The Medium of Memory | ONC2020

12. The Plan

"As I said, human remains are not my area of expertise. I do hope, however, that some of my knowledge, theoretical though it is, might help us."

"But what about the door?" I persisted. "If not a ghost, then what's making the door close and trapping us here?"

Charlotte took a sip of lukewarm tea. We had warmed a pot of water over the fire and brewed it as if we were camping, settled on our blanket before the fireplace.

"You said it yourself, I think," she replied. "The house itself may be doing it." She shrugged. "It never occurred to me before, but a house is a sort of object—and if trees, and people, and lamps and maybe even bones can hold memories, why not houses? In fact, it makes so much sense, I'm surprised it never occurred to me before."

She seemed pleased with this revelation, but it just made me feel more like we were in the belly of a beast. I stared into my cup.

"Of course," she continued, "it could be that you, with your link to the house's memories, are doing it."

I looked up sharply. "Doing what?"

"Making the door close. Keeping us here." She eyed me levelly.

"I wouldn't do that!" I protested. "How could you think that?"

"Not consciously," she said, leaving me once again to ponder just how much control I had of my own powers. And if or when the memories would once again use me for their own purposes. I frowned.

"Don't worry about it," she said, as if that were at all possible! I started to protest, but she said, "It's not as though we're truly trapped. If we can't figure out how to use your abilities to open the door, we'll have to go out a window or something. Even if we have to break the glass."

I raised my eyebrows. "I hope it doesn't come to that!"

"Me either," she agreed. "Let's just take it one step at a time, shall we?"

"Yes, you said you know some things ..."

Charlotte refilled her cup from the now nearly-cold pot. "Have you read Hollister?" she asked in the scholarly tone she had used when we first had tea together in the tea room, what seemed like so very long ago. At my blank expression, she said, "On spirit rituals and death cults?"

I shook my head.

"No matter. I'll distill the relevant parts for you. He notes that, in general, humans tend to ritually dispose of their dead—by burial or burning in most cases. What's interesting is even in societies who don't believe in a spirit or a soul, which indeed are few, people perform such rituals. One way or another, the deceased are put aside, relegated to a separate psychological space, so that the living can carry on."

I thought of my experience wading through sitters' memories. "Separate maybe, but not gone," I offered, for want of anything else to add.

Charlotte nodded. "How true. My point is this. That never happened for my sister and my nephew. My sister—" I noticed she didn't say her name, "—built up many rituals around him, enshrining him in the cellar, visiting him, but she kept him very much a part of her living world. We need to send him off," she said resolutely.

"So you do think he's a ghost?"

She cocked her head. "Not exactly. Though... memory, ghost, psychic manifestation ... maybe they're all the same thing," she mused. Her eyes wandered about the room.

"Think of it like this," she said. "If all our thoughts and memories are like a bunch of electrical circuits—as some have recently theorized—then we need to break the circuit. The circuit that's making these memories manifest over and over."