Locked rooms - Laurie R. King [6]
“But these dreams have nothing to do with the accident. They're nothing like the Dream I used to have when I was a child—the one I told you about. There's no motorcar, no family. No fire or explosion, no road or cliffs. Not the same at all.”
He thrust the scrap of orange into one pocket, then drew his pipe from another and started packing tobacco into its bowl. As he rolled the top of the pouch shut, he remarked, “This faceless man of the second dream. He seems to alarm but not threaten.”
“That's a fair description, yes.”
“He does not reach for you, or harm you in any way?”
“He just appears, says ‘Don't be frightened, young lady,' and leaves.”
He paused with the brass lighter halfway to the bowl, and two sharp grey eyes locked on to me. “Young lady, or little girl?”
“Young—No, you're right, it's little girl. How did you know that?”
“That was the phrase you used the first time you told me.”
“Well, it scarcely matters.”
“I shouldn't assume that,” replied my husband, in his customary irritatingly enigmatic style, and concentrated on getting the tobacco burning. When he had done so, he let out a fragrant cloud and sat back, his legs stretched out before him. “What do you suppose it means by his being faceless? Is it literal, or is something obscuring his features—a mask of some kind, perhaps, or heavy makeup?”
I gazed out over the sea for a minute. “I just think of him as faceless, but it could be a white mask, or bandages, or as you say, heavy makeup. Like those dancers we saw in Japan, only without the features accentuated. He's just . . . faceless.” It was frustrating, trying to grasp a thing so firmly lodged in the dim recesses of the mind.
“And he appears in a white room.”
“Yes, always.”
“Tell me about the room.”
“It's brightly lit, windowless, and crowded with an odd assortment of furnishings.” I had already decided that this room was a place of importance to my subconscious mind, which had furnished it with elements from all the sides of my life. An almost mythic place, as it were, a sort of Platonic cave.
“But not the same as the locked rooms of the third dream.”
“Oh, no, nothing like. Those are dim and solid, this is bright and, I don't know, soft somehow.” Womblike, I thought—other than the brightness.
“Ah,” he said, and bit down on his pipe-stem with an air I knew well: The case was coming together in his mind.
For some reason, that gesture made me uneasy; I got to my feet to walk over to the railing, looking down at the lower decks, refusing to rise to his bait.
“It's a tent,” he said after a minute.
“From my childhood? Not very likely, Holmes—my mother wouldn't have been caught dead tenting. We did have a summer house, south of San Francisco, and although we left the servants behind when we went there, it was a far cry from roughing it.”
“Not a holiday. Following the earthquake and fire, the parks of San Francisco were covered with the canvas tents of refugees.”
“I told you, I wasn't there during the earthquake.”
“So where were you?”
“I don't remember—I was six years old, for heaven's sake, and we moved around. England, most likely. Or Boston. Not in San Francisco.”
“You were born in London, and lived in California fourteen years later; were you not resident in between?”
“On and off. Not the whole time,” I said, far more decisively than I felt. Did anyone pay much attention to memories of childhood? Personally, I rarely thought about them.
“Where did you live when you were six years old, Russell?” he asked patiently.
“Oh, Holmes, leave it, do.”
“Where, Russell?”
God, was the man out to drive me mad? “Boston, I think.”
“Do you recall the house?”
“Yes,” I said triumphantly, and turned to face him, my chin high. “A large brick mansion with a portico, a pianoforte in the parlour, and a stained-glass