Slade House

  “No, no, no, that’s a classic beginner’s mistake. An aperture’s a portal into an orison. A reality bubble. God, I wish you could see your face right now, Doc.”

  The Mighty Shrink looks shifty and puzzled. “I have faith that you believe, Bombadil, but science requires proof. As you know.”

  “And proof requires reliable witnesses,” I have Bombadil answer, “ideally with PhDs.” The wind bounces a plastic bottle off the floor and walls of the alley. We stand aside to let it pass. Tall weeds sway.

  Marinus raps her knuckles on the aperture. “No sound when you hit it. The metal’s warm, too, for such a cold day. How do you open it? There’s no keyhole.”

  I have Bombadil do a zipped-up smile. “Mind power.”

  Marinus waits for me to explain, shivering despite her cold-weather clothes.

  “Visualize the keyhole,” I elaborate, “visualize the key, visualize inserting the key, turning it, and the door opening. If you know what you’re about, that’s how you pass through an aperture.”

  Marinus nods gravely to assure me she doesn’t disbelieve me. This woman’s amusing. “And when you went inside, what did you do there?”

  “On Thursday, I didn’t dare leave the shrubbery I found on the other side. I learned to be a bit cautious after my last orison in New Mexico. So I just sat there for ten minutes, watching, then came back out again. Yesterday, I was braver. Walked up as far as a big ginkgo tree—not that I knew what it was, but I brought a leaf back and looked it up. I’ve got an app.”

  Marinus, of course, asks, “Do you still have this leaf?”

  I have Bombadil hand her a Ziploc freezer bag.

  She holds it up: “Yes, that’s a ginkgo leaf.” She doesn’t add that the leaf could have come from anywhere. “Did you take any photos on the inside?”

  I puff out Bombadil’s near-frozen cheeks. “Tried. Took about fifty on Thursday on my phone, but on the way back they all got wiped. Yesterday I took in my old Nikon and shot off a reel but when I developed it last night—blank. No surprise, to be honest: of the five astronauts I’ve met who are the real deal, not one has ever returned from an expedition with a single photo or video clip intact. There’s something about orisons. They refuse to be recorded, like.”

  “ ‘Astronauts’?”

  “It’s what we call ourselves. It’s online misdirection. ‘Orison tourist’ or something like that’d attract the wrong sort of attention.”

  Marinus hands back the freezer bag. “So astronauts can bring samples of flora out but not images?”

  I have Bombadil shrug. “I don’t make the laws, Doc.”

  Behind a wall, someone’s bouncing on a squeaky trampoline.

  “Did you see any signs of life?” asks Marinus. “Inside the orison, I mean.”

  The Mighty Shrink still thinks she’s studying a psychiatric phenomenon, not an ontological one. I can be patient: she’ll learn. “Blackbirds. Plus a squirrel—cute and red, not gray and ratty—and fish in a pond. But no people. The curtains in Slade House stayed drawn and the door stayed shut, and nobody’s used the aperture since four o’clock on Thursday.”

  “You sound very sure.”

  “I am.” I touch a brick opposite the aperture. “See this?”

  The Mighty Shrink straightens up and looks. “It’s a brick.”

  The trampoliner’s giggling his head off. He’s a young boy.

  “No. It’s the fascia of a brick, bonded onto a steel-framed box containing a webcam, a power pack and a sensor to switch the lens to infrared. What the camera sees through this two-mil hole”—I point—“feeds straight to my phone.” I show Marinus my iPhone. Its screen shows me showing Marinus my iPhone.

  She’s duly impressed. “A neat bit of kit. You built it yourself?”

  “Yeah, but full credit to the Israelis—I hacked the specs from Mossad.” I give my spy brick—installed by the Blackwatermen earlier today—a friendly pat and turn back to the aperture. “So. All set for the great adventure?”

  Marinus hesitates, wondering how I’ll react when my own private fantasy island fails to materialize. Scientific curiosity trumps caution. “I’ll follow in your footsteps, Bombadil.”

  I kneel before the aperture and place a palm on it. Its warmth is pleasant on Bombadil’s icy hand, and Jonah becomes telegrammable: Brother, our guest has arrived—I presume everything’s ready?

  Look who it isn’t. His signal is weak. I thought you’d buggered off to a “retreat” in Kirishima again…

  Give me strength. No, Jonah—it’s Open Day, and our metalives depend on my being here, and your having the orison and sub-orison ready.

  Jonah sniffs telegrammatically. Well, it’s very kind of you to bother visiting your incarcerated brother.

  I visited you yesterday, I remind him. My trip to Kirishima was six years ago—and I was only gone for thirteen months.

  A grumpy pause unwinds: Thirteen months is thirteen eternities if you’re stuck in a lacuna. I would never have deserted you, were the shoe on the other foot.

  I shoot back: Like the time you didn’t desert me in Antarctica for two whole years? For a “joke”? Or the time you didn’t forget me on the Society Islands while you went “yachting” with your Scientologist friends?

  Another grumpy Jonah pause. Your birth-body didn’t have a hairpin stuck through its throat.

  After nearly twelve decades together, I know better than to feed my brother’s self-pity: Nor would yours now if you’d heeded my warnings about the operandi’s aberrations. Our guest is waiting and Bombadil’s body is shivering. I’m opening the aperture on the count of three, so unless you fancy committing suicide and fratricide in a single fit of pique, project the garden now. One…two…

  · · ·

  I slip Bombadil’s body through first. All’s well. The Mighty Shrink follows, expecting a poky backyard but finding herself at the foot of a long, stepped garden rising to a penciled-on-fog Slade House. Iris Marinus-Fenby, PhD, straightens up slowly, her eyes as astonished as her jaw is drooping. I have Bombadil do a taut giggle. Our operandi is utterly depleted, so Jonah has only a glimmer of voltage to project today’s orison, but it won’t need to bedazzle or seduce the senses like the Halloween party or the policeman’s honey trap; this orison’s mere existence is enough to render Marinus pliable. I clear Bombadil’s throat. “Is this proof yet, Doc?”

  Marinus can only point, weakly, towards the house.

  “Uh-huh. A big house. Large as life. As real as we are.”

  Our guest turns to the aperture, hidden by camellias.

  “Don’t worry. It’s stable. We won’t get locked in.”

  The Cautious Shrink crouches and peers back out into Slade Alley. My phone is ready to call the Blackwatermen, but Marinus soon comes back, takes off her beret and puts her beret back on, just to buy a little time, I think. “I found an old postcard in Fred Pink’s notes,” she says in a faltering voice. “Of Slade House. That”—she looks at the old rectory—“that’s it. But…I checked the council archives, Ordnance Survey, Google Street View. Slade House isn’t here. And even if it were, there’s no space for it to fit between Westwood Road and Cranbury Avenue. It’s not here. It can’t be. But it’s here.”

  “It’s a conundrum, I agree, unless Fred Pink was,” I whisper, “y’know, Doc…right. As in, not bug-fuck crazy after all.”

  A pigeon is heard but not seen in the damson trees.

  Marinus looks at me to see if I heard it too.

  I can’t help but have Bombadil smile. “A pigeon.”

  Marinus bites her thumb and examines the bite mark.

  “It’s not a dream,” I tell her. “You’re insulting the orison.”

  Marinus plucks a camellia leaf, bites that and examines it.

  She lobs a stone at the sundial. It smacks it, stonily.

  Marinus presses her hand on the dewy grass. It leaves a print. “Holy hell.” She looks at me. “It’s all real, isn’t it?”

  “In its local, enclosed, p
ocket, bubble, orison way. Yes.”

  The Mighty Shrink stands up again, puts her hands together as if in prayer, covers her nose and mouth for a few seconds, then shoves her hands into her flying jacket. “My patients at Dawkins, in Toronto, in Vancouver…my abductee-fantasists…were they all…in fact—right? For, for, for experiencing this, did I, did I—did I sign off on restraint orders and dose them to the gills with antipsychotic drugs?”

  We’re at a delicate stage. I need to coax Marinus up to the house without her either sensing a trap, or being crushed by remorse, or being spooked into running for the exit. “Look, real orisons are rare. Less than a single percent of your patients are authentic astronauts. The others, no—they needed the drugs, they needed your help. Climb down off that cross, Doc. It’s not for you.”

  “One percent is still…too many.” Marinus bites her lower lip and shakes her head. “So much for ‘First, do no harm.’ ”

  “Orisons aren’t covered at medical college. Sure, you’ll never get this printed in peer-review journals, like, but if you want to help your patients, look around. Explore. Observe. You’re a flexible thinker. That’s why I chose you.”

  Marinus lets my words sink in. She takes a few steps over the lawn, looking up at the blank wet white sky. “Fred Pink—who until two minutes ago, I—I thought was delusional—Fred Pink thought Slade House was dangerous. Is it?”

  I have Bombadil unzip his ski jacket. “I don’t think so, no.”

  “But we—Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this—we just stepped from our reality into another. Didn’t we?”

  I feign mild disappointment at Marinus’s timidity. “We’re astronauts; and yeah, it’s a riskier hobby than collecting Lego figurines. Now as it happens, I suspect Slade House is a deserted orison running on autopilot and nobody’s set foot here for a very long time. But if you’d feel safer going back to your consultancy at Dawkins, dosing up future Fred Pinks on Izunolethe and antidepressants and whatever and visiting them in padded cells, knowing that you were the first and last clinical psychiatrist to chicken out of exploring a real live orison, then who could blame you? Have a safe drive home, Doc.” I walk off towards the sundial.

  “Bombadil.” Marinus’s footsteps hurry after me. “Wait!”

  Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.

  · · ·

  Droplets of mist cling to the lavender. Lavender, I remember, was one of the happier scents of Jonah’s and my childhood on the Swaffham estate in Norfolk, where the Chetwynd-Pitts’ tenant farmers grew several acres of the flowers for the London perfumeries. I pause while Marinus pinches and sniffs. “Smells like the real thing,” she says, “but why’s everything turning black-and-white? The camellias were red and pink but this lavender’s gray. Those roses are monochrome.”

  I know exactly why: after eighteen years without fresh voltage, our operandi is now too drained to sustain color reliably. “Decay,” I answer with a half-truth. “I’m more sure than ever the Grayer twins have gone for good. The fog’s another sign. We can relax a little, Doc. We’re visiting a ruin.”

  Looking reassured, Marinus unwinds her keffiyeh. “Human beings created this place? Every pebble, every twig, every droplet of mist, every blade of grass? Every atom?” She shakes her head. “It’s like a…divine act.”

  “I’d lay off the particle physics, Doc, if I were you. But yeah, it’s people and not gods, if that’s what you’re getting at. If it helps, think of orisons as set designs for a theater. Careful, a bramble’s got you.”

  Marinus unpicks it from the hem of her coat. “Ouch. The thorns are real, too. How many of these places have you visited?”

  I draw on Bombadil’s genuine experiences. “This is number three. First was on the island of Iona, in the Scottish Hebrides. Quite a well-known orison, that one. Relatively, anyway, like. It was awesome. It’s an apse in the abbey that’s not there unless you know where and when to slip through a certain archway. The time disparity was chronic, mind. When I got back after only a day away, two whole years’d passed and Mum’d got remarried to a divorced Microsoft rep.”

  “That’s”—the Mighty Shrink searches for words—“incredible.”

  “I frickin’ know it’s incredible! Microsoft! My second orison was more hardcore. Its aperture was in a high school for the arts in Santa Fe. Yoyo, an astronaut from Cedar Rapids, tracked it down. It was in a cleaning cupboard.”

  Marinus asks, “What makes a ‘hardcore’ orison different from the one on Iona, or this one?”

  “Unhappy endings. Yoyo never came out.”

  Marinus stops. “He died in there?”

  “Well, no, he chose to stay inside—and he’s still there, as far as I know—but its creator was in residence and he had a bad-ass Jehovah complex. Named his little world Milk and Honey. When I wanted to leave he accused me of apostasy and tried to, uh, kill me. ’Nother story, all that. But all this”—I have Bombadil gesture about us—“peace and quiet is a world away from that. Look, wild strawberries.” The strawberries are the banjax that Jonah and I agreed to feed our guest. If I can get Marinus to eat one now, it’ll save having to create a suborison inside the house. I pick a couple of the fatter fruits and pop one into my mouth. “Juicy. Try one.”

  Marinus’s hand begins to rise, but drops down. “Maybe not.”

  Damn it. Damn her. I have Bombadil grin. “Scared?”

  The Mighty Shrink looks cagey. “Mildly superstitious. In all the tales, the myths, the rule is, if you eat or drink anything—pomegranate seeds, faerie wine, whatever—the place has a hold on you.”

  Inwardly, I curse. “ ‘Myths,’ Doc? Are myths science?”

  “When I’m in doubt—as I am now—I ask myself, ‘What would Carl Jung do?’—and act accordingly. Call it a gut instinct.”

  If I push the banjax too hard, she’ll grow suspicious. Jonah will just have to muster the voltage for a suborison. “Suit yourself,” I say, and eat the other strawberry. If Marinus weren’t so engifted, I could have just suasioned her to eat it; but then if she weren’t so engifted, her soul would be useless to us and she wouldn’t be here. “Awesome. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  · · ·

  The wisteria’s twisted boughs are dripping with blooms, never mind that it’s October in the world outside. But when Marinus reaches up to touch the flowers, her hand passes clean through. The only vivid colors left in the orison now are the dyes in the clothes we came in with. Clothes. I’m nagged by the thought that I’ve missed something…What about? Clothes—possessions—what? It was a similarly nagging thought that had tried to warn me before Sally Timms attacked Jonah nine years ago, but I didn’t listen closely enough. If Jonah weren’t having trouble maintaining the orison I’d telegram him to pause it so I could stop and figure out what’s bothering me. As we emerge onto the upper lawn, a black-and-white peacock darting across our path just fades into the air, leaving a dying trail of Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Luckily Marinus was distracted by the ginkgo tree looming up far too quickly for our cautious amble. “This is as far as I came yesterday,” I say, and stop; thousands of fallen leaves fall upwards from the gray lawn, all at once, and attach themselves to the tree. Marinus is enchanted by the sight, but I feel a queasiness in Bombadil’s stomach: this is serious malprojection, not whimsy. Jonah’s losing control of the orison. “It’s like a dream in here,” says Marinus.

  My brother telegrams me: Get her inside, it’s collapsing.

  Easier said than done. “Let’s look inside,” I tell our guest.

  “In there? The house itself? Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “Yeah,” I have Bombadil say. “Why ever not?”

  An anxious silence is followed by a worried “Why?”

  I appeal to a force that is stronger than our guest’s cowardice. “Look, Doc, I didn’t want to raise any false hopes before, but there’s a chance of finding Fred Pink alive in there.” I look at the upper windows.

  “Alive? Afte
r nine years? Are you sure?”

  Are you inside yet, sister? telegrams Jonah. Hurry!

  “There are no certainties when it comes to orisons, Doc,” I reply. “But time ran differently in the Iona orison, and Milk and Honey was habitable, so I think it’s possible. Don’t we owe it to Fred Pink to give the place the once-over at least? It’s the clues he left you that brought us here today, after all.”

  The Guilty Shrink takes the bait. “Then yes. If there’s even a chance of finding him alive, let’s go.” Marinus strides over the last lawn towards Slade House, but when she looks back at me she looks past me and her eyes go wide: “Bombadil!”

  I turn around and see the end of the garden is erasing itself.

  “What is it?” asks Marinus. “How do we get out?”

  A curved wall of nothing is uncreating the garden as the orison collapses in on itself. I thought that by finding a guest as voltaically rich as Marinus and bringing her here, my brother, our lacuna and the operandi were as good as saved. I see now that I may be too late. “Only fog, Doc. No need to get panicky.”

  “Fog? But surely…I mean look at how quickly it’s—”

  “Orison fog looks like that. Saw it in Iona, too.” I mustn’t let Marinus run out into the wall of nonexistence like a headless chicken. I stride on, calmly. “Trust me, Doc. Come on. Hey—would I be this laid-back if there was anything to worry about?”

  · · ·

  The steps up to Slade House are mossy and stained, the once-proud door is peeling and rotten and the knocker is chewed by rust and time. I open the door and hustle Marinus inside. Only thirty paces away, the ginkgo tree is devoured by the shrinking orison. I close the door behind us and telegram Jonah, We’re in. We hear a noise like dragged furniture and my ears pop as the orison molds itself to the outside of the house. When I look out again through the mullioned window in the door, nothingness stares back. Blankness is a horror. “What was that noise?” whispers Marinus.

  “Thunder. The weather in here’s been neglected for so long, it’s all scrambled up. Fog, storms. Blazing sunshine’ll be next up.”

  “Oh,” says the Mighty Shrink, uncertainly. Autumn leaves are strewn over the chessboard tiles in the hallway. Our old Czech housekeeper would be appalled by this version of the Slade House she kept so spick-and-span in Jonah’s and my corporeal days. The coving is festooned with spiderwebs, the doors are hanging off their hinges, and the paneling up the stairs is wormy and flaking. “What now?” asks the Mighty Shrink. “Should we search the ground floor, or—”