Laurie R. King - Locked Rooms

Contents

Editors Preface

This is the eighth chapter in the continuing memoirs of Mary Russell, based on a set of manuscripts I received in the early 1990s.* Some of the manuscripts were neatly collated and tied by ribbons; others, comprising as they did varied sizes and qualities of paper, required considerable work to decipher. Still others were mere fragments apparently unrelated to larger bodies of the work, and thus, for lack of a better approach, are best published as short stories.

The following episode in the memoirs looked, at first glance, like a collection of those fragments, but on closer examination I realized that they combined two separate narratives which had been either clumsily filed together, twenty pages here and fifty there, or else roughly interleaved, matching up the chronological progress of both story lines. One document was handwritten in Miss Russells distinctive script; the other was a typewritten, third-person narrative following the actions of her partner/husband. Certain instances of grammar and punctuation would seem to indicate that the writer (or, typist) was Russell herself, but whether she is transcribing a story given her, or creating a more or less speculative document based on learned material, is anyones guess. Personally, having had some time to consider the matter, I venture to say that she put together those chapters of her story based on at least two separate accounts, and found that typing them instead of using her customary handwriting provided her a necessary psychological distance from the tale, as did the shift from the personal voice to one of an objective narrator.

But as I say, its anyones guess.

I have preserved Miss Russells third-person material as it appears in the original, although attempting to duplicate her crude day-by-day interleaving of the two viewpoints made me a bit dizzy. Instead, I have allowed the material to accumulate, following several days story before resuming the alternative account.

Laurie R. King
Freedom, California

Prologue

T he dreams began when we left Bombay.

Three dreams, over and over, rode the ship with me as we churned south around Cape Comorin and up Indias eastern coast, lending their peculiar chill to the steamy nights. Three companions, at my back all the way around the coastline of Asia and across the mis-named Pacific to California.

In the first dream, objects flew.

The first time I dreamt about flying objects was just a day or two after we had steamed away from the port, and it seemed at the time an entertaining variation played on one of the days events. That morning, sitting on a deck-chair beneath the canvas awning that sheltered us from the tropical heat, I had eavesdropped on a discussion of the Alice books between a child enthusiast and her disapproving nanny. So when I dreamt that very night of a deck of cards hurling themselves at me through the air, I woke startled, but amused as well.

The amusement did not last for many days, not when the playing cards became winged bats, then fluttering books, then finally bricks, lamps, and pieces of furniture, all of them aimed at me with ever-increasing force and animosity. Within a few days I caught myself examining my skin in the morning, looking for bruises.

The second dream began after the first was well established in my nocturnal routine. In it, a completely faceless man stood before me, peculiarly terrifying in his utter anonymity, and appearing always in a similarly white and featureless room. He would sometimes speakhow, without a mouth? Dont be afraid, little girl, he would say. Dont be afraid.

Might as well say Dont look down at the bear trap, or Take no notice of the shotgun on the breakfast table. The sort of command intended to suggest its opposite: Be afraid, little girl.

Be afraid.

Then, as if two hauntings were not sufficient, a third dream began shortly after we had rounded the tip of India. The nights were stifling and would have made sleep difficult at the best of times, but with this third regular visitor, I nearly gave up sleep entirely.

Not that this one was as openly nightmarish as the flying objects or the faceless man, merely troubling. In the third dream, I would be strolling through a house, a large and beautifully designed building whose architectural style changed every timeMediaeval stone one night and modern steel-and-glass the next, Elizabethan half-timbered or nineteenth-century brick terrace. My footsteps seemed to echo through the hall-ways, although I often had a number of friends with me, showing them around what seemed to be my own house. We visited a spacious bedroom here, they admired an ornate dining room there, stood and talked about a baronial fireplace in a great hall.

But neither the architecture nor the friends seemed to be the central thrust of the dream, for sooner or later, in dim stone passage-way or brightly windowed corridor, we would come to a door, silent and undemanding, and I would finger a key in my pocket. The door was to an apartment, I knew that, but it was so thoroughly concealed that no-one knew of it but me. My companions would pass by, unaware, while I thoughtfully played with the cool metal key and felt the unsettling pull of the rooms on the other side of the door.

It wasnt that I was hiding the apartment from themindeed, some nights my illusory self would pull out the key and open the unnoticed door, showing my surprised friends around a set of richly comfortable roomsMediaeval or modernthat were only slightly dusty with long disuse. The importance seemed to lie neither in the existence nor in the secrecy of the locked rooms. What matteredand what troubled me inexplicably when I wokewas my awareness of them, and of the hidden apartments dim, empty stillness, comfortable and undemanding, tucked away in the back of my mind as the key was tucked into my pocket.

Almost as if the locked rooms lay deliberately waiting, knowing that someday I should have need of them.

BOOK ONE

Russell

Chapter One

J apan had been freezing, the wind that sliced through its famous cherrytrees scattering flakes of ice in place of spring blossoms. We had set down there for nearly three weeks, after a peremptory telegram from its emperor had reached us in Hong Kong; people kept insisting that the countryside would be lovely in May.

The greatest benefit of those three weeks had been the cessation of the dreams that had plagued me on the voyage from Bombay. I slept wellwarily at first, then with the slow relaxation of defences. Whatever their cause, the dreams had gone.

But twelve hours after raising anchor in Tokyo, I was jerked from a deep sleep by flying objects in my mind.

Three days out from the island nation, the rain stopped and a weak sun broke intermittently through the grey. The cold meant that most of the passengers, after venturing out for a brief turn on the decks, settled in along the windows on the ships exposed side like so many somnolent cats. I, however, begged a travelling-rug from the purser and found a deck-chair out of the wind. There, wrapped to my chin with a hat tugged down over my close-cropped hair, I dozed.