Slade House

by David Mitchell

  This time the thunder wallops the walls. They shudder.

  Marinus touches her ears. “God, did you feel that?”

  Brother, I telegram, we’re inside—what’s wrong?

  A dying operandi is what’s wrong! Jonah sounds frantic. The house is buckling. Get the guest to the lacuna. Now.

  “It’s the atmospherics,” I reassure Marinus. “Quite normal.”

  Call downstairs, I instruct Jonah.

  Pregnant pause, then: What are you talking about?

  Pretend you’re Fred Pink, trapped, and call downstairs.

  Another pause. Jonah asks, What did he sound like?

  You played him last Open Day! English, gruff.

  “Are you sure it’s normal, Bombadil?” Marinus is afraid.

  “There was a barometer in Milk and Honey,” I ad-lib, “that—”

  We hear something. Marinus holds up a finger and looks up the stairs, whispering, “I heard someone. Did you?” I look vague and we listen. Nothing. Mile-thick nothing. Marinus begins to lower her finger, and then we hear Fred Pink’s elderly, shaky voice: “Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”

  The Fearless Shrink calls out: “Mr. Pink? Is that you?”

  “Yes—yes! I—I—I—I’ve had a little fall. Upstairs. Please…”

  “We’ll be right with you!” Without a glance, Marinus is gone, climbing two steps at a time. For the first time since the aperture, I feel properly in control. I have Bombadil follow in Marinus’s wake, relieved by how the multilingual psychiatrist with a PhD—first class—from Columbus State University is so easily codded by my brother crying wolf. The carpet is threadbare, the dust has formed a light crust, and when we reach the little landing, the grandfather clock is silent and its face is too scabby to read. Similarly, the portraits of our early guests are leprous with mold, and Marinus, befuddled by the strangest hour of her life, flies past them without a first glance, let alone a second. The Shrink in Shining Armor sees the pale door at the top of the stairs and launches herself up again, stepping over the desiccated body of an owl. As I pass Sally Timms’s portrait, I slap her, a gesture as petty as it is pointless. She caused this trouble, or her “ghost” did. By spiking my brother’s throat at the vital second, she stopped us feeding the operandi with her sister Freya’s soul, and reduced us to psychovoltaic pauperdom. Which ends today! I collide with Marinus’s back, just a few steps short of the pale door, next to Freya Timms’s grime-encrusted portrait, and I hiss, “Why’ve you stopped, Doc?”

  She’s listening to the rumbling silence. “How do we know these are the right stairs?”

  I begin saying, “Of course they are”; we hear timber splinter in the hallway below; and we hear Jonah–as–Fred Pink calling through the door above us, “I’m in here, hello? Hello? I—I—need a little help, is anyone there? Please?” My brother’s acting is as hammy as ever and the volume’s too loud, but Marinus just seizes the beveled doorknob and vanishes. On any other Open Day I would assume that the job is done and the guest is safely rendered to our lacuna in the attic, but today I assume nothing. First, I telegram, Do you have her, Jonah?

  My answer is a bellow of splitting masonry, glass and wood as the orison’s perimeter annihilates the shell of Slade House. Destruction roars up the lower stairs and Bombadil’s feet are rooted to the step as my host’s unconscious self and I grapple for control of his adrenaline-crazed nervous system. Through his eyes I watch the seething front of nothing reach the little landing, erase it and its dead grandfather clock, then surge up towards skinny, tattooed Bombadil. Death. Something orders me, Jump, it’s time; but no, the operandi needs both Grayer twins, and if I obeyed the impulse, I’d kill Jonah. So I egress with a few seconds’ grace after psychoshoving Bombadil’s runty body down the stairs. Thumpetty-thumpetty-thump. My ex-host yells, brokenly, his sentience returned too late to halt his descent, much less assemble his wits; and then he’s gone, ski jacket, chilblains, iPhone, Internet porn habit, childhood memories, body and all: gone in a nonflash. I-as-my-soul rotate and transverse through the pale door.

  · · ·

  I emerge in a commendable copy of the private hospital room at the Royal Berkshire Hospital where I spent a recent week as a patient taking meticulous notes. True, Marinus is a psychiatrist and not an A&E mopper-upper; true, she knows North American hospitals better than British ones; but a single anomaly could end in our guest smelling an illusory rat and rejecting the banjax, and without this anesthetic the extraction of her soul would be messy and partial. Consequently, Jonah and I evoked the room with a fanatical eye for realism: a wall-mounted TV; a washbasin with a swivel tap; two wipeable chairs; a bedside table, a chipped vase; a door with a linen curtain over its small window; and an easy-to-read clock saying 8:01, with blinds down to suggest P.M. not A.M. The air is scented with bleach and the sonic hospital backwash includes the ping of lift doors, the trundle of trolley wheels and an unanswered phone. Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby lies unconscious with a drip in her arm and her head in a neck brace. My brother enters, evoked as himself, dressed in a doctor’s white coat. He sees my soul. “Norah. You’re late.” I look at Jonah-as-Jonah, enjoying his enjoyment at moving around again, even if the movement is as illusory as the hospital room. Then I evoke myself as a senior doctor in her forties, reverting to my own voice. “The traffic was murder.”

  “Well done, sister. How do I look?”

  “Give yourself raccoon eyes and spread that indomitable jaw with some five o’clock shadow. Well done yourself.”

  Jonah modifies his face and shows me his profile: “Better?”

  “Better. How are our bodies doing?”

  “Yours is in a state of serene perfection, as ever; mine is still skewered through the throat with a fox-headed hairpin. The attic walls are safe, but the operandi is a drained and dying husk, sister. I give it fifteen minutes.”

  I turn to Marinus. “Then let’s wake the patient and administer her medicine. Then we’ll recharge the operandi and repair your throat, cell by cell.”

  Jonah looks at the unconscious woman with impure thoughts. “Will she offer any resistance, sister?”

  “She rejected the strawberry in the garden—citing Carl Jung and ‘gut instinct,’ if you please—but the fruit was the hue of raw liver, and when she wakes up she won’t know if it’s May Day, Marrakesh or Monteverdi. Do you have the banjax?”

  Jonah evokes a red and white tablet on his palm. “Sufficiently generic, would you say?”

  “Make it smaller, so she can swallow it without effort. Have a glass of water ready. Deny her any chance to stop and think.”

  Jonah shrinks the pill, tips it onto a dish and evokes a glass and a bottle of Evian on the bedside table. “Look, when you telegrammed from the alley, I was, uh, not at my best, and—”

  “You’ve been starved of fresh psychovoltage for eighteen years and trapped in a traumatized body for nine. I’d be insane by now, not just a trifle insecure.”

  “No, sister, let me finish; what I, I ‘said’ was a dying huzzah of…what I no longer believe. You were—are—right.”

  My projected self looks at my brother’s projected self. “About?”

  “About old dogs, new tricks, not-so-splendid isolation from la Voie Ombragée; and about…a higher purpose. Will that do for now?”

  Well, this is a U-turn: “Have I wandered into an orison?”

  “If you’re going to gloat, sister, you can bloody well—”

  “No. I’m not gloating, Jonah. I’ve been waiting thirty years to hear you say this. We’ll go to Mount Shiranui. The west of Japan is heaven in the autumn. Enomoto Sensei wants to meet you. She suggested a dozen ways to improve our operandi.”

  The projected Jonah contemplates an ending and a beginning. “Good. Okay. That’s decided, then.”

  I think of my brother and me as fetuses sharing Nellie Grayer’s womb, one hundred and sixteen years ago; and of our birth-bodies, sharing our lacuna for eight decades. Strangers are “They,” a lover is first a “Yo
u” and then a “We,” but Jonah is a half of “I.” I focus on the matter at hand before I say anything sentimental. “Your throat will hurt like holy hell when I pull the hairpin out, but I’ll cauterize the wound and—”

  “Now or never, sister.” Jonah puts his left forefinger on our guest’s frontal chakra eye. With his right hand, he glyphs her awake…

  · · ·

  …and Iris Marinus-Fenby’s pupils dilate in the orison’s uncertain light. “Stay still, Iris,” says Jonah. “You’ve been in an accident, but everything’s fine. You’re in hospital. You’re safe.”

  She’s as feeble and scared as she sounds: “Accident?”

  “Black ice on the M4 side of town. Your VW’s a write-off, but nobody else was involved, and your injuries don’t appear to be that serious. You’ve been here all day. You’re in the Royal Berkshire Hospital.”

  Marinus swallows and looks dazed. “I…Who…?”

  “Yes, I’m Gareth Bell, and this is Dr. Hayes. All quacks together. Iris, to help with your treatment program, we’d like to ask a few diagnostics—are you up to it, do you think?”

  “Oh…” the Woozy Shrink squints, “yeah…sure. Go for it.”

  I take over: “Thanks, Iris, that’s great. Firstly, can you tell us if you’re in any pain right now?”

  Marinus checks that she can move her hands, then her feet. “No, I…I…just numbness, I guess. My joints ache a little.”

  “Uh-huh.” I scribble on my clipboard. “The IV’s feeding you anti-inflammatories and painkillers. You sustained some nasty bruising up your left side. Secondly…limb mobility, you just did that for us, great—who said that doctors make the worst patients?”

  “Well, hey, maybe psychiatrists make better ones.”

  I smile. “Great, I’ll tick my ‘tribal affiliation’ box.”

  “Do I have any breakages?” asks Marinus, trying to sit up.

  “Whoa, whoa,” says Jonah–as–Dr. Bell, “Iris, take it easy. The neck brace is just a precaution, don’t worry. We haven’t X-rayed you on the off-chance that you’re pregnant. Might you be?”

  “No. Definitely not pregnant.”

  “Great,” I say, “we’ll take you up to X-ray in an hour or so. Vision: How many fingers?” I hold up four.

  “Four,” says Marinus.

  “And now?” I ask.

  “None,” says Marinus.

  “No problem there,” says Jonah, “though we’re a tad anxious about concussion—there’s a doozy of a contusion round the back of your noggin. We’ll CAT-scan you after your trip to X-ray, but what recollections do you have of the accident?”

  “Uh…” Marinus looks haggard and worried. “Uh…”

  We sit down on her bed. “You recall being in your car?”

  “Yes, but…I remember arriving at my destination.”

  “O-kay,” Jonah says. “Where was this destination?”

  “A passageway, an alley, off Westwood Road, on the edge of town. Slade Alley. I’d gone to meet Bombadil.”

  “ ‘Bombadil’?” says Jonah. “Not the Green Man leprechauny one from The Lord of the Rings? What a bizarre alias.”

  “Uh…I—I—I never read it, but my Bombadil’s a conspiracy theorist. I don’t know if that’s his real name or not. He’s a research subject. I’m writing a paper on abduction fantasies. He was…in an alley, and…there was a door in a wall that wasn’t normally there…”

  “Fascinating,” I say, looking a little alarmed. “But I promise you, Iris, the only place you’ve been today is the Royal Berkshire Hospital.”

  “You know better than us,” Jonah says cheerfully, “the tricks a mind’ll play on itself after a trauma or accident. But look, you’ve told us what we need. If you’d just take this paracetamol to staunch any minor internal bleeding you may have sustained”—Jonah flips up the bed’s swivel table and places the pill on a little white dish—“I’ll text Viv Singh at Dawkins to say you’re conscious and verbal. They’ve been on tenterhooks all day.”

  “Yes, thanks, I, uh…” Marinus gazes at the easy-to-swallow pill.

  My evoked heart in my evoked body beats a little faster.

  I look back. Jonah puts a glass of Evian water by the dish.

  “Thank you.” Still bleary, Marinus picks up the pill.

  I look away. Swallow it, I think. Swallow it whole.

  “No worries,” says Jonah, unworriedly, as if our metalives aren’t dependent on this fickle woman doing as he bids her. Jonah scrolls down his contacts, mumbling, “Viv Singh…”

  “Uh…could I just ask a question?” asks Marinus.

  “Fire away,” says Jonah, not taking his eyes off his iPhone.

  “Why in the eleven thousand and eleven names of God would I oblige two parasitic soul-slayers by imbibing their poison?”

  · · ·

  The wall clock stops; the LEDs on the monitors die; a far-off telephone falls silent; and Jonah freezes, with his back to both me and Marinus. I stand and back away, stumbling and sick. My brain insists that Marinus, a guest, cannot know more about us than Jonah and I know about her; that a mortal psychiatrist cannot be lying in an evoked bed in our inner orison, watching us calmly like a committee member at a dull meeting; and yet she does, she can be, she is. “Of all the shortcomings in your operandi,” our guest is saying, “your ‘banjax’ is the most antiquated. Truly! An anima-abortifacient so fragile that unless the patient imbibes it of his or her own conscious volition it fails to work—we haven’t seen the Shaded Way deploy such a primitive formula for fifty or sixty years. What were you thinking, Grayers? If you’d only updated it you could have injected it into my body just now. Or tried to, anyway.”

  Sister, Jonah telegrams, what is she?

  Danger, I telegram back. Change. A fight. An ending.

  Kill her, Jonah urges. Kill her. Now. Both of us.

  If we kill her we lose her soul, I telegram my uncensored thoughts, and if we lose her soul, our operandi dies—it won’t last nine more hours, let alone another nine years. And if the operandi dies, there’s no more lacuna.

  “And without the lacuna,” Marinus says out loud, “the world’s time floods in, shrivels up your birth-bodies, and then your soul’s off to the Dusk, right? One hundred and sixteen years: over and out.”

  Jonah’s appalled face reflects my own; he telegrams, Can this trespassing bitch hear us, sister?

  Marinus tuts. “Mr. Grayer! Shoddy abuse. ‘Bitch’ is a stingless insult these days—it hurts like, I don’t know, a celery-stabbing. And ‘trespassing’? You invited me here today to get my soul sucked out—and for accepting your invitation I’m now a trespasser? Not nice.” With a casual glyph, Marinus revokes the IV drip and neck brace. We can’t conceal our astonishment. “Yes, I know about suborisons in orisons, a bubble in a bubble, the attic in the house. It’s not a bad copy; but Evian water? In an NHS hospital? Don’t tell me—that was his genius idea, wasn’t it?” The intruder looks at me but nods towards my brother. I don’t answer. Unhurriedly, she gets out of bed and Jonah and I both take a step back. “You’d know better than to conjure up fancy French mineral water, Miss Grayer, after your top secret undercover stake-out at Dawkins Hospital. I saw you, studying me through Viv Singh’s eyeballs. I reeled you in, as you reeled me in. A company of reelers. Classy pajamas, but,” she glyphs and her own clothes reappear, “I’m a creature of sartorial habit.”

  Jonah has let the suborison half fade to conserve voltage, which is wise. A brute-force attack on Marinus, however, which I fear Jonah is planning, would be less wise. I sense she’s expecting it.

  “You have us at a disadvantage,” I say. “You are?”

  “I am who I am, Miss Grayer. Born Iris Fenby, 1980, in Baltimore; ‘Marinus’ got added later, hereditary reasons, long story; my family moved to Toronto; I studied psychiatry; and here we are.”

  I probe. “But you’re telepathic; you glyph…Know what this is?” I float a gentle psychowave her way, which she deflects at the Evian bottle. It t
ips over, trundles to the edge of the tabletop, but vanishes before falling off. “Look at that, Jonah,” I say. “Our guest and we are three peas in a psychosoteric pod.”

  Marinus is not amused. “Leave me out of your pod, Miss Grayer. I don’t use human beings like disposable gloves. Did you even thank that poor wretch Mark—‘Bombadil’—before tossing him into the garbage just now?”

  “What a lofty hill of divine compassion you sit on,” I needle, I speculate, “to care for every one of humanity’s mewling, puking, rutting seven billion.”

  “Ah, you people always say that,” the intruder tells me.

  “Do we?” I say. “And how do you know our names?”

  “Therein hangs an hour’s tale.” Marinus takes a gadget from her jacket and shows us. I see the word SONY. “One of you, at least, has seen this digital recorder before, and I’m guessing it was Mr. Grayer…” She turns to Jonah, who peers closer. “Yes. See if this jogs your memory.” Marinus presses PLAY and we hear a woman’s confident voice: “Interview with Fred Pink at The Fox and Hounds pub, Friday, twenty-seventh October, 2006, 7:20 P.M.” It’s Freya Timms. Marinus presses STOP. It’s no great feat to read our faces. “She had a life,” says Marinus. “A sister she loved.” Her anger is controlled but fierce. “Go on. Name her. Or are you too ashamed?”

  Jonah looks too appalled to name anyone. So the fool should be. His bragging Self–as–Fred Pink nine years ago, as he toyed with Freya Timms in my orison of The Fox and Hounds, spun this Ariadne’s thread that led Marinus to the heart of our operandi. And when my brother regains the power of speech he spends it on the wrong question: “How did you get that?”

  Marinus ignores him and looks at me.

  I meet her gaze with no shame at all. “Freya Timms.”