. He wiped his palms on his trousers. Darkness meant locked cells. Helplessness. Secret coffin-shaped crevices among a ship’s cargo where an overheard gasp for air meant death to a fugitive.

  But I never wrote to her of such things, he thought. This is her darkness, not mine.

  Then he thought he saw a faint light, deep in the earth. No more than a single candle. A shadowed figure stood as if waiting for him. He peered through the smoky darkness.

  ‘Zeal? Thank God!’

  She seemed to tilt her head for him to follow. He strode eagerly after her.

  Sick disappointment punched him in the gut.

  A painted image of oiled cloth on wood. A decoy, he thought angrily. I’ve seen the same trick played with cannons and false men. He took the candle from its iron sconce and leaned close to the questioning look on her painted face.

  Then he turned and saw that the walls had closed behind him. Now he was forced to go forwards.

  He was turned player.

  Through my own actions but not by my choice.

  He stood for a moment, thoughtfully. Then, holding up the candle, he moved past the painted Zeal and found himself in a roughly dug underground passage.

  Or so it seemed. Assuming nothing now, he touched one wall.

  No illusion here, after all. Solid earth and stone.

  He looked back. Seen from behind, Zeal was an ugly frame of raw wood and unpainted canvas.

  He moved on, around a bend. Turned again. Then he lowered the candle and paused to let his eyes grow accustomed to the new dimness.

  Light reached this passage through mirrored shafts, which seemed to have been punched through from the surface, several feet above.

  Slowly, he began to see where she had led him.

  He stood at the end of a curving passage carved into the earth, irregular in dimension, its roof low enough to touch with his hand. The floor of the tunnel heaved and subsided like the back of a serpent. The walls, which blended without definition into the floor, also undulated and heaved. In places they had been smoothed with plaster or mud daub. In other parts, they were naked stony earth. So might the inside of Jonah’s whale have been shaped. He looked down. And felt the world shift. He was walking on stars. Fish swam above his head.

  Slowly he moved down the passage. He began to make out images painted onto the plaster of the walls or picked out in tiny stones. Animals drifted upside down among swimming fish, falling into the sky beneath his feet. A horse, a black bird, a flock of familiar-looking, goat-like sheep. A ginger cat tumbled slowly. A naked man – drowned or swimming? Near the ceiling, a red-haired woman drifted among ballooning skirts. Birds flew, or fell, or swam past his ankles.

  What he took at first to be a rough fan-vault ceiling proved to be the roots of trees growing upside-down into the space of the passage. Among one set of roots, hung a tiny Hawkridge House, which had just begun its long slow fall.

  The muscles of his thighs weakened. He forgot to breathe. This was no longer stage spectacle and tricks. She had let him in. He did not understand all she meant to say, but he recognized the terrain of the private mind. He touched the images as if they might yield their meaning to his fingertips. Beyond the next tree, he stopped to study a drifting lion. It half-turned as it fell, or flew, holding the sun in its jaws as delicately as if the celestial orb were a kitten or an unbroken egg. Then he saw that the tree was a branching coral.

  The passage began to curve. He heard running water again, closer to him now. He felt its deep pulse and bump in the earth. He looked down at the sky and saw that the heavenly constellations beneath his feet now looked like sand stars. He gazed up and saw the underbelly of a shark. Shoals of fish swam on the walls and above his head. All doubts about what he now saw vanished as he rounded a buttress of rough stone.

  In a pool of light from one of the shafts from the surface, he saw himself and his orange and blue enamelled swimming companions.

  He was under the sea. His sea. In a world turned upside down.

  I asked only that you try to imagine the things I wrote. I never expected this.

  His sea, his sky, his paradise, here, a part of her life.

  Against his expectation, it seemed that his words – mere dogged words – had carried his soul to her after all, and she had read them with full understanding. She had swum through this sea, where he had known without reason but beyond all doubt that all would be well. Though this was no longer straightforward exposition, he could read it clearly enough.

  You can’t be far now, he thought. Together, we will make all well.

  Remembering that unreasoning ecstasy, he moved boldly to the door at the end of the tunnel. In spite of the wonders of the passage, he half-expected the door to be another trick, and not to open. But it did open, onto a long tiled passage that led to another door, ornate and panelled, left standing just ajar. A crack of light showed down the side. Light picked out a tapestry hanging on the wall and leaked along the polished black and white floor. The way out.

  He cursed even before his hand tried to grasp the painted knob. He had reached the door many strides too soon. The lintel reached no higher than his forehead. A painted door. The light shone through oiled cloth. He felt suddenly unsteady on his feet.

  He retraced the false, painted perspective with a sense of moving far too fast, and stepped back into the undersea corridor. The door closed itself behind him.

  He heard more of the mysterious grinding and thumps that he had heard before in the theatre, like the internal rumblings in the belly of a giant beast.

  After a moment of thought, he went to the door again. The light behind the false door must have had a source. If he cut through the painted cloth, he might find a real window or door.

  Have I guessed what you mean to tell me? he asked her. Did you have to find the brutal way out? Believe me, I have shared that need!

  He opened the door again and froze.

  Holding the door so that it could not close once more, he stepped back a little and studied the rough passage wall on either side. He frowned and turned his head gently, like a man just dazed by a clout on the ear. The tiled passage, with its false perspective and false door, had vanished.

  Ahead of him now, in the light falling past him from the undersea passage, he could just make out the top of a set of stone steps twisting down into shadow. He stepped back yet again, and cautiously explored, to be certain he had not been mistaken and opened a second door. But there was only this one. For a moment, he doubted his san
ity.

  If I am in her place, then she must once have been in the place I now find myself.

  He shook his head.

  I read too much reassurance into that sea of mine, he thought. The story may have just begun.

  All thought of enjoying a battle of wits had gone. He did not care for the darkening turn in the game.

  He hesitated for a long moment before closing the door behind him.

  The arched roof above the steps was low. The deep bumping in the earth grew louder as he descended, joined by the sound of running water. At the bottom, he froze a second time.

  A stone mask made up one entire wall of the dim, irregular subterranean grotto where he had arrived. The mask loomed four times taller than his height. Distant light shining through its eyes gave it a bright demonic glare. Water ran from its mouth and tongue into the shallow pool beneath its chin. Thin streams of water ran from its hair, its eyebrows, fell ten feet, and splashed John with a fine constant spray. The deep watery pulse bubbled up from the pool.

  John stepped forward cautiously.

  The face smiled in a friendly fashion. Its gaping mouth was the only way forward out of the chamber. It looked very like Philip Wentworth. Lest there be any doubt, John now saw small carp and pike caught in the tangles of its brows and a tiny red-haired woman lying in a stone curl of its hair.

  Whatever did I leave her to?

  He crossed the small pool on the stepping stones and ducked his head to enter the cavern of the mouth.

  She has gone mad after all, he thought. Grief for her, grief for the pair of them, and cold unreasoning fear warred in him as he stared.

  The tongue was a table, a single stump of a tooth offered a seat to the diner, for whom had been set a glass, a knife and a plate on which lay a human hand holding a heart.

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