“Ours, of course.” But the moment I said this, the stairway in memory became populated with a number of small white dogs, their fluffy bodies spattered magically with blue and red from the window. My grandmother's dogs.

No: I must have seen that when Grandmother came to visit.

Bringing her dogs with her? Reluctantly, I prodded at the memory, trying to locate a bedroom or nursery I could call my own; all I came up with was an uncomfortable trundle bed in a room that smelt of lavender.

Damnation. Why couldn't I remember such a simple thing?

My fingernails located a rough place on the wooden railing, and began to worry at it. “Honestly, Holmes? I don't know.”

“Russell, I propose that in all likelihood you were, in fact, in San Francisco during the earthquake. That would explain the flying objects in the first dream, don't you think? And the soft white walls of the crowded room, a tent full of odds and ends rescued from a damaged or burning house.”

“Damn it, Holmes, I was not there! Why are you so insistent that I was?”

“Why are you so insistent that you were not? Russell, you never speak of your childhood, do you realise that?”

“Neither do you.”

“Precisely. Happy childhoods nurture memories; uncomfortable events cause the mind to wince away.”

A splinter came abruptly up from the railing and drove itself into my finger. With a stifled oath, I sucked at the offending digit and shouted furiously around it, “I had a happy childhood!”

“Certainly you did,” he retorted drily. “That is why you speak of it so freely.”

“Later events made the memories painful.”

“Russell, where did you live in 1906?”

“I'm going to go find a plaster for this finger,” I told him, and went down the stairway at something close to a run.

I had a happy childhood.

I did not live in California during the quake.

And I did not intend to linger in San Francisco long enough to dig over what sparse portions of my past lay there.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

It is a characteristic difficulty of shipboard life that one cannot escape an interrogator or a boor for long. It is particularly true when one is sharing rooms with one's interrogator.

So it was that the next morning, Holmes knew as well as I did that the dreams had not plagued me during the night. I did dream of the locked rooms, but for the first time since we had left Japan, the flying-objects nightmare did not arrive to jerk me gasping from my bed.

The other two dreams persisted. The faceless man had returned, although he had stood clearly outlined in the door-way of a tent, and had not spoken. Still, his presence had not been as troublesome as before. Instead, that night and the following, the enigmatic concealed rooms became the focus for my sleeping mind, dimmer yet ever more sumptuously laid beneath the dust of disuse.