Slade House

  “The real Fred passed away months ago, dearie. Prostate cancer. A horrible way to go.”

  A deep gulp inflates my lungs: a bona fide psychopath who impersonates the dead and keeps a fan club of sicko helpers—the other customers? A locked-up pub; blinds down; murder. Murder. I go to the window. It’s a sash design, but it has frame locks and it won’t open.

  The landlady’s voice crackles out of my Nokia: “Still there, are you, dearie? The connection’s breaking up.”

  Keep her talking: “Look, just tell me where Sally is, I’m sure—”

  “Sally’s not anywhere. Sally’s dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.”

  I drop the phone and let it lie and grab a chair to smash the window and scream blue bloody murder and wake the street and scramble down a drainpipe or jump out but when I turn back to smash the glass the window’s gone. It’s wall. It’s gone. It’s wall…

  …I turn to the stairs. The stairs are gone. There’s a pale door instead, with a worn gold doorknob. The landlady’s on the other side. She’s doing this. I don’t know how, but she’s doing this, and she’s inside my head. Or wait wait wait—

  I’m doing it. I’m the one with the psychosis, not Fred Pink.

  I need an ambulance, not a police car. 999. Dial it. Now.

  Really, which is likelier? The laws of physics breaking down, or a stressed-out journalist breaking down? I pick up my phone, praying this lucidity lasts. A crisp, efficient-sounding lady answers straight off: “Hello, emergency services?”

  “Yeah, hi, I—My name’s Freya Timms, I—I—I—I—”

  “Calm yourself, Freya.” The operator sounds like my mum, but efficient. “Tell me the situation and we’ll see what we can do to help.”

  If I speak about hallucinations in pubs, she’ll fob me off with a helpline number. I need something drastic: “I’ve gone into labor; I’m on my own, but I’m in a wheelchair, and I need an ambulance.”

  “That’s fine, Freya, don’t worry; what’s your location?”

  “A pub—The Fox and Hounds, but I’m not from around here so—”

  “It’s fine, Freya, I know The Fox and Hounds. My brother and I live just down the street.”

  I think, Thank God! but then I understand.

  I understand why she just sounded so amused.

  I understand there’s no way out of here.

  “Better late than never,” says the stern voice on the phone. “Turn around and look at the candle on the table, behind you. Now.”

  As I obey, the room dims. A candle sits on an ornate candlestick engraved with runes on its stem and base. The flame sways.

  “Watch the flame,” orders the voice. “Watch.”

  · · ·

  Reality folds in, origami-like, and darkens to black. I can’t feel my body but I’m kneeling, I think, and three faces have joined me. Left of the candle hovers a woman in her midthirties. She’s familiar…it’s Maggs the landlady, but twenty years younger, slimmer, blonder, smoother-skinned and eerily beautiful. Right of the candle is a man of the same age, also blond, and also known to me…as I study him, a young Fred Pink emerges from his face. The two are twins. Who can they be but Norah and Jonah Grayer? They are absolutely motionless, like the candle flame, and like the third face watching me over the candle. Freya Timms staring out of a mirror. I try to move a limb, a thumb, an eyelid, but my nervous system has shut down. Is this what happened to Sal? I suspect the answer is yes. Did she think of me? Did she want her big sister to come and rescue her? Or was she past that stage by then?

  “Unbelievable!” Norah Grayer’s face flickers into fury as the candle’s flame untwists and twists. Maybe I’ve been here minutes, maybe days. Time needs time to be measurable. “How dare you?”

  “Sister.” Jonah Grayer swivels his jaw as if it fits poorly.

  Me, I’m still paralyzed from the eyeballs down.

  “You told our entire life story to this wretched reporter!”

  “Fred Pink had to share some of his findings, or the Oink’s sister would’ve decided he was wasting her time and cleared off prematurely. Why the hysteria?”

  “Don’t ‘hysteria’ me!” Spittle flies over the candle. “For even naming the Shaded Way, the Sayyid would nullify you. On the spot and with just cause!”

  “Oh, I’d like to see the Sayyid try, peace be upon him. What are you afraid of? Our story’s a banquet of marvels, and it’s exactly never that the chance comes along to share it with a discreet listener. Because she is discreet. Shall we ask her how discreet she is? Let’s. It’ll put your mind at rest.” He turns to me. “Miss Timms: Do you intend to publish Fred Pink’s backstory, as you heard it told on this memorable evening?”

  I can’t shake—or nod—my head by so much as a millimeter.

  “We can take that as a no, sister dear. Just chill.”

  “ ‘Chill’? So acting like a teenager is no longer enough? Our guest was damn nearly a no-show; she rejected the first banjax and—”

  “No no no no no. No, Norah. You’re doing it again—scaring yourself with all manner of what-ifs instead of acknowledging an entirely successful outcome.”

  What’s happening? I am desperate to ask. What outcome?

  “Fred Pink told you all the answers, honey pie,” Jonah turns his mocking face my way, “but I’ll spell it out for you, since your sister evidently inherited the brains as well as the puppy fat. On your way to meet me—me, in a random old man’s body which I commandeered to be Mr. Pink—you decided that our rendezvous was a waste of time after all. Having planned for this eventuality, I had you followed, and at a sheltered bend in the park near the bandstand, one of my Blackwatermen sprayed an ingenious compound in your face. You lost consciousness on the spot, poor thing. Thanks to my fastidious foresight”—he glances at his sister—“a St. John ambulance was only a minute away. Our worthy volunteers had you safe, sound, strapped in a wheelchair and brought to our aperture within five short minutes. My men even hid your face under a hood, to protect you from the spots of rain. And from prying eyes. You were rendered into our orison, which my sister had swiftly redesigned into a rough copy of The Fox and Hounds—your original destination—and brought to the orison’s heart, the lacuna. Given the difficulties of redacting memories from an Engifted mind, I played safe and wiped out the whole day, which is why you can’t remember leaving London this afternoon. When you awoke, I treated you to the greatest scoop of your life. There.” Jonah runs his tongue along his upper teeth. “Wasn’t that satisfying? I feel like a detective laying out the facts in the final scene of a whodunit. Yes, yes, sister,” Jonah turns once more to his sister, who still looks furious, “our guest turned up her nose at the tomato juice, but we banjaxed her good and proper with the cashew nuts. And yes, I went off script a smidgeon during my turn as Fred Pink and revealed a little more than I’d meant to; but she’ll be dead in two minutes, and dead journalists don’t file copy.”

  Dead? He did say “dead”? They’re going to kill me?

  “You were a fool and a braggart, brother.” Norah’s voice is hard with anger, but I’m only half hearing. “Never discuss la Voie Ombragée with anyone. Nor Ely, Swaffham, Cantillon, nor Aït Arif. Ever. Whatever the circumstances. Ever.”

  “I’ll do my best to mend my ways, sister dear.” Jonah gives a mock-contrite sigh.

  Norah’s disgusted. “One day your flippancy will kill you.”

  “If you say so, sister.”

  “And on that day I will save myself if I can, and abandon you if I must.”

  Jonah’s about to reply—perhaps with a smarmy retort—but changes his mind and the subject. “I am famished, you are famished, our operandi is famished and supper is plucked, trussed, seasoned and”—he turns his whole body to face me and whispers—“bewitched, bothered and bewildered. You’re not breathing, honey pie. Have you really not noticed?”

  I want this to be a sadistic lie but it’s true—I’m not breathing. So this is it. I don’t die in crossfire, or in a car crash, or at s
ea, but here, inside this…nightmare that can’t be real, but which, nonetheless, is. The twins begin to pluck and ply the space in front of them, slowly at first, then faster. Now they seem to draw on the air, like high-speed calligraphers. Their lips move too, but I don’t know if I’m hearing my captors or if it’s the buzzing echoes of my oxygen-starved brain closing down. Above the candle, a thing congeals into being. It’s the size of a misshapen head, but faceless. It glows, red, bright to dark, bright to dark, and stringy roots emerge from its sides and underbelly, fixing it in the dark air. Longer roots snake their way towards me. I try to squirm my head back or shut my eyes but I can’t. I’d scream if I could, a loud, hard, horror-film scream, but I can’t. The roots twist into my mouth, nose and ears, and then I feel a spear-tip of pain where my Cyclops eye would be. Something is being extracted through the same spot; it comes into focus a few inches from my eyes, a translucent shimmering globe, smaller than a billard ball, but cloudy with countless stars. It’s my true me. It’s my soul. The Grayer twins lean in.

  They purse their lips, and inhale, sharply.

  My soul distends like a thick-walled bubble being pulled apart.

  It’s mine, it’s me, but it’s hopeless, it’s hopeless, it’s hope—

  Suddenly a figure fills the narrow gap between the Grayers, blocking my view. She’s a she, in a designer jacket. Her plump midriff blocks what little light shines from the candle and the heart-brain-thing above it. Norah Grayer falls back to my right, shock twisting her face. Jonah can’t move away, even if he wanted to: one of the intruder’s small hands—she has peacock-blue fingernails—grips his neck, while the other hand, swift as a bird’s wing, plunges a thick, six-inch needle into one side of his windpipe and clean out of the other, like a cocktail stick piercing a very large olive. Blood seeps from both punctures, treacle-black on stone-gray in this dimness. Jonah’s eyes bulge in disbelief, his head and jaw slump and his two puncture wounds froth as he tries to make a noise. His attacker releases him, but the weapon—a hairpin, if I’m not wrong—stays jammed in place. As his head tilts, I have a view of a silver fox’s head with gemstone eyes at the top of the hairpin. Shouted fragments reach me from Norah, a few feet and light-years away—Get out! Damn ghost! GET OUT! The intruder is fading away now—I see the candle flame through her body. My stretched soul has reformed itself into a single globe and is now fading away too. My body is dead but my soul is saved. My rescuer’s pendant swings through my soul, lit deep-sea green by the last of the starry atoms. Eternity, jade, it’s Maori, I chose it, I wrapped it, I sent it once to someone I love.

  Bombadil’s iPhone vibrates over his heart. With his cold fingers, I fish out the device from the large skiing jacket I had him buy near our anonymous hotel this morning when I saw the ominous state of the sky. Sleet peppers the screen. The message is from the Blackwaterman:

  yr guest parked 50m from Westwood Road

  entrance to alley, navy blue VW Tiguan.

  I reply concisely:

  good news

  Our operatives are masters of their martial craft and need no further orders. I half feared the wintry weather might delay our guest, or even deter her from making the car journey altogether. Turning a no-show into a show would have complicated the day in tense, unpleasant ways, but instead our guest is a quarter of an hour early and we can afford to relax a little. On a whim, I locate Philip Glass’s music for The Truman Show on Bombadil’s iPhone, and listen to it by way of preprandial entertainment. Jonah and I saw the film at a backstreet cinema in St. Tropez at the turn of the century. We were moved by the protagonist’s horror at discovering the breadth and depth of the gulf between his own life and the quotidian world. Now I think of it, the Côte d’Azur could be the right sanctuary for Jonah to spend a few weeks after nine static years in his wounded body. The Riviera has no lack of privileged hosts whose hair Jonah could let down, and I would enjoy the sunshine on a host’s skin after five days of this absurd English weather. A moon-gray cat appears at Bombadil’s feet, meowing for food. “You’re not as hungry as we are,” I assure it. The wind slams down Slade Alley, flurrying sleet and leaves in its roiling coil. I zip up Bombadil’s hood to protect his earphones, restricting my view to a fur-lined oval, and think of sandstorms at the Sayyid’s house in the Atlas Mountains. How the twentieth century hurtled away. The cat has given me up as a lost cause. Bombadil’s toes are numb in his flimsy trainers, but he’ll be dead before his chilblains can bloom. My conscience rests easy.

  · · ·

  And here comes our guest. A short, slim figure, bulked out by cold-weather clothing, walks down Slade Alley, backlit by sleet-white, hurrying light. Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby is a psychiatrist from Toronto on a placement at Dawkins Hospital, outside Slough. Two twists of fate set her on the path that has delivered her to our aperture. The first is that in 2008 she obtained the notebooks of Fred Pink, the former Dawkins patient who died in 2005. She wrote a series of academic papers on abduction psychoses, drawing from the notebooks, in which she describes Pink’s obsession with Jonah and Norah Grayer, a pair of long-dead “soul vampires.” The second twist of fate is that Iris Marinus-Fenby is, against quite delicious odds, an Engifted herself, and is therefore fair game. The Mighty Shrink proved absurdly easy to lure here. She stops a few paces away; a black professional in her late thirties—a smooth, sub-Saharan, black-leather-jacket black that sharpens the whites of her eyes and teeth. Marinus-Fenby dresses dowdily for work, and even off duty she hides her figure under mannish clothes: a sheepskin flying jacket, rumpled trousers, hiking boots, a moss-green beret, a keffiyeh round her neck and little or no makeup. She wears her wiry hair short. A khaki canvas bag is tucked under her shoulder. Calmly, she sizes up Bombadil, a skinny Caucasian in his early twenties, with bad skin, an ill-advised lip stud, a sharkish chin, a cheesy smell and sore eyes. My host is swallowed up by his XXL ski jacket. Iris Marinus-Fenby, PhD, sees her next research subject, her Fred Pink the Second, and this one she gets to meet in the flesh. I unplug Bombadil from his headphones and have him give our guest a Got a problem? face.

  She recites the first line of the word-key: “Yes, I’m looking for a pub called The Green Man.” Her voice is deep, clear and has an accent that used to be labeled “mid-Atlantic.”

  Bombadil speaks with a nervous mutter that I do not modify: “No. The Green Man’s gone the way of The Fox and Hounds.”

  Iris Marinus-Fenby offers her gloved hand. “Bombadil.”

  I feel the prickle of psychovoltage, even through her cashmere gloves. “Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby.”

  “Nine syllables wears you out. ‘Marinus’ is fine.”

  I notice the blue checks of her keffiyeh are in fact tiny Stars of David. What a smug piece of symbolism. Our handshake ends. “Isn’t that, like, calling you by your surname?”

  The Mighty Shrink duly notes my nomenclatural sensitivities: “Marinus is more of an inner name than a family name.”

  I have Bombadil shrug. “Welcome back to Slade Alley, Marinus.”

  “Thanks for reaching out to me.” She knows better than to ask for my real name. “Your emails were fascinating.”

  “Thought it’d broaden your mind, seeing a real live orison, like.”

  “I’m very curious about what we’ll see, Bombadil. Say, this wind’s sharp as a razor. Would you prefer to talk where it’s warmer? My car’s parked just on the street, or there’s a Starbucks at the green. Did you have lunch already? I’m buying.”

  “I never talk where I haven’t swept for wires,” I tell her.

  Marinus makes a mental note of this. “I understand.”

  I nod along the alley. “Let’s jump in at the deep end, like.”

  “Go straight inside the ‘orison,’ you mean?”

  “Yup. Still there. I went in yesterday, too.”

  “So that’s once on Thursday as well as yesterday? Two visits in total?”

  “One and one is two.” I nod, amused by her professional demeanor. “They don’t happen along v
ery often.”

  “And the way in, into the ‘aperture,’ it’s still”—she looks down the claustrophobic middle section of Slade Alley—“down here?”

  “Sure is, Doc. Exactly where you said Fred Pink wrote that Gordon Edmonds said he found it, all those years ago.”

  Marinus marvels that this gawky geeky English boy reads the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Lead the way.”

  Twenty paces later we stop at the aperture, and for the first time our guest is flummoxed. “It’s small, it’s black, it’s iron.” I enjoy spelling out the obvious. “Exactly as Fred Pink described it.”

  Marinus touches it. “There wasn’t a door here three years ago.”

  “There wasn’t a door here three days ago. But when I did my post-dawn recce on Thursday morning, voilà.”

  Marinus looks up and down the alley, then crouches down to inspect the sides. “Looks as if it’s been here for years. This is odd. Check out the lichen, this scuffed concrete…”

  “Apertures are chameleons, Doc. They blend in.”

  She looks at me, her faith in a logical explanation shaken but as yet intact. “What’s on the other side?”

  “That’s the cool bit. Look over the wall with a twelve-foot ladder, you see this…” I have Bombadil produce a photo from an inner pocket. “The back garden of a semidetached house, built in 1952, home to Jamal and Sue al-Awi and their two point four children—literally, she’s in her second trimester, according to her hospital records. But if you go through the aperture”—I rap the soundless surface with my knuckles—“you’ll find the terraced garden of Slade House, as it appeared in the 1930s, on a foggy, mild day.”

  Marinus gives me an assessing look.

  “The fog was a total surprise,” I tell her.

  Marinus is wishing she was recording all this. “You mean the same Slade House that got razed in the Blitz, in 1940?”

  “December twentieth, 1940. Just in time for Christmas. Yes.”

  “So are you saying this door’s a kind of…time portal?”