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window once. You suddenly woke up, and found yourself clinging to the wall outside, with no memory of how you got there.”
    “No, I do remember that. I was helping one of the Levrier boys clean the gutters, and the wind gusted, and the ladder fell…”
    “What color was the ladder? Wood or aluminium? What happened to the boys that they did not immediately lift the ladder again? There were no boys. There was no ladder.”
    He was silent.
    Laureline said, “You see? The spell is very subtle. It not only sponges out memories, it covers them over with false ones. It explains away little inconsistencies. It made you forget this house entirely, this last time. Even though you have been coming here for years! Before, you were able to remember the house and the outside of the chamber. It is getting stronger, not weaker. It is an enemy, and a cunning one…”
    Henry had rolled up his sleeve. He was staring in horror at the large and angular knife-scars which covered his left forearm from elbow to wrist. Two-year-old scars. The letters spelled out
I LOVE LdL
.
    Henry said, “But it? It who? Some mind, some deliberate thing, must be doing this!”
    “Must it? Does a deliberate mind send dreams, the little details in a dream, the color of a pair of shoes, or the words spoken by a figure we meet? Or do we do it to ourselves?”
    “How can we fight this?” Henry asked angrily.
    Laureline said, “We can influence ourselves subtly. The last time we were here, you wrote
The Memory Palace of Giordano Bruno
in your little memorandum book.”
    He nodded. “Yes. I became fascinated with the idea of picking up books about Bruno from the library. He died in 1600, burned as a heretic. Some say he was a warlock. He was famed for having the best memory in the world, the best in all history. He developed what he called the Ancient Art of Memory, mnemonics, based on the writings of the Greeks.”
    She was frowning, biting her thumbnail delicately, staring at the floor. “How does it work? How can that help us?”
    “The idea was to build an imaginary house in your mind, a palace of memory, so that every room and bit of furniture is just so. You use rhymes and colors and figures from astrology or myth to help keep things in order. In each room, you fix an image to remind you of what you want to remember. For example, I can never remember the taxonomic classifications, so in the den, beneath the stuffed heads of a leopard, lion, and a she-wolf, I imagined a chessboard made of reddish-purple glass and I have a crowned king in an ermine-lined robe playing a game. I can remember
Kings Play Chess on Fuchsia Glass Surfaces
. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genre, species.”
    “So?”
    “These led to other books on memory and memory-binding. I came across the theory of state-related memory. You know drunks who wake sober on Monday, and forget the whole weekend of what they did. The surprising thing is next time they’re plastered, the forgotten memories can return. The same with certain states of mind, drugs, hypnosis, altered states, or even returning to an old place. Memory retrieval is most efficient when a man is in the same state of consciousness as he was when the memory was formed.”
    “What does it mean?” she asked softly, searching his face with her eyes.
    “Something in this chamber is changing our state of consciousness.”
    “And what does
that
mean?”
    He looked bewildered. “I–but I don’t know what it means. It is a start. If we can think of a solution, solve the puzzle…”
    Laureline sighed scornfully. “You know we will forget the answer the moment we step out of this chamber, and the puzzle too. What is worse is that if I subconsciously influence myself, my out-of-doors self, to call off the wedding, then I will lose you too! Manfred owns the house and the Rose Crystal Chamber.”
    She pulled away from him now, and went and sat on a purple divan, and put her face in her hands.
    “Only here, in this