Slade House

by David Mitchell

  I don’t love her, not yet, but love grows out of sex, in my experience. The more you get into a woman, the more you get into her. Who knows? We could end up getting married. Imagine owning Slade House, or half owning it. Who cares about three little spooks? The fact that I hear them makes me special in Chloe’s eyes. Slade House is way bigger than Trevor Doolan’s executive home up on his hill with his well-paid Conservative Club neighbors. If the Malik Inquiry throws me to the wolves, Slade House’d be my lifeboat, my fuck-off money. How much is it worth? £100,000? £120,000? Fortunes change hands every day, all the time, via business, via the football pools, via crime or, yes, via marriage. I’ll give Chloe security and fill the man-shaped hole in her life; she’ll offer me financial security. Seems like a fair deal. “Goooooorrrrrrr-donnn!” Her voice finds me from a nearby room. “Are you awake?”

  I shout back to her, “I am now—where are you?”

  “Dans la douche, and I can’t unscrew this shampoo…”

  You cheeky little minx. “Oh, can’t you indeed?”

  “I’m a damsel in distress, Gordon. Up the stairs.”

  There’s a man’s furry brown dressing gown on the bed. Probably Stuart’s, but hey, now I’ve had his widow, why should he care if I have his dressing gown as well? I put it on, slide off the bed and slip through the thick red drapes, cross the odd round room and find myself on a square landing. To my left’s a grandfather clock, to my right, stairs lead down to the hallway, and up ahead, more stairs climb past some pictures to a pale door at the top of the house where a soapy Chloe Chetwynd awaits her Knight in Shining Armor. “Are you coming, Gordon?” Oh, I will be, I will be. Up I climb, two steps at a time, past a portrait of a teenager in a beaten-up leather jacket, with dark oily hair and narrow eyes like he’s half Chinese. The next picture is of a young woman dolled up to the nines and with a honey-blond hairdo like a backing singer from a sixties girl band. She’s got a dreamy smile that reminds me of Julie when she wasn’t being a neurotic bitch so I stop and brush her lips with mine, just ’cause I can. The third portrait up from the landing’s of a boy of about thirteen. Sandy hair, big nose, sulky, not at ease in his skin, or that tweed jacket and bow tie that you suspect his pushy mother made him—

  It’s Nathan Bishop. It can’t be. It is. My heart’s juddering and I feel sick and weightless. Nathan Bishop, as seen by Fred Pink in Slade Alley in 1979. Nathan Bishop, whose photo Fred Pink cut out of the newspaper. Trevor Doolan got Debs to photocopy it and pin it above our desks, so Famous Fred Pink could see how seriously the Thames Valley Force was taking his lead. She’s lying, says a sulky voice in my ear canal, clear as anything. I jump; nearly fall; crouch; look round. Nobody. She’ll take your life, and more…

  Stairs going up; stairs going down; nobody’s here.

  I try to un-tense myself. I imagined it. That’s all.

  You may find a weapon in the cracks, says the voice.

  This one’s not like Jonah or Norah in the kitchen. This voice is addressing me. I don’t know how I know but I know.

  The cracks they throw the scraps down, says the boy.

  Cracks? Scraps? Weapon? I manage to mutter, “Who are you?” but as I’m saying it to the portrait of Nathan Bishop, the smarter part of me thinks it knows.

  I’m not a lot, says the boy. I’m my own leftovers.

  “Why will I”—what am I doing, talking to a picture of a vanished boy?—“why’ll I need a weapon?”

  The grandfather clock’s tocking, far far below.

  It’s all in my head. It’s not. Each word’s a throb of pain.

  For you, it’s too late, says the boy. But pass it on.

  “Pass it on to who?” I ask the voice that may or may not be real.

  The next guest…I’m finished now…I’m all used up.

  I say, “Hello?” but the boy’s gone. I crawl backwards up the stairs, away from Nathan Bishop’s portrait, until my eyes lock onto the next one which I also recognize instantly ’cause it’s me, Gordon Edmonds. I ought to be totally freaked out by this, but there’s only so many shocks you can take before your, I dunno, circuits burn out. So I just gape, like a total bloody lemon. I gape at the more-real-than-real picture of gaping Gordon Edmonds, in a brown furry dressing gown, with my buzz-cut hair, my retreating hairline, my kind-of-leaner-fitter-better-looking-Phil-Collins face, with bloody creepy skin-tone blanks where my eyes should be. I stare until I think, You should get out of this house. You don’t know what you’re dealing with. But that’s idiotic as well as chickenshit. Run off, ’cause Chloe painted your portrait? I try to think, but it’s not easy. My brain’s sort of numb. If Chloe painted my portrait, she painted the others. If Chloe painted the others, she painted Nathan Bishop. Meaning she lied about not knowing his name. Meaning…

  Chloe’s a killer? Get a grip. I’ve interviewed three or four serial killers, and Chloe’s nothing like those feces-gobbling fucks. Look again. Yes, Chloe painted me as a surprise, but it doesn’t follow that she painted the other pictures. The other pictures look like they were painted a long time ago. They must have been hanging here when Chloe and Stuart bought the place from the Pitts. That explains it. Sort of. They don’t have titles or signatures, so Chloe couldn’t’ve known she’s passed Nathan Bishop every time she uses these stairs. And I didn’t show her the boy’s picture last week in the garden; all I did was tell her his name.

  What about the voice I just heard, warning me to get out?

  What about it? Just ’cause you hear a ghostly voice, that doesn’t mean you have to take what it says as gospel. Maybe the voice I just heard wasn’t Nathan Bishop but the one Chloe called Eeyore. Anyway, how do I know I heard it? What if I only imagined it?

  Here’s what you do: Get Chloe out of the shower, tell her she owns a portrait of Nathan Bishop, assure her she’s not a suspect, and first thing tomorrow call Chief Super Doolan at home. He won’t be best pleased at first, and it’ll be a bit embarrassing when everyone at the station discovers I’ve been shagging Chloe, but once Doolan learns that Fred Pink’s lead might not be such a neon-bright red herring after all, he’ll change his tune soon enough.

  Sorted, then. In we go.

  But on the other side of the pale door, I find not a bathroom with Chloe in a shower, but a long dark attic. A long dark attic that’s some sort of…prison? That’s sure as hell what it looks like. Three-quarters of it’s caged off by thick, sturdy bars, an inch thick and an inch apart. I can’t see how far back the attic goes ’cause it’s so dark. A faint bit of light comes in from two skylights, on the “free” side of the bars above where I am, but that’s it. The attic smells of bad breath and pine disinfectant, a lot like the cells down the station. My thumb finds a switch to flick, and a light comes on behind the bars. It’s a weak bulb, high up. I make out a bed, a washbasin, a sofa, a table, a chair, a toilet cubicle with the door ajar, an exercise bike and someone stirring on the bed, half hidden in blankets and shadow. The attic’s only about five meters wide but it goes back a long way, maybe the full width of Slade House. I press my face against the bars to peer in the best I can and I say, “Hello?”

  He or she—I can’t see which—doesn’t reply. A mad relative? How legal is any of this? I’m going to have to report it in the morning.

  I try again. “Hello? What’re you doing up here?”

  I hear breathing, and the camp-bed squeaks.

  “Do you speak English? Do you need any help? Do—”

  A woman’s voice cuts in: “Are you real?” A brittle voice.

  Not the sanest opening question. The bed’s halfway down the attic, and I can’t see much—a cheekbone, a hand, a shoulder, a flop of gray hair. “My name’s Gordon Edmonds, and yes, I’m real.”

  She sits up in bed and hugs her knees. “Dream-people always say they’re real, so pardon me for not believing you.” The woman sounds frail and sad but well spoken. “Once I dreamed that Charlie Chaplin came to rescue me with a pair of giant nail clippers.” She squints my way with a face th
at hasn’t smiled for years. “Vyvyan Ayrs drilled a hole in the roof, once. I climbed out of the hole and he strapped me onto his hang glider, and we flew over the English Channel to Zedelghem. I cried when I woke up.” A radiator groans. “Gordon Edmonds. You’re new.”

  “Yes, I am.” She’s talking like a mental case. “So…are you a patient?”

  She scowls. “If you’re real, you’ll know who I am.”

  “Not true, I’m afraid. I’m real, and I don’t know you.”

  The woman’s voice turns harsher: “The Monster wants me to think I’m being rescued, doesn’t she? It’s her little entertainment. Tell her I’m not playing.”

  “Who wants you to think you’re being rescued?”

  “The Monster’s the Monster. I don’t say her name.”

  Her name? A nasty thought creeps up—Chloe—but there’ll be a logical explanation. “Sweetheart, I’m a copper. Detective Inspector Gordon Edmonds, Thames Valley Force, CID. Can you just tell me why you’re here? Or at least, why you think you’re here?”

  “A detective in a dressing gown. Undercover, is it?”

  “It doesn’t bloody matter what I’ve got on—I’m a copper.”

  She gets out of bed and floats towards the bars in a nightie. “Liar.”

  I step back, just in case she’s got a knife. “Love, please. I…just want to know what the story is. Tell me your name, at least.”

  One mad eye appears in the inch between two bars. “Rita.”

  The sentence says itself like a conjurer’s hanky pulled out of my mouth: “Oh, sweet bloody hell, don’t tell me you’re Rita Bishop…”

  The woman blinks. “Yes. As you know perfectly well.”

  I peer closer, and summon up the other photocopied picture Debs pinned above our desks. Oh, Jesus. Rita Bishop’s aged, badly, but it’s her. “After all these years”—her breath smells vinegary—“does the Monster downstairs still get a kick from these pantomimes?”

  I feel like I’ve lost half my blood. “Have you”—I’m afraid of the answer—“have you been in this attic since 1979?”

  “No,” she sneers. “First they hid me away in Buckingham Palace; then a fortune-teller’s booth on Brighton pier; then Willy Wonka’s—”

  “Okay! Okay.” I’m trembling. “Where’s Nathan? Your son?”

  Rita Bishop shuts her eyes and forces out her words: “Ask her! Ask Lady Norah Grayer, or whatever name she’s going by this week. She’s the one who lured us to Slade House; who drugged us; who locked us up; who took Nathan away; who won’t even tell me if my son’s still alive or not!” She folds over and lies in a silent crying heap.

  My mind’s jolted and clattery: Chloe Chetwynd? Norah Grayer? Same woman? How? How? The paintings? Why? Why bring a CID officer up to bed? Why lure him up the stairs where he’ll see the paintings? Makes no sense. What I do know is that Slade House isn’t a police station, a prison or a psychiatric ward, and it looks like we have a case of illegal imprisonment here. Ordinarily—ha, “ordinarily”—I’d go back to my car, radio for backup and warrants and return in a couple of hours, but in this mad bugger’s scenario, where I may—may—have just shagged a thirty-one-year-old killer-slash-abductress-slash-whatever-the-fuck-she-is, I’d rather get Rita Bishop safely away first and call in a Code 10 to Slade House after. If I’m wrong and Trevor Doolan de-bollocks me then so be it. “Mrs. Bishop. Do you know where the key is?”

  She’s still a softly sobbing mess on the floor.

  I notice the sound of the shower’s stopped.

  “Mrs. Bishop—help me help you—please.”

  The woman lifts her head and fires hate-rays at me: “As if you’ll just unlock this door after nine years. As if.”

  For Chrissakes. “If I am who I say I am, you’ll be out of Slade House in two minutes and I swear on all that’s holy, Mrs. Bishop, I’ll have armed officers in here within thirty minutes and ‘the Monster’ in custody, and in the morning CID and Scotland Yard and Forensics on Nathan’s trail, so will you please just tell me where the key is? Right now I’m your only chance of seeing your son again.”

  Something in my voice persuades Rita Bishop to give me a chance. She sits up. “The key’s on the hook. Right behind you. It amuses the Monster that I can see it.”

  I turn round: a long, thin, shiny key. I take it, and fumble, and drop the thing. It hits the floorboard with a pure note. I pick it up and find the steel plate in the cage door and push the key into the keyhole. It’s well oiled and the door swings open and Rita Bishop staggers to her feet and backs off and sways forwards and stares like she can’t believe it. “Come on, Mrs. Bishop,” I whisper, “out you come. We’re leaving.”

  The prisoner takes uncertain steps to the cage door, where she grips my hand and steps out. “I, I…” Her breathing’s all raspy.

  “Easy does it,” I tell her. “It’s okay. Do you know if…if ‘she,’ ‘they,’ if they’ve got weapons?”

  Rita Bishop can’t answer. She’s gripping my dressing gown, quivering. “Promise me, promise me, I’m not dreaming you.”

  “I promise. Let’s go.”

  Her fingers dig into my wrist. “And you’re not dreaming me?”

  I stay patient; if I’d been locked up for nine years, I’d be off my rocker too. “I guarantee it. Now let’s get out of here.”

  She releases me. “Look at this, Detective.”

  “Mrs. Bishop, we need to leave.”

  Ignoring me, she holds up a lighter.

  Her thumb flicks and a thin flame…

  · · ·

  …grows longer, paler and still as a freeze-frame. It’s not a lighter anymore, it’s a candle, on a chunky metal base with writing all over it, Arabic or Hebrew or Foreign. The cage has gone. All the furniture’s gone. Rita Bishop’s gone. The candle’s the only source of light. The shrunken attic’s black as inside a coffin deep inside a blocked-up cave. I’m kneeling, I’m paralyzed, and I don’t know what’s happening. I try to move but no joy. Not even a finger. Not even my tongue. My body’s the cage now, and I’m the one locked in. The only things working are my eyes and my brain. Work it out, then. Nerve gas? A stroke? I’ve been Mickey Finned? God only knows. Clues, then, Detective Inspector? There’re three faces in the dark. Straight ahead, across the candle, there’s me in a dead man’s dressing gown. A mirror, obviously. On my left there’s Chloe, in a hooded padded robe thing. On my right there’s…a male Chloe. Chloe’s twin, I’m guessing—this blond guy, dressed in a robe thing like Chloe’s, handsome in a sort of gay model Hitler Youth way. Neither of them is moving. A few inches from the candle flame there’s a brownish moth, just frozen in the air, frozen in time. I’m not dreaming. That’s about all I’m sure of. So is this the story of how Gordon Edmonds lost his mind?

  Time passes. I don’t know how much. The candle hisses and its white flame sways this way and that. The moth flaps around, in and out of the dark; now I see it, now I don’t. “You’re smirking, brother,” says Chloe, if that’s her real name. This woman has the same face as the one who served me tiramisu but while her voice before was smooth and woolen, now it’s a rusty jackknife.

  “I am not smirking,” objects the man, moving his legs like they’ve got pins and needles.

  I try to move too. I still can’t. I try to speak. I can’t.

  “You’re a damned liar, Jonah,” says Chloe. She holds up her hands like they’re a pair of gloves she can’t make up her mind about. “I didn’t smirk when you serviced that hairdresser two cycles ago. And you really did exchange fluids; I only threw this dog in heat”—she gives me a disgusted, sideways look—“an imaginary bone.”

  “If I smiled,” says the man, “it was a smile of pride at your performance in my suborison. You played the neurotic widow to perfection. The attic cage was one of my finest mise-en-scènes, I think we’ll agree, but Meryl Streep herself could not have delivered the role of poor Mrs. Bishop with greater aplomb. Why, I scarcely noticed the prickly creature, all those years ago. Her voice hurt
my ears. Why the long face, sister? Yet another Open Day has gone swimmingly, our operandi has proven itself robust, our pheasant is plucked and basted, yet you’re looking all…vinegary.”

  “The operandi is an improvised hodgepodge, too reliant—”

  “Norah, I beg you, we’re about to dine; can’t we just—”

  “—too reliant upon luck, Jonah. Upon nothing going wrong.”

  The man—Jonah—looks at his sister—Norah—with fond smugness. “For fifty-four years, our souls have wandered that big wide world out there, possessing whatever bodies we want, living whatever lives we wish, while our fellow birth-Victorians are all dead or dying out. We live on. The operandi works.”

  “The operandi works provided our birth-bodies remain here in the lacuna, freeze-dried against world-time, anchoring our souls in life. The operandi works provided we recharge the lacuna every nine years by luring a gullible Engifted into a suitable orison. The operandi works provided our guests can be duped, banjaxed and drawn into the lacuna. Too many provideds, Jonah. Yes, our luck’s held so far. It can’t hold forever, and it won’t.”

  I’ve got no idea what they’re on about, but Jonah looks properly pissed off. “Why this illuminating lecture now, sister?”

  “We need to make the operandi proof against mischance and enemies.”

  “What enemies? Thanks to my insistence on isolation, not even the Shaded Way know about us. Our life-support system works. Why tamper with it? Now, supper is served.” Jonah looks my way. “That would be you, Detective Plod.”

  I try but I can’t move, or fight, or beg. I can’t even shit myself.

  “You’ve stopped breathing,” Jonah tells me, matter-of-factly.