Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [0]
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Editor's Preface
Prologue
Book One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Book Two
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Book Three
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Book Four
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Book Five
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Laurie R. King
Copyright Page
To the ’06 survivors, especially
Robert John Dickson and Florence Frances Adderley,
“Dick” and “Flossie—”
my grandparents
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 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