LOCKED ROOMS
by Laurie R. King
Editor's 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 Russell's 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 anyone's 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, it's anyone's guess.
I have preserved Miss Russell's 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
The 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 India's 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 day's 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
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 speak—how, without a mouth?
Might as well say
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 time—Mediaeval 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 wasn't that I was hiding the apartment from them—indeed, 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 rooms—Mediaeval or modern—that 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 mattered—and what troubled me inexplicably when I woke—was my awareness of them, and of the hidden apartment's dim, empty stillness, comfortable and undemanding, tucked
