Room 13

"Can you find out if he accessed any other books around that time?" I asked excitedly.

"Oh, that won't be easy sir. The records on his temporary membership card would have long gone and we would have to check the records on every book in the library. That would take days. Weeks even."

Did I have weeks to spend on this one task? Probably not, but if I started with those books on similar subjects maybe I could follow Taylor's own research trail and track down how the medallion had come into his collection. It would not be easy, but it was considerably more than I had a few days ago.

"Well thank you Herr Tausen, I am most obliged to you."

"Not at all, sir. Glad to to be of service to someone so interested in the history of our wonderful city."

As I walked back to my lodgings my mind was racing at the possibilities. Taylor must have read the journal and had his curiosity aroused by the mention of the amber jewellery, but how had he come by the medallion itself? It was not the sort of item one could just pick up in a back street antique store of a minor European city because eventually it would have discovered by someone who could recognise the obvious value of such an item. Its entry into the market should have created a stir and it would have been sold at a major international auction house such as Sotheby's. But what if he had not bought it, but instead found it or, god forbid, stole it? That could cause great problems for the Ashmolean, because there would be no clear provenance and there would be subsequent questions on ownership, maybe even legal battles. Should I even try to discover the truth of the matter, knowing that doing so could place Taylor's legacy, my intuition and even my own career in jeopardy?

I thought hard about this as I returned to rooms before settling on my professional integrity - I was a rational scholar and a seeker of truth, even if it might lead to dark places and undesirable ends. It was not for men such as myself to try to rewrite the past to suit our own conveniences. Did Galileo try to hid his discover that the Earth moved around the Sun? If an archaeologist found a grisly discover, surely he would investigate it to the full extent of his power and not simply ignore and bury it again. After all even deeply buried truths are eventually uncovered once again, often producing twice the hurt they would have caused the first time.

This was all still running through my mind when after supper I retired to my rooms to assemble and edit the very considerable notes from my research of the day. As an aid to concentrate my mind on the task I took up the medallion and placed it at the top of the desk. Somehow in this confusing mass of words in Gustav von Svendborg's diary must lie the clues that lead Taylor to acquire the medallion. All I had to do was follow the trail the same as he did and I would reach the same destination.

I was still working feverishly when the lamp oil began to run low and I refilled it with a little more from the previous night's lamp, not knowing or caring what hour it was. The young nobleman's descriptions of Helena were so numerous and so vivid that I could clearly picture her in my mind's eye as I translated the phrases into English, the long golden curls, the soft blue eyes, the red lips that could smile with delight to light up the room or turn into a scornful sneer if displeased.

When I reached the passage describing Helena's medallion I carefully examined every phrase while looking at my own on the desk in front of me I became more and more sure that it had to be the same item as in the text the intertwining limbs were said to represent the eternal binding of recipient. Then I came was the strange ritual when Helena had given the item to unfortunate young man. Gustav was writing in Danish but left the words of the ritual in Latin, which he was clearly not proficient at because the spelling was often phonetic. As I had to very careful to translate both carefully I fell back on speaking these phrases quietly aloud to make sure that I had the phrases correctly transcribed.

It was rather laborious work as the Latin used was quite obscure, but I managed to get to the end of it just as I could feel my tiredness creeping up on me. In my tiredness I thought I could low sounds coming again from an adjacent room. To prepare for bed I visited the bathroom, and after I had finished washing I realised that I had absent absent-mindedly pocketed the medallion into my dressing gown. As I brought it out into the dim light of the bathroom I noticed that it had a faint blue sheen to it, something that would normally only be seen in direct sunlight. Something about pale blueness glittering over the surface highlighted the spiral inside and I looked at the object in a new light for a minute of. The entwining limbs of the silverwork around it no longer seemed a vulgar decadence, but something of true and profound beauty. It's value was incalculable, and I had been foolish enough to leave it in desk drawer of a hotel room, a drawer that I sometimes even forgot to lock. No, I think I would have to be much more careful about this priceless object and should make sure I knew where it was at all times. I would have to keep it on my person, but placing it in a pocket could steal lead to it being stolen. The only safe thing to do would be to wear it underneath my clothes. The chain would need to be repaired and I would see to that as the very first thing the next day.

As I held the medallion my thoughts then wandered to Gustav's descriptions of Helena, they were so vivid that even without his words in front of I easily bring her image to my mind, her celestial beauty, the halo of golden hair, the red lips that when quietly pleased could form a smile like a contented cat, and her clear blue eyes that once they had fixed themselves upon you meant that you could not break her gaze before she did. Reading between the lines of his diary it was clear that she ruled over her circle of worshipping admirers like the queen of an ancient civilisation, part ruler, part goddess.

I shivered and realised that I had been standing for some time in this cold bathroom when I should be in a warm bed. Still holding the medallion in my left hand I headed back to my room, and then stopped in the corridor. There was a faint pink light emanating from underneath the door to my room. No, not my room. As I reach up to check the number it was a clear 13, numerals of aged cast iron on an elaborate ancient font quite different to the doors to the other rooms.

I realised that my hand was already moving automatically toward the handle of the door when I stepped back from the door in bewilderment. In addition to my fear was a curious excitement to find out what was on the other side of that door, to enter and find out the rational source for the mystery of room 13. The temptation to turn the handle seemed unnaturally strong, but something ancient and primordial within knew that it would have terrible consequences so I forced myself to move along the corridor to my own room.

Except that the next door also had the same pink light flooding out it. I reached up to the door and felt the same cold iron numbers of 1 and 3 in the same style. I look back down the corridor but saw nothing but darkness. Should I try to go back to the previous door or continue on to where my room should be?

As I tried to make sense of this madness, tentative traces of perfume could be smelt wafting through the air. The memories of the previous night's dream came flooding back. I pinched myself hard on the hand and felt a sharp pain, but one that was not long lived as I breathed in more of the soothingly sweet perfume. It had feeling of being like incense used in a ritual, or a relaxing soporific narcotic drug. Was I being drugged? Was this a crazy opium dream? Oh, how easy it would be to open the door and discover the truth. Wasn't that what I had wanted all along?

Feeling deeply disoriented and not a little exhausted I staggered further down the corridor, so unsteady in both body and mind that I was forced to lean against the wall for support. Then I felt the doorway, my hand reach out for support and found the door handle, which turned so easily under my staggering weight and the door to room 13 opened and I fall through it.

It is hard to describe what I saw. Rather than seeing or hearing these things they were more felt and experienced like they entered into the mind sometimes without being processed correctly by the senses. If you were being simplistic then I suppose you could say it was like a dream, but where a dream is often a pale copy of the real world this was like the opposite, a deeply enhanced reality where everything is experienced to a heightened level, everything all at once. The nearest I have heard of anything similar is the mania phase of manic depression, or, at the risk of being blasphemous, the religious ecstasy of the saints.

But what way within was not saintly of heavenly, although it may have come from the other place. The first thing I should describe was the soft pink light that suffused the room. It was incredibly strong but not blinding, more hazy. It had a way of overwhelming the vision, getting into your head and making everything it shone on seem perfectly ... and here I can not find the right word. "Acceptable" is perhaps the best I can do. The made things seem "right", that they should be there, that you should be there, that you didn't need to think about them but just accepted them automatically. Most of what it illuminated I could not tell you, accept that there was a four poster bed at the centre of the room covered with pink gossamer thin silk curtains which gently fluttered about and immediately caught the eye.

The other immediate thing to assault my senses was the perfume, a rich heady scent of such sweetness that it was like eating delicacies of pure sugar. I said before that when I had smelt it in the corridor it was soothing, but that is probably the wrong word. Inside the room it was stifling, sapping your strength with every breath, leaving you weak and helpless, making it so hard to think straight without wanting to take another breath, like it was some sort of devilish drug. I knew that the longer I stayed in the room breathing it in, the deeper I would fall under it's insidious influence and the less able I would be to escape.

At that moment it was all I could do to stand, helplessly enraptured. Soft voices and feminine giggling surrendered me, although in that hazy pink light I could not comprehend where they came from. Things, impressions of shapes, stirred at the edge of my sight but were beyond comprehension. Maybe they were drapes hung from the ceiling, or sheets draped over things, but they moved in a breeze that was not there. A breeze that could not be felt but which came from all around and carried more and more of that intoxicating fragrance to surround me and subdue me. As the scent around me got thicker and heavier so too did my mind and body, weak and heavy and helpless. I knew I was falling deeper under it's spell with every breath but still I could not resist inhaling it again and again, the seductively sensual perfume completely enrapturing me all the way deep down into my soul, making me yearn to give myself up to the sweet temptations of it's wicked ways.

Looking back I had the sensation that the room was just too big to fit into a hotel, it seemed to have the same huge empty feeling of a cathedral or a large theatre, maybe one where I was on the stage and the audience was all around me waiting in hushed expection for the show to come. I had the disturbing feeling that those vague draped shapes at the edge of my vision where waiting for someone or something to happen, hanging there in languid anticipation for the moment when they could come to life. But for the moment they seemed content to watch, merely fluttering gently in the perfumed breeze, or maybe creating it with their movements, sending that intoxicating incense like scent towards me.

All I could be sure of was that ahead of me, seemingly near but possibly miles away, something was stirring behind the silken drapes of the bed. Something was waking and rising to greet it's newest visitor, it's shape as yet indistinct. Breathy sighs and sensual moans floated around me as if they were part of the scent in the air, but whether they came from the bed or somewhere else in the room I could not be certain.

I could not be certain of anything that happened to me in that room until the curtains on the bed were slide apart by a soft white hand, a hand the wore amber jewellery, just like in my dream. A mass of pink satin and silks emerged, moving like a body, and at their head I saw the face of Helena. There was no doubting it from descriptions of Gustav that had haunted my dreams and even my waking thoughts. Her golden hair curled and spun around her like it was borne by gentle breezes. Her cool calm blue eyes met mine and I was caught by their mesmerising power, I knew I was falling under the same spell that had caught Gustav and so many others.

She stepped down from the bed like it was the throne of an empress, and as she moved the many long thing cuts of silks and satin around her became not so much as dress as a mess of entwining branches or tendrils, twisting and turning and seeking as if alive and hungry.

As she paused to examine me, her devilishly sweet red lips smiled and she said in a voice like silken honey, a voice that I thought I could willingly listen to for the rest of my life, "You're new. Not the same as the one who took my amulet. But younger, stronger, more malleable. And you have my amulet. And you said the words so well. Now I will teach you new words to say, words that would allow us to stay together forever."

I would like to have said that I was filled with horror at the prospect of being made an eternal slave to this unnatural creature, a woman who should have been dead for a century and a half and who had been made present here by some unspeakable magics, magics that I may have unwittingly helped to unleash. But it was not horror that I felt, it was joy at finally seeing her, and lust for her, and even a form of happy acceptance of my fate.

"Come now, come to me my lover. Let me seal our union with a kiss." Oh, a kiss from those delicate lips would be heaven. My feet were already moving me towards her. The long scrapes of silk were twirling around her as if anticipating a feeding frenzy. And still she did not release me from her hypnotic gaze.

As I neared her those silken tendrils reached towards me and ran across my body, robing it of the dressing gown and nightshirt and a series of caresses of such sensuality that the previous night's dream did not justice to. It was like they were not touching my skin, but something deeper like my soul. Always moving and stroking and arousing, but not yet binding, not yet.

"Oh, sweet boy, how wonderful you are. Would you like to exchange gifts?"

Gladly I thought, I could not refuse her anything.

"First I will give you a kiss, and then you will give me your true name."

At that moment in time a kiss from her seemed to be worth more than anything in the world.

Helena moved forward to begin the kiss, the kiss that I knew would seal my submission to her. A dozen silken tentacles slipped around my head and body to pull me into her embrace. She tilted her head to enter the kiss and as she did so she broke the hypnotic stare that held me, allowing me to close my eyes and savour the coming kiss.

Now don't for a moment think that this allowed to break free of her control and escape, because that would not have been possible. I was fully under the power of spell from the amulet, my mind and body helplessly drugged by the magical perfume, and silks were ready to wrap themselves around me if I tried to flee. No, I don't think it was that which happened but something quite less heroic.

In my ardour to join her I attempted to lift my weakened arm to reach out and embrace her, forgetting that I held the amulet in my left hand instead of wearing it around my neck. The amulet slipped out of my grasp and fell. Shocked by this I instinctively went to grab it, causing Helena to momentarily miss the kiss. I looked down and could see it falling, falling not to the floor because there was no floor, but tumbling into an endless void in which Helena and I were suspended. My instinctive movement to grab it continued and I too fell into that dark chasm, slipping out of the silken embrace of the now shocked Helena.

As I fell I looked up and saw a whirling mass of bright pink light, furiously grasping at it's lost prey.

"No, you can not refuse me," was the last coherent words I thought I heard.

I remember nothing more about that night, except when I was woken in the early morning with the landlord and one of the maids standing over me. I seems I had passed out in the night on the way back from the bathroom, halfway between the doors of room 14 and my own. I was naked, but my dressing gown and nightshirt were close to hand. Of course the landlord insisted on getting a doctor to examine me, but knew there was nothing physically wrong with me so I resolved to seek other advice.

Henrik Tausen was at the cathedral library, and over a warming drink of Danish mulled wine I told the story to him. Not the full story I have relayed to you here, I skipped over and downplayed some of the more embarrassingly personal parts. When I had finished I ask his opinion, was I mad or damned?

"Mad? I'm not an expert but I don't think so. And as for damned, surely only God knows our destiny. And I know our Lord would accept any sinner who truly wished to repent. With regret, I think that perhaps you have not had a good time here in our city and maybe a return to the more comforting surroundings of your home would be best for you. And if I might offer a little further advice, I would counsel you to give up your search for the origins of this medallion as it has clearly disturbed you deeply. I do not think that the previous owner of this item had a happy life after he had found, so maybe it would be best to let it lie deep in a secure vault for a time. A very long time. Never to see the light of day."

The words of the old man were kind, but I thought I detected some underlying knowledge he was not disclosing to me and I pressed him on the matter.

"Oh my dear young man, you must know that I am old and sometimes my memory is not what it once was. If I had known what exactly you had carried with you, or made the connection between it and that other Englishman, who's name I recalled but not in relationship to that amulet, then I should have been able to pass on this advice to you early and so prevent the disturbing events you have recently experienced from coming to pass. Now that I have all the pieces I do remember that your Mister Taylor did visit us and enquired after Gustav's diary and several other books of the same era. He never told me what he was searching for, and if he did I would have deigned him access to the library, even barred the doors against him."

"Why?" I asked, unable to be sure why the archivist would take such action against another researcher.

"Because in this world there are things that would be best left buried, history that would be best forgotten, words that should never be spoken, and ideas ever thought. Records we have in this place of the Baron, and his women, if indeed they are or ever were truly women. Records through the centuries, even to the recent years."

"What sort of records?"

Henrik hesitated to answer, but saw that I would not be satisfied until he had. "Every place has it's ghost stories, tales of 'visitations' in the night, and we have those. Not so many have tales told by respectable folk of 'leavings', people who after reporting such a visitation vanish without a trace, leaving all belongings and loved ones behind. Not many, maybe a dozen or so over the two centuries after the great fire of 1726. Never enough to concern the authorities, who just assume that they have run off. But enough that those of us who research these matters many years later could see the similarities."