Seeing no escape, and cursing himself for a fool under his breath, he followed.
The Silver Chain
They stepped again into the Rose Crystal Chamber, where Laureline, as she had said, indeed spread out a fine supper table. There was no shock this time as their true memories returned, they merely straightened, looked one another in the eye, saw the recognition there, the truth they shared, the burning passion.
Then they were in each other’s arms.
They held hands while they ate, and slipped morsels into each other’s mouths, each forcing the other to drink more than was wise. After the meal, he started nibbling on her. She pulled him down onto the rug.
The madness of longing drove him further this time than he had dared before, so that by the time he pulled himself back from where they lay intertwined on a tigerskin rug before the blazing fire in which their shattered wine glasses lay, she was naked from the waist up, wearing little more than her silk stockings. Oddly, her black shoes were still on her feet, as if, in the midst of their passion, she had forgotten to kick then off.
Panting, head pounding, he stepped back to help himself to more wine and paused to drink in the frankly erotic vision of her. She lay carelessly draped over the fur rug, displaying to best advantage the sensuous contour of her soft body—her lovely shoulder, her wasp-like waist, her curving hip, the smooth black lines of her stockinged legs, and her shoes glinting like onyx. He had seen such seductive poses ten thousand times in advertisements, films, paperback covers, calendars, but this was real. She arched her back and smiled her ensorcelling smile not for a camera, not for an anonymous audience, but for him and him alone.
A strange sensation ran through him then, a heated, animal energy that inflamed his body even as it seared his conscience. She was a blessing and a blasphemy; she was rare wine cast indifferently into the briny sea, the nectar of the gods poured into a sewer. And yet, he burned to slake his thirst and drain her to the very dregs.
Henry whispered, “This cannot go on. I will go mad.”
“Mad with what?”
“We really should not be doing this…” without meaning to do so, he took a half-step towards her.
“Mm. A girl likes to know that she is wanted.” Laureline made a soft noise in the back of her throat, half-sigh, half-moan. Rolling over, she writhed against the tigerskin, her shoulders and knees touching the luxurious fur, her hips high, her head low. Firelight caressed her, a red-gold dappling that danced over her porcelain skin. “You do want me, don't you, Henry?”
“You know I do.” His throat was thick, his voice was oddly deep. “You know damn well I do. Why are you doing this to me? This is so wrong.”
“It will feel right soon, very soon. Everything is all right. Kiss me, that will make it all better!”
“Do you even realize what you are doing? Are you doing all this on purpose? Do all girls practice in a mirror looking seductive?”
Laureline rolled onto her back and put her hands above her head, smiling at him. “You think too much, Henry. Live! Love! Feel! It is like dancing; let yourself go! If you are doing it deliberately, step after careful step, you are doing it wrong. Do all men practice in a mirror looking bold and masterful, so menacing and huge and hairy?”
He glowered down at her, his broad and hairy chest glistening in the firelight where she had torn all his buttons away, his face stern, his eyes like fire, his countenance like a pagan war god, or a lion towering over its helpless prey.
“Am I now?” he said in a low growl, as the fire cast his huge shadow across the ceiling behind him. “Is that what you want?”
“Of course. When the antlers of the king stag of the forest affright the other does, his royal consort can queen it over them.”
“Outside you—is she marrying Manfred for his money, then? His title?”
Laureline shook her head. “I don't know. I can’t psychoanalyze her. Maybe it is for the security, or the illusion of security. Or maybe not. It’s even possible I want to marry him just to get closer to you, but I fear what my mother would say if I wed an penniless American nobody. Out there, in that outer world, I am a coward. Only here am I true.”
He stared at her, bewildered. “But I am a nobody! I cannot even break us out of this chamber into the outside!”
“In here, you are my knight in shining armor, my champion, my demigod. You are strong and give me strength. Do you think I could fight this shapeless nightmare of amnesia without you?”
Henry plunged his hand into the ice bucket, pulled out a handful of dripping ice cubes, and wiped them angrily against his face and neck, hissing in shock. The pounding heartbeat left his face and released his groin. He stuffed the handful of ice under one armpit, then the other, which certainly drove away his erotic thoughts.
Laureline sat up on the rug, her arms behind her to either side, palms on the fur, black-clad legs stretched before her, crossed at the ankles. She watched his antics with both eyebrows raised. “Well, that must smart!”
Henry said, “You and I, we have to control ourselves. Things are spinning out of control.”
She smiled archly and leaned back on her elbows. “It’s not working. You still look huge, hairy and menacing to me. Damp, to be sure, but still desirable.”
“I cannot imagine why you love me.”
She smiled. “It is like dancing, if you look at your feet, you break the spell. Why do I love you? Look at me. What do you see?”
“The most attractive woman in the world.”
“Beauty fades. Five years, or ten, or when I have your first son, and this will be gone. I am wasting my life studying theater and going to parties, hunting for eligible bachelors, hanging out with silly girls my own age even sillier than I am. I am never going to change the world. Do you understand why I love you now?”
He shook his head, as if trying to drive away the echo of her words from his brain. When I have your first son. She had said it so casually, as if, in her heart, they were already wed.
Laureline was saying, “All the little starlets and stage hands I know talk about power and empowerment, and how women must be strong. Strong, strong, strong is all their talk, all day. But I am frail, really. Like glass. My life could be shattered in an instant. Do you understand how opposites attract? I am sure all the beasts aboard Noah’s Ark must have stared at the restless sea in awe. But after the waters receded, the fish learned to adore the land for its hardness and stillness, wondering why the mountains never break like curlers. You will not break either.”
Since he felt as if he were already broken in two, he scowled and said nothing.
She smiled up at him, and saw his thought on his face. “Maybe you don’t feel strong. That is because I have not been doing my job. It is the woman’s job to put strength in her man. We are designed to need each other, man and mate. The cavegirl cannot kill a mastodon, but she can cheer up and cheer on the big hulking brute who can…and pan-sear a mastodon steak for him afterwards, in a light wine sauce with olive oil, butter and peppercorns.”
“That does sound delicious,” Henry said, “But it doesn’t seem like a fair deal for the cavegirl.”
“Do you think you men would kill mastodons without us, instead of lying about the cave all day, drinking cave-beer from a coconut shell?”
“On second thought, maybe the caveboy is the one with the wrong end of this deal.”
“I’ll say! You have to kill whole forests of birds and beasts for us, so we can have doeskin-leather bikinis and have necklaces of bearclaws thonging our cavegirl throats, and can adorn our cavegirl hair with prehistoric feathers. Speaking of adornment: Did you get it? Did you bring it?”
He had not taken off his shirt, pants, or boots, but his jacket had been flung across the chamber. He retrieved it and drew a long, flat box of black velvet from an inner pocket. He came and knelt.
She sat up straight and clapped her hands in delight.
He snapped open the box.
Inside, like a snake made
of solid light, was a silver necklace with a tear-shaped diamond pendant. Tiny chips of ruby, garnet, and diamond dust circled the boss from which the pendant hung, and the boss was adorned with a pattern of waves and fishes. The links near the boss were tiny dolphins of silver, curling this way and that, each holding the tail of the one before it in its mouth. It was a cunning work, and Henry was sure the artisan must have used a microscope to see and work the fine detail, the drops of spray, the scales of the fish, the smiles of the bottle-noses.
Laureline made little noises of feminine joy and knelt at his feet. Holding up her outrageous masses of hair with both hands, she presented her graceful, swanlike neck. Her eyes were lowered demurely. The firelight gleamed against her naked breasts and the soft contours of her white belly.
Kneeling thus, Henry thought Laureline looked, in that light, in that pose, very much like the cavegirl she had described.
He snapped the silver chain around her neck. She put her hand to her bosom, looking down, to admire the glinting jewels.
She looked so lovely, there in the dancing light of the fire, that he could not take his eyes from her. She was so precious to him, so dear, far more so than a thousand such necklaces.
He imagined their future life, once this terrible curse had been broken, picturing them together, traveling, laughing. He pictured their future house, the children that they would have, sweet, dark-haired girls and stalwart, towheaded boys.
He recalled a time, soon after they had met, when he had come upon her bending over, talking to the granddaughter of the innkeeper in town. She had looked so attentive, so intent, so patient, as she listened to the child. He had been entirely captivated.
He always pictured her speaking to their future children with exactly that same radiant expression.
Laureline spoke: “I was lost last time, and about to give up, and you were my strength. Now it is my turn to put your heart back in you! This proves your new system, your memory mansion, can help you recall more things more clearly. We have more control over our blind Out-of-Doors selves now! It was easy for me to lure us both back into the Rose Crystal Chamber this time! And this necklace—don’t you see, it is a symbol! We are fighting our own subconscious minds, the minds that take over and make us forget our love when we step out that hateful rosy door! But symbols have great power in the subconscious mind!”
“I am still not sure what this will do.”
“I will write a note telling myself to wear it Wednesday, and you write a reminder about meeting me for golf. You will see this glorious pendant on me, and you will remember. Here, now! Kiss me on the back of the neck where the clasp is! Kiss me where the teardrop rests! Look at the chain! Stare at it closely!”
“But I won’t remember it is I who gave it to you.”
“Why not? You bought it! You should be able to remember that. Put all the images of me you can into your new memory halls. Adorn the walls with them! Study me like a painter would a model. You will forget, but your lips and eyes will remember the necklace! When you see it, the impulse will break through, and you’ll have to kiss me!”
“And then what? I kiss my best friend’s wife-to-be? How will that change anything?”
She bit her lip. Still kneeling, she wrapped her white arms around his upper thighs. “Think of Sleeping Beauty! The kiss will break the spell!”
When he bent down, his mouth half an inch from hers, she put her slim fingers on his lips, and whispered. “No more tonight! Only if you are burning, aching, longing, will you remember. Your body and blood might remember, even if your mind does not.”
He did step away from her again. This time, however, he had to put his whole head in the ice bucket to cool the rebellion in his flesh.
Laureline looked at him through heavily lidded eyes, her lips pursed. “You are going to have the locals start telling their old stories about ghosts and sea-witches, if they hear you howl like that.”
Henry shook the ice water out of his eyes. “You slept in here that night. Why did you say you slept on the cot? Because that is what I remembered, too.”
Her smile vanished.
She said sharply, “This means someone is coordinating the false memories. Do you think it is Manfred? You know he has all those books on hypnotism and the occult for his dissertation. He went to Rome last year, and got permission to study the books in the black library under the Vatican, where copies of the most blasphemous grimoires and manuals captured from warlocks and heretics are stored. Maybe including that Italian fellow you read, Giordano Bruno. Didn’t you tell me he was burned at the stake in the Sixteenth Century?”
“It cannot be Manfred,” said Henry curtly.
But his mind returned, against its will, to the suspicion that had touched his mind when he first entered the house. He and Laureline were bewitched by some manner of hypnotism that plagued them when they left this room. In all the world, he only knew one man who was studying mesmerism. And by some unlikely chance, it happened to be the very same man who owned this house.
Even he was forced to admit this seemed like a rather unexpected coincidence.
She looked up at him, and her eyes seemed deeper than he had ever seen them, like two emerald oceans, fathomless, bottomless. “He is descended from Arviragus and Anna, the Virgin’s cousin, from Avallach and Eudelen, from whose heirs Helen of the Cross was born, who married Constantine the Great. From him King Athrwys son of Uthyr sprung.”
Henry started. Some scholars thought Athrwys to be King Arthur, or, rather, the real name of the figure about whom the legends had gathered. He was struck by a sudden notion. Were not such gathered legends very much like the false memories that robbed him and Laureline of their true selves whenever they stepped into the air of the outer world?
He wondered uneasily what, if anything, Manfred might remember were he to enter this chamber? Would his friend remember the real version of events, where he had called Laureline a harpy and had not wished to wed her? Or had he changed his mind? And, if so, what lengths had he been willing to go to in order to win this emerald-eyed beauty?
Henry shivered and rejected this line of thought as absurd. Still, it was strange that Manfred, who had aided him in his studies, had never told him of any blood connection to the legendary King Arthur.
She said, “Owen Glendower the Magician comes from the same bloodline. Donne and De Vere families, who are the earls of Oxford, descend from the Magician, as does the Cavendish family—and the Hathaways. You know that what is happening to the two of us has no natural explanation. Who has the better motive, the stronger desire, to take me away from you? Why is this chamber, in his house, his very house, the only place where we are immune?”
Because were there any truth to it, the temptation to claim the willing girl as his own, to take her and have her before Manfred did, to consummate his passion not in love but as an act of preemptive retaliation, was simply too strong.
And because the accusation seemed so reasonable now that it came from her lips, so inevitable, Henry ran from the chamber, seeking the oblivion that would wash into forgetfulness the horrible thought that his best friend might be his betrayer.
There was no other way to forget it.
The Garret
Hal found himself in dark halls with his shirt buttons missing, dripping with icy water, and wondering for the life of him where Laurel and her candle had gone. Perhaps she went to change into something more decent, he hoped. He had bumped into a ladder in the dark, where a careless workman had left a bucket of water that had turned icy in the winter cold. Had she been doused as well? Oddly, he could not remember. She would have had no choice but to go change if she, too, had been caught in the icy drench. His imagination of what would have happened to her silky nightgown under such circumstances made him feel less chilled.
He stumbled around the lightless mansion for a time, barking his shins on unexpected crates the workmen had left behind, wondering where the dinner could be that she had promised him. Finally he found his wa
y into a part of the mansion he recognized, despite the gloom, and found the cot in the spare attic room. It was equipped with a sleeping bag and an inflatable pillow. The hunting rifles were gone, and the pyramid of cans had been placed in a footlocker next to a cooler, and several car batteries were wired to a hotplate. There was also an electric teapot half-full of water and a propane lantern as well. His dinner consisted of a beer bottle from the cooler and a Styrofoam cup of instant noodles. He ate less than half, surprised to find himself not hungry at all.
The Chain and the Links
In Hampshire, Barton-on-Sea was between Highcliffe and Milford-on-Sea. The clubhouse was an imposing glass-walled structure with a peaked roof of brown slate like a tortoise shell. It was situated on a green hill commanding a splendid view across the Solent to the Needles on the Isle of Wight, along to Old Harry Rocks at Swanage. The golf course here dated back to 1879.
The day was blustery and unseasonably cold, with snarls of cloud promising rain that never came scudding swiftly against a deceptively bright blue-white sky. The lawn was as green and neat as only two centuries of maintenance could produce, surrounded by thickets of darker green rough and water traps like shining rugs.
Hal resisted the impulse to swat his golfball over the cliff into the sea. He could not remember why he had agreed to take Laurel golfing on Wednesday. A month ago, he would have thought nothing of it, but ever since the day that they broke into the High House of Wrongerwood, he had found himself entertaining distinctly unbestmanly thoughts. A private outing with her seemed a foolish move, especially with Manfred’s doubts troubling him.
But agreed he had, and now he must make the best of it.
She was dressed smartly, obeying the strict dress code of the club, while managing to subvert it. Laurel wore white knee socks and very short shorts, her crisp white blouse tucked neatly into her wide black belt, buttons of her short-sleeved blouse straining wherever her bosom heaved in a laugh or indrawn breath. How she could breathe with her belt cinched so tightly was a mystery to him. She looked like a pouter pigeon.