Slade House

  Todd’s saying to me: “You have to open the aperture, Sal.”

  He means the black iron door. How? “What do I do?”

  “Open it, like you did before! I can’t do it.”

  The faceless walkers are closing in.

  I’m shaking. “What did I do before?”

  “You pressed it. With your palm!”

  So I press the small black iron door—

  —and it presses back, just as hard.

  “Why isn’t it working?”

  “You’re too scared, it’s blocking your voltage.”

  I look behind us. Yards away. They’ve got us.

  Todd begs: “Forget the fear, Sal. Please.”

  “I can’t!”

  “You can.”

  “I can’t!”

  Todd presses his hands against my cheeks and gently, firmly, kisses my lips and whispers, “Please, Sal.” I’m still scared, but something’s unlocked, and something flows through my hand, the door swings open and Todd’s pushing me through into…

  · · ·

  …a starless, bodiless, painless, timeless blackness. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. Minutes, years, I just don’t know. I passed through a phase when I thought I must be dead, but my mind’s alive, even if I can’t tell if I’m in my body or not. I prayed to God for help, or just for a light, apologizing for not believing in him and trying hard not to think about what a sociopathic bigot He is in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation, but no reply came. I thought about Freya and Mum and Dad, and tried and failed to remember the last things I’d said to them. I thought about Todd. If he’d survived, he’d be helping the police look for me, even though I doubted this was a place where sniffer dogs could track you. I hoped Todd wasn’t angry at me for interacting with Fake Fern and catching the mirror. Was that a fatal mistake, like Orpheus looking back? A dirty trick, if so. My hands just acted on reflex to save my mirror. But legends and stories are as full of dirty tricks as life is, and however much time has gone by nothing has changed, and all I have are memories—the brightest of them all being Todd’s hurried kiss—to keep me company and to keep me sane in the starless, bodiless, painless, timeless blackness.

  · · ·

  After minutes or months, a dim dot of light appears. I was afraid I’d gone blind, like Todd’s mum. Seconds or years later, the dot grows into a slit of flame, the flame of a candle, a candle on a strange candlestick that sits in front of me, on the bare floorboards. The flame’s absolutely still. It’s not bright enough to reveal much of the room—an attic?—but by its light I see three faces. To my right sits Kate Childs, the Wicked Witch of the West, dressed in a gray Arab-style cloak thing, but now in her midthirties. Have I really been here so long? Have all those years been stolen from me? To my left hovers another vaguely familiar face…Jesus, it’s Melbourne Mike. He’s now the same age as the older Kate Childs, too, also motionless and Buddha-posed, and also wearing an ash-gray robe. Now I see them both in the same field of vision, I realize they’re twins. The third face is Miss Piggy, watching me over the candle, about six paces dead ahead. Or rather, a kneeling girl in a Miss Piggy mask. A girl wearing a Zizzi Hikaru jacket with a Maori pendant round her chubby neck. Me, or my reflection. I try to move, speak, or even grunt, but my body won’t respond. My brain works, my eyes work, that’s about it. Like that Frenchman in the book Freya sent me, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly…locked-in syndrome, it’s called. But the French guy could blink one eyelid, that’s how he managed to communicate. I can’t even do that. Left of the mirror is a pale door with a gold doorknob. A memory of that same door from an earlier time drags itself into focus…the room at the top of Slade House. The “games room.” Have the three of us been drugged and brought here? Who by? And where’s Todd?

  “The Cosgrove boy’s been let go, with the other waifs and strays you brought in with you,” Kate Childs says. The candle flame quivers. Her American accent’s gone, replaced by crisp, upper-class English, not unlike my mother’s. “You’re here in Slade House at my and my brother’s behest. I’m Norah, and this is Jonah.”

  I try to ask, What do you mean, “The Cosgrove boy’s been let go”? but my mouth isn’t working, not even a little bit.

  “Dead. He didn’t suffer. Don’t mourn. He never loved you. Over the last few weeks, culminating in tonight’s show, he was my brother’s ventriloquist’s dummy, mouthing all those lovey-dovey lies you yearned so badly to hear.”

  I try to tell this Norah she’s insane, that I know Todd loves me.

  “You tell her,” Norah orders Melbourne Mike—or Jonah—irritably, “or she’ll taste all saccharine and powdery.”

  Jonah, if that’s his actual name, sneers my way. “It’s all true, sweetie. Every word.” His Australian accent’s gone; he has a plummy public school voice. “I was inside Todd Cosgrove’s head and I promise you, he found Sally Timms as erotic as a tub of lard forgotten at the back of the fridge.”

  You’re lying! Todd kissed me. Todd tried to help me escape.

  “Let me translate it into Stupidest Oink Oink. Everything from the pub to the aperture in Slade Alley was real. This attic is real, too, and these are our real bodies. Between the iron door and waking up here, however, was an orison: a live, 3D stage set, projected from inside this lacuna in time,” Jonah drums on the floorboards, “by my outrageously gifted sister. A scripted vision. I was in it too, or strictly speaking my soul was there, moving Todd’s body, saying Todd’s lines, but everything else—the people you met, the rooms you passed through, the tastes you tasted—was a local reality brought into being by my sister. Your and Todd’s thrilling bid for freedom was another part of the rat’s maze we had you run through, an orison inside an orison. A suborison. We need a better name for it, I agree. I’d ask you to help us to think of one, but you’re dying.”

  My stubborn Me insists, You’re lying, this is all a bad acid trip.

  “No,” Jonah sounds pleased, “you’re really dying. Your respiratory system. No muscles. Think about it. Is that the bad acid trip too?”

  To my horror, I realize he’s right. My lungs aren’t working. I can’t gasp, or fall over, or do anything but kneel here and slowly suffocate. The twins now appear to lose interest in me. “I am speechless with admiration, sister,” Jonah’s saying.

  “You haven’t been speechless for a hundred years,” says Norah.

  “If the academy awarded Oscars for Best Orison, you’d be a shoo-in. Truly, it was a masterpiece. Cubist, postmodern—superlatives fail me.”

  “Yes yes yes, we’re geniuses—but what about the policeman? His residue was substantial enough to speak with the guest. And the aperture—appearing of its own accord like that, and open. The girl nearly bolted.”

  “Ah, but she didn’t bolt—and why? Cupid’s noose was firmly round her neck is why. Todd Cosgrove was a trickier role to pull off than Chloe Chetwynd, you’ll concede. Plod would’ve mounted a gashed slab of raw liver, while this little piggy needed proper wooing.”

  These words would normally draw blood, but right now I’m worrying about how long you can survive without oxygen. Three minutes?

  Norah Grayer twists her head as if screwing it into a socket. “As per usual, brother, you’re missing the point. With each Open Day, these aberrations grow worse.”

  Jonah flexes his spidery fingers. “As per usual, sister, you’re spouting paranoid nonsense. Once again, dinner is served without hitch or hiccup. Once again, our operandi is charged for a full cycle. Personally, I blame your sojourn in Hollywood for these histrionics. Too many actors’ hairy buttocks in too many mirrored ceilings.”

  She half-whispers, half-growls: “It really isn’t in your best interests to speak to me like that, brother.”

  “Oh? Will you take another unannounced sabbatical to the Chilean Andes to divine the meaning of metalife? Go, by all means. Do you good. Inhabit some Indian peasant. Or an alpaca. I’ll drive you to the airport after dinner. You’ll be back. The operandi’s bigger t
han both of us, baby.”

  “The operandi’s sixty years old. To cut ourselves off from the Shaded Way—”

  “—avoids unwanted attention from the only people alive who could cause us trouble. We’re demigods in thrall to no one. Can we please keep it that way?”

  “We’re in thrall to this risible pantomime every nine years,” replies Norah acidly. “We’re in thrall to these”—she indicates her body with disgust—“birth-bodies to anchor our souls in the world of day. We’re in thrall to luck ensuring that nothing goes wrong.”

  I’m still not breathing and I feel like my skull’s starting to contract. Desperately, fiercely, I think the word Help!

  “Can we please dine now?” ask Jonah. “Unless you plan to kill the operandi in a fit of pique?”

  My skull throbs painfully as my body groans for air. Please! I can’t breathe—

  Norah exhales like a moody adolescent and grudgingly nods. The Grayer twins’ hands then begin to weave through the air like Todd Cosgrove’s did earlier, leaving short-lived scratch marks on the dark air. Their lips move and a murmur grows louder as something solidifies above the candle, cell by cell; a kind of fleshy jellyfish, pulsing with reds and purples. It would be pretty if it weren’t something from an alien horror movie. Tendrils grow out of it, tendrils with subtendrils. Some of them twist through the air towards me, and one pauses for a moment an inch from my eye. I see a tiny orifice at its tip, opening and closing like a carp, before it plunges up my left nostril. Luckily I barely feel it or the others as they worm into my mouth, up my right nostril and into my ears, though I feel a sudden drill-bit of pain in my forehead and see, in the mirror opposite, a shimmering something oozing through one of my mask’s eyeholes. It gathers in a small clear sphere in front of my eyes. Tiny luminous plankton hover inside it. So souls are real, it seems.

  My soul’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

  But now the Grayer twins close in on both sides.

  No! You can’t! It’s mine! Please! Nonono—

  They purse their lips like they’re about to whistle.

  Help help help Freya Freya anyone help help I need—

  The twins inhale, stretching my soul into an oval.

  Someone’llstopyouonedayyou’llsufferyou’llpay—

  My soul splits in two. Norah inhales one half, Jonah the other.

  Their faces look like Piers’s did that night in Malvern…

  …and now it’s over. They’re sitting back where they were.

  The tendril things have gone. The glowing lump has gone.

  The Grayers are as still as sculptures. So is the candle flame. In the mirror, a Miss Piggy mask slaps the floor.

  I nodded off for long enough to slip into a stressful dream. I dreamed I got cold feet about meeting Fred Pink here this evening. Halfway across the cold park I turned back, but a black and orange jogger sprayed a blast into my face from an asthma inhaler. Then I saw a woman in a wheelchair being pushed by Tom Cruise. Her face was hidden by a raincoat hood and Tom Cruise said, “Go right ahead, take a look.” So I lifted the hood and saw she was me. Then we were traveling down a narrow alley and someone said, “You pay an army for a thousand days to use it on one.” Last of all was a black slab like the black slabs in 2001: A Space Odyssey and as it opened I heard Sally saying, “You have to wake up,” so I did and here I am, alone, in the upstairs room at The Fox and Hounds. As arranged. It’s seedier than how I remember it from 1997. The tables are scarred, the chairs are rickety, the wallpaper’s scraggy and the carpet’s the color of dried vomit. My tomato juice sits in a smeary glass. Liquified roadkill. The Fox and Hounds is on its last legs, clearly. Downstairs there are only six drinkers at the bar and one of them is a dog for the blind—and on a Saturday evening. The sole nod to alcofrolic jollity is an old-time enameled Guinness ad, screwed to the wall over the blocked-up fireplace, with a leprechaun playing a fiddle for a dancing toucan. I wonder if that leprechaun noticed Sally nine years ago, and if she noticed him. They sat up here, the “X-Files Six.” Several witnesses saw my sister and her friends, but nobody agreed at which table they had been sitting.

  I press my forehead against the dirty windowpane. In the street below Fred Pink’s still having his “quick catch-up with Misters Benson and Hedges.” The streetlights are coming on. The sun sinks into tarmac-gray clouds, over one-way mazes of brick houses, gasworks, muddy canals, old factories, unloved blocks of flats from the sixties, multistory car parks from the seventies, tatty-looking housing from the eighties, a neon-edged multiplex from the nineties. Cul-de-sacs, ring roads, bus lanes, flyovers. I wish Sally’s last known place of abode could have been prettier. For the millionth time I wonder if she’s still alive, locked in a madman’s attic, praying that we’ll never give up, never stop looking. Always I wonder. Sometimes I envy the weeping parents of the definitely dead you see on TV. Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open. For the millionth time, I flinch about wriggling out of inviting my sister to New York the summer before she started uni here. Sally wanted to visit, I knew, but I had a job at a photo agency, fashionista friends, invitations to private views, and I was just starting to date women. It was an odd time. Discovering my Real Me and babysitting my tubby, dorky, nervy sister had just felt all too much. So I told Sal some bullshit about finding my feet, she pretended to believe me, and I’ll never forgive myself. Avril says that not even God can change the past. She’s right, but it doesn’t help. I get out my mobile and text Avril:

  At pub. Real dive. FP no nutter so far but we’ll see.

  Interview begins in a mo. Home when I can. Xxx

  SEND. Avril will be heating up yesterday’s lasagna, opening a bottle of wine, settling down to an episode or three of The Wire. Wish I was with her. I’ve known livelier morgues than The Fox and Hounds. The whiskery landlady downstairs tried to crack a funny when we came in: “Evening, dearie, you must be Our Fred’s latest girlfriend, then. Fred, you dark horse you—what magazine you order this one out of, eh?” I should’ve said, “Hot Ukrainian Dykes Weekly.” When the landlady learned I’m a journalist with an interest in Slade Alley, she turned frosty and her “dearie” grew thorns: “That’s the media for you, innit? Why let a sleeping dog lie when you can flog a dead horse, eh, dearie? Eh?”

  Footsteps clomp up the stairs. I get out my Sony digital recorder, a gift from Dad and Sook, aka Mrs. John Timms III, and put it on the table. In walks Fred Pink, a withered gray man in a tatty brown coat and a schoolboy’s leather satchel that must be half a century old. “Sorry to keep you, Miss Timms. I do need my little fix.” He’s got a gruff, friendly voice you want to trust.

  “No problem,” I say. “Will this table do?”

  “Best seat in the house.” He puts his beer on the table, sits down like the old man he is and rubs his skin-and-bone hands. His face is pocked, saggy and spiky with bristles. His glasses are fixed with duct tape. “Bloomin’ parky out. This smoking ban’ll be the death of us, I tell you; if cancer don’t get us, the double pneumonia will. Still can’t get my head round not smoking—in a pub? Political correctness gone mad, that’s what it is. Ever interview Tony Blair or Gordon Brown or that lot, do you, in your line of work?”

  “Only in press packs. You have to be at the top of the food chain for a private audience. Mr. Pink, could I record our interview? That way I can concentrate on what you’re saying without taking notes.”

  “Record away.” He doesn’t add, “and call me Fred,” so I won’t. I press RECORD and speak into the microphone: “Interview with Fred Pink at The Fox and Hounds pub, Friday twenty-seventh October, 2006, 7:20 P.M.” I swivel the recorder so the mike’s facing him. “Ready when you are.”

  The old man takes a deep breath. “Well. First thing to say is, once you’ve been a psychiatric patient, no one ever gives you the benefit of the doubt again. Easier to fix a bad credit rating than a bad credibility rating.” F
red Pink speaks with care, as if he’s writing his words in permanent ink. “But whether you believe me or not, Miss Timms, I’m guilty. Guilty. See, I’m the one who told my nephew Alan about Slade Alley, about Gordon Edmonds, about Nathan and Rita Bishop, about the nine-year cycle. It was me who whetted Alan’s appetite. Alan’d told me there was twenty or thirty of them in his club so I reckoned, Safety in numbers. Atemporals fear exposure, see. Six kids vanishing was big news, for sure, but twenty or thirty? They’d never dare. All sorts’d’ve come running: MI7, FBI if any Americans were involved, my friend David Icke; the whole bloomin’ shebangle’d be all over Slade House like a dose of the clap. If I’d known Alan’s group was down to six, I’d’ve told him, ‘Too risky, just forget it.’ And if I’d done that, my nephew, and your sister, and Lance Arnott, Todd Cosgrove, Angelica Gibbons and Fern Penhaligon, they’d still be here, living their lives, with jobs, boyfriends, girlfriends, mortgages. Knowing that’s a torment, Miss Timms. A never-ending torment.” Fred Pink swallows, clenches his jaw and shuts his eyes. I write “Atemporal?” and “David Icke” in my notebook to give him time to compose himself. “Sorry, Miss Timms, I…”